Gypsy Heart
Gold Member
Clyde and Lulu Dayton's Gold
Murder Mystery Prompts Manâs Quest
By Cecilia Rasmussen
October 06, 2002
What really happened to Clyde and Lulu Dayton? The health food pioneer known as the âRed-Ripe Honey-Manâ and his wife were shot and burned to death in their isolated cabin more than 80 years ago, their deaths officially unsolved.
Now, a distant relative thinks he has the answer. But even he doesnât know what happened to their buried treasure.
Clyde Dayton was something of a demented, miserly eccentric. When he wasnât pushing a wheelbarrow full of honey five miles east to Owensmouth, he could be found performing as the âbee-wizardâ (bees swarming around his head) at Los Angelesâ cultural center, Hazardâs Pavilion. He reputedly made a fortune, but he never owned a car, or even a horse and buggy.
The Daytonsâ 138-acre ranch stretched from Roscoe and Valley Circle boulevards in the San Fernando Valley community of West Hills to the Ventura County line. It included a canyon and creek named for the Daytons.
Now itâs being transformed into Dayton Canyon Estates, where developers are building 150 luxury homes. Project archeologists have unearthed bone fragments in 32 individual American Indian graves. But thereâs been no sign of Daytonâs fortuneâreputed to be thousands of dollars buried in Mason jars.
Since 1922, members of the family have believed that Clyde, 60, and Lulu, 52, were victims of a double murder because there was talk of âsuspicious holes in their skulls,â a âblood-bespattered trailâ and buried treasure.
As a child, Robbie Wilson of Coalfield, Tenn., had been told that his great-great-aunt and uncle had been murdered for their money. But after watching âRoots,â the 1977 television miniseries based on Alex Haleyâs novel, 12-year-old Robbie wanted to know what really happened.
He spent more than two decades digging through archives, poring over family letters and microfilm stories from eight newspapers, and interviewing family members across the nation.
After sorting through a maze of contradictory information, including death certificates that listed the cause of death as unknown, Wilson believes he has the answer.
*
New York-born Clyde Dayton arrived in Los Angeles in the 1890s and squatted on land tucked into a canyon of sagebrush, a creek and twisting ravines. In 1896, he married Katie McNeill, an Iowa native. She moved to his ranch in the farming community of Chatsworth. (The communityâs present name, West Hills, was adopted in 1987.)
Dayton suffered from chronic indigestion, which sparked his interest in healthy eating. He proselytized about nutrition and became a professional beekeeper, believing that honey held the key to health.
He built himself a shack with corrugated metal and made hundreds of wooden beehives.
Local fruit growers depended on Daytonâs bees to pollinate their crops. But the bulk of his income came from his honey, which he never sold without peddling his philosophy via his free health food pamphlets.
Despite all her presumably healthful eating, Katie contracted tuberculosis. In 1903, she left Dayton Canyon for treatment at a renowned Seventh-day Adventist sanitarium in Michigan. Two years later, as she was about to die, she returned to Los Angeles with a student nurse, Lou âLuluâ Adkisson. After Katieâs death, the nurse stayed in California, working as a seamstress and living downtown with Daytonâs mother.
Four years later, Dayton and Lulu were married. Both were strict vegetarians and devout Seventh-day Adventists.
Lulu moved into the shack where Clyde still wrote and printed pamphlets about the nutritional benefits of raw vegetables and honey.
Dayton believed that cleaning up the nutritional clutter in a personâs body required eating uncooked green vegetables, red honey and fruits with red pulp. In an era when most of America was strictly meat and potatoes, he strongly suggested avoiding fats for good digestion.
An article he wrote for the March 30, 1917, issue of the Owensmouth Gazette, headlined âHow Honey Heals,â declared:
âThere is not any kind of food that is nutritious if it is white, unless it is combined by its molecules with red or green. White honey is a conglomerate mass of colors until it has been ripened by cold weather so that its red is more intensified and the white eliminated. White is the color disease germs thrive in.â
A Fortune From Honey
Over more than a quarter-century, Dayton made a fortune selling large barrels of his âRed Ripe Honeyââsome of which he buried for seven years to âenhanceâ its medicinal value. He shipped it by railroad car, along with boxes of his health food pamphlets.
