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Red Light Bandit. Over a span of several days within the next month, a gunman in a grey Ford coupe equipped with a red spotlight prowled lovers' lanes in outlying sections of Los Angeles. Flashing the spotlight as if he were a police man, he pulled up to parked cars, robbed the couples at pistol point. Local news papers called him "the Red Light Bandit." On two occasions, he forced a woman to get into his car and perform, as the indictments later charged, an "unnatural sex act." One of the victims, a girl of 17, was also forced to submit to "attempted rape." The girl later sank into schizophrenia, has been confined to a state hospital for nearly as long as Caryl Chessman has been confined on Death Row. Some psychiatrists think that the ordeal inflicted upon her by the gunman is partly to blame for her mental illness.
The evening after the final Red Light Bandit crime, Los Angeles police flashed a bulletin to patrol cars: two armed men had just robbed a clothing store and escaped in a grey Ford. Shortly afterward, two officers in a patrol car spotted a grey Ford, pursued it, ran it down after a wild, 70-m.p.h. chase. Driver of the fleeing Ford: Caryl Chessman.
Damaging Evidence. Charged with the Red Light Bandit crimes as well as the clothing-store robbery, Chessman insisted on acting as his own defense counsel. He denied the red-light crimes, but the evidence against him was strong enough to convince the jury. The grey Ford (it had been stolen Jan. 13) matched descriptions of the Red Light Bandit's car. At the trial, Red Light Bandit victims identified the .45 pistol that Chessman had tossed away when the pursuing patrol car caught up with him. Witnesses also said that a pen flashlight found in the grey Ford looked like one that the bandit had used. The prosecution produced a nut, found in Chessman's pocket when he was arrested, and charged that he had used it in attaching red cellophane to the spotlight on the car. A plainclothesman who had interrogated Chessman the day after his arrest testified that he made several statements linking him to the red-light crimes, including an admission that the 17-year-old girl was in his car. And most damaging of all, three victims, including the sexually maltreated woman and girl, unequivocally identified Chessman as the Red Light Bandit.
Chessman was convicted and sentenced in Los Angeles County Superior Court on a total of 17 counts. The two counts on which Judge Charles W. Fricke sentenced Chessman to death were not the sexual assaults, but two offenses under the California kidnaping statute, which makes it a capital offense to "seize" anyone "for ransom, reward or to commit extortion or robbery," if the victim suffers "bodily harm." The prosecution argued, and the jury agreed, that by robbing the woman and the girl, then forcing them into his car and sexually assaulting them, Chessman had committed kidnaping for robbery with bodily harm.***