Mark Gribben’s posts on The Malefactor’s Register are better than 85% of any true crime series out there. ‘The Murder Of Captain Wanderwell” should be on the short list of the all-tie great Los Angeles true crime stories.
Take a suspected German spy, his beautiful wife, a soldier-of-fortune with a grudge, throw in a British peer, a mysterious “man in grey,” allegations of mutiny, and an unsolved murder aboard a barely seaworthy ship manned by an amateur crew of adventurers and you have a Hollywood melodrama that seems to write itself.
But the murder of 43-year-old Captain Walter Wanderwell in 1932 wasn’t dreamed up by Tinseltown scriptwriters. It happened in Long Beach not too far from Hollywood when Wanderwell, born Valerian Johannes Tieczynski — a German-Pole, was preparing his two-masted schooner, the Carma for a South Sea adventure cruise.