March 29, 2025 • 43 mins
This 2017 episode covers the early days of Hollywood, and its reputation for debauchery. When a high-profile director was murdered, it added to that image, and revealed that Taylor, like so many in Hollywood, had lots of secrets.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. We have a little Hollywood history coming up soon.
So today's classic is an episode on the murder of
actor and director William Desmond Taylor. This episode is about
his unsolved killing, but it also gives some context on
the very scandal filled atmosphere of the film industry in
(00:22):
the early twentieth century. This episode originally came out on
November sixth, twenty seventeen, which doesn't seem like as long
ago as that, but there we have it. Enjoy Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
(00:48):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm
Tracy B. Wilson, and I have a confession to make
right out of the gate, which is today's episode is
kind of a remainder from Halloween stuff. Yeah. When I
looked at the title of I was like, oh, more Halloween. Yeah,
it's like one of those things that I started looking
at as a potential October episode, and then as I
got more into it, I was like, oh, this really
(01:09):
is just like more of a sad, convoluted tale of
people in the lives they lead. It wasn't so much
spooky as just sad. It's more Hollywood history than creepy
Halloween stuff. Although a lot of the Hollywood scandals we're
going to be talking about are pretty upsetting themselves, right Like,
it popped on my radar because it's on my list
(01:30):
of unsolved crimes. But then the deeper you go, the
less it really has anything spooky about it. It's more
just the like the right paperwork didn't happen, and people
protected each other. So in the nineteen twenties, the idea
of Hollywood as a motion picture town was still really
pretty new. The film industry had existed in Los Angeles
(01:53):
for just a little more than a decade when They're
Roaring Twenties began, and even in its youth, though, Hollywood
and it's really quickly growing film industry had a reputation
for debauchery. As movies grew into a serious business, the
small California town, which had initially just been chosen because
it was a good location to shoot because the consistent
sunshine made it easy in terms of lighting, it grew
(02:18):
so quickly, so from nineteen ten to nineteen twenty, the
population of Los Angeles went from three hundred and nineteen
thousand people to five hundred seventy seven thousand, so it
almost doubled. It's like one point seven ish. I'm doing
very sloppy math in my head. And during that time,
its population of actors and actresses went from six hundred
(02:40):
and fifteen to thirty six hundred according to census records,
and the mushrooming business of making entertainment drew this kind
of perfect combination of fame and wealth seekers, and it
wasn't long before scandals started to happen, because sometimes people
would get very desperate and do things that were unscrupulous.
Day we are talking about one of those scandals. It's
(03:02):
a murder that had so many suspects and so much
convoluted stuff going on that the case was never solved,
and that is the murder of William Desmond Taylor. William
Desmond Taylor was born William Cunningham Dean Tanner and Carlo
Ireland on April twenty sixth, eighteen seventy two. The family
(03:22):
moved to Dublin when he was still young. His father
was a major in the British Army and had hoped
that William would enter the military. Those hopes were dashed
because he failed to pass his interests tests. Instead. William
moved to the United States in eighteen ninety at the
age of eighteen, and he had been sent by his
father to work on a dude ranch. A ranch known
(03:44):
as Running Meade that was in Kansas had been advertising
in Great Britain as a place where young men could
go and learn to be manlier, and Major Dean Tanner
thought it would make William into the sun that he wanted.
This is such a weird premise to me, it is,
but it was one of those things. It was a
little bit of a fad in Great Britain for a
few years of like, oh, our sons who are maybe
(04:07):
privileged and don't really haven't really been tested in terms
of their manliness, will send them to America, to the
rough riding West, and they'll come back just strapping young
men ready to take on the world well. And the
idea that there would be a movement to try to
make men manlier, that is not the part that strikes
me as weird. It's the part of like dude ranches
(04:28):
specifically as like the place to go be manlier, just
because like the dude ranch has that element of being
for tourists to come well it does now. Well it
must have then too, because there's a stage on the ranch. Yeah,
that's true. But I think you know, to somebody that
doesn't know much about ranching, what they know is you're
gonna go out and be kind of in the wilderness
(04:51):
and the prairies, and you are gonna herd animals, and
you're gonna ride horses and gonna learn things like carpentry.
You are gonna come back so manly. Well that was there.
There's also the part where this ranch was giving William
an outlet in the form of acting. He had done
some stage work in school, but appearing on stage at
(05:13):
the ranch, which like we said, had a resort element
to it, he really seemed to love that. When the
ranch closed in eighteen ninety two, he moved briefly to
Missouri and then drifted a while as a laborer before
he took an acting job in Chicago under the name
Cunningham Dean. Eventually he made his way to New York. Yeah,
this is one of those things where you kind of
(05:35):
have to condense because he really does just drift around
and do a lot of odd jobs and you know,
kind of keep himself going because you could do that
at this time in the United States, but by the
end of nineteen oh one he was living in New York.
He had gotten married to a woman named Ethel May Harrison,
who was an actress. That was actually her stage name.
Her real last name was Hamilton, and her family wealth
(05:57):
had come from her stockbroker father. William was then employed
in an establishment called English Antique Shop, in which his
new father in law was an investor, and the couple
had a daughter named Ethel Daisy in nineteen oh three.
Seven years into this marriage, William vanished. This was in
October of nineteen oh eight. He called the antique shop
(06:18):
to ask for six hundred dollars on the day after
he left his family. The shop messengered this money to him,
and then the New York society and on the family
everything that he had had around him. Never saw him again. Nope,
he just like we said, vanished. And the years immediately
after William's disappearance are quite hazy. His friends and family
(06:42):
were concerned that he may have had some sort of
mental break or amnesia. There were even stories that started
cropping up of like, well, he's had some incidents before.
Various versions of his life story indicate that he drifted
for several years after he left his wife and child,
placing him everywhere you can imagine, from the Deep South
to Montana to Colorado and even Alaska. These are all
(07:05):
places that one might imagine that men would go to
become more manly. I'm still going to just be stuck
on that this whole episode. In nineteen twelve, Ethyl petition
of the state for a divorce from her missing husband
so that she could remarry. At the end of that year,
William reappeared in California going by the name of William
(07:25):
Desmond Taylor. As William Taylor, he was hired to act
in an assortment of short films, including the Iconoclast Bread,
Cast upon the Waters, A True Believer, and The quakeres
in nineteen thirteen. Yeah, all of those films were made
that same year. As we've talked about before when we
talk about older Hollywood history, they were churning out movies
(07:45):
at a much quicker rate than we ever talked about
we would ever imagine today. In nineteen fourteen, Taylor started
taking on work as a director as well, and for
several projects he actually worked as both actor and director.
His knowledge, he was pretty well read he could speak
a couple languages pretty well, and he really loved literature,
so he came off as very airy dite, and his
(08:06):
work ethic enabled him to really rise quite quickly as
a major player in the fledgling film industry. During World
War One, Taylor enlisted with the Canadian Army, but he
never saw any action. He had enlisted in nineteen eighteen,
but the war ended before he could be shipped out.
And so as the film industry was growing and the
(08:27):
concept of a movie star became a thing which was
all happening in parallel to Taylor being part of it, Hollywood,
as we said, started to attract people seeking fame and
money and power, and in the early nineteen twenties the
industry began experiencing its first scandals. There were a lot
of them. In September nineteen twenty, actress Olive Thomas had
(08:49):
spent the evening with her husband Jack Pickford, brother of
Mary Pickford, in Paris. Their marriage had been struggling because
they both had hectic careers, and the two of them
were hoping that a getaway could help mend their problems.
But after coming back to their hotel room one evening,
Olive drank a lethal dose of mercury by chloride, and
(09:10):
whether she intentionally ended her life or accidentally ingested the
fatal chemical remains uncertain. You might recall, if you listened
to our Lawn Cheney episode, that Cheney's first wife, Cleva Creton,
attempted to kill herself with mercury by chloride in nineteen thirteen.
One of the reported versions of this story was that
Olive thought she was taking a sleeping aid and she
(09:32):
had misread the French label on the bottle, which had
been prescribed for her husband. One of the reasons that
sometimes given for why there was mercury by chloride on
hand in the first place was that Jack was using
it topically to treat sores from syphilis. Today that would
carry a lot of stigma, but at the time that
would have been even more so so. If that was true,
(09:53):
that obviously would have been one of the causes of
their strained marriage. This scandalous element to the story, plus
all these lingering doubts about whether the death was accidental
or not, really started tongues wagging about how the Hollywood
life had been The undoing of a sweet girl from Pennsylvania.
As a side note, Olive's ghost is rumored to haunt
(10:15):
Broadway's New Amsterdam Theater, but that ghost has never divulged
what really happened the night she died. Yeah, as recently
as last year, there were articles about this ghost. If
you don't know Broadway or where the New Amsterdam is,
it is where the Aladdin Show has been running for
quite some time, which to me, I don't know, makes
it extra kind of witty that she would be hanging
(10:36):
out watching the Aladdin Show every night. Roughly one year
after Olive's death, in September of nineteen twenty one, It's
twenty five year old actress Virginia rap or Rape or Rappa,
depending on who you listen to, died several days after
she had attended a party at the Saint Francis Hotel.
