It was young Roger Thomas who discovered something unexpected in the tule reeds.
The 12-year-old and his father were tromping through the marsh on the edge of San Francisco Bay on a warm Sunday afternoon, collecting bunches of exotic-looking sedge grass to decorate their El Cerrito home. Near the Southern Pacific train tracks, which traversed the East Bay wetlands on a raised berm, Thomas spotted a tuft of blonde hair and a severed human ear. The skin seemed freshly lacerated.
The remains were taken that day, Aug. 23, 1925, to Berkeley’s police station for examination. Experts the police consulted concluded that the body parts belonged to a young woman — and that she was probably dead.
Police began a search in the Richmond and El Cerrito wetlands, near present-day Point Isabel Regional Shoreline park. The next morning, they scanned the train tracks for signs that someone had been struck by a locomotive. Finding nothing, Berkeley’s police, now joined by Richmond police officers and Contra Costa County Sheriff Richard Veale, who had taken over the case, waded further into the mud and bulrush.
They discovered additional signs of an insidious crime. More clumps of golden hair surfaced, wrapped in the pages of the Oakland Tribune. Then an officer spotted something larger in the water, what turned out to be the woman’s lower jaw.
“Murder feared,” one newspaper announced in a banner headline. It appeared that a sinister killer had dismembered a young woman and strewn her body parts along the East Bay’s shoreline. Who would do such a ghoulish thing?
The case quickly became infamous. Dubbed the “Tule Marsh Murder,” it garnered obsessive media attention, and reporters raced to chronicle every twist and turn.
Police from multiple cities combed over miles of wetlands, searched remote cabins, and raided the homes of prominent men. They interrogated dozens, including one of the Bay Area’s highest ranking law enforcement officers. District attorneys and police also turned to the emerging science of forensics, leaning on the opinions of a star criminologist in Berkeley.
Like other murder mysteries of the 19th and early 20th centuries — dozens became grist for the era’s sensational yellow journalism — the murder gripped the public’s imagination because it hinted at taboo subjects and appeared to have involved powerful men.
As the police, including a young Earl Warren, badgered suspects and ran down tips, their investigation turned up potential motives that pointed to the possibility of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, or even an abortion. Authorities ultimately landed on a theory that the victim had been killed in retaliation when she attempted to extort a lover.
As the case dragged on without an arrest, the integrity of the police would be called into question by the Klu Klux Klan, as the terror group attempted to politicize the law enforcement failures and seize power, in a racially tinged law-and-order campaign.
The Tule Marsh Murder was never solved. But the case’s twists and turns offer a window into the Bay Area of 100 years ago, when women’s reproductive care was criminalized, when white supremacist forces were on the rise, when forensic science was new, and when newspapers held extraordinary power to narrate, or distort, reality.
“The Wizard of Berkeley”
Early on, the police theorized that the killer drove his victim to the swampy area, murdered her in the reeds, and disposed of her bloodied fragments where the tide would scatter them.
Two couples living on Mariposa Street, on the sparsely populated edge of Richmond, told police they’d heard “piercing shrieks” drifting up from the shore the night the murder may have taken place. Other neighbors with views of the water told the police about a suspicious man who’d recently visited the area in a car. On the second day of their search, officers found a bloody hatchet in an isolated El Cerrito shack. This all pointed toward a butchering on the water’s edge.
But Edward Oscar Heinrich wasn’t having it.
Heinrich, a lecturer in police science at UC Berkeley, was at the time one of the country’s preeminent criminologists. From his home laboratory on Oxford Street, he plied his trade for California’s police, meticulously studying bullets, hair follicles, and dirt under microscopes, tracing the origins of clothing fibers and animal furs, and reconstructing crime scenes. By the time of the murder, he was known as the “American Sherlock Holmes” and “The Wizard of Berkeley.”
The year before the killing, Heinrich had helped solve a baffling mystery involving a chemist who was trying to invent synthetic silk but appeared to have perished in an explosion in his Walnut Creek lab. Heinrich discovered that the inventor had faked his own death, setting off the explosion and leaving behind the charred corpse of an itinerant worker he’d murdered in an elaborate scheme to collect on a life insurance policy while avoiding debts to investors. Exposed and cornered, the fraudster killed himself in an Oakland hotel room.
