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Dignified Gentleman\u00a0Du Jour!<\/h3>\n
Okay, who wouldn’t want photo props like this?<\/p>\n
On April 19,\u00a01945, Bertha Fox worked the afternoon shift at the Sacramento Frosted Food plant at 9th and D Streets.\u00a0 She left a note for her husband Paul, telling him not to meet her on her lunchbreak that day as she planned to eat inside.\u00a0 Paul went to a downtown bar where Louie the bartender told him Bertha was running around with another man.\u00a0 Paul made a couple of phone calls and found out that Bertha had not reported to work that day.\u00a0 He went home to stew in angry thoughts.<\/p>\n
Bertha arrived at their home at 415 11th Street around midnight and Paul immediately accused her of infidelity.\u00a0 She denied it and insisted she had been at work.\u00a0 She offered to go with him to the plant to prove it.\u00a0 A loud argument ensued and Bertha ran outside, but Paul caught up to her, grabbed her arm, and repeatedly punched her face with the other.\u00a0 He dragged her back inside and beat her for over an hour.<\/p>\n
Paul threw Bertha, beaten and bloody, into their car and drove the five blocks to the plant, but once there Bertha would not get out of the car.\u00a0 Paul drove over the Jibboom Street Bridge where Bertha jumped out of the car and ran down a levee.\u00a0 Paul caught her and proceeded to whip her with a four-foot long switch until she collapsed.\u00a0 Then Paul began to kick her.\u00a0 After he got tired, he dragged her up the levee and back to their car.<\/p>\n
Bertha was unconscious\u00a0when they arrived home, so Paul threw water on her to wake her up.\u00a0 It did not work.\u00a0 He told his step-son, ten-year-old Stanley Fox, to go get help as he started artificial respiration on her.\u00a0 Bertha was dead when the police arrived.\u00a0 Fox admitted to the police that he had beet his wife of eight-years to death.<\/p>\n
Paul Fox took detectives to the levee where he beat Bertha.\u00a0 The police found a six-foot square\u00a0area splattered with blood.\u00a0 A fifty-found, bloodstained rock was discovered at the scene, prompting detectives to presume Bertha had fallen on it and struck her head.<\/p>\n
The Sacramento County autopsy surgeon C. H. McDonnell concluded that Bertha’s death resulted from a severe bruise on the back of her head caused by the aforementioned rock at the levee.\u00a0 She also had bruises and lacerations all over her body.<\/p>\n
The thirty-three-year-old Fox, who had worked as a mechanic at the Army Air Depot, at first pleaded not guilty but changed his plea to guilty of second degree murder and was sentenced to five years to\u00a0life at San Quentin.\u00a0 Fox admitted to the crime, explaining to the detectives, “I was crazy drunk.\u00a0 I lost my head when I became convinced that she had been out with another man.”<\/p>\n
Culled from:\u00a0Forgotten Sacramento Murders<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Okay, who wouldn’t want photo props like this?<\/p>\nDignified Gentleman\u00a0Du Jour!<\/h3>\n
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