Front Desk Murder
In July, an early morning holdup attempt at the front desk turned tragic when the night clerk, 50-year-old Carl Aldinger, was shot and killed. Hotel guests alerted by the gunfire rushed to the lobby but by the time they arrived Aldinger was dying behind the front desk. He’d been shot three times in the chest and twice in the back. The hotel manager, Albert Smith, estimated that there was only about three dollars in the till.
A suspect was arrested in late August. Farrington Hill, age 29, a cowboy and paroled convict, had been identified as the killer of a clerk in a nightclub in Las Vegas. During questioning, he confessed to killing Aldinger at the Garden. He also admitted he had kidnapped a taxi driver in San Bernardino, whom he forced into driving him to Los Angeles.
Hill was jailed in Las Vegas but managed to escape two months later. He was arrested in El Paso and returned to Las Vegas, where he escaped a second time, on New Year’s Eve. He was arrested for a third time in Bakersfield, but not before pulling a gun on the deputy sheriff and having to be subdued by the deputy’s partner.
Hill was returned to Los Angeles, where police had uncovered other crimes that resulted in nine indictments. In May he pleaded guilty to killing Aldinger and avoided a jury trial. He was sentenced to death at San Quentin. When his time came, in January 1944, he made a strange request to the warden.
“Have you got ‘Tales from the Vienna Woods?'” He’d first heard the classical waltz by Johann Straus while hiding near a bandstand in a park after a robbery.
The prison library didn’t have a copy, and the record shops were all closed. With no other recourse, the warden improvised. He assembled the prison band in the mess hall and recorded their attempt to play from memory. Hill listened to the recording over and over on his last night. The warden set up the record player in the gas chamber so he could hear the waltz as he died.
The murder at the hotel’s front desk was the worst crime in the Garden’s history, but it wasn’t the only crime. Amy Porter’s list of incidents at the Garden started with the death of the desk clerk: “A stick-up man murdered a night clerk,” she wrote, and a “beautiful Garden waitress was arrested for peddling narcotics — they said she carried the stuff in her pompadour. A jealous husband broke into his wife’s villa and put all her clothes in the bathtub and set them on fire.”