This August I asked the Beverly Hills Police Department for the file on crime case number 46176. It is a homicide from 1947.

They wrote back twenty-four days later. The records exist. They are in the department's possession. And they are exempt from disclosure, and will not be released.

Then they told me the rest of it. The case is presently assigned to the Crimes Against Persons unit of the Detective Bureau. The file is on permanent retention — kept indefinitely, not subject to any planned destruction. And the department's summary of the incident, written out for me this year, is one sentence long:

"Unknown assailant shot into window of residence fatally wounding victim."

Seventy-nine years. Still assigned. Still unknown.

On the night of Friday, the twentieth of June, 1947, a man sat down on a chintz sofa in a rented house on North Linden Drive and opened a newspaper. A few minutes before eleven, somebody standing in the driveway next door rested a thirty-caliber carbine on a rose trellis, fourteen feet from the window, and emptied the magazine into the room.

There were nine shell casings in that driveway the next morning. There were four people awake upstairs, and a man sitting on the same sofa. Nobody saw anybody.

This show is called Forgotten True Crime, and Benjamin Siegel is not forgotten. The murder is. Everybody knows the man on the sofa. Almost nobody knows what was actually done about it, or who stopped it being done, or that six people came to the funeral and it lasted four minutes.

If you have a copy of Fortnight magazine for the fourteenth of July, 1947 — a Los Angeles news weekly, Siegel on the cover — I would like to hear from you. I know it exists because the publisher mailed one to the FBI. I have never been able to find one. I'd also like the Herald-Express or the Beverly Hills Citizen for the twenty-first of June, 1947.

Content note: this episode describes a shooting and its results, and it quotes 1947 newspapers in the language they were printed in. Nothing in it is gratuitous, but if that's not for you today, sit this one out. There'll be another one.

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Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio.

Music by TrackTribe — copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com