Tuesday, March 13, 2018

William Desmond Taylor









The William Desmond Taylor mystery-


Who could make sense of it all?


William Desmond Taylor

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William Desmond Taylor
WilliamDesmondTaylor.jpg
BornWilliam Cunningham Deane-Tanner
(1872-04-26)26 April 1872
Carlow, Ireland
Died1 February 1922(1922-02-01) (aged 49)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Cause of deathHomicide
Resting placeHollywood Forever Cemetery
NationalityIrish-American
Other namesWilliam D. Taylor
William Taylor
OccupationDirector, actor
Years active1913–1922
Spouse(s)Ethel May Hamilton (m. 1901–1912)
Children1
RelativesDenis Gage Deane-Tanner (brother)
William Desmond Taylor (26 April 1872 – 1 February 1922) was an Irish-born American director and actor. He directed 59 silent films between 1914 and 1922 and acted in 27 between 1913 and 1915. He was a popular figure in the growing Hollywood motion picture colony of the 1910s and early 1920s.[1]
Taylor's murder on 1 February 1922, along with other Hollywood scandals, such as the Roscoe Arbuckle trial, led to a frenzy of sensationalistic and often fabricated newspaper reports.[2] His murder remains an official cold case[3]

Early life


William Desmond Taylor directing the silent film Top of New York (1921), several months before his death
He was born with the name William Cunningham Deane-Tanner into the Anglo-Irish gentry on 26 April 1872, in Carlow, Ireland. He was one of four children of a retired British Army officer, Major Kearns Deane-Tanner of the Carlow Rifles, and his wife, Jane. His siblings were Denis, Nell, and Daisy.[4] The Home Rule MP Charles Kerins Deane Tanner was his father's youngest brother. He sailed for America in 1890, when he was 18 years old.[1]
Deane-Tanner briefly pursued a career on the New York City stage before marrying Ethel May Hamilton. The Episcopalian ceremony took place on 7 December 1901, at the Little Church Around the Corner;[5] they divorced in 1912.[6]
Although Mrs Deane-Tanner had appeared as a member of the Florodora sextet as Ethel May Harrison,[7] she was the daughter of a wealthy Wall Street broker who provided Deane-Tanner with funding to set up the English Antiques Shop, through which he could support a family.
The Tanners were well known in New York society until Deane-Tanner abruptly vanished on 23 October 1908 at the age of 36, following an affair with a married woman, deserting his wife and their daughter Ethel Daisy.[1]
Deane-Tanner (Taylor) had suffered "mental lapses" before, and his family thought at first that he had wandered off during an episode of aphasia.
Deane-Tanner's brother, Denis, a former lieutenant in the British Army and a manager of a New York antiques business, would also disappear four years later, in 1912, abandoning his wife and two children.[7][8]

Career 

Deane-Tanner changed his name to William Desmond Taylor,[1] and was in Hollywood by December 1912. He worked successfully as an actor—including four appearances opposite Margaret "Gibby" Gibson—before making his first film as a director, The Awakening (1914). Over the next few years, he directed more than fifty films.
In July 1918, towards the end of World War I, Taylor enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force as a private at the age of 46. After training for four and a half months at Fort Edward, Nova Scotia, Taylor sailed from Halifax on a troop transport carrying five hundred Canadian soldiers.[9] They arrived at Hounslow Barracks, London on 2 December 1918.[9]
Taylor was ultimately assigned to the Royal Army Service Corps of the Expeditionary Forces Canteen Service, stationed at Dunkirk and promoted to the temporary grade of lieutenant on 15 January 1919.[10][11] At the end of April, 1919, Taylor reached his final billet at Berguet, France, as Major Taylor, Company D, Royal Fusiliers.[12]
Returning to Los Angeles on 14 May 1919, Taylor was honoured by the Motion Picture Directors Association with a formal banquet at the Los Angeles Athletic Club.[12]
After returning from military service, Taylor went on to direct some of the most popular stars of the era including Mary Pickford, Wallace Reid, Dustin Farnum and his protégée, Mary Miles Minter, who starred in the 1919 version of Anne of Green Gables. Between 1914 and 1919 Taylor was engaged to serial actress Neva Gerber, whom he had met during the filming of The Awakening. Gerber later recalled, "He was the soul of honour, a man of personal culture, education, and refinement. I have never known a finer or better man."[13]
By this time, Taylor's ex-wife and daughter were aware that he was working in Hollywood. In 1918, both were attending the film Captain Alvarez, when they saw Taylor appear on the screen. Ethel responded, "That's your father!" In response, Ethel Daisy Deane-Tanner wrote to her father in care of the studio. In 1921, Taylor visited his ex-wife and daughter in New York City and made Ethel Daisy his legal heir.[14]

