In the creation of L.A. Noire, Team Bondi exhaustively researched Los Angeles newspapers of the day, including archives of every single daily L.A. Times from January 1st through December 31st 1947. The team pored over countless true crime reports in those papers, finding kernels of inspiration along the way that led to all the fictionalized cases you’ll work in the game as Detective Cole Phelps — including “The Red Lipstick Murder” and “A Marriage Made in Heaven” as recently detailed.
Including true tales of:
- 72-year-old oil man, E.J. Miley, who picked up three hitchhiking youths as he left on a drive from LA up to Fresno. The trio were petty thugs who thought they had an easy mark on their hands…
- A pair of weightlifting rivals in Pacific Palisades who agreed to head to the gym to “settle the question of superiority”, but it winds up being far from a fair lift-off…
- A horrible account of a young, disturbed returning veteran who, with no warning or apparent cause, murdered his bride and himself at his in-laws house one evening…
- Acrobat burglars who broke into a market by ripping off a skylight, chopped a hole in the ceiling, and slid down a pole to make off with $2500 in cash (yes, that was a LOT back then) along with several hundred pounds of meat — but not before stopping to apparently chug several quarts of milk.
Plus a bunch more. Read the original clippings of these stories as they appeared in the L.A. Times that year, and see exactly where they happened in Los Angeles with the 1947 Edition Crime Map at .
Look for more true crime stories to be added there during the week of L.A. Noire’s release.