417: The Whiskey Creek Murders

0:01 [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Jason Horton, I'm Rebecca Leib, and this is Ghost Town. [SPEAKER_01]: The 12-story, stately Romanesque building at 811 West 7th Street in downtown Los Angeles has seen a lot since its construction in 1927. [SPEAKER_01]: It's housed art galleries and oil tycoons, banks, and million dollar film sets. [SPEAKER_01]: Its name, the Fine Arts Building, is appropriate. [SPEAKER_01]: As it's made in appearance in many a print, many a painting, many a television show and, of course, in movies, perhaps most notably in 500 days of summer, when the film's protagonist Tom Hansen, played by Joseph Gordon-Levet, says the Fine Arts Building is his favorite building in LA.

0:59 [SPEAKER_01]: But far more interesting to me is what the building isn't known for. [SPEAKER_01]: But before we get to that, let's set the scene, shall we? [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, we're going to Los Angeles in September of 1967. [SPEAKER_01]: Lots of things are happening. [SPEAKER_01]: And January 15th, 1967, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum hosted the first ever Super Bowl, Super Bowl one. [SPEAKER_01]: With the Green Bay Packers, who defeated the Kansas City Chiefs 35 to 10, very exciting. [SPEAKER_01]: We have huge anti-Vietnam war sentiment, especially in Los Angeles. [SPEAKER_01]: Protesters marched toward the century Plaza Hotel, where Lyndon B. Johnson was attending a fundraiser, resulting in a violent clash with the LAPD.

1:45 [SPEAKER_01]: We've got music of the time, of course, right? [SPEAKER_01]: The troubadour, the sunset strip, defining rock acts like the doors, the birds, free love, loving and griff of the park. [SPEAKER_01]: At the same time, we have incredible iconic comedy, the Carol Burnett show, premiered on September 11th, 1967, September 11th, unfortunate date for it to premiere in retrospect, whatever. [SPEAKER_01]: More importantly than that tiny footnote of the premiere is that Carol Burnett was the first woman to host a major comedy variety show. [SPEAKER_01]: Things were happening in the world in Los Angeles, but what else you might ask?

2:25 [SPEAKER_01]: In 1967, the fine arts building was the scene of a theft by its own staff, two quiet secretaries stole thousands of dollars of bank securities from the company they worked for. [SPEAKER_01]: Their actions would culminate in a film and Louise style run across the country with a murder at the hands of one of America's most infamous criminals. [SPEAKER_01]: So now it's November 1967, 23-year-old Terry Frank and 21-year-old Anna Lee Mohn are working as secretaries for a brokerage firm inside the Fine Arts Building in DTLA.

3:07 [SPEAKER_01]: Now, if you saw pictures of them, they are truly adorable. [SPEAKER_01]: They look so 1960s, like straight out of Madman, you've got Terry Ray Frank, she's so young, she's got like a beautiful platinum blonde bob that's like really teased out this picture of her and she's in a little motorboat and she's got these cute glasses and she looks so fashionable and sexy and kind of like secretive, she's very mysterious. [SPEAKER_01]: Mone also seems very mysterious kind of wily, mischievous. [SPEAKER_01]: She's got this beautiful smile. [SPEAKER_01]: She has a lot going on behind her eyes.

3:49 [SPEAKER_01]: They both truly look like the devious secretaries that they are. [SPEAKER_01]: Unfortunately, we don't know that much about them other than that they had balls. [SPEAKER_01]: They had Kahones. [SPEAKER_01]: Exploding their access, the two young women slowly over a period leading up to November 1967 began pocketing high value negotiable street name stocks and bonds. [SPEAKER_01]: Because street name securities are registered in the name of the brokerage firm rather than an individual. [SPEAKER_01]: Hence the name. [SPEAKER_01]: Street name. [SPEAKER_01]: they were significantly easier to transfer trade or liquidate if they fell into the right hands. [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe young secretaries hands. [SPEAKER_01]: Together, the two women stole 488,732 dollars worth of bank securities and stocks.

4:30 [SPEAKER_01]: Equivalent to wait for it. [SPEAKER_01]: Approximately 4,719,000 and 44 dollars in [SPEAKER_01]: Crazy, right? [SPEAKER_01]: The heist was timed perfectly with her exit strategy. [SPEAKER_01]: Rather than trying to sneak the securities out while working the two women took their stocks, hit kind of a limit, sealing perhaps, and then both of them just quit the firm. [SPEAKER_01]: They packed their bags and they went to Florida. [SPEAKER_01]: The loss of the stocks was not discovered until after the [SPEAKER_01]: Now shortly after arriving in Florida, Frank and Moon moved in with a man named Jack Roland Murphy, notoriously known as Murph the Surf.

