The Prostitute, The Prophet, and the Lost Continent: Part III
Betrayal, Obsession, and Death in Old L.A.
You love history, well, so do I! Our Belated Past is your home for stories from the past. Served up to you every month.
It is the day, the day of days, the release of my book, Lemuria: A True Story of a Fake. It is a history of the lost continent of Lemuria, and the people who have believed in it from its creation in the 1800s to today. If you are looking for an engaging read, you should check it out wherever you buy your books.
This is the final installment of a story from the book about Frederick Spencer Oliver, the author of A Dweller on Two Planets, and his obsession with a sex worker who murdered her husband in the L.A. City Hall. It’s a mixture of true crime, cults, and lost continents! Literally everything that is good.
Read Part I & Part II
From the bridge of his vailx, Zalim stood. Atlantean clouds streaming by below. And there. At the limit of sight, upon the purple haze of the horizon, lay the temple of his despair. The resting place of his affinity and his child.
A Dweller on Two Planets, the book channeled by Frederick Spencer Oliver, is an interesting bit of Christian esotericism by way of Atlantis, Mt. Shasta, and Venus. It begins with the story of an Atlantean’s rise to prominence. Along the way, the protagonist drives and flies around in an aerial-submarine vessel and falling into a deadly love triangle.
Upon dying his soul gets reincarnated millennia later into that of Walter Pierson, who bears some resemblance to Frederick’s father. Both of whom were born in Washington, D.C., and moved to California shortly after the Civil War. The differences seemingly end with Pierson encountering a mystical Chinese laborer, Quong, near Mt. Shasta. Quong takes Pierson on a magical, mystical tour inside of the mountain along the way teaching Pierson the core of an otherworldly Christian philosophy. This involved transforming into Phylos and being astrally projected to Venus to meet with other ascended masters.
Back in his worldly form, Pierson would go on to meet a former alcoholic prostitute that he helped escape the life and the two of them soon married. He dedicates his life to the Christian occult arts while his wife kindly indulges this passion. The book ends with the two of them dying aboard a ship caught in a storm. And this redemption of a lost love found in a former prostitute was all the inspiration Oliver needed to pursue the Earthly embodiment of Theresa Kerr.
Los Angeles. Valentine's Day, 1899.
In reality, the trial was over before it began. As most throughout Los Angeles had already formed an opinion on the case and on Teresa. A good trial was must-see entertainment, and this one would not disappoint. King was the son of a scion of Los Angeles, Judge Andrew Jackson King, who served in several different official capacities over the previous 50 years and founded what is now El Monte.
Hundred or so spectators, well-wishers, and reporters bloated the benches of the courtroom for the four days the trial lasted. Most were women who felt their own connection with Teresa. Crowding around her and giving her a kiss to show their support. Putnam was there. Edwina too, passing a note and flowers to the defendant.
The prosecution would argue Teresa came to City Hall intending to shoot George King. The King family paid to have the young, brilliant lawyer, Earl Rogers, aide the prosecution. He would go on to have an illustrious career as a defense attorney serving as the inspiration for Perry Mason.
They tried. King’s deathbed declaration saying she shot him on purpose was presented and witness after witness who visited King in the hospital recounted how she had threatened him before. That she was emotional, jealous, unstable, and, ultimately, dangerous.
When it came time for the defense, they managed to turn the trial into a series of emotional pleas with testimony revolving around Teresa’s psychological state at the time of the shooting. Defense witnesses discredited King’s statements and showed that they were married, he left her, and that she was the only target for the bullet. It helped that her story had never changed once. Her last letter to King was produced that laid bare her sorrows, “I was not worth the trouble, in your estimation, although I fondly hoped I was, at one time, but I find I was sadly mistaken.”
Teresa took the stand, and cried so bitterly an adjournment had to be called for hours to see her composure return. The women in the courtroom weeped right along with her.
She sat up there before the crowd. Her feet dangling inches above the floor. A girl who came from nothing. Had nothing. The only glimmer of something in her life stepped out on her and she shot him. That bullet taking the only hope she may have ever known. And that it should have been her.
It took the jury nine minutes to acquit her.
The courtroom turned pandemonium, bursting into cheers and clapping. A swarm settling in around Teresa as she nearly fainted. The jurors, all men, on their way out passed by her and shook her hand and gave their best wishes to her.
Now it would be nice if life built to some grand crescendo. A triumph. That this relief would lead to new leases, new attitudes, new opportunities. But for an ex-sex worker just acquitted of murder, it became how to survive the next day and the one after that. “What are my plans for the future? Well, to tell the truth, I have not looked into the future…’Forget’ every one tells me, but if they knew my heart they would know that such advice is useless. Time is a healer, they say, but I do not know. It may be that with the passing of time I may forget my sorrows, but it seems now as if an age would have to elapse before my mind can be medicine to forgetfulness of the past.”
Teresa spurned the offers of the Olivers. Her and Frederick would never meet, never even lay eyes on one another. But she did not slide back into prostitution. She stayed for a while with sympathetic local women and in a group home. A jeweler from Stockton, CA, who had donated money to her defense fund showed up in her life. They got married and lived together for a while, and then they weren’t. And Teresa Kerr faded back into history.
Frederick Oliver’s story would end a lot sooner. Shortly after the verdict word of his advances toward Teresa began to spread. Try as he might to deflect attention away from himself and onto others, it did not work. He found himself now the brunt of ridicule.
1899 would be a year of pain for him. First, emotional, with the rejection of his affinity, Teresa, the half that was to make him whole, and the derision that knowledge of it brought. Next, physical. In July, he suffered hemorrhages in his stomach caused by advanced cirrhosis of the liver. It took his life on November 15, 1899. Dying in Los Angeles at the age of 33. At the time, the diagnosis was delivered due to lifestyle choices either consuming too much fatty foods or too much alcohol.
Life sure is a lot harder to live than to write about. Wading through it. Responsibilities rising up all around you acting like some test to your higher ideals. And all you can do is sit there and watch them get waylaid. It’ll tell you something about yourself.
So maybe when the book that has been your life’s work keeps falling short. And the people around you keep falling short. And when you finally have found the one who was put here to make you whole only for her to be just out of reach. Well, maybe that becomes something you cannot live with. A weight too burdensome for a sober soul to bear. And for Frederick Spencer Oliver, the channeller of Phylos, the affinity to Teresa Kerr, he slipped out of this world and onto some other. A dweller on this planet no more.
The sources for Part III have come from a wide variety of newspapers from the period that cover the shooting of George King, Theresa Kerr’s trial, and articles covering Frederick Spencer Oliver and his newspaper writings culled from the California Digital Newspaper Collection and Newspapers.com. Additional information comes from the book, A Dweller on Two Planets.