THE LOS FELIZ MANSION MURDERS

hey guys it's bella and welcome back to my channel i hope you're all having an incredible day today in today's case we're going to be covering another case for my 12 days of christmas i'm doing a mystery monday case every day for 12 days until christmas so i really hope you guys are enjoying this little 12 days of christmas if you are please make sure to give this video a thumbs up so i know that you like them and will continue to do them in today's video we are going to be talking about the los feliz mansion murders and this is like a murder mansion it's a spanish revival house it's located on 2475 glendale place in a more wealthy area of los feliz in los angeles and i don't actually know if it's still a wealthier area or what it's like now i mean the house recently sold for a big chunk of change so i assume that it still is but definitely back when this happened it was a really wealthy area and this happened back in 1959 and still to this day it is like a really popular house among people who like explore haunted houses and all of that sort of stuff it's a super infamous house in the area like as infamous as nicole brown simpson's condo and also the space in lemon park where the black dahlia's body was found so it's up there it was actually a regular stop on this tour called the deeply departed tour where they would like go and visit infamous houses and places people have died and crimes that took place in neighborhoods until neighbors complained about it which like you know fair enough so definitely a super infamous and notorious house there was actually a lot of talk about this house being haunted because it was vacant for a very long time but let's talk about what happened let's talk about the crime that happened in this house to make it so infamous and so notorious at the time the perilson family was living there and they are the ones that this whole crime like took place around and they were the ones involved in this crime so let's take it back a little bit and talk about them the father of the family was harold perelson he was born on the 1st of february in 1909 in queens which is in new york he was the oldest of four children to his polish father henry and his russian mother molly and both of his parents had emigrated from eastern europe along with millions of other immigrants from around the same area i think there was like 13.5 million people that had immigrated from eastern europe to america at the time because they were going through some pretty hard times like really high unemployment rates they were going through land shortages and an imperial recession the family settled in pitkin avenue which is in queens in new york and his father henry was a princess clerk i think he earned a pretty decent amount of money but his mother molly was a homemaker because you know this was 1909 women expected to stay at home and look after the house and the children and cook and clean growing up harold was a really good kid he was good in school he got really good grades he was pretty smart so when he finished high school his parents sent him to medical school and again did really well in medical school he was very business savvy as well and hoped to open his own business one day but he wasn't really doing so well in new york so he decided to pack it all up he wanted to get off his feet so he moved to southern california he managed to get a job there at an inglewood physicians office and just like he did in school he excelled right away he ended up publishing a bunch of papers in the field of neurology and he also published this one paper that was like really well renowned at the time it was like one of the most respected clinical reports and it was called the electro diagram of familial periodic paralysis which is a mouthful and it was published in the magazine american health journal in june of 1947. not even going to pretend like i understand any of what the article said but basically as the title would suggest it was about familial periodic paralysis which is a rare disease that was discovered in 1853 i don't know lots of words big article big brain he was obviously a very intelligent guy he was a keynote speaker at a bunch of different medical conferences around the country he became the assistant head of cardiology for the school of medicine at ufc he was on the surgical teams of cardiology at los angeles county general cedars of lebanon hospital and the santa fe hospital of los angeles so he was really going places he was working really hard he was accomplishing a lot and he was earning good money for it too it was bringing in the in the dough after graduating medical school he met lillian silva she was also a second generation immigrant and was born in cuahoga falls in ohio they met headed off right away and eventually had three children together so they had their first daughter jude then they had another daughter debbie and then they had their youngest child who was a son named joel and they were ready to settle down they were ready to find their i mean settle down they already had but they were ready to like find their dream forever home in the hills of los angeles they were looking around in the wealthier parts of la because like i said harold was bringing in the coin and as they were looking for a house they found it they found the los feliz mansion and they bought it for sixty thousand dollars which jesus christ right i mean that's like five hundred thousand dollars in today's money but that mansion recently sold for over two million dollars so just the cost of housing today is ridiculous like i feel like that really goes to show that the increase in the cost of living just has not matched the increase of wages but anyway that's a whole other topic this house was described as a delightful 12 room home with terraced lawns artistic gardens and a magnificent view and it was a gorgeous house it was a spanish revival style house it was located on a quiet leafy cul-de-sac and it was designed in 1925 by architect harry e weiner sorry i should laugh so childish um and he designed it for a man named harry f schumacher and