page_title: Westlake, Los Angeles
section_title: Notable crimes
hierarchical_section_title: Westlake, Los Angeles / Emergency services / Police / Notable crimes
caption_attribution_description: English: This section of page 1 of the Los Angeles Herald of August 14, 1908, shows photos of the house where H.J. Diffy killed his son, beneath which are photos of Mrs. Mary Duffy, wife of the slayer; Mrs. Ada La Con, his daughter; H.J. Duffy, the killer, and Fred Duffy, his son. The address of the house at the left was 247 North Mountain View Avenue, Westlake, California, where the son died, and that of the room at the right, where the daughter died, was 453 North Westlake Avenue. Upon trial, the killer was found insane.
context_page_description: Westlake is a residential and commercial neighborhood in Central Los Angeles, California. It was developed in the 1920s, but many of its elegant mansions have been turned into apartments, and many new multiple-occupancy buildings have been constructed.
  Westlake is a high-density area, with a young and heavily Latino population. It contains many primary and secondary schools.
context_section_description: 1906. On August 16, 1906, Annie Sanderson, 45, was slashed to death by her husband, Edward H. Sanderson, president of the California Truck Company, in their residence at 1336 Westlake Avenue. He then committed suicide by cutting his throat with the same knife.
  1908. Wielding a sharpened ax, Henry J. Dufty, 56, slew his sleeping 24-year-old son,  Fred Dufty, a machinist, in the son's bungalow at 247 North Mountain View Avenue on August 13, then walked uphill to nearby 453 North Westlake Avenue, where he used the same instrument to decapitate his pregnant daughter, Zaidah La Com. He returned to his home, where he cut his own throat, attempting suicide. He had previously purchased gravestones for himself and his two children, which had already been laid at Evergreen Cemetery. A jury trial resulted in a verdict of insanity.
  1922. On February 2, the body of motion picture director William Desmond Taylor was found on the floor of the living room of his bungalow at 404 Alvarado Street. He had been shot. The killer was never found.
  1948. Joyce Corbley or Corbly, age given as either 22 or 38, died after shooting herself in the head on June 26 when she played a game of Russian roulette in a room at the Ansonia Apartments, 2205 West Sixth Street.
  1996. On March 29, Linda Morimoto, a noted physician of the Japanese American community, was found bludgeoned to death on the floor of her ransacked home in the 400 block of Lafayette Park Place. No arrests were made.
  2010. Two nights of violent protests troubled the Westlake neighborhood after a policeman fatally shot Manuel Jaminez, a Guatemalan construction worker who spoke no English and very little Spanish, at Sixth Street and Union Avenue on September 5. Police said Jaminez had threatened a woman with a knife, which he refused to drop.
  2010. The mummified remains of a still-born baby and an infant, brother and sister, were discovered in August, wrapped in newspapers from the 1930s and hidden inside a trunk in the basement of an apartment building near MacArthur Park. They were identified as the children of Janet Mann Barrie, who had lived in the building and who died in Canada at age 97 in 1994.
  2012. Pedro Martinez, a 26-year-old gang member, was sentenced to 100 years to life in prison for killing Andres Ordonez, 25, a church deacon who was trying to stop a woman from spray-painting, or tagging, an outside wall at Iglesia Principe de Paz Church on Beverly Boulevard. Ordonez was slain on November 4, 2012, when he and a fellow parishioner exited the church to stop the woman's vandalism; Martinez stepped from a nearby vehicle and opened fire, killing one and wounding the other. Nearby residents said that gang members had threatened violence against those who complained about or painted over graffiti. The woman was arrested and faces trial.
caption: Westlake crime: front page of Los Angeles Herald for August 14, 1908
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