She had a ruptured bladder, and she died of peritonitis.
(10:56):
She had been seen in a room with super star
at the time, Fatty Arbuckle, and her friend Maude Delmont
said that Arbuckle had sexually assaulted her, uh, the actress Virginia,
and though there was no evidence to back up the
claim and Arbuckle was acquitted of manslaughter, this story, which
was very scandalous had been front page news and reported
(11:19):
in the most sensational ways possible to sell as many
papers as possible. It's been almost one hundred years and
Fatty Arbuckle's name is still like was intimately connected with scandal. Yeah,
when you say it, it's like people get that like
scared look on their face of like, I don't even
want to hear about that, because there were various versions,
(11:41):
some of which are very very upsetting to hear that
we will not go into. But yeah, they're really lurid
of how he may have assaulted her, and even some
that were sort of more I don't want to say mild,
because it still involves him forcing himself on her, but
that were just like he was so heavy when he
forced himself on her, it caused this this ru sure,
So there are a lot of different versions of it,
(12:02):
and they're very unseemly. So that is why even today,
even though he was completely acquitted and there was no evidence,
his name still has this sort of specter of ickiness
on it. Yeah, it ended his career. He was blacklisted,
he wasn't cast in another film for more than a decade,
and he died just as it look like that he
might make a comeback, and this whole incident really negatively
(12:25):
impacted the whole film industry's image. By that point, Hollywood
had gained this reputation as a place where people went
to follow their dreams, only to often have things end
in disaster. Headlines swirled about the lack of morality in
filmmaking culture, and William Desmond Taylor was the advocate for
the industry. He spoke about the good that films could
(12:48):
do as censors threatened to clip anything even remotely considered scandalous.
I was reading in one of his biographies that there
was a scene in a picture where a woman was
making baby clothes, and the sensors stepped in and said
they had to cut it because it would confuse children
who thought that the stork brought babies. So the sensors
(13:08):
were sort of trying to overcorrect. At the same time,
some people in the film industry, like Taylor were saying, like, hey,
we can also make wholesome films. We can kind of
meet in the middle a little bit. He also cooperated
with US attorney Tom Green to try to get rid
of a drug problem that had been steadily growing in
(13:30):
his movie studio Over the years. Yeah, it was pretty
common for people in the industry to use drugs, either
at parties or developing habits that became problematic. But this,
despite all of his efforts, that image of this morally unglued,
self indulgent town was about to get a lot worse.
(13:52):
But before we delve into this next section, we're gonna
pause and have a little sponsor break. On February second,
nineteen twenty two, William Desmond Taylor's body was found in
his home on Alvarado Street in Los Angeles. He had
(14:14):
been shot in the back, although that was not initially
immediately apparent. We'll talk about that in a moment. His valet,
Henry Peavey, had reported for work in the morning and
discovered him and began yelling, which alerted the neighbors. Taylor
looked perfectly composed, he was dressed, and he was lying
on his back dead in a pool of blood. Both
(14:34):
the back and front doors had been locked when Peeve
arrived for work, but the front door locked automatically. The
police were also called that morning to the scene of
what was reported as a natural death. It was obviously
not natural to have been shot in the back. But
initially it was thought that he may have fallen and
hit his head or as a doctor who was called
(14:55):
to the scene initially pronounced that he had died of
a stomach hemorrhage. They all did marvel, however, that the
way he was lying seemed like nobody could have fallen,
hit their head and died that way, because he looked
so put together. By the time detectives arrived at Taylor's home,
it was already completely compromised by an assortment of the
director's associates who were going through his belongings. When studio
(15:18):
manager Charles Ayton arrived, he had commanded people to get
rid of any piece of incriminating anything. I feel like
this is a running theme every time we talk about
our crime in our show. That then people came and
wrecked the crime scene. So, after all of Thomas's death,
(15:39):
and with Fatty Arbuckle still at the time facing trial,
he wanted any scrap that could be perceived as seed
in any way to be taken back to his office
so it couldn't further damage the studio's reputation. Later, he
turned over what he claimed were all the papers to
the police, but he did not in fact, give them everything. Eventually,
(16:01):
the deputy coroner arrived and there was after a lot
of discussion because initially people were really ready to accept
that this had been a natural death. There was a
more thorough examination of Taylor's body, and then after he
had been rolled over, it became apparent that William had
been shot. The motive for the murder was elusive because
there did not appear to be anything missing. Once the
(16:23):
bungalow turned into a crime scene, detectives moved out all
the people who had gathered, but reporters were really persistent.
One of them actually got into the home and others
started taking photos through the windows. You may be wondering
at this point, like if he got shot in the back,
wouldn't it have been obvious as he was lying there
on the floor. But an autopsy later revealed that a
(16:46):
thirty eight caliber soft nosed bullet had entered Taylor's body
on his left side, about six and a half inches
below his armpit, and that bullet had traveled on an
upward trajectory through his left lung and then it had
lodged in his neck, So it was shot from kind
of below and went up. It didn't exit his body,
which is why it was not immediately apparent when he
(17:06):
was lying on his back. Part of the difficulty in
unraveling this murder is the vast number of possible suspects.
Taylor had been known as something of a philanderer, even
back in New York when he was still with his wife,
and there were a lot of young starlets that he
had been linked to romantically over the years. Even though
a lot of those links are a lot, they were
(17:27):
basically unsubstantiated gossip. Taylor wasn't big on the sorts of
huge parties that a lot of people in the film
industry were frequenting, like the whole incident with Fatty Arbicle
had happened at just like a big, raucous party. Neighbors
described him as having a regular and fairly dull schedule. Yeah,
(17:48):
they were like, he's usually home by seven. We can
see him reading through the window into the evening, and
then he goes to bed. His former wife had of
course recognized William when she saw him in a film
in nineteen nineteen eleven years after he had walked out
of her life, but she was in New York and
at that point she was happily remarried to a restaurant tour.
(18:09):
Her existence had been completely unknown to Taylor's Hollywood acquaintances
until shortly after his death. Some of his papers revealed
that this person existed, and there were also papers describing
that Taylor had met with his daughter the summer before
he was killed, and that he might have been trying
to re establish some sort of relationship with his daughter
(18:30):
and his ex wife, So it was not likely to
be a revenge scenario of his former wife, not for her.
She was in New York and accounted for during all
of it. Additionally, it had become apparent that Taylor's relationship
with his former employee, Edward Sands had become strained. Sands
had actually left Taylor's employee seven months before the murder.
(18:52):
The valet had forged Taylor's signature on checks and then
crashed his car while Taylor was traveling outside that country.
He was neither seen nor heard from again after Taylor's murder. Yeah,
he's one of the nebulous suspects that a lot of
people point to that does make sense in some ways.
He had a criminal history, but there are also a
(19:13):
lot of things that don't make sense, like basically he
was running from the law, and it wouldn't make sense
for him to show back up in Los Angeles and
be like, Hi, I'm going to do some high profile
killing of things because he was trying to be on
the lamb. Taylor also, it turned out had a brother
that was living in the States, Dennis Dean Taylor, and
oddly enough, just as William had done in nineteen oh eight,
(19:35):
Dennis had left his family, although he did so four
years later in nineteen twelve, but Taylor had found out
about this and was actually supporting his sister in law
and her two children. It turned out he had been
sending them regular checks every month. This tangle of the
two brothers and their abandoned families was never entirely cleared up,
but it did fuel a lot of speculation about Taylor
(19:57):
and his mysterious life. More information about Taylor was uncovered,
it only made things more confusing. People who had known
him during those years that he had vanished started coming forward.
He had used all kinds of different aliases while working
various labor jobs. Yeah, it's one of those. Reading through
(20:19):
this whole story in a few different books, it's kind
of interesting because you're like, oh, These are all the
tropes of like mystery movies, but these all happened in
a person's actual life. Where he vanishes, he lives several
other different lives his like franchise lives, and then he
finally settles in Hollywood. A neighbor named Faith McLean was
(20:40):
the only person to have seen anything the night of
the murder. She said that she had seen a man
leaving Taylor's home around eight PM, and her description of
the man was stocky, but not fat. This kind of
excluded Sands because he was considered to be fairly overweight.
This person that the claim described was clean shaven, with
(21:01):
a plan cap and looking, as she put it, quote
like my idea of a motion picture burglar. I imagine
that as carrying a crowbar and looking suspiciously over one's shoulder.
