The McGlincy Killings: An Interview with Author Tobin Gilman

[00:48:03.350] - Benjamin

Tobin, welcome back to Crimecap. So it's great to have you.

[00:48:12.980] - Tobin

Great to be back.

[00:48:15.530] - Benjamin

So where we left off last week, a massive manhunt had been organized to catch James Dunham. The team takes off across the Santa Clara Valley. There's been a sighting at a nearby hotel, but Dunham is a step ahead of the hundreds of people who are searching for him and the very good boys, the bloodhounds as well. Where is Dunham at this point?

[00:48:48.210] - Tobin

So Dunham is in the lower part of the Mount Hamilton Mountains, the Diablo Range, if you will. And one of the things that's really important for your listeners to understand is that this mountain range, these Hills get very treacherous very fast for those of us that live here. Many folks who've lived here many years have never actually been up the road that goes up into those Hills. And when you're looking up from the Valley floor, it appears to be these nice, smooth, round topped Hills. But when you actually start ascending up into those Hills, which you realize it is very steep and Rocky terrain, there's a lot of foliage, thick brush, trees, manzanitas. And so he is at the lower part of those Hills in the Smith Ranch area. But he does have the advantage of those Hills in terms of his ability to hide and be evaded. The disadvantage he had was he was not supplied. He wasn't prepared to make that flight. So his clothing was inadequate. Of course, his food supply was nonexistent. And the things that you would need to even attempt to go into those mountains and stay there for any length of time were lacking.

[00:50:23.510] - Benjamin

Right. And we have to remember that he never expected to have to make this particular flight because he thought after killing his entire family, he could just saunter back onto the property, take ownership of it through his son, the infant, as the legal trap. And he was never expecting to have to just pick up sticks and take off, was he?

[00:50:49.050] - Tobin

That's correct.

[00:50:51.530] - Benjamin

So there are quite a few sightings along the way. And I thought we could just take a look at one or two of them. The first one, the most important one, is at this place called the Smith's Creek Hotel. And it's actually a close call for Dunham, isn't it? And he kind of gets a lucky break due to the climate, the weather, the kind of conditions that nobody can really control, sort of nightfall, that sort of thing. So what happened at Smith's Creek?

[00:51:23.890] - Tobin

Yeah. he had found a cabin and it actually belonged to a hand on the Smith rant. And he had gone into that cabin and had gotten some supplies, prunes and weeks, I think. And then it encountered two of these Smith Branch employees on the property. And one of the employees was suspicious, thought he recognized on them, thought that he might be the killer, and the other one, I think, might have been a little less aware. But there was a dialogue between the two of them, and it ended with Dunham moving on and continuing his escape without those gentlemen being able to alert law enforcement in sufficient time to apprehend him right then and there. But that could have ended his escape right then and there. There is this interesting moment in that dialogue, too, where this employee who recognizes Dunham, he comes up with, I think you call it something like a clever lie on the spot. And this clever lie is don't go up this path because the law enforcement is out trying to get cattle poachers or something like that. And he basically sort of steers Dunham away. And it's not true. There was no law enforcement up that particular trail or whatever, but he steers Dunham into a different direction down into the Valley, doesn't he?

[00:54:51.030] - Tobin

That's correct. I had forgotten about that. But, yes, he did have suspicions that this was Dunham. He wanted to actually steer Dunham onto the road that leads to and from Mount Hamilton, the Lick Observatory. And so that was the ploy that he attempted. But it didn't work.

[00:55:12.890] - Benjamin

Yeah. Let me ask you, we have to remember as we're looking at this particular case, that this is still very much an analog era. How is traversal up and down this particular geography. I mean, it's mostly horseback. There are some new roads that you described that are kind of being built at the time, but not really very many. So I'm kind of envisioning a combination of horseback and foot, and that's about all you get. What are the challenges for getting around in this part of the Valley?