Murder 

At 7:30 am on the morning of 2 February 1922,[15] the body of William Desmond Taylor was found inside his bungalow at the Alvarado Court Apartments,[15] 404-B South Alvarado Street,[16] in the Westlake Park area of downtown Los Angeles, which was then known as a trendy and affluent neighbourhood.
A crowd gathered inside and someone identifying himself as a doctor stepped forward, made a cursory examination of the body, declared Taylor had died of a stomach haemorrhage. The doctor was never seen again, perhaps owing to his own embarrassment, because when doubts later arose, the body was rolled over by forensic investigators and it was discovered the 49-year-old film director had been shot at least once in the back with what appeared to have been a small caliber pistol which was not found at the scene.

Funeral 

Taylor's funeral took place on 7 February 1922 at St. Paul's Pro-Cathedral. Despite having reached the Western Front after the Armistice, Taylor's casket was draped with a Union Jack and buried with full military honours. After an Episcopalian ceremony, Taylor was interred in a mausoleum at Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. The inscription on his crypt reads, "In Memory of William C. Deane-Tanner, Beloved Father of Ethel Deane-Tanner. Died 1 February 1922."[17] Among other famous personages, the mausoleum also holds the crypt of Rudolph Valentino.

Investigation 

In Taylor's pockets, investigators found a wallet holding $78 in cash (adjusted to $1,074 for 2012 inflation), a silver cigarette case, a Waltham pocket watch, a pen knife and a locket bearing a photograph of actress Mabel Normand.[18] A two carat (400 mg) diamond ring was on his finger.[19] With the evidence of the money and valuables on Taylor's body, it seemed apparent that a robbery was not the motive for the killing, but a large but undetermined sum of cash which Taylor had shown to his accountant the day before was missing and apparently never accounted for. After some investigation, the time of Taylor's death was set at 7:50 p.m. in the evening of 1 February 1922.[16]
While being interviewed by the police five days after the director's body was found, Mary Miles Minter said that following the murder a friend, director and actor Marshall Neilan, told her Taylor had made several highly "delusional" statements about some of his social acquaintances (including her) during the weeks before his death. She also said Neilan thought Taylor had recently become "insane".[20]
In the midst of a media circus caused by the case, Los Angeles Undersheriff Eugene Biscailuz warned Chicago Tribune reporter Eddie Doherty, "The industry has been hurt. Stars have been ruined. Stockholders have lost millions of dollars. A lot of people are out of jobs and incensed enough to take a shot at you."[21]
According to Robert Giroux, "The studios seemed to be fearful that if certain aspects of the case were exposed, it would exacerbate their problems." King Vidor said of the case in 1968: "Last year I interviewed a Los Angeles police detective, now retired, who had been assigned to the case immediately after the murder. He told me, 'We were doing all right and then, before a week was out, we got the word to lay off.'"[21]

Suspects and witnesses 

More than a dozen individuals were eventually named as suspects by both the press and the police. Newspaper reports at the time were both overwhelmingly sensationalised and speculative, even fabricated, and the murder was used as the basis for much subsequent "true crime" fiction. Many inaccuracies were carried forward by later writers who used articles from the popular press as their sources. Overall, most accounts have consistently focused on seven people as suspects and witnesses.

