National Affairs: Crime

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Sequels

Campus Killer. A bad place for girls to be at night was the lovely, leafy campus of Los Angeles City College and the neighborhood around it. Anya Sosoyeva, 32, a blonde dancer and drama student, was bludgeoned to death in one of its lanes last February. Bludgeoned, robbed (of 35¢) but not killed was Delia Bogard, 18, who sometimes danced in L. A. C. C. plays. Bludgeoned, raped and left to live was Nursemaid Myrtle Wagner, 17. Hammered to death while abed at home was Mrs. Margaret Campbell, 56, a onetime actress who taught drama at L. A. C. C.

Margaret Campbell's lackwit son confessed that he killed her, was adjudged insane by two alienists. Last week Los Angeles police, on mass guard in the Hollywood area, nabbed a bearded, slender runaway just after a robbery was reported. In his car they found a 2 by 4 bludgeon, at his home shoes which fitted the cast of a footprint near where Delia Bogard was felled. De Witt Clinton Cook, 20, a marauding printer who had learned the fine points of robbery at an Iowa reform school, confessed that he killed Anya Sosoyeva, struck down Delia Bogard, yielded to "an uncontrollable impulse" and raped Myrtle Wagner after he had looted her employer's home. On his way to the campus to show police and newsmen how he had worked, he was allowed to visit a barber, get rid of his beard. Publicity-wise, cinemad Los Angeles prosecutors and police then had Killer Cook put on an act as fantastic as it was morbid. For grinding sound cameras (ostensibly at hand to record evidence) a neighborhood blonde impersonated Anya Sosoyeva. Clinton Cook stalked the willing stand-in as he had stalked the dancer, socked her with a roll of paper (see cut), dragged her to the spot where he had left dying Anya. Next day he pleaded guilty, later changed his plea to "not guilty" after talking to headline-conscious Prosecutor Buron Fitts, who will get much publicity at the trial.

Annenberg. Having pried into the manifold affairs of Philadelphia Publisher Moses L. Annenberg (TIME, May 1, et seq.), a U. S. grand jury in Chicago last week took a new way to charge him and associates with an old crime. By coding, printing and transmitting horse-race entries, odds, results to bookies, said the jurors, an Annenberg printing house and his Nationwide News Service conducted a lottery by interstate wire and the U. S. mails.

Indicted seven times, billed for $5,548,384 in allegedly unpaid income taxes, penalties and interest, liable upon conviction to more than 100 years in prison, 61-year-old Publisher Annenberg affably quipped in Philadelphia: "From the efforts and demands of the Government agents, it appears that I may well paraphrase the words of Nathan Hale—my only regret is that I haven't enough remaining years to give my country." Immensely rich, newly humble Moses Annenberg was meat for Cartoonist Daniel Fitzpatrick, who in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch limned a pigmy Annenberg fleeing a gigantic and pursuing Uncle Sam, quipped: "Anybody making book on this race?"

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