[00:55:46.150] - Tobin

Well, in that mountain range, there, in fact, is only one road. It goes to the top of Mount Hamilton, which is where Lick Observatory stands today. And that was built in the 1880s. And I will tell you that road is treacherous today. I'm a motorcycle rider, and I ride big bikes. I have an Indian Roadmaster, which is a fully loaded touring bike. And last time I rode my motorcycle up that road, it was kind of terrifying because the road is so narrow and there are large parts of that road with no guardrails, with just steep cliffs. And I am always amazed at what it must have taken just to get the Observatory built to get the telescope up that Hill on horseback. It's a very narrow road. So that was really the only traversable path by horseback or foot or anything else. Dunham had to stay off that road, which meant he had to kind of navigate the ravines and sides of these bills to avoid law enforcement. Not an easy task. Yeah.

[00:57:00.880] - Benjamin

And there's another factor here, too, which I thought was really compelling in your account. There's a climate issue as well. You have sort of heat during the day. This is May, late May. So it's going to be hot. You have fog at certain points in the evening, and so you're kind of constantly battling the elements if you're trying to escape in this very rugged terrain. One question I have for you was how easy is it to find tracks and trails for the folks who are in the search party absent mud. Right. So you would think that if there had been some rain, then the ground would have been softer and it would have been easier to find the sort of hoofprints or footprints, the boot prints, as it may be. But you do mention that it had been very dry up until that point, and the only moisture was sort of coming in through fog. So how are they able to kind of look for him with that impediment in their way?

[00:58:03.380] - Tobin

Well, they didn't really have a lot of options. That was actually where the bloodhounds were brought in to try and help. But you're right. I mean, there were no footprints that they could go on. Now what they did have one of the things, and maybe I'm jumping a little bit ahead here, but at one point during the search, they heard a gunshot off in the distance. There was a question Mark about where that gunshot originated and who fired that gun. And that's a question that lingers today. But shortly thereafter, they discovered Dunham's horse. And what that tells you is that the horse was of no value to Dunham since he couldn't be on the road and the terrain was just too treacherous to navigate on horseback. So everybody was on foot. The killer as well as the chasers.

[00:59:05.250] - Benjamin

You have more and more people joining the Hunt. Right. You have more sort of interested parties from the community, more people who'd known the Mclinseys, more folks coming from outside of the county volunteering their services and their skills. I was taken by your account of Juan Edson, who was both an attorney and a fairly wellknown tracker, which seems to be kind of a unique skill set in this particular case, doesn't it?

[00:59:39.790] - Tobin

It does, yeah. He was an interesting character. He was, again, very well known for his prosecutorial exploits within the city. And he was somebody who was obviously motivated by the reward money. And he went to great lengths over many years to try and track down the killer, but ultimately to no avail.

[01:00:08.170] - Benjamin

So Dunham heads south into you write that he eventually sort of makes his way down towards Fresno County, south and eastish through the Valley believes to have.

[01:00:21.030] - Tobin

Made his way south.

[01:00:23.120] - Benjamin

Thank you.

[01:00:24.610] - Tobin

Yes.

[01:00:25.930] - Benjamin

No, that's very important, actually. I appreciate that because it is not conclusive. And one of the things that makes the inconclusiveness so interesting is because most of the sightings that we get again, we're in this sort of the first few days, maybe the first week of his escape, that very kind of delicate timeframe. Many of the ranchers and the farmers in the area had already known him. Right. He had maybe worked for them for a little while. He'd done little short stints on their property as a Ranch hand and then moved on. And he's not a stranger. He's not this sort of anonymous face in the crowd. And he's also very physically distinctive at the photographs that we do have of him. You kind of can't mistake him for anybody else, can you?

[01:01:15.200] - Tobin

Yeah, that's correct.

[01:01:18.190] - Benjamin

So as the search expands, something I'd like to ask you about is the tension that the law enforcement authorities are starting to experience here regarding the sightings, which are coming in more and more, the false sightings, which are coming in more and more. And then every time you get a high profile case like this, every single time we hear on Crime Capsule, we spend a lot of time looking at the cranks and the lookyloo's and the folks who just want to be a part of the action, even though they have no relationship to the case whatsoever, they're just rubber neckers and glory seekers. Right. How did Sheriff Linden and the authorities how did they handle this?

