People v. Wray

DORAN, J. Appellant was charged by information with the murder of his wife, Jane Roberta Wray. After a trial by jury he was found guilty, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. He appeals from the judgment of conviction.

The record reveals the following facts. Appellant during the month of November, 1941, lived with his wife and infant child in an upstairs apartment of a house in Santa Monica. On Saturday, November 19, 1941, shortly after 9:00 o’clock in the evening, police officers arrived at the apartment in question in response to a radio call directing them to the address and. found the body of appellant’s wife lying at the top of the stairs leading to the apartment. Her right leg was hanging over the stairs with the head and right shoulder in an open door that entered into the living room. The left hand was on the floor on the left side. She was apparently dead. There was a gun on her breast, pointed down towards the left breast, with the handle up toward the right shoulder. Her right hand was lying on her shoulder about two inches from the handle of the gun. One of the officers walked into the hall, heard a noise in a room, entered and found appellant just buttoning up his trousers. The officer asked appellant what the trouble was and appellant replied: “My wife has just blown her God damned brains out.” The officer asked appellant if they had been fighting, and appellant replied that they had had a slight argument on account of his drinking. He was asked if his wife drank and he replied no. In response to a question by the officer, appellant stated that he had been drinking in Mike’s saloon all afternoon. When asked what had happened appellant stated that he was in bed asleep and his wife was in the kitchen preparing dinner; that when he woke up he noticed his wife walking out of the bedroom into the hallway with a gun in her hand, but she kept backing into the hallway saying she was going to kill herself and that she backed into the hallway and then shot herself. Appellant said the gun was his, and that he kept it in a closet on a shelf behind some paper hat bags. When one of the officers returned to the apartment after having notified headquarters appellant asked him if Mrs. Wray was dead yet, and the officer replied that she was dead. Then appellant asked the officers if they would find his glasses for him and they looked around the bedroom and did not find them. The officers attempted to question appellant further but he refused to answer until [349]his glasses were found. The glasses were finally found in the bedroom. On the way to headquarters in the police car appellant asked the officers if they would stop and buy him a drink. He told the officers that there were two points that they had overlooked and that if they had seen fit to buy him a drink he might have stated what those points were. He said that there had been two clues, and that if the officers had been “halfway smart” they would have noticed them. Asked what the clues were appellant replied that if the officers could not see them he wasn’t going to tell them. As appellant was being booked at headquarters he repeated the statement that if the officers had not been reading so many fiction stories out of detective magazines and murder mysteries they might have been able to notice the two clues that had been missed. He said if he saw fit he could point out the two clues to the officers and these clues would help a great deal in the investigation, but he didn’t see any reason why he should point them out to the officers. The other police officer who answered the radio call on the evening in question stated that he saw a bullet hole in the bedroom going through the south hallway wall into the east stairway and wall, and that he saw blood marks on the floor, little splotches of blood from the bedroom leading into the hall, coming through the hall to the stairway door and out on the stairway to the body. In different conversations with the officers appellant gave slightly different versions of the manner in which his wife had shot herself. When appellant’s attention was later called to the bullet holes in the wall he stated that they were old holes and had nothing to do with the case. He also denied that the holes were bullet holes. There appears to have been plaster on the floor directly under one of the bullet holes. Appellant had stated that his wife had shot herself while standing in the doorway. The bullet hole in the bedroom wall was in the north wall of the bed room, two feet four and three-quarters inches east of the west wall and was four feet eight inches above the floor. After some questioning on this matter by the officers, appellant finally said, “Well, maybe she did shoot herself over there by that wall. ’ ’ One of the officers asked appellant how the gun happened to be on Mrs. Wray’s chest, and appellant replied: “I don’t know; I may have picked it up and moved it, I was drunk, I don’t know what I was doing.” The of