Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class SYMHC Classics: William Desmond Taylor Murder About this episode This 2017 episode covers the early days of Hollywood, and its reputation for debauchery. When a high-profile director was murdered, it added to that image, and revealed that Taylor, like so many in Hollywood, had lots of secrets.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:14 Holly Frey? Happy Saturday. We have a little Hollywood history coming up soon. So today's classic is an episode on the murder of actor and director William Desmond Taylor. This episode is about his unsolved killing, but it also gives some context on the very scandal-filled atmosphere of the film industry in the early 20th century.
2:36 Tracy V. Wilson? This episode originally came out on November 6, 2017, which doesn't seem like as long ago as that, but there we have it. Enjoy.
2:49 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
3:00 Holly Frey? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.
3:02 Tracy V. Wilson? And I'm Tracy B. Wilson.
3:05 Holly Frey? And I have a confession to make right out of the gate, which is that today's episode is kind of a remainder from Halloween stuff.
3:11 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, when I looked at the title of it, I was like, oh, more Halloween.
3:14 Holly Frey? Yeah, it's like one of those things that I started looking at as a potential October episode. And then as I got more into it, I was like, oh, this really is just like more of a sad, convoluted tale of people and the lives they lead. It wasn't so much spooky as just sad.
3:31 Tracy V. Wilson? It's more Hollywood history than creepy Halloween stuff, although a lot of the Hollywood scandals we're going to be talking about are pretty upsetting themselves.
3:39 Holly Frey? Right. Like, it popped on my radar because it's on my list of unsolved crimes.
3:47 Holly Frey? But then the deeper you go, the less it really has anything spooky about it. It's more just the, like, the right paperwork didn't happen and people protected each other. So in the 1920s, the idea of Hollywood as a motion picture town was still really pretty new. The film industry had existed in Los Angeles for just a little more than a decade when the roaring twenties began. And even in its youth, though, Hollywood and its really quickly growing film industry had a reputation for debauchery. As movies grew into a serious business, the small California town, which had initially just been chosen because it was a good Location to shoot because the consistent sunshine uh made it easy in terms of lighting.
4:29 Holly Frey? It grew so quickly. So from nineteen ten to nineteen twenty, the population of Los Angeles went from three hundred and nineteen thousand people to five hundred seventy seven thousand. So it almost doubled. It's like two uh one point seven ish. Uh I'm doing very sloppy math in my head. And during that time, its population of actors and actresses went from six hundred and fifteen to thirty six hundred, according to census records. And the mushrooming business of making entertainment drew this kind of perfect combination of fame and wealth seekers. And it wasn't long before scandals started to happen because sometimes people would get very desperate and do things that were unscrupulous. And today we are talking about one of those scandals.
5:14 Holly Frey? It's a murder that had so many suspects and so much convoluted stuff going on that the case was never solved. And that is the murder of William Desmond Taylor.
5:23 Tracy V. Wilson? William Desmond Taylor was born William Cunningham Dean Tanner in Carlow, Ireland on April twenty sixth, eighteen seventy two. The family moved to Dublin when he was still young. His father was a major in the British Army and had hoped that William would enter the military. Those hopes were dashed because he failed to pass his entrance tests.
5:47 Holly Frey? Instead, William moved to the United States in eighteen ninety at the age of eighteen. And he had been sent by his father to work on a dude ranch. A ranch known as Runnymede that was in Kansas had been advertising in Great Britain as a place where young men could go and learn to be manlier. And Major Dean Tanner thought it would make William into the son that he wanted.
6:08 Tracy V. Wilson? This is such a weird premise to me.
6:11 Holly Frey? It is, but it was one of those things. It was a little bit of a fad in Great Britain for a few years of like, oh, our. Sons who are maybe privileged and don't really, haven't really been tested in terms of their manliness, will send them to America to the, the rough riding west and they'll come back just strapping young men, ready to take on the world.
6:31 Tracy V. Wilson? Well, and the, the idea that there would be a movement to cer- to try to make men manlier, that is not the part that strikes me as weird. It's the part of like dude ranches specifically as like the place to go be manlier, just because like the, the dude ranch has that element of being for tourists to come.
6:50 Holly Frey? Well, it does now.
6:52 Tracy V. Wilson? Well, it must have then too, because there's a stage on the ranch.
6:55 Holly Frey? Yeah, that's true. But I think, you know, to somebody that doesn't know much about ranching, what they know is you're gonna go out and be kind of in the wilderness and the prairies and you are gonna herd animals and you're gonna ride horses and gonna learn things like carpentry. You are gonna come back so manly.
