On the night of April 3, 1961, while in a drunken rage, Cooley beat, stomped, and kicked Ella Mae Evans unconscious, and then summoned his fourteen-year-old daughter Melody to the house. Later testifying against her father, she described the horrifying scene to jurors:
When I entered, he (Spade) was on the phone. He was talking to his business partner and he said, 'Don't call the police.' He was real sweaty and he had blood spots on his pants. He put down the phone and said, 'Come in here. I want you to see your mother. She's going to tell you something.' He took hold of my arm and took me into the den. The shower was running in the bathroom. Mother was in the shower. He opened the door and said, 'Get up. Melody's here . . . talk to her.' He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her into the den with both hands. She was undressed. He banged her head on the floor twice. He called her a slut. She couldn't move. She seemed unconscious. He turned back to Mother and said, 'We'll see if you're dead.' Then he stomped her in the stomach with his left foot. He took a cigarette which he had been smoking and burned her twice.
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In the midst of this the phone began to ring, which distracted Spade. When he went to answer it, Melody tried desperately to revive her mother with cold water but couldn't. She said Spade came back into the room and told her not to "say anything to the police or I might have to kill you." He told her, "You're going to watch me kill her, Melody. If you don't, I'll kill you too. I'll kill us all."2
Cooley called the ambulance himself, and Ella Mae was pronounced dead shortly after midnight on April 4. Due to the suspicious nature of her injuries, doctors notified the sheriff's department. During questioning, Cooley initially claimed he roughed her up during an argument that night, but she later fell in the shower stall. Officers in the department were wise to the marital discord at the Cooley ranch, and perhaps no one was surprised by this sad and violent end to their relationship. Cooley was brought up on charges of first degree murder, and he initially pled not guilty by reason of insanity. Psychiatrists found him fit to stand trial, and the lurid details of the crime and the murderer's star reputation made the trial tabloid fodder. On the stand, Spade was confused and rambling. He claimed Ella Mae was a member of a sex cult and later admitted that he might have struck her for some alleged infidelity, but Melody's testimony cemented the verdict. The jury found Spade guilty, but due to his fragile emotional and physical health, he was assigned to the California Medical Facility at Vacaville rather than hard time at San Quentin.
Cooley often figures as a peripheral character in James Ellroy's LA Quartet, The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, and White Jazz. Like Big Sandy he grew up in Southern California, and his hard, violent crime novels often deal with Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s. These novels are littered with the bodies of women, many murdered by their husbands. Like Melody, forced to watch her father perpetrate a horrendous crime, so too is Bud White in LA Confidential. Handcuffed to a radiator by his father, he watches helplessly as he beats his mother to death. Ellroy himself grappled with the unsolved murder of his mother, and his attempt to solve it is chronicled in My Dark Places.
In the novella Dick Contino's Blues, Ellroy vividly captures the violent tenor of Spade and Ella Mae's marriage. Contino, an accordion player on the scene in LA during the post-war era, visits Spade at his ranch in Mojave. He is dressed in glittery western wear and crazy drunk. Ellroy writes:
Dig it: Spade Cooley in a cowboy hat and sequin-studded chaps--packing two holstered six guns.
I said, "Like you and Ella Mae. You beg her for details on her old shack jobs, then you beat her up when she plays along."
. . . Spade slouched low in his chair and drew down on me. "You mean I shouldn't have asked if those John Ireland and Steve Cochran rumors were true?"
"You're dying to torture yourself, so tell me."
Spade twirled his guns, popped the cylinders and spun them. Two revolvers, ten empty slots. One bullet per piece.
"So tell me, Spade."
"The rumors were true, boy. Would I be sittin' here in this condition if those dudes were any less than double-digit bulls?"
I laughed.
I roared.
I howled.
Spade put both guns to his head and pulled the triggers.
Two loud clicks--empty chambers.
I stopped laughing.3
Next page: "I think its gonna work out for me; I have the feeling that today is the first day of the rest of my life."
