At the beginning of the summer of 1962 nobody much cared about the story except for a Press Democrat staff writer. By midsummer it was the top news in the Bay Area. As the season came to an end, a mania over the case had gripped all of California, with tips and false leads flooding police telephone lines.
The pressing question everyone wanted answered: Where were the Arnesons? Mildred and Jay had been missing over six months when the first PD article appeared. They had no close friends in Santa Rosa so there was no one to raise an alarm over their unusual disappearances, but her family in Washington state was convinced something terrible had happened.
They presented the Sonoma County Sheriff with their suspicions and even evidence of crimes. Yet the office stubbornly refused to investigate and treated it like a routine missing-persons case, which is to say they did nothing as the months passed. "It's primarily a matter of waiting for leads," the sheriff's investigator said. The PD slammed the department for what it called "official indifference." In a headline, no less.
And then there was Eva Anna Long, who had also vanished. She was supposedly a friend of the Arnesons - were they all together somewhere? The inspector in charge of the case believed so (while leaving open "possible foul play") even though the woman had an incredibly sketchy history. She was already wanted by the sheriff for recently pulling a gun on someone and her name was actually an alias.
At its core this is a true crime story which any competent writer could sum up in 2,500 words or so - as several have in years since. (Monte Schulz, son of Peanuts cartoonist Charles Schulz, wrote a novelized version called "Naughty.") Sure, it can be framed as a straight-forward "Motive, Means and Opportunity" crime, but only by going back to the original sources can we grasp what made this tale so remarkably compelling; it sucked everyone in because each new detail was wilder and crazier than the last. It was like receiving a piece of a jigsaw puzzle nearly every day which changed the emerging picture from what you expected.
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
Someday we will have large brains but no teeth; such was a prediction that appeared in Santa Rosa's newspaper in 1885.
As seen through the pages of the Sonoma Democrat, the 1880s were years of frustratingly slow progress. Take the example of the telephone; at the start of the decade people in San Francisco and Sacramento could speak with each other, but it took until 1884 before Santa Rosa and Petaluma were connected by a single telephone line. Similar with electricity; since 1879 San Francisco had electric street lamps and lights in a few important buildings, but it was almost Christmas 1892 before the Merchant's Electric Lighting Company managed to get a few lightbulbs glowing in downtown Santa Rosa store windows for the first time.
Yet our ancestors in the 1880s were intensely interested in what things may come, particularly when it came to advances in knowledge. In the Democrat can be found over five hundred mentions of "science" or something being "scientific," which is quite a lot considering it was a four-page weekly with about half the space taken up by advertising. And a good portion of those references came from the ads - there was a guy who did "scientific horse shoeing" in Santa Rosa.
The Democrat was hardly alone in its fascination with anything science related. Some editions of Hearst's San Francisco Examiner filled a page or more with so many letters from researchers and amateur scientists that it could be mistaken for an academic journal. Probably never before or since in America has the very concept of science been such a popular buzzword. This attitude continued into the 1890s, although newspaper science items became more sharply focused on the development of internal combustion engines and the horseless carriage.
In that era continuing education was considered a pastime; like Petaluma and Healdsburg, Santa Rosa formed a Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.1 When it was declared Cloverdale would be the ideal spot in the North Bay to view the 1889 total solar eclipse, an estimated 800 people booked seats on a special excursion train. "The sidewalks on the main streets were lined with amateur astronomers, the result of whose observations consisted in chief of aching eyes and the satisfaction of having witnessed an event of great scientific importance," reported the Democrat.
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