LARRY PHILLIPS JR.

Are you sitting comfortably? For this will be a long read, but hopefully an enjoyable one.

Many years ago I wrote the original biography page for Larry Eugene Phillips Jr, based off commonly known information and extra little pieces we had managed to unearth.
About a year or so after I wrote that page I remember reading a quote in an article that was attempting to describe our studied duo that said of Phillips 'If anyone was born to fail it was Larry' or very similar words to that effect.
Simultaneously that quote both bothered me and intrigued me, and continued to do so for many years. The idea that he was somehow not in control of his own fate and no matter which way he turned he would have always been a criminal seemed somehow insulting to not only his life but to everyone's; yours, mine, that we have a predetermined destiny that we cannot change? Sorry but I did not and still do not buy that logic and the phrase used to present it to the reader smacked of lazy cliched writing with no explanation or effort from the author as to why they felt that Phillips was marked by fate. No examination of class, culture, environment, influence. Nothing. Just the quote.
Closely associated with that came the idea of generational criminality. We know now that Jr's father was a petty crook for many years, and continued to rack up court dates until only a year before he passed away. So for sure Sr, as we shall soon see, could have had a negative influence on his son, but where did Sr get it from? So I rewrote Jr's bio to include Sr's history, and then the floor of the rabbit hole collapsed under me and down into the depths I fell.
With a million things to do that are associated with this project I stalled out and couldn't focus on any one thing, I needed something new to kickstart the creative mindset so I did what I seem to do best and I started digging into dusty old files, newspapers and anything I could get my hands on and piecing together all that I found. What I found was something related to generational criminality, and a story which could warrant a website in its own right but as it is related to the Phillips family it was decided to include it here.
Once I started in on the Phillips family tree I found it extraordinarily easy to trace his lineage, it was only when I made it back to 1720 that I decided I had probably gone just a tiny bit too far. The irony of Jr's family being so easy to trace and him trying to live a hidden life was also not lost on me.
So where shall we start? Certainly not 1720 that's for sure!
Instead let us start around the turn of the 1900's, some 1500 miles northeast of Los Angeles; for the Phillips clan were not a southern California clan, nor were they originally a Denver, Colorado clan. They came from Iowa, born of farmers and hardy stock.
Ready? Let's go.

Nestled tight into a bend of the Missouri river one could be forgiven for thinking that the town of Council Bluffs was little more than an overspill from the neighboring Omaha, Nebraska yet it was more than that. In 1863 Council Bluffs had been designated the eastern terminus for the Union Pacific transcontinental rail line; the rail line which plays a part in the coming story.


Huge rail yards dominated the city and both Council Bluffs and Omaha and would be instrumental, nay critical in the transportation of just about everything you could think of from West to East and vice versa. Whole industries sprang up around the rail service, whole towns, whole cities and they became majority employers in some of those areas.
In 1899 Delbert Phillips, a man who listed his occupation as a farmer, and Eva McCafferty saw the birth of their first child, Grace Pearl Phillips.
On the 11th September the following year in the small town of Crescent which numbered less than 200 inhabitants they would welcome twin sons into the world. Earl and Merle.
Over the next nine years the family moved the nine miles south from Crescent to Council Bluffs and Delbert and Eva would produce an additional five children, Orville, Mary, Floyd, Leonard and Lester.
The family would hardly be any different to thousands around them, and with six sons one would expect a fair amount of shenanigans, but Delbert and Eva were probably not expecting the notoriety that two, maybe three of their sons would bring to the family in short order.


Age sixteen is where we first meet Earl; for he got himself into some trouble with the law when he sent an obscene letter to his cousin. Earl's cousin told her father, a neighbor was blamed, cleared and the postal investigators subsequently landed at Earl's door. The result was the sixteen year old Earl ended up with a court date, which he missed or skipped and found himself on a $300 bond ($4,728 today). Information on this case is sparse beyond this point.


Earl is then off the radar until 12th September 1918, one day after his 18th birthday, when his military service draft card was filled out in what was the third and final supplemental Selective Service registration for that year. Listed on the card was his occupation, mail handler.


The handwritten A that you can see at the top of the draft card is believed to indicate what would later be termed as 1A, fit for service and not exempted from the draft. However being issued a draft card does not indicate that they entered service and I can find no records for Earl Robert Phillips beyond what you see above.

Merle, Earl's brother, received the same card on the same day, and for him I can find no responsive military records either.



Mail handler. Remember that from Earl's draft card?
The twins both had jobs sorting mail carried by Union Pacific in and out of Council Bluffs, and it is to those mail trains and their contents that we must now focus.

Before we dive into the story of Earl, Merle and the mail train I must explain something.
Like the North Hollywood event some seventy seven years later there is a lot written about the event, and like the NHWD the incident that follows became a catalyst for change, but finding the true story has not been far from straightforward in both cases.
I had masses of old newspaper articles all regurgitating the same story, the same timeline etc, and felt that I was ready to write this piece. Until I stumbled across two newspaper articles written a week after the event and seven years later which were so rich in detail I could hardly believe that the other sources would choose to leave these details out. It is to those articles, the November 20th 1920 edition of the Des Moines Register, and the article from 14th August 1927 from the same publication that I will lean on heavily in telling this story.

At 6:41pm November 13th 1920 the Burlington No.8 train crawled slowly eastward from the Union Pacific Transfer yard in Council Bluffs, Iowa, its final destination: Chicago.



