LOS ANGELES — "Ladies and gentlemen, this tour should not be taken by anyone with a heart condition ... We recommend you leave the bus immediately." A tour guide makes the announcement as the doors slam shut on our filled-to-capacity 56-seat cruising bus. We are rolling into Los Angeles noir, embarking on an exhaustive five-hour tour of grisly crime scenes and lesser Halloween hijinks from the '20s to the '50s.

Crimebo, balloon killer

The 1947 Project's inaugural Halloween Horrors crime bus tour is touted as a BYOBB (Bring Your Own Barf Bag) event. And no children are allowed.

So why is there a clown breathing down my neck?

Crimebo the crime clown (aka Michael Perrick) bares his teeth and purrs in a gravelly voice as he walks down the aisle with a cauldron full of cheap candy, some shaped like eyeballs. "Something sticky?" he offers.

He pops a balloon animal and quips, "These things just keep committing suicide."

Story continues

Over the next five hours, co-bloggers and murder historians Kim Cooper and Nathan Marsak will recount the details of murder, mayhem and death that marked a dark period in L.A.'s cultural history. We'll pass the apartment where silent film star Marie Prevost starved herself to death before her dog ate her rotting flesh, the eucalyptus groves where a mysterious rich woman was mutilated beyond recognition, the home where a married woman kept her secret lover in an attic for decades.

A very long day begins

We start on Avenue 26 in Pasadena, heading toward the Los Angeles River. As we pass a fire station, Marsak waxes poetic about the only contemporary crime report on this 47-locale tour. In August, a woman named Jennifer Flores was found beaten and strangled to death on Loleta Avenue. "Ah, Loleta Avenue," Marsak says. "I hope to live there one day."

Marsak's red tie is painted with butterflies caught in spider webs.

Nathan Marsak and his crime tour fashion

A veteran fire captain named David Jaime Del Toro was charged with Flores' murder, Marsak says. The fire captain allegedly left a trail of blood and tire tracks from Flores' body right to his own front door.

As Marsak and Cooper read from archival newspaper clippings, black and white photos are projected on small TV screens hanging throughout the bus.

Down the road, Cooper points toward eucalyptus groves near the L.A. River, where in 1920, a young couple was taking a romantic stroll when they saw a glittering object in the dirt — a gold tooth — and the smell of a decomposing corpse.

Faith Sudow, 45, had a broken shoulder, thumb, and multiple blows to her head. Her teeth were scattered, her eyes were gouged out, and her facial skin was scraped off.  "Faye" was slovenly, Cooper says. It was rumored that she was a drug dealer: She'd come home at 4 a.m. with her purse stuffed full of money. "We know she wasn't a prostitute," Cooper says, "because, well, she didn't like to wash."

Many suspects were questioned — her boyfriends, her husband, her own daughter — but Sudow's murder was never solved.

Faith Sudow's 1920 murder made the papers.

We roll past the crime scene and head onto the trash-filled streets of Glendale Avenue.

"When do we get out?" someone yells from the back row.

"Never," Crimebo says.

"Since there are so many of you and you're all so badly behaved, you won't be getting out," Cooper says.

Trivial Pursuit, the gross-out edition

The riders on this tour are an eclectic mix of nerdy, Star Trek-convention-loving types, couples of the young and hip persuasion, and middle-aged retired folks in T-shirts, jeans and Birkenstocks. A blond woman in the seat in front of me has skull-adorned chopsticks in her hair. An elderly woman in a Black Dahlia baseball cap is eating a burrito. One came in costume: a red flapper dress, fishnets, and red elbow-length gloves, with blood-drip stains seeping from her eyes and mouth.

On Vanowen Street in Burbank, a woman named Virginia Thomason was found slumped over in the car. She'd been shot through the jaw by her stalker boyfriend, Marsak says. Thomason died less than a mile from Valhalla Memorial Park, which we pass on our left, the resting place of Criswell the psychic, Oliver Hardy, Stooge Curly Joe, the woman who was the voice of Betty Rubble and the man who voiced Jiminy Cricket.

We pull up to a residential section of Los Angeles, outside a small gray home that sits across from the Los Angeles River, and Marsak begins a tale of "sapphic lust and murder."

Beauty shop owner Peter Fabiano's wife, Betty, was so enchanting that an employee named Joan Rabel became infatuated with her and conspired with another woman, a hospital clerk named Goldyne Pizer, to murder Fabiano.

Late Halloween night in 1957, the doorbell rang at the Fabiano home. At the door were two masked trick-or-treaters. Isn't it a little late for this? Fabiano asked. The shooter replied with a mean .38 slug in Fabiano's gut.

Rabel and Pizer died in prison, Marsak says.

Halloween horrors in L.A. aren't only the provenance of adults. Children get their fair share too, according to Cooper. In 1962, little trick-or-treater Deborah Lohr was on a neighbor's porch when her Hawaiian grass skirt burst into flames as she brushed against a candlelit jack-o'-lantern.

A doctor happened to be passing by, and he rushed her into the house, where they placed her in a fish tank and filled it with ice. She had burns over 80 percent of her body. While lying in her tomb of ice, Cooper says, the little girl asked if she couldn't just go get another costume and head back out: "I didn't get any candy yet."

"She had no idea what had happened, or that she was dying," Cooper said. She was dead on arrival at the hospital. The tragedy led the PTA to publish a list of Halloween safety guidelines.

As the crime bus snakes its way toward Hollywood, Crimebo swigs from a bottle wrapped in a wrinkled brown paper bag. He is wearing bright red face paint and his eyes are painted into black raccoon orbs. He has a thick black goatee, and wears a yellow frumpy jacket, tattered brown hat, and a blue skull ring.

To break up the time it takes to get from one scene to the next, Crimebo reads from his Big Book o' Crime, filled with clippings of pranks past: razor blades in cookies, poisonous raisins, small-time hijinks with big impact.

He poses trivia questions:

"What's the number-one killer?" Crimebo asks. "Raise your hand."

The winner who answers "heart disease" is rewarded with a brown vinyl wallpaper sample.

"What's the number-one surgery in Japan?"

"Penis enlargement?" a woman in the front row guesses. No, that's number two.

A man correctly guesses breast enlargement and wins a tattered, stuffed Coca-Cola polar bear.

"What's the number-one way people die in their own homes?"

Falling down steps? Shot by a spouse?

"Over 600 people a year die in their houses by mixing ammonia and bleach," Crimebo says.