Carbon Canyon Crime Capsule #5: Murder at the Keene Ranch, 1931

The last post detailed some of the history of Arthur G. Keene and his Carbon Canyon ranch, located on the Orange County portion of the canyon.  Keene had a sister, Ruby, who had been married to Texas native and blacksmith Gilbert Francis Collie, born in 1879 in San Antonio.  The couple had two sons, Herbert and Gilbert, Jr., before the relationship disintegrated, probably due to physical abuse by Collie, and the pair divorced.

Collie who drifted considerably over the years, remarried and had another son in Medford, Oregon, before his violent tendencies manifested themselves again.  Collie wandered through several areas of Oregon and California, living in Kern and Imperial counties for spells and then at Bailey Flat in Madera County in late 1930, before showing up in Carbon Canyon early in 1931.

Interestingly, in February 1931, the El Rodeo Riding Club, which is now in Carbon Canyon, but at that time was a four-year old organization out in Placentia/Brea near Valencia Avenue and Imperial Highway, held a rodeo on the Flying Cow Ranch of Ed Gaines, where the Olinda Village community is within the canyon.

A press photo of Gilbert F. Collie, who killed George Walker in Carbon Canyon early in 1931.  Click on any image to see the set in enlarged views in a separate window.

The 24 February edition of the Santa Ana Register featured an article on the festivities, which included a lunch "at a beautiful site on the hillside" and then the group "moved up to the stockade on the mesa behind the ranch house" where a goat roping contest was held.  Then, a pair of potato sack races, one for men and the other for women, followed.

The next activity on the program featured bronco riding, with that entertainment provided by "California Jimmie" Murphy and "Snake Bite" Gilbert Collie.  After that part of the day's events, there was an exhibition of "broom polo."  Participants included club president and recently retired Orange County sheriff Sam Jernigan, John Wagner of an old Placentia famiy, Mr. and Mrs. Alonso Yorba, descendants of the founding family of the northeast Orange County region, and dozens of others.

What isn't known is whether "Snake Bite" Gilbert Collie was the father or his namesake son, who was 20 at the time of the rodeo.  Young Collie did live in the area later in the 1930s, and, in fact, was arrested in August 1939 at the Tidwell Oaks tavern in Sleepy Hollow--located at the intersection of Carbon Canyon Road and Rosemary Lane.  A resident of south-central Los Angeles, Gilbert, Jr. was hauled in for disturbing the peace (drunkenness) and Chino's Justice of the Peace Edwin Rhodes, later writer of a 1950s history of Chino, sentenced him to a $30 fine or 15 days in the town hoosegow.

A portrait of Gilbert Collie, probably from about the 1910s from the family tree of "cfirstoffive" on Ancestry.com.

While Arthur Keene was not listed as a guest at the Gaines affair, his ranch was just a short distance to the southeast near the La Vida Mineral Springs and his ex-brother-in-law soon found the Keene Ranch to be a particularly useful place.

As reported nationwide in the press just prior to Thanksgiving, a remote shack on the Keene Ranch was found to be fully engulfed in flames on 20 November.  Workmen, apparently from the ranch, responded and a gruesome discovery was made.

The body of 35-year old George Myron Walker, a laborer from Santa Rosa from northern California, was found inside.  Walker's skull was crushed, the little building torched, and the victim's car stolen. One account suggested Walker had been murdered several weeks before, but others indicate it happened just before the shack was set afire.  Notably, one media account stated that investigators believed that Walker's death was an accidental one involving an unexpected fire in the cabin.

From the Santa Ana Register, 4 January 1932.

Shortly afterward, however, Collie was arrested by San Bernardino County Sheriff Department deputies, because he was suspected of a similar murder involving 20-year old Dale Slater, a carpenter who had recently moved to Los Angeles from The Dalles, a town east of Portland, Oregon, where Collie had also resided not long before.  Slater's mother had received a letter from Collie claiming that Slater was in Las Vegas on a drinking binge, but his mother insisted that her son never drank.  With this information, Collie was arrested drew a crude map indicating where Slater's body could found.