when schumacher died the house was sold on the 6th of december in 1932 and the 6th of december is actually when the whole infamous crime took place with the persons years later in 1959 so that's definitely a weird coincidence but anyway it was sold to a man named frederick zelnick who was a pretty influential producer and director of german silent cinema he was forced to flee germany for london after like hitler came into power in 1933 and then of course the perilsons purchased the house the house has three stories the first floor has a big beautiful tiled entrance which had a glass conservatory to the side of the entrance it had a massive living room multiple eating rooms and a big beautiful kitchen the second floor was where most of the 12 bedrooms were and there was like four master bedrooms which is just ridiculous it had three baths and then the third floor had a full on ballroom with a bar in it this was a ridiculous house it even had staff quarters even though the perilson's never hired any staff even though they definitely had the money too the only help they ever had was a teenage neighbor who would sometimes come over to babysit for them maybe they didn't hire any help because lillian was a homemaker so they didn't need it maybe it's because lillian was a homemaker so they didn't need any help but at the same time like this was the 50s society was different it was a little bit sexist a lot sexist and women were expected to stay home look after the children and cook and clean and look after the house and that sort of thing i don't know anyway whatever the case may be they didn't hire any help on that topic though lillian was a great housemaker she always kept the house really tidy she looked after her kids she loved them with all her heart but apparently she wasn't that great of a cook their neighbors called the lewis's they lived like directly across from the perilsons they had a daughter named sherry lewis and she said that lillian would make like soup with chopped up hot dogs in it which honestly sounds disgusting to be honest sherry in an interview also talked a bit about the family she said that harold the father was a very gentle guy he was very mild-mannered non-aggressive like there was nothing strange or off about him that popped out at her and she also said that he was very good at injections because he was an injection specialist he was also a cardiothoracic specialist and an allergy specialist like i said big time dude but yes specifically he was an injection specialist and then on december 30th in 1938 he filed a patent for a medical device that he'd actually invented himself it was this device that would basically allow you to inject things from a sealed glass capsule and it reduced any danger of contamination or spillage so instead of having to like get the syringe put it into the jar of whatever it is you're injecting take it out into the air and then inject it into the person you could just straight up inject it straight from that jar of whatever it is that you're injecting he spent over 10 years working on this device he was very passionate about it he wanted to perfect it and then in 1949 he met this guy named edward shustak and they got into this like verbal agreement where harold would do all the device making and edward would help him market it because you know a device is nothing if you can't get it out there you don't have the skills or connections to get it out there and market it and sell it so they were going to go and split the profits at 50 50. and like you know he had all this faith in this guy named edward because he talked himself up he said he was gonna make it a medical hit that he could really get it out there and make them a lot of money so they had really high hopes for this because it was kind of a genius invention and so harold and lillian put in twenty four thousand four hundred and ninety five dollars into this project which is like two hundred and sixty thousand dollars in today's money so a lot of money was sunk into this lillian put in seven thousand dollars just of her own money and her own savings and today again that's like 75 000 of lillian's own money that she put into this and like yeah they had money but this is still a huge investment harold spent a few more years developing this tool until 1952 when he found out that this guy edward shustak was basically a big scam artist he never had any intentions of splitting the profits he actually had no intentions of giving any of the money at all to harold and then on the 21st of july 1952 harold filed a complaint about him and he said all of this stuff in his complaint but he also said that apparently edward had already sold the riots to this tool to other people without harold knowing he gave him a fake name and apparently he was using a fake shady corporation to hide all of this so i totally get why harold was pissed off about it this project was like his baby this tool was like his little baby like imagine spending that much time on something like that is so many years that he spent developing this perfecting it he was really proud of it he sunk so much money into it and then this guy just like rips you off and steals the whole thing from you harold went ahead and sued him for about a hundred thousand dollars which in today's money is about a million dollars the case took around two years it was really long it was really drawn out and then harold didn't get a big return like he won the case but he was only awarded 23 956 dollars which is less than him and lillian even put into it to begin with so not only is it less than him and lillian put in in the first place but he also had to go through these expensive legal proceedings so he was at a huge financial loss then to make things even worse on the 3rd of november in 1957 his three children got into a car accident jude was the eldest child she was 16 at the time and she was driving her younger siblings debbie and joel in her dad's 52 oldsmobile and as she came up to the intersection of vermont and los feliz boulevard she got into a pretty bad accident with another car the youngest child joel had a head