Doomed to Fail - Ep 17 - Part 1: Wait, he did what? - Griffith J. Griffith (of the park in LA)

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

Today, we are re-releasing our episode on Los Angeles's Griffith J. Griffith. It's a wild ride from Ireland to the US, to California, to Los Angles, to prison.  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

Taylor from Doom to Fail, we are back with re-releases. Today I am re-reasing episode 17, part one, which is on Griffith J. Griffith. So if you've been to Los Angeles, you might have seen the Griffith Observatory and been to Griffith Park. It's on a mountain. It's very, very beautiful. And it was paid for by money that Griffith J. Griffith, I know. That is his name. Donated to the city of Los Angeles. But the city of Los Angeles was not initially excited about accepting this gift because Griffith had tried to kill his wife in a very, very spectacular manner. So let's learn about this Los Angeles icon. I don't even know how to explain this man. So listen and let us know what you think. This is episode 17, part one. We have up to episode 26

that we will re-release in two parts. So look for episode 17, part too soon. And if you have any questions or ideas, please find us at DoomtofailPod on all the socials, or email us at doom tofillpod at gmail.com. Thanks. In a matter of the people of the state of California, first is Hortlandthall James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Welcome to Doom to Fail, the podcast where we always have allergies. I'm Fars. I'm joined here by my co-host, Taylor. Hi, Taylor.

Hello. I'm taking an allergy pill right now. I know. Taylor looks like she's having allergy situations going on. And I also have allergy situations going on. And we also got a chance to hang out for the first time in since January, right? Yeah. When you were in Austin. Yeah. Yeah. So. It was pretty cool. It was very fun. We went to a nice steakhouse in La Quinta and my daughter was sick but my son came and he had a great time yeah gave him some business cards he he loves them and it has the most this the restaurant that we went to the steakhouse we went to

is called LG's prime steakhouse and LG is the name of the or the initials of the founder who has long since passed I think he passed in 2008 but they had this adorable pick painting of him in the lobby it's like a room it's like a I would give it like a romantic kind of vibe like it's like a modern edgy looking steakhouse it's a nice steakhouse you know Yeah, yeah. But then there's this one painting of this very, very feeble-looking old man wearing a Christmas sweater of some kind. It's definitely a Bill Cosby sweater, you know.

It's definitely a Bill Cosby sweater. Yeah. Different, different ramifications back then. But, yeah, it. Back when that was okay. It stands out. It is a painting that stands out amongst the modern artwork they have there. So it was fun, though.

Yeah, very, very fun. And now we're back home. I'm in Austin. You're in Joshua Tree, and you're about to leave again for L.A., right? Yep, I'm going to leave a little bit after this. I haven't even packed yet, but I'll get to it. I'll get to it. I'm going to tell you yesterday.

I was like in my one-on-one with my boss and Florence is sick. My daughter and I've said that. And so she's sitting, I opened up the bed in my office on my couch and she's sitting next to me. And I heard this voice, like a weird voice. And I was like, what is that? I looked over and she was listening to our podcast on YouTube. And I was like, ah! And I like screamed her name and I was like, hold on.

I had to like mute myself and be like, Florence, that's not for you. was like i didn't hear any bad words and i was like let's just not that's not feed you is our podcast not child appropriate not child appropriate no okay do we need to put a disclaimer on no it literally it says we have an explicit next all of our next to everything it's a big e oh okay so like you know that's like parents discretion yeah yeah in your discretion is definitely not appropriate for flow at this age okay makes sense i'm going to say not for eight year olds Make sense. Make sense. So let's go ahead and dive right in. So if I am doing my math correctly, you go first. Yes. So I'll describe what I'm drinking and then you can segue into yours. Okay. So mine is a beer that I discovered while I was living in L.A that I absolutely love. I keep drinking it. It is shocking how many calories were in this beer, but it is so well worth it. It is a Sierra Nevada IPA. I'm going to hold it up with the camera so you can see what it looks like.

Wait, hold on, let me, let me screenshot at you. A minute, too. Okay. Did you? I didn't do it. No. Wait, wait. Oh, my God.

