Decathlon of Death by Jack Leslie

Decathlon of Death by Jack Leslie

It began with the Chester Massacre...the murders of Grocer Guard Young and three small children on a mountain road in the wilds of Plumas County...a crime which Governor Earl Warren described, "Unspeakable in character."

That was on a Friday afternoon in 1952. It ended on a Friday morning in 1955, in San Quentin's gas chamber, with a grisly triple execution. "A dark day in the history of California," Governor Pat Brown called it.

In between there were the murders of Edmond Hansen in Nevada City and Mabel Monahan and Baxter Shorter in Los Angeles. On the evidence, there may have been as many as fifty homicides by the Mountain Murder Gang. But there came a time when the police stopped counting and justice stopped caring.

The complete story, recounted from the court records, the pages of the San Francisco Examiner and the files of its Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Edward S. Montgomery.