The year before, Heinrich had been summoned to Southern Oregon to help identify the bandits who had robbed a train and murdered its crew, an incident dubbed the Siskiyou Massacre. By examining a pair of overalls, wood chips, a receipt, and other seemingly mundane objects, he was able to identify the three brothers behind it.
Some of his methods would prove to be baldly pseudoscientific, riven with the kinds of errors and biases that continue to trouble the field of forensics to this day. After the shocking killing of a young couple on a hunting trip in Humboldt County, Heinrich was brought in to scour trails through the forests. He helped send a man to prison for the murders in 1928, relying on little more than a boot print, a few goat hairs, and a bullet. Using a racial slur to refer to the suspect because of his indigenous heritage, Heinrich ridiculously claimed the motive was to enact a “phallic ritual” before a “heathen altar” deep in the woods. The suspect, Jack Ryan, was pardoned in 1996, nearly two decades after his death.
Yet in 1925 East Bay police still considered it a coup to get Heinrich involved in their case.
From the small group of remains and wisps of hair laid out on a table in the Berkeley Police Department, Heinrich claimed he could determine that the victim was a woman, about 30 years old, around 5 feet, 4 inches tall, weighing 135 pounds. She was “round faced, long haired and a blonde, perhaps with a Scandinavian strain, a woman who took pride in her appearance,” Heinrich told the police.
He also proposed an alternative theory of the crime: She wasn’t killed in the marsh. She was killed somewhere else and her remains were dumped in the bay later.
A woman named Bessie
The same day the 12-year-old discovered remains in the marsh, an Oakland woman named Annie Ferguson reported to the police that her daughter Bessie was missing. She’d last seen Bessie four days earlier, on Aug. 19, and she was worried.
The Ferguson family lived in a house on Fourth Avenue in Oakland, about where Laney College’s baseball field is today. Bessie had worked as a nurse at San Francisco’s St. Elizabeth’s Hospital and held a variety of other jobs, but she hadn’t been employed steadily in over three years. The 30-year-old had once been married but, since her divorce, had lived on her own or with her mother.
In the days immediately before she vanished, Bessie had been staying in the Antlers Hotel in San Francisco, falsely registered under the name Mrs. J.J. Loren of Seattle.
On Aug. 24, the police brought Bessie’s mother and brothers to view the remains they’d gathered from the marsh. When Veale, the Contra Costa County sheriff, pulled two muddy shoes from a box, the Oakland Post Enquirer reported that Ferguson let out a heartbroken cry: “My daughter’s, oh my little girl.”
At least, that’s how one newspaper dramatized the moment. Although Bay Area police have a more contentious relationship with journalists today, it was common at the time for officers to give reporters intimate access to their work, an arrangement the historian Scott Memmel has called “cooperative coexistence.” Police frequently let them walk around crime scenes, speak freely to officers, look at evidence as it was acquired, and listen in on interviews with witnesses. Newspapers, in turn, would publish vivid stories whose narratives had been steered by their police gatekeepers in self-serving ways.
According to the papers, two dentists would later clinch the murder victim’s identification, using the remains to verify they exactly matched work they’d recently performed on Bessie.
Heinrich’s initial description of the victim turned out to be eerily accurate in many ways. But his deployment of “race science” was faulty again. The Fergusons were an Irish family — not Scandinavian.
Under a microscope in his Berkeley lab, Heinrich spent hours studying the sand and mud clumped on the newspaper pages used by the killer to wrap Bessie’s remains. Something was off, he concluded; the dirt appeared to be from somewhere else. He said it looked more like the “alluvial” deposits around the island of Alameda — not the bayshore 10 miles north where the clues were recovered.
His insight was seemingly confirmed days later when a dredgerman, Ed Burns, whose job was to keep the channel separating Alameda from Bay Farm Island clear for small ships, spotted something unusual in mud. He and the tender of the drawbridge waded into the knee-deep mire and carried to shore an old coat wrapped around part of a human skull.
“To think I should have been on the bridge all this time with that terrible evidence of tragedy beneath me,” Young told the Oakland Post Enquirer, one of the many Bay Area papers clamoring for scoops.