So sorry, everyone. Okay. Continue. If I remember, so I looked this up when I first fell in love with it and was like, I wonder, I mean, this feels so filling. I wonder why. It was like 360 calories or something. It was some. What?

In a can? Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. It was, it was, I need to look it up again, just to make sure I didn't go a fact checked on that, but it was, it's delicious. And because my story is going to take place in California, I wanted to have a Californian beer to reminisce about the upbeat story I will be telling later on.

I think California, too. Okay. So also, when me and Taylor were at this stakehouse this week, I asked Taylor what her topic was on. And she is truly committed because she was like, I'm not telling you. To my face, I was like, I'm not telling you. So that's how close to the chess we play these. So I did not know that your story was in California. I'm hoping this is not that we don't have the same one because I'm tiptoeing into true crime smidge, but from a long time ago.

Was yours in the 1800s? No. Great. Then we're all set. Yes. So I'm drinking, well, this story has a lot of whiskey in it. So I'm just going to drink like a pint glass of whiskey for this one, which is not great. Don't do that.

So I'll just go ahead and get started. So like we said later today, I'm driving to L.A. for work. So I decided to take it back to the place that we lived in when we lived there and talk about Los Felas, the neighborhood. And I'm saying Los Felas because I live there for eight years, but I know you could also say Los Feliz, whatever. I'll teach you back and forth. And specifically, the history of the man who donated the land to make Los Felas Silver Lake and Griffith Park. So this is a story of Griffith, Jay Griffith, and his wife, Tina Massimer Griffith. that is really exciting i okay so yeah taylor kind of teed this up so we both lived in

la that's how we met each other was through a company work worked at in l a and we lived really close to each other for most of that time because if you remember my first apartment your friend is the one who hooked me up with it do you remember that was Nicole that was that's the d tf Nicole yeah okay so she knew the guy who was wanting to sub lease and i went out of them so that was los feles lost fellies what i would i what are We're going to go back and forth, yeah. And then after that, I moved into the apartment that I had in, like, Hollywood, which is like, which was right on the cusp of most places.

So we were always kind of just, like, really close to each other. So, like, we're very familiar with this area. The shark house, the Jaws house is right there. Yeah. So exciting. Okay. Yeah. It's a great.

It's a great neighborhood. I'm going to talk about that in a little bit, too, because we'll get some history of the area and a little bit more about it. Do you want to trigger warning that there is some domestic violence that's going to happen in a little bit? So we'll get to that. But Griffith, J. Griffith was born in Wales on January 4th, 1850. I have no idea why anyone would ever name a child that. Like, are you going to name a child, Sokensange, F. Sokensh, that makes no sense.

J. Griffith. Griffith. Yeah, it kind of worked. I mean, it depends on what kind of personality type he was, but it could work. Yeah. I mean, the J. St. For Jenkins, FYI. But Griffith, J. Griffith.

His family immigrated to the United States in 1865 and settled in Pennsylvania. And eventually he moved west to Sanford, Francisco. So his upbringing in Wales was very poor. He was always embarrassed by this. So he kind of wanted to have his own American dream. He always wanted to be part of high society. That's something that we'll talk about later. So he really had this like social climbing thing in the back of his head. While he was in San Francisco, he started working for the newspaper and he wrote stories on the mining industry. So it was like gold rush mining time in California. And he learned a lot about it. So basically he was able to flip the knowledge that he got from being a journalist to being sort of like a mining consultant, and that's how he made his fortune. So at 30 years old, he made a shit ton of money being a mining consultant in California. So he's rich pretty quickly. Good for him. Yeah.

So in 1882, Griffith moved to Los Angeles and purchased approximately 4,000 acres of the Rancho Los Feliz Mexican land grant. So this is the fun part that I'm going to tell you about, the history of it. You said 400, right? 4,000. 4,000? Yeah, 4,000 acres of the, yeah. So this is the fun part, we're in the history of that area.