Acting on this, authorities traveled to Yermo, a town out in the desert beyond Barstow and found the young Slater's body dragged from a shallow grave alongside railroad tracks, his body partially consumed by animals.  As with Walker, Slater had been killed by a blow to the head and his body burned.

Collie, known as "Gorilla Man" for his strength (obviously built up from years in the blacksmith trade) and black beard, apparently was a man prone to sudden irrational bursts of anger, as displayed by the profanity-laced tirade he unleashed when told he would not accompany investigators to Yermo to search for Slater's body.  While in jail the day after his arrest, he blurted out that he had killed 11 or 12 people and would have an unnamed person who bought Slater's car from him reveal the locations of their bodies.

From the La Grande (Oregon) Observer, 11 January 1932.

Yet, Collie's bravado soon receded and he was said to have spent restless nights in jail, crying out "I want to die!  Let them hang me now!"  On the 27th, he employed a crude suicide attempt by slashing himself with the lid of a can of chewing tobacco, cutting his wrists and throat from ear-to-ear in the early morning hours.  Scrawled in his blood on the walls of his cell was:

There will be Hell around here tomorrow, but it will be in blood.

Though he was found unconscious, Collie was revived and a preliminary hearing postponed until he was healed up.  On 2 December, he pled not guilty on a first-degree murder charge in his  hearing before San Bernardino County Superior Court judge Charles Allison.

On the 4th, the Chino Champion published an article in which Collie stated to authorities that he was a brother-in-law to Arthur Keene, but Keene answered that the marriage to his sister and ended in 1914.  While Ruby did marry again, to Gilbert Jara, that marriage also dissolved and she, notably, retook the Collie surname when she was counted in the 1940 census.

From the Bend (Oregon) Bulletin, 16 March 1932.

The rancher said that he was unaware of what had happened on his property until oil workers from the nearby Olinda oil field woke him up at his cabin, which was about a quarter-mile from the burning shack, but "obscured" from it, probably by hillsides in the narrow canyon.

It does seem strange, though, that Collie attended, nine months prior, the El Rodeo event at the Gaines ranch just a short distance away without Keene knowing that his former brother-in-law was in the area.

In any case, Collie was adjudged sane by a panel and ordered to trial on 4 January 1932.  A week later, on the 11th, he was found guilty for the Slater murder--the Orange County district attorney waited to see the outcome in this case before filing for one in the Walker slaying--and sentenced to be hung.  It was reported that the condemned man uttered "an almost inaudible expression of 'thank you'" when the judgment was rendered.

Collie's registration card at San Quentin State Prison, 12 January 1932.

Collie's court-appointed attorneys offered no defense, perhaps on his insistence, but, after the state rested, the jury took nearly 12 hours to return their verdict.  Because there was no recommendation for sentence from them, the judge was required by law to render a death sentence.

Collie was then sent up to San Quentin State Prison and it was not long before reports came out that he had gone mad over fear of his execution, which, ironically, was scheduled for April Fool's Day.  On 16 March, a jury in San Rafael near the prison found him insane, sparing him, for the time being, from the gallows.

Collie was transferred to a state mental hospital in Mendocino County and was there about a year, when the medical superintendent petitioned Governor Rolph to change Collie's sentence to life imprisonment, determining that the prisoner had "regained his sanity."

From the San Bernardino Sun, 30 July 1937.

San Bernardino County District Attorney Stanley Mussell, however, argued, based on conversations he had with Collie, that the insanity fit was an act to avoid execution and said that Collie told him as much, though also said at one point that he'd welcome a return to death row so that they could "get it over with."

Around the first of July 1933, Collie was back at San Quentin and the governor met with the chief justice of the state Supreme Court for advice on how to proceed with the matter of the death sentence.  While state law required a return to death row for men determined to have regained their sanity, the governor was careful about stating that he could not justify execution for an insane man.

