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This tragic child murder case affected multiple places in the Bay Area: the abduction took place near San Jose, the defense lawyer was located in Oakland, and the arrest happened in San Francisco – but the body was supposedly dumped in San Mateo County, so I have decided to include the sad story here.
Thomas H. McMonigle died in San Quentin's death chamber on February 20, 1948, for the murder of 14-year-old Thora Chamberlain. He had lured Thora into his car with the promise of a babysitting job, and she had gotten into that car and was never seen again.
South Bay police were stymied, but San Mateo Chief of Police Robert O'Brien "acted on a hunch," as the newspaper The Times put it, and decided to question McMonigle, who had previously been accused of assaulting a San Bruno girl near Hillsborough. In that instance, the girl's parents had refused to prosecute as they were "fearful of the notoriety it would entail."
With Thora, however, the case went forward, and McMonigle was found guilty and sentenced to death in a trial that took place in Santa Cruz.
He then led the police on wild goose chases, promising to show them the location of Thora's body – which continuously delayed the date of his execution. The Times reported: "McMonigle told half a dozen stories. In the first he said he had thrown the body into the ocean at Devil's Slide…and a long and patient search of that forbidding stretch of coastline turned up the dead girl's sox but not her body. Later McMonigle said he killed his victim on the coast road below Pescadero. Later he said he had buried her in a dump heap north of Broadway in Burlingame and a search there revealed the girl's books and shoes."
While waiting for his final sentence in San Quentin, he was linked to the 1945 murder of a San Francisco woman, Dorothy Rose Jones, where he again claimed to have thrown her body over a cliff at Devil's Slide. Going to the location he specified, the police found "little more than a skeleton." The Jones family finally had some sad closure to their nightmare.
McMonigle, a bus driver, had an interesting history. The Times reported that he had once visited them "to complain about the bus company and the mechanical condition of the bus he was driving. He came back several times to complain about company rules." While in San Quentin, he had contacted a scientist who was experimenting with the possibility of bringing dead dogs back to life. McMonigle wanted the doctor to "resurrect him should his legal moves to escape the death penalty fail."
His execution day was finally set, and he spent the eve of the dreaded day in conference with police and drawing maps of a location in Burlingame where he swore they could find Thora's body. A representative of the Burlingame police complained that the maps were too vague and that the body might now be under the concrete floor of buildings that had recently been erected.
McMongile was executed as scheduled despite his last-minute requests to the governor and the United States Supreme Court for a reprieve. Nobody seemed distressed about his death, not even his wife. She continued living in San Mateo during his trial and subsequent prison sentence. The Times reported the day after his execution that "she expressed little concern over McMonigle going to the gas chamber, and said she would not claim his body."
In a final note, some excitement took place in July 1948 when a child's skull was found in South San Francisco. After checking with a dentist, however, it was determined not to be Thora.
The Chamberlain family apparently never learned the ultimate fate of Thora. The Times reported in February 1975 that "the search for Thora Chamberlain's body ended almost two decades ago."