So a land grant is an offering of the sale of land to a specific person or type of person, like a veteran or a rich person for a certain reason or just someone who's willing to farm the land like homesteading. So it's land that they have like reserve for a specific person. So California, that includes like the Baja California and part of Mexico was obviously like native land for hundreds of thousands. of years. And I know I mentioned on social media, like a resume, like 90-something percent of human history isn't recorded. So there's so much stuff that happened in California that we will never know about. You mentioned last week about South America having such a rich culture. We weren't anything about it because, you know, it was colonized. I read something this week that was like Spanish colonizers would go and see these beautiful cities. And then the next guy

who went a couple years later, they'd be gone because everybody was dead because of all those diseases. So real shitty that we don't know more about it. But the land in California is often, was often given to Spanish missions and religious institutions. There's a lot of like missions in like San Diego, those beautiful like old buildings. You know what I'm talking about? Like a mission. Yeah. I mean the Alamo, I'm being in Texas, the Alamo was a mission. Like that's what the in the facade resembles one. So exactly, exactly. So eventually it does get more secular. It opens up to more people. So at different times, the land that is California now belongs to different people. So there's.

The Spanish rule was 1769 to 1821. The Mexican era was 1821 to 1846. Then there was the Mexican-American War and started in May 1846. James K. Polk was the president. He was the 11th president and responsible for the most land grabs of all presidents. So with the Mexican-American War and some treaties, he expanded the country by like 1.5 million square miles, like a crazy amount, all of California and a big part of the East. So with the Treaty of the Guadalupe Hildago, ending the Mexican War on February 2nd, 1848, so that war was just two years long, California became a territory of the United States. And then between 1847, 1849, California was run by the military.

And there was a government that was kind of stated in 1849. So after 10 months of being its own kind of government, California was admitted to the union as a 31st state by the Congress as part of the compromise of 1850 on September 9, 1850. So some California history, how we got here. And this is, so about 30 years later, after this tech. Can I direct real quick? Yeah. So that means that California as a state has only existed for 170 years. Yeah.

Is that wild? There are cultures like, there's like ruins in Egypt that are 30,000 years old. And as a state, California, that's weird. It's too much. Yeah. Weird to think about. Yeah. Timelines are crazy.

Like, I even like, my look at the timeline that I made of, this is episode 17, so much of it leans towards like, even like 1,500 to now. That's what we know about. And then I know a little bit about up to like maybe zero or a couple of things below that. But like, really, we don't, there's so much we don't know. It's crazy. Yeah. Most of human history. Yeah.

So in 1882, Griffith gets Rancho Los Felice. And then this is where I also have a weird, shameful confession. So Susie Isard is a comedian that I love. and she had a bit where she was like, oh, we're on Lafayette Street. She was at a club on Lafayette Street in New York City. And she goes, you know what that means, right, Americans? Like, you know about Lafayette. And I literally, at the time I was watching this, like on a DVD,

I lived in a building called Lafayette, and I did not know about Lafayette. Like, I didn't know about the... I still don't know. He was like a French general who came to America, was really, really good friends with George Washington in Hamilton. He's in Hamilton. They call him the Lancelot of the Revolutionary set. He was like French.

went back and was involved in getting Marie Antoinette, overthrown, so super part of, big part of American history. So now that I know more, I literally have like a plate that I found a thrister on my wall that's like Lafayette in Washington, inspecting the troops of Valley Forge. So like, I know more now.

I wish I knew even more. I know who he is. And I was like, I'm so embarrassed about this. Like I need to like learn more and it kind of like clicked for me. And then it hadn't clicked yet that my passion was like being mad at the way we learned history, but I was embarrassed. And then I also just remembered that the L, and L. Ron Hubbard stands for Lafayette.

Did you know that? No way. Yeah. I thought it was literally just E. L. No, it was just an L. Okay, it's just an L. Lafayette Ron Hubbard. Yeah. That name does not flow. Yeah. Anyway, I fucking did it again. Like, I live in Los Phila's and didn't know the history of it.

So, super embarrassed. I'm the worst. I'm an asshole. It's my thing. So, Rancho Los Feliz was 6,647 acres. It was given in 1795 by Spanish governor Pedro Fais to Jose Vincente Felice. Like, it was, that's named after a person. He was a member of the 1775 to 1776 Onsa Expedition that brought the first Spanish settlers to California. In 1781, he was one of the four soldiers who guarded the settlers.

