Okay, mystery night. This is Allene Thorpe Lamson. This case is sometimes compared to the Dr. Sam Sheppard (The Fugitive) story, but I think it's much more like The Staircase. It's 1933, and we're on Stanford University's Faculty Row. 1/

David and Allene Lamson had met as undergrads at Stanford, married in '28, and by '33 they had a 2-year-old daughter, "Bebe." David was advertising manager at Stanford U Press. Allene was executive secretary of the campus YWCA. They were in the campus literary set. 2/

They were putting their place up for summer rental, and just before 10 on Memorial Day morning, a real estate agent named Julia Place arrived unannounced with a woman from SF who was looking for a rental. She knocks on the door, and there's no answer. 3/

So she goes around back, and finds David. He's stripped to the waist, holding a hoe and chatting with a neighbor, a woman named Helen Vincent. He's also burning weeds. He tells Julia Place to go back around front; he says he'll check his wife was decent before he let her in. 4/

He had been hoeing blackberries, and he was an accomplished gardener. This was not a random thing for him to be doing. 5/

The women go back to the front door and wait. Then they hear screaming. The potential renter says later, “I heard something that sounded like laughter, but it wasn’t laughter. It was a peculiar noise.” David throws the door open, and now he's wearing a shirt covered in blood. 6/

The two women later remember him saying different things, and this becomes important. Julia Place remembers him saying, "My God, my wife has been murdered!" The renter remembers him saying "My wife has been killed." 7/

Place then remembers him yelling, "Get the police to find the murderer. Who could have done it? No one had anything against her.” Let's just agree that this is bad dialogue. Whether it's his bad dialogue or hers, I don't know. 8/

Place comes in and uses the phone to call the police and doctors and an undertaker. The renter goes and gets neighbors, who also call the police. 9/

When they arrive, they find Allene Lamson dead in the bathroom, which is spattered with blood. She's undressed, the tub is full of water and blood, and the back of her skull is smashed in. (Apologies; but that's as bad as it gets.) 10/

The bathroom is small, 7 feet by 10 feet. There's a clothes hamper, a closet, the tub, a sink, and a toilet. David has moved her body significantly, and by the time they arrive he has her in his arms. 11/

There IS a crime scene phone that shows her body, and you can find it online, but I'm not going to post in here. I'll describe it, though: She's face down, hanging headfirst out of the tub. There is a LOT of blood. But of course this wasn't her original position. 12/

Here's what David Lamson says happened the night before: The housekeeper/nurse was away for the holiday weekend, and they'd been invited to play cards with another couple, so their daughter stayed with her grandmother. 13/

Allene wasn't feeling well, and was a light sleeper, so David decided to sleep in the nursemaid's bedroom. At 3:30 a.m. Allene called him and he gave her a back rub and got her lemon juice and water and then soup and a sandwich. 45 minutes later, he went back to bed. 14/

He woke up in the morning, got himself breakfast, and went out to work in the yard around 7. About an hour later he began burning weeds and trash. He chatted calmly with the neighbor the whole time. 15/

Actually, not the whole time. She was in and out of her house, and not out there at the very beginning. The police and coroner believe that Alene died between 7 and 10. 16/

David says that at some point between 7 and 10, he went in, drew her bath and made her breakfast in the kitchen. Then he shut off the water, told her the bath and breakfast were ready, and went outside again. He says that was the last he saw her. 17/

Later, he changes his story somewhat. He says that he carried her into the bathroom, since she wasn't feeling well; he'd forgotten this detail. 18/

The crime scene is pretty compromised. A neighbor, Mrs. Brown, got there before the police and found David with the body in his arms. She used a bath towel to try mop up blood, until the police got there and stopped her. 19/

There was also an undertaker’s assistant who helpful drained the tub.

Also, David walked all over the house, so there was blood everywhere, including the walls of the hallways and the attic door in the ceiling. 20/

Essentially, this makes any spatter evidence entirely inadmissible in court. 21/

So thanks to David and Mrs. Brown and the tub-drainer, all they have are Allene's head wounds to go by. 22/

She has massive trauma to the back of her head (the occipital region). She has a horizontal laceration about five inches long, and then halfway along it there's a vertical cut. There are two smaller horizontal cuts coming off the vertical one. And everything's caved in. 23/

There are "three small hemorrhage areas between the layers of tissue composing the scalp," and she's got a couple of small bruises on one hip -- but nothing else. 24/

There would have been arterial bleeding (which would cause a lot of spatter) but (thanks, Mrs. Brown) this is a dead end. 25/

It's clear to some investigators that she was hit at least three times. Other investigators believe she could have slipped and hit her head one time. 26/

But the police are starting to see this as a murder. Reasons:
1) At the bottom of David's burn pile, there was a metal pipe. It tests positive for a protein called "heme," which -- hey, that sounds like blood, right? And it IS in blood, but... 27/

... it's also in lots of other things, including horseradish. It's entirely possible that this guy bludgeoned a horseradish. Or just that it was a normal garden burn pile. 28/

2/ They find what they're pretty sure are traces of blood on the back porch. An intruder would've left through the front door, and no one but David would've used the back door. 29/

3) There's no significant blood wherever she was supposed to hit her head (the sink, etc.). 30/