Two attendants at a nearby gas station said they had
been asked Tailor's address by a stranger, and an unknown
(21:23):
man was seen boarding a streetcar at the Maryland Avenue stop,
which was not far from the crime scene. When shown
photos of Sands, none of the people who described this
stranger thought it was the same man. Yeah, and there
are people that say none of these people are even
describing the same person like they're just Their descriptions were
general enough that some people started to automatically assume it
(21:45):
was the same person, But there's not really enough clear,
hard detail to know. It is estimated, to further complicate things,
that three hundred different people confess to this murder in
police stations across the country, but they were all written
off as false confessions. Was every lead based on these
exhaustively examined? Probably not, uh, But the investigation ended up
(22:09):
focusing around three women, primarily none of whom were those
people that showed up in police stations to confess. These
were Mabel Normand, Mary Mentor, and Mary Mintor's mother, Charlotte Shelby.
So we're going to tack through the three of them,
starting with Mabel. Mabel Normand was a comedian who had
been romantically linked with Taylor, at least according to gossip columns.
(22:33):
Mabel was very successful in films, but she also really
abhorred all the artifice that the industry's culture had taken on.
She had a reputation for being kind and generous, but
she also had a drug problem. She traveled to New
York to try to get away from all this, and
it was the news of Olive Thomas's death that really
snapped her into the realization that she needed to get sober.
(22:55):
She and all of had been friends and had partied together,
and Mabel saw her own fate as being potentially the
same as Olives. Mabel and William were really close friends,
and they corresponded often, and their letters to each other
were very sweet. She had been involved with men before
him who had been really unkind to her, but she
(23:17):
and William seemed really more to have a deep friendship
rather than a romantic relationship. It was William that she
called after Olive's funeral asking for help, and he was
completely encouraging, and when she checked herself into a rehab
program at a sanatorium north of Seneca Lake, New York,
it was rumored that Taylor actually paid the bill for it.
When Mabel came back to Hollywood looking radiant and healthy,
(23:41):
Taylor was often her escort around town, leading to the
belief that the two of them were a couple, But
there's also a likelihood that this was just a way
for Taylor to support his friend's sobriety. As she started
making herself visible again in Los Angeles, Yeah, they seemed
like the best of friends. He actually sent her flowers
several times a week, and she would come over and
(24:02):
they would talk about literature, and they seemed to be
super close. But she pretty much makes clear that if
this was not romantic. Mabel was, however, the last known
person to see Taylor alive. On the evening of February first,
she stopped at the director's bungalow home to borrow two books,
Nietzschez Thus Spake Zarathustra and Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. The
(24:25):
two then shared a drink and then Taylor walked her
to her car. He was supposed to call her at
nine pm, but he didn't, but she had already been
asleep and her maid did not normally wake her up
if she got calls after she was in bed, so
she thought nothing of this. Detectives who were piecing this
crime together believed that as Taylor was walking Mabel to
her car, the assailant snuck into the bungalow. Yeah. They
(24:49):
did investigate Mabel though, because on a tip that Mabel
had a thirty eight caliber revolver like the one that
was used to kill Taylor. Police searched her home and
they did find two handguns, but both were twenty five
caliber weapons that were not a match for the murder weapon,
and so the police pretty quickly determined that Mabel was
not the killer. She was also of the people they
(25:09):
interviewed seemed to be the most deeply grieving over the
whole loss. Mabel's life continued to have problems after Taylor's death.
Not long after the murder, she had a date in
a jazz club with a married man named George S. Patterson.
He died in a car accident that after they parted
ways that evening, and then the newspapers used that whole
(25:32):
event to smear her. Yeah, it was kind of like,
isn't it weird that two men that you were close
to both died so soon after one another. It was
really unkind uh. And then she was also involved in
a shooting in nineteen twenty four when her driver killed
her boyfriend. It turned out that the driver was an
escaped convict who, like many people in Hollywood, had taken
(25:54):
on a new identity. In nineteen twenty seven, Mabel was
diagnosed with tuberculosis, and she died in nineteen thirty at
the age of thirty seven. Next up. We're going to
take a look at the mother daughter duo who are
most frequently linked to Taylor's death. But first we're going
to pause again for a little sponsor break. Mary Miles
(26:22):
Minter was a young actress of eighteen who had been
acting since she was a small girl. She was cast
in an adaptation of Anne of green Gables that Taylor
was directing, and she developed a huge crush on the director.
Mary's mother, Charlotte Shelby, was dismayed at the possibility of
a relationship between her teenage daughter and the late forties
(26:43):
age director. Mary had fallen for a number of older
men during her career, and at least one of them
had taken advantage of her attraction to him. So why
Charlotte was watching her daughter like a hawk? She was
really intent that Mary should be famous and that the
two of them should get rich in the process. She
did not want any kind of dalliance to complicate matters.
(27:04):
She didn't want anything to ruin their plans. But Mary
really seemed to believe that William Taylor was the love
of her life. I will say, reading pretty much every account,
Charlotte does not seem to have been concerned about her
daughter's well being in any of this, Like, she wasn't
like I don't want another man to take advantage of
my daughter. She really seemed to be making pretty selfish moves,
(27:27):
which is sort of heartbreaking. Yeah, it's kind of the
original prototype for the horrible stage mom. Yeah, and there's
also in one of those ways that is unfortunately not surprising,
putting the blame on her when she was a child
for the actions of adult men. Yes, and Charlotte definitely
(27:50):
brought into that love. Notes that Mary Mentor had written
William Taylor were among his effects in his Bungalow, in
which the starlett wrote of wanting to go away with
William and living an idyllic, domestic, romantic life. The papers
began running stories that stated that the young woman was
having an affair with the much older director, but friends
(28:11):
of his, as well as Mary Mentor, had all claimed
that Mary's love was unrequited. When the young woman had
told Taylor how she felt about him, he had very
gently explained to her that he was far too old
for her, and he believed that the matter was settled.
After Taylor got promoted to a different office by the studio.
Mary was no longer working with him, and she became
(28:32):
even more obsessed and really a little unstable as she
tried to deal with her feelings for him and her
growing resentment of her mother's interference. At one point, Mentor
had feigned shooting herself after a fight with her mother
over whether she had been with Taylor. The gun was
the same type that had been used to kill Taylor. Yeah,
(28:53):
that happened, just for clarity before Taylor was killed. But
the two of them, there was sort of a constant
badgering of were you with that man? Were you with
that man? Did you go see that man? And while
Mary would have loved to have gone to see that man,
she made very clear that she really did adore him.
She also had not been Later, missus Shelby was seen
(29:17):
carrying that same revolver when she at one point went
to William Desmond Taylor's house in search of her daughter,
who had failed to come home. She was going to
confront him, but Mary was not at the director's house.
Charlotte Shelby's protective nature regarding her daughter was really explosive
when it came to William Taylor, even though he really
(29:38):
seemed to have no kind of lascivious intent on the
young actress, but a witness employed by Missus Shelby once
saw her say to Taylor, if I ever catch you
hanging around with Mary again, I will blow your expletive
brains out. When Mary Mentor heard the news of Ta's death,
(30:00):
she went first to his home and then to a
nearby mortuary, where she asked to give blood to save him.
Whether she truly was in denial that he was dead
or if she was playing up this relationship with the
deceased remains unknown. Charlotte Shelby opted to get out in
front of this story by inviting reporters to speak with Mary,
and the young actress said that she and William Desmond
(30:23):
Taylor had never been involved and that he saw her
as a child. When Mary was deposed by police, her
interview lasted for several hours. She told them that she
had been in love with William Taylor, but he had
never returned his affection, and that they were not romantically involved.
Charlotte Shelby was close to the da in Los Angeles,
and there had been rumors that the two of them
(30:45):
were having an affair. This was about the time that Holly,
as she was doing this research, started to believe that
the papers in LA in the nineteen twenties were speculating
that everyone was having affair an affair, but I mean,
who knows, maybe they were, Maybe everyone was heavy an affair.
So she got a little heads up. When the police
were headed to her home to ask a few questions
(31:07):
about William Taylor's murder, she was a very shrewd woman
and she refused to answer their questions. Eventually, detectives that
were pretty convinced that she had probably murdered Taylor cooked
up this wacky ruse to try to lure her out
by running a fake story in the newspapers that a
spiritualist had communicated with the deceased William Desmond Taylor and
(31:29):
had learned the killer's identity and that it was a
woman with a beautiful daughter. This was, of course, alla farce,
but it was designed to spur Shelby into some sort
of action, and the morning that that story ran, Shelby
phoned her lawyer immediately, but it really didn't result in
anything more, and she did not come forward to confess.
As they were hoping. One of the detectives in the
(31:50):
case pulled three blonde hairs from the jacket that Taylor
had been wearing when he died. He had an expert
compare them to hair from Mary Mentor, and they were
declared to be a match. The theory was that Charlotte
had walked in on Mary and William as they embraced
and had shot Taylor, and then Mary had arranged the body.
