Coastal View News • April 8, 2021 by Coastal View News

20  Thursday, April 8, 2021

Coastal View News • Carpinteria, California

CVN

THROWBACK

A 1942 Carpinteria Murder Mystery: Who killed Margaret Senteney? Part 2 of 2

It stands as Carpinteria’s greatest murder mystery, an infamous story in the classic sense of “true crime,” shaking the community at large like a tidal wave, appearing and disappearing, only to reappear again and then vanish amidst years of rumor and speculation. This feature was written by former CVN editor Paul Sisolak and originally published in Carpinteria Magazine, Summer 2007. Part 1 of this story may be read at coastalview.com.

Silence broken

Longtime Carpinteria farmer George Bliss had been interviewed by authorities in 1942 shortly after the murder. He asked if anything suspicious had come within his sights. “They asked me if I had seen the car ... and I saw nothing at all,” Bliss recently recalled as his answer to police. (Bliss was interviewed in 2007 for this story. At the time, he was 87.) Bliss’ property, near the former Beckstead land, was not in close proximity to where the body was reported found on the border of neighboring Summerland. Leonard Kirkes’ wife’s maiden name was Beckstead and police were investigating all leads. But authorities most likely began canvassing rural areas, questioning anyone they could for information. Other Carpinterians had seen something—plenty—in the days surrounding the homicide. But if Kirkes was the guilty party, his actions, and witness accounts, wouldn’t come to light until nearly a decade later. It wasn’t until after returning to Carpinteria in 1945 from serving during World War II that Ross’ suspicions against Kirkes—commended for an exceptional Alaskan stint with the Red Cross—came closer to prosecution. Apparently, when Kirkes found himself under arrest on an unrelated moral charge of child molestation in September 1950, Ross, having been promoted to sheri of Santa Barbara County, saw it as his opportunity to pin the Senteney murder on him. Now that he was in custody, a remarkable in ux of once-silent witnesses began pouring in, swearing that Kirkes was the killer. One witness, Charles Boverson, told authorities that he was the man Kirkes asked to hastily repaint his car, despite Boverson’s response that the car didn’t need it.

CARPINTERIA HERALD ARCHIVE IMAGES

On Aug. 29, 1942, the body of 20-year-old Margaret Senteney was discovered in Toro Canyon.

Another, Amilcaero Fogliadini, an elderly Italian farmer, claimed that he spotted irkes’ Ford in a field near the crime scene the day of Senteney’s death. Murder charges were pressed; the case came to trial, and Boverson and Fogliadini provided solid testimony. But evidence of Kirkes’ smoking gun came from key witness Dorothy Egan. The Carpinteria woman said she saw Margaret Senteney get into Kirkes’ car that fateful August day in 1942, eight long years prior. In 1951 a jury convicted Leonard Kirkes of second degree murder and sentenced him to five years to life in prison.

Retrial approved

While in San Quentin prison, the ex-patrolman maintained his innocence. According to an anonymous source, Kirkes disclosed his story to an inmate. An interview with Daniel Corral Sr., Kirkes’ supposed cellmate, was declined to Carpinteria Magazine. Kirkes did not spend his time idling in jail and quickly appealed his case. The ex-patrolman in 1952 was approved a retrial first denied to him when the deputy district attorney at Kirkes’ original trial was accused of misconduct during his closing argument. The bias he displayed might negatively have influenced the guilty verdict placed on the patrolman. Specifically, .A. eldon’s courtroom behavior was assessed after he intimated to members of the jury that he was assured of Kirkes’ guilt prior to the beginning of legal proceedings, before any formal evidence had ever been presented. Trial transcripts quoted Weldon as saying, “I knew prior to the time that I became associated in this particular pros-

