(by Student #36 AMH 2010 1115)
I decided to pick a criminal because crime is interesting to
me and I know I won’t get bored writing about something that interests me. I
got a female criminal named Mollie Tran (turned out to be Trau) who was
convicted of murder in the second degree in Fresno, California. She was born in
Oklahoma, age 36, white, occupation was put as housewife, paroled 4 years after
the murder.
I hope to find out what happened to get her put in jail and
if it involves anything significant in history because all of this happened
during the Great Depression. Also, she might not be fully white because her
last name might be Trau and I’m wondering if race could have anything to do
with her case.
I started my research by doing a quick Google search of
"Molly Tran Fresno California" because the cursive in my case File
report wasn't very clear. Nothing I was looking for came up for the search so I
tried "Molly Trau Fresno California". This brought up many search
results that looked like they could be what I'm looking for. This Google Search
helped me figure out the name of the person and the case for this case File
investigation. One of the search results was labeled Bakersfield Californian
archives December 20th 1927 page 5 newspaper archive so I decided to click on
the link and look through this newspaper archive to understand what this case
was about. The newspaper picture file was hard to read but thankfully the text
was put beneath the image. The section of the newspaper that talks about this
case read "Clifford Burdg, 3/, veterinary, and Mrs. Mollie Trau, 36, are
charged at Fresno with the slaying of Philip Trau, 42, special patrolman and
onetime stage dancer, in a love triangle case. They are shown here with J. G.
Moran, detective, who arrested them. Burdg says Trau shot himself during a
spree. The newspaper article was written 3 months before Molly Trau was charged
for second degree murder. The mention of Clifford Burds and a love triangle
might be a clue as to why she was charged with murder in the second degree
instead of the first. Looking up Clifford Burds might give me more information
about what happened in this case. A love triangle involves three people so I
might benefit from looking up her dead husband (and victim) Philip Trau.
Looking up Philip Trau helped me find a very lengthy
investigation report on casemine.com titled People vs. Burdg. In the
investigation, it talks about the night of the murder from the accounts of
Mollie Trau, Clifford Burdg, Trau’s sister and her husband. To make a long
story short, Mollie Trau and Clifford Burdg were exes and, for some reason, he
was still very active in her life when she married the new guy Phillip Trau. Clifford
would be over at their house frequently and vice versa. They were all drinking
earlier that night and Mollie and Clifford were left alone because Phillip had
to go to work. Then the only part of the story that can be proven is that
Phillip came home later that night and got shot in the neck and died.
Mollie and Clifford had lied about how it happened at first
and told detectives that Phillip shot himself. Then both of their stories
changed, I guess because of the pressure, and their stories were basically them
turning on each other. Clifford claimed that Mollie shot her husband while
Mollie claimed that Clifford did. Both of their stories had serious
discrepancies so putting them in this report might not even be useful because
the detectives disproved a lot of what they had said by doing a search of the
house. One interesting thing that Mollie had said during her confession was
that Clifford and Phillip had gotten into a heated argument where Clifford said
that he loved her and “would have her, by God, if he had to kill him.” Clifford
was charged with 10 years in jail while Mollie had 5 to life because the jury
decided neither of them were telling the whole truth, but all evidence led to
both of them being involved in Phillip’s murder.
Looking Mollie and Clifford up on Ancestry showed me that
they ended up in the same prison. I found Mollie in the census about 3 years
after the murder and it revealed that she was married. My guess was that she
and Clifford got married while in prison together, which was just a guess and I
think it was wrong after finding the last piece of information about this case
in another newspaper archive. Mollie was paroled after 5 years and ended up in
the newspaper again for a suicide attempt. She tried to end her life by cutting
her arm open with a razor. When asked the reason she said, “My daddy’s gone”.
When asked “Who is your daddy?” by an officer she answered “Phillip Trau”. She
was put into a psychopathic ward. I’m now sort of uncomfortable writing about
this. The newspaper uses really messed up ways to describe her life like
mentioning her “lonely house on 428 Inez street”. Is the newspaper even allowed
to mention things like suicide attempts and her ending up in a psych ward? Is
the newspaper allowed to do that with people today?
This was the last piece of information I found related to
this case. I have no clue where Mollie Trau is after this newspaper article,
probably because of her last name since I’m guessing it changed after she
married Phillip. I tried her sister’s last name to see if I could find her and
I tried Clifford’s last name but they didn’t pull anything else up. I found out
that Clifford had died in 1948 but there was nothing about his death. There
were some things left out of this report because I forgot to write them down
like the fact that everyone’s birth date was “estimated” so I had to do the
math to try to find these people on Ancestry. It did eventually work out and I
found the correct people.
There was nothing really interesting about this case in
terms of historical content. Love triangles with murders are things that still
happen to this day. I think the only interesting things about the time that
Mollie Trau lived in was the way they categorized people. The small things that
add up like the way they wrote “housewife” as her occupation on the prison
records and the way she wasn’t her own person because she still had Phillip’s
last name. The last newspaper mentioning her “lonely house” just because she
wasn’t married with children and the details of her suicide attempt just being
thrown out there like that. The 1920’s and 30’s didn’t seem like a time where
people took the time to understand others. It seems like there was a lot of
judging others instead. People were put into categories based on the way they
lived their life and that’s where they stayed.
Mollie Trau was involved in a murder, yes, but she was still
a person and deserved a little more respect when she was going through a hard
time. It wasn’t at all necessary to put her suicide attempt in the paper along
with her address and being checked into a psych ward. Doing that to someone
doesn’t help them, it harms them. It is gossip being thrown out there for
people to “read all about it”. I’m actually glad that I didn’t find more
because it seemed like an invasion of privacy to even read that newspaper article.
I’m glad we live in a time that’s more understanding towards others and their
privacy because we are all people and deserve to be respected as such.
Places I went to find this information: