The Thief, The Mapmaker, and The Alaskan Blonde: Guest Post by James T. Bartlett

I first became interested in true crimes that had a mystery element when I learned about Colonel Thomas Blood, who tried to steal the crown jewels from the Tower of London on May 9, 1671.   

The day before Blood, in disguise as a priest, had arrived at the Tower and befriended Talbot Edwards, the keeper of the crown jewels. In those days the jewels were kept in a simple cabinet with metal bars, and visitors could pay the elderly Talbot a small “compensation” to look at them. 

Blood had done this, and also dropped hints about his eligible “nephew”, knowing that Edwards had a marriageable-age daughter. However, on returning with his “nephew” that fateful day, their visit turned violent. Blood and his gang might well have escaped with the crown, scepter and orb if it was not for the sheer chance that they ran into Edwards’s son, a soldier returning home on leave, who raised the alarm.

 

Aside from the pure swashbuckling nature of this scheme, the thing that fascinated me was that Blood, in chains at the very same Tower he’d just tried to rob, asked for – and was granted – an audience with King Charles II. Soon after, the King pardoned Blood and his gang, and Blood went on to become a kind of celebrity criminal. The mystery? What on earth did Blood say or know that won him a pardon, instead of a swift execution?  

 

My next true crime obsession came soon after I moved to Belfast, Northern Ireland, where I found the name Richard Bartlett in Irish history books. The young and inexperienced Bartlett had been sent to Ireland by Queen Elizabeth I around 1601 to draw maps for her invading armies.

 

As a military cartographer he was classified as a spy, so he went disguised a bugle-playing soldier, and there are few references to him in the official records – besides his maps. His anonymity did not last however, and it was reported in 1603 that he had been captured deep in enemy territory and beheaded. The mystery? What was Richard doing alone in Tyrconnell (now Donegal), armed only with his cartographic equipment? 

I thought there was a clue in some of his maps; the later ones included personal touches like people, animals, or – daringly – had used Gaelic nomenclature and even depicted Irish homes set alight by soldiers, all of which were clear violations of protocol. Perhaps he had become disillusioned with his maps, which were being used to seize land and cripple the Spanish allies sailing to the aid of the Irish clans.

 

Both these historical mystery/crimes became screenplays, and the Richard Bartlett one saw my producer and I selected for a residential screenwriting workshop in Ballygally, a small coastal town on the Antrim coast. 

Wendall Thomas, who many of you might know as the author of the Cyd Redondo mysteries, was one of the tutors there, and, after being late for dinner on the final night, I ended up sitting next to her. The rest, appropriately enough, is literally history, but how did a daring thief and a lost cartographer lead me to Alaska?

 

My true crime book The Alaskan Blonde reexamines the murder of Cecil Wells in Fairbanks, Alaska, in October 1953, and focuses on Cecil’s wife, the main suspect in the case and the eponymous “Alaskan Blonde”. 

 

Cecil’s fifth bride, she was 20 years younger than he and notably attractive, ergo the ideal film noir-type suspect for the newspapers and pulp magazines. To them it seemed obvious that she committed the murder alongside her lover, Black musician Johnny Warren, who was indicted alongside her. Alas her story ended in suicide in Hollywood, which is how I found out about it during one of my many expeditions through the LA newspaper archives, while the murder remained a cold case that was never officially solved, nor anyone ever brought to trial. 

 

Intrigued, I started tracking down friends and family, but they all had the same question as me:  What happened? At the time it had been a taboo subject, and now these elderly men and women, great-grandparents some of them, wanted a solution to this 70-year-old mystery.

 

In the final chapter of the book, I bring together all the evidence – the police and FBI files, the interviews and the new evidence – to tell the story of that final fatal day, and so while I may not have brought Colonel Blood or Richard Bartlett to the big screen, I think I managed to solve the true crime mystery of who killed Cecil Wells.

*** 

Originally from London, James T. Bartlett is author of the National Indie Excellence Award winning and Anthony Award-nominated true crime book The Alaskan Blonde: Sex, Secrets, and the Hollywood Story that Shocked America.

 

As a travel and lifestyle journalist and historian, he has written for the Los Angeles Times, BBC, San Francisco Chronicle, Thrillist, ALTA California, Los Angeles Daily News, National Geographic Traveler, High Life, Hemispheres, Westways, Frommers, Crime Reads, American Way, Atlas Obscura and Real Crime, among others. 

 

You can find out more at www.thealaskanblonde.com