Bumbling plot spells end for cheating doc, stunning flame
Carole Tregoff, the other woman in a Los Angeles love-triangle murder, arrived at her perp walk in 1959 dressed for breakfast at Tiffany’s. She wore a lily-white fit-and-flare party dress with a fabric flower at the waist, dainty matching gloves and cat-eye sunglasses that masked her dewy peepers.
The AP’s Dial Torgerson called the redhead “one of the most attractive women ever tried for murder in Los Angeles.”
Cops were challenged to keep her couture ink-free at fingerprinting.
Not that she hadn’t already been smudged up a bit.
Tregoff, 22, had admitted to illicit “intimacies” with Dr. Bernard Finch, whose wife, Barbara, had been killed by a bullet between the shoulder blades.
Though its luster would fade, the Finch affair was a true crime bodiceripper in its day, generating hundreds of naughty news stories.
Dorothy Kilgallen, the scalpel-sharp New York scribe who’d seen it all as the queen of press row at murder trials, called it “an absurdity piled upon an absurdity.”
For Kilgallen, the boss clown of this circus was Dr. Finch, 42.
He seemed to be living the California dream.
The handsome Air Force veteran had a thriving surgical practice in West Covina. He enjoyed his country club status as one of the best amateur tennis players in the booming suburbs east of L.A.
But for years, the twice-married doc had beaten a well-worn path as a serial philanderer. Carole Tregoff became his latest plaything when, at age 18, she was hired as his receptionist. Nine months later, Finch rented a steal-away apartment where he and the newlywed Tregoff met for hot-sheet lunches every single day.
Barbara Finch, 35, caught on and phoned Tregoff’s husband to break the news.
It couldn’t have come as a complete surprise to Barbara. She was a married woman when she met Finch, her neighbor. Their affair climaxed in the two couples swapping spouses in 1951.
The Tregoff hanky-panky did not end so amenably.
Carole Tregoff filed for divorce from her high school sweetheart, and Barbara Finch hired a private eye to gather evidence of her husband’s adultery. This was pivotal because Barbara stood to gain the bulk of his assets — more than $6 million in today’s money — under an infidelity provision of state divorce laws.
Barbara sought a divorce in May 1959, and infuriated Finch by securing a court order freezing his financial accounts.
Using the era’s boilerplate justification for horndog husbands, Finch grumbled that his wife had grown “frigid” after the birth of their son in 1953. In truth, he was gripped by lust and greed, the terrible twins of the seven deadly sins.
He wanted Tregoff’s fleshy assets — and his own.
The lovers were hiding in the bushes when Barbara Finch arrived home on the night of July 18, 1959.
Her Swedish au pair, Marie-Anne Lidholm, was startled by a scream from the garage. She rushed out to find Barbara on the floor, stunned and bleeding from a Finch pistol-whipping. At gunpoint, Finch tried to poke Lidholm and his groggy wife into her Chrysler convertible.
But Barbara regained her senses and fled into the yard while Lidholm dashed inside to call police. Lidholm heard a gunshot and found Finch kneeling beside his dead wife, stammering that she had shot herself in a struggle for the gun.
That would have been a mean trick: Forensics showed she was shot in the back from two paces away. The lovers escaped to Las Vegas, where Finch was arrested. Both were eventually charged with murder as detectives pieced together their scheme — Kilgallen’s pile of absurdities.
They had first tried to hire a gigolo to seduce Barbara, enabling Finch to countersue for infidelity. They paid $350 to an oily, elfin, ill-bred grifter named Jack Cody who crowed, “Women are my business.”
Finch recognized that Cody had no chance of seducing classy Barbara, so he upped the fee to $1,300 for a hit. Cody pocketed the cash with no intention of killing anyone. When Finch complained, he life-coached the doctor.
“To start out, killing your wife just for money doesn’t add up,” Cody told him. “Let her have every cent if that’s the way she’s got you boxed in . . . . If this girl loves you, she is going to stay with you.”
Finch then turned to plan C — to sedate Barbara, pose her behind the wheel of her car and roll it over a 100-foot cliff. Murder on the front lawn was the impromptu plan D.
“It seems almost unbelievable that a man of Finch’s background, education, and training could have been so utterly stupid,” Kilgallen wrote. “And he thought he was smart enough to get away with it.”
He nearly did, despite potent testimony from Cody and au pair Lidholm — and seven full days of fanciful excuse-making on the witness stand from Finch. After two hung-jury mistrials, Finch and Tregoff were convicted of murder in 1961.
Both were sentenced to life, though that was a misnomer.
Tregoff served just eight years, changed her name and returned to the same suburbs, where she was still living at last word.
Finch, paroled in 1971, was lured to the doctor-starved Missouri Ozarks. He practiced there until 1984, then in Palm Springs until his death in 1995.
He and Tregoff never renewed their white-hot flame; it had extinguished behind bars.