(32:11):
Just as investigators really thought they were getting pretty close
to solving this crime, they were ordered to drop the
case by the district attorney, the same one that was
good friends with Charlotte Shelby. But as the investigation once
again pointed to Shelby several years later, she claimed at
that point that she and William Taylor had been the
best of friends, that there was no animosity between them.
(32:32):
This was a flat out lie, as anyone who knew
them would have attested to. But when she was questioned
at that point about the whereabouts of her thirty eight
caliber revolver, which she was known to have owned the
DA had actually given it to her, she confessed to
investigators that her mother had taken the guns somewhere and
disposed of it, but that she did not know where.
(32:52):
Director king Vador later told people that Mary mentor had
strongly suggested that her mother had killed William Taylorarolette Shelby's
other daughter, Margaret, also started openly accusing her mother of
the murder in the nineteen thirties. Although Margaret's version of
events was wildly off the known facts of the case,
this mismatch in the description of the killer and Charlotte
(33:14):
Shelby was the one real halting point in her status
as a suspect. Yeah, Faith McLean's description definitely did not
describe anybody that looked like Charlotte Shelby, And so even
when they felt like they had a lot of good,
circumstantial evidence that all was pretty much put an end
to things. It's like, but she doesn't look at all
like the one person that a witness saw. In nineteen
(33:35):
thirty seven, fifteen years after the murder, Charlotte Shelby's former
chauffeur told police that his employer had asked him to
remove all of the ammunition from the gun that she
owned immediately after the murder of William Desmond Taylor was
publicly known. She claimed at the time that she feared
that Mary was going to turn the pistol on herself.
(33:56):
He had put this ammunition on a beam in the
basement of Charlotte Shelley with Shelby's former residence, and when
the police went to the home, which at that point
was occupied by other residents, the bullets were still there.
They were matched to the bullet that had killed Taylor,
which was significant because it was an older style of
ammunition that was not normally used in nineteen twenty two. Yeah,
(34:17):
the ammunitions expert said something to the effect of like,
you know, this is one in a million or something
crazy like that, like, if you find this this ammunition,
it's got to be the same person. The case was
reopened based on this new evidence. But when she appeared
before a grand jury, Charlotte Shelby suddenly had a backup
witness for an alibi. Prior to that, there had always
(34:39):
been a little discrepancy in her whereabouts at the time
of the murder. She had always said she was at
her house, but Mary and Mary's grandmother, who were at
the house, were like, no, she wasn't, So it was
always a little unclear if she had been in the
house and they just didn't know or not. But this
time she had a friend back her up and say
he was there with her. After the hearing, she told
(35:00):
reporters quote, one of the worst tortures for any person,
particularly a woman, is to go through life with a
cloud of malicious innuendo constantly hovering over her like a specter.
Why must William Desmond Taylor's murder follow me through the years?
I want to live the rest of my life and
happiness and peace if I may be permitted to do so.
The case was closed after the hearing, and it was
(35:22):
never reopened. In the meantime, though, in those fifteen years,
Mary Mentor's wholesome image was tarnished by the rumors of
a sexual relationship with Taylor, even though everyone denied that
such a thing existed. So she was this sort of
ingenue type actress, and so that it just was really
incongruous with the image that they were trying to promote
(35:42):
for her. So her contract with the studio wasn't renewed.
She did manage to move away from her mother, but
she quickly realized that because she had been basically a
child star and then an actress and her mother had
managed everything, she did not have the skills to manage
money on her own. And moreover, there wasn't any money
coming in to manage anyway. For a while, she seemed
(36:04):
to constantly want to dredge up the case in an
effort to stay relevant, and at one point she even
fabricated a whole story that somebody had tried to murder her.
She also started a rumor that her mother had been
jealous of her relationship with Taylor and hinted that there
had been a romantic involvement. She finally ended up marrying
into wealth and living out her life in a happy obscurity. Yeah,
(36:26):
when she went through that phase where she was saying
a lot of crazy things to the press, it is
pretty widely believed that she was developing a pretty bad
dependency on drugs and that's why she was so erratic
all the time. Another woman in Taylor's story, though that
was not really investigated at the time, was Margaret Gibson.
(36:50):
And Gibson, who went by Gibbee, knew William Desmond Taylor.
They had been actors together in their early careers. This
was before Taylor had even moved to Los Angeles. Gibby
ran into some legal trouble after an arrest for dealing
opium and possible prostitution under a sort of an umbrella
vagrancy charge. She had been acquitted, but she knew that
(37:12):
her career, which she had been trying to get off
the ground, was never going to get its feet back
under it, so she reinvented herself as an actress under
the name of Patricia Palmer. With her new name and
an age that she fudged, Gibby or Patricia sought out
her old friend who was then head of the famous
player's last studio, but she didn't get the help she
hoped for. Instead, her life wind up spiraling into just
(37:36):
a constant, clawing effort to try to make it in
Hollywood that often involved some really seedy people and eventually
included being part of a blackmail ring. Yeah, Gibby was
so desperate. It was a combination of, you know, maybe
some flexible morality and also being just gullible enough to
(37:57):
believe horrible people when they promised that they would be
the ones that really got her career off the ground.
But eventually Gibson fled Hollywood, but she did move back
to California later in her life, this time as a
married woman. Her husband was Elbert Lewis. She was widowed
in the nineteen forties when Lewis died, and in nineteen
(38:17):
sixty four, Gibson, who at that point was living as
Patricia Lewis, had a heart attack. When a neighbor found her,
she asked for a priest to give her final confession,
eventually telling the neighbor I killed William Desmond Taylor. It's
possible that, even if she didn't physically kill Taylor, that
her blackmail dealings may have led to his demise in
(38:40):
some way. If she was speeding information to the people
who did in his life, she might have felt that
she was responsible for his untimely end. Even so, in
addition to that, people confess to things they didn't do,
like all the time. That is true. This is a
theory that's become a lot more popular in recent years,
in part because she did run with a lot of
(39:01):
people as part of this blackmailing ring, and there are
some matchups of people that she knew and was dealing
with and some sort of shady looking characters that had
been seen around William Desmond Taylor's home in the weeks
leading up to the murder. But again, that's one that
could very easily be strictly coincidence. We just don't know.
(39:25):
And to further complicate the picture of Taylor's life and
who in it might wish to harm him, it slowly
came to light in all of this post murder investigation
that he may have been bisexual. Friends eventually started speaking
about his jaunts into opium clubs in Los Angeles that
catered to gay men, and there were headlines that ran
(39:45):
in papers about Taylor visiting quote queer places. The studio
tried to spin these stories as the director scouting kind
of you know, color for his films, but this really
didn't have any effect. George James hop who was a
designer of sets and production, had collaborated on several pictures
with William Desmond Taylor, and in nineteen eighty one he
(40:07):
wrote an autobiography which was never published, in which he's
spoken of an affair with Taylor that lasted for several years,
right up until the murder. It's possible that someone was
blackmailing William Desmond Taylor. Given his abandoned family and the
possibility of bisexuality, and even his career in film, there
(40:28):
were plenty of secrets that he may have wanted to
keep under wraps. The revelations about the many secrets of
Taylor's life, which fed into this larger story of scandal
in Hollywood, really had a serious impact on the film industry.
An article that appeared six days after Taylor's body was
found read quote, the murder of William Desmond Taylor has
(40:50):
had a fearsome effect upon the movies. It is exposing
the debaucheries, the looseness, the rottenness of Hollywood. Studios immediately
started working on on vigilance plans to ensure that ethics
and conduct regulations were in place in the industry. This
eventually led to the adoption of the Hayes Code in
nineteen thirty, which laid out moral guidelines for all motion
(41:13):
pictures made in the United States. That code remained in
place until nineteen sixty eight. William Desmond Taylor directed more
than fifty movies in a span of only eight years,
and when he was laid to rest, ten thousand people
showed up for the funeral. It was a combination of
people from Hollywood who just loved him because he was
(41:33):
really well liked, as well as onlookers who were hoping
to see famous people grieving The crowd at one point
pushed their way into the chapel where his funeral service
was taking place, and a riot nearly started, but police
were eventually able to push them back out onto the street,
and then they locked the door so the service could continue. Today,
there's an annual film festival of his movies in Carlo, Ireland,
(41:57):
which is where he was born. And what really becomes
apparent when you look at all of the elements of
this bizarre, unsolved case is how many people in Los
Angeles in the early days of the film industry were
hiding huge personal secrets, and the truth of what happened
the night that William Desmond Taylor died will likely never
be known, though there are certainly plenty of books written
(42:17):
about the case, each of which seems to favor a
different killer. Yeah, it comes up a lot when you're
reading histories of this case, like how easy it was
for someone to just show up in Los Angeles and
say my name is X, and there were not the
easy ways to background check people as there are now,
and people would go, okay, X, let's do this. So
a lot of the people that had moved there were
(42:39):
kind of starting over and maybe had some unsavory things
that they wanted to leave behind, just you know, a
fascinating and kind of sad thing in many ways. Thanks
so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd
like to send us a note, our email addresses. His
(43:00):
free podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe
to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. We have a little Hollywood history coming up soon.
