One of Hollywood’s enduring murder mysteries. On February 1, 1922, director William Desmond Taylor was shot dead in his Los Angeles home. Was cocaine addict film star Mabel Normand involved? Did studio executives try to cover up the murder to avoid further scandal that was already embroiling Hollywood with the Fatty Arbuckle case?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Desmond_Taylor
From Criminal Element blog:
- To the outside world, Hollywood seemed to be a place where the sun always shone and so did the people. Not for nothing, these new celebrities were known as stars. Nothing like Hollywood had ever existed.
So imagine the horror when the world learned of the murder of William Desmond Taylor on the morning of February 2nd, 1922. Taylor was a famous director (and sometimes actor) who had helmed landmark films such as the first adaptations of Huckleberry Finn and Anne of Green Gables. He’d worked with some of the biggest stars of the era, including Mary Pickford, Wallace Reid and Mary Miles Minter. He was handsome, rich, and respected.
Now he was dead and no one seemed to know why. Stories and theories were furiously circulated by a press corps that was still in the midst of breathlessly reporting the Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle rape trial. What exactly happened that morning in the hours after Taylor’s body was discovered is still shrouded in myth and conjecture. Were two top executives from Paramount Pictures there burning documents when the police arrived? Was Hollywood’s biggest female comedy star, Mabel Normand, in the bedroom upstairs tearing through drawers? Did an unknown stranger suddenly appear, announce himself as a doctor, declare Taylor dead of a hemorrhage and then disappear before the body was turned over and a bullet hole discovered?
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/06/books/king-vidor-private-eye.html
Even director King Vidor became obsessed with the case.
https://gizmodo.com/edgar-award-winning-crime-book-takes-on-an-unsolved-hol-1701369846
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