5:19 [SPEAKER_01]: So how did they know some random dude in Florida with a horrible nickname? [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I'll tell you, Murphy was an LA native after moving around a bunch he played violin with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, according to him, and won a tennis scholarship according to him to the University of Pittsburgh. [SPEAKER_01]: He was kind of a savant in a way, both with tennis and with violin to what extent, hard to say. [SPEAKER_01]: In 1955 he moved to Miami where he worked at hotels, got married, had some kids, got divorced, and then moved to a different part of Florida and opened a surf shop. [SPEAKER_01]: Very few people at that time on the East Coast surfed. [SPEAKER_01]: So when life guards on the East Coast saw him surfing, they gave him [SPEAKER_01]: Murph the surf went on to win Florida State Surfing Championships in 1962 and 1963 while living in Coco Beach.

6:13 [SPEAKER_01]: But more than all of that, Murph the surf would go down in history as the mastermind behind the jewel heist of the century. [SPEAKER_01]: Here's how it went. [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so one day, Murph was visiting New York and went to the Museum of Natural History like you might. [SPEAKER_01]: Tourists, right? [SPEAKER_01]: There, he discovered that security was Interestingly enough, lacks to non-existent. [SPEAKER_01]: As a savvy and observational person, he also noticed that the alarm system was non-operational. [SPEAKER_01]: and the halls 19 exterior windows were left open about two inches overnight for ventilation.

6:54 [SPEAKER_01]: So with his friends, Alan Kahn and Roger Clark, on October 29, 1964, Murphy climbed in through the window and discovered that the display case alarms were also non-functional. [SPEAKER_01]: At this point, the three men realized they were inside the museum of natural history with a bunch of stuff, and they had to do something big. [SPEAKER_01]: So, they struck with an iron was hot. [SPEAKER_01]: The three of them stole 24 precious gems out of JP Morgan's dual collection, including the star of India, the Eagle Diamond, and the Delong Star Ruby. [SPEAKER_01]: The stolen jewels were reported as being worth more than $400,000 dollars, dollars, equivalent to over $4 million in 2025.

7:42 [SPEAKER_01]: A lot of jewels, but also, keep in mind, these are precious artifacts, pieces of history, and really, they're priceless. [SPEAKER_01]: So the men got the jewels, went back to their hotel room, and had a party, and they had [SPEAKER_01]: You know, like guys do, when they've just committed the biggest jewel-highest of the century, they had fun. [SPEAKER_01]: They celebrated. [SPEAKER_01]: But the party would soon be over, because Murphy and both of his accomplices, Conan Clark, or arrested two days later after police had been tipped off by staff members of the hotel, the Cambridge House Hotel, by the way. [SPEAKER_01]: because they had been partying too hard, the three men were charged with first-degree burglary and possession of burglary tools.

8:30 [SPEAKER_01]: Free on bail, the men returned to Florida. [SPEAKER_01]: Months later, prosecutors charged Murphy and Con with the unrelated robbery and assault of actress Ava Gabor and her boyfriend Robert Brown. [SPEAKER_01]: It's actually a pretty horrific event. [SPEAKER_01]: where Murphy and Con broke into the famous actor's Miami hotel room, beat her up, ripped out her earring from her ear, assaulted her with a gun, and tied up the couple using a cord from a blind and another electrical cord. [SPEAKER_01]: Eventually making them retrieve a $25,000 diamond ring from the safe, and of course stealing it. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, you'd think they wouldn't do that if they were already on bail from other charges, but they did.

9:10 [SPEAKER_01]: So, in response to the new charges, a judge raised their bail to $150,000 and the men were jailed. [SPEAKER_01]: Con offered to retrieve the jewels in the highest in exchange for letter sentence, which the judge accepted. [SPEAKER_01]: So eventually the uninsured star of India was recovered from a locker at a Miami bus station. [SPEAKER_01]: Most of the other gems were also recovered except for the Eagle Diamond, which has since been hypothesized but we're not sure to have been cut down from a golf ball-sized gemstone into many much smaller stones. [SPEAKER_01]: In April 1965, Murphy Cunne and Clark pleaded guilty to burglary and grand larceny and were sentenced to three years in jail.

9:53 [SPEAKER_01]: At this point, a young Nora Ephron only 23 years old covered their story for the New York Post, and who should read that story, even younger women, ambitious in their own way, but their big dreams would lead to their demise. [SPEAKER_01]: More after this break. [SPEAKER_01]: Terry Frank and Annelly Mone were on the lamb, walking out of LA with nearly $500,000 worth of securities and being harbored by Merff the Surf in Florida. [SPEAKER_01]: The heist itself in retrospect went flawlessly, but the laundering phase is where things became a little bit dicey. [SPEAKER_01]: A little history lesson, a little corporate greed and theft history lesson.

10:38 [SPEAKER_01]: So in the 1960s, fencing, half a million dollars in stolen corporate goods required deep mafia or black market connections to actually liquidate those things and get them in cash. [SPEAKER_01]: So, in December of 1967, Murphy and Jack Griffith took the two secretaries out on a boat trip along South Florida's intercostal waterway, ostensibly to discuss what that would look like, how they could help them, and specifically how would they divide up all of these assets in the whole scheme. [SPEAKER_01]: However, the deal quickly went awry. [SPEAKER_01]: When the two young women realized that they were being kind of cheated out of their share of things and that they had done all the work, things got very tense.

