Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and I
Speaker 1: have a confession to make right out of the gate,
Speaker 1: which is today's episode is kind of a remainder from
Speaker 1: Halloween Stuff. Yeah. When I looked at the title of it,
Speaker 1: I was like, more Halloween. Yeah, It's like one of
Speaker 1: those things that I started looking at as a potential
Speaker 1: October episode, and then as I got more into it,
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, this really is just like more
Speaker 1: of a sad It's a convoluted tale of people in
Speaker 1: the lives they lead. It wasn't so much spooky as
Speaker 1: just sad. It's more Hollywood history than creepy Halloween stuff,
Speaker 1: although a lot of the Hollywood scandals we're gonna be
Speaker 1: talking about are pretty upsetting themselves, right like it it
Speaker 1: popped on my radar because it's on my list of
Speaker 1: unsolved crimes. Um But then the the for you go,
Speaker 1: the less it really has anything spooky about it. It's
Speaker 1: more just the like the right paperwork didn't happen and
Speaker 1: people protected each other. Um. So in the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: the idea of Hollywood as a motion picture town was
Speaker 1: still really pretty new. The film industry had existed in
Speaker 1: Los Angeles for just a little more than a decade,
Speaker 1: uh when they're wearing twenties began, and even in its youth, though,
Speaker 1: Hollywood and it's really quickly growing film industry had a
Speaker 1: reputation for debauchery. As movies grew into a serious business,
Speaker 1: the small California town, which had initially just been chosen
Speaker 1: because it was a good location to shoot because the
Speaker 1: consistent sunshine uh made it easy in terms of lighting,
Speaker 1: it grew so quickly. So from nineteen ten to nineteen twenty,
Speaker 1: the population of Los Angeles went from three hundred nineteen
Speaker 1: thousand people to five hundred seventy seven thousand, so it
Speaker 1: almost doubled. It's like two uh one point seven ish.
Speaker 1: I'm doing very sloppy math in my head. And during
Speaker 1: that time it's population of actors and actresses went from
Speaker 1: six hundred and fifteen to thirty six hundred according to
Speaker 1: census records. And the mushrooming business of making entertainment drew
Speaker 1: this kind of perfect combination of fame and wealth seekers
Speaker 1: and it wasn't long before scandals started to happen, because
Speaker 1: sometimes people would get very desperate and do things that
Speaker 1: were unscrupulous. And today we are talking about one of
Speaker 1: those scandals. It's a murder that had so many suspects
Speaker 1: and so much convoluted stuff going on that the case
Speaker 1: was never solved, and that is the murder of William
Speaker 1: Desmond Taylor. William Desmond Taylor was born William Cunningham Dean
Speaker 1: Tanner and Carlo Ireland on April eighteen seventy two. The
Speaker 1: family moved to Dublin when he was still young. His
Speaker 1: father was a major in the British Army and had
Speaker 1: hoped that William and the military. Those hopes were dashed
Speaker 1: because he failed to pass his entrance tests. Instead, will
Speaker 1: have moved to the United States in eighteen ninety at
Speaker 1: the age of eighteen, and he had been sent by
Speaker 1: his father to work on a dude ranch. A ranch
Speaker 1: known as Running Mead that was in Kansas had been
Speaker 1: advertising in Great Britain as a place where young men
Speaker 1: could go and learn to be manlier, and Major Dean
Speaker 1: Tanner thought it would make William into the son that
Speaker 1: he wanted. This is such a weird premise to me,
Speaker 1: it is, but it was one of those things. It
Speaker 1: was a little bit of a fad and Great Britain
Speaker 1: for a few years of like, oh, are sons who
Speaker 1: are maybe privileged and don't really haven't really been tested
Speaker 1: in terms of their manliness, will send them to America
Speaker 1: to the rough riding West and they'll come back just
Speaker 1: strapping young men ready to take on the world. Well,
Speaker 1: and the the idea that there would be a movement
Speaker 1: to to try to make men manlier, that is not
Speaker 1: the part that strikes me as weird. It's the part
Speaker 1: of like dude ranches specifically as like the place to
Speaker 1: go be manlier, just because like the dude ranch has
Speaker 1: that element of being for tourists to come. Well it
Speaker 1: does now, well it must have them too, because there's
Speaker 1: a stage on the ranch. Yeah, that's true. But I
Speaker 1: think you know, to somebody that doesn't know much about ranching,
Speaker 1: what they know is you're going to go out and
Speaker 1: be kind of in the wilderness and the prairies, and
Speaker 1: you're gonna herd animals, and you're gonna ride horses, and
Speaker 1: I'm gonna learn things like carpentry. You were going to
Speaker 1: come back so manly like f 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 had a resort
Speaker 1: element to it, he really seemed to love that. When
Speaker 1: the ranch closed in two he moved briefly to Missouri
Speaker 1: and then drifted a while as a laborer before he
Speaker 1: took an acting job in Chicago under the name cuttingham Deem.
Speaker 1: Eventually he made his way to New York. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is one of those things where you kind of have
Speaker 1: to condense because he really does just drift around and
Speaker 1: do a lot of odd jobs and you know, kind
Speaker 1: of keep himself going because you could do that at
Speaker 1: this time in the United States. But by the end
Speaker 1: of nineteen o one he was living in New York.
