Murder of Brooke Hart and the lynching of Thomas Harold Thurmond and John M. Holmes
Brooke Leopold Hart was the eldest son of Alexander Hart, the owner of the L. Hart & Son department store in downtown San Jose, California, United States. His kidnapping and murder were heavily publicized, and the subsequent lynching of his alleged murderers, Thomas Harold Thurmond and John M. Holmes, both white men, sparked widespread political debate.
The overnight lynchings of November 26-27 were carried out by a mob of San Jose citizens in St. James Park across from the Santa Clara County Jail, and were broadcast as a "live" event by a Los Angeles radio station. The killings were tacitly endorsed by Governor James Rolph Jr., who said he would pardon anyone convicted of the lynching. Scores of reporters, photographers, and newsreel camera operators, along with an estimated 3,000 to 10,000 men, women, and children, were witness to it. When newspapers published photos, identifiable faces were deliberately smudged so that they would remain anonymous; the following Monday, local newspapers published 1.2 million copies, twice the normal daily production.
Background
In 1933, 22-year-old Brooke Hart was the heir to one of San Jose, California's best-known businesses, the L. Hart & Son department store, located at the southeast corner of Market and Santa Clara streets. Brooke's grandfather and the store's namesake, Leopold Hart, was an Alsatian immigrant who bought a mercantile shop known as the Cash Corner store in 1866. After Leopold's son, Alex J. Hart Sr. took over the business, it expanded to the landmark status it held in San Jose for four decades – becoming as much a part of the fabric of the city as Macy's was in New York City or Neiman Marcus was in Dallas.The Hart store was famous for its attentive customer service, and benefited from the deep loyalty of customers and employees alike. When the country found itself in the grip of the Great Depression, Hart's held on to its central place in the lives of San Jose's citizens, and continued to buy advertising in local publications. The Hart family was one of the city's most prominent, and their influence was the source of many colorful stories: one such tale recounts that the artist who repainted the ceiling of the Cathedral Basilica of St. Joseph in the 1920s modeled the cherubs in his work on the family's children.
Brooke Hart had worked in his family's department store during much of his youth and was well-known and liked by the local community. After he graduated from Santa Clara University, his father, A.J., made him a junior vice president and began grooming him to take over when he retired.
Disappearance
Just before 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 9, 1933, Brooke Hart retrieved his 1933 Studebaker President roadster, a graduation present from his parents, from a downtown San Jose parking lot behind the department store. He had agreed to chauffeur his father, A.J., who did not drive, to a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce at the San Jose Country Club.When Brooke did not turn up to collect his father, A.J. became concerned. As hours passed and there remained no sign of Brooke, the Hart family's anxiety grew; Brooke was responsible and punctual, and his absence was entirely out of character. A.J. confessed his worry to Perry Belshaw, the manager of the San Jose Country Club, during dinner; after Brooke's friend phoned to say the younger Hart had missed an appointment at 8:00 p.m., A.J. called the police to determine if his son had been involved in an accident.
According to the parking lot attendant, Brooke had left the lot heading east on Santa Clara Avenue at 6:05 p.m.; he was later spotted around 6:30 p.m. by a Hart store employee at Santa Clara and Fourteenth. Finally, a rancher in Milpitas, seven miles north of San Jose, saw a man matching Hart's description standing alone next to an automobile on Evans Lane at approximately 7 p.m.; when the rancher returned, he saw the car still parked there at approximately 8:30 p.m. with no one else present.
Ransom demands
At 9:30 that night, Aleese Hart, the older of Brooke's two younger sisters, answered the telephone at the family home and was informed by a "soft-spoken man" that Hart had been kidnapped and that instructions for his return would be provided later. At 10:30, what sounded like the same man called and informed the other sister, Miriam, that her brother would be returned upon payment of $40,000. Delivery instructions would be provided the next day. According to phone company records, the kidnappers had tried to reach the Hart home three times but the line was busy before they were finally connected. Belshaw lived near the site where the Studebaker had been parked and reported the abandoned car in Milpitas to the police at 11 p.m.; it was positively identified as Brooke's.The San Jose Police Department, the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office, and the U.S. Division of Investigation were quickly brought into the case. The phone calls were traced to locations in San Francisco; the call that connected was traced to the Whitcomb Hotel. However, the search initially focused on the hilly region surrounding Calaveras Dam and the city of Oakland; the call's origin was thought to be a decoy action.
