Criminal Misconduct: Two Officers Down in El Segundo: The Cold Case Murders of Richard Phillips and Milton Curtis

Fingerprints and a Signature Crack a 45 Year Old Case

It was Sunday night, July 21, 1957 in Hawthorne, California. Bob Dewar was 17 years old and had attended a summer party with three friends earlier in the evening. It was before midnight when the quartet, consisting of two boys and two girls, decided to make a stop at the local Lover's Lane on Van Ness Avenue. After parking, Bob rolled the window of the 1949 Ford down - and that's when the barrel of a gun poked through. A voice told him "This is a robbery." Bob initially thought someone was pulling a prank on them but it was all too real. All four handed over watches, jewelry and cash.

Armed with a flashlight, the robber had also brought surgical tape which he used to cover the teenagers' eyes, before forcing them to undress and then binding them. One of the girls, only 15 years old, was raped by the man after he moved from the driver's side of the car to the passenger side.

Bob later remembered that the man asked them to get out of the car and then said, "I think I'm going to kill you. I want you to march out into the field." The girls were crying and Bob figured it was the end of the line for all of them - when they heard the car door close and the Ford take off. The four were left, bound and taped, naked and helpless but alive. Officers Richard Phillips and Milton Curtis would not be so lucky.

The Crimes

El Segundo in the 1950s was a quiet, safe and well-to-do suburb of Los Angeles. The night shift usually consisted of traffic stops of impatient or intoxicated people. Officers Richard Phillips and Milton Curtis were working the graveyard shift, sitting in their patrol car at the intersection of Sepulveda and Rosecrans. Phillips was 28 years old, a veteran who served in the Air Force during the Korean War and was known to be an excellent marksman. He had been with the department for nearly three years. He was married and had three children. Curtis was 25 years old, a rookie who had just graduated from the academy in Riverside and had been in uniform only two months. He was married and had two children.

It was somewhere between 1:15 a.m. and 1:20 a.m. on Monday, July 22, 1957 when the two officers, with Curtis at the wheel, noticed the 1949 Ford pull up to the intersection and stop at the red light before then proceeding through it. Neither Phillips nor Curtis knew about the robbery, assault and rape that had taken place in the hour before when they decided to pull the car over.

Phillips had gotten out of the patrol car and pulled his citation book out, as another patrol car with Officers James Gilbert (Milton Curtis' partner until two weeks previous) and Charlie Porter drove by. Seeing Phillips writing in his citation book and Curtis behind the wheel and phoning it in, it appeared to be a routine traffic stop with no need for any kind of backup and so Gilbert and Porter drove on. They had no idea that other than their killer, they would be the last people to see Richard Phillips and Milton Curtis alive.

The call that Curtis made, requesting that the plates on the Ford be run came through around 1:28 or 1:29 a.m. Only seconds later came a call over the radio from Officer Phillips requesting an ambulance and saying that he and his partner had been shot. Porter and Gilbert raced back to the scene, where they found Phillips, mortally wounded on the ground beside the patrol car, with three gunshots in his back. His service revolver lay next to him, emptied of bullets. His citation book was on the hood of the police car, with only the date filled in. Phillips died before he could get to the hospital. Curtis, still in the driver's seat of the patrol car, was dead from three gunshot wounds: one to the upper right chest, one to the right side, and one to his right forearm. Both men had been shot with .22 caliber short rounds. The killer was gone.

A woman by the name of Margaret Osburn had been heading home from work on westbound Rosecrans Avenue and had stopped for the signal. She noted the patrol car that Phillips and Curtis were sitting in and also noted a Ford pull up in the left lane next to her, briefly stop for the light and then run it. She saw the officers take off in pursuit of the Ford and once the light had changed, she proceeded through the intersection, continuing on Rosecrans. She saw the police car, with the Ford, pulled off the road at Rosecrans and Palm. She recalled seeing the driver standing outside the car and one of the officers shining a flashlight into his face. Osburn said the driver was taller than the officer, with "husky" shoulders. She estimated him to be around 25 years old, with either curly blonde or light brown hair and wearing a red plaid shirt with the tailed pulled out of, rather than tucked into, his pants.