injury and suffered severe shock to the nervous system debbie's cheek was sliced open and then jude suffered hand and knee injuries a concussion and severe shock as well the driver of the other car was a woman named eleanor keller and she claimed that jude went through a red light and that's how the collision happened and harold was pissed about this he claimed that it was her negligence and incompetence that caused the crash and he took her to court and sued her and her family and he sued up for crazy amounts of money especially considering there was no like crazy damage to his kids or anything like that he sued her for twenty thousand dollars for each of his daughters so june and debbie and then ten thousand dollars for his son joel so fifty thousand dollars in total he was suing this woman for and he did win the case but again he only won just enough to cover the children's medical bills so he didn't win the full fifty thousand dollars he didn't even have enough to cover the expensive legal proceedings he had just gone through and i feel like maybe the reason he was suing for 50 000 in the first place was like a bit of a projection like he was really struggling financially because of the case from three years ago with his tools so maybe he was just trying to recoup some losses again after this case they were really struggling financially but they weren't acting like it they weren't spending like it like jude for example when she was 16 she had a brand new sports car and then when she was 18 when the whole crime happened in 1959 which we'll talk about later she had another brand new sports car and like sherry lewis for example the neighbor that i spoke about earlier she wasn't really old enough to be friends with jude but they were family friends they were neighbors so they interacted she saw jude's room and she said she just had piles and piles of boxes and shoe boxes like she had so many shoes and she would buy clothes like that didn't even fit her and sherry's mom was a seamstress so she would go to sherry's house and be like hey can you take in this size 14 thing to me who is a size six jude actually wrote a letter to her aunt about all the financials and she said that like her family was in a financial merry-go-round and that every time they went around it just got worse and worse and worse and she said that her parents were in a bind financially that she was considering going to get a job to help them out and she also said that her dad was so stressed about all of it that he had suffered a couple of coronaries and had to go to the coronary ward jude perelson we'll talk about her a little bit but she was described as an uncomplicated kid she was a popular kid growing up she went to barrister high school where she was part of the girls league and she was also the secretary of the student body outside of school she was an usherette at the huntington hartford theatre which was a super glamorous auditorium on hollywood and vine and she was a good kid now at this point after all of their financial losses after harold had had his like baby his invention stolen from him he used to be really ambitious he was always working to try and get ahead and better himself and he wanted to help people he wanted to invent and he wanted to be successful he seemed to dive into this really deep depression though he wasn't motivated anymore and he was reading like these really dark and depressing books and he was just in a really bad slump so now we're at december 6th in 1959 the fatal day where this whole crime happened harold got home at around 5 p.m that day and he sat in the land room as lillian wrapped presents to put under the christmas tree and they were actually jewish but they still celebrated christmas apparently because they just loved like the community of it they loved that it kind of brought everyone together and it was just like a really happy time it was just a nice thing so they celebrated it then lillian goes to make some dinner and she eats like a plate of green beans which i feel like just really backs out what i said earlier about her not being that great of a cook i mean i don't know is that a normal thing that people eat for dinner like where's the flavor there's no flavor in this i feel like a plate of green beans is nothing the family then sat around they watched some tv together and then harold and lillian put their children to bed and just thinking about this i think i said earlier that debbie was the middle child and joel was the youngest but that's not correct if i said that i can't remember i feel like i did debbie was actually the youngest she was 11. joel was 13 he was the middle child and jude was 18 she was the eldest lillian also went to bed at this time and read a book and then harold went downstairs and just waited for lillian to go to bed and then as soon as she was asleep he went upstairs read a little bit of his book that he was reading at the time which is called dante's divine comedy and this book that he's reading by the way is like it's not a comedy it's about the afterlife it's about hell and purgatory and then sometimes it's also about paradise and heaven and that sort of thing but he puts the book on the bedside table and then he goes to sleep then at 5am he wakes up and this is so weird because it seems like he just like wakes up from a deep sleep and then just like does this like almost robotically like he just wakes up and is like yes down to kitchen and he goes down to the kitchen there's a toolbox in the kitchen he gets out a bullpen hammer then he goes back up to his bedroom his wife is dead asleep and he just starts absolutely smashing her face in with this ballpeen hammer and her face is like actually caved in after this because he just went crazy and like despite the fact that her face was like caved in she actually didn't die from blunt force trauma she died from asphyxiating on her own blood so she's just sitting there choking on her in blood and he goes into his eldest daughter's room jude and she's like kind of awake at this point or is waking up i don't know if she like heard what was going on so as he brings