Court Opinion

ID: 9446580
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 21:58:43.857694+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:30:42.266303
License: Public Domain

DANAHER, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
Delbridge told the California sheriff, according to the latter’s testimony, he was tired of running from the charges. His “friends had informed him that there was a fugitive warrant for his arrest by the FBI.” “He stated to me that he stole $1175 from the College Hill Poultry firm.”
Delbridge testified he had been convicted of petty larceny under the name of Robert Jordan, of grand theft in California under the name of Thomas Del-bridge, of violating the National Motor Vehicle Theft Act in Petersburg, Virginia, under the name of Tom Delbridge, and of auto stealing in Columbus, Ohio, under the name of John Delbridge. He checked in Hood River, Oregon, to see if there was a “flyer” outstanding against him.
*713Having been arrested at Bakersfield, California, on another charge, the marshal told him when his term was up, “We haven’t got a thing in the world on you.” Then he became “eager to go back and face the charges and clear it up.” “If I wasn’t wanted, I wanted it so I could go home to my people, and there was only one way I could find out * * -X- ”
Delbridge had a key to the store, but he testified that on the night of Friday, April 11, 1952, he found the door open, somewhere around 10:30 p. m. The front part of the store was closed and the night light was on. “So I went there and opened the door. I thought Joe [the manager] might possibly be down there working or something and I would go down and chat with him and see if I had anything to tell him, because I opened up every morning before Mr. Arthur came to work.”
He went down into the basement and saw that the cubicle was wide open. As he looked about he noticed that the money box was open. All the lights were on. He then “got out of there as quick as I could,” and left town within an hour, without his pay, and was a fugitive for three years.
Earlier that evening the manager had placed silver, some one dollar bills and a few fives in the cash box, available to make change the following day. He had concealed the rest of the fives, tens and twenties among some stacks of linen. He locked the door of the cubicle with a padlock and locked the store before leaving, he testified.
At 6:30 Saturday morning the manager again entered the store and went downstairs to get the money to be used in Saturday’s business. The basement room door was closed. The lock had been broken and had been replaced over the hasp. Only when the manager reached to unlock the door did he discover that the place had been entered. Not only had the change box been emptied, but the linen had been pulled onto the floor, and large denomination bills which he had there concealed were missing.
So the sequence establishes the manager concealing the money and locking the store. If Delbridge were not the next person to enter the basement locker, it was the thief. Then followed Del-bridge who discovered the breaking, as he says. But “I left that door open,” he testified. “I didn’t touch anything down there, and I left the street door standing about half open.” If those statements are true, someone else entered the same area after Delbridge left, placed the broken lock over the hasp and closed the store. This remarkable series of visits to the scene of the theft somehow strains credulity. The jury had to decide that either the manager lied or Delbridge did.
Then, when Delbridge said “I left town immediately that night, and the next day I bought a paper in Raleigh, North Carolina,” he did not specify a paper published in Washington. The Washington Post, a morning paper, certainly “next day” could not have reported a burglary which was not discovered until 6:30 a. m. the “next day.” Del-bridge’s attorney argued, contrary to the testimony, that “the defendant stated he read this in a Washington paper in Virginia.”
The jury could have believed that the same “friends” who told Delbridge “that there was a fugitive warrant for his arrest by the FBI,” as he stated to the California sheriff, also told him there had been a piece in the papers about the College Hill burglary where $1,175 had been stolen. The “friends” might have thought it more than coincidence that Delbridge disappeared when the money did. Advising him that a warrant was outstanding was barely short of clairvoyance, for he had not even been indicted until after his confession in Bakersfield. Moreover the news stories made no mention of Delbridge. Only when he thought, three years later, that the whole business had blown over and no charges were pending against him, do we find Delbridge “eager” to get back. *714The newspaper episode which the majority say is “too fine a line upon which to rest a conviction” is a mere incident in the sum total of events. Delbridge simply presented “too fine a line” for the jury to accept. The District Judge who saw the witnesses and had an opportunity to appraise their worth was of similar mind. I would affirm.