Hart's wallet was discovered in San Francisco on the guard rail of the tanker Midway, which had been refueling the Matson Lines passenger liner when both ships were docked at Pier 32 from midnight to 5 a.m. It was assumed the wallet had been tossed from a porthole on the liner. Lurline was stopped and searched in Los Angeles when it arrived there on its way to Honolulu on November 11, but nothing was found. Police then advanced an alternative theory: since Pier 32, from which Lurline had departed, was close to the sewer outfall, the heavily laden tanker might have dipped below the surface and picked up the wallet from where it had been discharged from the sewer, lifting it from the bay once a sufficient amount of fuel had been offloaded. One of the passengers detained during the three-hour search was Babe Ruth, who was traveling to Los Angeles to watch a football game between Southern California and Stanford.
At the time, the Oakland Tribune named Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd a suspect in the kidnapping, as he was reportedly present in California. Floyd was later spotted in Almaden, near abandoned quicksilver mine shafts. While searching for Floyd or Hart at the mine, a man claiming to be Floyd boarded a bus in Modesto and robbed passengers using a gun.
The Hart family chartered an airplane to look for cabins in the hills near Milpitas starting on November 12, following up a theory that Brooke had been first lured to the area where his car was abandoned, and the kidnappers then took him from there. Because the car's lights were left on, and there were signs of a scuffle, authorities believed Brooke had been overpowered in Milpitas. In addition, witnesses who had seen Brooke driving the Studebaker said that he was alone, although in some cases visibility was poor.
A "compromise ransom" telegram from Sacramento arrived on November 12, suggesting that would be sufficient. However, the family was not contacted again until Monday, November 13, when a letter, postmarked in Sacramento, arrived in the mail at the department store. It instructed A.J. to have a radio installed in the Studebaker, because the ransom instructions would be broadcast over NBC radio station KPO. The kidnapper also instructed A.J. to be ready to drive the Studebaker to deliver the ransom, but A.J. had never learned to drive. On November 13, A.J. posted a $5,000 reward for his son's safe return, with a promise to drop any further investigation upon his return. To emphasize the validity of the reward offer, police announced they would not be tracing calls to the Hart residence. However, this was a ruse to entrap the kidnappers; in fact, the telephone line continued to be tapped.
On Tuesday, November 14, a second ransom note arrived, this time postmarked in San Francisco. It instructed A.J. to place the ransom in a black satchel and drive to Los Angeles. That night, A.J. took a call from a man claiming to be his son's kidnapper, who instructed him to take the night train to Los Angeles. The authorities staked out the train station and mistakenly arrested a bank teller out for an evening stroll. The next day, a sign was placed in a window of the Hart store stating that A.J. did not drive. A call was received that night again demanding that Hart drive to deliver the ransom. Hart demanded proof that his son was with the caller. The caller stated that Brooke was being held at a safe location. Because a phone tap had been placed on the Hart telephone, the call was traced to a garage in downtown San Jose, but the caller was gone by the time the authorities arrived.
Arrests and confessions
Another demand arrived the following day, November 16, again ordering A.J. to drive with the ransom. That night, another call was received and the demand that A.J. drive was repeated. The call was traced to a payphone in a parking garage at Market near San Antonio, and Police Chief J.N. Black and Sheriff William Emig hurried to the scene just from the San Jose Police station, where they arrested Thomas Harold Thurmond as he was hanging up, at about 8:00 p.m.At 3:00 a.m., Thurmond, after hours of questioning, signed a confession in which he claimed to have bound Brooke's hands with wire and tossed him off the San Mateo Bridge into San Francisco Bay sometime between 7:00 and 7:30 on the night of the kidnapping. He also identified an accomplice: John Holmes, a recently unemployed salesman who was separated from his wife and two children. Holmes was arrested in his SRO room at the California Hotel near the San Jose Police station at 3:30 a.m. According to Thurmond's confession, Holmes approached him with the scheme six weeks prior, after he had separated from his family.
