A Victimless Murder
Did a vagabond veteran kill a woman in the California desert?
The outrageous story ripped across the wire services to every paper in the country: an Arkansas convict had blurted out that he’d killed a young woman in the California desert.
Police in Arkansas had picked up Marvin C. Boyd, 29, for vagrancy. He confessed that a few weeks earlier he’d met a 23-year-old carhop named Virginia Gosbeck in El Centro, California. On May 15, 1954, he took her on a date across the border to the Mexicali nightclubs, where they bought tequila, marijuana, and heroin. In a signed statement, Marvin admitted he made advances and they argued, after which he lost consciousness. He awoke to find his clothes bloodied and the woman dead, with stab wounds in the chest and abdomen. He buried her in the desert, reentered the U.S., ditched his car, and hitchhiked back east.
The police chief thought there was something off about Marvin, who’d admitted a heroin addiction. ‟I don’t know whether he’s crazy or not,” the chief said. Marvin’s story ‟didn’t jibe everywhere but seemed straight in some points.”
El Centro sits, as you might expect, at the east-west midpoint of California, less than 20 miles from the Mexican border. In 1954, the town was the local agricultural center, and the lives of young people there were filled with a mixture of listlessness and hormones like those in the Texas town later depicted in The Last Picture Show. El Centro police found no trace of any Virginia Gosbeck. Working with their counterparts in Mexico, they searched the desert for a grave and found nothing, though it was a big area to check.
They did come across a picture of Marvin and a woman taken at a Mexicali nightclub. The woman matched the description of a carhop reported missing in El Centro since May 16. She was known locally as Shirley Fields, though her real name was Shirley Taylor Lewis, and she’d fled a life in Phoenix. A Virginia Gosbeck had been arrested that year in Los Angeles and provided Shirley Field as an alias.
Seeing the nightclub photo, Shirley’s mother exclaimed, ‟That’s her! That’s my daughter!” before breaking down in anguish. Police reminded her that there was no proof Shirley was dead.
The story baffled me, so I visited El Centro, where the tale started. I found where Shirley lived, but the building there dated from a slightly later era and had a different street number. It must have replaced her building.
There was only one drive-in restaurant in El Centro during Shirley’s time there, and it was a local landmark. Red Shepherd’s Waikiki somewhat scandalously attired its carhops in grass skirts, leis, and rollerskates, offered beer, and attracted hot rodders. Parents were up in arms. Today, the site is a dry, litter-strewn piece of land.
But visiting that spot made me realize that the story of Marvin Boyd and Shirley Lewis was a tale of American car culture in the early 1950s. Both protagonists had escaped their hometowns in cars, which provided young people of that postwar decade a freedom earlier generations had little access to. Automobiles were redefining El Centro, not just through the drive-in restaurant and drag races but also at drive-in movie theaters and motels.
It was the era of the Beats, and Jack Kerouac visited Mexicali about the same time Marvin and Shirley did. However, writing in Dharma Bums, he recounted avoiding what he called the ‟tourist-trap honkytonks.” A little research uncovered a Mexicali-El Centro drug smuggling vector in the 1950s. Heroin and marijuana crossed the border there on their way to Los Angeles.
Genealogical records told me that, by age 20, Shirley Taylor had married and divorced and remarried. Six months after the second wedding, she found herself — for any number of possible reasons — needing to flee that marriage and Phoenix.
Marvin had spent several years in prison for forging checks. After he attempted suicide in his hometown of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, by pouring strychnine into beer, his family tried, without success, to get him psychiatric treatment.
Marvin claimed to have served in the Air Force as a lieutenant, but he’d actually been an enlisted man in the Army, discharged after four months for being mentally unfit. A trail of bad checks mapped his excursions around the country. He traveled under multiple aliases and arrived in El Centro about a week before meeting Shirley.
After confessing to Shirley’s murder, Marvin played cat-and-mouse with the police for weeks. He first told them he buried the body in Mexico, near Mexicali. A few days later, he said the burial site was near San Luis, a smaller town twenty miles away. A four-day search of the desert by 300 officers and volunteers from El Centro and Mexico failed to locate a body.
Then Marvin announced that he’d actually driven to the California coast and dropped the body into the Pacific Ocean near Dana Point in Orange County. No body had appeared on the beach there, and after dragging the inlet, the local sheriff rejected the claim. Marvin then said he’d tossed only the lower half of the body into the ocean. He buried the top in the California desert near US-80, the road connecting El Centro and Yuma. He described the location as a mile north of a service station, near some yucca trees.
Parts of US-80 remain between El Centro and Yuma, and I drove the surviving road. There is no agriculture in this part of the county, just unirrigated desert. Occasional floods have undulated the land into gentle rolls. Wildflowers pop up between mesquite and chaparral. The air was too dry to convey much of a smell.
Though it was once paved, US-80 is now crumbly and washboarded. The road was so bumpy I couldn’t go more than 30 miles per hour, even as I watched cars along Interstate 8, parallel to me, scream by at over 80. But after a few miles, new pavement began. The cinematic majesty of the Buttercup Sand Dunes rose like a mirage from the Sahara. The Mexico border fence that prevents the easy desert crossings feasible in Marvin’s era was visible in the distance.
I stopped to see the remaining pieces of the Plank Road, a highway built of lumber in the early 1900s to allow cars to cross the dunes.