Police swarmed the new crime scene.
Upon hearing the news, Heinrich rushed to the offices of Alameda’s city physician, Dr. Arthur Heiryonimous. A Post Inquirer report exemplified the obsessive attention to detail in coverage of the case.
“Heinrich arrived in Alameda before noon with all the pieces of the body found in El Cerrito,” the paper reported. “They were in glass containers preserved in alcohol. He donned his white surgeon’s apron gloves and cap and then moved a long table from the Alameda city hall into the rear yard. On this table he laid out the pieces of skull, embracing them in the folds of the pansy colored coat in which one of the pieces was found on the beach. After assembling the three pieces of skull, Heinrich fitted the upper jaw and the lower jaw, which were found in the El Cerrito tule swamp, to the skull.”
The back of the skull, the paper reported, displayed a large fracture from a “two pointed instrument,” something like a wrench. It appeared to be the undeniable mark of a homicide.
Police now believed that Bessie had been murdered and that her killer had gone through the trouble of dismembering her and scattering her body parts in two distant tidal marshes. But why?
In the days and weeks that followed, the police entertained several theories, at times declaring themselves close to catching the murderer, and the newspapers followed the case with zeal.
Still, authorities never pinned down the location where the murder took place. They never found the murder weapon or the saw used to destroy Bessie’s body.
Later, investigators would wonder whether the real-time coverage of their work had done too much to tip off the killer, allowing him to evade detection, or even to introduce red herrings. The skull parts found near Alameda, for example, might have been planted there by the killer to sow confusion, Warren, then Alameda County DA, speculated, after the papers reported on Heinrich’s dirt studies.
A string of prominent men
Now that police had identified their victim, they turned to reconstructing Bessie Ferguson’s final days.
To do this, they interviewed her mother, putting Ferguson under increasing pressure. Interviews turned into interrogations as they squeezed out highly personal information about Bessie’s private life that inevitably ended up receiving salacious coverage in the press.
They pieced together that Bessie had left the family home on August 17 to take the ferry to San Francisco. The next day, from the Antlers Hotel, she called her mother, saying she needed to discuss something important. Mother and daughter met the next evening, on Aug. 19, at San Francisco’s Ferry Building, for dinner. Later, at her hotel just off Union Square, Bessie confided in her mother that she was having trouble with a male friend.
According to the Oakland Tribune, Bessie “told her mother she was making the man think she was going to have a baby and that she had tried to use a plan of going to Seattle, which had proved successful in drawing money from other men.”
Leaned on by the police, Bessie’s mother said her daughter had several affairs with wealthy and influential men, the Tribune reported. After some time, police speculated, Bessie would tell her lover she was pregnant and that the baby was his. She would offer to spare her romantic partner from scandal by quietly leaving the Bay Area, perhaps to give birth and put the child up for adoption, or to obtain an abortion, all bankrolled by her lover. Another version of this alleged swindle, police said, was for Bessie to claim she’d already had the child and needed money to raise the fatherless infant.
Perhaps Bessie was really pregnant in some cases and perhaps she wasn’t; either way, police said, the funds apparently helped support her and her mother. Investigators claimed she also spent some of it on diamonds, clothing, and other luxuries.
It’s impossible today to know who Bessie Ferguson really was. But her independent lifestyle and romantic entanglements may have led the police and press to embroider a story, based on shreds of evidence and a pressured interrogation of her mother, that she was a serial blackmailer.
Certainly she was trying to navigate life as a single woman at a time when reproductive rights were highly constrained. A wave of laws had outlawed abortion in most states by the 1880s. Yet having a child out of wedlock was often a source of public shame. A network of homes for unwed mothers was built across the country in the 1880s and 1890s; in Seattle, where Bessie was rumored to have traveled, the Florence Crittenton Home of Seattle opened in 1899 with 50 beds.
Whatever the underlying truth, the immediate task confronting the police was to figure out what had happened on the day of her disappearance.