The No.8 had several short stops to make and it was during one of those stops that four young men planned to liberate the contents of one of the mail cars. Those young men guessed that their endeavors would not be uncovered until many hours later when the train arrived in Chicago.
As the engine pulled away from the transfer Merle Phillips stepped up into the cab and asked the engineer, a well known and respected Alonzo Quimby if he could ride with him to the Burlington station. Quimby, knowing Merle worked on the trains, agreed.




Merle though, was nervous, and Quimby noticed. The pair engaged in conversation to pass the time and four minutes later they arrived at the first stop; the Illinois Central and Burlington switch.

With the train at a halt, Merle's younger brother Orville accompanied by nineteen year old Fred Poffenbarger broke a small window on the unoccupied mail car, unlatched the door and gained entry.


On the north side of the tracks was twenty-three year old Keith Collins waiting in a stolen car. Fred and Orville proceeded to heave ten mail sacks out of the open door to the waiting Keith.


The first five sacks hit the ground in rapid succession, to be scooped up and thrown into the back of the stolen getaway car, five more sacks came out of the door but instead of seeing Collins retrieving them Poffenbarger and the younger Phillips brother saw disappearing tail lights. Keith had done them dirty.
Both burglars exited the mail car, closing the door, scooped up a bag in each hand and made their escape, no doubt panicking quite hard and cursing the departed Collins.
The robbery had taken just four minutes.

Sitting in the rear of the train was Burlington foreman Dan Newbury and he just happened to notice the sole remaining red striped sack as the train started lumbering forward after the switch. Recognizing the bag for what it was Dan and his associate ran full steam through the next five carriages to reach the mail car that was secured behind the engine.
Whilst the stampede was happening through the carriages back in the engine Merle made his excuses and before the train gathered too much speed he stepped off. He had asked for a ride to the Burlington complex, and hopped off with still a mile to go. This odd action coupled with his nervousness raised Alonzo's radar.
Newbury discovered that the mail car had been burgled, by 7pm the decision was made to keep the train running. Quimby's leg of the run was to end at Creston, Iowa some 80 miles east as the crow flies and during the time it took him to guide the No.8 there he got to thinking. In the six years he had known Merle never once had Merle hopped into his cab, let alone asked him to dead-head to another station. Quimby smelled a rat.
When the train came to its scheduled halt in Creston Quimby hit the phones, calling the Burlington special agent and telling him 'Merle Phillips is in on that robbery, he knows all about it, get him'.

Now whether Merle's twin brother Earl knew anything about the robbery is not provable but he was the first to be arrested. Whether Alonzo said Merle and the cops heard Earl is also unknown but remains a distinct possibility. Despite Earl's story changing multiple times and him being in the area of the rail yards on the night in question the investigators seemed to have no way to tie him to the crime and he was eventually released without charge. As soon as Merle showed up for his shift the following night the bracelets went on and he was away for a four hour interview, and soon a story started to flow.
He admitted that he had been in the engineer's cab to act as a distraction for two men he had just met (odd when one of them was his seventeen year old brother but anyhow let us continue).

Merle, on the hook, continued to twist and turn but steadfastly refused to drop his brother's name. Yet what he did drop was enough for Fred Poffenbarger to be scooped up.
Then something unexpected, Orville surrendered to authorities and cleared Earl of any involvement, he also tried to get Merle of the hook but Merle was done for, Merle's own statement and that of Alonzo Quimby had made sure of that. Orville's actions in trying to clear his two brothers, when he for sure knew at least one of them was involved casts suspicion on the validity of his statement. Just how uninvolved was Earl?
Fred Poffenbarger was the polar opposite of Orville and gave investigators the silent treatment, he had been around the block before but two days of no sleep and he too broke.

$800,000 ($12.6m) of bonds had allegedly been burned in a kitchen stove throughout the remainder of the night of the robbery; the boys appeared to see this mass of paper as only a link to their crime and maybe did not fully understand the value of what they were burning. They were interested in more tangible assets, namely currency. To highlight that mentality three diamond bracelets were also found discarded in the corner of one of the men's kitchen's to which Orville offhandedly remarked:
'There ought to be two or three more around here somewhere, we had so much money that nobody wanted the diamonds so we threw them away'.
Investigators didn't buy into the story of the burned bonds, not then, nor in the weeks, months and years that followed.
When investigators looked at the loss they first believed that it might be up to half a million, the final tally was closer to $3.5m ($55,000,000 in 2024). Out of that vast haul only $50,000 was believed to be bank notes, and remember that Keith Collins still had not been found and nobody knew yet what his split was.
It was believed to be the largest train robbery committed anywhere in the world, ever, and all allegedly planned and executed by four young men in four minutes and without violence.
It is at this point we must start to ask questions of the story, for many of these pieces have been overlooked in official recounting of what happened post robbery.
Whilst Merle, Orville and Fred cooled their heels investigators came across other information.
Orville and Fred had given a friend, Harry Reid, $15,000 cash and he had promptly hidden it around the home where he rented a room.

We know that Merle, Orville and Fred had been handed $25,000 by Keith Collins some time after the robbery and yet despite hard cash being what the men were looking for we are asked to believe that they each gave away 60% of their split to a friend who allegedly played no part at all in the nights proceedings.
Let us then examine the home where he was lodging.
Investigators bought Harry Reid back to the home owned by Mr & Mrs T. Daly, and after being 'induced to tell the hiding places' and whilst being covered by two pistols Reid started to dig.
In a chicken coop, by a fence, under a trash pile bundles of $10 bills wrapped in cloth came to light.

