The Prostitute, The Prophet, and the Lost Continent: Part II
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.
In the buildup to the release of my upcoming book, Lemuria: A True Story of a Fake Place (out Jan. 9 so ORDER IT NOW!), I’m releasing this deep dive into 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
Santa Barbara. January 1899
Oh, how the disappointments mounted. That’s the writer's life though. A manuscript finished and time and time again it gets rejected for publication. Though many efforts were made to get it published from selling subscriptions to trying to get the local government to take out ads in the book. Anything to raise the few thousand dollars needed to publish it. Nothing worked. And the pain grew stronger and more bitter as the writer became more desperate.
Frederick Spencer Oliver was a newspaperman. Covering mostly the area around his home base in Ballard in the Santa Ynez Valley filing stories on agricultural life. For a little over a decade, the 32-year-old had been on that beat.
Born in 1866 in Washington, D.C., Frederick and his family moved to Bear Creek, California in 1868 and for the next 15 years, they bounced around between Bear Creek, Los Angeles, Oregon, Nevada, and Yreka in Northern California, before ultimately settling in Ballard.
Being an only child, his parents indulged Frederick’s lackadaisical, day-dreamed filled inner life. Which came to a head and pushed the limits of their acceptance when beginning in 1883 Frederick would first start hearing the voice that would lead him to compile his book, A Dweller on Two Planets.
The voice, that of Phylos the Esoterist, first made himself known to the 17-year-old Frederick while he was out surveying a piece of land for his father near Mt. Shasta. Driving stakes on the boundary of a mining claim, he took out a notebook to jot something down but his hand started writing something different all on its own. Suitably freaked out, he ran the couple of miles back home.
For the next year, Phylos appeared to Frederick, inside of his head, educating the teen through “mental talks” that consumed his life. Days would go by and he would be just going through the cursory motions of life, subsisting on the education Phylos provided. As it became obvious to everyone that something was up he told his parents who were a little worried but mostly curious.
They wanted to meet this Phylos, but the mystic would only materialize through Frederick who spoke the words Phylos relaid to him. Word spread and attracted others with a small, dedicated crowd forming to listen to Phylos’s lessons being channeled through the teen.
Soon Phylos instructed Frederick to start writing, transcribing what was being funneled through him, acting as amanuensis for the mystical presence. Writing backward and out of order, an arduous process that took three years to complete. Now a decade later that same manuscript lay there. Finished but unpublished though not from the lack of trying.
Efforts made over the past few years included trying to sell subscriptions to fund the publication, trying to sell ads within the book to raise the funds, and sending the only copy to a publisher in the East. Only to have them not return it for nearly a year and it nearly being lost in a train derailment and fire. Frederick stood resolute against these setbacks, “Even if at the last, efforts of Evil beings prevail for a little while, and I have to pass on, leaving another to hold open the Glorious Gates, and not see the book go forth to the world, still am I content.”
The years rolled by. Frederick got married. Got a job. Had kids. And lived a seemingly respectable life with some adherents still coming to listen to the lessons of Phylos.
One night in January 1899 while working the night editor desk at the Santa Barbara Press reading the news from around the area, Frederick’s eye gets drawn to an interview with Teresa, and something clicks inside of him.
The smoke wafted up from between her hands, but the sound of the shot never reached her. Then, Teresa knew something terrible happened.
King staggered back collapsing on the stairs. Teresa, not far behind, cradling his head in her hand. Disbelief and shock all over her face. Men rushed up to her taking the gun, her pleading for it back to do the job she came there to do. “It should have been me!” Hysterical now. “It should have been me!”
She had pressed the gun against her breast aiming to kill herself in front of King, one last demonstration of the pain he hath wrought upon her when he grabbed it. In the struggle, the gun fired. Tearing a deadly path through his intestines.
The authorities whisked Teresa away to a jail cell where she would remain for the next month and a half before her trial. Almost immediately word of her deed spread through the newspapers, and just as quickly people began sympathizing with the distraught 25-year-old. Reporters flocked to talk to her, being rewarded with pensive interviews of her through the bars, letting everyone know how it was all just a terrible accident, that it was supposed to have been her. That whatever King said to people while he lay dying was his last cruel stab at her. She prayed to God for him, his lies, his soul, and for her to be gone as well.
Sex workers from across the city en masse donated to her defense. The local Women’s Christian Temperance Union took a keen interest in her. Epistles of support streamed into Teresa, her legal team, and newspapers around the greater L.A. area. Most offered emotional support, sympathy, and prayers.
One letter would go further. Edwina Oliver, wife of Frederick, wrote to the Los Angeles World expressing not only her belief in Teresa’s innocence (“I don’t think the good God will suffer her to be adjudged guilty”). But to also offer Teresa a place to stay with the Olivers after her acquittal. To stay in Los Angeles would mean prostitution or suicide or both and Teresa deserved a chance to get away from that life. So Edwina strongly declared her intent, “I want her, I need her, and she needs me! Los Angeles, so fair to many, must be a vista of Hades to this poor soul-sick girl.” She pours her heart out pleading for Teresa to come live with her and her husband, “shall we not go down the Stream of Time together, both our lives the better for our companionships, and together go to One who bids all the weary to come to Him? I have found Him and to Him would I take her.”
That is a dual Him, standing for Jesus and her husband. He who possesses the spiritual and psychic gifts to uplift and save Teresa. The Oliver’s did not stop there. Pretty soon afterward, A. E. Putnam, former district attorney of Santa Barbara County turned lawyer and part-time literary agent to Frederick Oliver showed up at the door of Teresa’s lawyer. Looking very much like a regal, rural lawyer he said he represented unnamed interests from back home who were greatly interested in the case. They had ample resources to cover the cost of the defense and Putnam would offer his services to join the defense team or even take it over. But when it came time to ante up the money Putnam was nowhere to be found.
This led to Frederick, himself, showing up at Teresa’s lawyer’s office. Claiming a deep interest in the case, and “a kind of cousinly relation” to Teresa, Frederick awkwardly stood around evasively answering questions put to him and making vague allusions as to his true intentions for being there. Even adding that his mother was willing to adopt her and make her a part of the family. He would walk away empty-handed with the only clear result being that he held a fascination with Teresa Kerr and the case.
Which is when the whispers started. Putnam while in the city was showing off A Dweller on Two Planets and saying its author made a psychic connection with Teresa. She was his ‘affinity.’ You see each individual is but a half only made whole when they find their other half, their affinity. For Frederick, Teresa was that half who had traveled through celestia. From the days of Atlantis on down to now in California in Los Angeles, across reincarnations to make him whole. Uniting with her was his one chance to bring A Dweller on Two Planets to life. Maybe the only chance.
Tune back in for the thrilling conclusion!!!
The sources for Part II 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.