Erwin Walker

William Erwin Walker, also known as Erwin M. Walker and Machine Gun Walker (born Erwin Mathias Walker; October 6, 1917− October 7, 2008), was an American police employee and United States Army World War II veteran, known for having committed several thefts, burglaries, and shootouts with police in Los Angeles County, California, in 1945 and 1946, one of which resulted in a fatality. The film He Walked by Night was loosely based on Walker's 1946 crime spree.

Early life Little is known about Walker's early life. He was born Erwin Mathias Walker in 1917 to Weston and Irene Walker, and was raised in Glendale, California. He lived with his parents and a sister. Weston Walker was a Los Angeles County flood control engineer, and his uncle Herbert V. Walker was a prominent Los Angeles lawyer and Chief Deputy District Attorney who became a Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge. Walker graduated from the Hoover School and attended the California Institute of Technology for one year, excelling in electronics and radio engineering.

Police and military service After he dropped out of Caltech, Walker worked as a radio operator and police dispatcher for the Glendale Police Department. In 1944, Walker graduated from OCS and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. Walker was apparently well liked by the soldiers who worked with him, and he was reputed to be more than usually considerate of them. Walker later explained that his crimes were motivated by a desire to gather funds and equipment to build an electronic radar gun (which, by shooting a beam, would disintegrate metal into powder) so that he could force the government to pass legislation raising soldiers' pay. That would, in turn, increase the cost of war to a point that it could not be waged profitably.

Using the alias "Paul C. Norris", Walker contacted Willard W. Starr, a sound engineer who bought and sold motion picture and sound recording equipment out of his home, to sell him a collection of commercial motion-picture equipment. Starr immediately suspected that the motion-picture equipment had been stolen and alerted the police.

On April 25, 1946, LAPD Hollywood division detectives Lieutenant Colin C. Forbes, and his partner, Sergeant Stewart W. Johnson, staked out Starr's home to wait for the suspect's arrival. Walker opened fire, and Forbes was hit in the abdomen at pointblank range after his own pistol jammed. Johnson wounded Walker in the stomach and left leg with at least two bullets from his .38-caliber service revolver. Forbes and Johnson were both rushed to a hospital, where Forbes was found to have a .45-caliber bullet lodged against his spine. He recovered although doctors were unable to remove the bullet and had to leave it in place.

In May 1946, Walker committed another burglary by stealing rolls of safety-detonating fuse and priming cord. To open safes and break locks, Walker made his own explosive, nitroglycerine, by using fuming nitric acid, sulfuric acid, and glycerine. On June 5, 1946, Walker drove to a meat market at the corner of Los Feliz Boulevard and Brunswick Avenue in Glendale, California. According to detectives who interviewed him, Walker told a slightly different version of what happened at the time of his arrest, declaring that Officer Roosevelt had shot at him first, which forced Walker to duck and return fire, hitting Roosevelt twice. Walker then elaborated that Roosevelt had asked him to call an ambulance, and Walker responded that he would do nothing for him. According to later newspaper accounts, Officer Roosevelt returned fire but was apparently unable to place a radio call for help because of his wounds. by .45-caliber bullets, Officer Roosevelt was rushed to a nearby hospital. Although badly wounded, Officer Roosevelt was able, before his death, to give both a physical description of his assailant and a different account of his encounter with Walker and the subsequent gunfight.

Roosevelt died in hospital a few hours after the shooting. Walker's abandoned car was found to contain bolt cutters, a loaded Thompson submachine gun, a bag of tools, sap, sash cord, bell wire, hacksaw blades, hand drill, electric drill, crescent wrenches, pry bar, extension cord, hammer, pliers, wire cutters, nitroglycerine, adhesive tape, a percussion-type dynamite blasting cap crimped to a white blasting fuse, and a primer cord attached to the percussion cap.

At 2 a.m., December 20, 1946, three detectives (Officers Wynn, Donahue, and Rombeau) entered Walker's apartment by using a key provided by the owner. Walker, who had been asleep with a .45-caliber pistol at his bedside table, was caught reaching for a Thompson submachine gun on the bed beside him when the three detectives burst into the living room. After a fierce struggle for the submachine gun in which the arresting officers twice shot Walker in the shoulder and broke the butt of a pistol over his head, Walker was finally handcuffed and arrested. Detective Donahue asked Walker why he killed the highway patrolman, to which Walker replied that he "had to." When asked, "Did you shoot the two officers in Hollywood?" Walker answered, "Yes." Despite his wounds, Walker told one of the detectives that he had been stopped the previous week by two motorcycle patrolmen on Hollywood Boulevard for a minor traffic violation but had been given only a warning: "Lucky for them they didn't try to make me get out of the car. I had a submachine gun with me then. You might have had two more dead cops." noting that Walker himself testified at great length in the trial and demonstrating a mentality and scientific learning far above the average: "This is a case in which I feel my responsibility very greatly.... The defendant, of course, in his lengthy time on the witness stand here showed a high degree of intelligence. I seldom recall a more intelligent witness, a witness who gave clearer responses to the questions than did Mr. Walker. It is true that he had a war experience that, in the vernacular of the service men, might be termed 'rugged', but without analyzing it or comparing it too much, I would say that perhaps millions of his fellow Americans had experiences that were equally rugged during the war.... A killing in an attempt to perpetrate a burglary is murder of the first degree.... However, I believe that in addition to my finding that the killing of Loren Roosevelt was murder in the first degree as a matter of law, I feel that it was a deliberate killing, a purposeful killing on the defendant's part."

