‘Time Bandit’ killer avoids S.F. lynch mob
Over the course of two bloody nights in October 1926, a young South of Market thug named Clarence Kelly went on a horrifying rampage, murdering four people and robbing and pistolwhipping dozens of others.
As recounted in the previous Portals, 2,000 armed men — the entire San Francisco police force, plus Fire Department volunteers — were mobilized to find Kelly and a pair of accomplices, the socalled “Terror Bandits.”
After a week of grilling underworld sources, detectives identified Kelly’s first accomplice as a 22yearold laborer named Lawrence Weeks. Police arrested him Oct. 18 as he worked on construction of the Duboce Tunnel, and he soon confessed and named Kelly as the ringleader.
Police surrounded Kelly’s thirdfloor apartment at 47 South Park St. (the building, on the corner of Jack London Alley, still stands). Kelly tried to flee down the back stairs, but was blocked by officers on their way up. He dashed into a secondfloor apartment, where police fired blindly at him, just missing a woman standing at her sink but hitting Kelly in the chest. Officers found him hiding in a closet.
Kelly denied knowing anything about the crimes. But both Weeks and Kelly’s other accomplice, 17yearold Michael Papadoches, who had also been arrested, pointed the finger at him. Kelly called them “weak sisters” and said they were framing him.
Also identifying Kelly as the culprit were seven victims of his crime spree, including a woman he kidnapped.
Kelly’s troubles were just beginning. A few days after he was arrested, police thwarted an attempt to lynch him.
One of the people Kelly murdered was a taxi driver named Walter Swanson, who was married and had a 3monthold daughter. The Chronicle reported that several hundred taxi drivers and other friends of Swanson’s were planning to drag Kelly out of his room at San Francisco General Hospital and kill him. Police Chief Daniel O’Brien said that “such a situation would be all the more serious from the fact that a large concentration of the taxi drivers are veterans of the Great War and would be capable of an orderly attack, much superior to that of an ordinary mob.”
The Chronicle reported, “A general mobilization with lynching as its object has been going on for several days. Veterans among the taxi drivers took command of the movement and the volunteers, of whom there were several hundred, had been organized into companies, each under a leader with explicit instructions as to the movements of those under his command.”
To thwart the lynching, Chief O’Brien ordered Kelly’s room guarded by the shotgun squad and placed a posse of 25 heavily armed officers from the Mission Station in a “dead line” around S.F. General. “Motorcycle police were dispatched to all parts of the city to warn taxi drivers to keep away from the vicinity of the hospital and to tell them that the guardians of the hospital would shoot first and ask questions afterwards,” The Chronicle reported. The lynching was called off.
At Kelly’s trial in December 1926, his attorney, Milton U’Ren, argued that he was innocent of the crimes and that even if he had committed them, he had been temporarily insane because of brain injuries he suffered as a child and because of heavy drinking. Unimpressed with these arguments, the jury took just 22 minutes to find Kelly guilty of three counts of murder.
Kelly was sentenced to be hanged at San Quentin State Prison. The condemned man appeared unfazed. He said jokingly to the bailiff, “Well, they can only get me once, huh?” and walked steadily out of the courtroom to smoke a cigarette.
In May 1927, the governor refused Kelly’s final request for a stay of execution. The day before his hanging, Kelly asked the warden for a phonograph and records so he could enjoy music for the last time. He played the fox trot “My Blue Heaven” again and again.
He met with the warden and the chaplain in good spirits, and assured them he would go to his death smiling. “Everybody has been good to me and I have nothing against anyone,” he told the warden.
By coincidence, Kelly’s father was in San Quentin at the same time as his son, serving five years for burglary. Neither the father nor the son asked to see the other.
Clarence “Buck” Kelly was hanged at San Quentin at 10 a.m. on May 12, 1927. His last words were, “Goodbye mother, goodbye, Jean,” the latter to his younger sister.
His air of bravado cracked at the end and he almost had to be carried to the gallows. Of the 114 witnesses present, four fainted, including a prison guard who was a former taxi driver and friend of Swanson. He took the job to be sure of “seeing that Kelly went through to the finish.”
Because of his age, Papadaches was sentenced to just two years in reform school and 10 years’ probation. Weeks was sentenced to life at Folsom Prison.
One strange twist in this saga remained. After Kelly was executed, the chief surgeon at San Quentin, Dr. Leo Stanley, had Kelly’s testicles removed and implanted in a patient at a hospital.
This was not, at the time, an unusual practice. “Gland therapy,” as the practice of “harvesting” human testes and implanting them in the scrotums of other men was euphemistically called, enjoyed a long heyday. It was thought not just to promote virility but solve other problems, from loose teeth to impaired vision, senility and “moral perversion of old age.”
The press reported that the acting dean of the UCSF medical school, L.S. Schmitt, acknowledged that parts of Kelly’s vital organs had been used on a patient “in the interests of science.” According to the website Executed Today, since 1918, Stanley had removed the testicles of no fewer than 30 executed convicts and implanted them in other men.
However, Dr. Stanley had failed to get authorization from either Kelly or his family to remove his testicles. Something of a scandal ensued, with Kelly’s former defense attorney threatening to sue. In the end, nothing came of it, and the curtain fell on one of the city’s most terrifying crime sprees.
Gary Kamiya is the author of the bestselling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. To read earlier Portals of the Past, go to sfchronicle.com/ portals. For more features from 150 years of The Chronicle’s archives, go to sfchronicle.com/vault. Email: metro@sfchronicle .com