Lt. John W. Ward Portraits

Visalia’s First Detectives

Visalia’s First Detectives:
A brief history of investigation in Visalia, Calif.
-OR-
X103.9, Final Project
by Dave Adalian

Drive south out of Sacramento on Highway 99, and somewhere on the outskirts of Stockton the busy eight-lane artery narrows to two busy lanes in each direction and enters the farmland and ranches of the San Joaquin Valley.

The land is not as open as it used to be, and the 99 never quite leaves civilization completely behind. Islands of shops, homes and businesses now dot the fields, and every few minutes farms grows fewer, buildings grow more, and you enter the suburbs of another former farming town that’s grown with more or less grace and reluctance into a city: Manteca and Modesto, ravaged by the broken housing bubble; Atwater and Merced, home of the hope of the new UC; Madera and Fresno at the halfway point between Los Angeles and the Bay Area; and finally into Tulare County, where John Steinbeck and bad fortune led the Joads after their forced journey west.

There, the 99 leads into the tiny, unincorporated town of Goshen, and it looks as if it’s about to enter yet another city bursting its boundaries when suddenly the threat evaporates and the freeway arrives at the junction of State Route 198, where the signs tell travelers they are now just five miles west of Visalia or, more prominently, forty-two long and winding miles from the world famous Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.

The 198 rolls right through the middle of Visalia, past the municipal airport and the Holiday Inn, alongside the city-owned golf course dotted with golfers and oak trees, through outlying industrial parks, then subdivisions, and into the center of a city where 121,792 people now live, work, play, relax, worship, get sick, get well, grow old, and eventually move away or die some way or another. [1]

The Central Visalia exit merges into the left-hand lane of Noble Avenue. An immediate turn left onto Watson Street then a left again at the light on Mineral King Avenue and a right two blocks up onto South Johnson Street leads to the headquarters of the Visalia Police Department in the middle of the block on the west side of the road. These are the administrative offices where the chief of police, his captains and lieutenants oversee a force of some 130 officers and a few dozen support personnel who work out of this campus of buildings and a pair of identical white stucco district precinct offices, one located in each of the north and south halves the 198 divides the city into. [2][3]

“It’s pretty much like any big police department anywhere,” says Terry Ommen, local historian and former VPD captain, but it didn’t start out that way. Tulare County was founded officially in 1852 though it had been a geographical entity for much longer than that, and just twelve years later in 1864 at the height of the Civil War, Visalia was formed and an elected marshal took over law enforcement duties in the immediate area from the local sheriff. The marshal was reelected annually, and policing in Visalia was handled that way until nearly sixty years later when a city charter was voted into place in 1923. A city manager took over operations at City Hall and a police department established.

“If you want good business you need a good manager. The argument was ... if you want to run a big organization you need a professional manager, and that’s when the police department formed,” Ommen says. [4]

A large, organized and professional police force is exactly what Visalia has eighty-five years later in 2008, and the man now supervising the force’s detectives is Lt. Steve Puder, a member of the department for the last twenty-two years who worked as an investigator -- the VPD’s term for its detectives -- for the last dozen years before becoming the head of the entire investigations division in October of 2008.

“Things have changed a lot in [the] violent crimes [unit],” Puder says. “In 1991, it was me and another guy.”

Today, the investigations division includes a property crimes unit dealing with burglary, nonviolent theft, ID crimes, and stolen vehicles, a youth services unit investigating crimes involving children and maintaining a presence in all the city’s middle and high schools, and a violent crimes unit assigned to cases of murder, armed assaults, sex crimes, domestic violence, and molestations. The thirty or so detectives who work for Puder handle an average of fifty to sixty property crimes and one hundred violent crimes each month, usually working alone or in pairs, or shifting to larger detachments when needed.

“On real big cases, like homicides, one detective will be the primary officer. But, we work in teams. There’s so much to do and there’s the danger factor when you’re chasing a killer,” Puder says.