Ferguson said the day after their dinner at the Ferry Building, she met her daughter in the tiny hamlet of Port Costa, about 15 miles north of Richmond. There, they boarded a south-bound train, to make it seem as though they were arriving in Oakland from Seattle, the Tribune claimed. Bessie had already sent word to the man in question that she would arrive in west Oakland later that day. However, when she stepped off the train at Market and Seventh streets, he wasn’t there. Bessie’s mother told the police she stayed aboard the train to disembark at its next stop, in East Oakland. She watched her daughter walk away in the crowd, and never saw her again.
Police began to close in on a few men who’d recently been in contact with Bessie, starting with Gordon Rowe, a wealthy accountant.
Rowe had employed Bessie as a stenographer in 1914 and had given her money in the years since. He was also identified by a bellboy and the manager of the Antlers Hotel as the man who had visited Bessie the night before she vanished.
Police whisked Rowe across the bay to Berkeley, subjected him to a barrage of questions, and then insisted that he lead the way to his duck-hunting cabin in Alviso, on a salt marsh north of San Jose.
Rowe denied visiting the hotel or taking trips with Bessie. He’d gotten a phone call from her the day she disappeared, he said, in which she said she was taking a trip and hoped he could line up a job for her when she got back. He said he had an alibi for the day of the murder — his wife.
As to the money and other assistance he’d given Bessie over the years, Rowe portrayed himself as a helpful father figure. “I have been a fool, I suppose, in being too generous to personal friends,” he told the San Francisco Examiner.
A trunk of letters found in the Ferguson family home pointed the police to other prominent men. Astonishingly — by today’s laws of evidence — the letters were also provided to the press, which gleefully published the most tantalizing excerpts.
The authors of the letters were distinguished Oakland and San Francisco men, and the letters appeared to indicate that they had been Bessie’s friends, close confidants, or lovers. Some appeared to indicate that the young woman had been pregnant at least once before.
“How am I to talk intelligently to your mother,” one letter from Bessie’s family physician, J.J. Moyer, began. “She will certainly ask who the father is.”
Other letters appeared to reference Bessie’s need to leave town, whether to see a pregnancy through, or to end it.
“Am enclosing amount asked and trust it will see you all over the case,” another of Moyer’s notes explained. “You needed an operation, so you can make easy explanation to your folks after this is over. Take my advice just this once.”
“I would like to see you before you go,” a different doctor wrote to Bessie. “I am very sorry to know how much you suffer but I feel that your choice to go east is a very good one.”
Other letters revealed that one of Bessie’s dentists, one police had relied on to identify her teeth, was among the men who’d sent her money. The dentist’s name, J. Loren Pease, echoed the name Bessie had used to register at the San Francisco hotel, “Mrs. J.J. Loren.” And police found a postcard Pease had mailed Bessie on New Year’s in 1921 as well as a letter from a bank describing a $951 transfer of Liberty Bonds to Bessie from one of Pease’s accounts.
When put under police interrogation, the Oakland Tribune reported, Pease was “highly nervous” and “refused to utter a syllable.”
Moyer denied any relationship beyond serving as the family physician and “refused point blank, under advice from his attorney, to answer questions about the letters.”
Police eventually backed off the dentist, the family doctor, and the accountant, Rowe, but not before Rowe gave fuel to the idea that the perpetrator was someone powerful.
“I believe I am being made a victim to cover up for someone else,” he said.
In fact, a far more prominent name had emerged early on: Frank Barnet.
Barnet, the prominent son of an officer who’d helped found the Oakland Police Department, was appointed sheriff of Alameda County in 1905 and had been handily reelected ever since. He also held an influential position as president of the state sheriff’s association. Local newspapers were used to heaping praise on him, calling Barnet an “energetic public officer” and “one of the best sheriffs in California.”
Early on, Ferguson fervently insisted that Barnet be treated as the top suspect in her daughter’s slaying, saying he was the source of her daughter’s “man trouble.” Barnet had known Bessie for years, Ferguson said, and, papers reported, Bessie had told her it was Barnet she had planned to meet in Oakland when she stepped off the train the day she disappeared.
Just days into the investigation, the San Francisco Examiner reported, Bessie’s mother showed up at Barnet’s home at 8th and Fallon streets to confront him. With Barnet’s wife as a witness, Ferguson and the sheriff engaged in an exchange of “bitter words.”
