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.
Wanderwell lived a life that most people can only dream about. He was a world traveler who literally been-there, done-that. His resume included trips to the wastelands of Siberia, journeys through the darkest parts of the Amazon, treks across the scorching sands of the Arabian and Saharan deserts– where he witnessed the opening of King Tut’s tomb — and numerous sea voyages.
He was a mysterious man who achieved in death the notoriety he courted in life. During World War I, Wanderwell was suspected of being a spy for Germany and was interned in the federal prison in Atlanta. He was also once charged with unlawfully wearing a military uniform to which he was not entitled.
After his release from detention (his ties to Germany were never proved) he met a Broadway chorus girl named Nell, and they were married in Alabama. The marriage failed after seven years.
In Paris, he had met Galcia Hall, a Canadian girl who had run away from a French convent school in search of adventure, and the husband and wife took the young girl on one of the first motor car tours of the European and Asian continents. He dubbed the stately, 23-year-old blonde “Aloha” and it was by that name that she appeared in the press. Somewhere along the way, the first Mrs. Wanderwall became superfluous.
“Too many women caused our marriage to go on the rocks in 1926,” the former Mrs. Wanderwell told the United Press when her ex-husband was killed. “I came back to the United States alone. I guess it was love at first sight for them,” Wanderwell’s first wife said.
Shortly after Nell divorced Wanderwall, the adventurer and Aloha were married.
Wanderwell had no money of his own, but he was skilled at getting others to subsidize his adventures, usually by taking the bored children of wealthy families on tours to exotic locales. Together with Aloha, the tours visited the Pyramids and Sphinx, the Great Wall of China, the Eiffel Tower, Mayan and Aztec ruins in Mexico and Central America, and Angkor Wat in Indochina. In the last trip before the Wanderwells arrived in Southern California, they travelled more than 35,000 miles.
The Carma was a 20-year-old craft that had been seized by federal Prohibition agents with a cargo of 300 cases of whiskey when Wanderwell bought it for $2,500 and began recruiting a crew for a South Sea cruise of “adventure and riches.” The ship was described in the press as being “about as seaworthy as a cardboard raft,” but Wanderwell managed to skirt Coast Guard regulations by listing the dozen adventurers who had paid about $200 for the trip as crewmembers.
Most of the seven-man, five-woman “crew” had never set foot on an ocean-going craft, and just two of the men were qualified as able-bodied seamen.
Had the trip occurred a few decades later, the crew of the Carma would have been considered Beatniks or hippies. The group intended to be self-sustaining during the trek by selling paintings and poetry created along the way. The Wanderwells were also negotiating the film rights to the trip.
Wanderwell also wanted to use the trip to publicize his idea for an international police force that would make war obsolete. He had been trying to sell the League of Nations on the idea without success. The trip, he thought, might help create international interest in the idea. Viewing the League of Nations as an international government, Walter wanted to be the head of the League’s police force. To do so, he organized the Work Around the World Educational Club, or WAWEC. Wanderwell assumed the title of the Captain Commanding, with multiple unit leaders around the globe under his direct command.
To join, members had to swear off alcohol and tobacco and adhere to a military-like dress code. The initial sign-up fee was $5, which quickly rose to $200 when WAWEC proved to be a popular idea.
Wanderwell’s money-making schemes earned him a reputation of scam artist; the ultra-paranoid J. Edgar Hoover had his G-men keep a very close watch on WAWEC, because he believed that Wanderwell was a con man and because he feared the suspected spy was building a private army but the FBI never had sufficient evidence to catch him doing anything more than wearing a uniform with a rank he didn’t earn.
On December 5, 1932, Wanderwell was alone in the cabin he shared with Aloha and their two young children. Aloha was in Hollywood making arrangements to sell the movie rights to the adventure, many of the crew was ashore enjoying a last shore leave, and the remainder of the crew — three men and two women — was in the galley talking with eager anticipation of the trip that was to begin shortly.
It was a moonless, foggy night and the tired schooner’s creaking wooden decks and hull almost drowned out the bells and horns that sounded throughout the Long Beach Harbor.
