On A Tree, By A River

William A. Hightower, wandering baker-poet-philosopher, was convicted of the kidnap-murder of Father Patrick Heslin on October 13, 1921 and thereafter served over forty years in San Quentin, where he steadfastly maintained his innocence of the crime. He was released in 1965, a veritable Rip Van Winkle, and befriended by a family in Los Angeles who later recalled him fondly and donated his voluminous prison writings to Brigham Young University in Utah. He died at the age of 95 in 1974.

In The Early Years, Steve Hodel leaves open the issue of whether Hightower was an accomplice of the “small foreigner” who abducted the Catholic priest, while lending some credence to the notion that Hightower’s cover story about Dolly Mason and the “Greek with a gun” held a kernel of truth. I can think of three broad-brush reasons to entertain Hightower’s innocence: (1) he doesn’t fit the original witness descriptions of the kidnapper; (2) his coming forward to locate the body isn’t particularly compatible with guilt; (3) there really wasn’t any convincing evidence to suggest that he would be capable of such a crime. There is also much to indicate that he was trying to protect Doris Shirley, and she seems a better candidate for a conspirator to a kidnap-murder, based on the fates of her two previous common law husbands, Earl Cavanaugh and Thomas J. Coleman. Shirley’s story changed in significant detail—first she was never in the suspect rental car, then she was, only just briefly. It’s obvious that she was being shielded by the DA for helping him secure a conviction, and her own alibi for the night of the abduction—her new husband—doesn’t seem that impressive. Hightower’s lawyer went there, almost, in his closing argument to the jury:

Time and again, though, Hightower pulled back from pointing a finger squarely at Doris Shirley. Perhaps he was merely trying to muddy the waters by raising suspicions against her. Perhaps they were co-conspirators in a kidnap-for-ransom plot, so there was little to gain and much to lose by provoking her. Or, perhaps Hightower was really as besotted with her as he appeared to be and ‘twas blighted affection that led him to take the fall…