Speaker 1: He had gotten married to a him and named ethel
Speaker 1: May Harrison, who was an actress. That was actually her
Speaker 1: stage name. Her real last name was Hamilton's, and her
Speaker 1: family wealth had come from her stockbroker father. And William
Speaker 1: was then employed in an establishment called English Antique Shop,
Speaker 1: in which his new father in law was an investor
Speaker 1: and The couple had a daughter named Ethel Daisy in
Speaker 1: nineteen o three. Seven years into this marriage, William vanished.
Speaker 1: This was in October of nineteen o eight. He called
Speaker 1: the antique shop to ask for six hundred dollars on
Speaker 1: the day after he left his family. The shop messenger
Speaker 1: this money to him, and then the New York Society
Speaker 1: and I'm the family, everything that he had had around him.
Speaker 1: Never saw him again. Nope, he just like you said,
Speaker 1: van uh. And the years immediately after William's disappearance are
Speaker 1: quite hazy. His friends and family were concerned that he
Speaker 1: may have had some sort of mental break or amnesia.
Speaker 1: There were even stories that started cropping up of like, well,
Speaker 1: he's had some incidents before. Various versions of his life
Speaker 1: story indicate that he drifted for several years after he
Speaker 1: left his wife and child, placing him everywhere you can imagine,
Speaker 1: from the Deep South to Montana to Colorado and even Alaska.
Speaker 1: These are all places that one might imagine that men
Speaker 1: would go to become more manly. I'm still going to
Speaker 1: just be stuck on that this whole episode. In nineteen twelve,
Speaker 1: Ethel petition of the State were a divorce from her
Speaker 1: missing husband so that she could remarry. At the end
Speaker 1: of that year, William reappeared in California going by the
Speaker 1: name of William Desmond Taylor. As William Taylor, he was
Speaker 1: hired to act in an assortment of short films, including
Speaker 1: the iconoclassed Bread, Cast upon the Waters, A True Belief Eiver,
Speaker 1: and The Quakers in Yeah. All of those films remained
Speaker 1: that same year. As we've talked about before when we
Speaker 1: talked 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 of languages pretty well, and he really loved literature.
Speaker 1: So he came off his very erudite and his work
Speaker 1: ethic enabled him to really rise quite quickly as a
Speaker 1: major player in the fledgling film industry. During World War One,
Speaker 1: Taylor enlisted with the Canadian Army, but he never saw
Speaker 1: any action. He had enlisted in nineteen eighteen, but the
Speaker 1: war ended before he could be shipped out. And so
Speaker 1: as the film industry was growing and the concept of
Speaker 1: a movie star became a thing which was all happening
Speaker 1: in parallel to to Taylor being part of it, Hollywood,
Speaker 1: as we said, started to a tracked people seeking fame
Speaker 1: and money and power, and in the early nineteen twenties
Speaker 1: the industry began experiencing its first scandals. There were a
Speaker 1: lot of them. In September ninety, 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: all of drank a lethal dose of mercury by chloride,
Speaker 1: and whether she intentionally ended her life or accidentally ingested
Speaker 1: the fatal chemical remains uncertain. Uh You might recall if
Speaker 1: you listen to our Lawn Cheney episode, that Cheney's first wife,
Speaker 1: Clevela Creton, attempted to kill herself with mercury by chloride
Speaker 1: in ninett One of the reported versions of this story
Speaker 1: was that all Of thought she was taking a sleeping aid,
Speaker 1: and she had misread the French label on the bottle,
Speaker 1: which had been prescribed for her husband. One of the
Speaker 1: reasons that sometimes given for why there was mercury by
Speaker 1: chloride on hand in the first place was that Jack
Speaker 1: was using it topically to treat sores from syphilis. Today
Speaker 1: that would carry a lot of stigma, but at the
Speaker 1: time that would have been even more so. So. If
Speaker 1: that was true, that obviously would have been one of
Speaker 1: the causes of their strained marriage. This scandalous element to
Speaker 1: the story, plus all these lingering doubts about whether the
Speaker 1: death was accidental or not, really started tongues wagging about
Speaker 1: how the Hollywood life had been the undoing of a
Speaker 1: sweet girl from Pennsylvania. As a side note, Olive's ghost
Speaker 1: is rumored to hunt Broadway's New Amsterdam Theater, but that
Speaker 1: ghost has never divulged what really happened the night she died. Yeah,
Speaker 1: as recently as last year there were articles about this ghost. Um,
Speaker 1: if 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 hanging out
Speaker 1: watching the Aladdin Show every night. Roughly one year after
Speaker 1: all of his death. In September, year old actress Virginia
Speaker 1: rap or rap A or Rappa, depending on who you
Speaker 1: listen to, died several days after she had attended a
Speaker 1: party at the St. Francis Hotel. She had a ruptured bladder,
Speaker 1: and she died of paraitonitis. She had been seen in
Speaker 1: a room with Superstar at the time, Fatty Arbuckle and
Speaker 1: her friend Maud del Mont said that Arbuckle had sexually
Speaker 1: assaulted her, the actress Virginia, and though there was no
Speaker 1: evidence to back up the claim, uh and Arbuckle was
Speaker 1: acquitted of manslaughter. This story, which was very scandalous, had
Speaker 1: been front page news and reported in the most sensational
Speaker 1: ways possible to sell as many papers as possible. It's
Speaker 1: been almost a hundred years and Fatty Arbuckle's name is
Speaker 1: still like intimately connected with Candle. Yeah, when you say it,
Speaker 1: it's like, um, people get that scared look on their
Speaker 1: face of like, I don't even want to hear about that. Um.