They founded the settlement. El Pueblo de Nuestra, Signora la rena de Los Angeles, which means the town of our lady, the queen of angels, which literally became Los Angeles. Oh, wow. So, like, what? So, Jose Vicente Feliz was one of, like, the founding fathers of Los Angeles. And then he had this ranch called the Los Velas Ranch. Okay, so I'm mixing with chronology.

It sounds like the land grant was for Los Feliz territory. Yeah, that was later. That happened later. So Los Angeles was founded first. Mm-hmm. Okay. Yes, yes. So Los Angeles was on the first.

So I kind of skipped around a little bit. But anyway, so this is more about the land that Griffith ends up getting. So the land remained. the Los Felice family until the 1800s when they sold it and then Griffith got 4,000 acres of it in 1882 so that's how we're here. I know I said this already but like I fucking love it there I know we've talked we just talked about it I love where I live like this is where I live in Joshua which I love it here but I loved living in New York City that was amazing it would be a dream to have an apartment there that was like nice but at my absolute dream house would be in like the hills

of Los Felas like I it's so beautiful there's that murder house there's there's the Franklin right house that was used in vincent prices house on haunted hill and in an s club seven video and there's one by his son that shark house where the black dahlia may have been murdered that one's so cool and um when i had both of my kids i got like you know three months off with them and we would just go on walks used to those hills about it was like beautiful houses i listened to a lot of korena longworth's haunted hollywood so you know i was just like i love the same road it's so pretty so it's so charming it's so lush it's so green it feels weirdly private given the fact that it's a part of of Los Angeles, you were a street away from some of the best hiking trails, mountainous regions possible, it's overall, I guess, our hills, technically, but still absolutely gorgeous in Griffith Park. And then Little Dom's was like my favorite, favorite restaurant. It is so old-timey, classic Italian. I went there the day that Prince died. I went, I had dinner with friends there, and they had like a purple cocktail. You could buy. It was very sweet. Yeah, they have a wonderful zoo.

The L.A. Zoo is in that area now. It's great. My kids love that zoo. There's that terrifying old zoo. Did you ever look at that? Yeah, because that's where the haunted hayride always was. It went through the old zoo, remember? And it was like...

The haunted hayride. I loved the haunted hayride. Yeah. I totally forgot about that way. That was so fun. We did that a couple times. Yeah. The zoo has like really small enclosures because it was like...

It was like the zoo before they had like animal rights. So you can go visit it and like sit in the enclosures, which is crazy. Also, you remember of Florence had her. birthday party there. We were that bouncy house and we're on the carousel. So the carousel was actually built in San Diego, but it was moved there in 1937. So there's a lot of cool stuff there. It's great.

It's a dream. So now it belongs to 1880s. It belongs to Griffith, Jay Griffith. And he wants to be very popular in LA society. He's rich. He wants to, you know, be the guy. But people think he's annoying. They're a little bit like, he's new money.

He's kind of like, I don't know. Like, they don't love him. So he's having a hard time, like, getting into these services. goals. So in comes the Messmer family of California. They are from France, like the Alsace Lorraine area, which is where my people are from between France and Germany. The patriarch was Louis Messmer. He was another founding father of L.A. You can say something like that. He was he laid the first sidewalk. He built hotels. So another like prominent man in Los Angeles. So L.A. was indigenous and Spanish, then had the ranchos. Then it was American. Then it was like a post-World War II

boom and then now it is now but this is sort of the american part and louis mesmer is in the top ranks um he has a daughter named mary agnes christina mesmer her name is tina she was born february 29th 1864 so tina you know grew up in los angeles she had money from her parents but she actually had her own fortune because they had a family friend andre spritzwalter and he left her money in his will so she's independently wealthy as well for what is worth she was Catholic and Griffith was Protestant, so I wrote a tale as old as time. Obviously, that's going to be a thing. Yes, yes. The capulets and the Montague's. Yeah. So there are rumors that some of her family and friends were like, this dude's new money. He's kind of annoying. Like,

he really wants to be rich. Everyone can tell. Like, I don't know if he's like the one for you, but Tina marries him anyway. So Griffith and Tina get married. They have one son. His name is Vandal. He will eventually be on the police commission in LA. So he does pretty well for himself. There There isn't a lot about him, but Find a Grave says that he ran away from home at certain points, which I think is fair because you don't know how that way. I'm sorry. What were you referencing just there? Find a grave.

