Year 1931, when the frightening story told by a young woman led to murder, and the territory of Hawaii almost lost its civilian government, when Hawaii's Unsolved Mysteries continues. She went for a walk in Waikiki one summer night in 1931. But the shocking story she told about that night became the motive for a murder. And even the President of the United States got involved by demanding that the convicted killers be set free.
It was Saturday evening, September 12th. Thalia and her husband, Lieutenant Thomas Massey, had joined several other young Navy officers and their wives at a night spot called the Olawai Inn. It was here, beside the Ala Wai Canal, near where the Veterans of Foreign Wars Clubhouse is now. Thalia was in a bad mood that night, so she decided to go for a walk alone.
She crossed over the canal on the Kalakaua River. Avenue bridge and then turned right onto Ena Road or John Ena Road as it was known in those days. Here where Ena Road makes a curve she says a car pulled to the side several young men jumped out forced her inside and then the car sped away toward Ala Moana.
The vehicle crossed the bridge over the Ala Wai Canal and headed toward town passing Honolulu's smoldering garbage dump which three years later would be transformed into Ala Moana Park, and a swampy area, where nearly three decades later, Ala Moana Shopping Center would be built. Finally the car pulled off the road at the site of an abandoned airstrip at an old animal quarantine station. It was right over there where Ward Warehouse is today. Now back in 1931 there were just some broken concrete slabs and thick brush. It was right over there that, in Thalia Massey's own words, something terrible happened.
It was a few minutes past 1 a.m. Sunday, September 13th, when she stumbled out to Alamoana Road, flagged down a passing car, and through bruised and swollen lips, mumbled her request that she be driven home. Thalia and her husband lived in this house in Manoa. When Thomas couldn't find his wife at the Alawai Inn that night, he drove home with another Navy officer, then phoned his house.
Thalia answered and asked him to come home at once. When Thomas Massey saw his wife's battered, bloodied face, he called the police. Thalia Massey told the detectives who answered the call that her abductors beat her and took turns raping her.
But she said the scene was so dark she would not be able to identify them, and she said she did not see the license plate of the car when it drove away. However, while she was being treated at Queens Hospital, a police car was parked just outside the open window of the emergency room. From its radio, the police dispatcher's voice could be heard describing a car carrying several young men that had been involved in a traffic incident.
And the vehicle's license number, 58895, was repeated several times. An hour or so later, Thalia Massey gave police essentially the same description of the car involved in her abduction and its license number, which was only one numeral different from this one. Well, that led police to round up the five young men who had been in the car that night.
And during the next few days, those suspects, David Takai, Horace Eda, Henry Chang, Benny Ahakuelo, and Joseph Kahawai were paraded before Mrs. Massey on several occasions. Her memory continued to improve, and she began identifying the men as her attackers. Here in the Judiciary Building, they were put on trial for rape. but the jury members could not agree on their guilt or innocence, and a mistrial was declared. The jury's failure to convict the five men angered the Navy brass at Pearl Harbor and in Washington.
Mainland newspapers ran editorials claiming white women were not safe in Honolulu. There were demands from the newspapers and some members of Congress that the military take over Hawaii's territorial government. Meanwhile, rumors were circulating here in Honolulu that Thalia Massey was... actually beaten by a lover or even by her husband who discovered she was having an affair with another Navy officer. Amid this background of rumors and tension, authorities here searched for new evidence for the retrial of the five men.
At this point Thalia Massey's mother became a key player in the drama. Socialite Grace Fortescue came to Honolulu after learning of the attack on her daughter. She and Thalia's husband decided they could get the key evidence for the retrial by forcing a confession from one of the accused men. Their target was Joseph Kahawai. With the help of two Navy enlisted men, Edward Lord and Albert Jones, they drew up a fake legal summons and served it on Kahawai one morning as he was leaving the Judiciary Building.
With the bogus document, they enticed him into a car and headed for Grace Fortescue's rented cottage in Manoa. But a witness to the serving of the fake summons was suspicious and notified the authorities. Police started looking for the car. A few hours later, a police officer spotted the vehicle on Wai'alae Avenue and went after it. The suspect car led the officer on a high-speed chase all the way to the entrance to Honoma Bay, and it stopped only after the officer fired shots and forced the car to the side of the road.