Edward Sands 

Edward F. Sands had prior convictions for embezzlement, forgery and serial desertion from the US military. Born in Ohio, he had multiple aliases and spoke with an affected cockney accent. He had worked as Taylor's valet and cook up until seven months before the murder. While Taylor was in Europe the summer before, Sands had forged Taylor's checks and wrecked his car. Later Sands burgled Taylor's bungalow, leaving footprints on the film director's bed. Following the murder, Edward Sands was never heard from again.[22] Some accounts claim that Sands' body was found in the Sacramento River in the early 1930s.[citation needed]

Henry Peavey 


Henry Peavey
Henry Peavey was Sands' replacement, Taylor’s valet who found his body. Newspapers noted that Peavey wore flashy golf costumes but did not own any golf clubs. Peavey also had a criminal record. Three days before Taylor's murder, Peavey had been arrested for "social vagrancy" and charged with being "lewd and dissolute".[23]
According to Robert Giroux,
Even though the police decided, after severe questioning, that Peavey was not the murderer, the Hollywood correspondent of the New York Daily News, Florabel Muir, came to a private conclusion that Peavey was the murderer. In that era of ingenious women reporters, Muir thought she could engineer a scoop by tricking Peavey into a confession. She knew (from the movies) that blacks were deathly afraid of ghosts. With the help of two confederates, Frank Carson and Al Weinshank, she offered Peavey ten dollars if he would identify Taylor's grave in the Hollywood Park Cemetery (which she had already visited). Weinshank had gone on ahead with a white sheet, and Muir and Carson drove Peavey to the site. Weinshank, who came from a tough section of Chicago, spoke with the accents of a hoodlum. When he loomed up in the sheet and cried out, "I am the ghost of William Desmond Taylor. You murdered me. Confess, Peavey!" Henry laughed out loud. Then he cursed them roundly. Unfortunately for Muir, she was unaware that Taylor had a distinctive British accent. Weinshank, as Muir revealed in her memoirs, not only spoke like a hoodlum but was one of the Chicago mobsters who later were gunned down in the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre.[24]
In 1931, Peavey died in a San Francisco asylum where he had been hospitalised for syphilis-related dementia.[25]

Mabel Normand 


Mabel Normand
Mabel Normand was a popular comedic actress and frequent costar with Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe Arbuckle. According to author Robert Giroux, Taylor was deeply in love with Normand, who had originally approached him for help in curing her cocaine dependency. Based upon Normand's subsequent statements to investigators, her repeated relapses were devastating for Taylor. According to Giroux, Taylor met with Federal prosecutors shortly before his death and offered to assist them in filing charges against Normand's cocaine suppliers. Giroux expresses a belief that Normand's suppliers learned of this meeting and hired a contract killer to assassinate the director. According to Giroux, Normand suspected the reasons for her lover's murder, but did not know the identity of the triggerman.[26]
On the night of his murder, Normand left Taylor's bungalow at 7:45 pm in a happy mood, carrying a book he had given her as a loan. They blew kisses to each other as her limousine drove away. Normand was the last person known to have seen Taylor alive.
The Los Angeles Police Department subjected Normand to a grueling interrogation, but ruled her out as a suspect.[27] Most subsequent writers have done the same. However, Normand's career had already slowed and her reputation was tarnished by revelations of her addiction, which was seen as a moral failing. According to George Hopkins, who sat next to her at Taylor's funeral, Normand wept inconsolably throughout the ceremony.[28]
Ultimately, Normand continued to make films throughout the 1920s. She died of tuberculosis on 23 February 1930. According to her friend and confidant Julia Brew, Normand asked near the end, "Julia, do you think they'll ever find out who killed Bill Taylor?"[17]

Faith Cole MacLean 

Faith Cole MacLean was the wife of actor Douglas MacLean and the couple were neighbours of Taylor. She is widely believed to have seen Taylor's killer. The couple were startled by a loud noise at 8 pm. MacLean went to her front door and came face to face with someone emerging from the front door of Taylor’s home whom she said was dressed, "like my idea of a motion picture burglar". She recalled this person paused for a moment before turning and walking back through the door as if having forgotten something, then re-emerged and flashed a smile at her before disappearing between the buildings. MacLean decided she had heard a car back-fire. She also told police interviewers this person looked "funny" (like movie actors in makeup) and may have been a woman disguised as a man.

