For months in the spring of 1921, a women’s-only private dorm at the University of California, Berkeley was rocked by a crime wave. College Hall, located on the northeastern corner of campus, where Hearst Avenue began to climb into the hills, was home to 90 young, mostly affluent women—18- and 19-year-olds, whose possessions kept disappearing.
It started small: silk undergarments, books, registered letters, items whose absence could be attributed to carelessness. The housemother was reluctant to involve the authorities, so she brought all the residents together for a meeting and demanded the thief come forward. When that didn’t work, she launched her own investigation. All she discovered was that the robberies seemed to be concentrated in one corner of the dorm.
Then, on the night of March 30, 1921, Ethel McCutcheon, a sophomore from Bakersfield, returned to her room to find her evening dresses had been removed from her closet and spread out on the bed. A textbook with $45 tucked inside had been taken, and her bureau had been ransacked. McCutcheon was not the only victim that evening. Rita Benedict, a freshman from Lodi, had more than $100 in jewelry and cash go missing. Margaret Taylor, a first-year student from San Diego, couldn’t find her diamond ring. It was worth $400 (more than $6,500 today). Taylor had no choice but to contact the police.
“I am really doing what all of the 90 girls in our dormitory didn’t want anyone to do,” she told the desk sergeant at the Berkeley Police Department. She seemed embarrassed to have to ask for help. “We do not want publicity, but this thing really can’t go on.”
Taylor might have wanted to avoid attention, but the police department was all too eager for publicity in those days. Its police chief, August Vollmer, had an unorthodox approach—and a journalist embedded in the department to tout his achievements. A gray-eyed veteran who had served in the Philippines, Vollmer was the first police chief in the country to treat crime as a problem that could be attacked with science. He hired experts in fingerprinting and handwriting analysis and put together a “morgue book” comprising images of corpses, weapons, and wrecked cars that he thought could prove useful in future forensic investigations. He also provided his officers with the latest technology, installing a rudimentary signaling system around Berkeley so they could call for backup. He was the first to equip his officers with vehicles: first bikes, then motorcycles and cars. And he slowly replaced the uneducated brutes who dominated policing with fresh-faced rookies hired from the university. The newspapers disparaged them as “college cops,” but these diligent young men, armed with degrees and committed to justice, quickly got results. Berkeley’s crime rate started to fall, even though the town’s population had almost doubled since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. As a result, Vollmer is to this day considered the father of modern policing.
After Taylor contacted the station, Vollmer assigned the College Hall case to Jack Fisher, a seasoned veteran, and Bill Wiltberger, a college cop who had joined the force just four months earlier. While Fisher questioned the young women at the dorm, Wiltberger toured Berkeley and Oakland’s secondhand stores, used bookshops, and pawnshops in search of the missing items. Fisher found no shortage of suspects: The dorm’s residents were quick to spread rumors and fire contradictory accusations at one another.