A Cast of Killers (19 page)

25

Willow Creek Ranch was Vidor’s dream retreat. Spread over twelve hundred rolling acres in Paso Robles, minutes from the Pacific Ocean, it offered the perfect escape from the bustle of Los Angeles. Though Vidor preferred to think of retirement as only a distant eventuality, he often imagined spending his later years overseeing the ranch’s operation, living the quiet life of the landed gentry. The ranch contained a spacious three-bedroom house, two guest houses, and several outbuildings that Vidor planned one day to renovate into warehouses for his personal archives and perhaps a studio where he or any of his guests could write and develop projects in comfortable privacy.

When Vidor pulled the T-Bird off Vineyard Road and over the lead-pipe cattle barrier onto his property, the ranch looked dark and spooky. He employed a full-time caretaker, and for years after buying the ranch in the 1940s had visited it regularly, but somehow nearly five years had passed since his last visit, and the place reflected its owner’s neglect.

“Looks like a ghost town,” Vidor said to his passengers: Cassie and Dick Marchman in the backseat with Nippy, and Colleen Moore beside him in front.

It was midnight when they arrived at the house. Inside, the furniture had all been draped with sheets, and the beds stripped of their linens. But the caretaker had kept the place clean, and within an hour they were settled in for their stay.

Vidor slept soundly in his own bedroom the first night, then awoke early and walked Nippy outside, beaming proudly at his property and breathing deeply the cool air blowing in from the ocean. After an invigorating shower in cold well water, he walked into the kitchen where Cassie and Colleen were busy preparing a large country breakfast.

“Good morning,” he said and sat at the table. “I’d almost forgotten just how nice it is up here.”

“It’s very peaceful,” said Colleen. Standing beside Cassie at the counter, Colleen looked right at home, very much a part of the family.

After breakfast, Colleen, Cassie, and Dick made a list of chores that would occupy them for the day while King made his first intensive foray into the police files. He set a folding card table before a sun-filled window in the den of the house and pulled from his briefcase the entire typewritten transcript of the tapes he and Dick had made at the Detective Bureau. With his list of unanswered questions in his mind, he settled in for a long day’s read.

King could see right away that the files offered much the same general information that the various media accounts had covered. But on many significant details, the files differed greatly from the version the public had been told by the press about the murder and its investigation. Some of the discrepancies could easily be attributed to the reliability of witnesses questioned, to the interpretations different interviewers gave to witnesses’ statements, to the zealous nature of the media scrutinizing Hollywood in 1922, or to embellishments that journalists had made in subsequent years. But others, especially those discrepancies concerning what should have been matters of simple fact and not open to interpretation or supposition, made Vidor wonder why police officials had allowed the press to continue printing stories and theories that not only contradicted each other, but contradicted the police department’s own, presumably definitive, findings.

Vidor made notes from the transcripts, recreating chronologically the new version of the events of February 2, 1922. From the beginning the police story differed from the press version.

According to the police records, Henry Peavey discovered Taylor’s body at exactly seven-thirty, only thirty minutes before the first police officer arrived at the scene. How newspapers could have varied as much as an hour in their reports of this easily documented fact Vidor didn’t know. But it was a significant fact, because it meant that Taylor’s friends and associates who were in the bungalow when police arrived had had less than half an hour to be roused from whatever they were doing (and some claimed to have been sleeping), hightail it to Alvarado Street, and start searching the bungalow.

When Peavey arrived that morning, according to his own testimony to investigating officers, the front door of the bungalow was locked—another “fact” that contradicted many published accounts. And since the front door locked itself automatically whether it was shut from the inside or the outside, and all other doors and windows were sealed from the inside, the police knew that the killer had exited through the front door.

Peavey entered the bungalow, found Taylor’s body in the living room, and immediately ran into the courtyard screaming for help. The first bungalow resident to hear him was E. C. Jessurun, the bungalow court’s owner. He followed Peavey into the bungalow and saw the body. Soon they were joined by Douglas MacLean, who lived in the bungalow at a right angle to Taylor’s, facing Alvarado Street.

