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.