The Innocents (1964)
by Edward D. Radin

Excerpt from Chapter 10 on

Daniel Kamacho

To Los Angeles police the murder of Deputy Sheriff Fred T. Guiol, assigned to the county jail, had been solved by familiar routine. Guiol had attended a movie on the night of March 10, 1946, with a friend, Miss Pearl Rattenbury, and had driven her home. Before she could step out of the car, the door was wrenched open by a young man armed with a gun. When Guiol reached for his own weapon, the armed stranger fired, killing the jailer instantly, and then ran off.

The interior light in the car had gone on when the door opened and Miss Rattenbury had seen the man clearly. She described him as in his early twenties, of Latin descent, small, slender, and dark-complexioned. During the next few months many suspects were picked up and viewed by Miss Rattenbury. Each time she said the prisoner was not the man.

Some four months later police received a tip that Daniel Kamacho might be the killer. He answered the description; he was twenty-three, a native of Iowa of Mexican descent, small and slender. He had a criminal record. The tipster said that he was carrying a Colt automatic, the same kind of weapon that had been used in the murder of Guiol. Checking back on his movements, officers learned that he had left Los Angeles about the time of the murder and had just recently returned. This is a familiar pattern to investigators; the criminal leaves town after a crime, and when he learns he is not being sought, he quietly comes back.

Kamacho was picked up and questioned, but denied any knowledge of the murder. He was placed in a line-up with several others of his general description, and this time Miss Rattenbury, without hesitation, pointed to him as the man.
Not long after this identification Kamacho confessed to shooting Guiol. He was hazy on details but said he had been "high" on marijuana at the time and could remember little of what he had been doing. He was indicted for first-degree murder, and since he had no funds, Public Defender Ellery Cuff was appointed counsel.

Kamacho admitted to the lawyer that his confession had been voluntary; Miss Rattenbury had been so positive in her identification that he felt he had to be the man. It was while Cuff was prodding him for any kind of details – what he had done that night, the night before, the night after – that Kamacho suddenly sat upright and blurted that he now knew why his mind was a blank about the shooting; he was innocent – back in March he had been in Juarez, Mexico. Asked if he could furnish any proof, the prisoner was doubtful and then brightened. He had been in jail in Juarez for several days; perhaps one of them had been the day of the murder.

Cuff wrote to authorities there but received no reply to his queries. He also got in touch with peasant relatives of Kamacho living in Mexico and asked them to check. The prosecutor's office willingly gave Cuff every opportunity and kept postponing the trial. A full year after the murder, with no word from Mexico, Kamacho was placed on trial, but a recess was granted when the public defender received word that Kamacho's sister was coming from Mexico with important information. When the trial resumed, the sister testified that her brother had been in jail in Juarez on the day of the murder, but officials there had refused to give her any copies of official records to prove it. In view of Kamacho's voluntary confession, Miss Rattenbury's identification, and the lack of any corroboration of the sister's story, a jury convicted Kamacho of first-degree murder and fixed his sentence to life imprisonment.

By now Kamacho also was certain that he had been in jail in Juarez on that date. While Cuff had been impressed by the sincerity of the sister, he did not know whether his client's story was true, and he felt it should be checked out. Both police and the prosecutor's office agreed to help him. An official request was sent to El Paso police, across the border from Juarez, asking them to examine the records. Two investigators went to Juarez but were denied permission to examine either the court or jail records. The Los Angeles district attorney's office sent one of its own men there. He learned that a man named Kamacho had been in the Juarez jail from March 3 to March 11 the previous year, but he could not determine whether this prisoner had been Daniel Kamacho, the American citizen.

Juarez officials, who were baffled by all this attention to a man with a criminal record, suddenly found themselves playing host to three more Americans: Detective Gilbert Encinas, a Spanish-speaking officer, and the man who had arrested Kamacho in Los Angeles, Deputy District Attorney Fred Henderson, the man who had prosecuted Kamacho, and Cuff, the public defender. With Encinas' fluency with Spanish, all difficulties vanished and Mexican police and jail officials promptly opened up their records. The three men returned to Los Angeles on May 2 and presented to the court documentary evidence that Kamacho, who had voluntarily confessed to the murder of Guiol, actually had been in the Juarez jail on the night of the murder. The conviction was set aside and the indictment against Kamacho dismissed. Judge Edward R. Brand, who had presided at the trial, publicly praised Cuff, the prosecutor's office, and the police department for their long and expensive investigation to prevent a mistaken conviction.