In the car were Thomas Massey, Grace Fortescue, Navy enlisted man Edward Lord, and the body of Joseph Kahawai. He had been shot to death. A short time later, police arrested Albert Jones in Manoa. He still had the bogus summons in his pocket. The people in Honolulu were outraged at the killing of Kahawai.
The Navy, Washington politicians, and the mainland newspapers were outraged too. Not because a native Hawaiian had been murdered, but because a naval officer, two enlisted men, and a well-known socialite were charged with the crime. And there was more talk on the mainland of putting Hawaii under a military government. Grace Fortescue's wealthy friends on the mainland raised enough money to lure world-famous criminal defense lawyer Clarence Darrow out of retirement to defend her and the three Navy men. Thomas Massey was the only one of the four Darrow put on the witness stand during their trial here in the Judiciary Building.
Massey told of the abduction of Kahahawai and how the young Hawaiian was taken to Grace Fortescue's house in Manoa. Massey said he held a gun on Kahahawai and finally forced the Hawaiian to confess to the beating and rape of Massey's wife. Massey claimed at that point he blacked out and could not remember pulling the trigger.
Clarence Darrow's strategy was to prove that Thomas Massey was insane at that moment and was therefore not guilty of murder. That would also mean the other three could not be guilty of being accessories to that crime. But the jury did not agree. All four were convicted of manslaughter, a crime that carried a mandatory 10-year prison sentence.
The outrage on the mainland reached a fever pitch, and congressional measures were prepared to take away Hawaii's civilian government. That's when President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, got personally involved. He telephoned Hawaii's governor, Lawrence Judd, and told Judd the territory would lose its self-government if the convicted killers of Joseph Kahawai did not go free.
The president wanted the governor to pardon them. Judd didn't do that. Instead, after their formal sentencing, he had them brought to his office in Iolani Palace and formally shortened their 10-year prison terms to just one hour to be served sitting in his office.
When their brief sentences were over, the four, along with Thalia Massey, posed for a picture with Sheriff Gordon Ross. The governor later wrote about his shame at freeing them, but Hawaii's civilian government had been saved. In a few days, the Masses, Mrs. Fortescue, Lord, and Jones left for the mainland.
With Thalia gone, the four surviving defendants in the rape case could not be retried, so they were legally set free. And a mainland detective agency was called in to go over the evidence and try to determine what really happened to Thalia Massey that Saturday night she went for a walk in Waikiki. The detectives in their final report said the five young men could not be found.
have been her attackers. There were several witnesses that had placed them at a dance in Waikiki that night and other witnesses who saw them 20 minutes later at a house near town. There simply was not time enough for them to abduct, beat, and rape Thalia Massey. And although she obviously had suffered a beating, there was no evidence of rape. Thalia Massey had testified that before the police were notified, she had been so concerned about the possibility of venereal disease or pregnancy, she had cleansed herself.
But that act also washed away what might have been evidence of a sex crime. And the doctor who examined the undergarment she had worn that night testified that he didn't find any of the kind of evidence that might be expected had Mrs. Massey been raped by several men. A year after they left Hawaii, Thomas and Thalia Massey were divorced.
She died in 1963 of an overdose of barbiturates. It is likely she died without ever being certain about the identity of her assailants. There was one crucial bit of evidence that did not come out at the rape trial.
A doctor who had been treating Thalia Massey later revealed that she suffered from a disease that had drastically reduced her vision. He said had she been attacked in broad daylight, she probably could not have identified her attackers. At night, he said, it would have been impossible.
As for the murder of Joseph Kahawai, Albert Jones later told an author who was writing a book about the Massey case that it was he, Jones, who shot the young Hawaiian, not Thomas Massey. But he said Clarence Darrow felt the only chance he had of getting them all acquitted was to portray Thomas Massey as the one who fired the shot and to claim that Massey was insane. And after all those years, Jones said he still felt no remorse, no regret about murdering K'hahawai.
And as for the murder weapon, he said Thagiamassi's sister took the gun and threw it in some quicksand at a remote beach on Oahu. The location of that beach is also still a mystery.