"Music to Murder By" (in Startling Detective, January 1962) [full account of the Spade Cooley murder case and trial, with additional clippings]

Greenwich CT: Fawcett Publications, Inc.. Very Good-. 1962. (Vol. 53, No. 334). Magazine. [vertical soft crease down the middle of the magazine, as though it had been folded lengthwise for storage, minor insect nibbling around edges of covers]. Among the dozen or so other lurid true-crime stories of the day presented in this magazine ("Death Diary of a Prowling Psycho"; "Bullets Speak Louder Than Love"; "Schoolteacher's Lesson in Murder"; etc.), the one that clearly mattered to its one-time owner appears on page 36. It's an account of how the popular Western swing musician and sometime actor Spade Cooley came to brutally murder his second wife, Ella Mae Evans, in April 1961, a crime for which he was convicted (of first-degree murder) and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was, however, granted a parole at a hearing in August 1969, to become effective the following February; alas for Spade, he didn't make it to his parole date: in November he was granted a 72-hour furlough in order to perform at a benefit concert in Oakland -- during which he died, at intermission, of a heart attack. Tucked into this copy of the magazine is a group of five contemporary newspaper clippings about his death. (That's why I said, above, that the owner of this copy of the magazine really cared about this story, above all others.) .