Beverly Hills cops solve 50-year-old case
The Early Days
When you’re cop in Beverly Hills, anything can happen on any given night. One night, Paul Edholm, a patrol officer in the early part of his career, stopped a car going sixty-five miles per hour down Santa Monica Boulevard. It was late. Not too many cars on the road. Paul was sitting in his cruiser killing time, when a blur of a vehicle passed by him.
After hitting his lights and pulling the car over, Paul walked to the driver’s side window to see none other than Jonathon Winters staring back at him. The famous comedian/actor was smiling.
“Do you know how fast you were going?” Paul asked Winters.
“No, officer.”
“Well,” Paul said, trying to keep a straight face, “about sixty!” The speed limit was somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-five, Paul recalled.
Winters looked at Paul with his signature pudgy smirk, and said, “I’m going to have to get rid of this damn car … they told me it would do at least 120.”
Undeterred by the remark, Paul handed Winters his license back. “Have a good night,” he said.
Winters paused. Then said, “No.”
“Do you want a ticket?” Paul asked.
“No.”
Paul later recalled, “For the next 20 minutes, he kept me there while telling jokes.”
There was another time when Paul locked eyes with a guy in a fancy sports car who was waiting at a stoplight next to him. The guy looked familiar, but Paul couldn’t quite place him. There they sat, waiting for the light to turn green. The guy looked as if he wanted to drag race with Paul.
As the light turned green, the guy squealed his tires and, taking a sharp left, cut off Paul’s police car inside the intersection.
So Paul hit his lights and pulled him over.
It was actor Don Adams, who played Maxwell Smart of the hit television show “Get Smart.”
After Paul asked Adams if he knew why he had stopped him, he explained that he had cut the police car off.
Adams looked at Paul and said, “Sorry about that, Chief,” in his signature Maxwell Smart whine.
As Paul’s career would move into the darker world of murder, he would not enjoy his nights cruising the streets of Beverly Hills as much as he had earlier in his career. One of his most famous-if not interesting and bewildering-cases, as he landed himself a job inside the investigative unit of the BHPD, involved the brutal rape of a teenage girl and the murder of two police officers. Quite interestingly, the case was opened some five decades ago, when Paul was a just boy living in Buffalo, New York. Who would have thought then, when criminal forensics was but a dream of science, and a fingerprinting kit for a detective consisted of a magnifying glass, some powder, and a cop’s eye for detail, that one of the coldest cases on American record would be solved, for the most part, by a forensic handwriting expert.