Despite the growing number of violent crimes the city’s investigators handle each year, an increase Puder says he pins on population increases and gang activity, the way those crimes are solved hasn’t changed since the city’s first detectives looked into the wrongdoing of an earlier era.

“It’s the same. How you catch crooks is you go out shake the bushes and talk to people,” Puder says. “That work remains the same. That’s how you solve your cases.” [5]

In its early years the Visalia Police Department hardly earned the title. The first few chiefs of police had one or two deputies and there was no separation of duties among the men who were policing 5,000 to 6,000 residents, serving them legal papers, investigating the few crimes that occurred in and around the tiny farm town, and making arrests when needed. This was the way Visalia’s police department continued even through the growth it experienced in the Great Depression.

“Murders were unusual events in the 20s, 30s, and 40s,” Ommen says of towns in Central California. “You’re not going to have a homicide unit if you’re that small. The senior guy was the one who did the follow-up. They couldn’t afford to have someone on the street and someone specializing. You tend to form specialty departments when a problem arises.” [6]

So rural was Visalia it wasn’t until the 1930s the VPD formed a traffic unit to patrol the city, and likewise there was no need for an investigators unit until about the time that he joined the force in 1973 says former chief Bruce McDermott, who led the department from 1992 to 1997.

“There just wasn’t a need for it until then,” he says. [7]

It was after the Depression and before the end of World War II that Visalia hired its first men who’s job was solely that of detective, and like the division of duties today, the individual investigators were specialists who looked into certain kinds of crimes, at least as far as the practicalities of policing in such a small jurisdiction would allow for such specialization. The exact date when the VPD first employed investigators, however, is lost.

“A lot of [rural police squads] in the 40s and 50s they started hiring detectives. Before then everyone did everything. The [Visalia] department didn’t keep archives. I have names, but that’s about it,” says Ommen. [8]

A man who typified Visalia’s early police detectives, he says, is Lt. John Ward, the city’s chief juvenile investigator until 1965. Ward came to Visalia from San Francisco in 1942 with his wife Aldula and their young daughter Sally. He had been a yeoman in the Navy during World War I and a driver for the Yellow Cab Company for sixteen years before coming to Visalia, where after only a single year on the force Ward formed the VPD’s juvenile bureau. [9][10]

Unlike the police detectives typical of police procedural stories, Ward’s days were taken up mostly with mundane casework. Newspaper clippings the lieutenant saved describe workaday crimes such as a group of boys ticketed for riding their bikes at night without lights, the pilfering of unlocked cars, a foot chase down Main Street after the theft of an electric coffee pot by a ring of shoplifters from Los Angeles, and an incidence of vandalism at the Visalia Country Club that elicited a glowing letter to the police chief from an effusive club president commending “the painstaking and efficient efforts of your Lt. Robert T. Jump and your Juvenile Officer John W. Ward.” [11][12]

There were also more serious and disheartening crimes recorded in Ward’s scrapbooks: periodic jail breaks, burglaries at the local gun shop and a clothing store warehouse, a rash of home break-ins by a “crew of hoodlums,” and a traffic collision killing two women caused by a 17-year-old driver whose parents were then sued for their life savings. [13]

Ward was also on the scene on the night of Nov. 2, 1946 when Sgt. Charles Hubert Garrison, the first officer ever murdered in the line of duty in Visalia, was shot while trying to apprehend an auto-theft suspect. The incident is retold in detail in a letter written just four days after the killings by officer Floyd Depew, who wanted to record “just a word of what I know about [the] case. ...” for Chief Paul F. Finley and “All Brother Officers.”

Depew, Garrison and Ward were discussing the “window breaking cases of Oct. 31-1946” when the suspect in the theft of a new 1947 Studebaker sedan was seen leaving a nearby service station. The man, Clyde T. Bauer, was chased by the officers into an alleyway behind the city’s pool hall.

