AMERICAN LYNCH LAW

Taranaki Daily News, 14 January 1921, Page 7

AMERICAN LYNCH LAW

INDICTED FOR MURDER. THREE MEN HANGED AT SANTA ROSA, CALIFORNIA. A GRUESOME SCENE, California, Dec. 14. Impersonated by a mob of 75 to 100 angry citizens, Judge Lynch passed and executed a death sentence upon Terrance Fitts, George Boyd, and Charles Valento, all white American citizens, alleged members of a San Francisco gang accused of the murder of three police officers, and of unspeakable attacks on two comely girl telephone-op-erators of San Francisco. An hour later the three men had been summarily strung from the same limb on a big oak tree in the Oddfellows’ cemetery on the outskirts of Santa Rosa —the beautiful city of flowers of California, Coroner Phillips and Sheriff Boyes went out and cut down the bodies.

But they did not do it until scores of Santa Rosa citizens—including many women—had made a pilgrimage to the cemetery and stood there silently gazing upon the three bodies as they swung gently in the breeze. There they dangled about three feet from the ground, the three men who had been indicted for the murder the previous Sunday of Sheriff James Petray, of Sonoma County, and Detectives Miles Jackson and Lester Dorman, of San Francisco.

Boyd, who had confessed to shooting the three officers, was hanging at the end of the limb, his face expressionless, for he was nearly dead from a mortal wound when the lynchers pulled the. rope. Fitts, his head cut open, his mouth gagged, and his face contorted with .terror, was in the v-ddic. Valento, a defiant half-smile btlfi on his face, his body stripped to the waist, just as he was found in bed at the gaol, was nearest the trunk of the tree. The mob had formed quietly, and Judge Lynch had acted swiftly. MASKED MEN DROVE IN. About one o’clock that, morning motorcars began driving into Santa Rosa, with masked men at the wheels and in the seats. They were heavily armed, too. Presumably at. a given signal they ' poured into the office of Sheriff Boyes, i pointed to a picture of the murdered • Sheriff Petray hanging on the walls, land shouted: “Look at that! Isn’t that enough ?” Outnumbered, and with shotguns pointed at him, the sheriff said he dould not resist. Late that forenoon a coroner’s jury relieved the sheriff of all blame in giving up his prisoners. The lynchers took the sheriff’s keys, opened the cells, dragged out the prisoners, and rushed them into motorcars. Then a cavalcade of about thirty motor-cars each filled with maskc I men, drove silently through the most fashionable section of the town to the Oddfellows’ cemetery. \ With hardly a word passed, except for. the screaming and pleading of Terrance Fitts, they placed the nooses and lifted the three men to their deaths. MODERN LYNCHING LAW. It wits lynch law of the gold-rush days of ’49 ruling again, modernised by automobiles instead of the glow of lanterns; the ghastly gleam of headlights made the tortured,'writhing bodies glow ghostlike amid the mist which helped to blacken the night that December Friday. It was all done with modern efficiency—quickly, over in half an hour; hardly a word uttered, not a. shot fired. Not since the days of the famous Vigilantes’ operations against early-day desperados in California has there been such a lynching in California as that which occurred that December morn. For a month San Francisco had been aroused over the outrages of a gang of ex-prize-fighters and thugs who kidnapped girls and subjected them to fearful mistreatment, scarcely imaginable in civilised America, in the very heart of a city of some half-million .people. On the previous Sunday two of the score of girl victims accompanied police detectives to Santa Rosa, some forty miles or less from San Francisco. There occurred a revolver battle with the desperados, and three of the most popular police officers of California were shot dead. The men were captured, and their terrible end was as described above.