Barnet acknowledged being a “friend” of the Ferguson family, saying that he’d met with Bessie twice: once because Bessie wanted a recommendation for a job at a local health center, and again when Bessie approached him on her sister’s behalf, saying her brother-in-law was not paying child support.
But Barnet denied any knowledge of the crime. “She must be crazy,” he said of Ferguson, the Examiner reported. “There is absolutely no sense or truth to her charges.” He denied that he’d met Bessie and insisted that he could account for himself for the entire evening.
Less than a week into the investigation, newspapers reported, Contra Costa Sheriff Veale and Alameda County District Attorney Earl Warren dropped Barnet’s name from their list of suspects.
An “illegal operation” gone wrong?
The story police pieced together of Bessie’s final days strongly resembled her corpse — most of it was missing.
Was she a blackmailer of eminent men, killed by a lover who refused to play that game?
Or did a young woman die on an operating table while receiving a hushed abortion to spare a married man from scandal?
A botched abortion was possible. In fact, the macabre details of the tule marsh case resembled numerous other deaths in pre-Roe v. Wade America. Doctors and other abortion providers, eager to avoid prison, had sometimes cut up the bodies of women who’d died from fatal procedures and dumped them in lakes, sewers, harbors, and cemeteries in a desperate attempt to hide the evidence.
On Sept. 15, three weeks into the case, Heinrich joined Sheriff Veale and his men in searching the basement unit of a Victorian home on Santa Clara Avenue in Alameda, according to the Examiner. They questioned the landlady, who lived in the upper flat. As the bottom unit’s tenant, W. S. Card, was away on vacation, Veale’s men had ample time to dig up the backyard, bagging soil samples under Heinrich’s supervision.
Card was a Bay Area doctor who’d had his home and practice raided by police in the past. One bust in 1912 led to his arrest on charges that he’d provided abortions to at least 90 Oakland and San Francisco women. His office at the time, on 23rd Street, not far from Lake Merritt, was shut down and he was imprisoned for years in San Quentin.
“Many of the women who visited the place are said to be well-known society women,” the Oakland Tribune said in reporting on the raid, “and it is possible in the trial, the records made by the police of the visitors to Doctor Card’s offices may be brought out as evidence.”
California, like much of the nation, had restricted abortion decades earlier, allowing it only to save a woman’s life or to protect her health. But the restrictions gave physicians, often practicing in private offices or patients’ homes, broad discretion to provide abortion care to their patients. “When the initial laws were created in California, it was to protect women and make sure the people practicing medicine without a license were being punished,” Alicia Gutierrez-Romine, a professor of history at California State University San Bernardino who has studied the history of abortion criminalization, told The Oaklandside. “It wasn’t specifically over concerns about abortion.”
However, doctors who performed large numbers of abortions frequently became targets of law enforcement. And in the 1920s, the further professionalization of medical care brought with it more oversight over physicians. Moral and religious language was also being injected into the discussion of abortion. By 1935, California law would change, removing much of the discretion available to doctors.
Still, abortions were an indelible part of life in the Bay Area the year of Bessie’s death, especially for women who had the means to pay for them.
Card was said to have been acquainted with Bessie, and Heinrich claimed the soil samples matched those found in the clothing pulled from the swamp. But police said they uncovered no conclusive evidence that could tie Card to her death. Police interrogated other known abortion providers, including a San Francisco beauty specialist, before closing this investigative tangent, too.
By September, the case had stalled. However, Alameda County District Attorney Earl Warren had taken over the investigation, due to the discovery of the skull pieces near Bay Farm Island, in Alameda, and because the suspect list centered on Oakland.
Still young and unknown outside California, the future Supreme Court Justice had only been appointed the county’s top law enforcement officer eight months earlier. At his swearing in, Warren promised to enforce the laws “strictly and uniformly.” He’d already shown flashes of independence, most notably by indicting the leaders of a powerful bail bond companies who’d tried to bribe officials and charging nearly a dozen oil industry executives with scamming investors. Thus began Warren’s more than a decade-long crusade against corruption in the East Bay, a battle that put him up against bootleggers, bookies, saloon owners, casino operators, city contractors, and the crooked cops and municipal bosses who protected them.