As Depew was running through the pool hall he heard a shot. Reversing course, Depew ran to the east end of the alley, where he stopped the suspect at gunpoint. “...[A]s I started for him [I] heard another shot [and] Bauer’s feet seemed to fly from under him. ... Also as I heard the last shoot [and] saw Bauer fall [I] looked toward the Alley and saw Garrison on one knee and fall on his face. ... I then went to Garrison [and] raised his head [and] his last words were HE SHOT ME FIRST.” (sic) [14]

Sally Goeringer, Ward’s daughter, remembers the night of the killing and a visit from officers who knew both her father and Garrison had been in the alley, that one of the men was dead, but not which of the officers had survived.

“When that happened the police came to our house and told us one of them was dead. We didn’t know who it was. We found out when it went out over the radio. Garrison’s wife was a [police clerk] and that’s how she found out, hearing it on the radio,” Goeringer says.

The killing of Sgt. Garrison happened near midnight on a cold and foggy night, but Goeringer says it wasn’t unusual for her father to work long and unpredictable hours.

“He worked all the time, night and day. The only time he took out was Friday night when we went to the movies. I had to be at the table with my hands washed at five o’clock. If he was there, fine. If not I did my homework and went to bed. If he was there we played checkers or whatever. He was a wonderful father and husband,” she says.

Near tragedy wasn’t the only intrusion of his police work into the Ward household. Goeringer says she often remembers her father telling her mother he had spent part of the family budget on some needy child he had come across during a day’s work.

“He put other people ahead of him all the time. I remember times he’d come home and say to my mother, ‘I’ve done something that’s going to cut your groceries short. Buddy needed a haircut so I got him one,’” she says. “That was his soul, to try to keep these kids out of jail. You think it’s bad now? It was bad then.” [15]

Keeping children from turning to a life of crime was of great concern to Ward, who felt they came to it after a slide down a slippery slope that started early, usually with smoking cigarettes. He once wrote: “Delinquency begins when youngsters violate tobacco laws, then become truants, next liquor laws are violated, followed by traffic violations, and ultimately youngsters begin ‘pilfering hubcaps.’” [16]

Some children responded to his interventions, some didn’t, and the local paper reported this when Ward retired: “A Mexican girl in her junior year at Visalia High School in 1943 was always getting in trouble, fighting and beating up other girls. ‘Today at the age of 36 she has written screen and television plays for the Alfred Hitchcock series and Three Star Productions,’ recalls Ward. He still receives Christmas cards from her.” The story then tells of a boy in trouble with the law since age 11 who was released from San Quentin Prison the week before Ward retired. “Ward sees no hope in rehabilitating the man. ‘I’m afraid the cause is lost,’ he said.” [17]

His work to help children wasn’t limited to just Visalia. Ward was at one time head of the Central California Peace Officer Association and sat on a governor’s panel on juvenile crime that Ward’s daughter says was responsible for changing the state’s policy of incarcerating minors in the same facilities as adult criminals and suspects. [18]

As the city’s juvenile investigator, Ward was also one of its public faces. He made appearances as the YMCA and at PTA meetings to fight delinquency, appeared in a bike safety film strip for the city’s schools and hosted visiting dignitaries from Indonesia and Germany. At the time of his retirement, Gov. Edmund (Pat) Brown called Ward “a spirited pioneer in a field that has grown to new and challenging heights.”

Ward’s police work wasn’t confined to just matters of juvenile crimes and criminals. He served as the assistant chief of police under Frank Bentzen, and he was made acting chief in 1951 while Bentzen took a hiatus to attend FBI Academy classes in the nation’s capital.