Speaker 1: Because there were various versions, some of which are very
Speaker 1: very upsetting to hear that. We will not go into
Speaker 1: but of how he may have assaulted her um and
Speaker 1: even some that were sort of more I don't want
Speaker 1: to say mild, because it still involves him forcing himself
Speaker 1: on her, but that were just like he was so
Speaker 1: heavy when he forced himself on her. It caused this
Speaker 1: this rupture. So there are a lot of different versions
Speaker 1: of it, and they're very unseemly. So that is why
Speaker 1: even today, even though he was completely acquitted and there
Speaker 1: was no evidence, his name still has this sort of
Speaker 1: specter of ickiness on it. Yeah, it ended his career.
Speaker 1: He was blacklisted, he wasn't cast in another film for
Speaker 1: more than a decade, and he died just as it
Speaker 1: looked like that he might make a comeback. And this
Speaker 1: whole incident really negatively impacted the whole film industry's image.
Speaker 1: By that point, Hollywood had gained this reputation as a
Speaker 1: place where people went to follow their dreams, me too
Speaker 1: often have things in and disaster. Headlines swirled about the
Speaker 1: lack of morality in filmmaking culture, and William Desmond Taylor
Speaker 1: was the advocate for the industry. He spoke about the
Speaker 1: good that films could do as sensors threatened to clip
Speaker 1: anything even remotely considered scandalous. I was reading in one
Speaker 1: of his biographies that, Um, there was a scene in
Speaker 1: a picture where a woman was making baby clothes, and
Speaker 1: the sensors stepped in and said they had to cut
Speaker 1: it because it would confuse children who thought that the
Speaker 1: stork brought babies. So the sensors were sort of over
Speaker 1: trying to overcorrect. At the same time, people, some people
Speaker 1: in the film industry like Taylor, were saying like, hey,
Speaker 1: we can also make wholes some films. We can kind
Speaker 1: of meet in the middle a little bit. He also
Speaker 1: cooperated with US attorney Tom Green to try to get
Speaker 1: rid of a drug problem that had been steadily growing
Speaker 1: in his movie studio over the years. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: pretty common for people in the street to use drugs,
Speaker 1: either 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. Um.
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: William Desmond Taylor's body was found in his home on
Speaker 1: Alvarado Street in Los Angeles. He had been shot in
Speaker 1: the back, although that was not initially immediately apparent. We'll
Speaker 1: talk about that in a moment. His valet, Henry Peevy,
Speaker 1: had reported for work in the morning and discovered him
Speaker 1: and began yelling, which alerted the neighbors. Taylor looked perfectly composed,
Speaker 1: He was dressed, and he was lying on his back
Speaker 1: dead in a pool of blood. Both the back and
Speaker 1: front doors had been locked when Peevee arrived for work,
Speaker 1: but the front door are locked automatically. The police were
Speaker 1: also called that morning to the scene of what was
Speaker 1: reported as a natural death. It was obviously not natural
Speaker 1: to have been shot in the back, but initially it
Speaker 1: was thought that he may have fallen and hit his
Speaker 1: head or as a doctor who was called to the
Speaker 1: scene initially pronounced that he had died of a stomach hemorrhage.
Speaker 1: They all did marvel, however, that the way he was
Speaker 1: lying seemed like nobody could have fallen, hit their head
Speaker 1: and died that way, because he looked so put together.
Speaker 1: By the time detectives arrived at Taylor's home, it was
Speaker 1: already completely compromised by an assortment of the director's associates
Speaker 1: who were going through his belongings. When studio manager Charles
Speaker 1: Ayton arrived, he had commanded people to get rid of
Speaker 1: any piece of incriminating anything. I feel like this is
Speaker 1: a running theme every time we talked about our crime
Speaker 1: in our show that then people came and wrecked the
Speaker 1: crime scene. So, after all of Thomas's death, and with
Speaker 1: Attie Arbuckle still at the time facing trial, he wanted
Speaker 1: any scrap that could be perceived as CD in any
Speaker 1: way to be taken back to his office so it
Speaker 1: couldn't further damage the studio's reputation. Later, he turned over
Speaker 1: what he claimed were all the papers to the police,
Speaker 1: 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 who were really ready to
Speaker 1: accept that this had been a natural death. Um there
Speaker 1: was a more thorough examination of Taylor's body, and then
Speaker 1: after he had been rolled over, it became apparent that
Speaker 1: William had been shot. The motive for the murder was
Speaker 1: elusive because there did not appear to be anything missing.