So today's classic is an episode on the murder of
actor and director William Desmond Taylor. This episode is about
his unsolved killing, but it also gives some context on
the very scandal filled atmosphere of the film industry in
(00:22):
the early twentieth century. This episode originally came out on
November sixth, twenty seventeen, which doesn't seem like as long
ago as that, but there we have it. Enjoy Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,
(00:48):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm
Tracy B. Wilson, and I have a confession to make
right out of the gate, which is today's episode is
kind of a remainder from Halloween stuff. Yeah. When I
looked at the title of I was like, oh, more Halloween. Yeah,
it's like one of those things that I started looking
at as a potential October episode, and then as I
got more into it, I was like, oh, this really
(01:09):
is just like more of a sad, convoluted tale of
people in the lives they lead. It wasn't so much
spooky as just sad. It's more Hollywood history than creepy
Halloween stuff. Although a lot of the Hollywood scandals we're
going to be talking about are pretty upsetting themselves, right Like,
it popped on my radar because it's on my list
(01:30):
of unsolved crimes. But then the deeper you go, the
less it really has anything spooky about it. It's more
just the like the right paperwork didn't happen, and people
protected each other. So in the nineteen twenties, the idea
of Hollywood as a motion picture town was still really
pretty new. The film industry had existed in Los Angeles
(01:53):
for just a little more than a decade when They're
Roaring Twenties began, and even in its youth, though, Hollywood
and it's really quickly growing film industry had a reputation
for debauchery. As movies grew into a serious business, the
small California town, which had initially just been chosen because
it was a good location to shoot because the consistent
sunshine made it easy in terms of lighting, it grew
(02:18):
so quickly, so from nineteen ten to nineteen twenty, the
population of Los Angeles went from three hundred and nineteen
thousand people to five hundred seventy seven thousand, so it
almost doubled. It's like one point seven ish. I'm doing
very sloppy math in my head. And during that time,
its population of actors and actresses went from six hundred
(02:40):
and fifteen to thirty six hundred according to census records,
and the mushrooming business of making entertainment drew this kind
of perfect combination of fame and wealth seekers, and it
wasn't long before scandals started to happen, because sometimes people
would get very desperate and do things that were unscrupulous.
Day we are talking about one of those scandals. It's
(03:02):
a murder that had so many suspects and so much
convoluted stuff going on that the case was never solved,
and that is the murder of William Desmond Taylor. William
Desmond Taylor was born William Cunningham Dean Tanner and Carlo
Ireland on April twenty sixth, eighteen seventy two. The family
(03:22):
moved to Dublin when he was still young. His father
was a major in the British Army and had hoped
that William would enter the military. Those hopes were dashed
because he failed to pass his interests tests. Instead. William
moved to the United States in eighteen ninety at the
age of eighteen, and he had been sent by his
father to work on a dude ranch. A ranch known
(03:44):
as Running Meade that was in Kansas had been advertising
in Great Britain as a place where young men could
go and learn to be manlier, and Major Dean Tanner
thought it would make William into the sun that he wanted.
This is such a weird premise to me, it is,
but it was one of those things. It was a
little bit of a fad in Great Britain for a
few years of like, oh, our sons who are maybe
(04:07):
privileged and don't really haven't really been tested in terms
of their manliness, will send them to America, to the
rough riding West, and they'll come back just strapping young
men ready to take on the world well. And the
idea that there would be a movement to try to
make men manlier, that is not the part that strikes
me as weird. It's the part of like dude ranches
(04:28):
specifically as like the place to go be manlier, just
because like the dude ranch has that element of being
for tourists to come well it does now. Well it
must have then too, because there's a stage on the ranch. Yeah,
that's true. But I think you know, to somebody that
doesn't know much about ranching, what they know is you're
gonna go out and be kind of in the wilderness
(04:51):
and the prairies, and you are gonna herd animals, and
you're gonna ride horses and gonna learn things like carpentry.
You are gonna come back so manly. Well that was there.
There's also the part where this ranch was giving William
an outlet in the form of acting. He had done
some stage work in school, but appearing on stage at
(05:13):
the ranch, which like we said, had a resort element
to it, he really seemed to love that. When the
ranch closed in eighteen ninety two, he moved briefly to
Missouri and then drifted a while as a laborer before
he took an acting job in Chicago under the name
Cunningham Dean. Eventually he made his way to New York. Yeah,
this is one of those things where you kind of
(05:35):
have to condense because he really does just drift around
and do a lot of odd jobs and you know,
kind of keep himself going because you could do that
at this time in the United States, but by the
end of nineteen oh one he was living in New York.
He had gotten married to a woman named Ethel May Harrison,
who was an actress. That was actually her stage name.
Her real last name was Hamilton, and her family wealth
(05:57):
had come from her stockbroker father. William was then employed
in an establishment called English Antique Shop, in which his
new father in law was an investor, and the couple
had a daughter named Ethel Daisy in nineteen oh three.
Seven years into this marriage, William vanished. This was in
October of nineteen oh eight. He called the antique shop
(06:18):
to ask for six hundred dollars on the day after
he left his family. The shop messengered this money to him,
and then the New York society and on the family
everything that he had had around him. Never saw him again. Nope,
he just like we said, vanished. And the years immediately
after William's disappearance are quite hazy. His friends and family
(06:42):
were concerned that he may have had some sort of
mental break or amnesia. There were even stories that started
cropping up of like, well, he's had some incidents before.
Various versions of his life story indicate that he drifted
for several years after he left his wife and child,
placing him everywhere you can imagine, from the Deep South
to Montana to Colorado and even Alaska. These are all
(07:05):
places that one might imagine that men would go to
become more manly. I'm still going to just be stuck
on that this whole episode. In nineteen twelve, Ethyl petition
of the state for a divorce from her missing husband
so that she could remarry. At the end of that year,
William reappeared in California going by the name of William
(07:25):
Desmond Taylor. As William Taylor, he was hired to act
in an assortment of short films, including the Iconoclast Bread,
Cast upon the Waters, A True Believer, and The quakeres
in nineteen thirteen. Yeah, all of those films were made
that same year. As we've talked about before when we
talk about older Hollywood history, they were churning out movies
(07:45):
at a much quicker rate than we ever talked about
we would ever imagine today. In nineteen fourteen, Taylor started
taking on work as a director as well, and for
several projects he actually worked as both actor and director.
His knowledge, he was pretty well read he could speak
a couple languages pretty well, and he really loved literature,
so he came off as very airy dite, and his
(08:06):
work ethic enabled him to really rise quite quickly as
a major player in the fledgling film industry. During World
War One, Taylor enlisted with the Canadian Army, but he
never saw any action. He had enlisted in nineteen eighteen,
but the war ended before he could be shipped out.
And so as the film industry was growing and the
(08:27):
concept of a movie star became a thing which was
all happening in parallel to Taylor being part of it, Hollywood,
as we said, started to attract people seeking fame and
money and power, and in the early nineteen twenties the
industry began experiencing its first scandals. There were a lot
of them. In September nineteen twenty, actress Olive Thomas had
(08:49):
spent the evening with her husband Jack Pickford, brother of
Mary Pickford, in Paris. Their marriage had been struggling because
they both had hectic careers, and the two of them
were hoping that a getaway could help mend their problems.
But after coming back to their hotel room one evening,
Olive drank a lethal dose of mercury by chloride, and
(09:10):
whether she intentionally ended her life or accidentally ingested the
fatal chemical remains uncertain. You might recall, if you listened
to our Lawn Cheney episode, that Cheney's first wife, Cleva Creton,
attempted to kill herself with mercury by chloride in nineteen thirteen.
One of the reported versions of this story was that
Olive thought she was taking a sleeping aid and she
(09:32):
had misread the French label on the bottle, which had
been prescribed for her husband. One of the reasons that
sometimes given for why there was mercury by chloride on
hand in the first place was that Jack was using
it topically to treat sores from syphilis. Today that would
carry a lot of stigma, but at the time that
would have been even more so so. If that was true,
(09:53):
that obviously would have been one of the causes of
their strained marriage. This scandalous element to the story, plus
all these lingering doubts about whether the death was accidental
or not, really started tongues wagging about how the Hollywood
life had been The undoing of a sweet girl from Pennsylvania.
As a side note, Olive's ghost is rumored to haunt
(10:15):
Broadway's New Amsterdam Theater, but that ghost has never divulged
what really happened the night she died. Yeah, as recently
as last year, there were articles about this ghost. If
you don't know Broadway or where the New Amsterdam is,
it is where the Aladdin Show has been running for
quite some time, which to me, I don't know, makes
it extra kind of witty that she would be hanging
(10:36):
out watching the Aladdin Show every night. Roughly one year
after Olive's death, in September of nineteen twenty one, It's
twenty five year old actress Virginia rap or Rape or Rappa,
depending on who you listen to, died several days after
she had attended a party at the Saint Francis Hotel.
