Over the last few weeks in your neighborhood, empty lots and car parking spaces have become temporary spaces where you can buy your own Christmas tree. The supply of them is limited and demand for them sky-high, which can lead to big, fast profits for the vendors.
As a result, the Christmas tree business is highly competitive and even dangerous, with criminal enterprises keen to take control, and take their cut. In bigger cities like New York, sabotage, theft and even murder aren’t unheard of, but in 1950, Harry A. Pozner, the “Christmas Tree King” in San Diego, California, faced a very different threat: a love triangle.
On April 13, 1950, he drove away after dropping “attractive red-haired divorcee” Verna Simons, 31, outside her sister’s café. He did not see that his wife Margarette, 36, had been lying in wait until it was too late. “So you’re with him again,” said Margarette, and hit Verna on the head with a .32 caliber automatic pistol. The weapon discharged, and Verna was shot in the forehead, dying several hours later in hospital.
Margarette had long suspected that Pozner, 46, was having an affair. A few months earlier, Verna, who had been at his side as his secretary and bookkeeper since 1943, brought a lawsuit alleging that he was the father of her five-year-old son Martin.
Pozner denied it, and the judge ruled in his favor, but then why had he paid Verna’s hospital expenses and supported the child all that time? This alone might have pushed Margarette over the edge, but then someone who said he was “madly in love” with Verna dropped a dime to the suspicious wife.
After her arrest, Margarette told police that she “really didn’t mean to shoot her,” but nevertheless admitted that “I did it, and I’m glad I did it.” The DA charged her with first-degree murder, and at trial the next month café owner Evelyn testified that Margaretta had turned to a shocked Pozner and told him “I killed her, and I intended to kill you too.”
Margarette, supported by two psychiatrists, in turn said she had had a “mental blackout”, and in fact only planned to shoot out one of Pozner’s tires so the three could “talk things over.” She said she had been waiting in the cafe, but when she approached Verna, “she had her hands out, like she was going to scratch out my eyes.” She didn’t even realize the gun had gone off, she said.
This was again contradicted by witness Roland Morgantini, who said Margarette stood over the dying Verna and said “I told you I would kill you, you redheaded – – – -,” and that Pozner, in taking the gun away from his wife, said “look at the mess you’ve got us into.” She allegedly replied: “Go and hug her now… you’re not worried about the mess, you’re worried because you won’t have her anymore.”
Even though the jury deliberated overnight, it seemed like an open-and-shut case – but they acquitted Margarette, who left court arm-in-arm with Pozner. He had admitted the affair on the stand, but now hoped “I’ll do everything I can to make up to my wife if she gives me the opportunity.”
Perhaps they celebrated the holidays with their own two children later that year, opening gifts under a Christmas tree that Pozner supplied, but the archives do reveal that in late November 1960, he was filmed by local television news bringing some 2000 trees “from the North” into San Diego to decorate the Balboa Park festival.
The report said that he would personally transport some 65,000 trees for sale in the city that year, and that they cost a bit more as they were kept refrigerated at his downtown warehouse. Asked how many he handled in his career, he said “I don’t have the slightest idea.”