Speaker 1: Once the bungalow turned into a crime scene, detectives moved
Speaker 1: out all the people who had gathered, but reporters were
Speaker 1: really persistent. One of them actually got into the home
Speaker 1: and others started taking photos through the windows. Uh, you
Speaker 1: may be wondering at this point, like if he got
Speaker 1: on the back, wouldn't have been obvious as he was
Speaker 1: lying there on the on the floor. But an autopsy
Speaker 1: later revealed that a thirty eight caliber soft nose bullet
Speaker 1: had entered Taylor's body on his left side, about six
Speaker 1: and a half inches below his armpit, and that bullet
Speaker 1: had traveled on an upward trajectory, threw his left lung
Speaker 1: and then it had lodged in his neck, So it
Speaker 1: was shot from kind of below and went up. It
Speaker 1: didn't exit his body, which is why it was not
Speaker 1: immediately apparent when he was lying on his back. Part
Speaker 1: of the difficulty in unraveling this murder is the vast
Speaker 1: number of possible suspects. Taylor had been known as something
Speaker 1: of a philanderer, even back in New York when he
Speaker 1: was still with his wife, and there were a lot
Speaker 1: of young starlets that he had been linked to romantically
Speaker 1: over the years. Even though a lot of those links
Speaker 1: are a lot, they were basically unsubstantiated gossip. Taylor wasn't
Speaker 1: big on the sorts of huge parties that a lot
Speaker 1: of people in the film industry were frequenting, Like the
Speaker 1: whole incident with Fatty Arbuckle had a happened at just
Speaker 1: like a big raucous party. Neighbors described him as having
Speaker 1: a regular and fairly dull schedule. Yeah, they were like,
Speaker 1: he's usually home by seven. We can see him reading
Speaker 1: through the window into the evening, and then he goes
Speaker 1: to bed. Um. His former wife had, of course recognized
Speaker 1: William when she saw him in a film in nineteen nine,
Speaker 1: eleven years after he had walked out of her life,
Speaker 1: but she was in New York and at that point
Speaker 1: she was happily remarried to a restaurant tour. Her existence
Speaker 1: had been completely unknown to Taylor's Hollywood acquaintances until shortly
Speaker 1: after his death. Some of his papers revealed that this
Speaker 1: this person existed, and there were also papers describing that
Speaker 1: Taylor had met with his daughter this summer before he
Speaker 1: was killed, and that he might have been trying to
Speaker 1: re establish some sort of relationship with his daughter and
Speaker 1: his ex wife, So it was not likely to be
Speaker 1: 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 a parent that Taylor's
Speaker 1: relationship with his former employee, Edwards Sands had become strained.
Speaker 1: Sands 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 um. Taylor Also, it turned out had a
Speaker 1: brother that was living in the States, Dennis Dean Taylor,
Speaker 1: and oddly enough, just as William had done in nineteen
Speaker 1: o eight, Dennis had left his family, although he did
Speaker 1: so four years later in nineteen wellve but Taylor had
Speaker 1: found out about this and was actually supporting his sister
Speaker 1: in law and her two children. It turned out he
Speaker 1: had been sending them regular checks every month. This tangle
Speaker 1: of the two brothers and they're abandoned families was never
Speaker 1: entirely cleared up, but it did fuel a lot of
Speaker 1: speculation about Taylor and his mysterious life. As more information
Speaker 1: about Taylor was uncovered, it only made things more confusing.
Speaker 1: People who had known him during those years that he
Speaker 1: had vanished started coming forward. He had used all kinds
Speaker 1: of different aliases while working various labor jobs. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: one of those. Um reading through this whole story in
Speaker 1: a few different books, it's kind of interesting because you're like, oh,
Speaker 1: these are all the tropes of like mystery movies, but
Speaker 1: these all happened in a person's actual life. Where he vanishes,
Speaker 1: he lived several other different lives, his like franchise lives,
Speaker 1: and then he finally settled in Hollywood. Um. A neighbor
Speaker 1: named Faith McLean was the only person to have seen
Speaker 1: anything the night of the murder. She said that she
Speaker 1: had seen a man leaving Taylor's home around eight pm.
Speaker 1: And her description of the man was stocky but not fat.
Speaker 1: This kind of excluded Sands because he was considered to
Speaker 1: be fairly um overweight. Uh. This person that mcclan described
Speaker 1: was clean shaven, with a plaid cap and looking, as
Speaker 1: she put it, quote like my idea of a motion
Speaker 1: picture burglar. I imagine that as carrying a crowbar and
Speaker 1: looking suspiciously over one's shoulder. Two attendants at a nearby
Speaker 1: gas station said they had been asked Taylor's address by
Speaker 1: a stranger, and an unknown man was seen boarding a
Speaker 1: street car at the Maryland Avenue stop, which was not
Speaker 1: far from the crime scene. When shown photos of Sands,
Speaker 1: none of the people who described this stranger thought it
Speaker 1: was the same man. Yeah, and there are people that
Speaker 1: that say none of these people are even describing the
Speaker 1: same person, like they're just their descriptions were general enough
Speaker 1: that some people started to automatically assume it was the
Speaker 1: same person. But there's not really enough clear, hard detail
Speaker 1: to know. It is estimated to further complicate things, that
Speaker 1: three hundred different people confessed to this murder in police
Speaker 1: stations across the country, but they were all written off
Speaker 1: as false confessions. Was every lead based on these exhaustively examined,
Speaker 1: Probably not, but the investigation ended up focusing around three women,
