9/30/55
By Warren Beath
The weather was pleasant and the sun had fallen behind the hills to the west of the Cholame valley and there was no direct sunlight on the junction below where the two highways met. It was Friday and there was better- than-average amount of traffic between the people headed east for a high school football game in Bakersfield and the racers and entourage headed north to Salinas for an airport competition.
One of them was 24-year old actor James Dean in a Porsche 550 Spyder. There are several theories for why Dean was driving his racer to Salinas rather than towing it. The Highway Patrolmen who ticketed him later said Dean needed to "loosen the engine up." Others have said he needed to gain behind-the-wheel experience on the new car since he had owned it only two weeks.
In the passenger seat 28-year old Porsche mechanic Rolf Wuetherich watched the tachometer's wavering needle.
Rolf would unsuccessfully sue Dean's estate for $100,000 compensation alleging that Dean drove recklessly and with wanton disregard. In 1957 he would participate in a fan magazine recollection of the day entitled, "Death Drive."
They were driving on a stretch of State Route 466 that would fifty years later almost to the day be renamed James Dean Highway.
Clifford Hord was a 49-year old grain farmer traveling east on Highway 466 with his wife and two young children. He passed the Y intersection of 466 and Highway 41 and ascended the slight grade near where a clump of four trees grew to mark the top of the knoll. A silver sportscar suddenly shot into his lane as it passed another car forcing him off the road and onto the shoulder. He barely recovered control.
Hord would testify at the inquest eleven days later and he would recall being booed as he finished. Four decades later he would die in a traffic accident on this same highway.
In the westbound lane was John Robert White, an accountant from the Los Angeles area en route with his wife to a vacation in the north. A small sportscar with two men in the cockpit passed him at a high rate of speed as he descended the hills toward the Y intersection visible below. He sensed there was going to be a problem because a black-and-white Ford heading east was angling off, apparently to turn onto Highway 41.
Tom Frederick was a 28-year old bee-keeper tooling along east on highway 466 in the vicinity of the broad curve just past the tiny settlement of Cholame when he was overtaken by a customized black-and-white 1950 Ford. Next to him was his fourteen-year old brother-in-law Don Dooley and they were en route to a football game in Bakersfield 85 miles away. Tom's brother Paul and his wife were in a car behind them. They were nearing the Y junction with Highway 41 toward Fresno and the Ford ahead of them crossed over into the other lane to take 41.
There was a terrific collision. Donald Turnupseed-23-year old college student on his way home to visit his pregnant wife in Tulare--saw an arm thrown up over his hood. The Ford pivoted and slid sideways on down the highway. The car it hit wound up a crumpled mess in the dirt on the north side of the road.
In 2006 a coaster-sized purported piece of the Porsche--a car Dean had bought new for $7,000--would fetch over $11,000 at a Dallas, Texas auction.
Frederick would be subpoenaed and testify at the inquest held eleven days after the accident, and the remainder of his life would wish he had not been at that place at that time because he would be hounded over his recollections of what he saw and his impression of who had been behind the wheel of the sportscar.
John White watched the cars collide and thought he saw something fly out of the sports car. He knew it had been a horrible collision and he drove on to contact authorities from a telephone at the cafe'/gas station at Cholame just beyond the broad curve. Then he returned and parked on the south side of the road, crossing carefully to make himself available to authorities as a witness. He would not have to testify at the inquest because he was still out of state and did not receive a subpoena.
Dean's friend Bill Hickman was driving Dean's other car, a 1955 Ford Country Squire, westbound towing the trailer on which the sportscar would be returned to Los Angeles after the competition in Salinas. A car aficionado whose father and uncle had been Hollywood directors for decades, he came down the hill and upon the aftermath of the collision. Hickman was an expert driver who followed the Porsche Spyder all afternoon and two hundred miles pulling a race trailer and managed to stay within ten minutes of it at the end of the day.
He would become the film industry's pre-eminent stunt wheelman in the seventies and die of cancer in the eighties.
