The most notorious criminal case in Hawaiian history began in the early morning hours of September 13, 1931, when a young naval lieutenant phoned the Honolulu police to report that his wife had been "assaulted" by four Hawaiians. The officers who responded to the Manoa Valley home of Thomas and Thalia Massie found a young woman, barely out of her teens, battered and bloody. Her husband told them it had been more than a physical assault; Thalia had been gang-raped on the Ala Moana - Honolulu's Beach Road - and Tommie Massie wanted something done about it.

Police quickly arrested five men who had been involved in an altercation with another woman a few miles away. Thalia made a partial identification - picking out two of the men, Joseph Kahahawai and Shomatsu "Horace" Ida. All five were scheduled for trial in December, but even before proceedings got underway, the case sparks a battle in the islands between the mostly white U.S. Navy and Hawaii's mostly non-white population. Caught in the middle was the white ruling elite - the Big Five businesses and their politicians that ran Hawaii like America's largest company town.  

The Navy wanted swift justice - prison, if not hanging - for Thalia's attackers, the five men that the press called "lust sodden beasts." But there were many in Honolulu - including some in the police department and several on the trial jury - who thought that the Ala Moana Boys were innocent, that young Thalia Massie wasn't telling the truth about what happened on the beach road that night. It lit the fuse for a much bigger explosion. This one leads to kidnapping, lynching, murder, and Hawaii's Trial of the Century. 

Left to Right - Seaman Albert "Deacon" Jones, Grace Fortescue, Seaman Edward "Eddie" Lord, Lieutenant Thomas Massie. Aboard USS Alton, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.