A Cast of Killers (22 page)

Another night, Whitney stated, Minter was out late, and Shelby, believing her to be with Taylor, went out looking for her with her pistol in tow. “I will take my gun,” she told Whitney, “and if I find her there, I am going to kill her.”

Whitney begged her to leave the gun behind, but Shelby refused. She put on a coat with sleeves big enough to conceal the weapon and insisted that Whitney drive her to Taylor’s bungalow. There Whitney was ordered to stay in the car.

“Mrs. Shelby took the gun,” Whitney told police, “but I don’t think she had any intention of using it on Mary.”

Shelby didn’t use the gun on anyone that night. Mary hadn’t been there.

The more he read and reread, the more Vidor questioned the entire investigation directed by Woolwine. Everything that Asa Keyes and his investigators were able to find out four years later should have been that much easier to discover immediately after the murder. But Vidor was also bothered by the fact that even in light of Asa Keyes’s findings, it was not until a full four months after Charlotte Whitney’s testimony that Keyes questioned Shelby.

Vidor heard movement in the house. The others were getting up. Nippy scratched at the door to the living room, but walked away as Vidor heard Colleen ask the dog if he wanted to go outside. Vidor decided to face the others now, when their intrusion into his workday wouldn’t interrupt a thought. He walked out with his empty coffeepot.

“What time did you get at it this morning?” Colleen asked after “good mornings” in the kitchen.

“Early.”

Vidor wished the others a fun excursion to the beach and returned to his table, to the first official mention in the files covering Asa Keyes’s investigation of Charlotte Shelby’s other daughter, Margaret.

The night of the murder, Margaret said, was a night she remembered quite clearly, because her grandmother, Julia, had prepared a special meal for the family at their Hobart Avenue house, and Charlotte had not shown up for dinner. After dinner, Margaret and Julia and Minter sat in the living room, where Minter read to them from a book called
The Cruise of the South Sea Islands.

The next morning around nine or ten, Margaret said, Charlotte arrived at the Hobart house and announced to everyone, “Marjorie Berger tells me that Bill Taylor has been murdered.” She also claimed to have had dinner the previous evening at the family mansion, Casa de Margarita, with family friend Carl Stockdale and Jim Smith, the night watchman.

Vidor was fascinated with Margaret’s testimony. It blatantly contradicted Minter’s long-standing version of that evening, from the general circumstances—Minter claimed the entire family was together all night—down to the minor details, such as the name of the book Minter was supposed to have been reading.

Marjorie Berger categorically denied that she called Charlotte the morning Taylor was murdered. In fact, she swore it was Shelby who called her with the news of Taylor’s death.

“I arrived at my office between seven and seven-thirty on the morning of February second, nineteen twenty-two. My telephone was ringing. I answered the phone. Mrs. Charlotte Shelby said, ‘Marjorie, I have something terrible to tell you. The man that was in your office yesterday afternoon is no more. He is dead.’ “

Between seven and seven-thirty, Vidor thought: Shelby was telling someone that Taylor was dead at about the same time that Henry Peavey was first discovering the fact himself?

Berger went on to tell of Shelby’s having called her the night before the murder looking for Minter, then ended her testimony with another statement that gave Vidor pause to think.

In claiming never to have withheld knowledge or information from the police, Berger said that two days after Taylor’s death, she had filed a complete report with the police, covering these very same points. The man who took her report was District Attorney Thomas Woolwine himself.

Charlotte Shelby was interrogated on April 9, 1926, by which time any informed detective should have known exactly what to ask her. She denied any involvement in the crime. She denied having known of any love affair, or even friendship, that might have been going on between Taylor and her daughter Mary. In fact, she claimed to have been quite upset when she, along with the rest of the world, first learned about Minter’s love letters when they were printed in the press. She denied any but the highest regard for Taylor, and denied having ever had harsh words with him. She said she never once threatened Taylor or any other man. Though she did admit visiting Taylor one evening while Charlotte Whitney, her secretary, waited in the car, she denied having a gun with her at the time. She denied having ever owned a weapon at all. (Later, upon cross-examination, she confessed to having once, years ago, owned a gun that her mother, Julia Miles, threw away. She said she’d practiced firing the gun, but was not pleased with it. “The thing was too short. I can shoot a long pistol. I wouldn’t mind shooting a shotgun.”)

Asked about Minter’s failed three-shot suicide attempt, she said the incident occurred when, for reasons she didn’t know, Minter suddenly ran up the living room steps screaming, “I’m going to end it all!” then locked herself in Shelby’s room and fired the pistol twice. It was this incident, Shelby said, that made her give the pistol to her mother for disposal. “I never saw it again,” she insisted.

Later, when the subject turned to Taylor’s murder, Shelby’s answers grew quite specific. She said that a little after 9:00 A.M. on the day in question, Carl Stockdale called her from the studio and told her about the murder. A few minutes later, she said, Marjorie Berger called, and Shelby relayed the news to her.

Shelby was then asked whether anyone had ever accused her of the murder, and whether District Attorney Woolwine had ever taken a statement from her.

“No, no one ever questioned me,” she said.

And the only person who ever accused her of murdering Taylor, she said, was her own daughter Mary: “Mary said around the house, freely, ‘Mrs. Shelby killed Taylor.’ Not only once, but many times. She was always saying that.”

