Walter Kermit Spurgeon Gets Robbed

Jacob Smith > William Custer Smith > Harland Smith > Leone Smith married Walter Spurgeon

Leone Smith was the youngest child of Harland Smith and Fannie McGoon. Harland was the third child of William Custer Smith and Mary Ann Munson. Leone was born in 1895 in Plainfield, Bremer County, Iowa.

She married Walter Kermit Spurgeon, son of Sidney Adam Spurgeon and Sarah Carlton. After their
marriage, the Spurgeon's moved around a bit, landing sometime in the 1920s in Del Rio, Bernalillo, New Mexico where he was in real estate sales. They later they moved to Long Beach, California. During the war years, Long Beach was booming and shipyards were churning out ship repairs and transporting cargo like crazy to aid the war effort.

Walter Kermit Spurgeon and Leone Smith Spurgeon

Walter got a job as a checker in a local grocery store and they settled in not too far from Leone's sister, Edna Smith Corey and her husband Percy.

While not the Long Beach location,
this is an example of what the Mayfair
stores looked like in  the era

On September 11, 1952, two masked robbers entered the market through the rear door and after having the snack bar clerk clean out her register, they ordered, at gunpoint, 50-year-old Walter, who was having his coffee at the snack bar, to open the rest of the registers and cleaned out all the store's money. It was the second time in less than a month the store had been robbed. The robbers in the earlier robbery had pistol-whipped two employees. This time, no one was injured. The robbers got away with $5,000 in cash and checks. It had to be terrifying for the clerks, including Walter.

It took a bit of time and not before there was a total of 17 market robberies totaling $40,000 in losses, but the police finally got their men.  Three suspects accepted a plea deal to lesser charges. The fourth, William Ellhamer, chose to go to trial. Despite being fingered by the three other gang members, Ellhamer refused to answer questions when being arrested and at trial, presented an alibi witness. He was convicted of three of the nine counts of armed robbery and received a sentence of 10 years to life and initially served his time at Chino Men's prison. His wife divorced him. As of 1962, he was still imprisoned, now at San Quentin, a recent appeal having been denied. Ellhamer, a WWII US Navy veteran, died in 2010 in Orange County alone, with no survivors.

Walter Spurgeon died at 64 in Long Beach in 1961. Leone lived many more years, dying in 1976 in Spring Valley, San Diego County, near where her only child, Richard Kermit Spurgeon resided. Leone's sister Edna died in 1959.