A Cold Case in a Cold Place

Author will Delve into A Cold Case in a Cold Place: Murder Mystery in Alaska is Like No Other The San Fernando Valley branch of the California Writers Club (serving Los Angeles and Ventura counties) is pleased to welcome award-winning author and journalist James T. Bartlett as the keynote speaker on Saturday, November 7 at 1 pm. Bartlett will be speaking at the Motion Picture and Television Fund Wasserman Campus (Saban Center) at 23388 Mulholland Drive, Woodland Hills, 91364 with a presentation titled “Murder in Alaska and Tragedy in Hollywood: The Story of the Alaskan Blonde.” Lectures are free for CWC members. Guests can purchase admission for $10 at the door. “I was born in England,” says Bartlett, “and I never imagined that one day I’d be travelling to the center of Alaska to investigate a murder from the 1950s. It reminded me of ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice or Double Indemnity,’ but it was a real-life film noir.” The facts were that in the early hours of October 17, 1953 in Fairbanks, Alaska, local businessman Cecil Wells was shot in his bed and his wife Diane badly beaten before two intruders escaped with money and jewelry. Or did they? Someone dropped a dime to the police, suggesting that Diane was having an affair with Johnny Warren, a local Black musician. In the time of Jim Crow, this scandalous element made the story go national, and it was covered in Life, Newsweek, Jet, Ebony and many of the pulp detective magazines. Diane – blonde, attractive and 20 years younger than Cecil – was his fifth wife, and local gossip quickly guided the police towards a theory that she conspired with her lover Warren to kill Cecil for his fortune, and both were charged with first-degree murder. But was that true? A sex and money mystery that happened in territorial Alaska and ended up in the hotels of Hollywood, the Cecil Wells murder was investigated for years, but never officially solved. Over five years of research, Bartlett interviewed witnesses and…