Charles Eyton 

Charles Eyton was the General Manager of Paramount Pictures. Several sources claim that in the hours following Taylor's murder, Eyton entered Taylor's bungalow with a group of Paramount employees and removed compromising items, either before police arrived or with their permission.

Mary Miles Minter 


Mary Miles Minter
Minter was a former child star and teen screen idol whose career had been guided by Taylor. Minter, who had grown up without a father, was only three years older than the daughter Taylor had abandoned in New York. Love letters from Minter were found in Taylor’s bungalow. Based upon these, the reporters alleged that a sexual relationship between the 49-year-old Taylor and 19-year-old Minter had started when she was 17.
Robert Giroux and King Vidor, however, dispute this allegation. Citing Minter's own statements, both believed that her love for Taylor was unrequited. Taylor had often declined to see Minter and had described himself as too old for her.
However, facsimilies of Minter's passionate letters to Taylor were printed in newspapers, forever shattering her screen image as a modest and wholesome young girl. Minter was vilified in the press. She made four more films for Paramount, and when the studio failed to renew her contract, she received offers from many other producers. Never comfortable as an actress, Minter declined them all. In 1957, she married Brandon O. Hildebrandt, a wealthy Danish-American businessman.[29] She died in wealthy and comfortable obscurity in Santa Monica, California on 4 August 1984.

Charlotte Shelby 


Charlotte Shelby
Shelby was Minter’s mother. Like many "stage mothers" before and since, she has been described as consumed by wanton greed and manipulation over her daughter's career. Mary Miles Minter and her mother were bitterly divided by financial disputes and lawsuits for a time, but they later reconciled. Shelby's initial statements to police about the murder are still characterised as evasive and "obviously filled with lies" about both her daughter's relationship with Taylor and "other matters".[30] Perhaps the most compelling bit of circumstantial evidence was that Shelby allegedly owned a rare .38 calibre pistol and unusual bullets very similar to the kind which killed Taylor. After this later became public, she reportedly threw the pistol into a Louisiana bayou. Shelby knew the Los Angeles district attorney socially and spent years outside the United States in an effort to avoid official inquiries by his successor and press coverage related to the murder. In 1938 her other daughter, actress Margaret Shelby (who was by then suffering from both clinical depression and alcoholism), openly accused her mother of the murder during an argument. Shelby was widely suspected of the crime and was a favourite suspect of many writers. For example, Adela Rogers St. Johns speculated Shelby was torn by feelings of maternal protection for her daughter and her own attraction to Taylor. Although (like Sands) Shelby feared being tried for the murder, at least two Los Angeles county district attorneys publicly declined to prosecute her.[15][31] Almost twenty years after the murder, Los Angeles district attorney Buron Fitts concluded there wasn't any evidence for an indictment of Shelby and recommended that the remaining evidence and case files be retained on a permanent basis (all of these materials subsequently disappeared). Shelby died in 1957. Fitts, in ill-health, committed suicide in 1973.

Margaret Gibson's 1964 confession 


Margaret Gibson
Margaret Gibson was a film actress who worked with Taylor when he first came to Hollywood. In 1917 she was indicted, tried and acquitted on charges equivalent to prostitution (there were also allegations of opium dealing) and changed her professional name to Patricia Palmer. In 1923 Gibson was arrested and jailed on extortion charges which were later dropped.
Gibson was 27 years old and in Los Angeles at the time of the murder. No record of her name was ever mentioned in connection with the investigation. Soon after the murder she got work in a number of films produced by Famous Players-Lasky, Taylor's studio at the time of his death. One of these films was among the last made by Mary Miles Minter. Gibson (in her words) "fled" the United States to the Far East in 1934, where she married her husband who worked for Socony (later Mobil Oil). However, she returned to Los Angeles in 1940 for medical reasons. Her husband, Elbert Lewis, died in a March 1942 Japanese attack on the Socony oil refinery at Penang, Straits Settlements (now Malaysia) during World War II. Lewis left Gibson with a small pension, which she lived on until her death in 1964.
In 1999, the widely cited newsletter Taylorology published an account that on 21 October 1964, while living in the Hollywood hills under the name Pat Lewis, she suffered a heart attack. As a recently converted Roman Catholic, before dying she confessed she "shot and killed William Desmond Taylor" along with several other things the witness didn't understand and could not remember more than 30 years later.[32] The witness to her confession later repeated his recollection in a televised documentary.[33]