Yet more information came to light when Keith Collins girlfriend ratted him out to the police.
Collins was a bit of a character by all accounts, he had served in the 302nd Aero Squadron during the First World War but had never seen action, nor left the US during that conflict. He was a mechanic.
Yet he was apparently often seen around Omaha wearing the uniform of a pilot with the rank of captain and his chest decorated with medals. Stolen Valor? It would seem so, with an added flavor of probable confidence trickster thrown in.

On the night of the robbery he had bailed out, returned home and asked his girlfriend to marry him stating that he now had 'big money'. His plan was that they marry immediately and abscond to Europe for the next year. She was, rightly so, highly suspicious and told the police. Collins allegedly met up later with the returning members of the robbery and handed them $25,000 in currency as their share of the five mail sacks he had bailed out with. How he didn't take a beating for running away mid-job I don't know.
He also heard that he was being hunted and lit out to another state, taking with him according to his cohorts that remained in jail, two bags containing fifty $10,000 Liberty bonds and an unknown quantity of cash. Law enforcement would track him to Nebraska, but couldn't lay hands on him, until his brother called in that he had lit out for Oklahoma. Two weeks after the robbery the handcuffs finally went on.
When he was bought back to face justice his mother attempted to commit suicide.
Whilst investigators led by Claude H. Glenn pieced together the simplistic but effective robbery it must have become clear that whilst a national embarrassment for the Union Pacific railroad that they had somewhat gotten off lightly, only ten of 130 bags. How much would the loss have been if the car had been cleared?

These youths, barely men, had expected to get maybe a few hundred dollars and disappear into the night, instead they landed on the score of a lifetime. Instead of the half interested railway police tracking them they felt the full force of the Federal government.
Investigators also learned that all criminals are not created equal, even those in commission of a single crime. Collins, the eldest, had taken the lion's share of the loot. The rest was divided up between the Phillips brothers and Poffenberger. Collins had half of the $50,000 cash haul from the bags, and took five mail sacks with him. His 25k cash haul ($390,000 today) was discovered in his home after he had fled Council Bluffs. The contents of his mail sacks were never disclosed; Collins would say they contained bonds and fearing they could be tracked he packed them in a suitcase and dumped them of the bridge pictured below.


The river was searched for weeks, no suitcase was ever found. One story says Collins burned the bonds but other information says he burned only the empty mail sacks. Information appears to have been muddled, but whatever the case nothing beyond the $25k cash that Collins took was recovered from his share.
Strangely the story of the most valueless item in this whole story, the actual mail sacks themselves raises more questions. Collins said he burned his, Poffenbarger and Orville allegedly burned the bonds so why wouldn't they burn the sacks along with the bonds? Yet empty torn open mail sacks were turning up; two pouches by the 8th Street school, several more in Spoon lake.
Investigators were highly suspicious of the story Collins was telling them but could not prove that he had stashed the bonds for later retrieval.
The Phillips brothers, Merle and Orville? Their take was said to have been $432,000 of useless cancelled bonds. Waste paper.
All told all but $2,275 of the stolen $50k cash was recovered.
For their troubles, sentences between thirteen and four and a half years would be handed down; the convicts would be transferred to USP Leavenworth, Kansas.
It is here that we shall start to wind down this segment of the story, for it really could be a number of pages or even a site on its own, and this is already slated to be a very long page.
Stories of inspired robberies of the mail delivery system and the government placing US Marines on mail trains to defend the mail sit stacked on my desk but for now we shall leave them there for fear we take this page too far down the rabbit hole.
The four young men went to jail, in any article you look at related to the robbery it gives only the names of the two Phillips brothers, Poffenbarger, and Collins. Yet if you dig deeper there is much more to find.
Orville was hit with a thirteen year sentence later cut to five years due to an administrative error; Merle and Collins caught a five stretch each, Poffenbarger got four and half; although the Federal government were not done with Collins and Poffenbarger quite yet.
Upon their release in 1924 they were rearrested at the gates of Leavenworth and charged with 'rifling the mail sacks' and sentenced to eighteen and fifteen years respectively. First they got jail time for stealing the sacks, and when served they then got more jail time, significantly more, for opening them. That smells like a little double dipping on a district attorneys part if you ask me. Collins and Poffenbarger would both appeal their sentences, twice each, both times they were denied freedom.
Yet what of the other players?
Harry Reed would get a 5 year term, as would both Terrance Daly and his wife. Daly would die in prison. Fred Poffenbarger Sr would catch a nickel, for what never seems to have been disclosed. There were many players surrounding this story that served time for this robbery, yet in the common telling they are never mentioned unless you dig below the surface.

Some years later Earl, not Merle, would attend court for seven charges (for what I cannot deduce yet) levied against him with a co-accused called William French, a William French was also one of the names questioned and released by the investigators in the mail robbery case.
A connection? Not only quite possible but highly probable it would appear.
Were the boys the moving muscle for French and Reid's plan? Had Reid planned out the heist and the $15,000 was his fee? To loosely quote a film: 'There is what you know, and what you can prove in a court of law'. Personally I think that plays a very large part in this piece of history.

So why this side track about crime that occurred a half century before Phillips Jr was born?

