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Tag: Seal Beach Crime

  • October 6th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1963, the Long Beach Independent Press Telegram’s Women’s section ran a profile of the posh Larsen Hall off-campus women’s dormitory at 1310 Electric Avenue in Seal Beach under the breezy headline, “Larsen Hall — Books ‘n Bathing Caps.”

    Coeds Judy Delulio and Jeannine Merril studying in the library at Larsen Hall

    Larsen Hall was previously seen here in this post covering February 21, 1964 – a scandalous post filled with shame, dishonor, ignominy, and disgrace. (I may be overstating a bit.)

    Ah, but what a difference four months makes! On October 6, 1963, the situation still appears sunny at Larsen Hall, inspiring the unnamed reporter to observe, “Dorm living today is like camping in mink.” The reporter felt that the two-story dormitory, “just a bikini-brief walk from the beach,” had “nearly all the the attributes of a resort hotel.” These attributes included a dining and lounge area, a central pool patio, a sundeck, a separate snack room off the kitchen, a secluded library, an intercom system, and an automated laundry. The entire facility could accommodate 37 students.

    Some of the current students did homework and dangled their feet in the pool the day the reporter visited.  Judy Delulio from Lake Tahoe shared that “You’re never lonely here. We stick together — there’s always something fun going on: a popcorn party, a starfish hunt at the beach, a special excursion. Best of all, we have neat management.”

    Ah, yes. The management. At this stage, there’s nothing but praise for Frank and Joan Silone. Frank drove the “girls back and forth to school in the hall’s private bug of a bus” and did the cooking, “turning out menus that would please a gourmet.” Joan helped with sewing and the evening song fests. 

    Just another poolside day in coed paradise – Sherry Delulio plays catch while Jan Petersen strums a guitar and Terry Suffet tries to read

    But there was trouble (and poorly reproduced from microfilm photos) in the sad future of Larsen Hall.

    – Michael Dobkins

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  • August 25th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1964, a sixty-year old evangelist preaching the bible in Seal Beach was assaulted by a band of teen-age delinquents.

    Mark Frank Forsyth of Huntington Beach told police that he had been preaching at 10th Street on the beach as he done many times before in the previous two years. This time, however, a group of at least five teenagers began to heckle him at approximately 2 p.m. 

    One of the teens grabbed Forsyth’s hat, and then the verbal assault escalated into violence. The other boys pelted Forsyth with rocks, hit him with their fists, and burnt him with cigarettes on the neck and left ankle. Forsyth’s clothes were torn as he tried to flee, and one boy grabbed his bible and tracts and begin to rip the pages of his bible. During the scuffle, no one came to Forsyth’s aid.

    Later, the police brought in a fourteen-year old Long Beach youth on charges of participating in a riot, assault and battery, and armed riot, but he denied taking part in the attack and refused to identify any of his fellow teens.

    When interviewed by an AP reporter, Forsyth said that he preached because he was “concerned for the spirit and physical well-being of the thousands of teenagers who flock to the beaches.”

    – Michael Dobkins

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  • July 26th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1921, Mrs. Frances Talbert, age 20, wept as she plead guilty to assaulting Mrs. Carrie A. Collinge and was sentenced to thirty days in the county jail. The charge had been reduced from assault with a deadly weapon to simple assault. 

    Frances Talbert had been employed by Mrs. Coolinge, who ran a nursery at 137 14th Street in Seal Beach. Around midnight on June 3rd, Mrs. Collinge noticed that Frances was not in her room. Later, when she checked again to see if Frances had returned, someone threw a couch cover over her head and tried to smother her and then dragged her to the next room to strike her four times with a broom.

    Mrs. Collinge, who thought she was being attacked by a man, fell to the floor and pretended to be unconscious. When attack ended, she removed the cover from her head, and the only person in the room was Frances, holding her 2 1/2 year old daughter and a broom handle in the other. She denied having made the attack or having seen anyone else.

    Carrie Collinge seemed more bewildered and curious about the assault than angry. The newspapers cover her account of the assault, but there are no reports of her response to the sentence or details about any interactions with Frances after the incident. 

    There are so many unanswered questions nearly 100 years later, made all the more confusing by discrepancies in the four articles about Frances Talbert’s case in the Santa Ana Register. In one story, the assault happened in May and Frances was arrested two weeks after the story’s publication! This same story gives the daughter’s name as Catherine, but later article call her Lillian. Whatever her name was, she was a real sweetheart and charmed the staff and female prisoners at the jail where she stayed with mother Francis. 

    Another story rather carelessly hints as a possible motive for the assault rumors that Carrie Collinge had just recently made Frances the major beneficiary of her will, but then quickly admits to not being able to verify the rumor and that the authorities disclaimed any knowledge of a will.

    What we do know is that Frances Talbert gave no explanation for the attack, and that she was released five days early on August 23 for good behavior. Was she covering for a late night male guest and given a lenient sentence because the police and judges knew she was paying for a crime she did not commit? It’s pure speculation at this point, and we’re even further from the truth today than Santa Ana Register reporters were in 1921.

