9

Double Murder

HONOLULU POLICE DETECTIVE DIVISION, ON THE STEPS OF THE OLD DOWNTOWN STATION; IN FRONT ROW, FAR RIGHT, IS CHANG APANA. AUGUST 6, 1911 (Courtesy of Honolulu Police Department)

Murder like potato chip—cannot stop at just one.

—Charlie Chan

IN A DRAMATIC chapter of the first Charlie Chan novel, The House Without a Key (published in 1925), the young Bostonian John Quincy is chased by a criminal gang late at night through a maze of mean alleys in downtown Honolulu, in a neighborhood known as the River District. Spanning the banks of the Nu’uanu Stream—crime-infested Chinatown to its west and equally rough sections of Iwilei to its east—the River District appears to the blue-blooded Bostonian as a nightmare:

There in crazy alleys that have no names, no sidewalks, no beginning and no end, five races live together in the dark. Some houses were above the walk level, some below, all were out of alignment. John Quincy felt he had wandered into a futurist drawing. As he paused he heard the whine and clatter of Chinese music, the clicking of a typewriter, the rasp of a cheap phonograph playing American jazz, the distant scream of an auto horn, a child wailing Japanese lamentations…. Odd painted faces loomed in the dusk: pasty-white faces with just a suggestion of queer costumes beneath. A babel of tongues, queer eyes that glittered, once a lean hand on his arm.¹

John Quincy is almost shanghaied.

Foreshadowing the hard-boiled streets of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles or the symbolic underworld of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Honolulu’s rough neighborhoods, described poetically by Earl Biggers as if he had seen them in an opium-induced dream, were the locus operandi of newly promoted Detective Chang Apana. Even the names of these areas betrayed their infamy: Tin Can Alley, Blood Town, Mosquito Flats, and Hell’s Half Acre. Whores, pimps, thugs, footpads, bootleggers, dopers, and gamblers swarmed these blocks of slums. In his later years, with a twinkle in his eyes, Apana would reminisce about the time when the Iwilei section was the mecca of crime and the saloons were wide open. “Those were the days,” Apana said, “when the police patrol wagon was busy and the riot calls were frequent.”²

Sometime in the early 1910s, Apana joined the crime-busting squad, a team led by Captain Arthur McDuffie and comprising half a dozen detectives and officers, including John Kellett, George Nakea, Oliver Barboza, Kam Kwai, and driver Henry Kualii. Like Steve McGarrett’s Hawaii Five-O quartet a half-century later, McDuffie’s group would cruise around town in a black Packard, scouting for trouble. Their car had a special device that enabled the driver to open all four doors at the same time with a click, and the team members would simultaneously leap out into action.³

The cases they took up ranged from bootlegging and drug trafficking to missing persons to homicide. With no need for dramatic embellishment, some of these cases would be readymade material for Charlie Chan novels, or, later, Hawaii Five-O episodes. (As we will see later, Biggers was first inspired by an obscure article about an opium arrest made by Apana.) In a few cases, missing persons would never be found, despite the team’s efforts; in many others, dangerous jailbreakers would be apprehended and killers swiftly brought to justice.

One year, just as the islands were preparing for the big Independence Day celebration, a popular mainland girl named Frances Ash was reported missing from Waikiki Beach. “The news of the disappearance reached the police station early in the morning,” read the front-page article in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, “and Chief of Detectives Arthur McDuffie, together with his aides, John Kellett and Apana, came out in a high-powered machine.”⁴ They searched every hotel room along the beachfront and sent a team of lifeguards, including the brother of famed surfer Duke Kahanamoku, into the water with canoes and surfboards to look for the girl. The search went on for days, but no trace of Miss Ash was ever found.

While such a case required substantial organizational legwork for Apana and his colleagues, others demanded courage, as in the ability to stare down the barrel of a gun and not blink. Apana once joined McDuffie and Kellett in capturing a Korean who had broken out of jail. “They finally located their quarry, hiding under a house,” read a police report. “When he was ordered to come out he replied with a fusillade of shots, one of the shots boring the palm of Kellett’s hand, the others missing by narrow margin, the other two officers.” In a lull between shots fired by the escaped felon and the officers, Apana snuck around the side of the house, while the other two officers held the fugitive at bay. When Apana pounced on the prisoner, the Korean’s gun went off, sending a bullet into Apana’s left arm. He was in the midst of a life-or-death struggle when the other officers came to his rescue and subdued the fugitive. Apana took only a week in the hospital to recuperate from the gun wound.⁵

Newspaper reports confirm that Apana’s life was anything but boring. On the morning of May 1, 1913, for example, McDuffie, Kellett, and Apana came upon a scene of utter horror at a Chinese store in Kalihi: The bodies of Lim Ah Kim and his new young wife, Lum Shee, were lying on the floor in a crimson pool. Their throats were slashed, and they had suffered multiple stab wounds. The stench of death permeated the store, which had doubled as a residence. A black cat, too frightened to mew, shivered in the corner behind a rice sack, its dark fur stained with blood not yet coagulated. Mr. Lim had been a prominent merchant. His wife, a beautiful twenty-year-old, was pregnant. The cash register had been rifled, a steel safe damaged, and the bedroom drawers ransacked. The officers also found bloodstained footprints on the floor; some indistinct bloody fingerprints on the bed, the safe, and a number of other places; and a heavy hammer bearing the marks of a bloody hand. All signs pointed to robbery as the most likely motive.

