CRIME: Prince Koke

In 1931, “Flapper’s Half Acre,” Honolulu’s night-club and cabaret belt, was the scene of the most celebrated crime in Hawaiian history—rape of Mrs. Thalia Massie, wife of a lieutenant in the U. S. Navy, followed by the death of a Hawaiian suspected of the crime and the conviction of Mrs. Massie’s mother, husband and two men for manslaughter. Last week, Flapper’s Half Acre made sordid news again. A telephone call for an ambulance brought police to the sumptuous beach house of thick-jowled young Prince David Kalakaua Kawananakoa.

There they found the Prince, Major Bernard J. Tooher of the U. S. Army, two other guests and the corpse of the Prince’s comely half-breed, common-law wife, Arvilla Kinslea. Arvilla Kinslea was propped up in a chair, wrapped in a bloodstained sheet. The living room was littered with broken crockery of which she had apparently been the target. Her face was ragged with lacerations. A deep gash in her throat had severed her jugular vein.

David Kawananakoa, “Prince Koke” to white Hawaiians, is the grandnephew of the last male member of Hawaii’s long line of native kings—fat, pleasure-loving David Kalakaua, who liked to play poker for 48 hours at a stretch, died in 1891. Prince Koke’s mother is Princess Kawananakoa, Hawaiian Republican National Committeewoman from 1924 to 1936 who recently entertained Maryland’s Senator Millard E. Tydings and his wife when they visited Hawaii on a Congressional junket. Famed in Honolulu as a yachtsman and playboy, Prince Koke’s greeting to police at his beach house was: “I’m willing to take the rap.” Still too drunk to give a coherent account of what had happened, he was held for investigation.