The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (61 page)

A Mrs C. F. Reddick, a neighbour, stated she was awakened by a shot or a backfire between one and two o’clock in the morning. Police fixed the time of death as between 7:40 and 8:15 p.m., Wednesday, 1 February.

At nine o’clock Mabel Normand had been lying in bed with her book, waiting in vain for William Desmond Taylor to call.

He had then been dead for approximately an hour.

It is to be noted that in the room where the body was found were three framed pictures of Mabel Normand. On 18 February there was publicity given to a locket with a photograph of Mabel Normand and bearing the inscription, “To my dearest.”

For a while the investigation followed routine lines. There was some indication that a mysterious man had stood back of the Taylor bungalow waiting for an opportunity to slip in through the door. He was apparently someone who had reason to believe that by waiting in that position an opportunity would present itself—perhaps someone who knew that Taylor had or was going to have a woman visitor and that he would quite probably escort this woman out to her automobile. In any event, there was a litter of cigarette stubs indicating that someone had stood there waiting for some little time.

It is reported that there was a mysterious handkerchief bearing the letter “S” lying near the body. One of the police detectives picked this up and rather casually left it lying on a table. When he looked for it again, it had disappeared, and apparently has never been heard of since.

This ushers in the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t phase of the case. With bland, disarming casualness, “authorities” and others toss off statements which make the reader dizzy.

We may as well begin with the Mabel Normand letters. Apparently Mabel Normand’s first knowledge of what had happened was when Edna Purviance (who, it will be remembered, occupied the other side of the William Desmond Taylor bungalow) telephoned her on the morning of February second and told her that Taylor was dead. Miss Normand seems to have gone directly to the bungalow and asked for certain letters and telegrams which she had sent to Taylor. She was very anxious to have them returned to her and said that she knew exactly where they were.

From a study of the newspapers it is not always easy to reconstruct exactly what happened and the order in which it happened. In the
Los Angeles Examiner
of 10 February 1922, it is stated that when Peavey found Taylor’s body, the first person he telephoned was Charles Eyton, manager of the Lasky Studios. Eyton and other picture people seem to have been on the scene nearly an hour before the police arrived. Some eight days after the murder a writer was to state boldly in the press, “The mad effort being made by the powers in the Hollywood motion picture colony to block the investigation will avail them nothing now that Woolwine has assumed command.” Woolwine, it is to be noted, was at the time the district attorney.

The day before that statement, a newspaper had printed that, “It is suspected that both of them [picture actresses] are revealing only half truths because the complete disclosure might affect their professional interests. And it is also suspected that pressure has been brought to bear on them from others in the industry not to make disclosures which would injuriously affect the sales value of their pictures.”

It is therefore understandable that against such a background we will find rumours and contradictions, naïve explanations which fail to explain. Facts are to be glossed over with a smear of whitewash, evidence will vanish from under our noses.

But piecing together the facts solely from what the public was able to read in the press, we proceed to consider the rather remarkable history of these Normand letters.

In an interview on 5 February, Mabel Normand stated to a reporter, according to the published account, “I sought those letters and hoped to get them before they reached the scrutiny of others. I admit this, but it was for only one purpose—to prevent terms of affection from being misconstrued.”

However, on 7 February we find a published quotation from Miss Normand to this effect: ‘There have been insinuations made that I went to Mr Taylor’s house after the inquest Saturday to seek some of my letters to him. That is grossly erroneous. I went to the bungalow at the request of the detectives and in their company and solely for the purpose of showing to them the exact location of the furniture as it was placed in the room before I left. It was to show how disordered the place had become after the intrusion of the murderer.”

In any event, it seems that Miss Normand arrived at the house and made a request for her letters and was given permission to take them. It is not clear from whom she made this request, exactly when it was made, or who gave her the permission. But she is reported to have said that she knew where they were and to have gone immediately to the top drawer in Taylor’s dresser in his upstairs bedroom.

The letters weren’t there.

Under date of 7 February it was stated in the press that it is believed a man of high position and influence in the motion-picture world may have taken the Mabel Normand letters, and perhaps others too, in order to protect the fortunes of actresses in whom he had a business interest.

Public Administrator Frank Bryson claims that when his representatives arrived at the Taylor home Thursday morning, the room was filled with detectives, motion-picture people, and reporters, and the premises were swarming with them.

The
Examiner
of 9 February 1922, contains the following: “ ‘It is very evident,’ one of the officers said, ‘that someone who entered the house shortly after Taylor’s body was found made a thorough search and took all letters which Taylor had received from women, or men, which might aid in solving the mystery of his death.’ ”

Now then, surprise, surprise! On 10 February, Frank Bryson, the Public Administrator, stated that he had found the Normand letters concealed in Taylor’s apartment, “under a double lock.” Where were these letters between 1 February and 9 February. Is it possible that the officers in searching the house did so in such a slipshod manner that these important letters, “under double lock,” were not discovered for a period of more than a week? “Under double lock” is slightly reminiscent of the subtitles of the period. Figuratively it is an expression which hints at impenetrable security. Taken literally it means two locks. There is no specific interpretation given of how it was used in the quoted statement.

On 11 February Mabel Normand’s attitude toward these letters discovered “under double lock” seems to have been almost casual. She is quoted as saying, “My letters to him—I would gladly set them before the world if the authorities care to do that. I have nothing to conceal . . . I have been charged with trying to recover those letters; with trying to conceal them. That is silly. If those letters are printed you will see that they are most of them casual.”

