Who Killed Earle Remington in Los Angeles?

 

Map showing where Earle Remington was killed. Mr. & Mrs. Remington

When Earle Remington stepped out of his automobile shortly before midnight on February 15, 1923, two men were waiting for him.

One carried a double-barreled shotgun. The other had a revolver. As he walked toward his home at 1409 South St. Andrew’s Place in Los Angeles, both men opened fire. The medical examiner said Remington was dead before he hit the sidewalk.

The killers disappeared into the darkness.

Remington’s maid, Charity Dawson, found his body lying on the sidewalk the next morning. Neighbors had heard the gunfire the night before, but no one took the time to investigate. They told the police; they assumed it was an automobile backfiring. Nothing to worry about.

Someone heard a door slam. Someone else heard a car race away. Nobody thought much of it until daylight.

The killing looked like an ambush from the beginning.

Remington wasn’t just another Los Angeles business executive. He was an aviator during the early years of flight, when pilots were viewed as daredevils and celebrities. He was also a man with problems. His finances were shaky. His marriage falling apart. Rumors connected him to bootlegging operations when illegal liquor was creating fortunes and leaving bodies behind across California.

Earle and Virgina Remington

Then there was his wife.

Virginia Lola Stone Remington was young, attractive, and increasingly unhappy with her husband. Newspaper reports said she’d been talking about divorce only weeks before the killing. She left Los Angeles for San Francisco and returned home. Three days later, her husband was dead in the driveway.

Detectives noticed the timing.

Virginia didn’t hide her husband’s troubles. She told investigators that his business affairs were in poor condition. The pressures of bootlegging had driven him to drink. Sometimes heavily. Whether those same pressures were enough to get him killed was impossible to say.

One detail made the case even stranger.

On the day he died, Remington hired a bodyguard.

Charles Dana Collins, a private detective, told the police that Remington had contacted him only hours before the murder. He told him to meet at the Los Angeles Athletic Club and “to bring a revolver.”

Why Remington suddenly wanted armed protection remains one of the biggest mysteries in the case.

Collins couldn’t make the original appointment, so the men agreed to meet later that evening. The detective waited. Nine o’clock came and went. Then ten o’clock. Remington never showed.

A few hours later, he was dead.

Virgina Remington as a Red Cross worker during World War I

That fact changed the entire investigation. Men rarely hire bodyguards for no reason. Something had frightened Remington badly enough that he sought protection.

The police developed two theories.

The first involved bootlegging. Los Angeles was overflowing with illegal liquor operations during Prohibition, and disputes over money often ended in violence. If Remington had crossed the wrong people, the attack could have been a professional killing.

The second theory involved women.

Investigators learned that Remington’s social life was every bit as complicated as his business affairs. Stories circulated about romantic entanglements and unhappy relationships. Maybe jealousy, rather than liquor, might explain the gunfire outside his home.

Then, three months after the murder, a woman walked into the case and turned everything upside down.

She claimed she had loved Earle Remington for a year and a half. More importantly, she had witnessed his death.

According to her story, she expected Remington to marry her. Instead, he broke off the relationship. Humiliated and furious, she decided to get even. The day before the shooting, she purchased a vial of acid. But— she made sure they understood she didn’t want to kill him. She wanted to throw acid in his face and disfigure him a little. His new girlfriend too, if she could catch them together.

On the night of the murder, she sat in a car near Remington’s home while two male friends attempted to persuade him to come across the street and meet her. An argument followed. Then she heard gunshots. The two men ran back to the automobile moments later, jumped inside, and sped away.

She did not know they were going to kill him.

“I loved Remington,” she told investigators. “And expected him to marry me.”

It was the most dramatic lead the police had received since the killing. It was also the last major break in the case.

No charges were filed. The woman’s identity was never revealed. The names of the two men she accused never became part of the public record. Whether detectives doubted her story or simply lacked evidence remains unclear.

What’s clear is that the confession went nowhere.

More than a century later, nobody knows who killed Earle Remington.

Maybe he was the victim of a bootlegging dispute, a lover’s revenge turned deadly, or maybe the truth lies somewhere between the two.

All the investigators ever proved was that on a February night in 1923, a frightened man who had hired a bodyguard hours earlier stepped out of his car and into an ambush.

The people who pulled the triggers were never identified, and one of Los Angeles’ most intriguing murders remains unsolved.