“We kept baiting traps. He wouldn’t walk into them. Then somebody got the bright idea. A guy who does that sort of stuff doesn’t do it and then lay off, and then do it again. It’s a steady racket with him. So why did he lay off during the cold months? Of course, the pickings were rather slim, but there were pickings just the same, and logically you’d have thought he’d have been easier to trap when he didn’t have so much to choose from.”
“So we got the idea perhaps he’d gone some place else for the winter months. San Diego was all clear. So we looked up Florida. Sure enough, back of Miami there’d been a lot of trouble with a petting-party bandit during the winter of ’36 and ’37. What’s more, they had a couple of clues, some fingerprints, and something we could work on.”
“That gave us an opportunity. We figured this man was driving an automobile that was registered in California. We thought that he was a lone wolf, particularly that he had no woman. It was a tedious job, but we started checking the license numbers of California vehicles that had been registered in Florida, of California vehicles that had crossed through the state quarantine inspection station at Yuma in the two weeks before the first petting-party holdup took place in Los Angeles.”
“That gave us our first clue. We found a car registered to a man named Rixmann had crossed at Yuma just four days before the first of our spring petting-party holdups in ’37. We looked Rixmann up. He was rather good-looking in a dark, sullen sort of way. He’d been out of work for some time. His landlady didn’t know just what he did. He seemed to be moody and morose, but paid his rent on time, had plenty of money, and slept a lot during the day. He drove a Chevrolet coupe and stored it in a garage back of the place where he roomed. Two or three nights a week he’d go to a picture show, but a couple of nights a week he’d take his car and go out. She’d hear him come back quite late. All this was in the late summer of ’37.”
“Of course, on these petting-party holdups where there’s an assault on the girl, it’s only about one out of four or five that makes a complaint to the police. Sometimes the man can’t afford to have his name put on the police records. Sometimes the woman can’t. Sometimes when there’s rape, the woman feels that it’s poor business to make a complaint and have the newspapers publish all the facts.”
“Was it Rixmann?” I asked.
“That was the bird we wanted,” Rondler said. “We started shadowing him, and about the third night he took his car down to one of the lovers’ lanes, parked it, got out and walked about three hundred yards, waited where it was good and dark under a tree. That gave us all we needed. We had a woman police investigator who was willing to go through with it. We caught Rixmann red-handed — and I mean we really caught him. Of course, the boys worked him over some’, and when he arrived here in this office, he was all softened up.”
“He sat right over there in that chair and spilled his guts. He knew it was curtains for him. Right at the time, he didn’t care. Afterward he got a lawyer and tried to plead insanity. He didn’t make it stick. He told us that he had a very fine pair of night binoculars. He picked places where he could wait in the dark, but where there was a little light that would shine on the spot where cars would naturally be parked. He’d look occupants over with his night binoculars, and study them carefully before he went out to make his holdup. Three or four times he’d seen a couple of policemen stage a mock petting-party, and he sat watching them through his binoculars and getting a great kick out of it. With those night glasses, you couldn’t fool him. He knew it was a trap, and simply stayed there in the dark and outwaited them.”
“He told the story. He couldn’t remember all the jobs he’d pulled, but he could remember enough of them. He remembered the shootings, of course. He always did swear he didn’t pull off that Craig job. Some of the other boys didn’t believe him. I did. I couldn’t see why he’d lie about that when he was talking his neck into a noose, anyway.”
“Did they hang him?”