7:15 Tracy V. Wilson? And while that was there, there's also the part where this ranch was giving William an outlet in the form of acting. Uh, he had done some stage work in school, but appearing on stage at the ranch, which like we said, had, had a resort element to it. He really seemed to love that. When the ranch closed in 1892, he moved briefly to Missouri and then drifted a while as a laborer before he took an acting job in Chicago under the name Cunningham Dean. Eventually he made his way to New York.
7:45 Holly Frey? Yeah, this is one of those things where you kind of have to condense because he really does just drift around and do a lot of odd jobs and you know, kind of keep himself going because you could do that at this time in the United States. Uh, but by the end of 1901, he was living in New York. He had gotten married to a woman named Ethel Mae Harrison, who was an actress. That was actually her stage name. Her real last name was Hamilton. And her family wealth had come from her stockbroker father. And William was then employed in an establishment called English Antique Shop, in which his new father-in-law was an investor. And the couple had a daughter named Ethel Daisy in 1903.
8:23 Tracy V. Wilson? Seven years into this marriage, William vanished. This was in October of 1908. He called the antique shop to ask for $600 on the day after he left his family. The shop messaged this money to him and then the New York society and on the family, everything that he had had around him, never saw him again.
8:45 Holly Frey? Nope, he just, like we said, vanished. And the years immediately after William's disappearance are quite hazy. His friends and family were concerned that he may have had some sort of mental break or amnesia. There were even stories that started cropping up of like, well, he's had some incidents before. Various versions of his life story indicate that he drifted for several years after he left his wife and child, placing him everywhere you can imagine, from the deep south to Montana to Colorado and even Alaska.
9:17 Tracy V. Wilson? These are all places that one might imagine that men would go to become more manly.
9:24 Tracy V. Wilson? I'm still gonna just be stuck on that this whole episode. In 1912, Ethel petitioned the state for a divorce from her missing husband so that she could remarry. At the end of that year, William reappeared in California, going by the name of William Desmond Taylor. As William Taylor, he was hired to act in an assortment of short films, including The Iconoclast, Bread Cast Upon the Waters, A True Believer, and The Quakerous in 1913.
9:52 Holly Frey? Yeah, all of those films were made that same year. As we've talked about before, when we talk about older Hollywood history, they were churning out movies at a much quicker rate than we ever talk about, we would ever imagine today. In 1914, Taylor started taking on work as a director as well, and for several projects, he actually worked as both actor and director. His knowledge, he was pretty well read. He could speak a couple of languages pretty well, and he really loved literature. So he came off as very erudite, and his work ethic enabled him to really rise quite quickly as a major player in the fledgling film industry.
10:25 Tracy V. Wilson? During World War I, Taylor enlisted with the Canadian Army, but he never saw any action. He had enlisted in 1918, but the war ended before he could be shipped out.
10:37 Holly Frey? And so, as the film industry was growing and the concept of a movie star became a thing, which was all happening in parallel to Taylor being part of it, Hollywood, as we said, started to attract people seeking fame and money and power. And in the early 1920s, the industry began experiencing its first scandals.
10:56 Tracy V. Wilson? There were a lot of them. In September 1920, actress Olive Thomas had spent the evening with her husband, Jack Pickford, brother of Mary Pickford in Paris. Their marriage had been struggling because they both had hectic careers, and the two of them were hoping that a getaway could help mend their problems. But after coming back to their hotel room one evening, Olive drank a lethal dose of mercury bicloride.
11:23 Holly Frey? And whether she intentionally ended her life or accidentally ingested the fatal chemical remains uncertain. You might recall, if you listened to our Lon Chaney episode, that Chaney's first wife, Clevea Creighton, attempted to kill herself with mercury bicloride in 1913. One of the reported versions of this story was that Olive thought she was taking a sleeping aid, and she had misread the French label on the bottle, which had been prescribed for her husband.
11:49 Tracy V. Wilson? One of the reasons that's sometimes given for why there was mercury bicloride on hand in the first place was that Jack was using it topically to treat sores from syphilis. Today, that would carry a lot of stigma, but at the time, that would have been even more so. So if that was true, that obviously would have been one of the causes of their strained marriage. This scandalous element to the story, plus all these lingering doubts about whether the death was accidental or not, really started tongues wagging about how the Hollywood life had been the undoing of a sweet girl from Pennsylvania. As a side note, Olive's ghost is rumored to haunt Broadway's New Amsterdam Theater, but that ghost has never divulged what really happened the night she died.