He evidently didnât trust banks any more than he trusted red meat. He gloated over his cache of silver and gold coins, which he supposedly buried somewhere on his vast property.
Over time, life in the cabin grew difficult and cramped with piles of magazines and pamphlets competing for space. Lulu complained to a friend that her husband rarely bathed, talked to himself and argued with her constantly. She begged him to build her a larger cabin and take a vacation, but he refused. Instead, he threatened to kill her if she didnât shut up.
On April 12, 1922, Dayton was last seen returning from Owensmouth with an empty wheelbarrow and a pocketful of profits. Hours later, his life and 12-year marriage ended tragically with the crack of a gun and the flick of a match.
When the ashes cooled, sheriffâs deputies found the Daytonsâ remains side by side on twisted steel bedsprings. Luluâs body had been doused with coal oil. (A half-empty jug was found outside.) There werenât enough skull fragments left to determine if there had been violence before the fire. But a trail of blood led from the cabin to the road, then disappeared. Or was it from the road to the cabin? At first, authorities reported that it was a double murder with robbery as the motive. Half the community speculated that Daytonâs neighbor, rancher Lon Gates, might have killed the couple for money or even revenge. Gates, the son of Calabasas Constable William Gates, was known throughout the area as a âbad hombre.â He had been arrested on three different occasions for cruelty to animals, including beating horses unmercifully with an iron chain.
One of the police investigators, a part-time rancher who kept some of his own beehives on Daytonâs ranch, said he believed Gates got even with the Daytons. Apparently, Lulu had soured a cattle deal after overhearing Gates lie about the condition of a prize calf.
But other evidence surfaced to support a murder-suicide theory. Neighbors reported that the couple had quarreled frequently. And Luluâs friend gave police a letter in which Lulu said she feared for her life and asked the friend to notify relatives if anything happened to her.
Still, police were perplexed. At the end of the six-day investigation, all they could come up with was a âpossible murder-suicide.â Although evidence pointed to Clydeâs killing Lulu, setting her body afire, then shooting himself, police questioned the location of his three guns: in the corner. None was near his body. (Of course, the cabin was tinyâjust 12 by 12 feet.)
Compounding the mystery, it was impossible to tell if any of the guns had been fired. And if there were any shell casings, they melted in the conflagration.
It seemed that everyone in town, including sheriffâs deputies, had an opinion about the Daytonsâ cause of death.
Search Ends in Theory
Now, after decades of research, Wilson has one of this own: He believes that Clyde soured on life amid the sweet smell of health-food honey and killed Lulu, then himself.
Dayton was âprobably insane,â Wilson says. He thinks that a jerking reaction as he died most likely caused the gun to fly a few feet away from his body.
âThe fire was so intense because of the cabinâs corrugated metal frame and the amount of paper inside, making it impossible for a brass bullet casing to survive the fire,â he says.
âMy grandmotherâs recollection of âsuspicious holes in their skullsâ can probably be explained by the fact that she, a 7-year-old in 1922, probably heard the family mention âpieces of their skullsâ and, from that, assumed that they had been struck on their heads prior to the fire.â
But the clincher for Wilson was a two-paragraph story in the Los Angeles Evening Herald that mentioned Luluâs letter about fearing for her life.
Clyde and Luluâs remains were buried in separate caskets in the same grave at Evergreen Cemetery in East Los Angeles. Clydeâs eternal legacy was penurious: There was no headstone.
On the 80th anniversary of their deaths last April 12, Wilson visited Los Angeles and purchased a headstone to mark their grave.
*
One mystery solved, at least to Wilsonâs satisfaction. But what happened to the money?
âIâve always wondered about the possibility of buried money still being in existence, since I learned from a Glendale title company back in 1988 that their property was still undeveloped,â he said.
âThe newspaper articles state that it was an assumption that Clyde kept a large sum of money hidden inside his and Louâs cabin. However, my grandmotherâs first cousin, who worked and stayed on the ranch in 1919, knew it was buried somewhere in the bee yard. Every time Clyde paid him, he would go outside into the bee yard and return with gold and silver coins.â
Dayton Canyonâor, rather, Dayton Canyon Estatesâis about to get a multitude of new homeowners.
Some of them will be armed with metal detectors, and theyâll be heading for whatever remains of the bee yard.
