Triple Homicide at Palm Springs

On October 12, 1978, San Francisco social heiress Sophia Friendly was getting ready to have dinner at her Palm Springs home, when at around 7pm someone unexpectedly came to the door of the mid-century modern home, but what happened next is not overly clear.

Sofia answered the door, she must have either tried to turn and enter back into the house, or she may have even invited the visitor to follow her into the house, but as she turned her back, she was met by a bullet in the back of her head.

The killer then made his or her way to the kitchen, killing Frances Williams, the couples' housekeeper, who was preparing dinner for the couple, before making their way to the bedroom where Ed Friendly was shot.

Before leaving the scene of the crime, the killer placed a fedora hat over Sophia’s face, as if to leave a clue. The victims were found approximately twelve hours later by the pool man.

Police tried to piece together as to why this wealthy couple, both in their 70s, along with their housekeeper were killed. Nothing was taken from the house, so burglary was ruled out. Could Ed, who was a realtor, stockbroker and was involved in race horses, made an enemy doing business, or did a business deal go wrong? Or was it Sofia that had made an enemy?

When police looked further into Sofia and her life before she married Ed, they discovered that she was involved in a twisted inheritance saga with her ex-husband and their two children.

Sofia and her husband, Ed, moved to Palm Springs from San Francisco in the early 1970s, purchasing the property at 893 Camino Sur a few years later.

Sofia was the daughter of the Brownells, a wealthy San Francisco Family. Her first husband, Curtis Wood Hutton, was from a family of stockbrokers and distant relation to Frank Woolworth, founder of the F. W. Woolworth Company.

When Sofia’s first husband, Curtis, joined the Second World War, his aunt, Barbara Woolworth Hutton, placed $1 million in a trust to pass on to his family if he was killed. Even though they were divorced, on the death of Curtis Hutton, the inheritance would still to pass to Sophia. Curtis was battling cancer, and it looked like he would pass away before Sofia.

Almost forty years after Curtis entered the war, the $1 million trust fund was now worth significantly more, and it was looking like this large sum of money would soon be Sofia’s. However, if Sofia died before Curtis, the money would then pass to Sofia and Curtis’s son and daughter, Edward and Sophia Hutton.

Police believed that the murders were the work of a professional, concluding that Sofia was the main target due to her large and complicated inheritance and the clue of the fedora hat. Sofia's son, Edward Hutton, became the main suspect, along with his friend, Andreas Christensen, a Scandinavian criminal. However, there was no evidence to support such claims.

The Friendly murders were the first triple homicide that Palm Springs saw. Lack of physical evidence and without the same forensic technologies that are around today, the case went cold. Police did conclude that the murders were the work of a professional.

Some thirty years later, a professor at the University of Leicester in England found a way to lift fingerprints off of bullet casings and in 2008, a partial fingerprint was recovered from one of the bullet casings from the Palm Springs murders. Unfortunately, the print was from the very edge of a thumb, a part that police in Denmark did not have on file for Andreas Christensen.

Sadly, as of 2021, the murders remain unsolved.