12:34 Holly Frey? Yeah, as recently as last year, there were articles about this ghost. If you don't know Broadway or where the New Amsterdam is, it is where the Aladdin show has been running for quite some time, which to me, I don't know, makes it extra kind of witty that she would be hanging out watching the Aladdin show every night. Roughly one year after Olive's death in September of 1921, 25-year-old actress Virginia Rapp or Rappay or Rappa, depending on who you listen to, died several days after she had attended a party at the St. Francis Hotel. She had a ruptured bladder and she died of peritonitis. She had been seen in a room with superstar at the time, Fatty Arbuckle, and her friend,
13:15 Holly Frey? Ma Desmond, said that Arbuckle had sexually assaulted the actress Virginia. And though there was no evidence to back up the claim, and Arbuckle was acquitted of manslaughter, this story, which was very scandalous, had been front-page news and reported in the most sensational ways possible to sell as many papers as possible.
13:35 Tracy V. Wilson? It's been almost 100 years and Fatty Arbuckle's name is still like intimately connected with scandal.
13:44 Holly Frey? Yeah, when you say it, it's like, people get that scared look on their face of like, I don't even want to hear about that. Because there were various versions, some of which are very, very upsetting to hear that we will not go into.
13:57 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, they're really lurid.
13:58 Holly Frey? Of how he may have assaulted her. And even some that were sort of more, I don't want to say mild, because it still involves him forcing himself on her, but that were just like, he was so heavy when he forced himself on her, it caused this rupture. So there are a lot of different versions of it, and they're very unseemly. So that is why, even today, even though he was completely acquitted and there was no evidence, his name still has this sort of specter of ickiness on it.
14:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, it ended his career. He was blacklisted. He wasn't cast in another film for more than a decade. And he died, just as it looked like that he might sort of make a comeback. And this whole incident really negatively impacted the whole film industry's image.
14:43 Holly Frey? By that point, Hollywood had gained this reputation as a place where people went to follow their dreams, only to often have things end in disaster. Headlines swirled about the lack of morality in filmmaking culture. And William Desmond Taylor was the advocate for the industry. He spoke about the good that films could do as censors threatened to clip anything even remotely considered scandalous. I was reading in one of his biographies that there was a scene in a picture where a woman was making baby clothes and the censors stepped in and said they had to cut it because it would confuse children who thought that the stork brought babies. So the censors were sort of trying to overcorrect. At the same time, some people in the film industry, like Taylor, were saying like, hey,
15:27 Holly Frey? we can also make wholesome films. We can kind of meet in the middle a little bit.
15:34 Tracy V. Wilson? He also cooperated with US Attorney Tom Green to try to get rid of a drug problem that had been steadily growing in his movie studio over the years.
15:44 Holly Frey? Yeah, it was pretty common for people in the industry to use drugs, either at parties or developing habits that became problematic. But despite all of his efforts, that image of this morally unglued, self-indulgent town was about to get a lot worse. But before we delve into this next section, we're going to pause and have a little sponsor break.
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19:34 Holly Frey? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
19:50 Holly Frey? On February 2nd, 1922, William Desmond Taylor's body was found in his home on Alvarado Street in Los Angeles. He had been shot in the back, although that was not initially immediately apparent. We'll talk about that in a moment. His valet, Henry Peavy, had reported for work in the morning and discovered him and began yelling, which alerted the neighbors.
20:12 Tracy V. Wilson? Taylor looked perfectly composed. He was dressed and he was lying on his back, dead in a pool of blood. Both the back and front doors had been locked when Peavy arrived for work, but the front door locked automatically.
20:27 Holly Frey? The police were also called that morning to the scene of what was reported as a natural death. It was obviously not natural to have been shot in the back, but initially it was thought that he may have fallen and hit his head, or, as a doctor who was called to the scene initially, pronounced that he had died of a stomach hemorrhage. They all did marvel, however, that the way he was lying seemed like nobody could have fallen, hit their head, and died that way because he looked so put together.
20:53 Tracy V. Wilson? By the time detectives arrived at Taylor's home, it was already completely compromised by an assortment of the director's associates who were going through his belongings. When studio manager Charles Ayton arrived, he had commanded people to get rid of any piece of incriminating anything.
21:12 Tracy V. Wilson? I feel like this is a running theme every time we talk about our crime in our show.
21:19 Tracy V. Wilson? That then people came and wrecked the crime scene. So after all of Thomas's death and with Fatty Arbuckle still at the time facing trial, he wanted any scrap that could be perceived as seedy in any way to be taken back to his office so it couldn't further damage the studio's reputation. Later, he turned over what he claimed were all the papers to the police, but he did not in fact give them everything.