this ballpeen hammer down she moves ever so slightly so he doesn't just smash her right in the middle of the face and kill her he just grazes the side of her so she starts screaming duh and she's yelling she's yelling please don't kill me please don't kill me and her neighbors hear this happening like she is screaming bloody murder and harold is saying shh be quiet it's okay like yeah jude calm down i'm just killing you so she manages to run past him she gets out of the house and she starts banging on neighbors doors and the first house she goes to is the lewis's house where the neighbor sheri lewis lives if you remember i've spoken about her a couple of times and sherrie lewis is awake she heard the screams and she was having a sleepover with her friend named shelly and they hear her banging on the door but they are freaking out they're like 15 years old at this time so fair enough they don't answer the door so jude then runs to another neighbor's house she goes to a man named marshall ross's house and she starts banging on the door she's getting blood all over his door and he opens the door lets her in and calls 9-1-1 for her after he calls 9-1-1 he immediately runs over to the perelson's house because obviously jude is covered in blood i'm sure she told him what happened and that her two younger siblings are still in the house so he goes over there to see what's going on and the two younger siblings had actually woken up by this point and they'd come out into the hallway to see what was going on and harold walked past them and he was like it's a nightmare it's okay go back to sleep you're dreaming and he brings them to their rooms and they're 11 and 13 at this point so they're not young enough to be like really dumb and gullible so as soon as harold leaves the room after trying to put them back to bed they immediately run to the front of the house so when marshall ross gets there the neighbor he sees him at the front of the house he's like it's okay like i'm gonna go in there i'm gonna check what's going on and i'm gonna be right back out just wait here he runs upstairs he finds harold in the hallway and he's covered in blood obviously and he goes just go home marshall don't bother me like super calm about the whole thing as if he hadn't just murdered his wife and attempted to murder his oldest daughter like yeah okay buddy i'm just gonna go home seems like you're all good here according to marshall after this harold goes into his bathroom and he's going through his medicine drawers and he's just pulling out boxes and bottles of pills he takes out two capsules of nem-butyl nem-butyl i don't know how to say it but it's a babitu it was actually pretty common back in the 50s but now it's like you can't get it like there's people actually trying to illegally smuggle it into australia and you know import it here illegally because like it's pretty heavy stuff like a lot of people would use it to commit suicide and it's actually what is used a lot of the time in assisted euthanasia like in the places that that's legal and people do that so yeah definitely not something that should be easily accessible like it was in the 50s so he pulls apart these two capsules he starts mixing them in with water in the sink and then i guess he drinks it and then he also takes 31 white pills which could either be codeine or they could be like some sort of powerful tranquilizer then after taking all of these pills he goes back into the bedroom and just lies on the bed next to his dead wife that he had just murdered to i guess just wait to die 15 minutes later at 5 15 a.m detectives anderson and pozo finally arrive at the scene when they go up to the bedroom though harold is not on the bed anymore he's actually on the floor next to the bed he's lying on a pillow which is just covered in jude's blood and he still has the ball peen hammer in his hand he was also still alive at this time just like barely like he was hardly breathing really shallow breaths and then by the time the ambulance arrived he had already died on his nightstand they found his copy of dante's divine comedy which as i mentioned he was reading the night before and the book was open and he'd actually specifically marked this one passage called canto1 and this passage read midway upon this journey of life i find myself in a forest dark for the straightforward pathway had been lost he didn't leave a suicide note or anything like that but this passage i feel like because it was marked and it was open on a side table was a suicide note in itself like i feel like it was his way of saying like i'm really depressed and i don't really see any straightforward way out of this and that's why i murdered my wife and then myself now if you remember i mentioned a little bit earlier that jude had mentioned in her letter to her aunt that her father had suffered a couple of coronaries well sherry lewis's dad the neighbor he was an attorney and he managed to get a hold of some court documents turns out these coronaries were actually suicide attempts and lillian and his doctors were trying to get him committed which probably explains why he turned on his wife like that might be a little bit of murder there like she was trying to get him committed and so he was really pissed off about it maybe he saw jude as a cause of their financial problems as well for getting in that crash and then they suffered a really bad financial loss because of the whole lawsuit that followed that crash and that's why he tried to murder jude as well and then didn't try and murder his youngest two children i mean maybe he didn't go after the youngest two children because they were already awake like maybe he just wanted to murder them all in their sleep but because jude had woken up and because they had woken up he didn't end up like feeling comfortable murdering them while they were awake and could see that he was doing it or maybe he didn't see the youngest kids as part of the issue i don't know after this incident happened lillian's sister gertrude salem petitioned to take over as the children's trustee and therefore taking over their compensation