Merle and Earle? Larry Eugene Phillips Jr's great-uncle and great grandfather respectively.
Generational criminality? It would appear so, right?
For now though we shall leave Merle serving his time in Leavenworth and follow Earl for a short duration.

On April 2nd, 1925 nineteen year old Elva Arlene Pullen married twenty-four year old Earl Robert Phillips of 2121 Avenue F, Council Bluffs, Pottawattamie, Iowa. That address does not exist today; the land parcel and those surrounding it were restructured sometime around 1956.
On September 24th 1926 their only child, Reginald Eugene Phillips, was born to the young couple.

The 1930 US Census lists the four year old Reginald Eugene Phillips living with his maternal grandparents, 46 year old Roy Pullen and 44 year old Grace Pullen (nee: Kimball), their five children and 66 year old lodger. Neither the twenty-four-year-old Elva, nor the twenty-nine year-old Earl were listed at this address.
Thirty two months later and Elva Arlene Phillips petitioned before the courts for divorce under the grounds of cruelty. She stated that she and her husband had lived apart for the last two and a half years.

By September 26th 1929 the divorce was granted, with Earl being told to pay alimony of $15.
Bear in mind that 1929 was a pivotal year for the US economy, and although the warning signs had been there since March the great economic crash would land only a month after Earl and Elva's divorce.
Who knows if she ever saw a dime of the alimony?
Earl's story continued but for now we shall leave him in Council Bluffs where he remained for the rest of his life, for now we need to follow first his ex-wife and then his son, Reginald.

By January 29th 1931 she remarried William Louis Porter in Avoca, Pottawattamie, Iowa. From this point onward would be known as Elva Arlene Pullen Porter, the only remaining trace of Elva's previous relationship was her son, Reginald.
Some time between the 1934 and 1935 Censuses Elva, William, Reginald and Wilma moved from Iowa to Colorado. By 1939 Reginald was the oldest of four children. Wilma Darlene Porter (Born: 1934, Iowa). Donald Dean Porter (Born: 1936, Colorado) and Velma Grace Porter (Born: 1939, Colorado).
This is how the Phillips clan came to Colorado.


The 1940 Census had the family, including the 13 year old Reginald, living at 1175 South Federal Blvd, Arapahoe, Colorado (Now a fish market). The western side of Denver would become the stomping ground for the Phillips clan for many years to come.


Speaking to an extended member of Phillips family they told me that Reginald had joined the United States Navy in 1942, when he was sixteen and demobbed in '46. Interesting to note as it means he would have joined at 16 years old when the Burke-Wadsworth Act required men to be at least 18 to register for the draft and 21 to enlist. Reginald should not have been allowed to register until at least 24th September 1944 or enlist until 1947; yet as we can see from his draft registration card that this was simply not the case.


In 1948, June 27th, twenty-two-year-old Reginald would see his first son born, Larry Eugene Phillips to mother unknown. Reginald also had another son, Tim Phillips, mother also unknown.
Reginald remained off the radar until 21st March 1952 when he married Gloria Marie Clawson, in Englewood, Colorado.
Reginald's brother in law, Gloria's brother, one Dale Clawson, was a well-known police officer in Englewood, Colorado. I wonder if he was ever bought in by Reginald to wag the finger at Larry Sr. when he got in trouble? For Larry trouble never seemed to be very far distant.
Only a little is known of the remaining years of Reginald's life at this point, regrettably little is also known about his son's early years. He first pops up on the radar in 1965 as a sixteen year-old at Aurora Central High School.


Larry Sr is remembered in one interview as a sadistic and particularly cruel youth by his peers. Stories of animal abuse were proffered by a previous classmate of Larry's, although with the caveat that they were not witnessed by him but were common schoolyard knowledge. Whether true or not it would be only fair to take these stories with the proverbial grain of salt.

Then we come to 1967, the beginning of the slide for the man we will come to know as Larry Sr.
What comes next is something that despite several weeks of digging I am at a loss to completely prove.
In Peter Wilkinson's article 'Sons & Robbers' published in 1997 he identifies this year as the year that Larry would be arrested and jailed for the act of grave robbery and desecration of a corpse.
I hit the newspaper archives and found many events of this type in the early 1900's, and then paydirt, or so I thought. I found a single reported case for 1967.
On the night of August 19th shadowy figures stalked through the Evergreen cemetery in Colorado Springs.


The body of Mrs. Harry Hull was disinterred and the grave loosely covered over with the removed earth and additional fallen tree branches. The 90 year old occupant of this grave had been buried two weeks earlier, with no valuables her daughter would later state. The body had been dragged approximately 200 yards through the cemetery to a waiting vehicle investigators would claim.

Mrs. Hall's body would be discovered some 22 miles away on old Stagecoach Road. Not for a second am I going to pretend to understand the motivations of the perpetrators of this crime.
Wilkinson put the robbery down to a drunken prank that Larry Sr and friends had conducted.
Three young men, John Odlin, Michael Carney and Fred Hiltbrand would eventually be arrested or they would surrender of their own volition. All would be prosecuted for 'body snatching and malicious mischief'.
Noticeable for its absence was the name Larry Eugene Phillips.
I could find no other accounts of grave robbery, body snatching, grave disinterment, whatever you wish to call it at any time around 1967 that made the newspapers. So only two possibilities remain. Either Wilkinson attributed this crime to Larry Sr in an attempt to sully his name, which seems unlikely, or there were more people present than the three who were eventually arrested.
Whether for this bizarre act listed above or something that has never come to light Larry Phillips found himself a guest of the Colorado State Reformatory at Buena Vista.