Walker was sentenced to death in the gas chamber. After a motion for a new trial and appeal to overturn Walker's conviction and death sentence were rejected in December 1948, Walker's father, Weston, committed suicide by hanging.

Walker was sent to death row in San Quentin to await execution of his sentence. At San Quentin, he was diagnosed by a prison psychiatrist as having paranoid schizophrenia. On April 14, 1949, thirty-six hours before his scheduled execution, a corrections officer found Walker unconscious after an apparent suicide attempt in which Walker tried to hang himself with a radio headphone cord wrapped around his neck. He was successfully revived, and the execution was postponed indefinitely while a psychiatric examination was performed.

Mental health treatment After his attempted suicide, Walker was examined by a psychiatric board, which delivered its report in April 1949. The examining board reported that Walker was agitated by fear of his impending death and was "negativistic, mute, fearful, and unresponsive and possibly reacting to hallucinations" and frequently lapsed into semi-unconsciousness. The psychiatrists determined Walker "does not know the difference between right and wrong," thus making him insane under the legal standard of the day and ineligible for execution.

His execution was postponed indefinitely. At his competency hearing, Walker was declared insane by a jury and committed to the Mendocino State Hospital in Talmage, California, where he would remain the next 12 years. When not receiving electroshock therapy and other treatments, Walker spent most of his time at Mendocino reading mostly chemistry textbooks. He remained aloof from the other patients, stating that "even dying in the gas chamber might have been preferable to having to be with these creatures."

In 1961, Walker was declared sane by a newly convened panel of psychiatric examiners. On March 28, 1961, in response to a clemency hearing appeal by Walker, Governor Pat Brown commuted Walker's death sentence to life imprisonment without possibility of parole. Walker was sent to the CMF State Prison Facility, Vacaville to serve out his sentence, where he continued studying chemistry while he worked in a laboratory on the prison campus.

While Walker was a patient at Mendocino State Hospital until he was a prisoner at the Vacaville Medical Facility, he was a patient at Atascadero State Hospital, a maximum-security mental hospital located near Atascadero, California. He played the tenor saxophone with various musical groups in the hospital and was a talented musician although, as he said, "I have a little difficulty fingering the sax because of nerve damage caused by an old bullet wound."

Walker was reportedly well-liked by both patients and staff, and as a result, he was subsequently granted a "white card," which permitted him access to hiking trails located outside the hospital building but within the boundaries of institutional property. He was concerned about eventually being sent back to death row and so he put together a back pack with food and escaped, walking several miles through nearby hills. A short time later, he was apprehended when he was discovered by two armed duck hunters near the Cuesta Grade area of Highway 101. Walker was returned to the hospital and his white card privileges revoked, but he re-established himself as a model patient and was recruited to be a mentor in a Senior-Junior Big Brother type program on Ward 21, which housed responsible adult men, mostly military veterans, and dysfunctional teenage boys. Walker continued to do well at Atascadero State Hospital until one day, without notice, he was given just a few minutes to get ready to be transferred back to the state prison system. He took time to make sure that the property he borrowed from other patients was returned and to say goodbye to many of his friends.

Habeas corpus petitions and release on parole In 1970, Walker filed a habeas corpus petition with the Supreme Court of California, which was denied without a hearing. Walker filed a similar petition in the Solano County Superior Court and sought to have his 1947 trial set aside on several grounds, including an allegation that his 1946 confession had been made involuntarily. The case made its way on appeal once more to the Supreme Court of California, which decided the case in February 1974.

While the Supreme Court failed to overturn Walker's conviction or grant him a new trial, it instructed the lower court to delete that portion of Walker's life sentence that excluded any possibility of parole, allowing him to apply to the California Adult Authority for parole and to have his parole application duly considered. Walker applied for parole in 1974, which was granted, and he was released from Vacaville. After a short stay at a halfway house, Walker was released from further parole restrictions. Immediately after leaving prison, he legally changed his name. After obtaining a job as a chemist, he disappeared from public view. Walker died in 2008.

He Walked by Night In 1948, Eagle-Lion Films released a film that was loosely based on Walker's 1946 crime spree, He Walked by Night. Walker's character, Roy Morgan, was played by actor Richard Basehart. The film was shot in a semidocumentary format on location in and around Los Angeles. In the film, Morgan is shot dead in one of the city's underground drainage tunnels as he attempts to shoot his way out of a police dragnet. The film is notable for featuring actor and writer Jack Webb in the minor role of forensic specialist Lee Whitey; Webb's chance meeting with the film's police consultant inspired him to create Dragnet.