Murder Mystery Prompts Manâs Quest
By Cecilia Rasmussen
October 06, 2002
What really happened to Clyde and Lulu Dayton? The health food pioneer known as the âRed-Ripe Honey-Manâ and his wife were shot and burned to death in their isolated cabin more than 80 years ago, their deaths officially unsolved.
Now, a distant relative thinks he has the answer. But even he doesnât know what happened to their buried treasure.
Clyde Dayton was something of a demented, miserly eccentric. When he wasnât pushing a wheelbarrow full of honey five miles east to Owensmouth, he could be found performing as the âbee-wizardâ (bees swarming around his head) at Los Angelesâ cultural center, Hazardâs Pavilion. He reputedly made a fortune, but he never owned a car, or even a horse and buggy.
The Daytonsâ 138-acre ranch stretched from Roscoe and Valley Circle boulevards in the San Fernando Valley community of West Hills to the Ventura County line. It included a canyon and creek named for the Daytons.
Now itâs being transformed into Dayton Canyon Estates, where developers are building 150 luxury homes. Project archeologists have unearthed bone fragments in 32 individual American Indian graves. But thereâs been no sign of Daytonâs fortuneâreputed to be thousands of dollars buried in Mason jars.
Since 1922, members of the family have believed that Clyde, 60, and Lulu, 52, were victims of a double murder because there was talk of âsuspicious holes in their skulls,â a âblood-bespattered trailâ and buried treasure.
As a child, Robbie Wilson of Coalfield, Tenn., had been told that his great-great-aunt and uncle had been murdered for their money. But after watching âRoots,â the 1977 television miniseries based on Alex Haleyâs novel, 12-year-old Robbie wanted to know what really happened.
He spent more than two decades digging through archives, poring over family letters and microfilm stories from eight newspapers, and interviewing family members across the nation.
After sorting through a maze of contradictory information, including death certificates that listed the cause of death as unknown, Wilson believes he has the answer.
*
New York-born Clyde Dayton arrived in Los Angeles in the 1890s and squatted on land tucked into a canyon of sagebrush, a creek and twisting ravines. In 1896, he married Katie McNeill, an Iowa native. She moved to his ranch in the farming community of Chatsworth. (The communityâs present name, West Hills, was adopted in 1987.)
Dayton suffered from chronic indigestion, which sparked his interest in healthy eating. He proselytized about nutrition and became a professional beekeeper, believing that honey held the key to health.
He built himself a shack with corrugated metal and made hundreds of wooden beehives.
Local fruit growers depended on Daytonâs bees to pollinate their crops. But the bulk of his income came from his honey, which he never sold without peddling his philosophy via his free health food pamphlets.
Despite all her presumably healthful eating, Katie contracted tuberculosis. In 1903, she left Dayton Canyon for treatment at a renowned Seventh-day Adventist sanitarium in Michigan. Two years later, as she was about to die, she returned to Los Angeles with a student nurse, Lou âLuluâ Adkisson. After Katieâs death, the nurse stayed in California, working as a seamstress and living downtown with Daytonâs mother.
Four years later, Dayton and Lulu were married. Both were strict vegetarians and devout Seventh-day Adventists.
Lulu moved into the shack where Clyde still wrote and printed pamphlets about the nutritional benefits of raw vegetables and honey.
Dayton believed that cleaning up the nutritional clutter in a personâs body required eating uncooked green vegetables, red honey and fruits with red pulp. In an era when most of America was strictly meat and potatoes, he strongly suggested avoiding fats for good digestion.
An article he wrote for the March 30, 1917, issue of the Owensmouth Gazette, headlined âHow Honey Heals,â declared:
âThere is not any kind of food that is nutritious if it is white, unless it is combined by its molecules with red or green. White honey is a conglomerate mass of colors until it has been ripened by cold weather so that its red is more intensified and the white eliminated. White is the color disease germs thrive in.â
A Fortune From Honey
Over more than a quarter-century, Dayton made a fortune selling large barrels of his âRed Ripe Honeyââsome of which he buried for seven years to âenhanceâ its medicinal value. He shipped it by railroad car, along with boxes of his health food pamphlets.
