“You are one of the officers who discovered the body of this man who is at present lying in the undertaking parlors?”
“Yes, sir, I and my partner, Jack Moore, were cruising up this road, making a cut-off from the ocean boulevard to get over to the Conejo route, when I happened to notice that some branches had been freshly broken from one of the scrub oaks just down the hill from the edge of the road. We stopped the car, investigated, and found where some heavy object had crashed down through the trees. We worked our way down the ledge, and then came to an abrupt drop of about sixty or seventy feet. We could see a car lying upside-down in the bottom of this canyon. It took us almost half an hour to work our way down to it. This man was pinned underneath the car. The top had caved in, and the back of the front seat had crushed his head like an egg shell. He had been dead for some time. The body already showed evidences of decomposition. It had been lying for two days in the hot sun.”
“What did you do?”
“We notified the coroner, obtained a wrecking outfit, first raised the body to the road, and then brought up the machine.”
“Were you present when representatives of the district attorney’s office tested the steering wheel of the automobile for fingerprints?”
“I was.”
“What did they find?”
“There were no fingerprints on the steering wheel.”
“Were you present when the pockets of the dead man’s clothes were emptied?”
“I was.”