The Cub Reporter and the Killer

Humboldt Times reporter Ed Neumeier types as Henry Guldbrandsen dictates his confession.

VALLEY OF THE MOON, California, July 4, 1949 – Henry Guldbrandsen attacked the two men as they slept in the remote cabin in Sonoma County. He caved in their heads with a heavy stone pestle.

Then the 34-year-old merchant mariner went to the nearest town and lured a woman to the cabin where he raped her, beat her with the pestle, and tied her to a tree.

Next, Guldbrandsen drove 200 miles north to Eureka and surrendered to Ed Neumeier, a 24-year-old reporter who was three months into his first newspaper job.

Guldbrandsen confessed to killing the two men, Peter Flint, 31, a maritime academy roommate of Guldbrandsen’s, and Peter Jensen, 55, who owned the cabin. He denied raping the woman, saying she “gave herself to me” to calm him down. The district attorney would label this “a lot of malarkey.”

Guldbrandsen wouldn’t say why he killed the men. “To discuss it would be repulsive.”

Then, the day before his execution in October 1950, he opened up in another interview with Neumeier.

Guldbrandsen spoke of a "sordid incident" involving three men when he was a 15-year-old runaway in New York. Neumeier didn't explain further, but his coded language suggests Guldbrandsen was referring to a sexual encounter with other men that he viewed as traumatic.

Guldbrandsen said a "similar sordid incident" at the cabin triggered the killings.

The only other time he had lost control in a similar way, Guldbrandsen said, was in 1947, when he stabbed a friend with an ice pick and tried to rape the man's girlfriend, earning a two-year prison term. He said he should have been sent to a psychiatric institution instead of prison.

Guldbrandsen died October 6, 1950, in San Quentin’s double-seated gas chamber along with double-murderer Herman Avery. The two men nodded goodbye to each other before the cyanide pellets dropped. As the gas vapor filled the chamber, Guldbrandsen took a deep breath – on the advice of guards and a chaplain – looked around in surprise, and took another.