What does that mean? It's like a website where you can, well, this is, that's the only place that had saw information about him, but you can go to findagrave.com and put in, like, anyone who has a grave, and they'll tell you where it is. Or I guess it's probably maybe not anyone, but, like, Fianoceney ball. Wow. I've never heard of this. Oh, my God.

Aaron Morin died on this. This day in 2017, she played, oh my God, Ron Howard's sister and, um, Joanne, Joni. In Happy Days? Yeah, in Happy Days. Joni. Yeah. It's on the website. I don't know why I'm, whatever.

You can spend a lot of time I find a grave. Apparently. Do that later. Yeah. So Tina and Griffith are married. They're doing rich people shit in Los Angeles. The mining is essentially passive income. So just have a lot of money.

December 16th, 1896, Griffith and his wife, Tina gave 3,015 acres of the Rancho Los Felice to the city of Los Angeles for use as a public park. He called their Christmas present. And after accepting the donation, the city passed an ordinance to name the property after him. So that's why it's called Griffith Park. You also can see a, there's a statue of him still outside of it as well. Yeah, I remember. So here's what he said about it, quote, it must be made a place of rest and relaxation for the masses, a resort for the rank and file for the plain people. I consider it my obligation to make Los Angeles a happy, cleaner, and finer city. I wish to pay my debt of duty in this way to the community in which

I have prospered. That's great. I love it. Thank you. I'm definitely a plain person and I loved it. Yeah. It's beautiful. Yeah, it's great. And he also put in the stipulations that like if they ever tried to make it into anything else besides the park, that his family could take it back. So like, he really wanted to keep in a park, which is great. But it's still a park. So even all this has happened he still doesn't feel as popular as like he wants to feel and that's sort of like one of the red flags is he just like needs a social status like more than normal people even though he has the money he wants the fame and now he doesn't feel like he's being like treated the right way after giving all this land so he starts to kind of go insane like he starts to get really really paranoid and mostly

it's because he starts drinking probably comes a big part of it so he drinks like just so much whiskey every day and it's like thinks people are trying to poison him he thinks people are trying to to kill him he thinks the pope wants to kill him he thinks his family wants to kill him he's just like having all these paranoid delusions and he's in like a really terrible place and i'm sure he's just like jocelyn around the giant empty cavernous living room as well yes exactly so he's like living in a mansion you know and just like thinking that everybody's out to get him it's definitely like a nightmare in that house because he's like yelling and accusing everybody of everything you know he's probably just be happy being rich i know you don't be famous sounds kind of annoying just like

So many famous people say, like, I miss the moment when I could just go get, like, a coffee in public. Yeah. Yeah. I really, like, staring at you. Totally. But he still wants it. That's his thing. On September 3rd, 1903, so Vandal, their son is 15.

They've been married for a while. They are vacationing in Santa Monica at the Arcadia Hotel, which doesn't exist anymore, but they're in Santa Monica, like, on vacation. Tina was alone in the room when Griffith came in. with a loaded gun and he's definitely drunk definitely like losing his mind he made her get on her knees and he had a note card with some questions written down like pre-written down and he asked him to her he said he asked her if she had been involved in killing andre brits um the person that she had inherited the money from and she was like no of course not i would never have done that like if she asked her he asked her if she had poisoned him she was like no he asked her if she had

been poisoning him and she was like no i would never hurt you like of course i haven't been doing that during this she's praying because he's like got a gunpointed at her head and then he asked her if she'd been faithful and she said yes of course i've been faithful and then he shoots her in the head and she does not die the bullet hit her eye socket shattered a part of the bone and then part of the bone and the bullet went up into her skin and ended up under her skin between her skin and her skull her eye was destroyed she asks him why he shot her and it's confusing and he doesn't She's still awake? Oh, yeah.

She jumps out the window because they're on the second floor. She jumps out the window, lands on, like, the roof of, like, the portico underneath her, breaks her shoulder, crawls along the roof, and then goes into the window of another room that happened to be open to get to safety. That's crazy. I know. So the hotel called the doctor. They couldn't even bring her to a hospital that day because it was like 1903. So she was like in, like they sedated her to go to a hospital. They weren't sure it was going to survive, but she survived.