The only incident that had disturbed the preparations for the long sea voyage was the strange disappearance of Wanderwell’s revolver that had disappeared several days before. Despite a diligent search by the entire crew, the weapon was never found.
The mess hall conversation was interrupted by a face appearing in the open porthole.
“Is Captain Wanderwell aboard?” asked the man, dressed in a gray coat with the collar pulled up and a cap covering his eyes.
“Yes,” one of the crew replied. “Are you the electrician?”
The stranger answered that he was not the electrical expert the crew was expecting.
The man was directed to the captain’s cabin and the crew all said they heard his footsteps on the deck.
“Hello!” they heard Wanderwell say, more in a surprised manner than one of fear or alarm.
They all testified that they did not hear any conversation, but just a few moments after Wanderwell’s greeting, they heard a single gunshot.
Racing to the cabin, the crew found no sign of the man in gray, but found Wanderwell already dead on the deck. He had been shot through the back. The single bullet passed through his heart.
Robbery was not the motive for the murder, for Wanderwell’s wallet containing $600 in cash was still in his pocket.
At first police speculated that a member or members of the crew killed the captain and detained the group overnight for questioning. Aloha Wanderwell, who had the most solid alibi of the crew and was never thought to have been involved in the murder, did not make things easy for police when she told them that Wanderwell had accumulated many enemies during his lifetime.
“I can think of a thousand men would might want to kill the captain,” she said. There was serious speculation that the womanizing Wanderwell had been killed by the husband or lover of a woman he had seduced, while others guessed that Wanderwell was murdered by agents of a foreign power who feared the WAWEC’s growing strength.
However, police quickly centered their investigation around a former WAWEC crewmember who had led an attempted mutiny against Wanderwell during his last voyage from Buenos Aires to San Francisco. That crewman, a Welsh “soldier-of-fortune” named William “Curly” Guy had been placed in irons aboard the ship and deposited, along with his wife, ashore in Panama.
Guy recently caught up with the Wanderwells (it wasn’t hard to track their movements because of the publicity that they generated) and threatened Wanderwell with violence when the captain refused to return money that Guy had paid for passage to the United States.
“I went to his hotel and found two men who were about to sign up for another of Wanderwell’s cruises,” he told police. “I told them what happened to me and warned them not to have any dealings with him. But I did not kill him.”
After four of the five crewmembers aboard the Carma identified Guy as the mysterious man in gray, he was charged with killing Wanderwell. Guy, however, had an alibi — he was having dinner with friends miles away when Wanderwell was shot. Six people corroborated his alibi. He made no bones about his feelings for Wanderwell, however.
“I hated Wanderwell. I had reason to hate him,” he told police. “I would not have minded killing him, but I would not have shot him in the back.”
Guy went to trial in February 1933, and after a two-week trial, he was acquitted of the crime. The jurors said the eyewitnesses, who hedged while on the stand, could not overcome Guy’s alibi. Guy, however, didn’t enjoy freedom for long. He was immediately arrested by federal authorities on immigration violations and deported.
Wanderwell’s dream of an international police force died with him, however many of the principals in the strange case went on to illustrious (if somewhat tragic) careers.
Guy was deported to Great Britain after the trial and continued his soldier-of-fortune ways by fighting with the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War, and with the Chinese partisans after the invasion of China by Japan. During World War II he served as a flight instructor and then as a pilot transporting warplanes across the Atlantic. He was also pilot-in-command when Canadian Prime Minister MacKenzie flew to England to consult with Winston Churchill. Guy reportedly made more transatlantic trips than anyone else before he was killed in a crash in 1941.
The only other person arrested during the Wanderwell investigation, Lord Eugene Montague, younger son of the Earl of Manchester, went on to serve in the French Foreign Legion. Montague was only arrested on a visa violation and was not a suspect in Wanderwell’s death.
Aloha Wanderwell continued her globetrotting ways, marrying again in 1934. She and her second husband, also named Walter, after heading an expedition to Indochina, settled for a time in Cincinnati, Ohio and later in California. She died in California in 1996 at the age of 88.