CRIME: Grandma’s Boy

Courtney Fred Rogers was a model boy. Some of the other boys along North Gage Avenue, in Los Angeles, gallivanted around, used dirty words, got into fights. But tall, skinny, redheaded Courtney Rogers practiced his music lessons, minded his father and his mother and his grandmother. After he graduated from high school he got a job as a church organist.

Grandma died suddenly at the age of 76. Courtney’s mother died four years later. Courtney and his father lived alone in their modest frame house, until one night last fall when the house caught fire and burned down.

Courtney was away at the time, it seemed. But Father Courtney was there. Police decided later that he had come home drunk and had started the fire with the candles that were found around his charred remains. The coroner called it suicide. Courtney collected $2,300 insurance on the house, $1,000 on his father, and took a small apartment in Hollywood.

Months went by. One day the police nabbed Courtney, questioned him for hours. Finally he blurted out: “I started the fire that killed my father.” Why? Because “his drinking brought sorrow to my mother and finally caused her to take her life.”

Two days went by. Then North Gage Avenue’s model boy had something to add. Smoothing back his crop of red hair, he said: “I might as well tell you the whole story.” He had killed his mother too, he said. Why? He had had a bitter childhood, he wanted her money, his father mistreated her and he wanted to put her out of her pain. After she fell asleep one night, Courtney had dropped chloroform on a wad of cotton which he held over her nose until she died. Said Courtney calmly: “I had an Oedipus complex.”

The sheriff’s office, now suspicious of everything, probed further into Courtney’s quiet, well-mannered life. Before Grandma (Mrs. Sophie Spiegelmann) died in 1935, she had promised to leave Courtney $1,000. “We have a court order to take up the body of your grandmother,” a deputy sheriff told Courtney. “What do you think we will find?” Courtney replied: “You’ll find arsenic. I poisoned Grandmother. It was my first venture. . . .”