More than 66 years before Sierra LaMar disappeared in rural Morgan Hill, a 14-year-old Campbell Union High School student, Thora Chamberlain, was kidnapped and killed by a man who had coaxed her into his car with a phony story.
The two cases bear uncanny similarities: The girls were roughly the same age (15 in Sierra’s case). The men convicted of killing them did not know their victims. Both were snatched off the street in broad daylight. And although huge community searches were organized for the girls, their bodies were never recovered.
And in both cases, the death penalty came into play. In the case of Thora Chamberlain’s convicted killer, Thomas Henry McMonigle, his stay on death row was punctuated by a strange story involving a scientist who believed he could resuscitate the dead.
You probably know about Sierra LaMar: A jury this month found Antolin Garcia-Torres, now 26, guilty of kidnapping and killing the teen in March 2012. The penalty phase began Tuesday, with Garcia-Torres facing the death penalty or life in prison without the possibility of parole.
You may not know about Thora Chamberlain, a sweet, religious girl who was three weeks short of her 15th birthday on Nov. 2, 1945, when she and a group of friends were walking on a sidewalk to a football game in Campbell between CUHS and Washington High School of Centerville (now Fremont).
A little before 3 p.m. that Friday, a man driving a blue Plymouth pulled up to curb, lowered his window, and talked to Thora. He was wearing slate-gray Navy trousers and a Navy-style white T-shirt with a Purple Heart and a blue insignia that said “Londonderry, Ireland.”
The man told Thora that he needed someone to watch his sister’s children for about a half-hour. After trying unsuccessfully to persuade one of her friends to take the job, Thora got into the car, telling her friends to save a seat for her at the game. She never returned from that ride.
A Saratoga woman, Ella Beaudoux, caught sight of a speeding car that almost ran her down as she went to get her mail about 3:30 p.m. Inside was a girl who seemed to be clawing at the back window, a terrified expression on her face. Authorities believe that was Thora, who was wearing a red skirt and a blue sweater.
Within two weeks, the FBI entered the case, dispatching one of its top kidnapping experts, E.J. Connelly, to San Jose. Acting on a hunch from San Mateo police Chief Robert E. O’Brien, the bureau focused attention on Thomas Henry McMonigle, then 31, an ex-convict from Illinois who they believed stole the naval clothing seen in Campbell.
McMonigle, who was married, had done nine years in Illinois prisons for attempted rape. In May 1945, he was booked into San Mateo County Jail for an alleged assault on a 14-year-old San Bruno girl. Her family declined to prosecute, saying that they did not want public attention.
As the FBI quietly tailed him, McMonigle returned to Illinois to see his father and then took a bus back to San Francisco. When he arrived on Dec. 6, he was groggy, almost semiconscious, having ingested what the bureau investigators called “a large dose of sleeping tablets.’’
After taking McMonigle to the hospital for treatment — a doctor certified him as “mentally clear’’ before he was released — the FBI coaxed him into trying to reconstruct events on Nov. 2. The Mercury Herald reported that the girls with Thora had identified his picture.
In a statement he signed for FBI officials, McMonigle said he had taken Thora to Santa Cruz via Highway 17, then drove up Highway 1 to a point close to the San Mateo County line. He said Thora was shot by a .32-caliber Colt revolver he had in the car. “If I shot her, that is where it took place,’’ he told the FBI, using curious passive language.
McMonigle told investigators that he then continued driving north on Highway 1 to Devil’s Slide, where he dumped Thora’s body down the 300-foot cliff into the ocean. The FBI later recovered a pair of red and blue socks nestled in a rock about two-thirds of the way down the cliff. They were identified as Thora’s socks.
Buried at the construction yard where McMonigle worked on the Peninsula, the FBI found a pair of slate gray trousers and several items that belonged to Thora, including her brown shoes, school books, zipper binder and the cowbell she carried for the rooting section. Investigators even recovered the .32-caliber gun and pieces of bloody upholstery.
From then on, McMonigle changed his story: At one point, he claimed he “choked the girl’’ to death. Another time he said he had stabbed her. And a third time, he said he had buried her in a drainage ditch near the construction yard where he worked in Burlingame.
Although the FBI didn’t find the body, there was more than enough evidence for Santa Cruz authorities to convict McMonigle and send him to death row at San Quentin.
There, one of the strangest episodes of the case unfolded in 1947. A former child prodigy named Robert E. Cornish had become fascinated with the idea that he could revive victims of heart attacks by injecting adrenaline into their bodies and see-sawing them on a teeter board.
McMonigle heard of Cornish’s theory and offered his body for experiment after his execution. But the warden of San Quentin and California law enforcement authorities refused.
Among the perplexing questions was double jeopardy. If someone was executed and revived, would they be considered to have served their sentence? If so, could they demand release?
McMonigle was put to death in the San Quentin gas chamber on Feb. 20, 1948. As the guards strapped a stethoscope to his chest, he made a feeble joke. “Don’t strap it too tight,’’ he said. Through the glass of the chamber, roughly a hundred people watched him die.
