The very strange case of Christine and Walter Collins
On a very sunny afternoon on 10th March 1928, 9-year-old Walter Collins mysteriously disappeared after his mother, Christine, a telephone operator, gave him a dime to spend on admission to the theater near their Mt. Washington area home.
The nation rallied behind the grieving mother and her missing boy while the local police dragged nearby Lincoln Park lake and launched a national campaign to find Walter.
His apparent kidnapping struck a chord in a city still traumatized by a vicious crime only three months earlier. In that case, 12-year-old Marion Parker was kidnapped for ransom by a psychopath named William “the Fox” Hickman, who shoved her dismembered body from his car just before being captured.
No evidence
Countless tips on Walter’s location led to dead-ends. He was allegedly spotted as far north as San Francisco and Oakland. One reported sighting was at a Glendale gas station in the back seat of a car, wrapped in newspaper with only his head showing. The station owner described the driver as a “foreign-looking man, probably an Italian,” accompanied by a woman.
The boy’s father, Walter J.S. Collins, who was serving time in prison for robbery, believed that former inmates out for revenge against him may have kidnapped his son, though there were no witnesses and no proof that that had occurred.
Missing boy found!
Police continued their search until August, when a boy claiming to be Walter turned himself in to Illinois authorities. Christine Collins paid $70 in travel expenses so the boy could return to Los Angeles.
When he arrived, however, Collins said that although he resembled Walter, the boy was not her son.
‘You Are . . . a Fool’
However, the Los Angeles Police Department–under terrific pressure to declare the case happily closed–refused to believe that the boy wasn’t Walter, whatever the mother said.
Emotionally drained, Collins caved in to the cops’ suggestion that she “try the boy out,” and took him into her home.
But after three weeks of attempting to reconcile herself to the convenient fiction, Collins returned him to the police.
Still missing
Armed with proof in the form of her son’s dental records and a troop of friends who agreed that the boy wasn’t Walter, Collins still failed to convince LAPD Capt. J.J. Jones, who investigated the kidnapping, that the boy was an impostor.
“What are you trying to do, make fools out of us all? Or are you trying to shirk your duty as a mother and have the state provide for your son? You are the most cruel-hearted woman I’ve ever known. You are a . . . fool!” Jones allegedly told Collins.
Resolved to bend her to his will–and the department’s convenience–Jones had the distraught mother committed to Los Angeles County General Hospital’s psychiatric ward for evaluation.
While she spent five days in the hospital, Jones extracted the truth from the faux Walter.
The boy from Illinois confessed that he actually was 12-year-old Arthur Hutchins of Iowa. After his mother died, he had gone to live an isolated new life with his cold fish of a father and a malicious stepmother, he said. He ran away, hitchhiking around the country and working odd jobs.
While stopped at an Illinois roadside cafe, Arthur said, he listened to a diner tell him how much he resembled the kidnapped boy from Los Angeles, whose picture had appeared in newspapers nationwide. Arthur quickly seized on an opportunity to see Hollywood, turned himself in to authorities and carried out the charade by assuming the identity of the missing boy.
For Collins, however, there was more heartache and trouble to come.
Released from the hospital, she filed a false-imprisonment complaint against the city, Police Chief James Davis and Jones.
With the heat on the department, Jones, who also was being pressured to help solve a grisly murder mystery, insisted that Walter had been one of the victims of Gordon Stewart Northcott and his mother, who had recently been charged with beheading a youth, one of 11 children they sexually assaulted and murdered in Riverside County.
But Collins refused to believe it, especially because her son’s body was never found on the Northcotts’ chicken ranch in Wineville, now Mira Loma.
Case unsolved
Source LA Times