    The 1920 census lists a Francis (with an “i”) Talbert, a 19-year old single white female with no schooling, working as a resident nurse for widowed Carrie Coolidge’s nursery in Los Angeles. One of the inmates (the census-taker’s word, not mine) at the nursery is a five month year old girl named Kathrine Talbert with a mother born in Louisiana and a father born in the United States. The census alone makes no overt connection between Francis and Kathrine beyond the listing a shared last name and that they live at the same address.

    Here’s another interesting tidbit from the census. The page lists Kathrine Talbert as black. This is a subjective judgement, but it appears to me that the box for race had “W” originally and then was smudgingly erased to be replaced with a “B” for black.

    It’s easy to imagine a unwed teenage mother leaving Louisiana to have her child away from her home town. That would have been scandalous enough, but an African-American father would have been unthinkable in 1921. Again, it’s important to stress that this is all speculation, and the truth about the beating and Kathrine’s (or Lillian’s) parentage has move out of living memory. 

    Carrie A. Collinge died in Santa Barbara in 1938 at the age of 75. I could find no trace of Frances or Kathrine (or Catherine or Lillian) after Frances is released from jail. 

    – Michael Dobkins

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  • April 9th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1971, John Shelby Burrows, fifty-eight, of 1201 Marlin Avenue, was sentenced to 5-to-15 years in prison after pleading guilty for the murder of Claude LaBean, thirty-nine, of 459 Galleon Way.

    The murder occurred on October 22, 1970 at the Red Candle in the Seal Beach Shopping Center on Pacific Coast Highway. Burrows had been escorted out of the restaurant’s bar by LaBean and another man after a barroom brawl. Burrows returned twenty minutes later after retrieving a .38 pistol from home and shot LaBean three times in the chest as LaBean was leaving through the rear exit. Burrows re-entered the Red Candle where bar patron disarmed him. Burrows then fled the scene and was arrested a short time later a block from his home by Seal Beach Police.

    Karen Russell commented on the original version of this post in 2015:

    “…I lived across the street from Mr. Burrows and still live at the same address. He had a political argument in the bar with someone and went home and got a gun, went back and found the bartender in the parking lot that broke up the fight between him and the individual who he had the argument with. He shot the bartender in the parking lot.”

    The murder wasn’t the only source of notoriety for the Red Candle Bar. A month before the murder, a two-week investigation into a prostitution operation at the Red Candle Bar resulted in the arrest of three women and a man.

    Perhaps this notoriety motivated Joseph M. Beard, the new owner of the Red Candle Inn, to rename it The Red Velvet Inn in February 1971. The only crime on record for the Red Velvet Inn was how tempting chef Ernesto Brock’s new menu was — offering New York steak superba, abalone stuffed with crab, and pan-fried abalone with a choice of soup or salad, hot garlic toast, baked potato or potatos au gratin.

    One oddity to this story is that Mr. Beard had represented the previous owner, Peter Trama, in a dispute with the city over a variance to serve liquor that lasted throughout 1970 and into early 1971. It appears that the change of ownership (and chef) resolved the liquor issue, but the Red Velvet Inn didn’t last far into 1971. By late October, the address was occupied by Pat’s Electric and Lighting.

    John Shelby Burrows was out of jail and living in Huntington Beach by 1977. He died on March 6, 1990 at the age of seventy-six.

    – Michael Dobkins

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  • February 21st In Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1964, Seal Beach Police issued a warrant charging 33-year old Frank Silone with two counts of grand theft-felony.

    Silone and his 25-year old wife, Joan, managed Larsen Hall, a Long Beach State College approved off-campus coed dormitory located in a Seal Beach apartment building located at 1310 Electric Avenue. Thirteen students had registered there for the spring 1964 semester.

    Unfortunately, no background check had been required for Silone, and he was approved as dorm manager after a personal interview and being vouched for by the previous owners of Larsen Hall and Silone’s father-in-law, a USC professor (Go Trojans!). This is sad for the thirteen students, since Silone had served a prison sentence from 1960 to 1963 and had even escaped from Chino Minimum Security Prison before being recaptured and sent o San Quentin. Perhaps not the best candidate for a coed dormitory manager.

    Silone was charged with “misapplying in excess of $200” in funds received from two girls for room rent. He and his wife had skipped town shortly after February 17, the electricity had been turned off by the Edison Co., and the student manager of the hall had to convince the bank to cash a check so food could be bought for the hall.

    Frank Bowman, the Long Beach State College housing coordinator, quickly removed Larsen Hall from the list of approved housing and wrote a letter to the parents of the Larsen Hall coeds informing them that their offspring would need to move to approved housing. The college would aid students without rent money, Bowman assured.

    You can read about Larsen Hall in a happy post from October 1963 here.

    – Michael Dobkins

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  • January 11th in Seal Beach History

    On this date in 1940, The Santa Ana Register reported that a yellow taxi cab had been stolen from in front Don May’s cafe on the coast highway between Seal Beach and Sunset Beach. Huntington Beach police recovered the abandoned cab a short time later in the Wintersburg after a California highway patrol car “slid through the mud of a dirt road and landed in a ditch while en route to the scene of the abandonment.”

    At this date, the culprit still remains at large.

    – Michael Dobkins

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