David was the only other person in the house, so they arrest him. 31/

And they start looking for a motive. According to all their friends, and the people they played cards with the night before, and Allene's diary, they had a happy marriage and weren't fighting... 32/

The police think that David's sleeping in another room must be a sign of trouble, but he insists it was because she was sick. Then they think he must've been sleeping with the nursemaid, but he definitely wasn't. 33/

He'd been writing to a garden columnist in Sacramento named Sarah Kelley. He sent her flowers once (but he was like "But it's a gardening thing!") and she sent him poems that prosecutors said were love poems because they were about flowers. 34/

More suggestive, though: He'd made trips to Sacramento when he was supposed to be elsewhere; and he'd recommended her for an opening at his press. 35/

Forgot a detail about the poems: She wanted him to see them before she submitted them to a review at Stanford. Anyway -- the press latches onto this "blonde divorcee from Sacramento," and the prosecution finds witnesses who saw the two of them out to dinner. 36/

Part of the defense is that it doesn't make sense for him to be spending that much time just casually hanging out in the backyard after killing his wife, chatting calmly with the neighbor. Prosecutors find out that he (wait for it) ONCE TOOK ACTING CLASSES. 37/

So, you know... you can't trust anything he says or does every, I guess. 38/

There's a three-week trial. The defense argues Allene, weakened from being sick, fell and hit her head on the porcelain sink. The prosecution argues it was four separate blows with the metal pipe. 39/

The defense does not do a great job. For one thing, they only introduce the accident theory. They do not bring up at all that a Stanford business student saw someone lurking around the Lamsons' house both the night before and that morning. 40/

And the prosecution points out that the defense's expert witness who says it could've been a single blow is a friend of David Lamson. 41/

The jury deliberated 8 hours and came back with a unanimous verdict of guilty of murder in the 1st degree. He was sentenced to hang at San Quentin within 90 days. 42/

But we're not done. 43/

But first I want to add that the whole Stanford community was split in two over this. And that at a hearing a week later, the two lead lawyers got into a fistfight outside the courtroom and had to be separated by reporters. 44/

Some of his Stanford friends form a "Lamson Defense Committee." It was mostly the English department, but also the chairs of philosophy and geology. His sister started collecting for the appeal. 45/

A notable defense attorney wrote a 608-page appellate brief challenging the prosecution's case, and two Stanford English professors edited it down into 103-page pamphlet for the public. 46/

20 professors, writers, and physicians signed it. This is the novelist Peter B. Kyne, who write the foreword and called the case "Kafkaesque."47/

By this time, David Lamson is on Death Row at San Quentin. 48/

In October of 1934, he wins a new trial. The CA Supreme Court says the trial judge had let the prosecution rely on circumstantial evidence, without showing "circumstances inconsistent with any reasonable theory of innocence." 49/

Three of the judges, though, issued a concurring statement saying that this new trial was being awarded only on principle, and they believed it was murder and "a majority of the justices feel Lamson is guilty." 50/

(I'm not a lawyer, but this feels wildly uncalled for right?) 51/

He gets a new trial in February of '35, and this one lasts three months. There are new experts talking about blood trajectory, and this time they bring in the flower poet, who's now happily remarried and totally refutes the love triangle theory. 52/

It's a hung jury; nine for conviction and three for acquittal. 53/

The DA tries again. There's a 3rd trial in November, and this one is dismissed for jury list irregularities. The fourth and final trial starts in January of 1936. This photo is obviously not staged in any way. 54/

By now, the public has lost interest. The Lindbergh case happened in the midst of all this, and also it's 1936... stuff is happening in the world. The fourth trial also takes 3 months. 55/

By now, the defense has their act together. One key piece of info they manage to highlight: There were bloodstains on the INSIDE of the bathroom door, which means it was closed when the blood splattered. This is a SMALL bathroom, so it's unlikely David was in the room. 56/

They also argue that the amount of force required to Allene's skull would be 600 pounds. Impossible for a man, but not a sink basin. The prosecution argues a 14-year-old could have done it. 57/

The jury takes 10 ballots over 36 hours... 58/

And again comes back with 9 for conviction, 3 for acquittal. 59/

On the exact same day that Bruno Hauptmann went to the electric chair for killing the Lindbergh baby (he did NOT kill the Lindbergh baby), a Superior Court judge announced that they were dropping the case against Lamson. 60/

Lamson was reunited with Bebe, who was now 5. 61/

While he was in prison, Lamson wrote a book about his time on death row, called (of course) We Who Are About to Die. It was a bestseller in 1935. It's not about his own case, but about his fellow inmates, the guards, the prison system, etc. 62/

(I actually find this the single most compellingly exonerating thing about him.) 63/

After his release, he moved to southern CA to work on turning the book into a screenplay. He met and married a film magazine writer; later they moved to a small farm near the Sierra Nevadas and he tried to write a novel. 64/

Trying to write a novel burned him out (NO. KIDDING.) and he wound up as a maintenance manager for United Airlines. 65/

He died in 1975. His daughter still believes in his innocence. 66/

I go absolutely back and forth on this one. I have no idea. You know who I really blame? Mrs. Brown. PUT THE TOWEL DOWN and don't mess up the crime scene, Mrs. Brown. Sheesh. 67/

Anyway, that's all. Good night.