Speaker 1: primarily none of whom were those people that showed up
Speaker 1: in police stations to confess. These were Mabel normand Mary Minter,
Speaker 1: and Mary Minter's mother, Charlotte Shelby. So we're gonna tack
Speaker 1: through the three of them, starting with Mabel. Mabel Norman
Speaker 1: was a comedian who had been romantically linked with Taylor,
Speaker 1: at least according to gossip columns. Mabel was very successful
Speaker 1: in films, but she also really abhorred all the artifice
Speaker 1: that the industry's culture had taken on. She had a
Speaker 1: reputation for being kind and generous, but she also had
Speaker 1: a drug problem. She traveled to New York to try
Speaker 1: to get away from all this, and it was the
Speaker 1: news of all of Thomas's death that really snapped her
Speaker 1: into the realization that she needed to get sober. She
Speaker 1: and Olive had been friends and had partied together, and
Speaker 1: Mabel saw her own fate as being potentially the same
Speaker 1: as Olives. Mabel and William were really close friends, and
Speaker 1: they corresponded often, and their letters to each other were
Speaker 1: very sweet. She had been involved with men before him,
Speaker 1: who had been really unkind to her. But she and
Speaker 1: Williams seemed really more to have a deep friendship rather
Speaker 1: than a romantic relationship. It was william that she called
Speaker 1: after Olive's funeral asking for help, and he was completely encouraging,
Speaker 1: and when she checked herself into a rehab program at
Speaker 1: a sanatorium north of Seneca Lake, New York, it was
Speaker 1: rumored that Taylor actually paid the bill for it. When
Speaker 1: Mabel came back to Hollywood looking adiant and healthy, Taylor
Speaker 1: was often her escort around town, leading to the belief
Speaker 1: that two of them were a couple. But there's also
Speaker 1: a likelihood that this was just a way for Taylor
Speaker 1: to support his friend's sobriety as she started making herself
Speaker 1: visible again in Los Angeles. Yeah, they seemed like the
Speaker 1: best of friends. He actually sent her flowers several times
Speaker 1: a week, and and she would come over and they
Speaker 1: would talk about literature, and they seemed to be super close.
Speaker 1: But she pretty much makes clear that if this was
Speaker 1: not romantic. Uh. Mabel was, however, the last known person
Speaker 1: to see Taylor alive. On the evening of February one,
Speaker 1: she stopped at the director's bungalow home to borrow two books,
Speaker 1: Nietzsche's 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 assailants 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 after they parted ways
Speaker 1: that evening, and then the newspapers used that whole event
Speaker 1: to smear her. Yeah, it was kind of like, isn't
Speaker 1: it weird that two men that you were close to
Speaker 1: both died so soon after one? An there, it was
Speaker 1: really unkind uh. And then she was also involved in
Speaker 1: a shooting in when her driver killed her boyfriend. It
Speaker 1: turned out that the driver was an escaped convict who,
Speaker 1: like many people in Hollywood, had taken on a new identity.
Speaker 1: In ninety seven, Mabel was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and she
Speaker 1: died in nineteen thirty at the age of thirty seven.
Speaker 1: Next up, we're going to take a look at the
Speaker 1: mother daughter duo who are most frequently linked to Taylor's death.
Speaker 1: But first we're going to pause again for a little
Speaker 1: sponsor break. Mary Miles Mintor was a young actress of
Speaker 1: eighteen who had been acting since she was a small girl.
Speaker 1: She was cast in an adaptation of Anne of Green
Speaker 1: Gables that Taylor was directing, and she developed a huge
Speaker 1: crush on the director Mary's mother, Charlotte Shelby, was dismayed
Speaker 1: at the possibility of a relationship between her teen age daughter.
Speaker 1: In the late forties. Age director Mary had fallen for
Speaker 1: a number of older men during her career, and at
Speaker 1: least one of them had taken advantage of her attraction
Speaker 1: to him. Why Charlotte was watching her daughter like a hawk.
Speaker 1: She was really intent that Mary should be famous and
Speaker 1: that the two of them should get rich in the process.
Speaker 1: She 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 like,
Speaker 1: I don't want another man to take advantage of my daughter.
Speaker 1: She really seemed to be making pretty selfish moves, which
Speaker 1: is sort of heartbreaking. Yeah, it's kind of the original
Speaker 1: prototype for the horrible stage mom. Yeah, and there's also
Speaker 1: in the in one of those ways that is um
Speaker 1: unfortunately not surprising, putting the blame on her when she
Speaker 1: was a child for the actions of adult men. Yes,
Speaker 1: Um and Charlotte definitely bought into that love. Notes that
Speaker 1: Mary Minter had written William Taylor were among his effects
Speaker 1: in his Bungalow, in which the starlet wrote of wanting
Speaker 1: to go away with William and living in idyllic domestic
Speaker 1: romantic life. The papers began running stories that stated that
Speaker 1: the young woman was having an affair with the much
Speaker 1: older director, but friends of his, as well as Mary Minter,
Speaker 1: had all claimed that Mary's love was unrequited. When the
Speaker 1: young woman had told Taylor how she felt about him,
Speaker 1: he had very gently explained to her that he was
Speaker 1: far too old for her, and he believed that the
Speaker 1: matter was settled. After Taylor got promoted to a different
Speaker 1: office by the studio, Mary was no longer working with him,
Speaker 1: and she became even more obsessed and really a little
Speaker 1: unstable as she tried to deal with her feelings for
Speaker 1: him and her growing resentment of her mother's interference. That
Speaker 1: one point, mentor had feigned shooting herself after a fight
Speaker 1: with her mother over whether she had been with Taylor.