Vidor then moved on to the final papers filed on the Taylor case. After Asa Keyes left office, his successor, District Attorney Buron Fitts, inherited the case, calling in only one new witness to provide testimony.

Chauncey Eaton, Charlotte Shelby’s chauffeur, added two facts that further sealed Vidor’s suspicion that Shelby was involved in Taylor’s death.

On the morning Taylor’s body was found, Eaton said, he was called by Shelby to bring the car to Casa de Margarita, on New Hampshire Avenue, where Mary and Margaret were. He arrived at approximately 8:00 A.M. and was told by Shelby that Taylor had been murdered. Once again, Shelby had told someone about the murder before Shelby herself, unless she had had knowledge of it prior to Henry Peavey’s, could have known.

The second new detail that Vidor culled from Eaton’s testimony was that Eaton claimed to have seen and examined Shelby’s pistol immediately after Minter’s suicide attempt. Shelby told him to unload the weapon and hand it to her. He did so, then hid the shells on a beam in the basement, where he said they might very well still be. He said he wasn’t certain, but he thought the pistol was a .25-caliber automatic, not a .38.

Vidor wondered whether this testimony might have caused the D.A.’s office to balk at indicting Shelby. Subsequent to taking Eaton’s statement, perhaps investigators had found the bullets on the beam in the basement and concluded that, even if Shelby had threatened to shoot Taylor, it hadn’t been her gun that did it—so why prosecute her?

Vidor closed the file. As he pondered Charlotte Shelby’s testimony he realized that if he decided she had killed Taylor, and wrote his screenplay based on all the evidence supporting the notion, he would be immediately slapped in the face with the one question he couldn’t answer: if all this evidence existed against her, why hadn’t anyone accused her before?

It was mid-afternoon. The others would still be gone for a while. Vidor quickly made himself a sandwich, not wanting to be caught outside the sanctuary of his work-room should they happen to return early. Then he opened the files again, starting once more at the beginning.

It was clear that District Attorney Woolwine had had his hands full at the beginning. Possible leads popped up everywhere, then disappeared as though they had never existed. Vidor remembered figures from newspaper reports; leads and confessions poured into police headquarters as many as ten in a single day, totaling over three hundred within the first five weeks of the investigation. There were not nearly that many contained in the police files, though there were quite a few, all of which had to be at least looked into. Among them was an anonymous letter addressed to L.A.P.D. Captain David Adams:

Most of the confessions and letters were obvious hoaxes that were easily dealt with. But others demanded more attention: statements from Walter Kirby, the man identified as one of the two hitchhikers picked up by the Santa Ana rancher; statements from Otis Heffner, a Folsom inmate who claimed to have been a witness to the murder. A man named Harry Fields, a.k.a. Harry the Chink, said that he and fellow dope peddlers Jimmy Moore and the Lee brothers had tried to kill Taylor for killing the drug deals they had going with Mabel Normand. And there were dozens more, none that proved fruitful, but all of which cost the D.A.’s office man-hours and money. But this hardly excused overlooking such obvious backyard leads as Charlotte Shelby’s public threats to Taylor or Mary Miles Minter’s leaky alibi.

Vidor read through the confessions and leads, noticing for the first time that four statements he had read many times over in countless newspaper articles about the mystery were completely absent from the police files. Nowhere was there any mention of the owner or operator of the Hartley Service Station, or the conductor and motorman of the Third Street Red Car line, four men who had been presented in the press as the most promising witnesses at the beginning of the investigation.

Vidor began to wonder if some mistake had been made, if Captain Thad Brown had accidentally given him access to incomplete files, though that too seemed unlikely since the files he was given did cover the various investigations from the beginning through that of Buron Fitts. They just didn’t seem to cover them as fully as they should.

Next in the files Vidor encountered Edward Sands, the man Woolwine said the police most wanted to capture, and the only suspect for whom a warrant had ever been issued. Nothing in the Sands papers shed any light at all on anything other than the fact that Sands himself was a mystery. He disappeared suddenly after robbing his employer and was never seen again. Certain facts, such as his knowledge of Taylor’s true identity, made him too suspect to be dismissed entirely, but there was nothing against him like the kind of evidence against Charlotte Shelby and Mary Miles Minter.

The same was true of Mabel Normand. Though she had visited Taylor the night he was killed, there was nothing to suggest any wrongdoing on her part. Every detail of what she told police about that evening was checked out and proven, from the smudge of lipstick on the rear window of the passenger side of her car where she had pressed a farewell kiss to Taylor, to the man sitting in a window in the far end of the courtyard who Normand said watched Taylor walk her out to her car.

Vidor jotted these details down in his notebook. He found it interesting that Woolwine had investigated them with such diligence while not even bothering to interview Charlotte Shelby.

Illicit drugs also played a large part in Woolwine’s investigation. Though no drugs had been found anywhere connected with Mabel Normand, a number of known pushers claimed that both she and Taylor had long been regular customers. In exchange for having peddling charges dropped against them, they promised to lead police to the dealer who shot Taylor. So many such claims were made that the police had to institute a quiz to be given to all drug pushers claiming knowledge of the Taylor murder, in order to separate self-serving liars and cranks from worthwhile informants. Not one drug-related lead—in fact nothing at all related to Mabel Normand—led anyone a single step closer to finding the killer. And yet, for reasons not evident in the police files, but well-documented in print, Normand continued to be considered a suspect long after she was proven not to have been involved. The end result of this public suspicion was the destruction of her career.