Police followed a tip to a nearby gambling room, located in a small shack within a few feet of the store. Declared by neighbors as the rendezvous of soldiers attached to the military post at Fort Shafter, the room had windows covered with khaki uniforms. The murdered storekeeper reportedly had just been paid for the groceries furnished to Fort Shafter’s messes, and he was thought to have carried about $600 in cash. But further investigation by McDuffie and his team found no evidence linking the gamblers to the carnage.⁶ Other neighbors, however, told police that four Filipinos had been seen near the store on the day of the murder. A description of the men was given to the police: one of the quartet was said to have been wearing a grayish sweater with a red border.

A break in the case came the next day, when a woman phoned McDuffie with information she thought suspicious but “not very important.” She was a roomer at the Elite Hotel and had seen a Filipino man trying to wash some stains off his sweater in a third-floor bathroom of the hotel on the night of the double murder. McDuffie and Apana immediately acted on the tip and located the owner of the sweater, Domingo Rodrigues, a servant in the officers’ mess at Fort Shafter.

More than a decade later, when Biggers, at the height of his literary career, visited the islands and met with Apana, “the real Charlie Chan” would tell Biggers about the Rodrigues nabbing. When the two officers first approached him, the suspect withstood the questioning well, until Apana drew attention to Rodrigues’s new shoes. “Why you wear new shoes this morning?” became the punch line of the whole case. The suspect balked, turned around suddenly, and tried to escape. Swift as a shadow, Apana beat him to the door and blocked the exit. Rodrigues pulled a knife from his pocket and lunged at Apana. The blade slashed open Apana’s sport coat, close to his stomach, but fortuitously it landed in his broad leather belt. When the knife hit the brass buckle, Apana grabbed Rodrigues’s right wrist and gave it a twist. Once the knife fell to the ground, the “desperado” was arrested. A subsequent search of Rodrigues’s room yielded a pair of blood-soaked shoes, a stained sweater, and a pair of trousers smeared with human blood. Soon the other members of Rodrigues’s gang—Miguel Manigbas, Hildago Bautista, and Celestino Manalo—were also arrested.⁷

The four Filipinos confessed to the killing, but each pointed the finger of guilt at others. According to Rodrigues, the four men entered Lim’s store on the night of April 30. Miguel asked Lim for some apples, and when the owner turned to get them, Miguel stabbed him in the back. “The Chinese screamed in pain and attempted to defend himself with a hammer. After a desperate struggle he was overpowered and collapsed.” Rodrigues declared that Miguel had cut Lim’s throat. The storekeeper’s wife was roused by his shouts for help. She went to the door, which led to the main part of the store from the bedroom. “She was attacked and slain by a well-directed blow. Her mutilated body was left lying on the floor.” The store was ransacked, but the killers were unable to locate any loot other than a paltry $4.20 in the cash register, in addition to a revolver.⁸

Justice was swift for the four Filipinos. They were arraigned on May 22, sentenced to death by hanging (except for Manalo, who had turned state’s evidence and was sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment) on June 14, and sent to the gallows three weeks later.⁹ In Hawaii, between 1826 and 1913, there were forty-nine documented executions: twenty-six Hawaiians, seven Japanese, five Chinese, four Koreans, four Filipinos, two Puerto Ricans, and one Caucasian. The Caucasian was an illiterate Irish sailor, one John O’Connell. He had jumped ship in 1906 and then kidnapped, murdered, decapitated, dismembered, and disemboweled the son of a prominent haole family.¹⁰

On the morning of July 8, 1913, about a hundred people witnessed the hanging of the three Filipinos at the Oahu prison yard. As the noose was adjusted and a black cap drawn over his head, Domingo Rodrigues shouted to the crowd in broken English that he was being sent out of the territory because he had accidentally killed a man. These were the last words uttered by any of the trio before the traps were sprung one after another on the scaffold.¹¹

Beginning with this triple hanging, Hawaii would see in subsequent years a sharp increase in the executions of Filipinos. Following in the paths of Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, Filipinos were the latest additions to the plantation workforce, and they were on the lowest rung of the islands’ social and economic ladder. From 1914 to 1957, the year Hawaii outlawed the death penalty, twenty-six civilians were hanged, of whom twenty were Filipino. The others were two Koreans, two Japanese, one Puerto Rican, and one Hawaiian; not a single white man was among them.¹² Racism had obviously tipped the scale of justice even in the land of aloha.

After the hanging, members of Honolulu’s Chinese community paid $2 to $5 for pieces of the hanging rope, mementos that would grace their ancestral halls for generations to come.¹³ They also presented Chief McDuffie with a diamond-studded gold badge, “as a mark of esteem and appreciation of McDuffie’s efforts in effecting the prompt capture of the quartette of Filipinos.”¹⁴ There was no mention of Apana in this recognition, but Apana’s reward would come in a different form—one longer lasting and more glittery than a badge studded with precious stones. For that, we need to look at the character he inspired and the man who created Charlie Chan.