Speaker 1: The gun was the same type that had been used
Speaker 1: to kill Taylor. Yeah, that happened just for clarity before
Speaker 1: Taylor was killed. Um. But the two of them, there
Speaker 1: was sort of a constant badgering of were you with
Speaker 1: that man? Were you with that man? Did you go
Speaker 1: see that man? Um? And while Mary would have loved
Speaker 1: to have gone to see that man, she made very
Speaker 1: clear that she really did adore him, she also had
Speaker 1: not been um. Later, Mrs Shelby was seen carrying that
Speaker 1: same revolver when she, at one point went to William
Speaker 1: Desmond Taylor's house in search of her daughter, who had
Speaker 1: failed to come home. She was going to confront him,
Speaker 1: but Mary was not at the director's house. Charlotte Shelby's
Speaker 1: protective nature regarding her daughter was really explosive when it
Speaker 1: came to William Taylor, even though he really seemed to
Speaker 1: have no kind of lascivious attempt intent on the young actress.
Speaker 1: But a witness employed by Mrs Shelby once saw her
Speaker 1: say to Taylor, if I ever catch you hanging around
Speaker 1: with Mary again, I will blow your expletive brains out.
Speaker 1: When Mary Mentor heard the news of Taylor's death, she
Speaker 1: went first to his home and then to a nearby mortuary,
Speaker 1: where she asked to give blood to save him. Whether
Speaker 1: she truly was in denial that he was dead or
Speaker 1: if she was playing up this relationship with the deceased,
Speaker 1: remains unknown. Charlotte Shelby opted to get out in front
Speaker 1: 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 a d a 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 Polly,
Speaker 1: as she was doing this research, started to believe that
Speaker 1: the papers in l A in the were speculating that
Speaker 1: everyone was having a fair an affair. But I mean,
Speaker 1: who knows, maybe they were. Maybe everyone was having 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 all
Speaker 1: a farce, but it was designed to spur Shelby into
Speaker 1: some sort of action. In the morning that that story ran,
Speaker 1: Shelby phoned 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
Speaker 1: body just as investigators really thought they were getting pretty
Speaker 1: close to solving this crime. They were ordered to drop
Speaker 1: the case by the district attorney, the same one that
Speaker 1: was good friends with Charlotte Shelby. But as the investigation
Speaker 1: once again pointed to Shelby several years later, she claimed
Speaker 1: at that point that she and William Taylor had been
Speaker 1: the best of friends, that there was no animosity between them.
Speaker 1: This was a flat outlae, as anyone who knew them
Speaker 1: would have attested to. But when she was questioned at
Speaker 1: that point about the whereabouts of her thirty eight caliber
Speaker 1: revolver she was known to have owned the d A
Speaker 1: had actually given it to her, she confessed to investigators
Speaker 1: that her mother had taken the guns somewhere and disposed
Speaker 1: of it, but that she did not know where. Director
Speaker 1: King Vidor later told people that Mary Mentor had strongly
Speaker 1: suggested that her mother had killed William Taylor. Charlotte 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 mcclean'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 always pretty much put an end to things.
Speaker 1: It's like, but she doesn't look at all like the
Speaker 1: one person that a witnessed saw. In nineteen thirty seven,
Speaker 1: fifteen years after the murder, Charlotte Shelby's former chauffeur told
Speaker 1: police East that his employer had asked him to remove
Speaker 1: all of the ammunition from the gun that she owned
Speaker 1: immediately after the murder of William Desmond Taylor was publicly known.
Speaker 1: She claimed at the time that she feared that Mary
Speaker 1: was going to turn the pistol on herself. He had
Speaker 1: put this ammunition on a beam in the basement of
Speaker 1: Charlotte Shelby Shelby's former residence, and when the police went
Speaker 1: to the home, which at that point was occupied by
Speaker 1: other residents, the bullets were still there. They were matched
Speaker 1: to the bullet that had killed Taylor, which was significant
Speaker 1: because it was an older style of ammunition that was
Speaker 1: not normally used in Yeah, the ammunitions expert said something
Speaker 1: to the effective like, uh, you know, this is one
Speaker 1: in a million or something crazy like that, like, if
Speaker 1: you find this this ammunition, it's got to be the
Speaker 1: same person. The case was reopened based on this new evidence.
Speaker 1: But when she appeared before a grand jury, Charlotte Shelby
Speaker 1: suddenly had a backup witness for an alibi. Prior to that,
Speaker 1: there had always been a little discrepancy in her where
Speaker 1: about at the time of the murder. She had always
Speaker 1: said she was at her house, but Mary and Mary's
Speaker 1: grandmother who were at the house, or like, no, she wasn't.
Speaker 1: Uh So it was always a little unclear if she
Speaker 1: had been in the house and they just didn't know,
Speaker 1: we're not. But this time she had a friend back
Speaker 1: her up and say he was there with her. After
Speaker 1: the hearing, she told reporters quote, one of the worst
Speaker 1: tortures for any person, particularly a woman, is to go
Speaker 1: through life with a cloud of malicious innuendo constantly hovering
Speaker 1: over her like a specter. Why must William Desmond Taylor's
Speaker 1: murder follow me through the years? I want to live
Speaker 1: the rest of my life and happiness and peace. If
Speaker 1: I may be permitted to do so. The case was
Speaker 1: closed after the hearing and it was never reopened. In
Speaker 1: the meantime, though, in those fifteen years, Mary Mentor's wholesome
Speaker 1: image was tarnished by the rumors of a sexual relationship
Speaker 1: with Taylor, even though everyone denied that such a thing existed.