[01:02:10.150] - Tobin

It was probably very similar to what happens on America's Most Wanted or what happened when that series was on TV. Right? Yeah. Word gets out about somebody's on the loose and the next thing, you know, the tips just start flowing in, and law enforcement has to triage which ones are viable, which ones are not, so that they're not chasing down fruitless things and focusing on the best opportunities. I think that was probably the phenomenon that Sheriff Lyndon and his crew had to deal with. And, yeah, there were calls and Dunham sightings that came from all over California initially. And then as time went on, the leads came from all over the country.

[01:03:00.610] - Benjamin

Really. How quickly did that widening sphere of tips I mean, if you were to map sort of like where the tips were coming in based on day, how long did it take for the sightings and the false leads to reach the Atlantic Coast?

[01:03:18.010] - Tobin

Yes, good question. I would say the first two weeks the sightings were all in the vicinity of the east foot Hills of Santa Clara County and adjoining counties. And there was one interesting story. A kid who lived not too far away, a little bit further south, had been riding his bike over a very heavily used road today called Pacheco Pass. It's a road that kind of connects Silicon Valley to the Central Valley. And back in those days, it was probably just a dirt road, but he had been riding his bike over that pass and had found what he thought was remnants of a body. And so there were a lot of those things. But by month, well, within the first month, I would say the tips started coming in from States East of California, and then for decades later, tips came in from as nearby as Nevada in Arizona and as far away as Massachusetts, in New York, in Ohio.

[01:04:29.870] - Benjamin

So I want to ask you, in June 1896, remember, the crime you had written took place at the very end of May, and the majority of this manhunt takes place in early June into the kind of the middle of June. But you're right that by the end of that month, the trail really had gone cold. What were the theories at this point?

[01:05:01.430] - Tobin

The theories at that time probably are still the theories that exist today. There's one theory that he made it over the mountain range, the Diablo Mountain Range, into the Central Valley, perhaps got on a train and disappeared somewhere in the country, never to be seen again. That's one theory. There's another theory that suggests that he quickly came out of the foothills and headed to the coast and may have gone all the way down into Mexico, worked his way down the coast and disappeared into Mexico. In latter years, there was a report of somebody bleeding. They had an encounter with Dunham. Another theory holds that he made it to the coast and perhaps worn in a northerly direction toward the San Francisco Bay and caught a freighter, a shipping freighter maybe stowed away on it and sailed away to some far away land. And then the final theory is that he never made it out of those foothills, that he died right there in the Hills.

[01:06:13.910] - Benjamin

Yeah.

[01:06:28.610] - Benjamin

Yeah. I will ask you, it is interesting to me, Tobin, that as the leads dry up, as the tips get less and less reliable, as the more fanciful accounts begin to supplant, any real evidence that you might find there was evidence I thought it was fascinating that you described he had stolen some gunny sacks to wrap around his feet to protect his feet as he was walking. And that was fairly conclusively established. But my heart really went out to you as a researcher, because as the leads for the investigators dry up, the leads for the researchers working on the case a century later also dry up. And, you know, you sort of keep hunting, you keep searching, you keep looking for more material and data and evidence. And you were in the exact same position as Sheriff Linden and his team. And those bloodhounds. My heart went out to you as I was reading this book. What is Tobin going to have to bring to us next? Oh, no, the barrel is running dry.

[01:07:44.190] - Tobin

Yeah. And there were obviously no witnesses, no acquaintances that I could speak to. They're all, of course, long gone. At least Sheriff Lindon and his crew had that going for them. One of the more humorous things that happened during the search, and I forgot exactly how far into the search it happened, but it was kind of I got a kick out of it. There was a story that appeared in the local paper, the San Jose Mercury News, which is still the main paper here in Silicon Valley. And it was an article about three boys that were truant from school and they had taken time off from school to go search for James Dunham and one of the kids snagged his dad's rifle. Another kid got some food and supplies that they were going to take up into the Hills. I when got a kick out of was two things. One, that just three boys thinking that they could go and go and find this guy, because when I was 10, 12, 13 years old, I could easily see myself trying to pull that off. And the second thing I think that was funny about it is just the fact that a truancy was printed in the newspaper, because I will tell you, in 2022, it takes a much more significant crime to get coverage of the San Jose Mercury.

