SHOT IN COLD BLOOD

Evening Star, Issue 21835, 26 September 1934, Page 10

SHOT IN COLD BLOOD

STREET GRIME IN LOG ANGELES In two little homes in the south-west part of Los Angeles last month two families were torn with grief—their lives wrecked by a pair of youthful bandits who in an hour’s time, boasting they were “ Dillingers,” committed robbery, kidnapping, and murder. And in the Newton police station gaol, facing the noose for the slaying of Officer Russell A. Leidv, were two men, Paul M‘Donald and Harry Wilson —cringing examples of the futility of crime. They had engaged in a night of crime —first holding up a restaurant at Fifty-sixth street and Broadway, another in the 3,300 block on South San Pedro street, where they fought a pistol battle with an officer, and climaxed the orgy of shooting and robbery by slaying Officer Russell A. Leidy in cold blood as he sought to question them at Stanford avenue and Thirty-third street.

All was quiet in the little Leidy home at 3,434 West Seventy-four street, when a telephone call from the University police station brought the news that transformed it into a home of tragedy. “ Russ is dead—slain in line of duty,” was the message in the voice of the desk sergeant, a friend of many years standing. The other family, that of M'Donald, refused to believe that “ Paul,” the head of the household, could have turned to a life of crime until the proof was too overwhelming to be denied. His mother, Mrs Willie Bolyn, with whom M'Donald and his wife and two babies lived at 3,950 Cimarron street, sobbed, “ How can he have done such a thing?” And M'Donald’s wife, Marv, up for the first time since little Paul Richard was born two weeks ago, sat in despair in their cottage, and Charlotte, their 22-months-old daughter, sought to comfort her, little knowing the cause ot her grief. “He told me be was going to San Diego to find work,” Mrs M'Donald sobbed.

But now, there is another family that may face want—that of Officer Leidy. There will be a little money from the police fund, but it won’t be much when there are his wife (Mrs Lillian Leidy), his parents (Mr and Mrs Charles C. Leidy), and three, children (Bill 14, Lydia 12, and Joan 2]) to be fed. ■ In gaol M'Donald whined: “ I didn’t intend to kill anyone. I didn’t shoot.”

Officer O. H. Tucker, the slain radio officer’s partner, who fought side by side with him in the gun-fight at Thirty-third street and Stanford avenue, declared, however, that a gun was found in. the front seat of the bandit’s cat where M'Donald was at the time of the shooting. “ He didn’t shoot Russ,” Tucker declared, “ but he had a gun. They didn’t give him a chance—the finest officer 1 ever had as a partner. When we pulled them into the kerb at Thirty-third street and Stanford avenue, Russ got out and walked toward them.

“‘What have you got there?’ was the onlv thing he said, and the man in the back started shooting. Five shots, so fast that it sounded like a machine gun. Two of them hit my partner—one on either side of his badge —but before he fell he fired twice and then emptied the gun as he lay in the street. “ I shot twice and I saw a man fall out in the street and lie there kicking. The car pulled over the kerb and went up Thirty-third street. I emptied my gun into them and then tried to help Russ.

“ A neighbour called an ambulance, but Russ was dead when it got there. The other man, Johnny Myers, I guess I hit. The bandits kidnapped him when they took bis car.

“We got the call a little after 3,’’ he said, “to go to a restaurant at 3,310 San Pedro street, where there had just been a hold-up. When we got there, Officer Merle Parmalee rushed out and said, ‘ They just went around the corner, boys.’ We drove around and found where they had abandoned their car and taken Myers’s just as he drive up to his home at 838) East Twenty-third street. We had driven around several blocks when we saw the bandit car and started to shake it down. The shooting followed,”