After leaving the force when he had reached the mandatory retirement age of 65, Ward declared he would spend more time enjoying the mountain lakes in the nearby Sierra Nevada, and he took a part-time job as a first aid instructor at the local community college. Ward died on Jan. 12, 1970, three months shy of his seventieth birthday. [19]


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FOOTNOTES:

[1] Visalia, California - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visalia
[2] Top 101 cities with the lowest number of police officers in 2006 per 1,000 residents (population 50,000+)
http://www.city-data.com/top2/c424.html
[3] City of Visalia - Police Department
http://www.ci.visalia.ca.us/depts/police_department/default.asp
[4] Interview with Terry Ommen at his home in Visalia, Calif. by the author, Oct. 2008.
[5] Interview with Lt. Steve Puder of the Visalia Police Department during his second day on the job by telephone with the author, Oct. 2008.
[6] Ommen interview.
[7] Interview with former Police Chief Bruce McDermott on the street near his home in Visalia, Calif. with the author, Oct. 2008.
[8] Ommen interview.
[9] “Tributes Paid John Ward on Retirement”, Visalia Times-Delta, April 1965, in the private archive of Terry Ommen.
[10] “Lt. John Ward To Retire As Juvenile Officer”, VTD, June 16, 1964, in the private archive of Terry Ommen.
[11] Various newspaper clippings from the scrapbooks of Lt. John Ward, in the private archive of Terry Ommen.
[12] Letter to Mr. Frank D. Bentzen, chief of police, from the Visalia Country Club, June 25, 1959, in the private archive of Terry Ommen.
[13] Ward scrapbooks, in Ommen archive.
[14] Letter to “Chief Paul F. Finley, All Brother Officers”, Nov. 6, 1946, in the private archive of Terry Ommen.
[15] Interview with Sally Goeringer by telephone with the author, Oct. 2008.
[16] “Slices of Time,” an article on the wisdom of Lt. John William Ward, March 14, 1997, in the private archive of Terry Ommen.
[17] “Lt. John Ward To Retire As Juvenile Officer”, VTD, June 16, 1964, in the private archive of Terry Ommen.
[18] Goeringer interview.
[19] Ward scrapbooks, Ommen archive.

A Chance Meeting

When I said I was ready to write, there was actually one more person I was hoping to talk to, and today I ran into the former chief of police who also happens to be my neighbor, Bruce McDermott, who I mentioned in an earlier post. I was able to get an important last couple of piece of information from him, one of historic importance and the other that will add flavor.

The New Man in Charge

I hit a snag that cost me a few days. Lt. Perry Phipps was the head of the investigations division, but he's moved on, and the day I contacted his office last week was his last day on the job. I wasn't able to talk to the new man in charge, Lt. Steve Puder, until today. Now I've got all the background I need to get the project written.

John Ward's Daughter

In talking with Terry Ommen about the history of the Visalia PD, he introduced me to an early member of the detective squad, John Ward. Ward was essentially the No. 2 man at the VPD until he retired in the 1960s after he started there in the late 1940s. I interviewed his daughter by telephone, and with that interview, the interview with Ommen and newspaper clippings, I now have a good idea of who this man was and I am going to make him the central figure in my final project.

I think Ward makes a very good icon for the difference between a real and a fictional detective. Ward's daughter, Sally, also gave me some insight into the internal politics of the early days of the VPD that I won't use in the paper because I feel like it would be too controversial since some of these people are still alive and living in the area.

The Former Chief

One of my neighbors is a former Visalia PD chief of police. Bruce McDermott was the youngest chief of police in the state when he was appointed, but he was forced to retire far earlier than he would have liked because of Parkinson's syndrome. Bruce is very open about his illness, so I don't feel uncomfortable talking about it here. In fact, when he had deep-brain stimulation electrodes implanted about a year ago, I wrote an article about the procedure for a local magazine.

I talked to Bruce yesterday, and he's agreed to give me a more context for how the VPD operates today.

The Historian Policeman

I visited with Terry Ommen at his home office, and he was able to fill me in on the structure of the Visalia Police Department as it is now versus how it was when the first detectives began working here. It's good context, and I'll be including the history in my paper.

Terry also introduced me to the man I think will be my central character, a juvenile detective named John Ward who operated from the late 1940s into the early 1960s. I'll be working the Visalia Times-Delta for articles, and I've got contact information for Ward's daughter, who still lives in Visalia.