Taylorology 

From 1993 to 2000 Bruce Long, a staff member at Arizona State University (later retired), transcribed several hundred newspaper and magazine articles from the 1910s and 1920s relating to Taylor, his murder, the suspects, many of Taylor's contemporaries and their links to Taylor. The compiled result is a journal called Taylorology, which contains over a thousand pages of text and has been noted as a significant archive of primary and secondary source material relating both to Taylor's murder and the early Los Angeles film colony.

Lack of evidence 

Through a combination of poor crime scene management and apparent corruption, much physical evidence was immediately lost, and the rest vanished over the years (although copies of a few documents from the police files were made public in 2007).[34] Various theories were put forward after the murder and in the years since, along with the publication of many books claiming to have identified the murderer, but no hard evidence was ever uncovered to link the crime to a particular individual. Given Margaret Gibson's thoroughly documented background, the report of her dying confession attracted the attention of film historians,[2][35][36][37] but aside from circumstantial evidence, no independent confirmation has emerged.[38]

Aftermath 

A spate of newspaper-driven Hollywood scandals during the early 1920s included Taylor's murder, the Roscoe Arbuckle trial, the death of Olive Thomas and the drug-related deaths of Wallace Reid, Barbara La Marr, and Jeanne Eagels, which prompted Hollywood studios to begin writing contracts with "morality clauses" or "moral turpitude clauses", allowing the dismissal of contractees who breached them.[39][40]

In popular culture 

  • The 1950 film Sunset Boulevard with William Holden and Gloria Swanson featured a fictional, aging silent screen actress named Norma Desmond whose name was taken from Taylor's middle name and Mabel Normand's last name as a way to resonate with the widely publicised scandals of almost thirty years before.[41]
  • Taylor's murder was depicted in David Merrick's production of the Jerry Herman - Michael Stewart "cult" musical Mack & Mabel which opened on Broadway at the Majestic Theatre on 6 October 1974 and ran for six previews and 66 regular performances. Directed and choreographed by Gower Champion, the production starred Robert Preston as Mack Sennett and Bernadette Peters as Mabel Normand, with James Mitchell portraying William Desmond Taylor.[43]

Directorial career 


Poster for How Could You Jean? starring Mary Pickford (1918)
Taylor directed more than 60 films. The notable among these include:

