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