One of the most notorious crimes of Jazz Age Los Angeles began quietly enough with a lost boy. But the Walter Collins case would end up becoming the O.J. Simpson drama of its day, a crime that inspired a media frenzy and captivated Southern California.
What started as the real-life tale of a missing child would take on a much larger significance in the then-burgeoning city.
In the middle of it all was Christine Collins, Walter's mother, a victim turned unlikely heroine.
On March 10, 1928, Collins gave 9-year-old Walter a dime to see a film. Collins, who lived in a middle-class neighbourhood north of downtown LA, was an anomaly for an era when women were considered to suffer from the vapours.
A handsome woman with prominent features, she was a single mum whose ex-husband sat in jail for helping to run a liquor store.
Walter disappeared that day, a fact that was chronicled in the Los Angeles Times several days later. Within weeks, the police (with the media watching) were conducting a massive manhunt and dragging a local lake for Walter's body.
The boy's father, Walter J.S. Collins, floated the theory that some of his former inmates kidnapped his son, perhaps out of revenge.
In August, the LA Police Department delivered a boy to Christine Collins, her putative son who had been found in Illinois.
It was an apparent coup for the LAPD, which routinely had suffered bad press and whose chief, James Davis, was famous (now infamous) for having created only two years before a 50-man “gun squad'' to go after the city's criminal element with the express command to bring in the purported crooks “dead, not alive''.
Upon seeing the proffered child, Collins, according to an account from that time, stated: “I do not think that is my son.''
But, pressured by the LAPD, she took the boy home. Three weeks later, she returned the child to the LAPD, armed with dental records of her actual son and statements from people who knew Walter.
Collins unwittingly initiated what would become a veritable media storm, which ended with a court fight that lasted a decade, and a new state law, but never definitively resolved — at least for Collins — what happened to Walter.
Now her story is being told in the new Clint Eastwood film, Changeling. The title comes from European folklore; a “changeling'' was the offspring of a fairy or troll secretly swapped for a human child.
The film stars Angelina Jolie as Collins and John Malkovich as the Reverend Gustav Briegleb, a pastor with a radio pulpit who took up Collins's cause.
The Collins story was unearthed from city and court archives by journalist turned screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski, who had been tipped off by a former source to transcripts from a City Council hearing about the Collins case.
Straczynski wrote for the Times and the now-defunct Herald Examiner. He became fascinated by her story and spent a year trawling through newspapers and records, piecing together an elaborate tapestry.
“I was so caught up by the courage she showed, that she fought so hard for her son and nobody remembered this. It was outrageous,'' Straczynski says.
So many of Collins's travails, he says, stem from the fact that she was a woman who didn't conform to what men — in this case the LAPD — expected her to be like.
Meanwhile, under police questioning, the child who had been returned to Collins admitted that he was actually Arthur Hutchins, a 12-year-old runaway from Illinois who had pretended to be Walter because he wanted to go to Los Angeles and see cowboy star Tom Mix.
Around this time, the police also inadvertently discovered a serial killer, Gordon Stewart Northcott, operating from a rundown chicken farm in Wineville, a small community east of Los Angeles about half way to the desert. Northcott preyed on young boys, killing an unknown number of them; estimates run as high as 20.
Northcott's nephew, Sanford Clark, who had been coerced into being his accomplice, finally alerted the police to the atrocities. Clark said one of the victims was Walter Collins.
Christine Collins sued the city and Davis for false imprisonment, and 1,000 citizens attended a hearing before the City Council's health and welfare committee.
“Everybody around her had an agenda. The police had an agenda. Briegleb had an agenda,'' Straczynski says. “The only clear voice in the entire thing was her voice saying, ‘Where is my son?'''
Changeling is Eastwood's second film — after Mystic River — that deals with a child's disappearance and the torment it leaves behind. “Crimes against children are the most hideous of all. I think they would be on the top of my list of justification for capital punishment,'' says Eastwood, 78, who has seven children.
Once it was shown that the boy returned to her was not her son, Collins improbably waged war on the establishment.
Eastwood believes Walter was killed on the Northcott ranch but the boy's body was never found.
Unlike some of Northcott's other victims, none of Walter's possessions were found there.
Throughout her life, Collins maintained hope that her son was alive and continued to search for him. Northcott, notes Eastwood, tormented Collins to the very end.
Citing a memoir by Quentin Duffy, a San Quentin warden, Eastwood notes that Northcott invited Collins and another mother to see him in jail before his execution in 1930.
“He messed with their brains. He jerked them around.''
Says Eastwood: “It was his last sadistic act.''