She had a ruptured bladder, and she died of peritonitis.
(10:56):
She had been seen in a room with super star
at the time, Fatty Arbuckle, and her friend Maude Delmont
said that Arbuckle had sexually assaulted her, uh, the actress Virginia,
and though there was no evidence to back up the
claim and Arbuckle was acquitted of manslaughter, this story, which
was very scandalous had been front page news and reported
(11:19):
in the most sensational ways possible to sell as many
papers as possible. It's been almost one hundred years and
Fatty Arbuckle's name is still like was intimately connected with scandal. Yeah,
when you say it, it's like people get that like
scared look on their face of like, I don't even
want to hear about that, because there were various versions,
(11:41):
some of which are very very upsetting to hear that
we will not go into. But yeah, they're really lurid
of how he may have assaulted her, and even some
that were sort of more I don't want to say mild,
because it still involves him forcing himself on her, but
that were just like he was so heavy when he
forced himself on her, it caused this this ru sure,
So there are a lot of different versions of it,
(12:02):
and they're very unseemly. So that is why even today,
even though he was completely acquitted and there was no evidence,
his name still has this sort of specter of ickiness
on it. Yeah, it ended his career. He was blacklisted,
he wasn't cast in another film for more than a decade,
and he died just as it look like that he
might make a comeback, and this whole incident really negatively
(12:25):
impacted the whole film industry's image. By that point, Hollywood
had gained this reputation as a place where people went
to follow their dreams, only to often have things end
in disaster. Headlines swirled about the lack of morality in
filmmaking culture, and William Desmond Taylor was the advocate for
the industry. He spoke about the good that films could
(12:48):
do as censors threatened to clip anything even remotely considered scandalous.
I was reading in one of his biographies that there
was a scene in a picture where a woman was
making baby clothes, and the sensors stepped in and said
they had to cut it because it would confuse children
who thought that the stork brought babies. So the sensors
(13:08):
were sort of trying to overcorrect. At the same time,
some people in the film industry, like Taylor were saying, like, hey,
we can also make wholesome films. We can kind of
meet in the middle a little bit. He also cooperated
with US attorney Tom Green to try to get rid
of a drug problem that had been steadily growing in
(13:30):
his movie studio Over the years. Yeah, it was pretty
common for people in the industry to use drugs, either
at parties or developing habits that became problematic. But this,
despite all of his efforts, that image of this morally unglued,
self indulgent town was about to get a lot worse.
(13:52):
But before we delve into this next section, we're gonna
pause and have a little sponsor break. On February second,
nineteen twenty two, William Desmond Taylor's body was found in
his home on Alvarado Street in Los Angeles. He had
(14:14):
been shot in the back, although that was not initially
immediately apparent. We'll talk about that in a moment. His valet,
Henry Peavey, had reported for work in the morning and
discovered him and began yelling, which alerted the neighbors. Taylor
looked perfectly composed, he was dressed, and he was lying
on his back dead in a pool of blood. Both
(14:34):
the back and front doors had been locked when Peeve
arrived for work, but the front door locked automatically. The
police were also called that morning to the scene of
what was reported as a natural death. It was obviously
not natural to have been shot in the back. But
initially it was thought that he may have fallen and
hit his head or as a doctor who was called
(14:55):
to the scene initially pronounced that he had died of
a stomach hemorrhage. They all did marvel, however, that the
way he was lying seemed like nobody could have fallen,
hit their head and died that way, because he looked
so put together. By the time detectives arrived at Taylor's home,
it was already completely compromised by an assortment of the
director's associates who were going through his belongings. When studio
(15:18):
manager Charles Ayton arrived, he had commanded people to get
rid of any piece of incriminating anything. I feel like
this is a running theme every time we talk about
our crime in our show. That then people came and
wrecked the crime scene. So, after all of Thomas's death,
(15:39):
and with Fatty Arbuckle still at the time facing trial,
he wanted any scrap that could be perceived as seed
in any way to be taken back to his office
so it couldn't further damage the studio's reputation. Later, he
turned over what he claimed were all the papers to
the police, but he did not in fact, give them everything. Eventually,
(16:01):
the deputy coroner arrived and there was after a lot
of discussion because initially people were really ready to accept
that this had been a natural death. There was a
more thorough examination of Taylor's body, and then after he
had been rolled over, it became apparent that William had
been shot. The motive for the murder was elusive because
there did not appear to be anything missing. Once the
(16:23):
bungalow turned into a crime scene, detectives moved out all
the people who had gathered, but reporters were really persistent.
One of them actually got into the home and others
started taking photos through the windows. You may be wondering
at this point, like if he got shot in the back,
wouldn't it have been obvious as he was lying there
on the floor. But an autopsy later revealed that a
(16:46):
thirty eight caliber soft nosed bullet had entered Taylor's body
on his left side, about six and a half inches
below his armpit, and that bullet had traveled on an
upward trajectory through his left lung and then it had
lodged in his neck, So it was shot from kind
of below and went up. It didn't exit his body,
which is why it was not immediately apparent when he
(17:06):
was lying on his back. Part of the difficulty in
unraveling this murder is the vast number of possible suspects.
Taylor had been known as something of a philanderer, even
back in New York when he was still with his wife,
and there were a lot of young starlets that he
had been linked to romantically over the years. Even though
a lot of those links are a lot, they were
(17:27):
basically unsubstantiated gossip. Taylor wasn't big on the sorts of
huge parties that a lot of people in the film
industry were frequenting, like the whole incident with Fatty Arbicle
had happened at just like a big, raucous party. Neighbors
described him as having a regular and fairly dull schedule. Yeah,
(17:48):
they were like, he's usually home by seven. We can
see him reading through the window into the evening, and
then he goes to bed. His former wife had of
course recognized William when she saw him in a film
in nineteen nineteen eleven years after he had walked out
of her life, but she was in New York and
at that point she was happily remarried to a restaurant tour.
(18:09):
Her existence had been completely unknown to Taylor's Hollywood acquaintances
until shortly after his death. Some of his papers revealed
that this person existed, and there were also papers describing
that Taylor had met with his daughter the summer before
he was killed, and that he might have been trying
to re establish some sort of relationship with his daughter
(18:30):
and his ex wife, So it was not likely to
be a revenge scenario of his former wife, not for her.
She was in New York and accounted for during all
of it. Additionally, it had become apparent that Taylor's relationship
with his former employee, Edward Sands had become strained. Sands
had actually left Taylor's employee seven months before the murder.
(18:52):
The valet had forged Taylor's signature on checks and then
crashed his car while Taylor was traveling outside that country.
He was neither seen nor heard from again after Taylor's murder. Yeah,
he's one of the nebulous suspects that a lot of
people point to that does make sense in some ways.
He had a criminal history, but there are also a
(19:13):
lot of things that don't make sense, like basically he
was running from the law, and it wouldn't make sense
for him to show back up in Los Angeles and
be like, Hi, I'm going to do some high profile
killing of things because he was trying to be on
the lamb. Taylor also, it turned out had a brother
that was living in the States, Dennis Dean Taylor, and
oddly enough, just as William had done in nineteen oh eight,
(19:35):
Dennis had left his family, although he did so four
years later in nineteen twelve, but Taylor had found out
about this and was actually supporting his sister in law
and her two children. It turned out he had been
sending them regular checks every month. This tangle of the
two brothers and their abandoned families was never entirely cleared up,
but it did fuel a lot of speculation about Taylor
(19:57):
and his mysterious life. More information about Taylor was uncovered,
it only made things more confusing. People who had known
him during those years that he had vanished started coming forward.
He had used all kinds of different aliases while working
various labor jobs. Yeah, it's one of those. Reading through
(20:19):
this whole story in a few different books, it's kind
of interesting because you're like, oh, These are all the
tropes of like mystery movies, but these all happened in
a person's actual life. Where he vanishes, he lives several
other different lives his like franchise lives, and then he
finally settles in Hollywood. A neighbor named Faith McLean was
(20:40):
the only person to have seen anything the night of
the murder. She said that she had seen a man
leaving Taylor's home around eight PM, and her description of
the man was stocky, but not fat. This kind of
excluded Sands because he was considered to be fairly overweight.
This person that the claim described was clean shaven, with
(21:01):
a plan cap and looking, as she put it, quote
like my idea of a motion picture burglar. I imagine
that as carrying a crowbar and looking suspiciously over one's shoulder.
