About the Orange County Sheriff’s Department:

The history of Orange County goes back further than the past 100 years and is a tribute to the adventurous spirit, personal drive and tremendous courage of the early explorers and settlers who's vision and fortitude made cities where there were only dreams. In any society, there are always challenges, but the pioneer men and women who forged Orange County out of a barren land had the courage to overcome the obstacles that stood in their path.

It wasn’t until California became a state in 1850 that formal law enforcement institutions, based on the common law of England, became established. Even then, Southern California was a lawless society until the 1870s, plagued by rustlers, highwaymen, murderers, robbers and swindlers. Many made their headquarters in Los Angeles, blatantly defying the law and its traditional keepers-sheriff, jailor, judge and jury. Impromptu, poorly organized vigilante groups supplemented formal law enforcement officials, often taking the law into their own hands, but even these groups were ineffective.

The growth of communities, the increase in the number and proximity of small farms and the improvement of both education and communication systems finally brought lawlessness under control. Each formal community had its marshal, its constable and its judge and when Orange County was formed in 1889, its citizens had a sheriff, directly responsible to them, and a new set of institutions right in their own backyard.

The Orange County Sheriff’s Department today is a highly professional organization, which not only continues in its traditional role of crime suppression, but also has expanded into the area of crime prevention. At the Orange County Sheriff’s Department you can see the spirit of adventure and the same courage as the early settler had.

Orange County is a place where dreams have become a reality

Source:

ocsd.org/

Charlie Staump is a retired investigator from the Orange County Sheriff's Department in California. After 8 years in the Marine Corps and 18 years in law enforcement he found himself in the unenviable position of being retired at the age of 43 because of health problems. In an attempt to keep busy, he organized and directed an eighteen-piece swing band which was comprised of many veterans of the famous big bands of the forties and fifties. He also started a little business of making miniatures which he sold throughout the country.  Charlie Staump is the author of The Calico Incident and The Lady of Goldstone.

According to the book description of The Calico Incident, “In the year of 1988 Johnny M. Johnson, a retired deputy Sheriff in San Bernardino, California, takes a job as an actor-gunfighter in the ghost town of Calico. He was well aware of the history of that old mining town and the rumors of its reported ghostly legends. Johnny had a personal connection to Calico that went back one hundred years. He had no idea that this connection would come back to haunt both he and his partner. After talking to his grandmother for many years, Johnny thought he knew everything there was to know about that old town, but when he was taken back to a time when Calico was a thriving mining town he found there was much more than he imagined. Upon returning to present day Calico he is not as skeptical about the super-natural as he was before, but he now has to fight off those who followed him back in time. “Once you enter that dimension, you can never leave,” he is often heard mumbling.”