Given this, it is not surprising that Rolph, on 16 January 1934, ruled that Collie would be spared the hangman's noose and had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment.   Interestingly, just the day before, on the 15th, Collie somehow got hold of a hacksaw and cut his way out of the Mendocino State Hospital, though he was quickly recaptured without incident.  An account in the Register noted the irony of the fact that Arthur Keene had only been recently adjudged insane by an Orange County Superior Court and sent to a mental hospital in Norwalk where he died three years later.

Collie's mug shot at Folsom Stte Prison, 19 August 1940.

Orange County, then, decided to try Collie for the murder of George Walker and, on 29 July 1937 he pled guilty for that crime.  Collie stated that there was a fight over spilled liquor as the men were on a drinking binge and that he grabbed a tree root to pummel Walker over the head.  He dragged the unconscious man into the abandoned shack and set it afire "and Walker burned to death," according to a San Bernardino Sun piece.  The paper also reported that "Collie smiled as he walked out of the courtroom, because he believed his plea of guilty had saved him from a sentence to be hanged."

Collie's listing in the Folsom Descriptive Register, 19 August 1940

Collie was returned to San Quentin with two life sentences to serve, though, in 1940, he was transferred to the state prison at Folsom.  He remained there quietly for sixteen years, until, suddenly, in late September 1956, he was back in the papers again.  Submitting his own handwritten writ of habeus corpus to the California Supreme Court, the 76-year old lifer wrote

I ask that the court set aside the commutation and that the death penalty be invoked to give me a more merciful and humane death by hanging, as provided by the original sentence . . . I am old, infirm, ready for death, and tired of this mockery of justice . . . I want freedom from this living death.

However, the court had previously stated that it had no authority to countermand Governor Rolph's 1934 order and, in this instance, returned Collie's writ without comment.  Three-and-a-half years later, on 31 March 1960, Collie finally died at Folsom, undoubtedly being, at 81 years of age, one of its oldest inmates.  He was interred at the Masonic Lawn Cemetery, just south of Sacramento's downtown.

From the Amarillo (Texas) Globe Times, 11 October 1956.

Canyons are often the place for all kinds of secret acts--lovers' rendezvous, testing out the limits of how fast a car can go, dumping unwanted trash and, on occasion, horrible crimes, among others.  With this latter, the Collie murder of George Walker 85 years ago stands out as one of the more unusual aspects of Carbon Canyon's fascinating history.

Carbon Canyon Crime Capsule #1: The Murder of Horace McKenna, Jr.

3 November 2016:  Terri Lenée Peake, who was Horace McKenna's live-in girlfriend at the hilltop ranch on the Brea portion of Carbon Canyon, published a memoir last year titled 6200 Carbon Canyon Road: My Life as a Penthouse Pet.

It was read quickly over the last couple of days and, whatever its merits are as a literary effort, the information Peake shares about her complicated life with McKenna, which ended when she left him not long before his 1989 murder, is often fascinating.

The story includes her difficult childhood, with a mentally ill mother who committed suicide (as did others in her family); her decision to get into the world of stripping and nude modeling, including the summit of her career appearing as a Penthouse Pet of the Month in 1987; her leaving dancing to marry, raise her two children, and work in movie theater management; and her long and challenging health issues due to breast implants.

Obviously, the heart of the book is her relationship with the mercurial McKenna, who could be terrifyingly abusive and also loving, though, Peake talks about the Carbon Canyon ranch, both with some fondness and some tough memories of feeling trapped physically and mentally.  There are a number of photos of the place in the book, including the property's entrance off Carbon Canyon Road where the ambush that killed McKenna took place.

Towards the end of the book, Peake mentions "a little local blog in Brea called the Carbon Canyon Chronicle" and its post about the murder.  She notes that the post "has since become the personal bulletin board for the old gang" who knew McKenna.

Specifically, Peake refers to the fact that "the editor of the blog commented that the depth and complexity of our feelings about Mac and his murder led him to become more objective and less judgmental" about the situation and quotes from below: " . . . there were human beings involved in this terrible incident . . . not cartoon characters, TV personalities, or film stereotypes, tempting as it might be to think of them that way."  This is followed by a link to this post.