References 

  1. ^ a b c d USC-Lib-WDTaylor "The Unsolved Murder of William Desmond Taylor". University of Southern California (USC), July 2, 2000, USC.edu
  2. ^ a b "Taylorology". September 2003, retrieved 6 January 2008
  3. ^ Taylorology Issue 4 -- April 1993 Retrieved 12 May 2013
  4. ^ Higham, Charles (2006). Murder in Hollywood: Solving a Silent Screen Mystery. Terrace Books. p. 26. ISBN 0-299-20364-6. 
  5. ^ Higham, Charles (2006). Murder in Hollywood: Solving a Silent Screen Mystery. Terrace Books. pp. 33, 34. ISBN 0-299-20364-6. 
  6. ^ "Interviews with Taylor's Ex-Wife". Taylorology (45). September 1996. 
  7. ^ a b "Slain Movie Man Had Career Here; Deserted His Wife" (PDF). The New York Times. 5 February 1922. Retrieved 7 April 2009. 
  8. ^ Taylorology-45 "Taylorology" (newsheet) Issue 45, September 1996, Editor: Bruce Long
  9. ^ a b Giroux (1990), page 105.
  10. ^ Taylorology, Taylorology 40, April 1996, retrieved 22 February 2008
  11. ^ Supplement to the London Gazette, 27 January 1919, p. 1333, retrieved 23 February 2008. The published note reads, "Canteens.—William Desmond Taylor to be •temp. Lt. (without pay or allowances). 15 Jan. 1919."
  12. ^ a b Giroux (1990), page 107.
  13. ^ Giroux (1990), page 82.
  14. ^ "Taylorology 45". public.asu.edu, September 1996, retrieved 13 February 2008
  15. ^ a b c TheMinx-WDTaylor "Crime & Passion" (on William Desmond Taylor). Minx, The Magazine Volume Two. Issue Two. (Minx), Neal Patterson, 1998–99.
  16. ^ a b "William Desmond Taylor." Internet Accuracy Project.
  17. ^ a b Giroux (1990), page 239.
  18. ^ Giroux (1990), page 15.
  19. ^ "Shot in the Back." Crime Library, Courtroom Television Network, LLC, 2005.
  20. ^ "Statement of Mary Miles Minter." (LAPD) 7 February 1922. (retrieved 28 Aug 2007)
  21. ^ a b Giroux (1990), page 180.
  22. ^ "Badly Wanted". Time. 29 August 1929. Retrieved 21 July 2007. "Edward F. Sands, 34, 5 ft 5 in., for the murder of William Desmond Taylor, cinema director, whose butler he was. Questioned in this case were Cinemactresses Mabel Normand, last to see Taylor alive, and Mary Miles Minter whose lingerie and love letters were found in the Taylor apartment." 
  23. ^ "Valet in Court on Vagrancy Charge", Los Angeles Record (February 3, 1922), reprinted in Taylorology 60.
  24. ^ Giroux (1990), page 131.
  25. ^ "Film Star Faints at Taylor's Funeral.". New York Times. 28 February 1922. "Los Angeles; February 7, 1922. Sweeping the police aside crowds stormed the doors of St. Paul's Pro-Cathedral today in an effort to force an entrance when the funeral services were being held for William Desmond Taylor." 
  26. ^ Robert Giroux, A Deed of Death: The Story Behind the Unsolved Murder of Hollywood Director William Desmond Taylor, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1990.
  27. ^ "Press Film Star For Taylor Clew". New York Times. 7 February 1922, Tuesday. "A motion picture actress was subjected to what the police termed a "long and grueling" examination at her home here tonight in an attempt to obtain a clew to the murderer of William Desmond Taylor." 
  28. ^ Giroux (1990), page 236.
  29. ^ Giroux (1990), pages 159–160.
  30. ^ Taylorology-97 "Taylorology." (newsheet), Issue 97, Editor: Bruce Long, 2007 (after 7 year hiatus)
  31. ^ In 1967 director King Vidor privately speculated that while Taylor escorted Mabel Normand to her car, Charlotte Shelby entered the bungalow through the open front door, found her daughter Mary Miles Minter hiding inside (supposedly explaining a nightgown found by police which, despite sensationalized reports in the Hearst press, was never linked to Minter) and shot William Desmond Taylor within an hour of his return. Biographer Sidney D. Kirkpatrick claimed in his 1986 book Cast of Killers that Vidor had solved the crime, asserting the director had not published his conclusions in order to protect people who were still living. Taylorology subsequently listed over 100 factual errors in Cast of Killers and strongly disputes Vidor's speculation on the murder, but credits the book with renewing public interest in the topic.
  32. ^ Taylorology-84 "Taylorology". (newsheet), Issue 84, Editor: Bruce Long, December 1999.
  33. ^ Jackson, Dan (Producer) (2000). Perfect Crimes? DVD Set 1. William Desmond Taylor episode. (DVD). The History Channel. 
  34. ^ Taylorology 97 "Excerpts of Statements of Witnesses In Re William Desmond Taylor Murder 1922 – 1936", "Statement of Miss Mary Miles Minter in the Office of the District Attorney 7 February 1922".
  35. ^ "William Desmond Taylor." Classic Hollywood Bios. Retrieved 6 January 2008
  36. ^ "Taylorology 84." (also 85), December 1999, retrieved 6 January 2008
  37. ^ Thomas, Kevin, The Screening Room, Los Angeles Times, 20 April 2000
  38. ^ "Just the Facts, the William Desmond Taylor Murder." retrieved 8 January 2008
  39. ^ Menefee, David W. (2004). The First Female Stars: Women of the Silent Era. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 132. ISBN 0-275-98259-9. 
  40. ^ Vogel, Michelle (2007). Olive Thomas: The Life and Death of a Silent Film Beauty. McFarland. p. 6. ISBN 0-7864-2908-9. 
  41. ^ Petro, Patrice (2010). Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s. Rutgers University Press. p. 2. ISBN 0-813-54732-6. 
  42. ^ Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher (1990-01-18). "Vidal's Remaking of the American Myth". nytimes.com. Retrieved 21 November 2012. 
  43. ^ "Mack & Mabel". playbillvault.com. Retrieved 21 November 2012. 