The posse investigating Marvin’s claim located two service stations along that highway and no yuccas. Forty men searched the area near the road and found nothing. Marvin agreed to be extradited from Arkansas and promised to take the frustrated officers to the grave site.
When he arrived in California, Marvin changed his story again. Now he said the body was in Mexico. He drew a map but refused to accompany officers on a search, fearing Mexican police would kill him. Again, no body was found, but the cops probably felt they had no choice but to pursue each version of Marvin’s claims. The game had gone on for three weeks when Shirley turned up, alive, in Los Angeles.
Shirley had left Phoenix mysteriously two-and-a-half years earlier, though she stayed in contact with her family. On Saturday, May 15, 1954, she called her mother. She said she was in El Centro working as a carhop and promised to come home the following Friday for her brother’s high school graduation.
After the wild night with Marvin later that evening, Shirley left town without telling anyone, taking a bus to Los Angeles. She failed to collect the three days’ pay she was owed at the drive-in. She didn’t show up to her brother’s graduation. ‟Really, I wasn’t alarmed because Shirley is so unpredictable,” her mother said. ‟She’s called several times and said she was coming home, and then she didn’t get here. Later she’d call and explain why.”
Marvin made his confession on May 27. El Centro police contacted Shirley’s mother on June 1. Over the next few weeks, articles about Marvin’s claims appeared in every Los Angeles newspaper multiple times. Some were on the front page. Almost all mentioned Shirley’s name. She had to have seen them. Yet, she never revealed herself.
But the jig was up on June 24 when a visitor from El Centro entered a bar on Main Street in downtown Los Angeles. He recognized Shirley and contacted a police officer. Shirley told the police that she was unaware, stunned even, that someone had confessed to killing her. She admitted to knowing Marvin as a customer at the El Centro drive-in. She’d accepted his invitation to visit Mexicali night spots, but he began ‟acting crazy.” She spurned his advances, slipped away, returned to El Centro, and left for Los Angeles. She couldn’t explain the motivations behind Marvin’s fake confession. ‟I guess he didn’t like the jails in Arkansas,” she said breezily.
Newspapers said Shirley was residing at the Clark Hotel under one alias and working at a downtown bar under another. She declined to explain the fake names. ‟I have a lot of aliases,” she said. ‟They’d stretch a mile if I started naming them.” The articles referred to Shirley’s workplace as ‟a Main Street bar.”
Something about that phrasing piqued my curiosity, and I quickly discovered it was a euphemism. Up and down Main Street, bars employed ‟B-girls” who cozied up to male patrons — mostly servicemen — and implied that a more intimate experience could be forthcoming. Paid by the bars, the B-girls encouraged these men to buy drinks and to treat them to overpriced cocktails. The women would ditch the men at the end of the night. The practice was illegal, and in the prior year, there had been many raids by police. Sometime during her time in Los Angeles, Shirley was arrested. Beyond the later newspaper mention, there was no coverage of that arrest, but presumably, it was in a B-girl raid.
What was also curious was that Shirley was living at the 550-room Clark Hotel, not the kind of substandard housing most B-girls occupied.
The 1913 convention hotel near Pershing Square had just reopened after a renovation. Living there had to be expensive, requiring more than Shirley could have earned by tricking soldiers into running up big bar tabs.
My conclusion is that Shirley went with Marvin to Mexicali to buy drugs, probably heroin, to resell in Los Angeles. While Marvin was angularly handsome, he was basically a vagabond, just north of a hobo, with little to offer her.
Marvin had told police they both bought marijuana and heroin in Mexico. Once Shirley had the drugs, she was presumably motivated to get them over the lightly guarded border and to L.A. for resale as quickly as possible. Selling heroin would have provided enough money to live at the Clark Hotel and reason to use multiple aliases. Whatever her story, she did not come off as an innocent victim of a crazy man’s hallucinations.
Shirley’s family retrieved her from Los Angeles. On their way home to Phoenix, they stopped in El Centro, where Marvin was being held. A press photo shows Shirley, looking like Lana Turner, glancing at Marvin with disdain.
‟Hello, Shirley,” he said, jauntily.
‟It’s not so funny, is it?” remarked a police officer.
‟Yes, it’s still plenty funny,” said Marvin.
Marvin must have enjoyed manipulating the cops. He was sentenced to 14 years for passing bad checks. Before entering prison, he told reporters, ‟I told Arkansas police I killed Shirley and then planned to make a break for it. I knew they wouldn’t shoot me if I was only in on a vagrancy charge. But on a murder rap, I figured they might.” Marvin’s intent was an early example of suicide-by-cop.
No available record indicates what happened to Marvin after his prison term. Shirley, too, vanished after the strange affair. All I could find was that by the time her stepfather died two decades later, she was married again and living in Fort Worth.
From the beginning of the 20th century, people came to California not just for the weather and opportunity but to escape bad marriages, unpaid debts, and constricting family expectations. They adopted new lives and, sometimes, new names. Not every journey ended as planned.
Marvin and Shirley hitched rides, drove cars, and boarded buses to flee their pasts and skate the law.
Opportunists, they calculated one step at a time, reaching toward temporary financial security and dismissing social convention. When two such people collide like hydrogen atoms, they release an enormous charge of energy. The mushroom cloud Marvin and Shirley left behind enveloped police resources, newsprint, and public fascination. Their unchained mobility became a tiny precursor to On the Road.
Copyright © 2024 Lou Schachter • All rights reserved