January 1968 saw Sr paroled and for an unknown reason he appears to have robbed a gas station in Adams County, Colorado. His brief return to liberty was cut short and in April 1968 he was heading back to Buena Vista, this time with a potential ten-year sentence hanging over his head.
It is worth noting at this point that the only marking found on his body was a 3/4" scar on his right knee.
Three months into his bit at Buena Vista Sr was transferred to Colorado State Hospital on June 1st 1968.
Colorado State Hospital was not your average hospital. It was a mental institution, built in 1879 on forty acres of donated land, when it originally opened it was designed to house just fourteen patients, twelve men and two women.


By the 1960's the hospital was servicing the whole of the state and sprawled over 5100 acres complete with its own farms which helped in sustain the institution's near six thousand patients.
The reason(s) for Sr's move from Buena Vista to CSH have unfortunately been lost to time, his Federal file long since destroyed after having passed the statute for records keeping. Had the move been a matter of personal safety for himself, or others? Or had he simulated symptoms in order to facilitate what would come next. 'Next' would introduce another big player into this part of the story, the elusive and enigmatic Dorothy Clay. So let us for just a moment rewind the clock and take stock of the brief information we have been able to unearth on the woman that would in the not too distant future become Jr's mother.

January 13th 1897 (yes 1897, calm down, light a cigarette, this is all relevant-ish), and one Joseph Clay enters this world. In 1913 at age sixteen he went to work for Colorado Fuel & Iron Co during what was a very turbulent period for the company, dead centre of a labor war between the United Mine Workers of America, and the Rockefeller owned Colorado Fuel & Iron Co over pay and working conditions amongst other issues. Strikes by the UNMWA led to 'officially unsanctioned' reprisals by a private security firm (whose methods were genuinely shocking, check out the story of The Ludlow Massacre if this part of the story at all interests you).


One escalation followed another and after ten solid days and nights of rioting the National Guard was called in to put the uprising down, when the dust eventually settled at least nineteen people lay dead. Whether Joe Clay was a part of this piece of history is unknown, but it is sure that he would have known all about it. Several years pass and on August 8th 1918 Joe signs up for military service, said service would terminate on March 15th 1919, a period of some 219 days. (Military records still pending). Upon his return from service he once again picked up work with Colorado Fuel & Iron, but on April 20th 1920 for reasons unknown he left his employment and does not show up again on public records for another twenty years. In 1940 at age forty three he shows up on a Denver census as living at 2137 Arapahoe St, and married to twenty three year old Erlinda Clay.
The couple have three children: Virginia (b.1936), Rita (b.1937), and Dorothy (b.1938).
It is to Virginia, and more so Dorothy the story must now focus. Next to nothing is known about Virginia or Dorothy. Proof positive that in the days before electronic records that it was very much possible to stay off the radar. Nothing can be found of school, medical or criminal records. Nothing, and we have searched for years. Not a photo, not a school record, nothing. Not until 1968.
So why the story about Joe Clay's history? Well apart from background on this side of the family, for Joe will return to this story again shortly, I wanted it to show the disparity in tracing people's history. Some are easy to find, especially if they have served. And some? Some are truly ghosts, who walked through this world leaving very minimal evidence of their passing. Background checks and the traces people leave behind are very important, nay critical, to this story yet in some cases it's just not possible to dig anything up.

Back to the timeline. 1968 saw thirty year old Dorothy Clay spending time in the same Colorado State Hospital as Larry Eugene Phillips. It is unknown if they had known each other prior to being incarcerated at this location or if they had any contact within this vast estate of buildings.
Clay, or Dorothy Lopez as she was known (amongst a whole host of other aliases) had her own brushes with the law. Her FBI file lists her only known occupation as being prostitution. A story also exists that she had stabbed a corrections officer whilst incarcerated but alas since the closure of Colorado State Hospital her records are also lost to time so this story remains unverified despite extensive searching. Could it have been the reason she was moved to CSH? Absolutely! Do we know it for a fact? Unfortunately not.
What we do know is that on the 10th January 1969 Dorothy gave birth to a son, Denis. Denis's father is undocumented, Denis was told that his father was a doctor at the institution.
Parentage aside, the infant Denis was smuggled out of CSH late one night and into the care of his aunt, Dorothy's eldest sister, Virginia.
The timeline from here begins to merge into a single thread, two of the main players are now in located in the same location.
On or around the night of April 18th 1969 Larry Eugene Phillips managed to escape the hospital. Exactly how he achieved this is unknown. There is a large underground network of tunnels, some 3.9 miles of them beneath the hospital and its grounds and these may well have played a part in his disappearance.
It is unknown if Clay/Lopez escaped with him, or met up with him at a later date but what is known is that after Phillips slipped the bonds of confinement that he and Clay headed west toward Salt Lake City,
Utah.

On the 21st April in Pueblo District Court a warrant was issued for his arrest. Two months later US Commissioner Howard E. Erickson issued a further warrant for 'Unlawful flight to avoid confinement'. The case was now in the hands of the FBI. Phillips was not exactly a novice, he had thought out his escape plan and from the moment he stepped away from the hospital he began using an alias. Charles Dawn. He knew the name would not stand scrutiny and eventually in a moment of criminal cunning he decided to switch aliases and he began using the name Daniel Ira Warfel. Mr Warfel was no cobbled together name either; he was a living person, and an old classmate of the escapee. Phillips would later say that he had chosen Warfel's name because he had been a 'mama's boy, who wouldn't be in trouble'.
We managed to located Mr Warfel a number of years ago, but due to his advancing age and the fact he probably would have little input into the story of Phillips Sr we decided it best to leave him in peace.

