Brutality and Redemption: the Pearl O'loughlin Case
| Publication year | 2011 |
| Pages | 75 |
| Citation | Vol. 40 No. 6 Pg. 75 |
2011, June, Pg. 75. Brutality and Redemption: The Pearl O'Loughlin Case
MarJunech 2011
Vol. 40, No. 6 [Page 75]
Historical Perspectives
About the Author
Frank Gibbard is a staff attorney with the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals and Secretary of the Tenth Circuit Historical Society-(303) 844-5306, frank_gibbard@ca10.uscourts.gov. The views expressed are those of the author and not of the Tenth Circuit or its judges. The author is grateful for the research assistance of Dan Cordova and Lynn Christian of the Colorado Supreme Court Law Library. Readers are encouraged to contact Gibbard with topic suggestions or to volunteer to write Historical Perspectives articles. A collection of Historical Perspectives articles is available for purchase from CBA-CLE. Visit www.cobar.org/cle/pubs.cfm?ID=20166 for complete information.
In October, 1930, all Denver was arousedby the slaying of 10-year-old Leona O'Loughlin, who had been fed ground glass, slugged on the head with a tire iron and thrown into Berkeley Park Lake.
The body was found in the lake three days after the child had disappeared from bed in her home at 2320 Tremont pl. Less than a week later, Leona's attractive stepmother, Mrs. Pearl O'Loughlin, was charged with the crime.
On Dec. 11, 1930, a West Side Court jury found Mrs. O'Loughlin guilty of murder in the first degree. She was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Throughout the sensational trial, Mrs. O'Loughlin protested her innocence. Someday, she said, she would tell the real story of that night of Oct. 14, and then everyone would know she is guiltless.
What has become of this woman whose trial has been a source of speculation and argument in Denver through the years? She is still in the penetentiary. What her life is like there she tells in an exclusive interview to The Rocky Mountain News.
As for the "real" story:?"If I had been going to tell anything more, wouldn't I have done it long ago?" is her comment now.
-Rocky Mountain News, March 17, 1946
Sixty years before the tragic murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey caused an avalanche of adverse publicity to descend on the Boulder Police Department and the Ramsey family, another slaying of a young girl shocked the people of Colorado to their core. There are many similarities between the Ramsey murder and the Depression-era case of People v. O'Loughlin.(fn1) Both involve a bizarre slaying, a disappearance initially believed to be a kidnapping, lurid newspaper coverage, an appealing young victim, a lack of clear motive for the murder, and a focus on family members as suspects. There also are significant differences between the two cases.
Unlike the Ramsey case, for which to date no perpetrator has been punished, the O'Loughlin caseled almost immediately to an arrest. The field of suspects quickly narrowed to 30-year-old Pearl O'Loughlin, the victim's stepmother. In short order, Pearl was tried and convicted of the killing of 10-year-old Leona O'Loughlin. This swift justice came at a price, however. Unlike the Ramsey case, where the Boulder police were criticized for handling the suspect family members with kid gloves, the harsh nature of Mrs. O'Loughlin's pretrial interrogation at the hands of Denver police was so extreme that it led the trial court to suppress her confession.
Ultimately, the lack of a confession or an eyewitness spared Pearl a death sentence. This allowed for the surprising rehabilitation, decades later, of a woman who never convincingly explained her behavior and who wrapped herself in a cloak of innocence.
The Disappearance
At 7:00 p.m. on the evening of October 14, 1930, Detective Leo O'Loughlin left his home at 2320 Tremont Place for his job at the Denver Police Department. Perhaps he was glad to go to work that day; a cloud of tension had been hovering over the O'Loughlin home.
Leo shared the house with a blended family: his wife, Pearl, a decade younger than Leo; his brother, Frank; Douglas, Pearl's son from a previous marriage; and his daughter, Leona, also from a previous marriage.(fn2) Serious tensions had developed between Pearl and Frank, who was angry about a fire that had mysteriously started in his closet, scorching his clothes. Frank believed that Pearl had set the fire. Tension between Frank and Pearl escalated to the point that they were no longer speaking to each other and Frank no longer ate meals with the family.
On October 14, Leo put in his shift at the police department, returning home after midnight. Around 8:00 a.m. the next morning, when Pearl came downstairs, she found him reclining on the couch, reading the newspaper.
"Leona must have hiked off to school without breakfast," she told him.
"Anyway, she isn't around!"(fn3)
This caught Leo's attention. It wasn't like Leona to leave without breakfast or not to say goodbye. Pearl went outside and looked up and down the street. She told Leo that all the children must be on their way already, because she didn't see any walking to school. Pearl then checked with a neighbor girl, Betty Scott, who often walked to school with Leona. She found Betty still waiting for Leona.
His concern escalating, Leo phoned the Cathedral School where Leona was a student. The nun he talked to told him that Leona had not yet arrived.
Pearl and Leo began calling friends and neighbors who knew Leona. When their calls produced no results, Leo went to police headquarters and reported her missing. The police put out a dispatch about the disappearance.(fn4)
Bizarre and Dubious Leads and Developments
Once the police became involved, a number of leads quickly developed. A neighbor claimed that on the night in question, he heard a muffled scream and "the racing hum of an automobile" in front of the O'Loughlin house.(fn5) Police wondered whether Leo's previous work on the vice squad had led some errant mobster to seek revengeby kidnapping his daughter. The plot thickened when an official of the Colorado National Guard reported seeing a car drivenby a "swarthy man" drive past a rifle range near Golden with a "struggling, gagged and bound girl" inside.(fn6) The girl looked to be about 10 years old.
Despite these leads-including some others that had Leona spotted in several different states or that attempted to solve her disappearance using psychic means(fn7)-no concrete evidence of a kidnapping was found. There were other odd developments in the case, though. Within a day or two of the disappearance, Leo came down with abdominal pains. Pearl also complained of stomach pains, but Leo's were much worse.by week's end, he was in the hospital having his stomach pumped. Detectives wondered: had the mobsters managed to kidnap his daughter and somehow poison him, too?
The Body is Found
On Friday, October 17, three days after Leona's disappearance, a grocer named William McLeod reported finding a body floating in Denver's Berkeley Park Lake, a few miles from the O'Loughlin home.(fn8) Police and a coroner called to the scene recovered a body that was unmistakably that of Leona O'Loughlin. The coroner quickly determined that the girl had been dead for several days.
Pinpointing Leona's cause of death proved more difficult. There were abrasions on her body suggesting she had been struck on the head. These blows, the coroner determined, were not fatal, but likely rendered the child unconscious. To this day, there is controversy about how Leona died. Some later accounts concerning the case state that an autopsy found water in her lungs, suggesting she was alive when thrown into the...
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