Title supplied by cataloger. On June 27, 1937, Jeanette Stephens, 8, and her friends, Melba Everett, 9, and Madeline Everett, 7, were lured from Centinela Park in Inglewood. An extensive search ensued, with the police enlisting the aid of 500 Boy Scouts. Two days after their disappearance, a Boy Scout found the three bodies in a ravine in Baldwin Hills; the shoes of each girl were removed and placed in a pile near their bodies. From the moment news of the case broke, Albert Dyer, Inglewood resident and traffic guard at Centinela Elementary School where the girls were students, followed the story closely. He began keeping a scrapbook of newspaper clippings and offered the police theories about the case. As soon as the bodies were found, Dyer arrived on the scene in Baldwin Hills and began demonstrating strange behavior. Authories began to suspect Dyer and took him into custody. He was questioned at a jail in Los Angeles, as threats upon his life were being made in Inglewood. Dyer explained how he abducted the girls from the park and enticed them with the prospect of rabbit hunting in Baldwin Hills. Dyer confessed, "I had no other reason than sex" and he went on to describe how he strangled each girl. Despite that he later recanted his confession, Dyer was tried and convicted on August 26, 1937. On September 16, 1938, he was hanged at San Quentin. Photograph caption dated June 28, 1937 reads, "Merle Everett, whose two little girls are missing, is shown with his two other children, Olive and Carl. Their mother is heart-broken by the mysterious disappearance of Madeline and Marie [sic]. Believing that a young man lured the girls away, she said that a man had tried formerly to get Olive to come to his house. She says: 'No one has the slightest idea of what agony it is to wait for children who might not come home.'"
Type
image
Format
1 photographic print :b&w ;26 x 21 cm. Photographic prints
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