I See by the Papers...

Alfred Hitchcock made the wrong movie in Santa Rosa. Yes, Shadow of a Doubt is a great film, one of the greatest ever made, critics believe. But while he was here filming it in 1942, it's likely he heard about what had happened a couple of decades earlier - or at least, the condensed version still retold today. That gangsters gunned down some lawmen in cold blood, that vigilantes stormed the jail, that the bad men were lynched in an old cemetery.

But there was far more to the story; it had all the elements that Hitchock loved to work into the plots of his thrillers. Once the wheels of the story were set in motion, there was no stopping events. Guilt and innocence were sometimes ambiguous and people uninvolved with the crimes found themselves suddenly caught in situations where their lives were in peril. There was even a MacGuffin - a psychopath who was waving around a handgun so large he could barely hold it.

This is the third chapter of the series, "THERE WILL BE PRICES PAID" about the 1920 Santa Rosa lynchings. And like Shadow of a Doubt, this part began as a smoke-puffing train pulled into the depot at Railroad Square.

It was soon after Thanksgiving when three men stepped off the train. They were all ex-cons - one of them had been out of prison only a few weeks - and they had come to Santa Rosa to hide from the San Francisco police. The city had erupted in outrage that holiday weekend when it was revealed two women had been brutally assaulted and one of them gang raped by what the press called the "Howard Street Gang." There was a police dragnet for anyone believed associated with the group and a list of suspects went out to authorities statewide shortly thereafter. All of these developments were explored in the previous chapter.

They were led here by Terrance Fitts. Santa Rosa was his hometown and he visited here regularly - when he wasn't behind bars. Just two weeks earlier he had returned home to learn his father had unexpectedly died, leaving him nothing in the will. The family home on College Ave. would be vacant until the end of the year, however, and had more than enough room for the three of them (see chapter one).

The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com.

- Jeff Elliott