Further reading 

  • Giroux, Robert (1990). A Deed of Death: The Story Behind the Unsolved Murder of William Desmond Taylor. Knopf. ISBN 0-394-58075-3. 
  • Higham, Charles (2004). Murder in Hollywood: solving a silent screen mystery. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 0-299-20360-3. 
  • Kirkpatrick, Sidney D. A Cast of Killers (King Vidor's view of the Taylor murder), publisher: Onyx; Reprint edition, 1 September 1992, paperback, 336 pages, ISBN 0-451-17418-6.
  • Long, Bruce (1991). William Desmond Taylor: A Dossier. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-2490-6. 
  • Sennett, Mack (1954). King of Comedy. Doubleday. ISBN 0-916515-66-4. 
  • Brash, S. and J. Cave, ed. (1993). "The Director". Unsolved Crimes (True Crime Series). Time-Life Books. ISBN 0-7835-0012-2. 
  • 'Fallen Angels, a Blackwood McCabe Hollywood Mystery' by Dominic Lagan, Strategic Books, New York 2009, ISBN 978-1-60860-196-7

External links 

      

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Antonio Moreno, who was one of the last people to speak with William Desmond Taylor, was also one of the last people to work in a movie with Thelma Todd, THE BOHEMIAN GIRL.

THE MALTESE FALCON ended with the revelation that the main woman in the story had killed Sam Spade's partner by shooting him as they embraced, something which I think may have been inspired by the death of William Desmond Taylor as that was the way some people said he'd been killed. Thelma Todd was in the original version of  THE MALTESE FALCON, which has since been eclipsed by 1941 remake with Humphrey Bogart.

Much has been written about the Taylor case, but nothing has ever been proven. The "Taylorology" site discusses different books and their many errors. 

 The death of William Desmond Taylor is likely to remain forever one of Hollywood's Unsolved Mysteries.




                                Mabel Normand questioned by DA Asa Keyes in the Taylor case.






 Mabel Normand was exonerated, and Keyes himself later went to prison for accepting a bribe from a petroleum company.





Edgar Rice Burroughs' book THE GIRL FROM HOLLYWOOD drew inspiration from stories about Mabel Normand and William Desmond Taylor.




Another book purported to solve the mystery.


A CAST OF KILLERS had a "new" story that actually had already been presented in Kenneth Anger's HOLLYWOOD BABYLON and a number of other books. None of which actually proved anything.



Last surviving LAPD talks about the case. 






Buron Fitts:
http://da.lacounty.gov/history/fitts.htm

Asa Keyes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asa_Keyes

Antonio Moreno and THE BOHEMIAN GIRL:
http://benny-drinnon.blogspot.com/2012/10/antonio-moreno-and-bohemian-girl.html

Coroner Frank Nance:
http://allanellenberger.com/tag/william-desmond-taylor/

Taylorology:
http://www.taylorology.com/


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