Several pages are devoted to some of those who have posted comments, including John Sheridan, who turned himself in and served time in prison before being paroled several years ago.  The chapter in which this section is contained ends with Peake referencing her own commenting on the post four years ago and her statement about having "mixed feelings" about the aftermath and her not having "any anger left for anyone."  She concludes by saying "I can't imagine living that life again."

The book can be bought on Amazon for $5 in a Kindle edition and from $11 up for print and there are a few copies on eBay, but at much higher prices.  This is not a review, so there is no advice given here about whether it should be bought or not.  If the McKenna murder has any interest for you, though, 6200 Carbon Canyon Road is worth considering for the perspective Peake presents.

10 March 2014:  Yesterday, 9 March, marked the 25th anniversary of the slaying of Horace McKenna, Jr.  As was noted in a comment recently, the house in which McKenna lived was torn down several months ago as the new owner is building another residence on the grounds. 

Within the last few weeks there was a cable program on Investigation Discovery that covered the McKenna  murder (albeit, sensationally with all that entails).  A link to the program is here.

Finally, another blog has extensive coverage of the McKenna slaying and it can be accessed here.

Once again, this story has been, by far, the most visited on this blog and the comments have been many and fascinating.  This was not expected at all, but it has been very interesting to see the traffic and read the reactions about an event a quarter century old, but still notable in Carbon Canyon history.

Original post:

This incident had it all: sex, money, power, police officers turned strip club entrepreneurs and, naturally, violence. To think it has just about been twenty years since the murder of Horace "Big Mac" McKenna at his Carbon Canyon home is remarkable. Even more is how the case was solved a dozen years later when it seemed it just couldn't be cracked.

Horace McKenna and Michael Woods were former California Highway Patrol officers and, in the course of their work, developed enough knowledge of the world of strip clubs to become major players in the industry in the years after their very early retirement in 1977 from law enforcement. The two quickly rose in the strip club universe and, within only three years, were owners of the "Valley Ball" in Van Nuys, and "Bare Elegance" and the "Jet Strip" in Los Angeles and were wealthy, powerful men.

The partners, however, had significantly different personalities. Woods, a slight, medium-built man, was the quiet type, preferring to stay relatively low key at his large Westlake Village home. McKenna, on the other hand, lived large and loudly. He was 6'6", tipped the scales at near 300 pounds, and was an avid bodybuilder. At his home he had a fake Western town facade complete with a boot hill (which would prove ironic); owned Arabian horses and a stable of exotic animals, such as a Bengal tiger and tuxedo-wearing monkeys; and was driven around in expensive cars. There was one other common connection aside from their talent for running strip clubs: their competition for trying to fleece each other.

Matters worsened when Woods hired a young British man named David Amos as a club bouncer. Amos, who was almost as well-muscled and nearly as ambitious as McKenna, quickly rubbed the latter the wrong way, but had Woods' patronage. Soon, Woods and Amos were tighter than Woods and McKenna had been and something had to give.

In the meantime, a steady patron of the Woods/McKenna empire of strip clubs entered the picture. John Patrick Sheridan was a Irish-Chinese high school dropout from Agoura Hills in the western San Fernando Valley who dealt drugs and was an addict from his early teens. Out on bail on drug charges, Sheridan was a "stoolie" for the Ventura County Sheriff's Department and their drug busting arm. When he became a drinking partner of Amos, Sheridan found himself on the other end of an interesting proposal in 1988. Claiming that McKenna had it in for him, which could well have been true, Amos implored his new friend to take on a job that would pay him nicely (in support of his drug and drink habit) and save the life of a pal. It was, however, more than likely that Woods was in fear for his life from McKenna and employed Amos to find someone to carry out the contract killing.It took a few months and even then cold feet set in, but Sheridan accepted his task. He was to lay in wait in the late of night at the Carbon Canyon Road entrance to McKenna's manse and execute a good old fashioned contract killing. In return, Sheridan was paid $25,000 and given a strip club job that, by his accounting, paid him about $3,000 a month.