He evidently didnât trust banks any more than he trusted red meat. He gloated over his cache of silver and gold coins, which he supposedly buried somewhere on his vast property.
Over time, life in the cabin grew difficult and cramped with piles of magazines and pamphlets competing for space. Lulu complained to a friend that her husband rarely bathed, talked to himself and argued with her constantly. She begged him to build her a larger cabin and take a vacation, but he refused. Instead, he threatened to kill her if she didnât shut up.
On April 12, 1922, Dayton was last seen returning from Owensmouth with an empty wheelbarrow and a pocketful of profits. Hours later, his life and 12-year marriage ended tragically with the crack of a gun and the flick of a match.
When the ashes cooled, sheriffâs deputies found the Daytonsâ remains side by side on twisted steel bedsprings. Luluâs body had been doused with coal oil. (A half-empty jug was found outside.) There werenât enough skull fragments left to determine if there had been violence before the fire. But a trail of blood led from the cabin to the road, then disappeared. Or was it from the road to the cabin? At first, authorities reported that it was a double murder with robbery as the motive. Half the community speculated that Daytonâs neighbor, rancher Lon Gates, might have killed the couple for money or even revenge. Gates, the son of Calabasas Constable William Gates, was known throughout the area as a âbad hombre.â He had been arrested on three different occasions for cruelty to animals, including beating horses unmercifully with an iron chain.
One of the police investigators, a part-time rancher who kept some of his own beehives on Daytonâs ranch, said he believed Gates got even with the Daytons. Apparently, Lulu had soured a cattle deal after overhearing Gates lie about the condition of a prize calf.
But other evidence surfaced to support a murder-suicide theory. Neighbors reported that the couple had quarreled frequently. And Luluâs friend gave police a letter in which Lulu said she feared for her life and asked the friend to notify relatives if anything happened to her.
Still, police were perplexed. At the end of the six-day investigation, all they could come up with was a âpossible murder-suicide.â Although evidence pointed to Clydeâs killing Lulu, setting her body afire, then shooting himself, police questioned the location of his three guns: in the corner. None was near his body. (Of course, the cabin was tinyâjust 12 by 12 feet.)
Compounding the mystery, it was impossible to tell if any of the guns had been fired. And if there were any shell casings, they melted in the conflagration.
It seemed that everyone in town, including sheriffâs deputies, had an opinion about the Daytonsâ cause of death.
Search Ends in Theory
Now, after decades of research, Wilson has one of this own: He believes that Clyde soured on life amid the sweet smell of health-food honey and killed Lulu, then himself.
Dayton was âprobably insane,â Wilson says. He thinks that a jerking reaction as he died most likely caused the gun to fly a few feet away from his body.
âThe fire was so intense because of the cabinâs corrugated metal frame and the amount of paper inside, making it impossible for a brass bullet casing to survive the fire,â he says.
âMy grandmotherâs recollection of âsuspicious holes in their skullsâ can probably be explained by the fact that she, a 7-year-old in 1922, probably heard the family mention âpieces of their skullsâ and, from that, assumed that they had been struck on their heads prior to the fire.â
But the clincher for Wilson was a two-paragraph story in the Los Angeles Evening Herald that mentioned Luluâs letter about fearing for her life.
Clyde and Luluâs remains were buried in separate caskets in the same grave at Evergreen Cemetery in East Los Angeles. Clydeâs eternal legacy was penurious: There was no headstone.
On the 80th anniversary of their deaths last April 12, Wilson visited Los Angeles and purchased a headstone to mark their grave.
*
One mystery solved, at least to Wilsonâs satisfaction. But what happened to the money?
âIâve always wondered about the possibility of buried money still being in existence, since I learned from a Glendale title company back in 1988 that their property was still undeveloped,â he said.
âThe newspaper articles state that it was an assumption that Clyde kept a large sum of money hidden inside his and Louâs cabin. However, my grandmotherâs first cousin, who worked and stayed on the ranch in 1919, knew it was buried somewhere in the bee yard. Every time Clyde paid him, he would go outside into the bee yard and return with gold and silver coins.â
Dayton Canyonâor, rather, Dayton Canyon Estatesâis about to get a multitude of new homeowners.
Some of them will be armed with metal detectors, and theyâll be heading for whatever remains of the bee yard.
