In 2013 GTreaders voted Easterby the Best Bartender in Santa Cruz, a title he still cherishes proudly with a picture on his phone. Still, he continued tending at the local institution, after Karen Madura purchased it. During the holidays, local police acted as designated drivers for Easterby and gave him rides to and from their precinct parties, for which he helped supply the booze.Įasterby owned and operated The Jury Room for 23 years, until 1999, when a health scare made him relinquish some responsibilities.

It’s the same caricature the bar still uses today on pins and other merchandise. It seems he was always a favorite around town, earning the nickname “Judge Roy Beans,” given to him by a Jury Room regular, who also printed up business cards with the nickname and a caricature of Easterby on them. “If I had 40 customers at once, I bet you 25 of them would’ve been off-duty law enforcement.” Marv Easterby is seen behind the bar with tender and his dog

“When I bought, it was a total cop bar,” he remembers. Over the next several decades, he would fine-tune his skills, rubbing elbows with locals and authorities. He arrived in Santa Cruz in April 1976 and soon bought The Jury Room for $75,000. “When I interviewed, I told them I was going to be 22 I just didn’t tell them how long it would take me.”Īfter he was subsequently fired for being underage, he followed a sister to Washington state, where he found a job as a fry cook and eventually managed a bar and restaurant. “You could drink beer at 18 and then hard liquor at 21,” he remembers. His first job behind the bar was in 1963, when he was 19, in a small town called Pierpont which, in 2010, boasted a whopping population of 135. She’s tended downtown Santa Cruz’s Rush Inn since 2009 and has known Easterby for 16 years.īorn in Andover, South Dakota, Easterby was the youngest of seven.

Known for his collared shirts, stylish cuffs, curled mustache and soft-spoken but take-no-shit attitude, Easterby, or Marv to his friends and regulars, “is the quintessential, strong, handsome, silver-tongued, no bullshit bartender,” says Molly McVeigh. Marvin “Marv” Easterby is a bartender’s bartender. He then sold the Jury Room to Marv Easterby. The Jury Room was owned at the time by a fellow named Joe Mandela, who owned several bars in Santa Cruz. He told us that he wasn’t the owner of the Jury Room at the time of Kemper’s crimes and never met the serial killer.

On the day of our visit, legendary owner and bartender Marv Easterby was at work. At the time, they had no suspicion about Kemper. During our trip to Santa Cruz last August, we returned to the Jury Room, the bar where Ed Kemper would hang out regularly in 19, as it was also frequented by the police officers involved in the solving of his murders.

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