She had obviously a lot of facial scars, but she survived. Griffith was arrested for attempted murder. His lawyer claimed that he was insane because of the drinking. And that seems kind of fair because he was definitely, like, losing his mind. And the paranoia had been getting worse and worse and worse. Tina testified that everything that had happened. When she did, she had a black veil over her face. There's a really great court drawing of it.

She had a veil hiding her face. And then she had to go to each member of the jury. lift the veil and show them what he had done to her so each person like saw her like weird eye socket he ended up being charged with assault with a deadly weapon sentenced to five years in prison and a five thousand dollar fine that sounds light i know that he didn't he was charged with attempted murder but got or whatever but he ended up getting assault of deadly weapon wow okay in 1904 tina was granted a divorce and full custody of vandal griffith to pay for his education like child support and stuff she went in to get the divorce and the judge was like why do you want a divorce and she was

like well he shot me in the face and the judge was like done and it was like a record it took four and a half minutes for the judge to to get for that yeah she goes on like lives with a family she died in 1940 at the age of 84 so they never they never had contact again griffith served two years and then was released he has the world's best mugshot i don't know if you want to google it i'll put it in the thing it's like it's so good he came out sober and was like, well, I'm still rich. So he still tried to, like, be a part of LA society. He tried to give money to L.A. to build an observatory in a Greek theater. The city accepted the money, but the park commission was like, no, like you can't, I don't want to build those

things under your name because you tried to kill your wife. So let's stop taking money from this guy. But of course, this mugshot is incredible. It's incredible. Like, he looks like so annoyed. He looks like a lobotomy patient. He looks like Elmer Fudd. He looks like Elmer Fud. Yeah. You think? Yeah, they all kind of looked like that back then, right? Yeah, yeah. It's pretty great. So he tried to give the money to the city. They said no, but of course, there is a Griffith Observatory and there is a Greek theater. So he willed the money to the city to build them. So after Griffith died on July 6, 1919 of liver failure, he willed the money to the city. And the city did build the Griffith Observatory, which is awesome. And the Greek theater, which is also awesome. He is interned at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, and if you stand at his grave, you can see the Griffith Observatory. That's very cool. I love the observatory.

It's such an iconic piece of L.A. architecture. That's it. That is really interesting. It's crazy, yeah. Obviously, people had a hand on all this stuff. It's just like, yeah, it's weird. I mean, I live there seven years. I never once thought of it.

Because it's interesting because the character of Lois Flee's is so vastly different than Echo Park, Silver Lake, or all these other places. The reason I think it's so different is the park is there. The park is so, because I mean, Silver Lake has Silver Lake, but it's different. It just doesn't have the same vibe. Park is like isn't even the right word. Like you said like, it's like hills, like it's 4,000 acres. It's not like, it's huge. You know, there's tons of like hiking trails and stuff to do.

There's horses and there's like all. that little cafe and like it's just like such a beautiful a beautiful space and it's not it's not like flat like central park it's like hills you can go on like hikes and you can also drive up to the top and the observatory is awesome we went with our daycare one time and the kids all saw like a show about the stars like inside of it was so cold um it has Leonard Nimoy is the um the narrator of that yes yes I saw the fireworks there when 1 4th of july we were like up halfway up the hill and we could see them like all over the city it was beautiful so it's such a great place so super grateful that it's there but pretty wild life of the griffiths

and while that we like know we know his name from the park but we like don't know that he also tried to kill his wife and like kind of put crazy and yeah i've only almost died twice while hiking and one of those times was in 2019 in griffith park how'd you almost die well because i said i was ill prepared so i i didn't take enough food with me i didn't take enough i got those goo packs it was like they just stuffed them in my backpack and i was like i'm never going to have these they were in there for like a year i literally ate all of them on that one hike because it was just i'm gonna die if i don't get down soon it's awesome oh gosh that's so funny well i just survived i know i'm glad to survive too everything's going swimmingly well taylor thank you for sharing that story i'm going to transition

us over to the true crime side of today's stories and the power and Thank you.