11:21 [SPEAKER_01]: When at least one of the women threatened to go to the authorities, the trip became deadly. [SPEAKER_01]: To silence them, Murphy and Griffith brutally attacked the women, bludgeoning them with a boat or. [SPEAKER_01]: Mone was shot and Frank was severely stabbed. [SPEAKER_01]: In a horrific attempt to keep the corpses from floating, the men slashed open the women's stomachs, tied concrete blocks to their necks with wires, and threw them overboard into whiskey creek near Fort Lauderdale. [SPEAKER_01]: Medical examiners would later testify that Terry Frank was likely still alive when she was thrown into the water. [SPEAKER_01]: Fishermen discovered their bodies floating in the main grove thickets of whiskey creek a week later.

12:05 [SPEAKER_01]: Now these men in some ways seem very smart, cunning, and certainly dangerous, but then I'm doing research into this case and in some ways God they were so not smart as evidenced by how they got found at the highest, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Well, similarly to how they found out that they had committed these gruesome crimes. [SPEAKER_01]: So witnesses at a local marina summer fee and three accomplices, including Jack Griffith, heading out on a boat with two women, and later returning without them. [SPEAKER_01]: So a bunch of people at the marina see them go out. [SPEAKER_00]: They come back minus two women.

12:45 [SPEAKER_01]: the alarming, right? [SPEAKER_01]: Especially when police are all over this case, these are two criminals, dangerous criminals who've done dangerous things in the past. [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe when you take two women out and want to murder them, you don't do it publicly. [SPEAKER_01]: Now again, I also don't think that they wanted. [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think it was a premeditated murder, sure. [SPEAKER_01]: But I don't know. [SPEAKER_01]: they certainly must have known that these women could have been a liability, they had not discussed these things intimately when you take someone out when you're criminal and you take someone out on a boat in the middle of a Florida swamp. [SPEAKER_01]: Nothing could really come of it, you know?

13:26 [SPEAKER_01]: Something bad is bound to happen and if you're the instigator of this bad thing, [SPEAKER_01]: You probably have understood perhaps the possibilities. [SPEAKER_01]: In 1969, Murphy and Greve were tried in Fort Lauderdale for the murder of 24-year-old Terry Ray Frank, of course, one of the two women. [SPEAKER_01]: Murphy's attorney pleaded not guilty of first-degree murder by reason of insanity. [SPEAKER_01]: Murphy was then committed to a mental hospital for several months before the judge ruled that he was in fact fit to stand trial. [SPEAKER_01]: In March 1969, he was sentenced to life in prison with hard labor. [SPEAKER_01]: Griffith was convicted of second-degree murder and received 45 years with hard labor. [SPEAKER_01]: Why were they only sentenced for one murder he might ask and and tried for one as well?

14:10 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, simply because it was easier and effective, but again, not exactly just. [SPEAKER_01]: Once Murphy received the life sentence in March 1969, pursuing a second murder trial was considered a necessary waste of resources and redundant. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, this is something of course that differs [SPEAKER_01]: Really, a lot of it is not about the punishment of the perpetrator, but justice and the honor of the victim. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, there's a lot of discussion whether Martha Surf and Jack Griffith were involved in the initial scheme. [SPEAKER_01]: The initial plan at the Fine Arts Building, or if it was master-minded by the two women who carried the whole thing out.

14:54 [SPEAKER_01]: interesting, we will really never know. [SPEAKER_01]: I mean, did these two men commit the perfect crime by having these women do their bidding, do the dirty work, and then eventually destroying them, or was it about two empowered women who wanted aid and safe passage and thought, let's talk to these people who are truly pros at it, maybe a little bit too trusting. [SPEAKER_01]: Again, we will never know. [SPEAKER_01]: What we do know is that for decades, the victim's stories were heavily overshadowed by Murphy's celebrity status and weird biographical points, including a bizarre post-conviction life. [SPEAKER_01]: What post-conviction life you might ask?

15:35 [SPEAKER_01]: Could this man's life get any more insane? [SPEAKER_01]: It can. [SPEAKER_01]: While in prison Murphy claimed to become a born again Christian and built a massive evangelical [SPEAKER_01]: He was controversially paroled in 1986 after serving just 20 years in prison, and continued to be a public prison minister until his death in 2020. [SPEAKER_01]: He was 83 years old and died of heart and organ failure. [SPEAKER_01]: Still, preach in a way. [SPEAKER_01]: In recent years, true crime documentaries, most notably the 2023 MGM Plus documentary series Murph The Surf, directed by RJ Cutler, have called Murphy, quote, the first true crime American television superstar.

16:20 [SPEAKER_01]: Cutler said, quote, he became an outlaw in popular public figure and his name was in the news every day, and the cops couldn't pin the crime on him, even though he was carrying a golf ball-sized sapphire around in his pocket. [SPEAKER_01]: Contemporarily, media has re-examined the case, though, to shift the focus away from Murphy's crazy persona and back onto the brutal cutting-down of Franken-Mone, and their own lives, their own agency and pulling off their heist. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, again, we don't nearly know as much as we do about Murph the Surf, but hopefully history remembers these women, too, not as victims, but criminal masterminds in their own right.