Nineteen-year-old Alan King had also been traveling on Rosecrans that night and had seen the patrol car, with its lights and siren on, coming up behind him. He had pulled off to the side and watched the car speed by him. Having just finished his shift at a local gas station, he continued on to his home on Poinsettia, around the corner from where Phillips and Curtis pulled the Ford over at Rosecrans and Palm. King later claimed to have seen from the back porch of his house Phillips and Curtis forcibly remove the driver from the vehicle, where there was a brief "struggle," before the driver quieted down and Curtis returned to the patrol vehicle and talked into the radio mic. King then went inside, running back outside when he heard gunshots. He saw the driver get into the Ford and "speed down Rosecrans."

The police car of the fallen officers, with Officer Phillips' citation book on the hood
(photo source)

The Investigation

An immediate BOLO went out for the Ford, starting what would be the greatest manhunt in California's history at the time. The four teenagers from Hawthorne were discovered on the street and they, along with Alan King, Margaret Osburn, and Officers Gilbert and Porter, helped to develop a composite sketch of the killer.

With hundreds of officers from El Segundo and the neighboring communities scouring the area, the Ford was found fairly quickly, roughly four blocks west of the crime scene. It had been struck with three gunshots, thanks to Richard Phillips. A bullet hole was noticeable in the trunk., Two bullet holes were easily visible in the back window. Two rounds were recovered inside the vehicle, leading investigators to hope that the killer had been struck by one of the bullets. Two latent lifts (fingerprints) were taken from the steering wheel; they were later determined to be left thumb prints. The skirts belonging to the teenaged girls that had been assaulted several hours earlier were found on the back seat and floorboard.

Once again, the killer was gone.

Milton Curtis with his wife and children (photo source)

The fallen officers were buried on July 26, side by side, at Inglewood Park Cemetery (in April of 1958, Richard Phillips' remains would be moved to Spokane, Washington). The hunt for their killer went on. Several promising leads surfaced, as well as a multitude of tips, but led nowhere. In 1958, the case was featured in True Detective magazine with a plea for public help to solve the murders. Two years later, in 1960, a man pulling up weeds at his home on 33rd Street in Manhattan Beach discovered a watch and a chrome-plated revolver; the location was a mile from the crime scene. A second watch was found after a search. Both watches had been taken from the Hawthorne teens in July of 1957 by the killer that had since obtained the nickname of "The Lover's Lane Bandit." It was theorized that after he dumped the bullet-riddled car, he had run through the yards off Rosecrans, dropping not only the items he had stolen, but the murder weapon as well.

Richard Phillips' widow and children (photo source)

Having been on and in the ground for three years, no prints were able to be lifted off the nine-shot Harrington & Richardson .22 revolver. Ballistics tests could only say that the weapon was "consistent" with the bullets that had killed Officers Phillips and Curtis; the poor condition of the gun made it impossible to be more conclusive than that. The gun was able to be traced to a Sears store in Shreveport, Louisiana and had been purchased for $29.95 on June 18, 1957 by a man using the name of G.D. Wilson and a Miami address (the address turned out to be fictional). Assuming the man was not from Shreveport, investigators began searching nearby motels and hit pay dirt at a YMCA, where a George D. Wilson of Miami had checked in on June 16, 1957. Detectives would not know it then but the accompanying signature would eventually help to break the case four decades later.

The Shreveport connection also confirmed the investigators' suspicions that their killer was not from California. The Hawthorne teens had mentioned that he had an accent, possibly southern, and that he had been almost polite in the midst of the assault.

The police worked hard to track down every George D. Wilson in the United States but ultimately realized the name was a fake. The case went cold once again. Although the case moved on to the back burner as the years ticked by, Richard Phillips and Milton Curtis were not forgotten.

A Break in the Case

In September of 2002, the El Segundo Police Department received a phone call from a female claiming to have information on the case. She said that her uncle had bragged that he was responsible for killing the two cops in El Segundo. With a new suspect, the fingerprints lifted back in 1957 were sent to the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department crime lab, along with information on the suspect. Specialists Dale Falcon and Don Keir found that the new suspect was not a match to the 1957 fingerprints - but they decided to use modern science in an attempt to solve the case. Following the terror attacks of 9/11, the FBI had created a nationwide database of fingerprints containing convicted criminals from every state in the country. Falcon and Keir cleaned up the original fingerprints, digitized them and loaded them into the system. And just like that, they got a match.

A young Gerald Mason (photo source)

Gerald Fiton Mason had been born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1934 into a family with four other sons. He served time in the Army in the early 1950s before being honorably discharged. In 1954, he had spent a semester at the University of South Carolina, where he studied business. He had his first brush with the law in April of 1956 when he was arrested for burglary and larceny. Sentenced to three years incarceration, it was suspended to one and Mason served eight months.