Larry Eugene Phillips became Daniel Ira Warfel, and his travelling companion Dorothy Clay/Lopez became Barbara Allen (any attempts to track this name to a real individual have been met with a phonebook full of results and no starting point I'm afraid). Together the thirty year old Clay and the twenty year old Phillips made it to Salt Lake City where they stayed quiet and off the radar, for six months at least. On 27th October 1969 Phillips was stopped whilst walking by a Salt Lake patrol officer. He was invited to sit in the officer's cruiser whilst a check was run on him. Either in a moment of panic or foolhardy bravado he had given his real name so when the wants/warrants check came back that he was wanted back in Colorado he heaved the door of the cruiser open and took off running. All further efforts to apprehend failed to turn up the fugitive.
By the time the FBI were informed of a positive contact Phillips and Lopez had left Salt Lake in their rearview and were headed south to the Pacific coastline.

The common story has Phillips and Clay heading directly to Los Angeles, however that might not be the case.
In the 1969 city directory for San Diego a member of the Phillips family who appears to do similar research linear to our own, but more limited in scope, found the following.


One Lawrence E. Phillips whose wife's name was Dorothy living in plain sight at this address; Lawrence listed his occupation as US Navy.

Was this really the elusive duo? Given that eleven months after the near miss in Utah it is difficult to believe that they would suddenly return to their correct names, and then at the tail end of 1970 revert back their assumed names. It was a good find but one I believe to be a coincidental grouping of names. It sure got the pulse going for a moment though.

Speaking of Los Angeles, let us after seventy years, 1500 miles and a whole raft of shenanigans finally make our way to Pueblo del Rio de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciuncula or as you and I know it, L.A.
Eleven months after the near miss in Utah a young couple presented themselves to The California Hospital at 1414 South Hope St, Los Angeles and at 10:14pm on Sunday September 20th 1970 Larry Eugene Warfel came into the world.

Two interesting things to note from the birth certificate, first is that the ages of mother and father are listed as only two years apart when the reality was that Dorothy was ten years older than Phillips Sr. Second is that Dorothy listed her name as Barbara Allen, nothing unusual there as pretty much the entirety of the information given to the registrar was false, but she then signed the form as Barbara Warfel.

Information from 1970 to 1974 is regrettably non-existent; a black hole in the research and unfortunately it would not be the last. What we can infer is that something between Phillips Sr and Clay was not right for in 1974 Clay would have an extremely short lived marriage to one Brian Alton O'Neale.
This part of the story may be nothing more than a distraction, you should take from it whatever you wish, all that we know is that it could point us at a number of possible circumstances occurring in the timeline so we felt it must be included for clarity's sake.
Brian Alton O'Neal, born Neal Henry Reynolds in Maine 1941 had moved to the Woodland Hills area of Los Angeles in his youth and had spent most of his formative years there. In January 1969 he would marry for the first time and father a daughter. That marriage didn't last and on 28th May 1974 he married for the second time when he and Clay tied the knot.


Had this been a marriage in Vegas one could assume a drunken escapade, but this marriage having occurred in Los Angeles one can only assume it was a marriage of convenience or something was very wrong between the pair. Larry Eugene Warfel was three and a half years old.
O'Neale would meet an untimely end in 1988 when he was ambushed with a single shotgun blast to the face when approaching his house in Echo Park. As RHD dug into his past the only constant they would uncover was that this man told no two people the same story of who he was. To varying friends and colleagues he had been a CIA operative, a sniper, a doctor, a psychiatrist, a karate expert, a neurosurgeon and a pilot. All of these claims remain unfounded, so it would appear O'Neale could have been very much a Walter Mitty type. It is unknown if his murder was ever cleared, personally I can find no reference to a charge or conviction of anyone relating to this event. Had Clay been duped by another slick talking conman and then realized some weeks later that the man she married was not all he seemed? All signs do appear to point toward the affirmative.
Back in 1974 after the 'O'Neale Incident' Clay, and Jr drop off the radar again and resurface two years later two days after Jr's sixth birthday at a small trailer park in Kiowa, a small town some fifty miles southeast of Denver. Larry Sr was still living in Los Angeles at this point.

September 22nd 1976 and Sr approached the mobile home his son and estranged wife are living in. Unbeknownst to him he had law enforcement eyes all over him at that moment and as this fractured family sat down to a post birthday dinner of chili seven law enforcement officers made entry to the trailer and detained Sr.
This part of the story bothered me for the longest time, it just didn't ring right. How exactly did the FBI know where and when they could scoop up the elusive Sr? Phillips Sr (and Jr) FBI records make only passing comment to the event. There are no records of surveillance, in fact there is a dearth of information exactly where you would expect there to be some, UNLESS the information was deliberately left out to protect someone. We believe that someone was none other than Dorothy Clay. We believe the possibility exists that she had dimed out her ex, as he was at the time still up to some nefarious dealings, in an attempt to protect herself and her son.
Sr took the arrest calmly, was returned to jail and served a small amount of time and upon release settled down to a steady job in a small print shop in Denver, but Sr was far from done with exploits on the wrong side of the law.

