Writing and researching true crime - Guest Post by James T. Bartlett

One of the great pleasures of Bouchercon 2023 was a dinner with the Murder Is Everywhere team (or all of it who could attend). It was the first time I'd met Wendall (who is delightful), and as a bonus, I also met her husband James Bartlett. James is originally from London, but has been living in Los Angeles since 2004. As a travel and lifestyle journalist and historian, he has written for the Los Angeles Times, BBC, Los Angeles Magazine, and many other well-known publications.

It turned out that James was shortlisted for an Anthony award at the convention for his recently-published true crime analysis of the Alaskan Blond murder whose seventieth anniversary will be in just two days. The story sounded most intriguing, and indeed it was. After reading the book, I asked James if he could tell us more about the case and how he researched the story in a guest post. He graciously agreed. 

- Michael.

“All of the facts are not known and may never be, but enough became public to make the Alaska murder case a grim thriller that outdid anything invented by mystery writers like James Cain, Rex Stout, or Mickey Spillane.”      

Ebony magazine, October 1954

 That tantalizing description of the “Alaska murder” became the subject of my true crime book The Alaskan Blonde: Sex, Secrets, and the Hollywood Story that Shocked America.

 Having written several alternative crime-flavored travel guides to LA, I was often searching through the Los Angeles Times archives, and I came across a report from April 1954 about a suicide at a luxury Hollywood hotel that was related to the murder of a successful businessman in Alaska.

 The facts were that in October 1953, a tearful Diane Wells had told police in Fairbanks, a small city in the center of Alaska, that two masked men had forced their way into the apartment, shot her husband Cecil while he slept, and beat her unconscious before escaping with money and jewelry.

 

Cecil Wells

Dianne with black eyes

There had been a series of high-profile robberies locally, but then someone dropped a dime on Diane, alleging she had been having an affair with Johnny Warren, a Black musician. In Jim Crow America this was a bigger scandal than the murder, and the crime-loving newspapers covered it in a sensationalized way that we would still recognize today.

Johnny Warren

Cecil’s fifth wife, Diane was blonde, attractive, twenty years younger, and set to inherit a chunk of his considerable fortune. Unsurprisingly, the murder became one of the rare stories that broke out of then-territorial Alaska onto the pages of the Lower 48 newspapers, Newsweek, Life, Ebony, Jet, and the pulp detective magazines.

 

Glam shot of Diane

Five-Star Detective's take

The police and media focus quickly shifted to Diane and Johnny, who were charged with first-degree murder and potentially faced the death penalty.  

 Intrigued, I made use of the essential modern-day tools of Google, Ancestry, Newspapers.com and Facebook to see if there were any living relatives. The Hollywood hotel connection and film noir aura might work as an article I thought, and I was hooked: I wanted to know what happened.

 I also wondered what became of Mark, the 3-year-old son of Cecil and Diane? Mercifully he had been elsewhere the night of the murder, but he had been cruelly dubbed the “Millionaire Orphan” or the “Murder Orphan” at the time, only now he was close to 75 years old.

 

Diane and young Mark

To start my research, I made an online FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request to the FBI, something anyone can do.

 They had been involved because it was a felony and because, at the time, Alaska was a US territory. It only become the 49^th state in 1959, and this ended up affecting my research because territorial archives were often disorganized and spread out, as opposed to the highly-efficient State Archives in Juneau.

 The FBI file was around 130 fascinating pages, and it was a thrill to see that J. Edgar Hoover had signed some of the early documents. They revealed that Cecil’s murder investigation had soon stalled, and that the other robberies with a similar modus operandi were all unsolved.

Signed by J Edgar Hoover himself

Drawing of a bullet recovered from the crime scene

For a territory desiring statehood, it was not a good look when rich, influential members of their second-largest city were getting shot dead in their homes, and no one was going to jail.

 

49th State

In fact, members of Cecil’s family told me they felt the case was swept under the carpet in favor of that statehood push, though the FBI went to extreme lengths in pursuing the case against Johnny Warren for several years; he was only exonerated in 1960 (after statehood).   

 

Exoneration document

Usually, true crime books tend to be written by family members, surviving victims, or law enforcement officials. I was none of those, nor Alaskan or American, but ironically my English accent often helped break the ice in interviews.

 All the families felt this was a black hole in their history, something taboo that was never talked about, and when you add in the fact that Alaskans tend to feel they are ignored by the rest of America anyway, my genuine interest was something they almost entirely welcomed.

 In fact, quite often I was asked what I knew, and who I think killed Cecil.

 Encouraged by my wife Wendall Thomas over the five years of research, I became increasingly determined to reexamine the case with the benefit of hindsight, witness accounts, and the knowledge we have today but did not then: about mental illness, post-natal depression, domestic abuse and so on.

 Through my interviews I was also lucky enough to get the holy grail of research: the private writings of someone involved in the investigation. In my case it was the outspoken US Deputy Marshal Frank Wirth, whose typed-up notes hinted where the murder weapon ended up.

 They also included a mugshot of mysterious “third suspect” William Colombany, and a startling picture of Wirth when he was extraditing Johnny Warren back to Fairbanks.

 

Johnny and Frank laughing

By the time the book was ready to be published, I had edited out the endless non-essential facts and bizarre coincidences you inevitably find when you (rightly) become obsessed with finding out everything you can, and while I knew I could never “solve” the crime, I could take my best guess about what happened 70 years ago on October 17, 1953.