[01:09:11.130] - Benjamin

Yeah, I imagine so. No, of course, the premise of these young whippersnappers, these rap scallions taking it on themselves, it sounds like the pitch for this great film, like this great movie that somebody should write and direct. And what if they found him right once you catch him, then what do you do with them? Right.

[01:09:35.440] - Tobin

Well, one of the other things, I think, is probably one of the more humorous aspects of this search, and this happened some years afterwards. There were James Dunham sightings all over the country, and there was this one poor fellow who lived in Texas. His name was Hatfield, William Hatfield, I believe memory serves me right. And he was apprehended somewhere in Texas for some petty crime. And someone was sure that he was James Dunham. And he was held in Texas. And Sheriff Linden and his deputy went to Texas to examine this guy. And the deputy, actually, his name was Buffington, and Buffington had known Dunham. So Buffington accompanied Sheriff Lyndon to Texas. They talked to him, and Buffington saw enough to think that he probably was James Dunham. Well, the Texas authorities were not willing to just extradite them to California. They wanted the reward money as the condition for the extradition, which in and of itself is kind of tells you a little bit about inner law agency cooperation back in those days.

[01:11:01.710] - Benjamin

But at any rate, or the lack thereof or the kind of there are a lot of stories about folks vying for the big prize, so to speak.

[01:11:14.920] - Tobin

I hear you exactly. Anyway, they eventually did get him to San Jose, and an entire parade of people came to the San Jose jail to examine this guy. And half of them swore, yes, that's him. I knew him well, that's the guy. The other half said, I knew Dunham. Well, that is not the guy. This poor fellow sat in a jail cell for over a month, kind of took it all in stride. And as it ultimately would turn out, it became pretty conclusive that he was not the killer. Now, the funny thing about it was even the district attorney at the time made that conclusion. And there was a hearing before the judge profuse apologies to this poor Hatfield character. He was released. And by this time, he had gone from being the most hated man in Santa Clara County to a beloved celebrity. And he was released from jail. He was greeted with lots of Congratulations by passerbys. People gave him cigars, his meals were paid for by the local restaurants, and he was an aspiring VOD bill performer. And at the request of the judge, one of the local vodkael houses actually employed him.

So it worked out well for that guy. But it's kind of a funny story.

[01:12:44.230] - Benjamin

Some States have laws about compensation for wrongful conviction or wrongful detention, a certain amount of dollars per day that you were held illegally or were proven to be innocent. But getting a job like that to do what you've always wanted to do, that's about as good as a sack of cash, isn't it?

[01:13:06.360] - Tobin

You can't beat it. And there's one more dimension to this that I want to mention before we move on, because I think it's somewhat relevant to this story, and it's something I didn't even realize until after the book came out. Sure. But this young deputy, his name was Howard Buffington at this time, he was a 20 something year old young person in the early stage of his law enforcement career in the 1930s, he became a central figure in two other famous Santa Clara County cases. The most famous was a lynching that took place in downtown San Jose at St. James park. It's a long story. I don't want to go off into too much of a tangent, but a beloved heir to a Department store enterprise was murdered, a young man in his early twenty s. And the murderers, there were two guys that were apprehended and accused of the murder. They were held at the county jail. And there was so much outrage in the city. There was a storming at the jail. They broke down the jail door and went into the jail, and they dragged these two guys out and they lynched them in St.

James park, which at that time was right across the street from the jail. And the jailer overseeing the jail at that time was named Howard Buffington. And Buffington was furious that this Hatfield guy was released, the guy from Texas, because Buffington had been sure that he was, in fact, Dunham at the time this lynching took place. Buffington is believed to have kind of winked and nodded and allowed this mob to storm the jail. And then he was later the central figure in a murder that took place at Stanford University, where a Stanford employee and his wife, who lived on the campus, he was accused of murdering his wife in their home on the Stanford campus. Buffington aggressively the crazier the tips have become, Dunham has gone and joined the Mexican Revolution. There's this mysterious message in a bottle that purports to have something from him that surfaces, but frankly, he's in the wind. He's gone. That's it.

[01:16:11.390] - Tobin

Yeah. I think it tells you two things. One is it tells you that the crime that we've been talking about in this podcast, in the first segment of it, is as heinous as it was and as heinous as it still is to us today. We know that these things, unfortunately, are just all too commonplace. But the fact that interest in this crime and the shock lasted 1020, 30, 40 years after the fact tells you how different things had become in more recent years, more recent decades. The other thing it tells you is how the money remained a motivator for so many years afterwards.

