A True Crime Cold Case Author Marcia Clark Burned To Tell

Here is the 1950s true crime cold case author Marcia Clark burned to tell. As a prosecutor for LA County, Clark dealt with true crime all her life. So writing fictional legal thrillers is a release that’s led to ten novels and counting. Of course, Clark told her story when it came to the O.J. Simpson trial with her first bestseller Without A Doubt.

So why would she want to tackle true crime? Clark didn’t, not for years. Then the idea began to tantalize. Maybe she’d do a true crime book if the story hadn’t been told to death, if there was something new to uncover, if the trial (always the center of any case, in Clark’s mind) was well documented because that’s where you get closest to the truth and if Clark felt she had to tell this particular story. 

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What were the chances of finding all those elements? Not good. Until Clark spotted a passing reference to the criminal case and scandalous trail of Barbara Graham in the 1950s. It was one of many headline grabbing cases dubbed the Trial of the Century. (Clark knew about that.) But the trial coverage painted Graham as a femme fatale. But only a few years later, Susan Heyward won an Oscar playing Graham as a near-innocent in the acclaimed hit film I Want To Live! Surely the truth lay somewhere in the middle?

Then Clark saw a photograph of Graham at the trial itself. Reporters and photographers swarmed around her like vultures on a corpse. Clark was riveted. Then she got lucky because though the case was around 70 years ago, all the court records had been preserved. And as always happens, the details that emerged grew more and more fascinating. So Clark had her new book, a work of true crime. But before the photo, before the treasure trove of court documents, before the Oscar-winning film, there was the crime….

A True Crime Cold Case Author Marcia Clark Burned To Tell

Trial by Ambush by Marcia Clark ($16.99; Thomas & Mercer; out December 1) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

The following is an excerpt from the new book Trial By Ambush. It’s provided by Thomas & Mercer and author Marcia Clark. Copyright 2024, all rights reserved.  


CHAPTER ONE

The evening of March 8, 1953, was cool, even brisk, in the quiet Southern California suburb of Burbank. On the tree-lined Parkside Avenue, a light breeze gently wafted through the leaves. Mabel Monahan, a widow who lived alone in a charming ranch-style house on that street, was blissfully unaware of what the next twenty-four hours would hold. She was getting ready to go to her regular Sunday-night poker game with her close friend Merle Leslie. Although Mabel was sixty-four years old and walked with a slight limp—an old injury suffered in a car accident—she knew how to party.

Mabel and Merle had met during their vaudeville days back in the ’30s. Merle and her husband managed a vaudeville troupe, and Mabel was, among other things, a roller-skating star. She’d performed in carnivals and sideshows and at times went by the name Madam Martinez to bill herself as a palm reader. It was on the vaudeville circuit that she’d met her late husband, George Monahan, a spectacular ice-skater who was a featured performer at state fairs, outdoor events, and—of course—carnivals. They started out as a roller-skating team performing across the country and wound up as husband and wife. It was an unconventional but exciting and even glamorous life.

But by 1953, Mabel had traded in her wild nomadic days for the cozy house on the corner of Parkside Avenue and Orchard Drive. Back then, it was about as quiet as any small suburban town in You-Name-It, USA. Wide streets; kids playing in front yards; swing sets and fruit trees in backyards; and a little mom-and-pop grocery store tucked in among the houses where mothers could send their nine-year-olds to pick up a carton of milk. I know the area well, having lived just a few miles away in the neighboring town of Glendale in the eighties, and it was still a peaceful little haven then, ideal for young families.

Even so, Mabel Monahan kept her windows closed and her doors locked with a chain and always used the peephole when someone came knocking. She wasn’t a paranoid safety freak. She was just security conscious. Having lived in hotels for most of her life, where someone—usually a man—was posted at the front desk, standing between her living space and the outside world, Mabel wasn’t accustomed to the solitary, unprotected feeling of a house—with all those windows, not to mention front and back yards.

Mabel had never planned or hoped to own a home. The house on Parkside Avenue fell into her lap. At the time, it seemed to be one of the luckiest of lucky breaks.

It was a gift from her daughter, Iris, who got the house in the divorce settlement from her ex-husband, the brilliantly successful casino owner and real estate investor Tutor Scherer. He and Iris met when she auditioned to perform as a singer and dancer in the floor show of the Ship Café, his restaurant bar and lounge that was a popular haunt during Prohibition. Iris, following in her parents’ footsteps, had a bent for the performing arts, and Tutor hired her on the spot. Tutor, a bootlegger as well as a restaurant owner, was one handsome, smooth-talking operator, and Iris fell hard for him. After a few years, they married.

But Iris’s dreams of connubial bliss failed to take into account the realities of being married to a sharp-eyed dealmaker like Tutor, who always had his sights trained on the next big score. Seeing the end of Prohibition on the horizon, Tutor wisely moved out of booze and into gambling—at first in Los Angeles (where he quickly learned he’d have to compete with big-time gangster Mickey Cohen), then in the safer—and more open—pastures of Las Vegas. There, he invested in casinos, founded the Pioneer Club, and diversified into other real estate holdings. All this wheeling and dealing meant Tutor wasn’t home much. Still, Iris might’ve managed to live with his absences were it not for the fact that they so often included extracurricular activities. Entrepreneurial obsession was one thing, but adultery was quite another. After thirteen rocky years, Iris divorced him, then remarried and moved to New York.