payments from the lawsuit from the car accident and i'm pretty sure lillian's family took guardianship over the children as well no one really knows what happened to the children after this i think jude like changed her name a bunch of times which i mean fair enough because i probably or definitely wouldn't want to be associated with something like that my whole life and have that following me and i read that joel moved to israel became hasidic and won't talk to anyone just one year later in 1960 the house was sold at a probate auction to a couple named emily and julian enriquez and i wonder if they know about the murders like i think surely especially considering they never moved into the house they just used it as storage and like all of the perelson's furniture was still there it was never moved it was just covered with big sheets or cloths which is so creepy to me like that always makes the place look haunted like in scary movies or shows the creepy houses always have all their furniture covered in clothes like for instance haunting a bly manor all like that was a creepy house and to make it look creepier they put sheets over all of the stuff because it just makes a place look creepy and haunted the perelson's christmas tree and also the presents under the tree were all left there as well and they were visible through the window in 1994 when emily enriquez died her son rudy inherited the house he was a music store manager and he lived nearby in washington heights but again he never moved into the house he just used it as storage and this one time a reporter asked him if the house was haunted and he asked him about the rumors of ghosts in the house because like there was so many rumors about this place being haunted and about ghosts and he replied to this reporter tell people to say their prayers every morning and every evening and they'll be okay which i mean it kind of indicates that he probably thought that it was haunted as well right especially considering he didn't move into it and it was like this ginormous mansion or maybe he just thought it was like a lot more effort than it was worth because his parents had owned it for like 34 years and it was vacant for 34 years which means it probably would need a lot of work so maybe he just couldn't be bothered rudy died in 2015 he had no kids to pass the house onto so it went to public auction it sold in 2006 for 2.3 million dollars and then it sold super recently like i think this year for 2.35 million dollars so up until 2016 this house was vacant for like 57 years and of course this like big mansion where this horrible crime happened and like it's vacant and still had all of this stuff in it it's gonna bring a lot of paranormal rumors i feel like that's just a given of course it is especially because it's in la a lot of like paranormal explorers and youtubers like try and go there and have a bit of a squiz at the house and as i mentioned some paranormal and famous matators go past the house a lot of random people would go there to just explore and also have picnics at the back which sounds so weird to me i don't think i would want to have a picnic at like this haunted house and it would get a lot of squatters like going to the house all the time because i guess no one's living there and it still has all this furniture inside and stuff so one of the neighbors of the house a woman named sheree waterson said that her friend went there to try and have a little squishy and she tried to get in the back door as she did an alarm went off so obviously she like ran out of the house and as she ran out she got bitten by a black widow spider and she had to go to hospital and then two days later when she got home she said that night that her alarm just randomly kept going off even though no one was there and she felt like it was a paranormal spirit that had followed her from that house back to her house there's also this rumor that apparently the enriquez family actually rented the house out after they bought it and they didn't tell the people that they rented it out to what had happened there and that there was like a murder there a lot of people believe that the christmas tree that you could see through the window of the house actually belonged to the people that the enrique has rented it out to and not the peril sins there was also actually a few other items that could be seen through the window of the house that obviously didn't belong to the peril sins because they weren't even available in 1959 when the murder suicide happened like for example there was a can of spaghettios that could be seen and they weren't actually marketed to the public until 1965 so like six years after the murder suicide and there was also a cover of life magazine that could be seen in there and that specific life magazine like cover hadn't been released until may of 1960. so there's this rumor that the house was rented out to this family and they were all sitting in the lounge room together by the christmas tree just watching tv and then on the anniversary of the murder suicide the house got like really haunted they had no idea about the murder suicide so obviously like it wasn't just in their heads and they ran out didn't take any of their presents none of their trees nothing because they were so freaked out i mean honestly besides this there's not really that many like paranormal stories about it i think that i could find i think there's just like a lot of people think it's hornet because it's just so creepy and yeah that's all i have for this case for you guys so i would love to hear your thoughts in the comments down below and also i'd love to know like do you believe in the paranormal and if you do have you ever experienced anything paranormal yourself because i'd love to hear those stories in the comments down below but yeah that's all for today hopefully i will see you guys in my next video bye guys

Channel: Bella Fiori

Views: 651,744

Keywords: mystery monday, true crime, haunting, haunted house, paranormal, paranormal activity

Id: NjmmDCHhCOs

Length: 28min 41sec (1721 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020