1941 `murder by mail' case still unsolved
The method used to kill John Kmetz could have come straight out of an old “Perry Mason” episode.
The 54-year-old Kmetz, a landscape gardener for the Los Angeles Unified School District, received an unsolicited package at his Los Angeles home, 4549
E. Third St., from the Herb Specialty Co. on Oct. 11, 1941.
Kmetz had married his second wife, 33-year-old Esther Dockham, two months earlier on Aug. 18. His first wife, the mother of his two children, had died seven years earlier. Esther Kmetz told police that her husband's daughter, Lola Mae, 13, had brought the package, sent from an address in Hollywood, to her husband that day.
It contained a small box with a bottle of 12 pills inside. An enclosed twopage typewritten letter signed by one “Dr. W.W. Mackelroy” claimed that a select number of people had been selected to try out this new “vigor restorative” medicine.
The Kmetzes initially laughed off the sales pitch, but on Sunday night, John Kmetz decided it couldn't hurt to try out the pills, which the letter had claimed would put “a spring in your step.” He took two of them and immediately began to feel dizzy. He died that night from a lethal dose of cyanide that had been placed in the pills.
Esther stayed calm throughout the crisis, at one point asking the doctor she'd called to try and save her husband's life, “Do you think he's dead yet?”
She was a former church school teacher who had lived off and on in a San Pedro tent house settlement in the 2800 block of Gaffey Street with Oscar Albertson and his wife, Eva. Esther quit her teaching job when she married John Kmetz.
Albertson, 43, was an unemployed blacksmith who also served as a Seventh Day Adventist church elder. (John Kmetz also was a Seventh Day Adventist.) He and his wife first met Esther in 1935, and she began staying in
a trailer near their tent house in San Pedro in 1938.
Police immediately began investigating the case, and their attention focused intently on Oscar Albertson. They suspected that he was in love with Esther Kmetz and jealous of her new husband, though they had no concrete evidence that this was true.
After hours of questioning at a police inquest into the murder, Albertson was arrested on Oct. 30, 1941, and charged with murder. His first trial began on April 13, 1942.
Investigators traced the phony Herb Specialty Co. letterhead to a Santa Monica print shop, but could not pin down who exactly placed the order. They also couldn't find any record that Albertson had purchased cyanide.
They determined that the box in which the fatal pills came had been crudely fashioned from a vitamin pill box similar to one Albertson had given Esther Kmetz in San Pedro during the summer of 1941, but could not directly prove that that exact box had been used to house the deadly pills.
Much of their case arose from an incident that occurred a couple of weeks after John and Esther's marriage, during which the husband was attacked by a man wielding an ax handle. He suffered no serious injuries. A patrol car later chased a speeding car nearby, which was found empty, except for clothes and possessions belonging to Oscar Albertson.
Albertson was found three miles away in his underwear. He was never charged. Police later concluded that the poison pills were Albertson's second attempt.
Two members of the jury disagreed, though, and refused to vote for his conviction, and the trial ended with a 10-2 hung jury on May 30. The dissenting jurors felt the entire case hinged on circumstantial evidence that could not be proved, and that Albertson had no motive to commit the crime.
Undaunted, prosecutors immediately scheduled a new trial for Albertson to begin in July. Shortly after the trial began, they disclosed that Esther Kmetz had disappeared sometime following her last court appearance on June 1. They were unable to locate her. She never resurfaced.
The second trial didn't go well for Albertson.
On Aug. 6, 1942, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to die in the gas chamber. His lawyers launched an immediate appeal. It wound through the courts until Jan. 19, 1944, when the California State Supreme Court voted 4-3 to overturn Albertson's conviction. The grounds: insufficient evidence.
Albertson finally was released after more than 2 1/2 years in custody on June 14, 1944. He had been incarcerated on death row at San Quentin for more than a year. His wife, Eva, died in 1949, but Albertson survived the trial and lived until 1983. He was living in Chino at the time of his death, and is buried in Inglewood Park Cemetery.
In retrospect, it's curious that investigators never pursued the idea of Mrs. Kmetz as a possible suspect in the case, either before or during the Albertson trials.
Her June 1942 disappearance also is hard to explain. She may have been freer to pull her vanishing act after the judge in the case removed her husband's two children, Lola and her 16-year-old brother, Raymond, from Esther Kmetz's custody in January 1942 because of the trial. They were sent off to live with her late husband's aunt in Norwalk, who made the request for custody.
The judge said that it had been revealed to him in closed chambers that the Kmetz household was “jittery, and there is constant fear,” according to the San Pedro News Pilot. Esther Kmetz volunteered to give each child one third of Kmetz's modest $2,500 estate and keep the rest herself. She disappeared for good less than five months later.
The case was never reopened after Oscar Albertson was freed in 1944.
Sources: Find a Grave website. Los Angeles Times archives. “Murder in the Mail — Podcast #80,” by Steve Silverman, Useless Information: Fascinating True Stories From the Flip Side of History blog, March 6, 2015. “People vs. Albertson,” Justia US Law website. San Pedro News Pilot archives.