I knew the court transcript like the back of my hand.
December 13, 1957. It was a Friday. The forecast had predicted rain, but little on that day happened according to plan. By noon, the early-morning clouds had dissipated and the sun was shining. Jean Albacco spent most of the day answering the phone, typing letters, and filing correspondence at the insurance offices of Gilbert, Finster, and Johnson on lower State Street in downtown Ventura, where she had been employed since graduating from high school a year and a half earlier. On December 13, she worked through lunch, having asked her employer, Mr. Douglas Gilbert, if she could leave one hour earlier that evening. It was her first wedding anniversary, and she was preparing a surprise for her husband, Joe.
Jean’s coworker and best friend, Miss Madeleine Seaton, remembered Jean being somewhat edgy all day, but that wouldn’t have been unusual. Jean was known for being high-strung and particular about things. Miss Seaton recalled her spilling a cup of coffee on a stack of unmailed letters early that morning, and accidentally disconnecting Mr. Gilbert’s wife, who had called at 11:00 A.M. to remind her husband about a dentist appointment that afternoon. Perhaps, Miss Seaton speculated, it was just that Jean had errands to do after work and was worried about everything getting done before her husband came home. Joe was expected at approximately 7:15 P.M.
It was only later that everyone realized the day Jean Albacco was murdered had been Friday the thirteenth.
Joseph Albacco Jr. (Class of ’55, Ventura City High) worked as a linotype operator at the Ventura Press, the area’s major weekly. Joe’s boss, Ventura Press editor and publisher Mr. Anson Burke, remembered December 13 well because he had been preoccupied all day about the looming possibility of a strike. He had meetings with union officials in the morning and an unusual number of phone calls to juggle, as his secretary, Miss Mildred Rose, was out sick. Joe, one of his forty-nine employees, had merited scarcely a thought.
Arriving well before 8:00 A.M., Joe shared a breakfast of doughnuts and coffee with several coworkers. He joked about a baseball game over which he had lost ten dollars the previous night, and complained about an old back injury that seemed to be flaring up. No one at work knew December 13 was his wedding anniversary until reading about it in the paper the following day.
Mr. Thomas Malone, who had known Joe since grade school, worked on the city desk. He and Joe usually bought lunch at the Italian deli on Main and walked through the alley to eat in the park across the street from the San Buenaventura Mission, under the old fig tree. December 13 had been no different. That day they talked about the weather, Mr. Malone’s ailing mother, and the military’s increased presence in the county. They also discussed the new freeway, the U.S. 101, which would run from the Conejo Grade to Camarillo, cutting the trip to Los Angeles from five hours to just over two. The paper had been running a series of editorials complaining about how the elevated sections proposed for Ventura proper would block out views and access to the beach in the downtown area.
After lunch, Joe stopped at a phone booth to make a call. It lasted no more than three or four minutes. But, according to Mr. Malone, this was unusual for Joe. There was shouting, and Joe seemed agitated during the short walk back to the office. Despite Mr. Malone’s inquiries, Joe wouldn’t reveal to whom he had been speaking or the subject of their conversation.
Jean left work at 4:15 P.M. on the dot. On her way out, she wished Miss Seaton a nice weekend and told her that she might have a surprise for her very soon. Miss Seaton testified at trial that Jean’s manner was coy, which surprised her, given that Jean was normally a serious sort of girl.
At approximately 4:20 P.M., complaining of a headache, Joe went to see the company nurse, Mrs. Bianca Adair. She gave him two aspirins and sent him home to rest, no follow-up required.
At 4:30 P.M., Jean stopped in at C&M Locksmiths at the corner of Main and Santa Clara. She picked up a set of house keys, explaining that her husband had lost his, and asked after two other keys that weren’t yet ready. She chatted amiably with the proprietor, Mr. Lorenzo Calabro, but bustled out when she caught sight of the clock, clearly in a hurry. At approximately 4:40 P.M., she went into the used bookshop on Valdez Alley, browsed in the California section, and purchased a two-volume history of Ventura County. A present for her husband, she explained to Mr. Roger Sorenson, the store manager. On her way to the market on Thompson Boulevard, Jean stopped to chat a moment with a friend, Miss Diana Crisp, who worked at the Be Mine Hair Salon next door. Diana complimented Jean on her suit. Jean laughed and said that she had hidden the receipt from Joe since it wasn’t on sale and they were supposed to be saving for a house on a better street. At the market, Jean paid cash for her groceries (a roast, some baking potatoes, and a head of iceberg lettuce), though she had opened a house account just the week before.
At 4:30 P.M., Joe was seen driving above Register Street, heading west, just beyond the county courthouse.
At 5:30 P.M., Jean’s neighbor, Mr. Josiah McGruder, a retired plumber, saw Jean approach her house, stop abruptly for a few moments, as if lost in thought, and then go inside. She was loaded down with packages.
At 6:30 P.M., Mr. McGruder thought he heard the screen door swing open at the Albaccos’. He looked out the window and saw a person, whom he could not positively identify, enter the Albacco residence.
At 7:15 P.M., smelling something burning on the stove, Mr. McGruder knocked on the Albaccos’ front door. When he got no response, he went around to the back door. He called out and, still getting no response, entered the premises, where he saw the body of Mrs. Albacco on the kitchen floor.
At 7:30 P.M., the police arrived.
At 7:45 P.M., Joseph Albacco came home, with a pack of cigarettes in his hand and dried blood on the cuff of his shirt. He was taken in for questioning, held overnight, and charged, the following morning, with murder in the first degree.
The trial was brief. The cause of death was determined to be blunt trauma to the head. The murder weapon was never found. But that didn’t stop the prosecutor. There was trouble in the marriage. Talk of another woman. Joe had left work early for no real reason. That looked bad. There was no sign of forced entry. That looked bad, too. The blood on his shirt tested AB positive—his wife’s type. And he had no alibi. No explanation whatsoever of where he had been. It added up. At least, the jury saw it that way. But it was hardly an open-and-shut case.
Sitting in the prison parking lot, too nervous to do anything except pick at the tassels on my suit, I went over the details in my mind again and yet again. Any way you looked at it, there were dozens of lingering questions. What had that frantic phone call been about? If it had been Albacco at the door at 6:30 P.M. that evening, as the prosecution had contended, why had his neighbor been unable to make a positive ID, especially since it wasn’t even dark out? And if Albacco had indeed killed his wife, wouldn’t he have changed his bloodstained shirt before appearing back at his house at 7:45 P.M.? Why had he been carrying cigarettes when neither he nor Jean was a smoker? Most curious of all was the missing murder weapon. Where was it? I stopped myself short. It was hardly my business. Any of it. Erle Stanley Gardner was my business, and all this case meant to me, all it could ever mean to me, was a chance to get the real dope on an old pro.
Right.