21:46 Holly Frey? Eventually, the deputy coroner arrived and there was, after a lot of discussion, because initially people were really ready to accept that this had been a natural death, there was a more thorough examination of Taylor's body. And then after he had been rolled over, it became apparent that William had been shot. The motive for the murder was elusive because there did not appear to be anything missing.
22:08 Tracy V. Wilson? Once the bungalow turned into a crime scene, detectives moved out all the people who had gathered, but reporters were really persistent. One of them actually got into the home and others started taking photos through the windows.
22:23 Holly Frey? You may be wondering at this point, like, if he got shot in the back, wouldn't it have been obvious as he was lying there on the floor? But an autopsy later revealed that a 38 caliber soft-nose bullet had entered Taylor's body on his left side, about six and a half inches below his armpit. And that bullet had traveled on an upward trajectory through his left lung and then it had lodged in his neck. So it was shot from kind of below and went up. It didn't exit his body, which is why it was not immediately apparent when he was lying on his back.
22:53 Tracy V. Wilson? Part of the difficulty in unraveling this murder is the vast number of possible suspects. Taylor had been known as something of a philanderer even back in New York when he was still with his wife. And there were a lot of young starlets that he had been linked to romantically over the years, even though a lot of those links are a lot, they were basically unsubstantiated gossip. Taylor wasn't big on the sorts of huge parties that a lot of people in the film industry were frequenting. Like, the whole incident with Fatty Arbuckle had happened at just like a big raucous party. Neighbors described him as having a regular and fairly dull schedule.
23:33 Holly Frey? Yeah, they were like, he's usually home by seven. We can see him reading through the window into the evening and then he goes to bed. His former wife had, of course, recognized William when she saw him in a film in 1919, 11 years after he had walked out of her life. But she was in New York, and at that point, she was happily remarried to a restaurateur. Her existence had been completely unknown to Taylor's Hollywood acquaintances until shortly after his death. Some of his papers revealed that this person existed. And there were also papers describing that Taylor had met with his daughter the summer before he was killed, and that he might have been trying to reestablish some sort of relationship with his daughter and his ex-wife.
24:17 Tracy V. Wilson? So it was not likely to be a revenge scenario of his former wife?
24:22 Holly Frey? Not for her. She was in New York and accounted for during all of it.
24:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Additionally, it had become apparent that Taylor's relationship with his former employee Edward Sands had become strained. Sands had actually left Taylor's employ seven months before the murder. The valet had forged Taylor's signature on checks and then crashed his car while Taylor was traveling outside that country. He was neither seen nor heard from again after Taylor's murder.
24:49 Holly Frey? Yeah, he's one of the nebulous suspects that a lot of people point to. That does make sense in some ways. He had a criminal history. But there are also a lot of things that don't make sense. Like, basically, he was running from the law, and it wouldn't make sense for him to show back up in Los Angeles and be like, hi, I'm gonna do some high-profile killing of things, because he was trying to be on the lam.
25:13 Holly Frey? Taylor also, it turned out, had a brother that was living in the States, Dennis Dean Taylor. And oddly enough, just as William had done in 1908, Dennis had left his family, although he did so four years later in 1912. But Taylor had found out about this and was actually supporting his sister-in-law and her two children, it turned out. He had been sending them regular checks every month. This tangle of the two brothers and their abandoned families was never entirely cleared up, but it did fuel a lot of speculation about Taylor and his mysterious life.
25:45 Tracy V. Wilson? As more information about Taylor was uncovered, it only made things more confusing. People who had known him during those years that he had vanished started coming forward. He had used all kinds of different aliases while working various labor jobs.
26:02 Holly Frey? Yeah, it's one of those, um, reading through this whole story in a few different books. It's kind of interesting because you're like, oh, these are all the tropes of like mystery movies, but these all happened in a person's actual life where he vanishes, he lives several other different lives, he has like franchise lives, and then he finally settles in Hollywood. A neighbor named Faith McLean was the only person to have seen anything the night of the murder. She said that she had seen a man leaving Taylor's home around 8:00 PM. And her description of the man was stocky, but not fat. This kind of excluded Sands because he was considered to be fairly, um, overweight. Uh, this person that McLean
26:45 Holly Frey? described was clean shaven with a plaid cap and looking, as she put it, quote, "like my idea of a motion picture burglar."
26:53 Tracy V. Wilson? I imagine that as carrying a crowbar and looking suspiciously over one's shoulder.
