Fetch the Devil: The Sierra Diablo Murders and Nazi Espionage in America

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53 ChrisFox,whohadruefullyleftlawenforcementonlyafewmonthsbefore U.S. entry into the war, was undoubtedly chomping at the bit to get back intotheaction.HeeventriedtojointheTexasDepartmentofPublicSafety in any capacity as a peace officer, without pay, for the duration of the war. Though no longer at the center of the action, Fox, as always, stepped up when he recognized a need. As chairman of the El Paso regional draft board and sponsor of war-bond drives, he served as one of the top civilian leaders supporting the war effort on the border. Ironically,atthesametimehewasfeelingregretoverleavingthesheriff’s office, he received an important communiqué from a former colleague, suggesting a possible connection between the current counterespionage cases and the unsolved Frome murders. ThearrestofasuspectedGermanspyinCalifornialedtoacuriousbitof intelligence. Fox’s old friend, Division Chief C. H. Stone of the California Bureau of Investigation (CBI), called from Sacramento. The California crime bureau was assisting the FBI in keeping track of suspected Nazi agents. The CBI had long been one of the state agencies asked to cooperate most closely with the bureau. That cooperation went back a long way. The modern criminal identification method adopted by the FBI had been designed by the California agency and expanded to a nationwide system by J. Edgar Hoover’s men. When the German spy was arrested shortly after the Pearl Harbor attack , Chief Stone was informed by one of his detectives that the suspect was trying to make a deal with a bit of information on the Frome case. The man had heard secondhand talk about an operation that had gone awry several years earlier in El Paso, requiring the kidnap and murder of a bellhop. The story was that the bellhop had provided special services to the Frome women during their stay at the Hotel Cortez, in the days prior to their disappearance and murder in the desert. The employee, who was an enemy within 297 not named by the informant, had allegedly been grabbed by Nazi agents, taken into Mexico, and killed. Foxandhisdeputieshadsearchedforsuchahotelemployeeshortlyafter the murders and actually picked up similar rumors about the possibility of foul play. Because they were unable to run it down, the ex-sheriff now expressed some doubt about the story. “The information relative to the porter at the Hotel Cortez having been taken out into the weeds, hijacked, and killed is somewhat far-fetched,” Fox wrote, in response to his old friend. “By that I mean there was never any record presented that leads us to believe that such was the case.”357 But he was also quick to leave the possibility open. “However, there are many people working at the Hotel Cortez and many of them naturally worked there at the time Hazel and Nancy Frome stayed there,” he wrote. “It is possible that some porter, busboy, or some other male employee of the place whoworked ina positionthatdidnot makehim conspicuoushas been killed. His killing could have been accomplished after he had left the employ of the hotel, or even while he was working there for that matter, and no one need have known of his having been done away with. I want to pass this information on to Captain Stanley Shea of the Sheriff ’s Office and see that he works on it and checks carefully. Either he or I will advise you as to the outcome of this investigation.”358 No record of the disposition of this tip ever appeared in the Sheriff ’s OfficeCaseFile9628.Butduringthechaoticfirstdaysfollowingtheattack on Pearl Harbor, law enforcement officers at all levels of local, state, and federalgovernmentwereforcedtoabandonmanyleadsinpendingcriminal cases. Certainly it would be understandable that an obscure new lead in a long-cold case would be subsumed by the national crisis. Thesuddendrainofable-bodiedofficersfromlawenforcementagencies in Texas, as elsewhere, meant that many unsolved cases were moved to the back burner—most never to be actively reopened.359 It became nearly impossible for law enforcement agencies to allocate scarce manpower and other resources to anything except major, current criminal cases. A three-year-old unsolved homicide case, even one as sensational and brutal as the murders of Hazel and Nancy Frome, was no longer on anyone’s list of priorities. 298 fetch the devil From the moment America was forced into the war, attitudes changed as well, with daily news of overwhelming death and destruction becoming nearly commonplace. At a time when all the country’s resources were shiftedtothelife-and-death struggletowin WorldWarII,genocidewould soon supersede homicide in the American lexicon. The violent deaths of two California women in...