The Lady and the Dale

And, um...

I got a call from Liz one day

that they had chartered an airplane

and they were going to take some of their prototype cars

and do television commercials in Dallas.

I was supposed to get an advance payment

of three thousand dollars.

But the day before the shoot,

I still had not received my deposit.

And I wasn't happy about it,

so I just walked into her office.

There was a bunch of gentlemen in there,

and they were in some sort of a meeting,

and Liz was behind her giant desk.

I have no idea who these people were,

but they were serious businessmen.

They were dressed to the teeth, as was Liz.

What they were discussing, what was going--

I have no idea, but I was very uncomfortable.

I knew I should not have been in that room.

And I put a copy of the invoice on her desk, and I said,

"If we're going tomorrow, I gotta have this."

And she opened her desk drawer and counted out...

thirty 100-dollar bills for me.

I left the room feeling a little bit apprehensive,

but as far as I was concerned, we were heading to Dallas

the next day to film a commercial.

It was probably two hours later someone started shooting.

Late this afternoon,

someone was shot to death in the showroom

of the Twentieth Century Motor Car Company.

I remember pulling over

and frantically talking, "What do we do? What do we do?"

Vivian was scared to death.

We thought it was Liz.

When we got to Dallas,

Liz was at home.

-(GIRLS GIGGLING) Liz had already flown to Dallas. We didn't know this.

We were all just happy Liz was there, and we didn't care.

You know, "Mommy's all right. Life goes on."

And that's when she said that it was between the bodyguards.

There's been no official explanation as to what happened,

but we have learned the victim was a man

identified as Bill Miller.

It's believed that Miller and another man

got into a heated argument in a small office

next to the showroom.

One suspect has been jailed on suspicion of murder,

47-year-old Jack Oliver of Huntington Beach.

And it so happens that the murdered man,

William Miller, first met Oliver at San Quentin.

They were cellmates together.

William Miller was my dad Jack's cellmate

at San Quentin Prison.

He and my dad were bodyguards for Liz Carmichael.

There was an investigator from the Security Exchange

coming to look through the books of the company.

To quiet the investigation,

Bill Miller had come up with a plan

to assassinate this investigator.

My dad said, "No, this isn't gonna work.

This isn't what we should do."

They wrestled over the gun, and according to my dad,

the gun went off, and he shot Miller four times.

Mrs. Carmichael can't be reached for comment today.

According to a company spokesman,

she is currently in Texas.

She's trying to negotiate a deal for an assembly plant

she says was abandoned by the Ford Motor Company.

Carmichael had a perfect alibi. She'd left an hour before

from Burbank Airport to fly out to Texas,

where she was opening another facility.

All of this, of course, makes one wonder

why Mrs. Carmichael didn't take her bodyguard along with her,

why she had one in the first place.

Of course, it's a little late for that now.

Up until the homicide

that took place in the Encino office,

it was only after that, and very quickly,

law enforcement agencies start taking a closer look

and the press turned on her and said, "This is a scam."

We decided once again this morning

to pay a visit to the Dale headquarters in Encino

to see if they were still selling options on their cars.

They did yesterday. They weren't doing that,

but they weren't doing anything else either.

Things started to fall apart.

It happened rapidly. One thing after another.

Boom, boom, boom. You couldn't turn on the TV

without seeing a negative report.

Lots of irritated Dale investors were in the lobby

trying to get somebody to pay attention to them,

mostly to get their money back.

I was told that I would receive the money within 10 days,

but I-- I'm a little dubious about it,

and I came here to collect it, and they're closed.

People had begun to show up at the showroom

asking for their money back.

Let me get my money, that's all I want.

Money, here. Twentieth Century.

I called them last night at nine o'clock, and they--

they said, "Come on in," you know,

"we'll do what we have to."

And then I came in, and they wouldn't do anything.

So we pounded on the windows,

and they still wouldn't do anything.

Now, we tried to get some reaction from the people

out at Twentieth Century Motors in Encino,

but all the company officers, including Mrs. Carmichael,

are in Dallas, promoting the Dale in that city.

So we can't very well present their side of the story at this time.

I remember when we came to Dallas,

there was a lot of media attention.

I just remember there was a whole bunch of people

with cameras at the airport,

and the family was all together, all the kids and Liz,

and we were waiting for the airplane to arrive

that was bringing the Dale from Los Angeles.

When they finally got it out,

there was a big round of applause.

It was just awesome.

It was just really amazing, the whole thing.

Once she got to Dallas,

Liz got a lot of television coverage,

was shown on all the local stations.

At the time this happened, I had been

assistant district attorney for about three years.

There was a vehicle that was supposedly the prototype

that had been brought from California,

and it was kept in a garage out in Addison.

And we went out there and looked at it.

And it was a large toy kit car at the very best.

If Liz wasn't there on the scene

and wasn't convincing you,

and you started looking at this critically,

it was a house of cards.

Liz, you did this in California.

If you think you're gonna screw millions of dollars

out of people in Texas, not going to happen.

We're gonna prosecute it.

This late development from Dallas, Texas.

The district attorney of Dallas has issued criminal complaints

against 10 officers

of the Twentieth Century Motor Car Company of Encino,

manufacturers of the controversial Dale automobile.

They're accused of conspiracy to commit grand theft

in the sale and promotion of the Dale.

Among those charged is Mrs. G. Elizabeth Carmichael,

president of Twentieth Century Motors.

It just suddenly came to a head.

The house was full of all the people from the office,

and they were discussing,

"Do we stay and fight or do we leave?"

And they took a vote. Liz did not decide.

And I remember sitting on the stairs

when the last salesman came in the room

with a briefcase.

And that last man had just closed out their account,

and they divvied up the money,

and everybody went their separate ways.

It was Sam she worried about the most.

And she was in tears when she told him,

"Don't worry about it. Do what you've got to do."

Liz thought of Sam as a father figure.

Even as a child, I knew she loved Sam.

In probably less than 10 minutes,

the whole family was in the car and we were on the road,

and that was the end.

As we used to use a lot in file argument,

"the guilty fleeth when no man pursueth."

Meanwhile, downtown at police headquarters at Parker Center,

five top executives at Twentieth Century Motor Cars

were booked on fugitive warrants from Dallas, Texas.

They're all accused of conspiracy to commit grand theft.

I believe that, as any good criminal was,

she was thinking several moves ahead.

Investigators say that official records

of her existence before March of 1973

could not be found.

Whatever the facts of her past,

the mystery of Geraldine E. Carmichael,

or who she is, is not going to be solved

until it's discovered where she is.

To have done it three or four times

and gotten away with it,

why wouldn't she think she could keep on?

We went to a judge and obtained a probable cause arrest warrant

and a probable cause search warrant.

Place was abandoned. No one was there.

Um, we found a lot of female undergarments,

but a lot of things, and again, I don't know the names for 'em,

that would suppress the male part

so that, uh, she looked more like a female...