Tutor gave her a generous divorce settlement of over $100,000 in cash, expensive jewelry, and . . . the Burbank house on Parkside Avenue. But Iris, now living in New York, didn’t need the home or want the reminder of her life with Tutor. So Mabel, for the first time in her life, became a homeowner. And somehow that expensive jewelry also found its way into her hands. She was known to carry it around in her purse to show off to her friends and fellow poker players. Whether Tutor knew Mabel wound up with the jewelry he’d bestowed on Iris is an open question. But I have a feeling he wouldn’t have minded. Although Iris was out of his life, Tutor remained close with Mabel and visited her often when he was in town. 

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On the night of March 8, 1953, as Mabel got ready to go out to her poker game, she packed that jewelry and about $500 in cash—the equivalent of over $5,000 today—in her oversize black purse.

Lyda Newton, a mutual friend of Mabel’s and Merle’s, picked them up at about 8:00 p.m. and drove them to Albert Marino’s house in Sherman Oaks, a nearby suburban city in the San Fernando Valley, where the poker party was getting underway. They played and partied until 1:00 a.m., then went to the Silver Broiler for “lunch.” Lyda dropped them back at Mabel’s house at 3:00 a.m., and they talked until 4:30 a.m., then hit the hay. The next day, March 9, Mabel made them breakfast, and that afternoon, Merle’s husband came to pick her up. They chatted until the couple left at 2:00 p.m. Merle later called to check in on Mabel at 6:00 p.m., and they talked on the phone briefly. It was the last time Merle would ever speak to her longtime friend.

Mabel had settled in to read a book, a mystery titled The Purple Pony Murders, when someone rang the doorbell. It was 8:30 p.m. She wasn’t expecting anyone. She went to the door and peered through the peephole. A petite young woman in a long coat was looking up at her. Mabel asked who she was and what she wanted. The woman answered, clearly distressed, “My car broke down and it won’t start. It’s stuck out in the middle of the street. There doesn’t seem to be a phone booth nearby, and I don’t know anyone in this neighborhood. Could you please let me use your phone so I can call for help?”

And then, Mabel, the vaudevillian trouper who was nobody’s fool, made her fatal mistake. She opened the door. She stepped back, expecting to lead the woman to the phone. But she managed only a short bark of surprise . . . before the door slammed shut.

Two days later, on March 11, 1953, at 11:30 a.m., gardener Mitchell Truesdale showed up for work at Mabel’s home. He noticed the floodlights were still on. That was weird. When he went to ring the doorbell to get the key for the backyard gate, he saw that the front door was ajar. Even weirder. Mabel always kept her doors, windows—every point of access—locked. He pushed the door a little farther open and called out, “Mrs. Monahan? It’s me, Mitchell.” But he got no answer.

He moved inside and looked down the short hallway that opened onto the living room. That’s when he saw that the living room and carpets were “tore upside down,” and there was blood, lots of it. He closed the door and called his friend, Burbank police detective Carl Lane.

When Lane arrived, they briefly searched the house together. There was blood on the wall just inside the doorway, on the walls in the hallway, on the living room rugs and furniture, and on the wall of the hallway on the left that led to a linen closet and the den . . . and beyond that, the house had been ransacked. Or as Lane would later testify, everything in the house had been “radically disarranged.”

Lane backed out of the living room and turned down the hallway that led to the den. And there he found Mabel. She was lying on the floor, face down, her body half in and half out of the linen closet, her hands tied behind her back. There was blood on her head, a pillowcase underneath it, a bloodstained cloth wrapped around her neck, and a cloth strip with a knot in the center lying on the floor near her head.

Lane stared in shock. This just didn’t happen, not in this peaceful little neighborhood—and certainly not to an elderly widow. He called the station and waited for the lead investigator to arrive.

That turned out to be Lieutenant Robert Coveney—who would later become Captain Coveney of the Burbank Police Department. Lean, clean shaven, with the short haircut typical of cops—and just about every other man on the street in the ’50s—he had a determined set to his jaw and the skeptical air of a good detective. He’d be the driving force behind every move throughout the investigation and trial—for better, and for much, much worse.

Coveney and his team did a full search and found even more blood: on the leather-covered piano and on the nearby walls in the living room, on the partition between the living room and dining room, on the carpet in the entry hall and hall closet, and on the rug that was in front of the closet. Coveney also found another strip of cloth with a knot in the center—like the one near Mabel’s head—in the front room behind the sofa.

It was a scene of screaming violence and chaos, the house ripped apart from top to bottom. Whoever did this was expecting to score a big hit and was hell bent on finding it. But when the police searched Mabel’s closet, they came to a screeching halt: hanging on a hook was her big black purse, and in it was almost $500 in cash, along with fistfuls of jewelry—good jewelry, like diamond rings, earrings and brooches, and platinum bracelets. The stash was worth thousands. Even crazier, that closet had been thoroughly ransacked and the other purses in it had been turned inside out and thrown to the floor.

Now the cops were facing two questions: Not just who did it, but why?

The previous was an excerpt from the new book Trial By Ambush. It’s provided by Thomas & Mercer and author Marcia Clark. Copyright 2024, all rights reserved. 

Curious about the film (very loosely) based on the case? Here’s the trailer.

Trial by Ambush by Marcia Clark ($16.99; Thomas & Mercer; out December 1) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org