The Caryl Chessman Archive

In the winter of 1948, in the hills above Los Angeles, a man with a red spotlight, posing as police, stalked the lovers’ lanes. The papers named him the Red Light Bandit. On January 23, 1948, police arrested Caryl Chessman, twenty-six years old.

He represented himself. That spring a jury convicted him on seventeen of eighteen counts, among them robbery, kidnapping and sexual assault, and under California’s “Little Lindbergh” law, which made kidnapping with bodily harm a capital crime, he received two death sentences.

Nearly twelve years on Death Row followed, most of them spent fighting his own appeals from cell 2455 at San Quentin. The court reporter had died before transcribing his notes of the trial, and the reconstructed record carried the case to the United States Supreme Court in 1957. Nine times the State of California set a date for his execution. Eight times it was stayed.

He also wrote. Cell 2455, Death Row, published in 1954, sold some half a million copies in the United States, was translated widely, and became a Columbia picture the next year. Trial by Ordeal, The Face of Justice and The Kid Was a Killer followed. The prison tried to stop the writing, and later manuscripts were smuggled out.

By 1960 the case had become a cause around the world. Eleanor Roosevelt, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury, Norman Mailer, Robert Frost, Marlon Brando and Billy Graham were among those who urged clemency, and a petition from Brazil reportedly carried more than two and a half million signatures. On February 19, 1960, about ten hours before an execution date, Governor Pat Brown granted a sixty-day reprieve.