27:02 Tracy V. Wilson? Two attendants at a nearby gas station said they had been asked Taylor's address by a stranger, and an unknown man was seen boarding a streetcar at the Maryland Avenue stop, which was not far from the crime scene. When shown photos of Sands, none of the people who described this stranger thought it was the same man.
27:21 Holly Frey? Yeah, and there are people that, that say none of these people are even describing the same person. Like, they're just, their descriptions were general enough that some people started to automatically assume it was the same person, but there's not really enough clear, hard detail to know. It is estimated, to further complicate things, that 300 different people confessed to this murder in police stations across the country, but they were all written off as false confessions. Was every lead based on these exhaustively examined? Probably not. But the investigation ended up focusing around three women primarily, none of whom were those people that showed up in police stations to confess.
28:01 Holly Frey? These were Mabel Norman, Mary Minter, and Mary Minter's mother, Charlotte Shelby.
28:08 Tracy V. Wilson? So we're going to talk through the three of them, starting with Mabel. Mabel Norman was a comedian who had been romantically linked with Taylor, at least according to gossip columns. Mabel was very successful in films, but she also really abhorred all the artifice that the industry's culture had taken on. She had a reputation for being kind and generous, but she also had a drug problem. She traveled to New York to try to get away from all this, and it was the news of Olive Thomas's death that really snapped her into the realization that she needed to get sober. She and Olive had been friends and had partied together, and Mabel saw her own fate as being potentially the same as Olive's.
28:50 Holly Frey? Mabel and William were really close friends, and they corresponded often. And their letters to each other were very sweet. She had been involved with men before him who had been really unkind to her. But she and William seemed really more to have a deep friendship rather than a romantic relationship. It was William that she called after Olive's funeral, asking for help. And he was completely encouraging. And when she checked herself into a rehab program at a sanatorium north of Seneca Lake, New York, it was rumored that Taylor actually paid the bill for it.
29:23 Tracy V. Wilson? When Mabel came back to Hollywood, looking radiant and healthy, Taylor was often her escort around town, leading to the belief that the two of them were a couple. But there's also a likelihood that this was just a way for Taylor to support his friend's sobriety as she started making herself visible again in Los Angeles.
29:42 Holly Frey? Yeah, they seemed like the best of friends. He actually sent her flowers several times a week. And she would come over and they would talk about literature. And they seemed to be super close, but she pretty much makes clear that this was not romantic. Mabel was, however, the last known person to see Taylor alive. On the evening of February 1st, she stopped at the director's bungalow home to borrow two books, Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra and Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. The two then shared a drink, and then Taylor walked her to her car. He was supposed to call her at 9:00 PM, but he didn't. But she had already been asleep, and her maid did not normally wake her up if she got calls after she was in bed, so she thought nothing of this.
30:25 Tracy V. Wilson? Detectives who were piecing this crime together believed that as Taylor was walking Mabel to her car, the assailant snuck into the bungalow.
30:34 Holly Frey? Yeah, they did investigate Mabel, though, because on a tip that Mabel had a 38 caliber revolver, like the one that was used to kill Taylor, police searched her home. And they did find two handguns, but both were 25 caliber weapons that were not a match for the murder weapon. And so the police pretty quickly determined that Mabel was not the killer. She was also, of the people they interviewed, seemed to be the most deeply grieving over the whole loss.
31:00 Tracy V. Wilson? Mabel's life continued to have problems after Taylor's death. Not long after the murder, she had a date in a jazz club with a married man named George S. Patterson. He died in a car accident after they parted ways that evening, and then the newspapers used that whole event to smear her.
31:20 Holly Frey? Yeah, it was kind of like, isn't it weird that two men that you were close to both died so soon after one another? It was really unkind. And then she was also involved in a shooting in 1924 when her driver killed her boyfriend. It turned out that the driver was an escaped convict, who, like many people in Hollywood, had taken on a new identity.
31:42 Tracy V. Wilson? In 1927, Mabel was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and she died in 1930 at the age of 37.
31:50 Holly Frey? Next up, we're going to take a look at the mother-daughter duo, who are most frequently linked to Taylor's death. But first, we're going to pause again for a little sponsor break.
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32:33 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?
33:17 Holly Frey? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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34:03 Holly Frey? Mary Miles Minter was a young actress of 18 who had been acting since she was a small girl. She was cast in an adaptation of Anne of Green Gables that Taylor was directing, and she developed a huge crush on the director. Mary's mother, Charlotte Shelby, was dismayed at the possibility of a relationship between her teenage daughter and the late 40s age director.