And on 10 February 1922, the district attorney, Thomas Lee Woolwine, stated that the Normand letters contained nothing helpful in the investigation. Another official who had read them said that they were not the burning missives which they had been imagined to be. Apparently these letters were returned to Miss Normand. On 14 February Miss Normand admitted that she now had the letters.

There seems to be no explanation as to why letters which had been “under double lock” in Taylor’s residence had been overlooked for a period of some eight days.

In fact, the William Desmond Taylor murder case as reported in the press has some of the Alice-in-Wonderland qualities which leave the thoughtful reader rubbing his eyes.

There is yet another letter to figure in the investigation. Police opening a book in the library some time after the murder noticed that a letter fell out. The letter had the crest of M. M. M. and read: “Dearest, I love you. I love you. I love you,” followed by several cross marks and one big cross mark and signed, “Yours always, Mary.”

On 14 August 1923, the press stated that Mary Miles Minter, declaring that the time had come to reveal the true relationship that existed between William Desmond Taylor and herself, had announced they were engaged at the time of Taylor’s death. She is also reported to have set forth her reasons why the engagement had not been disclosed immediately after the murder.

In fact one of the peculiar developments of this case is the manner in which important facts are to be published for the first time years later. In the press of 26 March 1926, four years after the crime, the public learned, apparently for the first time, that two “strands of blonde hair” found on the body of William Desmond Taylor were being safeguarded by the district attorney’s office and were forming the basis of a new probe for the slayer. And it is in May of 1936 that we find Captain Winn in a newspaper interview disclosing that in the toe of one of William Desmond Taylor’s riding boots were found a dozen fervent love letters written in a simple code, all signed “Mary.” These letters were described as the outpouring of a young girl’s heart to the man she obviously loved.

But his is no ordinary murder mystery. Probably no other murder case has existed in history where every feature was so touched with bizarre mystery.

William Desmond Taylor, the simple, kindly, motion-picture director as Hollywood knew him, had managed to preserve the secret of his identity. But now that he had been murdered and an investigation was started into his background, it was disclosed that the famous director had a complex past filled with checkerboard patches of mystery that would have done credit to one of the movie plots of the period.

William Desmond Taylor, it developed, was really William Cunningham Deane Tanner. In 1908 William Deane Tanner had, it seemed, carried on a business in New York from which his share of the profits amounted to a cool $25,000 a year, and in those days that was a very considerable sum of money—particularly when one remembers that the income tax had not as yet been discovered and applied to our economic life.

For some undisclosed motive William Cunningham Deane Tanner, after having attended the Vanderbilt Cup Race in the fall of 1908, returned to New York, sent a message to a hotel where he evidently maintained a room asking to have clothing sent to him, drew $500 from his business, and vanished.

One minute here was a prosperous businessman with wealth at his fingertips and influential friends and connections. He had a charming wife, a beautiful daughter, an established business, a rosy future. The next moment he had vanished into thin air.

There follows a hiatus which has never been satisfactorily filled. There are rumours of this and that. Apparently he was in Alaska for a while. And it is certain that sometime along in 1917 he drifted into Hollywood where he became William Desmond Taylor and rapidly climbed the ladder of fame and influence.

But prior to that time, in 1912, his brother, Dennis Deane Tanner, also suddenly vanished into thin air, leaving a wife and two children.

The wife of this brother subsequently secured a divorce. She moved to Southern California and while there saw a motion picture of some of the screen notables. Watching those flickering figures on the silver screen, she suddenly gripped the arms of her chair, leaned forward, and stared incredulously. The picture of William Cunningham Deane Tanner, her long-missing brother-in-law, was before her startled eyes. She saw the man’s familiar figure, his gestures, his smile. And the man was William Desmond Taylor, the noted motion-picture director who was fast winning wealth and fame in the world’s motion-picture capital!

She immediately notified her sister-in-law, telling her what she had seen, and was calmly advised that this was no news as her sister-in-law knew it already. Yet apparently there had been no attempt made by Mrs William Cunningham Deane Tanner to communicate with her husband.

Thereafter, to complicate the situation, the ex-Mrs Dennis Deane Tanner went to William Desmond Taylor and accused him of being William Cunningham Deane Tanner who had disappeared in 1908. And the man who was her brother-in-law blandly asserted that the woman was suffering from a case of mistaken identity. Yet apparently he kept an eye on her and when her health broke down, he sent her every month an allowance which she received regularly up to the time of his murder—all of the time, however, insisting that this woman was a total stranger to him.

Nor is this all. As William Desmond Taylor had hurried through the chill of that early February evening to keep his appointment with death, he had in his pocket an assortment of keys which fitted no doors the police were ever able to discover. Moreover, in his bungalow, if we are to believe the testimony of his houseman, was a mysterious pink silk nightgown which was to figure prominently in the murder case.

No less an expert than Arthur B. Reeve, famous author of mystery stories of the time, is authority for the statement that Taylor’s employee (referring perhaps to Taylor’s former secretary, Edward F. Sands), doing a bit of amateur sleuthing on his own, made it a habit to take this silk nightgown from the bureau drawer where it was neatly folded, fold it over again and in a certain distinctive manner, then return it to the drawer. The next morning he would find that the folds of the nightgown had been changed, indicating that it had been worn and refolded. The amateur detective would unfold it, fold it once more in his distinctive manner, only to find that the next morning it had been used and refolded. Later on, everyone concerned is to minimize the importance of this nightgown. The houseman is to say he paid no attention to it; police are to push it out of the case as of no importance. Arthur Reeve doesn’t say where he got his information, and the press is to be very coy about the initials which may or may not have been embroidered on the garment.