Next to him was Sanford Roth, a photojournalist doing a feature story on the driver of the sports car that would include the upcoming race to the north in Salinas, California. They pulled off the road to the west beyond the wreck and got out of the car. A few days later Roth would compose a letter affirming that the young man lying across the cowling and hanging out the passenger side of the car was James Dean.
Within a year Roth would be denounced in a magazine article called "Gouls Won't Let Jimmy Dean Stay Dead" over pictures he would take of the wreck. He would die of a heart attack in Rome in 1962 and leave an enduring controversy over whether he had taken gruesome pictures of Dean's mangeld body in the car.
Donald Turnupseed stepped out of his car, relatively unhurt but for a bruised nose. A crowd had started to gather at the wreck site over the injured. Wuetherich lay in the dirt next to the racer and his legs were askew because his femur was broken. To Don Dooley, Dean--splayed across the seats with his hip on the rear cowl and his head over the door--looked like his face was covered with dirt and molasses.
The ambulance from Cholame arrived. The attendants were Paul Moreno and Collier "Buster" Davidson. Hickman was tending to Dean. A nurse passing by named Annabele "Kay" Coombes checked the actor for vital signs. Ambulance driver Paul Moreno placed his sunglases under Dean's nose and saw no breath fogging the lense. Hickman later said Dean died in his arms and heard the breath leaving his body.
Don Dooley stood nonchalantly by while Roth immortalized him with his camera standing before the tableau of carnage.
Dooley took Polaroids of the wrecked cars with his own camera and would later sell them in 2004 to David Loehr of the James Dean Gallary for $900. They were probably worth considerably more.
Two Highway Patrol cars arrived. Traffic was backing up in the eastbound lane, including a yellow school bus of gawking football game-bound students. Ernest Tripke was the first officer on the scene. It had taken him twenty minutes to arrive at the accident from the time he got the call on his radio.
He would later play himself in a movie called "The Junkman" and appear in numerous documentaries related to the accident.
Officer Ron Nelson arrived shortly afterwards and he would appear in the 1957 movie "The James Dean Story".
Tripke and Nelson would be together again at the intersection in 2005 for the filming of the 50th anniversary special for the National Geographic Channel called Crash Science that would include a detailed computer recreation of the accident.
The ambulance screamed back around the bend to the west and past the tree where a Japanese businessman would build a stainless-steel monument to Dean with $15,000 1977 dollars. It would feature a fallen bronze sparrow and the symbol of infinity.
The Final Inquest of October 11. 1955
Over the next week an inquest was announced to establish how James Dean had died and whether anyone was at fault. Witnesses were subpoenaed. Paul Moreno, who had extricated Dean's body from the car and transported it to the hospital, would appear. Deposition testimony from the physician who had pronounced Dean dead would be admited into evidence.
Rolf Wuetherich would be deposed from his hospital bed. Highway Patrolman Ernest Tripke and Ronald Nelson would be questioned and present photos and a diagram. Patrolman O.V. Hunter would testify about ticketing Dean near Mettler station earlier in the afternoon. Local rancher Clifford Hord would tell about his highway encounter with Dean's Porsche. Thomas Frederick would provide eyewitness testimony about the accident, and his brother-in-law Don Dooley would raise his hand and be sworn and add his two cents.
Everyone involved in that day would later provide their own accounts and they would be conflicting and contradictory.
The purpose of the inquest as included in the jury instructions is "You must find and set forth in writing: a, the name of the person killed;b, when, where and by what means he came to his death, c, if he was killed or his death occasioned by the act of another by criminal means, who is guilty; d, if the killing is accidental, and not by criminal means, so state."
The jury found the deceased, James Dean, came to his death by accident and that there was no indication that James Dean met death through any criminal act of another, and that he died of a fractured neck and other injuries received.
Donald Turnupseed never spoke publically concerning the events of that day.
We know that on in the night of the accident, the student walked on into the darkness, continuing toward Tulare. He walked away from the intersection, leaving his custom Ford behind.
He would turn to extend his thumb when a headlight approached from a car motoring up Highway 41.
It was nearly ten o' clock, over four-hours after the accident, before he finally flagged down a lift.
Warren Beath