In other words, Warren’s takeover of the tule marsh case signaled that even if the murderer was a man of influence, he’d still be held accountable. Warren only had to find him.
By early 1926, local papers reported that Warren and Veale had zeroed in on a new, final set of suspects, eight persons who, according to the Martinez Daily Standard, conspired to cover up the killing. Bessie had a new “male admirer” she was seeing, and on Aug. 20, the day after her mother saw her step off the train in west Oakland, she and this man set out, along with a few friends, on a road trip to Martinez.
They partied, drank, and visited the Maybeck-designed Clyde Inn, according to the Oakland Tribune, which had been shuttered by prohibition authorities but then reopened as a speakeasy. The inn was a lavish building in a remote rural setting, with bowling lanes, a pool, intricate woodwork, and marble decor, and was well-stocked with liquor and wine.
Sometime that night, the Tribune reported, Bessie and her lover broke into an argument and the man crushed the back of her skull. Some newspapers reported it as a lovers’ quarrel gone bad; others asserted the attack was retaliation for blackmail.
“The subject of money came up,” the Oakland Tribune speculated. “The principal is understood to have become enraged, and to have taken summary action, striking the nurse over the head and knocking her unconscious.”
The attacker then enlisted seven accomplices. They were, according to the Tribune, “an Eastbay veterinary surgeon, the veterinary surgeon’s wife, an Eastbay physician, a bootlegger, the bootlegger’s wife, a mechanic and the mechanic’s wife.” The attacker and the mechanic, who’d been at the drinking party, were seen near the physician’s north Oakland home, apparently seeking the doctor’s help to save Bessie’s life. But after learning she would not recover from the assault, they recruited the veterinarian to saw her apart to hide evidence of the crime. That the bones were cut to a uniform size, the exact length of a veterinarian pan, the Tribune claimed, was proof that it was a vet who had handled the butchery.
The seven accomplices were said to have aided the killer because of his power and influence, and because he threatened to kill them if they confessed. The Tribune reported that one of the accomplices was so terrified he had a nervous breakdown under police interrogation and had to be hospitalized.
If this final theory were true, this mystery man was powerful enough to keep his name out of the press. DA Warren and Sheriff Veale knew who he was, the Tribune claimed, but didn’t have the evidence needed to arrest and convict.
The lack of resolution would soon provide political fodder for the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in Oakland.
A law and order campaign, Klan style
In the 1920s, as today, a Christian nationalist movement was rising in the United States, seeking to establish a nation under the flag of white supremacy, protestantism, and patriarchy. The organization at the heart of this drive was the Klu Klux Klan, which was then experiencing a revival after a wave of federal prosecutions in the 1870s. Under the new Klan’s belief system, Catholics, Jews, Black people, Asians, Mexicans, and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were corrupting the country and needed to be excluded from public life, violently if necessary.
Oakland was a hotspot of Klan activity on the West Coast, host to a series of mass initiation rituals in the early 1920s, including cross burnings in the hills and at a gathering of 8,000 acolytes inside the Oakland Convention Center. The invisible empire’s East Bay leaders also sought power in local elections, and KKK members from multiple cities infamously marched down Macdonald Avenue in Richmond.
Bessie Ferguson’s murder presented a unique opportunity for local Klansmen, fixated as they were on imagined threats to what they viewed as the honor and purity of white women posed by a permissive polyglot society.
The Klan leveraged the inability of the police and prosecutors to solve the tule marsh murder, claiming law enforcement leaders were either incompetent or worse — they were protecting someone high up.
Klansmen visited the Ferguson home early on, according to the Martinez Daily Standard, and spoke to Bessie’s mother as part of “a searching investigation into the facts surrounding the crime.” (One of Ferguson’s sons denied she willingly shared information with the vigilantes.)
By early 1926, men with ties to the Klan were moving fast to pin blame for the mystery on their political enemies. Klan chapters and their allies — the Knights of the Flaming Sword, Ku Klux Klan No. 1 and No. 3 of Oakland, the Berkeley and Alameda County KKKs, and the Minute Men of America, among them — united under the banner of the California Civic Vigilantes. They drafted a statement condemning Barnet and Warren, who were up for reelection that year, for their failures in the tule marsh case.