Author's note: The whole Kiowa incident is still under investigation from our end, as this story originated from a single source and has no corroboration. This page will be updated as more information becomes available.

It must be noted that upon his incarceration that further scars beyond the one to his right knee were now evident. Was this evidence of prison violence? Or maybe pointing to the broken relationship between himself and Clay? Or were the scars to his forearm potentially a suicide attempt in prison that predicated his move to Colorado State hospital? Or maybe they were nothing more than the nicks and dings we all pick up in life. Unfortunately we will never know now.

The die would gradually be formed for his son and the subtle events of the next ten years spent around Denver would shape a young mind in the worst way. Larry Sr in a 1997 interview would speak of the Kiowa arrest and say 'It really messed him up', Sr would go as far as to attribute that moment as to why Jr followed the route into criminality that he eventually did. Yet that was more than a little disingenuous on Sr's part, as his influence over the next few years would appear to have more of a negative influence than that arrest ever did.
As Larry grew, he had, like any kid, a small cadre of friends, although curiously enough not one of them has wanted to step forward and speak of their recollections of their friendship with him. Weird that eh? Larry would attend school; we believe we have narrowed it down to the following school from clues offered by his ex-wife.


He attended just a single year of high school and dropped out at age 14 in the 9th grade. Clay appeared to be the major bread winner if the household working as both a truck driver and a janitor at a local hospital Jr found himself on occasion given into the care of his maternal grandfather, Joe.
What follows comes from a single source of information. It is completely unverified as all other players in the information that follows are now deceased. Unverified information is not usually something we would include, but on this occasion, we shall lay out for you, and you can choose whether you take on board its content. In 2020 we conducted four telephone interviews with Larry's half-brother Denis Franks. Denis, a personable guy, was the first to admit that he had led a colorful past which quite often saw him on the wrong side of the law. He has his own side projects relating to many years of interactions with Larry Jr, apparently to be released soon. The following paragraph is information taken from those interviews. Make of it what you will.
Dorothy would sometimes bring Jr to his grandfather's house, and she would then leave for the day with her sister Ginger (Virginia). Jr and Denis would be left with Joe and (as Denis described them) their uncles (said uncles could have been Virginia and Rita's boyfriends/husbands or they may have just been friends of Joe). Allegedly the two youngsters were then subject to varying forms of abuse from the elder male occupants. To their grandfather the boys were 'pinche gringos' or "fucking white boys", both having white fathers. Something apparently seen as derogatory to Joe and the unnamed uncles who had no qualms letting the boys know what they thought of their heritage. So, in true bully style they were subjected to what became known as 'tests of manhood'. From being made to hold up paper plate targets whilst knives were thrown at them to standing against a fence whilst pool balls were thrown as close as possible to their heads. Flinch and as Denis would put it "You would get fucked up." Stand straight and risk injury, and maybe, just maybe you weren't so bad. The way Denis told this story was that these were not isolated incidents, but a continuing pattern of abuse which would be taken forward by Jr himself and perpetuated in his later 'friendship' with Emil Matasareanu.

Let us add another layer of mental conditioning levied against the young Jr as we move forward.
Larry Sr was a sporadic visitor to his son; it does not appear that Clay was able to lock Sr out of her son's life completely. Sr, who obviously cared for his son, and who was no stranger to the dark side of the law himself made a fatal flaw. What we believe boiled down to multiple attempts to impress on his son just how much of a badass he was, (sidebar: who didn't think their dad already was a badass when they were a kid?) he started to tell Jr about his exploits on the other side of the law.
In those random visits Sr would take Jr to wrestling matches, shooting, video arcades, all the usual fare that an estranged father would think his son would like to do on a day out together.
Pause for a moment and ask yourself why any father would do something quite so destructive. To me this smacks of ego, of a man who wished his son to see him as some sort of anti-hero.
Jr was hooked, here he was sitting here with a real life comic book hero, and it was his dad. Sr had what he wanted. A son that, for the moment, idolized him. This destructive seed was planted early and planted deep, and we believe that it was this behavior from Sr coupled with Jr's prevalent mentality to overachieve and show no fear that became twisted and eventually created the 'monster' we all saw in North Hollywood years later.

Jr was fourteen, had dropped out of school. What direction was he to take in life? The answer it would seem lay on the silver screen. In October 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger took to the big screen in 'The Terminator'. Schwarzenegger a pro bodybuilder who had swept to seven Mr Olympia titles in the 1970s had evolved from humble beginnings in Austria and had decided to pursue bodybuilding when he was fifteen. Larry, always a solidly built character, decided he was going to follow suit. Phillips has been described to us as a bookworm by those close to him. If he was interested in a particular subject, he borrowed library books on the subject and read everything available to him. Bodybuilding was no different - he embraced the dedication needed for the art. Larry continued to maintain a circle of friends and would through a friend called Larry Santos meet his sister, Sharon at an ice rink. Sharon would play a large part in the next phase of the story that takes us up to early 1993.
In 1986, for reasons unknown, Clay performed moved herself and her son back to Los Angeles; and with them went Sharon Santos, now Larry's girlfriend. They would set up house in West Harriet Street, Altadena, nestled in the shadow of the Verdugo Mountains between Pasadena and Glendale.