Two attendants at a nearby gas station said they had
been asked Tailor's address by a stranger, and an unknown
(21:23):
man was seen boarding a streetcar at the Maryland Avenue stop,
which was not far from the crime scene. When shown
photos of Sands, none of the people who described this
stranger thought it was the same man. Yeah, and there
are people that say none of these people are even
describing the same person like they're just Their descriptions were
general enough that some people started to automatically assume it
(21:45):
was the same person, But there's not really enough clear,
hard detail to know. It is estimated, to further complicate things,
that three hundred different people confess to this murder in
police stations across the country, but they were all written
off as false confessions. Was every lead based on these
exhaustively examined? Probably not, uh, But the investigation ended up
(22:09):
focusing around three women, primarily none of whom were those
people that showed up in police stations to confess. These
were Mabel Normand, Mary Mentor, and Mary Mintor's mother, Charlotte Shelby.
So we're going to tack through the three of them,
starting with Mabel. Mabel Normand was a comedian who had
been romantically linked with Taylor, at least according to gossip columns.
(22:33):
Mabel was very successful in films, but she also really
abhorred all the artifice that the industry's culture had taken on.
She had a reputation for being kind and generous, but
she also had a drug problem. She traveled to New
York to try to get away from all this, and
it was the news of Olive Thomas's death that really
snapped her into the realization that she needed to get sober.
(22:55):
She and all of had been friends and had partied together,
and Mabel saw her own fate as being potentially the
same as Olives. Mabel and William were really close friends,
and they corresponded often, and their letters to each other
were very sweet. She had been involved with men before
him who had been really unkind to her, but she
(23:17):
and William seemed really more to have a deep friendship
rather than a romantic relationship. It was William that she
called after Olive's funeral asking for help, and he was
completely encouraging, and when she checked herself into a rehab
program at a sanatorium north of Seneca Lake, New York,
it was rumored that Taylor actually paid the bill for it.
When Mabel came back to Hollywood looking radiant and healthy,
(23:41):
Taylor was often her escort around town, leading to the
belief that the two of them were a couple, But
there's also a likelihood that this was just a way
for Taylor to support his friend's sobriety. As she started
making herself visible again in Los Angeles, Yeah, they seemed
like the best of friends. He actually sent her flowers
several times a week, and she would come over and
(24:02):
they would talk about literature, and they seemed to be
super close. But she pretty much makes clear that if
this was not romantic. Mabel was, however, the last known
person to see Taylor alive. On the evening of February first,
she stopped at the director's bungalow home to borrow two books,
Nietzschez Thus Spake Zarathustra and Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. The
(24:25):
two then shared a drink and then Taylor walked her
to her car. He was supposed to call her at
nine pm, but he didn't, but she had already been
asleep and her maid did not normally wake her up
if she got calls after she was in bed, so
she thought nothing of this. Detectives who were piecing this
crime together believed that as Taylor was walking Mabel to
her car, the assailant snuck into the bungalow. Yeah. They
(24:49):
did investigate Mabel though, because on a tip that Mabel
had a thirty eight caliber revolver like the one that
was used to kill Taylor. Police searched her home and
they did find two handguns, but both were twenty five
caliber weapons that were not a match for the murder weapon,
and so the police pretty quickly determined that Mabel was
not the killer. She was also of the people they
(25:09):
interviewed seemed to be the most deeply grieving over the
whole loss. Mabel's life continued to have problems after Taylor's death.
Not long after the murder, she had a date in
a jazz club with a married man named George S. Patterson.
He died in a car accident that after they parted
ways that evening, and then the newspapers used that whole
(25:32):
event to smear her. Yeah, it was kind of like,
isn't it weird that two men that you were close
to both died so soon after one another. It was
really unkind uh. And then she was also involved in
a shooting in nineteen twenty four when her driver killed
her boyfriend. It turned out that the driver was an
escaped convict who, like many people in Hollywood, had taken
(25:54):
on a new identity. In nineteen twenty seven, Mabel was
diagnosed with tuberculosis, and she died in nineteen thirty at
the age of thirty seven. Next up. We're going to
take a look at the mother daughter duo who are
most frequently linked to Taylor's death. But first we're going
to pause again for a little sponsor break. Mary Miles
(26:22):
Minter was a young actress of eighteen who had been
acting since she was a small girl. She was cast
in an adaptation of Anne of green Gables that Taylor
was directing, and she developed a huge crush on the director.
Mary's mother, Charlotte Shelby, was dismayed at the possibility of
a relationship between her teenage daughter and the late forties
(26:43):
age director. Mary had fallen for a number of older
men during her career, and at least one of them
had taken advantage of her attraction to him. So why
Charlotte was watching her daughter like a hawk? She was
really intent that Mary should be famous and that the
two of them should get rich in the process. She
did not want any kind of dalliance to complicate matters.
(27:04):
She didn't want anything to ruin their plans. But Mary
really seemed to believe that William Taylor was the love
of her life. I will say, reading pretty much every account,
Charlotte does not seem to have been concerned about her
daughter's well being in any of this, Like, she wasn't
like I don't want another man to take advantage of
my daughter. She really seemed to be making pretty selfish moves,
(27:27):
which is sort of heartbreaking. Yeah, it's kind of the
original prototype for the horrible stage mom. Yeah, and there's
also in one of those ways that is unfortunately not surprising,
putting the blame on her when she was a child
for the actions of adult men. Yes, and Charlotte definitely
(27:50):
brought into that love. Notes that Mary Mentor had written
William Taylor were among his effects in his Bungalow, in
which the starlett wrote of wanting to go away with
William and living an idyllic, domestic, romantic life. The papers
began running stories that stated that the young woman was
having an affair with the much older director, but friends
(28:11):
of his, as well as Mary Mentor, had all claimed
that Mary's love was unrequited. When the young woman had
told Taylor how she felt about him, he had very
gently explained to her that he was far too old
for her, and he believed that the matter was settled.
After Taylor got promoted to a different office by the studio.
Mary was no longer working with him, and she became
(28:32):
even more obsessed and really a little unstable as she
tried to deal with her feelings for him and her
growing resentment of her mother's interference. At one point, Mentor
had feigned shooting herself after a fight with her mother
over whether she had been with Taylor. The gun was
the same type that had been used to kill Taylor. Yeah,
(28:53):
that happened, just for clarity before Taylor was killed. But
the two of them, there was sort of a constant
badgering of were you with that man? Were you with
that man? Did you go see that man? And while
Mary would have loved to have gone to see that man,
she made very clear that she really did adore him.
She also had not been Later, missus Shelby was seen
(29:17):
carrying that same revolver when she at one point went
to William Desmond Taylor's house in search of her daughter,
who had failed to come home. She was going to
confront him, but Mary was not at the director's house.
Charlotte Shelby's protective nature regarding her daughter was really explosive
when it came to William Taylor, even though he really
(29:38):
seemed to have no kind of lascivious intent on the
young actress, but a witness employed by Missus Shelby once
saw her say to Taylor, if I ever catch you
hanging around with Mary again, I will blow your expletive
brains out. When Mary Mentor heard the news of Ta's death,
(30:00):
she went first to his home and then to a
nearby mortuary, where she asked to give blood to save him.
Whether she truly was in denial that he was dead
or if she was playing up this relationship with the
deceased remains unknown. Charlotte Shelby opted to get out in
front of this story by inviting reporters to speak with Mary,
and the young actress said that she and William Desmond
(30:23):
Taylor had never been involved and that he saw her
as a child. When Mary was deposed by police, her
interview lasted for several hours. She told them that she
had been in love with William Taylor, but he had
never returned his affection, and that they were not romantically involved.
Charlotte Shelby was close to the da in Los Angeles,
and there had been rumors that the two of them
(30:45):
were having an affair. This was about the time that Holly,
as she was doing this research, started to believe that
the papers in LA in the nineteen twenties were speculating
that everyone was having affair an affair, but I mean,
who knows, maybe they were, Maybe everyone was heavy an affair.
So she got a little heads up. When the police
were headed to her home to ask a few questions
(31:07):
about William Taylor's murder, she was a very shrewd woman
and she refused to answer their questions. Eventually, detectives that
were pretty convinced that she had probably murdered Taylor cooked
up this wacky ruse to try to lure her out
by running a fake story in the newspapers that a
spiritualist had communicated with the deceased William Desmond Taylor and
(31:29):
had learned the killer's identity and that it was a
woman with a beautiful daughter. This was, of course, alla farce,
but it was designed to spur Shelby into some sort
of action, and the morning that that story ran, Shelby
phoned her lawyer immediately, but it really didn't result in
anything more, and she did not come forward to confess.
As they were hoping. One of the detectives in the
(31:50):
case pulled three blonde hairs from the jacket that Taylor
had been wearing when he died. He had an expert
compare them to hair from Mary Mentor, and they were
declared to be a match. The theory was that Charlotte
had walked in on Mary and William as they embraced
and had shot Taylor, and then Mary had arranged the body.
(32:11):
Just as investigators really thought they were getting pretty close
to solving this crime, they were ordered to drop the
case by the district attorney, the same one that was
good friends with Charlotte Shelby. But as the investigation once
again pointed to Shelby several years later, she claimed at
that point that she and William Taylor had been the
best of friends, that there was no animosity between them.