At 1:00 p.m. on November 17, Holmes signed a confession admitting that he and Thurmond had kidnapped Brooke and thrown him into San Francisco Bay. Later, the Santa Clara County District Attorney advised the press that, unless corroborated by independent evidence, confessions by Thurmond and Holmes in which each blamed the other for the crime were not admissible in a court of law. In his confession, Holmes stated that Thurmond had come up with the plan: "A couple of days before the kidnapping, went to a show. On the way out he grabbed my arm and said, 'There goes Brookie Hart. If we pick him up we can get a nice piece of change." In Thurmond's earlier confession, he stated Holmes made the decision to murder Brooke: "Thursday afternoon, November 9, I went to Merritt's plumbing shop and bought three bricks for 10 cents each and 55 cents' worth of wire to make preparations to kidnap Brooke Hart. I don't know whether Holmes planned to murder the boy at that time but at any rate we wanted to be prepared."
According to the men's confessions, when Brooke stopped his car near the exit of the parking lot in the evening of November 9, Thurmond slipped into the passenger seat and, holding a gun on him, forced Brooke to drive to Milpitas. There they abandoned the Studebaker for another waiting car, which had been driven to the rendezvous point by Holmes, and the group of three drove to the San Mateo Bridge.
A mother and daughter on a farm immediately south of Milpitas had seen a dark, long-hooded sedan with three men stopped near their barn. A few minutes after it stopped, a convertible with three men two on the running boards and one driving stopped near the sedan. Their description of the man driving the convertible, slender with light colored hair, matched the description of Brooke, as did the convertible as his car. Brooke was driven away in the larger car. According to the farmers, one of the group followed in the Studebaker. The mother did not report the events until the following Monday, when she was visiting relatives and learned about the kidnapping. The investigators did not agree on the veracity of the story, because the number of kidnappers did not agree with the recorded confessions.
On the bridge, the men ordered Brooke out of the car, and one of the kidnappers struck him twice on the head from behind with a concrete block until he was unconscious. They then bound his arms with baling wire and tied two concrete blocks to his feet before dumping him off the bridge into the bay. The tide was out and there were only a few feet of water at the base of the bridge; the kidnappers then shot Brooke, killing him. According to Thurmond's confession, Brooke struggled in the water for a few minutes and may have been able to free himself from his bonds; after they had tossed him over the north side of the bridge, he moved south under the bridge, against the prevailing current. Thurmond also stated Holmes was the first to shoot at Brooke, but Thurmond shot at him after he had drifted under the bridge. After leaving Brooke in the bay, they stopped approximately from the eastern end, where they discarded an extra concrete block and a roll of wire, which were recovered after the confessions. A few hours later, they placed the first telephone call to the Hart family demanding $40,000 for Hart's return.
Two men scavenging for wood in the bay, Cal Coley and Vinton Ridley, heard screams for help at approximately 7:25 p.m. on the night of November 9, when Brooke was kidnapped, and tried to rescue him, but were hampered by muddy conditions. The two said the cries for help came from the bridge near the shore of Alameda, but added they did not hear any shots that night.
Local newspapers reported that Holmes and Thurmond had met with psychiatrists and would attempt to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. Thurmond claimed he had been "crazy" for more than a year, since his sweetheart married another man, and Holmes planned to repudiate his confession, which his attorney claimed had been "forced from him by third-degree methods", including threats to "turn him over to the mob for lynching if he did not confess". Upon learning of rumors of a possible insanity plea on the part of Thurmond, law enforcement authorities directed two psychiatrists from Agnews State Mental Hospital in Santa Clara to examine the two men to preclude such a defense. Following cursory examinations in their cells at the Santa Clara County Jail, with a mob outside in the jail courtyard, both men were declared sane.