“This organization has found that in the Ferguson murder case the district attorney’s office, claiming to have evidence to convict the guilty parties, has been very lax in its duties,” the vigilantes wrote in a widely distributed statement. “Certain persons were accused of the murder through rumor and intelligence and no action has been taken and the said district attorney’s office has advised the Ferguson family to keep quiet on the matter and talk to no one on said subject and to accept no help from outsiders.”
Barnet shot back, calling the vigilantes’ claims “untrue and ridiculous” and again asserting that he had “absolute proof” of his whereabouts on the day of the murder. “[T]hat they know the identity of the murderer of Bessie Ferguson, where she was slain and how, and where and how her body was disposed of, is undoubtedly false,” Barnet told the papers.
Warren’s strategy was to expose the vigilantes as opportunists. He called them “discredited attorneys, cappers for bail bond brokers, and other disgruntled people who have recently been under the cloud of police investigation.” He named a former deputy district attorney, Preston Higgins, as one of the ringleaders.
Higgins, who’d served under Warren’s predecessor, Ezra Decoto, was now running against Warren for district attorney. While working for several years as an Oakland defense attorney, Higgins had been investigated by Warren’s men for allegedly taking part in the bail bonds fraud, one of the most audacious corruption schemes Warren had uncovered in Alameda County. Under the complex scheme, lawyers conspired to set high bail for defendants, in return for kickbacks from bondsmen.
Warren said he and his deputies had worked unceasingly with the police departments of Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, and Richmond and the district attorney of Contra Costa County to solve the case. “The investigation is not complete, nor has it ever been abandoned,” he said.
When polls closed for the primary on Aug. 31, 1926, Warren easily prevailed over Higgins. But Barnet failed to secure more than 50% of the vote, forcing him into a runoff with the man who’d stepped forward to challenge him — Burton Becker, the chief of police of the newly incorporated town of Piedmont.
Becker had campaigned on a platform of enforcing prohibition, cracking down on saloons and gambling halls, and upholding the moral order. He was also a major force behind the KKK. When the Klan established its first “konklave” in Oakland in 1921, Becker served as the klan’s “kailiff,” or vice president, according to Steven Lavoie, the former Oakland Tribune’s former history columnist. Becker and other powerful men, many of whom tried to keep their roles with the KKK secret, participated in the East Bay’s mass initiation rituals in the early 1920s, including cross burnings in the hills above Richmond, Berkeley, and Oakland. As police chief, Becker also failed to offer protection to Sidney Dearing and his family when a mob of 500 white Piedmont residents surrounded their Wildwood Avenue home in 1924. The Dearings, the first Black family to buy a home in Piedmont, had faced several attempted bombings and constant harassment. Barnet, by contrast, had defended the Dearings when he was called on to do so as sheriff.
Becker and Barnet waged a bitter campaign. Barnet accused Becker’s Klan allies of insinuating that he “had guilty knowledge of the crime,” according to the San Francisco Bulletin. As the November election neared, unknown assailants fired on Becker at his home, narrowly missing him. Barnet called it a political stunt.
When election day came, voters tossed Barnet from office and elected the Klansman. Becker was presented with a $1,000 diamond studded badge at his swearing in ceremony, where he pledged to protect the county against the ills of alcohol and narcotics. He then appointed other high-ranking members of the KKK to key posts controlling the county jails and other divisions of the sheriff’s office.
Three years later, Becker was caught taking bribes to protect gambling halls and saloons. The sheriff was stripped of his office, convicted, and shipped off to San Quentin. Other Klan leaders met similar fates. The Oakland Klan imploded after just a few years.
Barnet would go on to retake the sheriffs office. When he died in 1935, no mention was made in his obituary of the accusations against him in the tule marsh case. Warren went on to become state attorney general, governor, and a Supreme Court justice. Heinrich’s legend as a forensic genius continued to soar.
But Bessie Ferguson’s killer was never caught.
And because she was unable to speak, the truth of how Bessie lived her life, what really happened in her final days, a story that would complicate the narratives woven by the police and press, has never been told.