Speaker 1: So she was this sort of ingenue type actress, and
Speaker 1: so it just was really incongruous with the image that
Speaker 1: they were trying to promote for her. So her contract
Speaker 1: with the studio wasn't renewed. She did manage to move
Speaker 1: away from her mother, but she quickly realized that because
Speaker 1: she had been basically a child star and then an
Speaker 1: actress and her mother had managed everything, she did not
Speaker 1: have the skills to manage money on her own, and moreover,
Speaker 1: there wasn't any money coming in to manage anyway. For
Speaker 1: a while, she seemed to constantly want to dredge up
Speaker 1: the case in an effort to stay relevant, and at
Speaker 1: one point she even fabricated a whole story that somebody
Speaker 1: had tried to murder her. She also started a rumor
Speaker 1: that her mother had been jealous of her relationship with Taylor,
Speaker 1: and hinted that there had been a romantic involvement. She
Speaker 1: finally ended up marrying into wealth and living out her
Speaker 1: life in a happy obscurity. Yeah, when she went through
Speaker 1: that phase where she was saying a lot of crazy
Speaker 1: things to the press, it is pretty widely believed that
Speaker 1: she was um developing a pretty bad dependency on drugs
Speaker 1: um and that's why she was so erratic all the time.
Speaker 1: Another woman in Taylor's story, though that was not really
Speaker 1: investigated at the time, was Margaret Gibson. And Gibson, who
Speaker 1: went by Gibbey, knew William Desmond Taylor. They had been
Speaker 1: actors together in their early careers. This was before Taylor
Speaker 1: had even moved to Los Angeles. Gibbey ran into some
Speaker 1: legal trouble after an arrest for dealing opium and possible
Speaker 1: prostitution under a sort of an umbrella vagrancy charge. She
Speaker 1: had been acquitted, but she knew that her career, which
Speaker 1: she had been trying to get off the ground, was
Speaker 1: never going to get its feet back under it, so
Speaker 1: she reinvented herself as an actress under the name of
Speaker 1: Patricia Palmer. With her new name and an age that
Speaker 1: she fudged. Gibbey or a Patricia sought out her old friend,
Speaker 1: who was then head of the famous player's last studio,
Speaker 1: but she didn't get the help she hoped for. Instead
Speaker 1: of her life wind up spiraling into just a constant,
Speaker 1: clawing effort to try to make it in Hollywood that
Speaker 1: often involved some really eedy people and eventually included being
Speaker 1: part of a blackmail ring. Yeah, Gibby was so desperate, Uh,
Speaker 1: she got 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 Albert 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 possible,
Speaker 1: but even if she didn't physically kill Taylor, that her
Speaker 1: blackmail dealings may have led to his demise. In some way,
Speaker 1: she was speeding information to the people who did in
Speaker 1: his life. She might have felt that she was responsible
Speaker 1: for his untimely end. Even so, in addition to that,
Speaker 1: people confess to things they didn't do, like all the time,
Speaker 1: that is true. This is a theory that's become a
Speaker 1: lot more popular in recent years in part because, um,
Speaker 1: she did run with a lot of people as part
Speaker 1: of this blackmailing ring, and there are some matchups of
Speaker 1: people that she knew and was dealing with and some
Speaker 1: sort of shady looking characters that had been seen around
Speaker 1: William Desmond Taylor's home in the weeks leading up to
Speaker 1: the murder. But again, that's one that could very easily
Speaker 1: be strictly coincidence. We just don't know. And to further
Speaker 1: complicate the picture of Taylor's life and who in it
Speaker 1: might wish to harm him, it slowly came to light
Speaker 1: in all of this post murder investigation that he may
Speaker 1: have been bisexual. Friends eventually started speaking about his jaunts
Speaker 1: into opium clubs in Los Angeles that catered to game
Speaker 1: in and there were headlines that ran in papers about
Speaker 1: Taylor visiting quote queer places. The studio tried to spend
Speaker 1: these stories as the director scouting kind of uh, you know,
Speaker 1: color for his films, but this really didn't have any effect.
Speaker 1: George James Hopkins, who was a designer of sets and production,
Speaker 1: had collaborated on several pictures with William Desmond Taylor, and
Speaker 1: in one he wrote an autobiography which was never published,
Speaker 1: in which he spoken of of an affair with Taylor
Speaker 1: that lasted for several years, right up until the murder.
Speaker 1: It's possible that someone was blackmailing William Desmond Taylor. Given
Speaker 1: his abandoned family and the possibility of bisexuality, and even
Speaker 1: his career in film, there were plenty of secrets that
Speaker 1: he may have wanted to keep under wraps. The revelations
Speaker 1: about the many secrets of Taylor's life, which fed into
Speaker 1: this larger story of scandal in Hollywood, really had a
Speaker 1: serious impact on the film industry. An article that appeared
Speaker 1: six days after Taylor's body was found read quote, the
Speaker 1: murder of William Desmond Taylor has had a fearsome effect
Speaker 1: upon the movies. It is exposing the debaucheries, the looseness,
Speaker 1: the rottenness of Hollywood. Studios immediately started working on vigilance
Speaker 1: plans to ensure that ethics and conduct regulations were in
Speaker 1: place in the industry. This eventually led to the adoption
Speaker 1: of the Haze Code in nine thirty, which laid out
Speaker 1: moral guidelines for all motion pictures made in the United States.