[01:17:04.150] - Benjamin

We do not believe in closure here. There is no such thing as closure for cases like this. There are aftermaths. Right. And there are epilogues plural that have to be written. And I do need to ask you about the different epilogues that took place for the folks who were involved in this first, what happened to the rest of Dunham's own family, not the family that he killed, but the sort of the extended family that had more or less seeing the back of him before this ever happened.

[01:17:47.690] - Tobin

Right. So his mother and father were actually, I believe, still alive at the time of the killings, but they might have passed. I don't remember that. But one thing I think that's relevant about his mother that I don't think I've mentioned is that when Dunham was growing up, he may have inherited some of his violent tendencies from her. She was an Irish woman. Her name was Kate Dunham, and she was known around town as a successful businesswoman, but also a woman with a violent temper. She was known as Kate the Terror. And there was actually an incident from Dunham's childhood that might have been predictive of what he did the night of the killing. When he was a young boy, he had asked his mother for some money to go into town and buy some candy, and she told him no. And he quietly accepted her no and went out in the backyard and broke the necks of the chickens she had in the backyard. Just a little temper tantrum. And I mentioned that because later in his life, when he was a Ranch hand, he was working on a Ranch somewhere up in Northern California before the killings took place.

And he got in a dispute with another Ranch hand and tried to snap that guy's neck. So a little bit of a divergence there. But in the aftermath of this, the surviving members of his family were his younger brother Charles, and his younger sister. I believe her name was Addie, and it was really sad. Charles was kind of a quirky guy in his own right, but by all accounts, somebody that lived a normal life. But he and the younger sister were both greatly shamed. The Dunham name was attached to them, and you can imagine how that would be in a small town to sort of have to carry that cloud over your head. So they actually petitioned successfully to have their last name changed. They adopted the name of a relative, but the younger brother Charles, I think what got on with his life, but it was never the same for the younger sister. Her name was Gosh. I would have to go back and double check it, sure. But she never really recovered from the shame and the shock. She was probably a frail person emotionally to begin with, but she ultimately sank into a very deep depression and died at a very early age.

The death certificate said consumption, but the general consensus was she died of a broken heart, and she's often known as the 7th victim of that crime.

[01:20:44.370] - Benjamin

What about Percy, the baby? Interesting to him.

[01:20:48.310] - Tobin

So Percy was adopted by relatives of the Wells family. They raised him, and not much was known about him.

[01:22:25.130] - Tobin

So one of the great mysteries that still remains to this day was whether or not Percy was ever told of who his biological father was and the heinous crime that he committed. And we will never know for certainty, but there's a bit of a clue that can be found in his Social Security application in Florida. He listed his parents and he listed his father as the gentleman, the relative that raised him. But he listed his mother as Hattie Wells, which was Hattie Dunham's maiden name. So it kind of suggests to me that he knew who his biological mother was, and he was proud of that. And he wanted her listed as his mother, but not under the name of his biological father. And so he listed his mother by her maiden name, hadty Wells, and his father by the name of the relative that raised him. But that doesn't necessarily prove that he knew who his biological father was. He may have been told that hadty was pregnant out of wedlock and raised by someone else. So we'll never really know with certainty, but I suspect he knew that's a.

[01:23:50.270] - Benjamin

Really intriguing little thread to pull there. And that's a pretty good sleuthing for you to have found that. That's really interesting. Let me ask you this. What is the legacy of this case in modern day Campbell, California?

[01:24:07.850] - Tobin

So I'll tell you kind of an interesting story. Right after the book went to press but had not been published, I was invited to give a talk at the Campbell Historical Museum. And it was a really wonderful Museum. And they do these things Friday night, history night. And you go early evening and you can go listen to a lecture about history. And then you can go into downtown Campbell, which is a vibrant, fun little downtown. That's kind of an enclave in the middle of San Jose, and they have great restaurants and bars. And so it's a popular thing they do in the summertime. And I gave my talk. And then at the end, I concluded by letting the audience know that to this day, every May 26, around midnight, neighbors in the Mclincy area report to the Campbell police the sound of gunfire. And I just paused, and I let that hang in the air, and I picked the whole thing up, but I just wanted to I'm hearing the ooze and the AWS and all of a sudden this elderly gentleman in his late 70s goes, oh, those are just kids lighting firecrackers. Well, it turned out this gentleman's name is Howard Katie.

