Wheels of Justice
J. Miller Leavy, the preeminent prosecutor on District Attorney Ernest Roll’s staff, and the man who put notorious "Red Light Bandit" Caryl Chessman on San Quentin’s death row, prepared to do the same with the four people he now had in custody for the Mabel Monohan murder: Perkins, Santo, Graham, and John True. But Leavy had a problem: the statement given by Baxter Shorter during the interrogation session at the Miramar Hotel, was inadmissible as evidence without Shorter taking the witness stand to repeat it in open court. Unless the prosecution had Shorter, the statement was nothing but hearsay. And nobody -- nobody --expected to ever see Baxter Shorter alive again.
So Leavy turned his attention to the one person he felt he could use to replace Baxter Shorter. That was John True. It was a logical choice. True had only just met Jack Santo a short time before the Monohan job. He had no criminal record, had never been arrested for anything, and while he had succumbed to Santo’s invitation to participate in what was supposed to be a walk-in, walk-out robbery, he basically was an honest, if not too bright, individual.
Leavy decided to offer True immunity. True leaped at the chance to take it.
The story John True told the prosecutors about the crime was essentially that same as that related by the missing Baxter Shorter, with a few details Shorter had not known. First, True had never been acquainted with Mabel Monohan’s former son-in-law, Luther Scherer, and had never driven with him from Las Vegas to the Monohan house, or any other house, with a shoebox full of cash. Santo had explained to True that he and his partner, Perkins, needed somebody "clean," completely unknown in criminal circles, to tell the concocted story to convince safecracker Baxter Shorter to come in on the job. Perkins himself could crack a simple, uncomplicated safe, but he had nowhere near the expertise Shorter was known to have. But Shorter had passed on the same job once before, and they were afraid he would do it again unless they had some good "bait" for him. That bait was John True. In addition, they needed a "front man" to back up Barbara Graham, who was going to con her way into the house by asking to use the telephone because her car wouldn’t start. True was to go into the Monohan house after Barbara was in, just in case there was anyone else inside with the widow, and get Barbara out by saying that he had managed to get the car started.
Prosecutor Leavy was elated by that last part of the plan, because it meant that his witness had been the second of the five people to enter the Monohan home that night. He had observed virtually everything that had transpired -- and had, when he entered the house, seen Barbara Graham pistol-whipping Mrs. Monohan with a chrome-plated revolver that earlier, in True’s presence, had been given to Barbara by Emmett Perkins. He had also observed Barbara hand the pistol to Emmett Perkins and say, "Knock her out!" -- which had happened just as Baxter Shorter came in, and which Shorter had related in the statement given before he was kidnapped.
J. Miller Leavy felt he now had his case. He presented the evidence he had, with John True as a witness, to a Los Angeles county grand jury, which returned murder indictments against Perkins, Santo, Graham, and True himself. At the opening of the trial, Leavy promised, the prosecution would ask that the charge against True be dismissed.
John True was then taken outside Los Angeles to the country sheriff’s honor farm, to be kept in seclusion there until time for him to testify.
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