(32:32):
This was a flat out lie, as anyone who knew
them would have attested to. But when she was questioned
at that point about the whereabouts of her thirty eight
caliber revolver, which she was known to have owned the
DA had actually given it to her, she confessed to
investigators that her mother had taken the guns somewhere and
disposed of it, but that she did not know where.
(32:52):
Director king Vador later told people that Mary mentor had
strongly suggested that her mother had killed William Taylorarolette Shelby's
other daughter, Margaret, also started openly accusing her mother of
the murder in the nineteen thirties. Although Margaret's version of
events was wildly off the known facts of the case,
this mismatch in the description of the killer and Charlotte
(33:14):
Shelby was the one real halting point in her status
as a suspect. Yeah, Faith McLean's description definitely did not
describe anybody that looked like Charlotte Shelby, And so even
when they felt like they had a lot of good,
circumstantial evidence that all was pretty much put an end
to things. It's like, but she doesn't look at all
like the one person that a witness saw. In nineteen
(33:35):
thirty seven, fifteen years after the murder, Charlotte Shelby's former
chauffeur told police that his employer had asked him to
remove all of the ammunition from the gun that she
owned immediately after the murder of William Desmond Taylor was
publicly known. She claimed at the time that she feared
that Mary was going to turn the pistol on herself.
(33:56):
He had put this ammunition on a beam in the
basement of Charlotte Shelley with Shelby's former residence, and when
the police went to the home, which at that point
was occupied by other residents, the bullets were still there.
They were matched to the bullet that had killed Taylor,
which was significant because it was an older style of
ammunition that was not normally used in nineteen twenty two. Yeah,
(34:17):
the ammunitions expert said something to the effect of like,
you know, this is one in a million or something
crazy like that, like, if you find this this ammunition,
it's got to be the same person. The case was
reopened based on this new evidence. But when she appeared
before a grand jury, Charlotte Shelby suddenly had a backup
witness for an alibi. Prior to that, there had always
(34:39):
been a little discrepancy in her whereabouts at the time
of the murder. She had always said she was at
her house, but Mary and Mary's grandmother, who were at
the house, were like, no, she wasn't, So it was
always a little unclear if she had been in the
house and they just didn't know or not. But this
time she had a friend back her up and say
he was there with her. After the hearing, she told
(35:00):
reporters quote, one of the worst tortures for any person,
particularly a woman, is to go through life with a
cloud of malicious innuendo constantly hovering over her like a specter.
Why must William Desmond Taylor's murder follow me through the years?
I want to live the rest of my life and
happiness and peace if I may be permitted to do so.
The case was closed after the hearing, and it was
(35:22):
never reopened. In the meantime, though, in those fifteen years,
Mary Mentor's wholesome image was tarnished by the rumors of
a sexual relationship with Taylor, even though everyone denied that
such a thing existed. So she was this sort of
ingenue type actress, and so that it just was really
incongruous with the image that they were trying to promote
(35:42):
for her. So her contract with the studio wasn't renewed.
She did manage to move away from her mother, but
she quickly realized that because she had been basically a
child star and then an actress and her mother had
managed everything, she did not have the skills to manage
money on her own. And moreover, there wasn't any money
coming in to manage anyway. For a while, she seemed
(36:04):
to constantly want to dredge up the case in an
effort to stay relevant, and at one point she even
fabricated a whole story that somebody had tried to murder her.
She also started a rumor that her mother had been
jealous of her relationship with Taylor and hinted that there
had been a romantic involvement. She finally ended up marrying
into wealth and living out her life in a happy obscurity. Yeah,
(36:26):
when she went through that phase where she was saying
a lot of crazy things to the press, it is
pretty widely believed that she was developing a pretty bad
dependency on drugs and that's why she was so erratic
all the time. Another woman in Taylor's story, though that
was not really investigated at the time, was Margaret Gibson.
(36:50):
And Gibson, who went by Gibbee, knew William Desmond Taylor.
They had been actors together in their early careers. This
was before Taylor had even moved to Los Angeles. Gibby
ran into some legal trouble after an arrest for dealing
opium and possible prostitution under a sort of an umbrella
vagrancy charge. She had been acquitted, but she knew that
(37:12):
her career, which she had been trying to get off
the ground, was never going to get its feet back
under it, so she reinvented herself as an actress under
the name of Patricia Palmer. With her new name and
an age that she fudged, Gibby or Patricia sought out
her old friend who was then head of the famous
player's last studio, but she didn't get the help she
hoped for. Instead, her life wind up spiraling into just
(37:36):
a constant, clawing effort to try to make it in
Hollywood that often involved some really seedy people and eventually
included being part of a blackmail ring. Yeah, Gibby was
so desperate. It was a combination of, you know, maybe
some flexible morality and also being just gullible enough to
(37:57):
believe horrible people when they promised that they would be
the ones that really got her career off the ground.
But eventually Gibson fled Hollywood, but she did move back
to California later in her life, this time as a
married woman. Her husband was Elbert Lewis. She was widowed
in the nineteen forties when Lewis died, and in nineteen
(38:17):
sixty four, Gibson, who at that point was living as
Patricia Lewis, had a heart attack. When a neighbor found her,
she asked for a priest to give her final confession,
eventually telling the neighbor I killed William Desmond Taylor. It's
possible that, even if she didn't physically kill Taylor, that
her blackmail dealings may have led to his demise in
(38:40):
some way. If she was speeding information to the people
who did in his life, she might have felt that
she was responsible for his untimely end. Even so, in
addition to that, people confess to things they didn't do,
like all the time. That is true. This is a
theory that's become a lot more popular in recent years,
in part because she did run with a lot of
(39:01):
people as part of this blackmailing ring, and there are
some matchups of people that she knew and was dealing
with and some sort of shady looking characters that had
been seen around William Desmond Taylor's home in the weeks
leading up to the murder. But again, that's one that
could very easily be strictly coincidence. We just don't know.
(39:25):
And to further complicate the picture of Taylor's life and
who in it might wish to harm him, it slowly
came to light in all of this post murder investigation
that he may have been bisexual. Friends eventually started speaking
about his jaunts into opium clubs in Los Angeles that
catered to gay men, and there were headlines that ran
(39:45):
in papers about Taylor visiting quote queer places. The studio
tried to spin these stories as the director scouting kind
of you know, color for his films, but this really
didn't have any effect. George James hop who was a
designer of sets and production, had collaborated on several pictures
with William Desmond Taylor, and in nineteen eighty one he
(40:07):
wrote an autobiography which was never published, in which he's
spoken of an affair with Taylor that lasted for several years,
right up until the murder. It's possible that someone was
blackmailing William Desmond Taylor. Given his abandoned family and the
possibility of bisexuality, and even his career in film, there
(40:28):
were plenty of secrets that he may have wanted to
keep under wraps. The revelations about the many secrets of
Taylor's life, which fed into this larger story of scandal
in Hollywood, really had a serious impact on the film industry.
An article that appeared six days after Taylor's body was
found read quote, the murder of William Desmond Taylor has
(40:50):
had a fearsome effect upon the movies. It is exposing
the debaucheries, the looseness, the rottenness of Hollywood. Studios immediately
started working on on vigilance plans to ensure that ethics
and conduct regulations were in place in the industry. This
eventually led to the adoption of the Hayes Code in
nineteen thirty, which laid out moral guidelines for all motion
(41:13):
pictures made in the United States. That code remained in
place until nineteen sixty eight. William Desmond Taylor directed more
than fifty movies in a span of only eight years,
and when he was laid to rest, ten thousand people
showed up for the funeral. It was a combination of
people from Hollywood who just loved him because he was
(41:33):
really well liked, as well as onlookers who were hoping
to see famous people grieving The crowd at one point
pushed their way into the chapel where his funeral service
was taking place, and a riot nearly started, but police
were eventually able to push them back out onto the street,
and then they locked the door so the service could continue. Today,
there's an annual film festival of his movies in Carlo, Ireland,
(41:57):
which is where he was born. And what really becomes
apparent when you look at all of the elements of
this bizarre, unsolved case is how many people in Los
Angeles in the early days of the film industry were
hiding huge personal secrets, and the truth of what happened
the night that William Desmond Taylor died will likely never
be known, though there are certainly plenty of books written
(42:17):
about the case, each of which seems to favor a
different killer. Yeah, it comes up a lot when you're
reading histories of this case, like how easy it was
for someone to just show up in Los Angeles and
say my name is X, and there were not the
easy ways to background check people as there are now,
and people would go, okay, X, let's do this. So
a lot of the people that had moved there were
(42:39):
kind of starting over and maybe had some unsavory things
that they wanted to leave behind, just you know, a
fascinating and kind of sad thing in many ways. Thanks
so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd
like to send us a note, our email addresses. His
(43:00):
free podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com, and you can subscribe
to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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