A Beat for Grandma

As a reporter on the San Francisco Chronicle, Bernice Freeman, 48, in her spare time once edited a weekly in nearby San Rafael. On her staff was an amiable cub reporter named George Boles. "George didn't turn out to be a very good reporter," she recalls, "but he had a flair for excitement and wrote the most marvelous stories. Only we couldn't print them--libel, you know." So his career as a reporter was short. When Bernice Freeman gave up the weekly job and began devoting all her time to the Chronicle, George fell into the habit of calling her from time to time "just to say hello." Several days ago, Boles got in touch with Reporter Freeman once again, and this time he had more than a friendly "hello"; last week his message touched off one of the biggest murder stories San Francisco papers have had in years. The murderer: George Boles.

"I Did It!" Boles, 28, had been arrested last month at Nevada City, 140 miles from San Francisco, as a suspect in the murder of Edmund Hansen, one of several recent killings in the past two years around the gold mines of the Mother Lode country in the Sierras. The police suspected a gang of hoodlums led by an ex-convict named Jack Santo, now on trial in Los Angeles for another murder. Boles, who had often been seen with members of the Santo gang, denied knowing anything about the Hansen murder, but repeatedly asked to see Chronicle Reporter Freeman. Finally the police agreed.

When Bernice Freeman, a grandmother who has four daughters (one older than Boles), entered his Nevada City cell, she greeted George warmly: "What gives, honey?" Answered George sadly: "It doesn't look so good." He said he was innocent of the Hansen murder, and blamed his arrest on "a web of circumstances." Reporter Freeman checked the evidence against him, then put it to George straight: "If you'll tell me positively that you had nothing to do with the Hansen murder, I'll do everything I can to get a good criminal lawyer to help you." He thought a "minute, then said quietly: "I can't do that to you, Bernie. I did it."

"The Bad Man." Within an hour, she had his full confession, involving the Santo gang just as the police had suspected. Reporter Freeman knew just how to keep her story exclusive; George dictated his confession to the police but held off signing it for a day. When the Chronicle broke its Page One exclusive, the police were deluged with calls from Hearst's rival Examiner and later the Call-Bulletin. There was no confession yet, newsmen were correctly told. For two days the Chronicle played Bernice Freeman's beat, until Boles finally signed the confession.

Goaded into producing their own exclusive by the Chronicle's beat, the Examiner and Call-Bulletin feverishly set out to try to solve another in the series of murders, the killing of a grocer and three children in a $7,000 payroll robbery. Hearst men got the four-year-old daughter of the grocer, the only survivor, to identify the killer as one of the Santo gang. Then the Chronicle went to work and proved the identification a fake. The Hearstlings had shown the girl the picture with the lower half of his face covered, and under such circumstances the girl's mother said her daughter would call anyone "the bad man who did it." It was clearly Reporter Bernice Freeman's week. Said she: "This has been the most exciting week of my life. But I still am very fond of George."

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