Caryl Chessman was a small-fry criminal. But he became an international crime celebrity when he was condemned to die not for murder but for two sexual assaults committed during a Los Angeles crime ...

Buck Busfield is pondering the finer points of one of the most important phone calls in California political history. It was Feb. 18, 1960, the eve of the long-delayed execution of Caryl Chessman. A ...

In 1956 the author of Chessman and His Nine Lives on Death Row, Terrence W. Cooney, was appointed by the California Supreme Court to argue the death penalty of Caryl Chessman who pleaded guilty to two ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Authorities remove Caryl Chessman's handcuffs at a post-conviction court hearing. He became a media star during his long battle to ...

One reason Californians will be voting, again, about the death penalty, next month, is because of a man named Caryl Chessman. He was called the “Red Light Bandit,” and he was executed in 1960 for ...

When convict Caryl Chessman went to his death in California’s gas chamber last Monday, he did so against the strenuous protests of hundreds of New Yorkers who met in Greenwich Village two days earlier ...

(Editor’s Note: A reading of Joe Rodota’s play Chessman, a work in progress, was performed at the B Street Theatre in Sacramento this weekend.) Crime never ceases to intrigue, especially its ...

Toward midnight the lights still burned in California’s state capitol in Sacramento. Cecil Poole, clemency secretary to Governor Edmund Brown, rummaged through the bales of telegrams that flooded the ...