Just after midnight on 9 March 1989, McKenna's driver, "Bible Bob" Berg, a placid born-again Christian, pulled off the road and got out of the car to open the gate. Berg then got back in when Sheridan jumped out from his hiding place and opened fire with an Uzi he had bought on the street for a little over a grand. The twenty-something bullets erupted out of the 9mm clip and ripped into McKenna's upper body. Berg, terrified, sped off to the house while Sheridan ran for his car. Later, from a convenience store payphone (remember, it was 1989!) Sheridan called Amos to report that his job was done.

UPDATE (19 April 2011):  A longtime resident of Carbon Canyon has related the fact that a motorcycle was found abandoned on its side on the north side of Carbon Canyon Road in Sleepy Hollow.  The recollections was that the cycle was concealed in some bushes at the driveway entrance to the McKenna residence and that the killer used it to drive over to Sleepy Hollow and make the call for the getaway car to shuttle him away.  It would appear that the "convenience store" was what is now Canyon Market, but long known as Party House Liquor #2.  It was also remembered that the automatic gate at the driveway entrance was in the process of being installed by McKenna with the suggestion that, had it been fully operational, the results may have been different.

It was a perfect crime: a remote area, no prints, no tracks, no witnesses to identify the killer or the contracting parties paying off their hit man. It should have been an eternal cold case. Not that anyone for a moment thought that Michael Woods and David Amos were free of suspicion. It was just that there was no evidence to link him to the slaying.

Sheridan, meantime, got his money and his job. Even though he spent two years in prison for a drug bust, he continued to work for Woods and Amos, who continued to make enormous sums of money, substantially pocketed before taxes, and live the high life. Amos, who fancied himself an actor, even partnered with Woods in making two low-budget films--well, just take a gander at these titles: "The Takeover" (1995) and "Flipping" (1997). Amos appeared in small acting roles in the two films (and even acted in three other films, including "Guns and Lipstick" (1995), "Fatal Choice" (1995), and "Dancing at the Blue Iguana" (2000)--all of whom appear to have had some palpable links to his world—and an episode of the television show "Conan" in 1998—while Woods served as executive producer. The first title may well have been chosen for a macabre reason, but the second turned out to be highly prophetic. As it turned out, the low-level Hollywood careers of both men proved less than successful and their strip club partnership also hit the skids when Amos suspected Woods of embezzling money from their business, threatened to take the matter to the authorities, and sought to wrest control of the empire from his former mentor.

According to Sheridan, however, his life took an unexpectedly human turn almost a decade after the killing. First, McKenna's bible-toting driver, clueless about Sheridan's role in the execution of his boss, told the hit man that McKenna's last words were: "Tell my mom I love her." Second, Sheridan's viewing of the autopsy photos of the deceased haunted him. Finally, God followed directly on the heels of a growing, gnawing guilt and Sheridan bared his scarred soul to a Roman Catholic priest.

In the late 90s, a retired Los Angeles Police Department officer working for the Orange County District Attorney's office began to reexamine the case and aggressively interviewed people associated with McKenna, Woods, and Amos. The latter two, fearing that Sheridan might squeal, offered him $10,000 to stay quiet. Once Sheridan had found religion, however, there was nothing else he could do but go to the authorities and tell all.

A significant amount of work still needed to be done, however, to build an airtight case so, for most of 2000, Sheridan took the risky move of wearing a wire to force Amos to incriminate himself. It as a long process, but in late October, there was enough accumulated on tape to arrest Amos. He, in turn, immediately turned on Woods and put on a wire for a meeting with his partner. Once Woods began to get into ideas of how to further cover up his tracks, investigators had enough to collar him as left the meeting.

