Three Little Girls

It was Saturday in suburban Inglewood, a few miles from Los Angeles. Little Jeanette Stephens, 8, Melba Everett, 9, and Madeline Everett, 7, started off with sandwiches for a picnic in the park as countless children in countless cities have done on countless Saturdays. As afternoon wore on and they did not return, their mothers grew uneasy. When suppertime had come and gone, Mrs. Stephens sent her little boy Garth, 7, to the park to look for them. An hour later the parents called the police. Shortly after midnight a community search was on and the disappearance of the three little girls was broadcast on the Los Angeles police network. By Sunday morning a State-wide alarm was out.

Early Monday afternoon four Boy Scouts, part of a volunteer army which was scouring the countryside, stumbled into a deep gully about two miles back from the road in the Baldwin Hills. There in weeds as high as a man's head, her face pushed into the dirt, a clothesline tight around her cold little neck was the lifeless body of one of the girls, ravished and murdered. In the bushes a few yards away, similiarly strangled and raped, were the bodies of the others. As the horrible news of California's crime-of-the-year spread through the Los Angeles area, police began a round-up of suspected sex criminals, pieced together possible clues.

Wearing a WPA badge and serving as a volunteer policeman at the scene of the discovery of the bodies was slim, 32-year-old Albert Dyer who had known the three little girls from his year's work as a traffic guard in front of the Centinela grammar school. At the discovery of the bodies, he asked men in the crowd not to smoke "out of respect to the dead." That night his 24-year-old wife Isabel helped him add the day's newspaper clippings about the tragedy to a scrapbook he had begun when the girls were first reported missing. By week's end, with angry crowds surging before the Inglewood City Hall threatening lynching to suspect after suspect, Mrs. Dyer wrote a summary of the crime into the scrapbook, ended it, "The suspected murderer was . . . ."

This week from Los Angeles' skyscraper jail where police had taken him to prevent a lynching attempt, came the name of the murderer to Mrs. Dyer. It was her own husband.

Weeping, shuddering, fainting at one point in the questioning. Murderer Dyer told how he had urged the girls to come with him into the Baldwin Hills where they would catch rabbits. They met him Saturday afternoon and walked back into the gullied wilderness where they built a fire. To catch the rabbits the girls were to be placed separately at different spots. "I left Jeanette and Melba sitting there, I took Madeline up the canyon. . . . After I choked her there with my hands ... I tied a piece of rope around her neck to make sure she was dead." Then he returned and repeated the crime with the others. Then he ravished the three bodies. Finally in a fit of remorse he took off the girls' shoes, ranged them neatly side by side and prayed over them. "What did you say?" asked the District Attorney. "I said 'Lord forgive what I have done.' Then I went home to my wife." Sobbed Mrs. Dyer, "Albert couldn't have done this terrible thing. . . . We both loved children. We lost two babies of our own."

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