CV Housewives Beat Up Old Lady in 1956

In a twist on the reality show “The Real Housewives of (insert city here)” a group of “real housewives of La Crescenta” beat and robbed an old lady in Glendale then created a gossipy media frenzy. It was 1956 (i.e. “the good old days”) and three over-the-hill juvenile delinquent friends got together regularly to smoke dope and cruise around. Mrs. Laura Wietz lived on Foothill Boulevard with her parents, while Mrs. Deanna Bejar and Mrs. Mary Kennedy lived in the same house on Frances Avenue. No mention of husbands. In a news photo taken after their arrest they all look exactly like Rizzo from the movie “Grease.” High fashion for the ’50s.

On the evening of March 29, the three women were driving around Glendale. They were bored and broke. As they slowly drove down the 1400 block of East California Street, they spotted a 70-year-old woman walking to mail a letter, her purse in hand. The trio later told police, “We were just cruising around and we saw the old lady. She looked like a soft touch, so we took her.”

They pulled to the curb behind their victim. Two of them quietly got out of the car while the third stayed behind the wheel. They grabbed the old woman from behind. She fell to the sidewalk where the two women beat and kicked her viciously, fracturing her hip and breaking her back. They grabbed her purse, piled back in the car and peeled out while the old woman lay bleeding and barely conscious. They headed up into the hills where they split the cash, $135. There was a check for another $120 but the housewives tossed it and the purse in the bushes, telling police later “Checks can get you in trouble, so we threw it away.” Savvy criminals, these three.

They probably would have gotten away with it but for the fact that in the struggle Mrs. Laura Wietz dropped her wallet on the ground. After the victim had been taken to the hospital, the police found the wallet with Mrs. Wietz’s ID. The police went to the address on Foothill where Wietz lived with her parents. Wietz turned out to be the weak link of the trio. She confessed immediately and ratted out the other two.

The police next visited Mrs. Bejar and Mrs. Kennedy up on Frances. They arrested the pair and sent Mrs. Bejar’s two small children to the hospital to get checked over. The three were arraigned the next day. The police reported that all three had “wise-cracking attitudes.”

A month later the court held a preliminary hearing in the hospital next to the victim’s bed. Her three assailants sat stone-faced in the makeshift courtroom while the critically injured old woman quietly described the attack.

“I was knocked down and kicked and beaten.”

After the attack she lay on the sidewalk. “I thought I’d rest up a little bit, then get up. But I couldn’t get up.”

In later hearings Bejar and Kennedy were charged with felony assault and robbery. Bejar was also charged with child neglect, to which she pled guilty.

The previously mentioned weak link of the trio, Laura Wietz, after having turned in her two companions in crime pled guilty to the charges, and also turned in the guy who was selling the housewives marijuana. She was well rewarded. The judge dropped the felony charges and sentenced her to three years probation, and every-other-weekend jail confinement. The judge added, “On the weekends when you are not in custody, you are to go to church.”

The two remaining criminal housewives, having been implicated by Wietz, finally pled guilty. Mrs. Bejar was sentenced to six months but Mrs. Kennedy, having been the initiator of the attack, was given a year. The trial was highly sensationalized in the newspapers.

The successful “The Real Housewives” TV show franchise made a fortune by airing a formula of gossip and back-stabbing between a group of suburban housewives, some of them eventually ending up in jail. It seems La Crescenta had a lock on that formula over 60 years ago.