A Man Tried to Claim Reward Money for a Priest’s Murder—Instead He Was Convicted

Prior to 1919, murders were solved using eyewitness statements, circumstantial evidence and confessions. As a result, scores of wrongfully convicted innocents ended in prison. The 1920s, however, proved to be a watershed decade for the field of forensic science, with a central California priest’s shocking disappearance and killing serving as the catalyst for the advancement of several well-known investigative techniques.

Father Patrick Heslin was last seen alive on the evening of August 2, 1921, leaving Colma’s Holy Angels Catholic Church in a man’s car. The Irish-born Heslin, 64, had been asked to administer last rites to the unknown man’s dying friend, and departed without hesitation. Within hours, though, San Francisco Archbishop Edward Hanna received a crudely worded ransom letter, demanding $6,500 cash for Heslin’s safe return.

The note—half typed, half handwritten—suggested the archbishop waste no time in his response. “[I] had to [hit] him four times and he is unconscious from pressure on brain so better hurry and no fooling,” the note from Heslin’s captor had warned.

“First, they had the handwriting analysis performed [on the ransom letter], which, back then, was debatable,” crime historian and author Katherine Winkler Dawson tells A&E + Investigation. “Without a known sample to compare it to, it really does you no good. And so, these well-known document examiners, they could only really say, ‘This guy is crazy,’ which isn’t at all helpful.”

Luckily, pioneering criminologist, self-trained chemist and University of California, Berkeley professor Edward O. Heinrich was also called in by state and local authorities to work on Heslin’s disappearance.

“Heinrich said ‘I don’t know who wrote this ransom letter, or if he the author is crazy,’” Dawson, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas Belo School of New Media, explains. “‘But I can tell you that he was a professional baker at some point, by the way he composes the different letters.’ Heinrich knew that bakers are specifically trained to write a certain way, for writing on cakes. So, the ransom letter did no good.”

Heslin’s disappearance made front-page news, with investigators telling reporters they were positive no one could be capable of killing an innocent priest for absolutely no reason.

Eight days after Heslin was last seen, a San Francisco Examiner reporter—loitering outside the archbishop’s residence, hoping for a scoop—was approached by a disheveled former baker named William Hightower. The 43-year-old told the ambitious newsman he needed to speak to Hanna about Heslin because the priest had been shot twice.

Heslin’s remains, Hightower continued, had already been buried at a nearby beach, and a "man flipping pancakes" was now keeping watch over the corpse. Additionally, Hightower said a woman he’d met claimed bootleg alcohol was also buried at the very same beach, but added he didn’t try digging for either.

Hightower—believing he’d receive the $8,000 reward police were offering the public—later led three detectives and three reporters to a roadside pancake mix billboard, where, according to United Press Association reports at the time, Heslin’s “crumpled body” was exhumed by the six men “from a rude grave in a tiny cave on the windswept cliffs of Salada beach,” wrapped in broken tent. Heslin had been shot twice and his skull was crushed.

Afterward, investigators searched a hotel room Hightower had been occupying and found a typewriter they were able to match to the erratic ransom letter to the archbishop.

“We have technology now—DNA, fingerprints and all the rest of it—but apart from that, things haven’t changed all that much,” Simon Baatz, a professor of history at John Jay College in New York, tells A&E + Investigation of advancements since the 1920s. “Anyone looking to solve a murder during the 1920s would want to look for physical evidence that would connect the suspect with the killing. They would look for witnesses, alibis—where the person was, that sort of thing.”

Baatz points out that if an investigator during the early 1900s “found a hair on the murder victim, they wouldn’t have been able to determine where that came from” because “they just did not have the skills or tools to do that.”

Heinrich—one of America’s first expert witnesses, earning him the nickname “American Sherlock”—also matched Hightower’s handwriting to the letter and found a piece of cloth in the killer’s hotel room that matched the tent with which the priest was found buried.

“Hightower also had a pocketknife that they found at his place, and Heinrich finds, under the hilt of the knife, a few grains of sand that had gotten caught,” Dawson says. “Heinrich was a chemist who’d worked in Tacoma, Wash., figuring out what materials should be used when you are building roads and bridges. For this, he used a petrograph, a kind of microscope.”

Heinrich put the grains of sand under the petrograph, “and the light breaks apart the piece of sand to figure out what elements exist in the sand,” Dawson says, noting that sand from one beach in California can have a different chemical makeup than sand from a beach half a mile away. “He saw salt deposits in the sand and was able to match those grains, physically, to the grains of sand he collected from where Heslin’s body was found.”

While Hightower was the one who brought authorities to Heslin’s shallow grave, he never admitted to the killing. “Hightower was subjected to the very first instance of a lie detector test,” Dawson says. “It had just been invented. John Augustus Larsen comes down from the Berkeley Police Department, and he strapped Hightower to all these tubes that record one’s blood pressure, and a little pen with charcoal starts rolling. Meanwhile, blood pressure has nothing to do with guilt or innocence, so that was worthless.”

During Hightower’s trial in October 1921, Heslin’s housekeeper, who answered the door the night of Heslin’s disappearance, identified him as the mysterious man who’d picked up the priest that tragic night. The identification, along Heinrich’s findings, led a jury to convict Hightower of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Hightower served over four decades in the California State Prison at San Quentin, where he worked in the kitchens and wrote poetry—all while maintaining his innocence. In 1965, when he was 87 years old, the state decided to parole Hightower after more than two dozen unsuccessful parole hearings. He died nine years later in Los Angeles at the age of 95.