Gluck made her the most amazing presents—a silver tea-service, a diamond
ring, a set of furs, opera-glasses, a ponderous _History of the World_ in
many volumes, and a motor-cycle all silver-plated in his own shop.
Enters now the girl’s lover, putting his foot down, showing great anger,
compelling her to return Gluck’s strange assortment of presents. This
man, William Sherbourne, was a gross and stolid creature, a heavy-jawed
man of the working class who had become a successful building-contractor
in a small way. Gluck did not understand. He tried to get an
explanation, attempting to speak with the girl when she went home from
work in the evening. She complained to Sherbourne, and one night he gave
Gluck a beating. It was a very severe beating, for it is on the records
of the Red Cross Emergency Hospital that Gluck was treated there that
night and was unable to leave the hospital for a week.
Still Gluck did not understand. He continued to seek an explanation from
the girl. In fear of Sherbourne, he applied to the Chief of Police for
permission to carry a revolver, which permission was refused, the
newspapers as usual playing it up sensationally. Then came the murder of
Irene Tackley, six days before her contemplated marriage with Sherbourne.
It was on a Saturday night. She had worked late in the candy store,
departing after eleven o’clock with her week’s wages in her purse. She
rode on a San Pablo Avenue surface car to Thirty-fourth Street, where she
alighted and started to walk the three blocks to her home. That was the
last seen of her alive. Next morning she was found, strangled, in a
vacant lot.
Emil Gluck was immediately arrested. Nothing that he could do could save
him. He was convicted, not merely on circumstantial evidence, but on
evidence “cooked up” by the Oakland police. There is no discussion but
that a large portion of the evidence was manufactured. The testimony of
Captain Shehan was the sheerest perjury, it being proved long afterward
that on the night in question he had not only not been in the vicinity of
the murder, but that he had been out of the city in a resort on the San
Leandro Road. The unfortunate Gluck received life imprisonment in San
Quentin, while the newspapers and the public held that it was a
miscarriage of justice—that the death penalty should have been visited
upon him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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