Larry was not interested in returning to the educational system and instead continued to devote himself to bodybuilding. A story exists that he trained at the world-famous Gold's Gym in Venice beach, of how he travelled two hours each way every day to train, so, we decided to explore that particular thread. After several long calls with first the reception desk at the venue on Rose St and then their corporate headquarters no responsive records could be found. This alone does not mean it never happened, it just means that no records can be sourced at this moment. Is this likely a place that Larry visited and trained at? Yes. It fits what we understand of his psychology perfectly. The Mecca of bodybuilding, full of memorabilia of those who had used the place and made it big, maybe with the occasional opportunity to glimpse one of those famous names in person. Absolutely this was right in Larry's wheelhouse.
But his 'home' gym? We were not convinced. It seems much more likely that he trained at Gold's but not necessarily the one at the beach, more likely the one in Pasadena which was once located at 39 South Altadena Drive. A distance of only seven miles over the thirty-seven to Rose Street.


Time marched past, Larry's life was undergoing some changes though. In 1987 for an unknown reason the truth of his name came to the fore. Had Sr told him his name was a lie during one of their visitations? We will never know, but we do know that in the December of that year Clay petitioned the County Court back in Adams County, Colorado for her son to be known under his rightful surname, Phillips.


Another revelation was dawning on Larry too, the realization that he was not going to be the next Schwarzenegger, Platz or Haney. He just did not have the genetics to become one of his idols that had stared back at him from the glossy pages of the stacks of bodybuilding magazines. His dream of making millions from flexing died the death of exuberant and unchecked youth.
Larry started to look around; he needed a plan, a plan to make money; for as far as we are aware he had not held a job since moving to Los Angeles. His mother bought him a computer, and then given him a black BMW that she had inherited. Yet still he needed a plan, a direction and most importantly, money.
If they had moved to Silicon Valley back in '86 he would have most likely picked up something to do with computers, something he held an interest in; but they had instead landed in LA, what was he to do?
For those who have never visited LA, check out some aerial footage online. LA from the air seems a vast and never-ending sprawl, and that sprawl is filled with over 1.5 million houses. Larry didn't know it but he was about to make a very large mistake. He decided to get into the property market.
The late 1980's was a feeding frenzy for property in the Southland, many people made their millions on the back of this boom but unbeknownst to the nineteen-year-old Larry that frenzy was about to hit a wall at 100 miles per hour. For Larry 1989 was a year of pivotal changes, every single event that follows sent him farther and farther down the path to extreme poor life choices. Was he a product of nurture? Oh absolutely! Sr's deviant whispering surely played a large part. But was nature a part of his psychological make up? World events happening around him exerting such pressures that he chose criminality to overcome them. It is a question that must be asked, yet unfortunately cannot be definitively answered; therefore, we can only conclude the possibility that this was a contributing factor was present.

On August 24th 1989 the collapse of the Soviet Union began in Poland when Tadeusz Mazowiecki became, after much wrangling over the previous decade, the first noncommunist Prime Minister in Eastern Europe. Unbeknownst to Larry Phillips some 6,000 miles away but the changing political winds in Europe would initiate a chain of events that would spell a hardship to those in North America.
When the Iron Curtain started to topple a whole mess of US based companies suddenly found themselves with contracts that were no longer needed. With a fast thawing of the Cold War there was no need for constant defense production on the scale previously seen, everything that supported that industry also felt the pinch, and that included the housing market.
For Larry though, his eyes were not on the winds of change currently blowing through lands he had never visited. He was stuck in his books; he was determined to take the Real Estate test and make himself a cool few million.
One day in early 1989, in what can only be described (with the obvious benefit of hindsight) as a monumentally stupid move he decided to shoplift himself a suit, or two, maybe three from the Sears store at 2500 West Commonwealth Avenue, Alhambra.


Whatever his plan was it was flawed and he ended up in the back of a black and white on a theft charge. His recklessness earned him a three day stay in the local police station (indicating to us that he was arrested on a Friday and released from court on the following Monday) and twelve months of probation, which passed off uneventfully. He may not have known it in that moment but his impetuous criminal streak would have further reaching consequences that reared their head twelve months down the line.
Larry went back to the books, unaware of the global recession that was about to lay waste to the housing market he was so desperately trying to be a part of.
Although his dreams of being the next Schwarzenegger had been shelved for something a little more realistic Larry was still a gym head, and continued to work out. It was during one of those work outs that a further piece of the puzzle slotted into place.

Larry, according to a 1997 interview with his half-brother Denis, was subversive. A specialist in attracting people who were missing a certain something in their lives, people who allowed Larry to mentally break them down and rebuild them into a 'someone' that was of use to him. Where exactly the meeting between Larry Phillips and Emil Matasareanu first occurred is unknown, common lore pushes the Venice Beach gym angle but once again there are no responsive records held under Matasareanu's name. We feel it more likely that once again the Pasadena branch of Gold's was the more likely culprit. A theory reinforced for us by the unsolicited information given by Denis Franks in 2020 that the first time he met Emil through Larry was at, once again, the Pasadena branch.

So here we are, all the way from 1897 through to 1989, through two family trees and following Larry Eugene Phillips Jr through his second phase in Los Angeles. Here we have a man who had an imperfect start to his life, a man who like many people was not cognizant of the external influences that would affect his life, a man that was on the cusp of making some horrendously poor choices. There are many holes in this extended timeline, and there are many more in the short eight years remaining in his story. We shall attempt to cover them as best as we can.