34:26 Tracy V. Wilson? Mary had fallen for a number of older men during her career, and at least one of them had taken advantage of her attraction to him. That's why Charlotte was watching her daughter like a hawk. She was really intent that Mary should be famous and that the two of them should get rich in the process. She did not want any kind of dalliance to complicate matters. She didn't want anything to ruin their plans. But Mary really seemed to believe that William Taylor was the love of her life.
34:53 Holly Frey? I will say, reading pretty much every account, Charlotte does not seem to have been concerned about her daughter's well-being in any of this. Like, she wasn't like, I don't want another man to take advantage of my daughter. She really seemed to be making pretty selfish moves, which is sort of heartbreaking.
35:09 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah.
35:10 Holly Frey? It's kind of the original prototype for the horrible stage mom.
35:15 Tracy V. Wilson? Yeah, and there's also, in one of those ways that is unfortunately not surprising, putting the blame on her when she was a child for the actions of adult men.
35:29 Holly Frey? Yes. And Charlotte definitely bought into that. Love notes that Mary Minter had written William Taylor were among his effects in his bungalow, in which the starlet wrote of wanting to go away with William and living an idyllic, domestic, romantic life. The papers began running stories that stated that the young woman was having an affair with the much older director, but friends of his, as well as Mary Minter, had all claimed that Mary's love was unrequited. When the young woman had told Taylor how she felt about him, he had very gently explained to her that he was far too old for her, and he believed that the matter was settled.
36:07 Tracy V. Wilson? After Taylor got promoted to a different office by the studio, Mary was no longer working with him and she became even more obsessed and really a little unstable as she tried to deal with her feelings for him and her growing resentment of her mother's interference. At one point, Minter had feigned shooting herself after a fight with her mother over whether she had been with Taylor. The gun was the same type that had been used to kill Taylor.
36:35 Holly Frey? Yeah, that happened, just for clarity, before Taylor was killed. But the two of them, there was sort of a constant badgering of, were you with that man? Were you with that man? Did you go see that man? And while Mary would have loved to have gone to see that man, she made very clear that she really did adore him. She also had not been. Later, Mrs. Shelby was seen carrying that same revolver when she at one point went to William Desmond Taylor's house in search of her daughter, who had failed to come home. She was going to confront him, but Mary was not at the director's house.
37:12 Tracy V. Wilson? Charlotte Shelby's protective nature regarding her daughter was really explosive when it came to William Taylor, even though he really seemed to have no kind of lascivious intent on the young actress. But a witness employed by Mrs. Shelby once saw her say to Taylor, "If I ever catch you hanging around with Mary again, I will blow your expletive brains out."
37:39 Holly Frey? When Mary Minter heard the news of Taylor's death, she went first to his home and then to a nearby mortuary where she asked to give blood to save him. Whether she truly was in denial that he was dead or if she was playing up this relationship with the deceased remains unknown.
37:56 Tracy V. Wilson? Charlotte Shelby opted to get out in front of this story by inviting reporters to speak with Mary. And the young actress said that she and William Desmond Taylor had never been involved and that he saw her as a child.
38:09 Holly Frey? When Mary was deposed by police, her interview lasted for several hours. She told them that she had been in love with William Taylor, but that he had never returned his affection and that they were not romantically involved.
38:21 Tracy V. Wilson? Charlotte Shelby was close to the DA in Los Angeles, and there had been rumors that the two of them were having an affair. This was about the time that Holly, as she was doing this research, started to believe that the papers in LA in the 1920s were speculating that everyone was having affair, an affair. But, I mean, who knows, maybe they were.
38:39 Holly Frey? Maybe everyone was having an affair.
38:43 Tracy V. Wilson? So she got a little heads up when the police were headed to her home to ask a few questions about William Taylor's murder.
38:51 Holly Frey? She was a very shrewd woman, and she refused to answer their questions. Eventually detectives that were pretty convinced that she had probably murdered Taylor cooked up this wacky ruse to try to lure her out by running a fake story in the newspapers that a spiritualist had communicated with the deceased William Desmond Taylor and had learned the killer's identity and that it was a woman with a beautiful daughter. This was, of course, all a farce, but it was designed to spur Shelby into some sort of action. And the morning that that story ran, Shelby phoned her lawyer immediately, but it really didn't result in anything more, and she did not come forward to confess as they were hoping.
39:29 Tracy V. Wilson? One of the detectives in the case pulled three blonde hairs from the jacket that Taylor had been wearing when he died. They had an expert compare them to hair from Mary Minter, and they were declared to be a match. The theory was that Charlotte had walked in on Mary and William as they embraced and had shot Taylor, and then Mary had arranged the body.