He's a longtime Campbell resident. He moved to Campbell in 1938 as an eight or nine year old kid. And he actually lived and still lives unless he's passed away in the last couple of years right in that vicinity. And he actually, as a boy, had had the opportunity to get friends that lived in the house where the killing took place. And as a kid, they would have these sleepovers at the house and the kids would dare each other to spend the night alone in the bedroom where Hattie and Minnie were killed. Yeah.

[01:26:12.620] - Benjamin

Not a chance. Not a chance. No, thank you. Slam the door shut. I'm out of there. No, sir.

[01:26:19.590] - Tobin

Exactly. Well, this gentleman, Mr. Katie, was gracious enough to invite me over to his home, and he walked me over to where the house had once stood, and he showed me where everything had once been, where the house had been, where the barn had been, the road. And it really helped me visualize this so much better. The other thing that was interesting is that Howard Katy himself is something of a legend in this area. He's a racer or was a racer. He raced as a category of race car and was well known at the race tracks throughout California for many years and actually won a claim over a period of four or five decades. And so learning a little bit about that legend was a little benefit I accrued from this exercise that I'm grateful for.

[01:27:14.530] - Benjamin

Last question I have for you, Tobin, you've studied this case more than anybody. What do you think happened to James Dunham?

[01:27:26.950] - Tobin

I think he died in the Hills. I think that the terrain is so treacherous. And again, having ridden motorcycles up that road and taken it many times, I just don't believe anybody could have gotten out of there without taking the road itself. And that was close to him. There are a couple of other data points that lead me to believe that. One is that I've mentioned earlier in our podcast that a shot had been heard and that later his horse was found. I believe that gun shot was Dunham's gun itself and that he shot himself somewhere in a ravine. And there have been many searches in the years that followed that killing, that searches that went on in the early 1009 hundreds, the 1920s. They never recovered the body, but that is not at all surprising, given the nature of that terrain. And then there's one piece of evidence that if I could only get my hands on it, might put this thing to rest once and for all about shortly after the book came out, the local newspapers did some reviews on it, and I was contacted by this guy that he's about my age.

It turns out we're five years apart from each other. We grew up in the same part of San Jose. We went to the same school. We both went to College at Cal Poly. I was a political science major. Five years later, he went to Cal Poly. He was a political science major. He's back living in San Jose, and his family owns Ranch land up in those Hills where Dunham had been spotted. And he had been following this case himself. And when he was a young kid, he and his father were walking around the property and they found a bone, a human femur bone. And they decided to just leave the bone there because they assumed it was probably a Native American, and they just didn't want to disturb the rent. So they just left it where it was. And it was years later, when he became an adult, he learned about the McGlincy case and doing some research of his own, and he began to wonder maybe that was Dunham's bone and he was not able to recover that femur bone. But I often wonder what would have happened if that bone had been recovered.

Could we have done some DNA testing and detected a match? And that might have conclusively determined once and for all that was done, but it didn't come to be.

[01:30:13.990] - Benjamin

Yeah, it's a fascinating question, but one thing is for sure is that at least in the immediate aftermath, he got away. It's not a pleasant truth, but it is the truth. And what struck me as I was reading your account of his great escape was that for however long the rest of his life would be, the knowledge of what he had done would stay with him. And I imagine the torment at the consequences of what he had brought upon himself and Tobin, that is the kind of torment from which there is no great escape.

[01:31:00.790] - Tobin

I agree.

[01:31:03.790] - Benjamin

Thank you so much for joining us. This has been such a pleasure to have you. It's an incredible tale and hard to believe that it's still unsolved, but you have captured the mysteries of that unknowing so beautifully. I really appreciate it.

[01:31:18.860] - Tobin

Well, thank you again for giving me the opportunity to share the story and elaborate. I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, and so thank you very much. Absolutely.