In 1960, Mason married his wife Betty and the couple went on to have two daughters and grandchildren. He had owned and operated several service stations in the Columbia area before retiring in the 1990s.

Investigators were stunned that the match was not to a career criminal. In fact, his record did not have a violent offense on it. Further searches revealed that Mason had not gotten so much as a parking ticket after April of 1956.

The old YMCA records were pulled out and the handwriting for George F. Wilson was examined by forensic expert Paul Edholme who found the Wilson sample "identical" to samples of Gerald Mason's handwriting. Armed with the fingerprint match and Edholme's assertion that he was "99.9% certain" that Mason and Wilson were one in the same, California detectives felt assured they had their man.

Arrest and Conviction

Mason had been put under surveillance in December of 2002 as detectives waited to make their move. On his last day of freedom (although he wouldn't have known that), Tuesday, January 28, 2003, he played golf. On Wednesday, January 29, around 7 a.m., he was arrested at his home. The large number of officers present for his arrest reportedly shocked Mason and he inquired where they were from. Told they were from the El Segundo Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office, Mason replied, "You're homicide detectives? I think I need a lawyer." He was then informed he was being arrested for the murder of two police officers in 1957, to which Mason said, "My god, you're here for that? That happened so long ago. I can't believe you're bothering me with that."

Booking Mason into the local jail while awaiting a request for extradition, a decades-long question was at long last answered. Officer Richard Phillips, after being shot three times in the back, lying on the ground and dying, had managed to pull his service revolver out and fire six shots at the Ford as it sped away. Three of those shots hit its target. Finding only two rounds in the car, investigators hoped against hope that Phillips had managed to wound his killer. Detectives in 2003 noted a bullet-shaped scar on Mason's back, one he eventually admitted came from a bullet fired by Phillips. Richard Phillips had marked him for life and nearly 46 years later, the scar remained there to prove it.

Mason in court (photo source)

Following a judicial hearing in South Carolina, Mason agreed to return to Los Angeles to answer for his crimes. Officer Howard Speaks, who had lifted the fingerprint from the Ford that eventually was linked to Mason, attended the hearing, remarking, "I've been waiting for this date a long time, but the wait was worth it." Officer Charlie Porter, who along with his partner James Gilbert, had seen not only Mason but Phillips and Curtis in their last moments alive, said "You can run, but you cannot hide. Kill an officer and we'll get you, no matter how long it takes."

Under a plea deal, rape, robbery and kidnapping charges were dropped against the 69-year-old Mason, who pleaded guilty to murdering Richard Phillips and Milton Curtis. According to his attorney, he did so to spare "the victims" the pain of testifying. He had told detectives that he had been intoxicated on the night of July 21-22, 1957 and had stumbled across the teenagers in Hawthorne by chance and didn't remember why exactly he had assaulted them and raped one of the girls. When the police officers had pulled him over in El Segundo, just east of Hawthorne, for running the red light, he figured they would soon find out he was in a stolen car and what he had done. So "If I don't get them, they're gonna get me." According to Mason, when "the officer turned away from me, I shot both officers, got back in the car and drove away." (That officer was likely Phillips, who had put his citation book on the hood of his vehicle to write the ticket.)

Also in the courtroom were children of Richard Phillips and Milton Curtis. Mason asked them for forgiveness for the killings, saying "Please believe I am still looking for ways to express my remorse for the horror I have caused." Carolyn Phillips, Richard Phillips' daughter, told him "Your cowardly act shattered our lives forever . . . there is no way to describe the emptiness and anguish we have felt all our lives without Dad . . . we cannot and will not forgive you."

Keith Curtis, Milton Curtis' son, said, "Gerald Mason, your family may be shocked but my family has been devastated."

On March 24, 2003, a tearful Gerald Mason was sentenced to life in prison, a sentence he was allowed to serve in South Carolina so that he could be close to his family. "At no other time in my life have I intentionally harmed anyone," he said. "I don't know why I did this." One of his daughters stated that even though she couldn't possibly describe the range of emotions their family had gone through as a result of his crimes, she couldn't have asked for a better father.

Mason was turned down for parole in 2009, with a recommendation of the maximum 15-year wait before the next parole hearing. He died on January 22, 2017, nine days before his 84th birthday. He had served 14 years for his crimes.