In September 2001, Michael Woods was indicted for first-degree murder with special circumstances, but the judge struck the special circumstances component, and Woods was convicted by an Orange County jury of first-degree murder in the hit on his old partner and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. He did mount an appeal to the 4th Appellate District Court, claiming that his right to to call Sheridan as a witness was thwarted by the prosecution and that his right to counsel was undermined by the use of an informant (Amos) to incriminate himself. In their opinion, however, filed in July 2004 the appellate judges ruled that even though "we recognize the fact the prosecution's actions in this case forced Woods to detour his defense, and put on a different -- possibly less convincing -- case than he wanted" there was no reason to overturn the decision because "we find no misconduct on the part of the prosecution." As to the second argument, the court stated that "equally important, [we] find no diminution of Wood's Fifth or Sixth Amendment rights which rose to the level of constitutional error."

In the court transcript, it was revealed that the prosecutor informed the court of the intent to question Sheridan as a witness, but decided against it. When the defense team tried to introduce Sheridan as their witness, his attorney claimed that he had not completed his plea bargain terms with the proseuction and would, therefore, invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. The prosecutor's stance that there would be no agreement executed until after Woods' trial was over led the judge to order a hearing over the crafty move played by the prosecutor. While recognizing that the prosecution had smartly carried out its plea bargain terms with Sheridan, allowing himself to avoid being called as a defense witness, he determined that there was no reason to, as the defense hoped, dismiss the case, declare a mistrial, or strike David Amos' testimony as contingent on Sheridan. The judge, however, did give the defense the option of using Sheridan's statements through the recollections of other witnesses, which Woods' counsel did make use of. There was another reason, however, for the prosecutor to develop the strategy of keeping the Sheridan plea bargain open until the conclusion of the trial. Simply put, the prosecution wanted to keep Sheridan available in case Amos decided to lie on the stand and protect Woods.

On the question of using Amos with a wire to incriminate Woods, thereby pushing the case from investigation to accusaion and necessarily triggering the "right to counsel" issue when Woods could not execute that right, because the police had already surrounded the restaurant where the wiretapped meeting took place and because they were already serving search warrants at his clubs and home, the court offered that "the undisputed facts establish Woods' Sixth Amendment rights were not violated." Namely, the court determined that the case was definitely still in the investigation stage when the Amos meeting was held and that accusation can only come in the formal presentment of charges in court.

Meanwhile, David Amos, for cooperating in nailing Woods, pled on the lesser charge of manslaughter and was sentenced to twenty years. He may well be released from prison in the next few years.

John Patrick Sheridan was given the same plea bargain as Amos and the same sentence. Married to a born-again former nude stripper and a father, Sheridan evidently saw his remarkable confession as a chance for redemption. In December 2001 he gave an interview to Fred Dickey, whose Los Angeles Times Magazine article "A Hit Man's Guilt" was substantially the basis, along with the Woods appeal transcript, for this post and who wrote an article memorable enough to stick in my mind the last seven years until I located it. Notably, Dickey wrote in his article that "Sheridan still can't explain why he did it, why he agreed to coldly aim an assault weapon at a fellow with whom he had no quarrel. Ask him the question a hundred different ways, and he cannot provide a single satisfying answer. Ultimately, an answer emerged: A screwed-up drug abuser committed murder primarily because he was a screwed-up drug abuser."

UPDATE (19 April 2011):  Recent comments to this post include one from someone signing in as John Patrick Sheridan and now released from prison.  He has also indicated that David Amos will be out at the end of April, while Michael Woods has had his most recent parole request denied.   Needless to say, perhaps, but this post has taken on something of a life of its own, being by far the most viewed post of any in at least the last year since analytics were introduced to the blog, and this includes the many comments, some very colorful and others conveying deeply personal feelings.  What this reflects is fundamentally an inherent interest that incidents like the Horace McKenna murder have with many people, especially those who know (or professed to) the principals involved.  As for this blogger, subsequent editing of the post, as well as comments in reply to others, have reflected some change in attitude about the incident and its aftermath.  That is, an interest in trying to be a little more objective in the telling and a little less judgmental than when this post first appeared.