THURSDAY ecution in the month of October, that this particular defendant was guilty of this particular o ense.” Weldon’s arguments were duly improper, according to the transcripts, because they embellished elements of the crime, partially justifying Kirkes’ guilt by painting him as a “wolf at bay” who in uenced key witnesses’ years of silence in fear he might retaliate against them. Dorothy Egan’s “unexplained eightyear silence,” as quoted by the transcripts, was justified by the .A. as one stemming from fear, though it was unsubstantiated. On Weldon’s remarks, “They appealed to the sympathy of the jury for the unfortunate victim of the crime; they characterized the defendant as a ‘wolf at bay’; they drew imaginary and fanciful inferences as to the circumstances of the crime not justified by any evidence in the record.” There were other testimonial inconsistencies, chalked up largely to the amount of time passed between the crime and the retrial. Truck farmer Fogliadini later claimed on a witness stand that the Ford he spotted was indeed a di erent color than Kirkes’ car. The clincher was when the prosecution determined that Dorothy Egan’s testimony was inadmissible, having learned that the woman, now a mother, had spent a four-month confinement to a Connecticut state mental hospital for symptoms related to postpartum depression. Finally, how thorough was the original investigation into Kirkes’ whereabouts the day of the crime? Laselle Thornburgh, an attorney involved in the early stages of the case, according to the transcripts, testified “that he had been informed that a sailor was known to have driven to Carpinteria on Aug. 28 and stated that he was going out that evening with a ‘churchy girl.’” It was noted that Senteney was a church choir singer and taught Sunday School. Kirkes also was not a sailor. Thornburgh told the court that when he followed up with Ross on the matter, the undersheri did nothing to check the information. It wasn’t until two and a half weeks later that Ross finally checked it out and nothing turned up. Still, it seemed suspicious that he had stalled on such an important matter. It also smacked of a setup. In 1953 Leonard Kirkes was acquitted of Margaret Senteney’s murder and returned home to Carpinteria a free man.

Who killed Margaret Senteney?

Leonard Kirkes was remembered as a friendly man about town, no more suspicious than the average stranger. “Nobody seemed to be afraid of him,” said resident Bonnie Milne. (Milne was interviewed in 2007. She was 81 at the

time.) “He was really a nice guy. I remember saying to my mother, ‘Gee, he’s a nice guy,’ and she would say, ‘Would you get in a car with him?’ I guess not.” Milne said Kirkes was a hunter and would have stored fresh game in his trunk, a valid explanation why the patrolman, before the age of DNA testing, may have scrambled to clean out his car. The consequence: pig’s blood mistaken for that of a human’s. That was only one argument out of several, and given as testimony by a man named Maddox, who confirmed that in the summer of 2 Kirkes carried two pigs in his trunk en route to a barbecue. “There were 10 million rumors, and most of them went away,” Milne noted. But for many years the rumor mill grinded away and became the equivalent of a Carpinteria urban legend. One popular theory suggested that Kirkes was, in fact, put up to the task. Rumor had it that a roadhouse or bordello-type destination existed on Carpinteria’s eastern end near the former “Thunderbowl” drag racing strip, where the elite attended secret parties filled with sex, gambling and assorted illicit behavior. Stories circulated that some noted public o cials were known to show their faces there and would have done—or paid—anything to make their presence unknown should something criminal happen. Senteney, according to sources, was easily trusting of others and was even said to be developmentally impaired, suggesting that she was lured to one such party and killed, or maybe died accidentally by a fall. Notable citizens seeking an escape plan, according to rumor, paid o Kirkes handsomely to take the blame and go to prison, swearing to silence. Altering the scenario a bit, there was implication that Kirkes was wrongfully accused, his car stolen and then used as storage for cargo in the murder, another reasonable answer to why the top cop, under duress, would bungle his e orts in a panicked attempt to avoid being framed. This could also explain the possibility that Senteney’s body was moved to a di erent location after she was killed. Still, more theories hinted that a local bus driver with a sordid way around children was the culprit. Though the murder remains technically unsolved, no cold case file exists, according to Sergeant Erik Raney of the Santa Barbara County Sheri ’s epartment. Kirkes died in 1988 of complications resulting from a stroke and is interred in Santa Barbara Cemetery. To the grave with him went perhaps the answer to one of Carpinteria’s biggest questions: Who killed Margaret Senteney? Nobody may ever know, though recollections from that August day in 1942 will remain. To learn more about Carpinteria history during Covid-19 closure, visit the Carpinteria Valley Museum of History’s website carpinteriahistoricalmuseum.org to access more articles on local history. To support the preservation of local history, consider becoming a member of the Carpinteria Historical Society.