HAYWARD — Seventy-two years ago Saturday, Hayward made national headlines — and gained a place in state history — as a major footnote to the last public lynching in California.
Around 9 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 26, 1933, a mob — described by newspaper accounts as a well-dressed, aftertheater street crowd — invaded the county jail in San Jose, dragged out two accused kidnappers and murderers and hung them from trees in the city’s principal park.
Ghostly images of the late-night lynching, including one in the Hayward Area Historical Society’s archives, still exist: men running full tilt with battering rams, crashing into the steel doors of the jail; the nude bodies of the suspects, swinging from tree limbs that later were sawed off for souvenirs; onlookers, including women and children, staring at photographers.
Twelve hours earlier, duck hunters had discovered the body of San Jose department store heir Brooke Hart half submerged in the Bay near the Hayward shoreline, just beneath the San Mateo Bridge.
Well-known Hayward constable Vincent Strobel helped recover the bruised and asphyxiated body and bring it to Pratt-Flierl Mortuary, a stillelegant building now owned by Herndon Chiropractic, at 1044 C St. in downtown Hayward.
The coroner helped identify the young man,wrapped in wire and weighed down with a concrete block, by a treasured pocket knife, a collar clasp and a taped, broken right foot.
The news electrified the Bay Area, which through newspapers and radio had followed the search on land, sea and ship for the handsome 22-year-old, who had been abducted on Nov. 9.
“I was on my bicycle and I rode down C Street and I still can remember there was a big group in front of Pratt-Flierl,” recalled Hayward’s Allen Strutz. “They were looking at some of the personal items the Hart boy had in his clothes.”
Now a retired banker, Strutz then was a 14-year-old newsboy who for more than two weeks had hawked paper extra editions tracking the hunt and tragic ending. About two hours after newspaper extras announced the body had been found, near Hayward’s Mt. Eden Creek outfall into the Bay, crowds began gathering outside the San Jose jail.
John Holmes and Thomas Harold Thurmond were in custody there for kidnapping and murder. The pair had admitted to kidnapping Hart, robbing and binding him, and throwing him off the bridge.
By 9 p.m. an estimated 15,000 people had converged outside the jail.
Yellowing, brittle copies of the Nov. 27, 1933, Oakland Tribune, now The Daily Review’s sister paper, describe the early morning lynching in stark and dramatic detail.
“HOLMES, THURMOND TORN FROM CELLS AND HANGED ON PARK TREES,” screamed the main headline.
“Maddened Crowd Beats, Kicks and Tortures Confessed Kidnappers as They Are Dragged Across Street to Doom in Public Square,” read a lower headline. “THRONG JEERS AS VICTIMS DIE.”
The first five paragraphs of the riveting story tersely reported:
“Fifteen thousand shouting and screaming men and women lynched Thomas Thurmond and John Holmes last night in historic St. James Park, after partially wrecking the county jail and beating, trampling or choking every one of its defenders, including Sheriff William Emig.
“The two confessed kidnappers and murderers of Brooke Hart were beaten into semi-consciousness by a crowd driven to fury by news of the discovery of the youth’s dead body earlier in the day, and which fought for the privilege of assaulting them.
“Holmes, stark naked and covered with blood, presented a ghastly sight as he hung in the bright moonlight, 10 feet above the heads of the jeering, wildly gesticulating, well-dressed multitude, and women screamed and fell fainting as they looked at him.
“Thurman’s trousers were torn from him while he hung twitching in his death agonies, and men and women fought for them.
“The lynching followed an hour and a half’s siege of the old red brick county jail building, which ended when two battering rams improvised out of six-inch pipe crashed through the steel front doors after the mob had been thrice repulsed with tear gas bombs.”
The Santa Clara County Grand Jury, in January 1934, refused to indict anyone for the double lynching of Thurmond and Holmes. The two duck hunters who found Hart’s body shared a $500 reward offered by the kidnapping victim’s father.
In Hayward, then a community of fewer than 5,000 ranchers, farmers and cannery workers, the struggle to survive in the Great Depression continued.
Staff writer Matt O’Brien contributed to this story.
Karen Holzmeister covers Castro Valley, the Hayward Area Recreation and Park District, and county government for unincorporated areas. Call her at (510) 293-2478 or e-mail kholzmeister@dailyreviewonline.com.