39:53 Holly Frey? Just as investigators really thought they were getting pretty close to solving this crime, they were ordered to drop the case by the district attorney, the same one that was good friends with Charlotte Shelby. But as the investigation once again pointed to Shelby several years later, she claimed at that point that she and William Taylor had been the best of friends, that there was no animosity between them. This was a flat-out lie, as anyone who knew them would have attested to. But when she was questioned at that point about the whereabouts of her .38 caliber revolver, which she was known to have owned, the DA had actually given it to her, she confessed to investigators that her mother had taken the gun somewhere and disposed of it, but that she did not know where.
40:33 Tracy V. Wilson? Director King Vador later told people that Mary Minter had strongly suggested that her mother had killed William Taylor. Charlotte Shelby's other daughter, Margaret, also started openly accusing her mother of the murder in the 1930s, although Margaret's version of events was wildly off the known facts of the case. This mismatch in the description of the killer and Charlotte Shelby was the one real halting point in her status as a suspect.
41:00 Holly Frey? Yeah, Faith McLean's description definitely did not describe anybody that looked like Charlotte Shelby. And so even when they felt like they had a lot of good circumstantial evidence, that always pretty much put an end to things. It's like, but she doesn't look at all like the one person that a witness saw. In 1937, 15 years after the murder, Charlotte Shelby's former chauffeur told police that his employer had asked him to remove all of the ammunition from the gun that she owned immediately after the murder of William Desmond Taylor was publicly known. She claimed at the time that she feared that Mary was going to turn the pistol on herself.
41:37 Tracy V. Wilson? He had put this ammunition on a beam in the basement of Charlotte Shelby's former residence. And when the police went to the home, which at that point was occupied by other residents, the bullets were still there. They were matched to the bullet that had killed Taylor, which was significant because it was an older style of ammunition that was not normally used in 1922.
41:58 Holly Frey? Yeah, the ammunition expert said something to the effect of like, you know, this is one in a million or something crazy like that. Like if you find this ammunition, it's gotta be the same person. The case was reopened based on this new evidence, but when she appeared before a grand jury, Charlotte Shelby suddenly had a backup witness for an alibi. Prior to that, there had always been a little discrepancy in her whereabouts. At the time of the murder, she had always said she was at her house, but Mary and Mary's grandmother, who were at the house, were like, no, she wasn't. So it was always a little unclear if she had been in the house and they just didn't know or not. But this time, she had a friend back her up and say he was there with her.
42:40 Tracy V. Wilson? After the hearing, she told reporters, quote, "One of the worst tortures for any person, particularly a woman, is to go through life with a cloud of malicious innuendo constantly hovering over her like a specter. Why must William Desmond Taylor's murder follow me through the years? I want to live the rest of my life in happiness and peace if I may be permitted to do so." The case was closed after the hearing and it was never reopened.
43:06 Holly Frey? In the meantime, though, in those 15 years, Mary Minter's wholesome image was tarnished by the rumors of a sexual relationship with Taylor, even though everyone denied that such a thing existed. So she was this sort of ingenue type actress, and so it just was really incongruous with the image that they were trying to promote for her. So her contract with the studio wasn't renewed. She did manage to move away from her mother, but she quickly realized that because she had been basically a child star and then an actress and her mother had managed everything, she did not have the skills to manage money on her own. And moreover, there wasn't any money coming in to manage anyway.
43:44 Tracy V. Wilson? For a while, she seemed to constantly want to dredge up the case in an effort to stay relevant. And at one point, she even fabricated a whole story that somebody had tried to murder her. She also started a rumor that her mother had been jealous of her relationship with Taylor and hinted that there had been a romantic involvement. She finally ended up marrying into wealth and living out her life in a happy obscurity.
44:07 Holly Frey? Yeah, when she went through that phase where she was saying a lot of crazy things to the press, it is pretty
44:14 Holly Frey? Widely believed that she was
44:18 Holly Frey? developing a pretty bad dependency on drugs. And that's why she was so erratic all the time. Another woman in Taylor's story, though, that was not really investigated at the time was Margaret Gibson. And Gibson, who went by Gibby, knew William Desmond Taylor. They had been actors together in their early careers. This was before Taylor had even moved to Los Angeles. Gibby ran into some legal trouble after an arrest for dealing opium and possible prostitution under a sort of an umbrella vagrancy charge. She had been acquitted, but she knew that her career, which she had been trying to get off the ground, was never going to get its feet back under it. So she reinvented herself as an actress under the name of Patricia Palmer.