Speaker 1: That code remained in place until nineteen William Desmond Taylor
Speaker 1: directed more than fifty movies in a span of only
Speaker 1: eight years, and when he was laid to rest, ten
Speaker 1: thousand people showed up for the funeral. It was a
Speaker 1: combination of people from Hollywood who just loved him because
Speaker 1: he was really well liked, as well as onlookers who
Speaker 1: were hoping to see famous people grieving. The crowd at
Speaker 1: one point pushed their way into the chapel where his
Speaker 1: funeral service was taking place, and a riot nearly started,
Speaker 1: but police were eventually able to push them back out
Speaker 1: onto the street, and then they locked the doors so
Speaker 1: the service could continue. Today, there's an annual film festival
Speaker 1: of his movies in Carlo, Ireland, which is where he
Speaker 1: was born. And what really becomes apparent when you look
Speaker 1: at all of the elements of this bizarre, unsolved case
Speaker 1: is how many people in Los Angeles in the early
Speaker 1: days of the film industry, we're hiding huge personal secrets,
Speaker 1: and the truth of what happened the night that William
Speaker 1: Desmond Taylor died will likely never be known, though there
Speaker 1: are certainly plenty of books written about the case, each
Speaker 1: of which seems to favor a different killer. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it comes up a lot when you're reading histories of
Speaker 1: this case, like how easy it was for someone to
Speaker 1: just show up in Los Angeles and say my name
Speaker 1: is X. And there were not the easy ways to
Speaker 1: background check people as there are now, and people would go, okay, X, uh,
Speaker 1: let's do this. So a lot of the people that
Speaker 1: had moved there were kind of starting over and maybe
Speaker 1: had some savory things that they wanted to be behind.
Speaker 1: Just uh, you know, a fascinating and kind of sad
Speaker 1: thing in many ways. Do you also have some listener
Speaker 1: mail I do, and it is fascinating but not sad
Speaker 1: at all. It's delightful. Uh. This is from our listener Julie,
Speaker 1: and she says Autumn greetings to the beloved host of
Speaker 1: my favorite podcast, Whoo. I managed to get out of
Speaker 1: that which name to mention first dilemma? As an aside,
Speaker 1: for the record, I don't think Tracy normal self care.
Speaker 1: Which one of us you mentioned first in any greeting. No,
Speaker 1: I really don't do whatever you want. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: pretty even spread. I think. I started listening to your
Speaker 1: podcast a few months ago to keep me entertained in
Speaker 1: a wake on a cross country dot drive from North
Speaker 1: Carolina to Washington. Anyone who thinks history is boring hasn't
Speaker 1: heard your take on it, and I thank you for
Speaker 1: making that experience far more enjoyable than I could have wished.
Speaker 1: I love that you challenged me with topics that I
Speaker 1: would never pick for myself, and managed to make me
Speaker 1: think new and different thoughts on subjects I've been familiar
Speaker 1: with for a long time. I wonder if this is
Speaker 1: one of the reasons you get so many listener requests
Speaker 1: for topics that seem on the face to be too
Speaker 1: well known form a mist in history subject. Like so
Speaker 1: many other listeners, I frequently crossed paths with topics you've covered,
Speaker 1: and I love that I know more because of your work. Um.
Speaker 1: She says her most recent example is seeing copies of
Speaker 1: the sears Wish books on display in Powell's Bookstore in Portland,
Speaker 1: which is a must visit whenever you're in town. I
Speaker 1: have been there. It is amazing. Anyway, she says, here's
Speaker 1: the the really delightful part. I like to crochet while
Speaker 1: I listen to your podcasts and remembering Holly's Glee and
Speaker 1: talking about candy corn, I had a bit of inspiration
Speaker 1: for a Halloween and thank you gift. Fortunately for Tracy,
Speaker 1: you will not have to pretend these are tasty. She
Speaker 1: also does not like candy corn, so she crocheted us
Speaker 1: these really cute. They're like candy corn handbags there, she says.
Speaker 1: You can use them as festive purses or to hand
Speaker 1: out candy. Look how cute. But here's what I discovered.
Speaker 1: You can roll up the sides with handles and make
Speaker 1: them a lovely hat. What candy corn hat. That's amazing,
Speaker 1: which I'm perfectly happy to all as were a hat,
Speaker 1: and more likely to do that than add another bag
Speaker 1: to my out of control back collection. Um. So they
Speaker 1: are absolutely delightful, Julie, thank you so much. I smiled
Speaker 1: so big when I opened this parcel because it is
Speaker 1: colorful and fun and features candy corn, and she also
Speaker 1: added in um some really cute fun stuff that she
Speaker 1: added in at the last minute, which were some cool
Speaker 1: um um postcards that she added in. So thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you, thank you. What a delight in It made
Speaker 1: my day. So if you would like to write to us,
Speaker 1: you can do that. We're in History podcast at house
Speaker 1: to works dot com. You can also find us across
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Speaker 1: if you would like to research additional things, or just
Speaker 1: check out our homepage that has Missed in History dot com,
Speaker 1: where you will find show notes for every episode Tracy
Speaker 1: and I have ever worked on, as well as an
Speaker 1: archive of every show that has ever existed since the
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