A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.'s Scandalous Coming of Age by Richard Rayner Page A
Authors: Richard Rayner
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flaking plaster and dropped it in an envelope. He fingerprinted both men, taking their lifeless hands in his own, rolling the finger and thumb ends on an ink pad, and pressing them against paper. He lifted Plunkett’s body and found a still-warm gun, a Bisley .45 Colt revolver. He wrapped it in a cloth, planning to take prints from it later.
With his camera and flashgun, White took crime scene photographs that have lost none of their power. They show an expensively furnished room with Ned Doheny lying in a pool of his own blood next to an overturned chair. Drying blood covers his face like a mask and his bare feet are tucked into shiny leather slippers. An unlit cigarette lies at his fingertips. A glass tumbler, unbroken, has fallen to the floor. An opened bottle of Johnnie Walker is on a table. Plunkett, dressed in a pinstripe suit, is in the background, prone in a doorway. He, too, lies in blood. The two men are close, as they had been for years, yet separated by a crucial distance.
Ned Doheny had a life of privilege from the start, very different from Plunkett’s. From the storybook frontier uncertainty of his own father’s, Ned grew up rich in Los Angeles, attending a private Catholic school, then Stanford University and USC law school. On graduation from USC in 1916 he joined Doheny Sr.’s oil business as a partner and became a multimillionaire instantly. Probate would value his personal estate at $12.5 million. In WWI he served as a lieutenant on a Navy cruiser and later behind a desk in Washington. In Los Angeles he was a member of the University Club, the Los Angeles Athletic Club, the Los Angeles Country Club. He had given handsome endowments to USC and sat as a university trustee; he was a part of the city’s aristocratic furniture—friendly, though spoiled and with flashes of his father’s temper.
Theodore Hugh Plunkett, on the other hand, was born poor on March 28, 1895, in Illinois, and came to Los Angeles in 1912. His parents, like many Midwesterners, had been seduced by the boosters’ promise of sunshine, health, and wealth. He got a job at a downtown service station owned by the family of Lucy Smith, soon to marry Ned Doheny. It was here that Plunkett and Ned Doheny first met. Plunkett changed the tires on one of Ned’s cars (Ned already had many) and the two struck up a friendship. Plunkett became a chauffeur for the Doheny family, and his WWI draft card shows that he enlisted in L.A. on the same day Ned did: June 16, 1917. Plunkett’s signature is clumsy, and the draft card states that he had blue eyes, light brown hair, and was of medium height and slender build. He served as a machinist’s mate on a submarine chaser, and, when the war was done, went back to work for his friend and boss. He was completely loyal to the Dohenys and they trusted him and treated him almost as a member of the family. He helped supervise the building of Greystone and wrote hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of checks in Ned’s name to pay the contractors. Plunkett was married, but he and Harriet, his wife of ten years, were estranged and without children. At the time of his death she was living in a retreat high in the Verdugo Hills, a neophyte dressed in Indian robes in one of Southern California’s many religious cults.
“Ned and Plunkett went everywhere together,” E. L. Doheny had said in one of the earlier trials.
“He acted as secretary to Ned, but their relationship was more than that of friends,” Frederic Kellogg, one of Ned’s attorneys, told the Times, a strangely formulated statement that hints at more than Kellogg probably intended. Leslie White would hear many rumors. One of them was that Plunkett and Ned Doheny had been lovers, killed by Ned’s wife, Lucy, out of jealousy.
Plunkett’s story belongs to another of those genres typical of L.A., which remains utterly class-ridden despite seeming so up for grabs. He was the employee who became an intimate, privileged yet doomed, part of
With his camera and flashgun, White took crime scene photographs that have lost none of their power. They show an expensively furnished room with Ned Doheny lying in a pool of his own blood next to an overturned chair. Drying blood covers his face like a mask and his bare feet are tucked into shiny leather slippers. An unlit cigarette lies at his fingertips. A glass tumbler, unbroken, has fallen to the floor. An opened bottle of Johnnie Walker is on a table. Plunkett, dressed in a pinstripe suit, is in the background, prone in a doorway. He, too, lies in blood. The two men are close, as they had been for years, yet separated by a crucial distance.
Ned Doheny had a life of privilege from the start, very different from Plunkett’s. From the storybook frontier uncertainty of his own father’s, Ned grew up rich in Los Angeles, attending a private Catholic school, then Stanford University and USC law school. On graduation from USC in 1916 he joined Doheny Sr.’s oil business as a partner and became a multimillionaire instantly. Probate would value his personal estate at $12.5 million. In WWI he served as a lieutenant on a Navy cruiser and later behind a desk in Washington. In Los Angeles he was a member of the University Club, the Los Angeles Athletic Club, the Los Angeles Country Club. He had given handsome endowments to USC and sat as a university trustee; he was a part of the city’s aristocratic furniture—friendly, though spoiled and with flashes of his father’s temper.
Theodore Hugh Plunkett, on the other hand, was born poor on March 28, 1895, in Illinois, and came to Los Angeles in 1912. His parents, like many Midwesterners, had been seduced by the boosters’ promise of sunshine, health, and wealth. He got a job at a downtown service station owned by the family of Lucy Smith, soon to marry Ned Doheny. It was here that Plunkett and Ned Doheny first met. Plunkett changed the tires on one of Ned’s cars (Ned already had many) and the two struck up a friendship. Plunkett became a chauffeur for the Doheny family, and his WWI draft card shows that he enlisted in L.A. on the same day Ned did: June 16, 1917. Plunkett’s signature is clumsy, and the draft card states that he had blue eyes, light brown hair, and was of medium height and slender build. He served as a machinist’s mate on a submarine chaser, and, when the war was done, went back to work for his friend and boss. He was completely loyal to the Dohenys and they trusted him and treated him almost as a member of the family. He helped supervise the building of Greystone and wrote hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of checks in Ned’s name to pay the contractors. Plunkett was married, but he and Harriet, his wife of ten years, were estranged and without children. At the time of his death she was living in a retreat high in the Verdugo Hills, a neophyte dressed in Indian robes in one of Southern California’s many religious cults.
“Ned and Plunkett went everywhere together,” E. L. Doheny had said in one of the earlier trials.
“He acted as secretary to Ned, but their relationship was more than that of friends,” Frederic Kellogg, one of Ned’s attorneys, told the Times, a strangely formulated statement that hints at more than Kellogg probably intended. Leslie White would hear many rumors. One of them was that Plunkett and Ned Doheny had been lovers, killed by Ned’s wife, Lucy, out of jealousy.
Plunkett’s story belongs to another of those genres typical of L.A., which remains utterly class-ridden despite seeming so up for grabs. He was the employee who became an intimate, privileged yet doomed, part of
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