45:03 Tracy V. Wilson? With her new name and an age that she fudged, Gibby, or Patricia, sought out her old friend, who was then head of the famous players Lasky's studio, but she didn't get the help she hoped for. Instead, her life wound up spiraling into just a constant clawing effort to try to make it in Hollywood. That often involved some really seedy people and eventually included being part of a blackmail ring.
45:28 Holly Frey? Yeah, Gibby was so desperate. She got... It was a combination of, you know, maybe some flexible morality and also being just gullible enough to believe horrible people when they promised that they would be the ones that really got her career off the ground. But eventually Gibson fled Hollywood. But she did move back to California later in her life. This time, as a married woman, her husband was Albert Lewis. She was widowed in the 1940s when Lewis died. And in 1964, Gibson, who at that point was living as Patricia Lewis, had a heart attack. When a neighbor found her, she asked for a priest to give her final confession. Eventually, ten- The neighbor, I killed William Desmond Taylor.
46:13 Tracy V. Wilson? It's possible that even if she didn't physically kill Taylor, that her blackmail dealings may have led to his demise in some way. If she was feeding information to the people who did in his life, she might have felt that she was responsible for his untimely end. Even so, in addition to that, people confess to things they didn't do like all the time.
46:35 Holly Frey? That is true. This is a theory that's become a lot more popular in recent years, in part because she did run with a lot of people as part of this blackmailing ring. And there are some matchups of people that she knew and was dealing with and some sort of shady looking characters that had been seen around William Desmond Taylor's home in the weeks leading up to the murder. But again, that's one that could very easily be strictly coincidence. Uh, we just don't know. And to further complicate the picture of Taylor's life and who in it might wish to harm him, it slowly came to light in all of this post-murder investigation that he may have been bisexual.
47:18 Holly Frey? Friends eventually started speaking about his jaunts into opium clubs in Los Angeles that catered to gay men. And there were headlines that ran in papers about Taylor visiting, quote, queer places. The studio tried to spin these stories as the director scouting kind of, uh, you know, color for his films, but this really didn't have any effect.
47:40 Tracy V. Wilson? George James Hopkins, who was a designer of sets and production, had collaborated on several pictures with William Desmond Taylor. And in 1981, he wrote about an autobiography, which was never published, in which he's spoken of, of an affair with Taylor that lasted for several years, right up until the murder.
48:00 Holly Frey? It's possible that someone was blackmailing William Desmond Taylor. Given his abandoned family and the possibility of bisexuality and even his career in film, there were plenty of secrets that he may have wanted to keep under wraps.
48:13 Tracy V. Wilson? The revelations about the many secrets of Taylor's life, which fed into this larger story of scandal in Hollywood, really had a serious impact on the film industry.
48:24 Holly Frey? An article that appeared six days after Taylor's body was found read, quote, "The murder of William Desmond Taylor has had a fearsome effect upon the movies. It is exposing the debaucheries, the looseness, the rottenness of Hollywood."
48:38 Tracy V. Wilson? Studios immediately started working on vigilance plans to ensure that ethics and conduct regulations were in place in the industry. This eventually led to the adoption of the Hays Code in 1930, which laid out moral guidelines for all motion pictures made in the United States. That code remained in place until 1968.
49:01 Holly Frey? William Desmond Taylor directed more than 50 movies in a span of only eight years. And when he was laid to rest, 10,000 people showed up for the funeral. It was a combination of people from Hollywood who just loved him because he was really well-liked, as well as onlookers who were hoping to see famous people grieving. The crowd at one point pushed their way into the chapel where his funeral service was taking place, and a riot nearly started, but police were eventually able to push them back out onto the street, and then they locked the doors so the service could continue.
49:34 Tracy V. Wilson? Today, there's an annual film festival of his movies in Carlo, Ireland, which is where he was born.
49:40 Holly Frey? And what really becomes apparent when you look at all of the elements of this bizarre unsolved case is how many people in Los Angeles in the early days of the film industry were hiding huge personal secrets. And the truth of what happened the night that William Desmond Taylor died will likely never be known, though there are certainly plenty of books written about the case, each of which seems to favor a different killer. Yeah, it comes up a lot when you're reading histories of this case, like how easy it was for someone to just show up in Los Angeles and say, "My name is X." And there were not the easy ways to background check people as there are now. And people would go, "Okay, X, let's do this." So a lot of the people that had moved there were kind of starting
50:21 Holly Frey? over and maybe had some unsavory things that they wanted to leave behind. Just, you know, a fascinating and kind of sad thing in many ways.
50:35 Tracy V. Wilson? Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected] . And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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51:28 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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