The description these three men gave of Taylor’s body matched perfectly the description given by the first police officer on the scene—but it differed significantly from several subsequent newspaper accounts. Taylor was lying on his back, head to the east and feet to the west, with one arm outstretched and the other beside his chest. His left leg lay six inches under a standing desk chair. His right was pushed up against a rug, folding over a corner of the rug. Blood had dribbled from Taylor’s nose, coagulated on his cheek, and stained the carpet beside him. What happened, Vidor wondered, to the perfectly laid-out corpse that had become accepted as one of the case’s most mysterious “truths”?

The police reported no evidence of a struggle. From the body’s position, as well as the position of the desk chair and bloodstains on the rug, police ascertained that Taylor had been shot while standing and facing the east.

Within five minutes of the body’s discovery, Jessurun used Taylor’s phone to call the police. Then MacLean used the same phone to call the studio. Later, before police arrived, Taylor’s chauffeur, Howard Fellows, also called the studio from the phone. Police had no reason to believe that any of these men suspected at that time that Taylor had been murdered.

Only one studio employee who arrived at the bungalow before the police seemed to have been questioned. Harry Fellows, assistant director and brother of Taylor’s chauffeur, testified that he and others, including Julia Crawford Ivers and Jimmie Van Trees, entered the bungalow sometime between 7:35 and 7:50 A.M., and on orders from the studio (orders later corroborated by Charles Eyton) conducted a search for anything that might reflect negatively on Taylor or the studio. They removed from the bungalow bottles of bootleg liquor and a large number of letters from Mabel Normand, Mary Miles Minter, Neva Gerber, Claire Windsor, and Daisy Deane Tanner. Five days after the murder, police demanded that the letters be turned over to them, and in a private meeting Charles Eyton personally showed them to District Attorney Woolwine. The letters were not mentioned again in the files.

From the fact that only Harry Fellows and, privately, Charles Eyton were questioned from among the studio employees involved, Vidor assumed that the police saw little reason to interrogate the others. Still, the fact that Julia Crawford Ivers, Jimmie Van Trees, and at least one other unidentified studio employee were never questioned at all in a murder case that had never been solved struck Vidor as odd.

The man who identified himself as a doctor apparently arrived at the same time as the studio employees, made his cursory examination of the body, stated his diagnosis of Taylor’s having suffered a stomach hemorrhage, and disappeared. No one other than Harry Fellows could even describe the man, and even Fellows, who observed the man in action, said nothing of his emptying Taylor’s pockets or picking up a silk handkerchief anywhere near the body.

Detective Tom Ziegler arrived at the bungalow from the L.A.P.D.’s Wilshire Station at a minute or two before eight. Immediately following him was Charles Eyton. Ziegler was met at the door by Jessurun. Inside, he briefly inspected the body, took a statement from Henry Peavey, and ushered everyone outside. From this moment, the only persons permitted inside the bungalow in any nonofficial capacity were the MacLeans, the Fellows brothers, Henry Peavey, E. C. Jessurun, and Charles Eyton.

Ziegler called the coroner to pick up the body, then took statements from those present. Everyone assumed that Taylor had died of natural causes, though Ziegler did note two things that struck him as peculiar. One was the “shot” or “explosion” that the MacLeans and others claimed to have heard the night before. The other was the fact that Charles Eyton had disappeared upstairs while someone else was being questioned. Asked about this later, he said he was making a last-minute search for any incriminating love letters that might not have been found during the previous search. He said he found some and stuffed them into his pockets.

At about 9:20 A.M., Detective Ray Cato arrived with the deputy coroner. Ziegler had already written the words “natural causes” in the cause-of-death space of his preliminary report when the coroner turned Taylor’s body over and discovered the pool of blood beneath it, and the bullet hole in Taylor’s back. The body was immediately set back on the floor, and sketches were made. A routine death investigation had turned into a murder case. Other officers were called. By 10:20, the body was removed to the morgue, the bungalow sealed off to all non-police visitors, and word was leaking out that Taylor had been murdered.

A search of Taylor’s pockets and body turned up a platinum wristwatch, a gold pocket watch, and a diamond ring. The police files contained no mention of a collection of mysterious “keys without locks”—another peculiar specific whose origin, since it obviously didn’t come from the police, Vidor could only wonder about. The watches, ring, and wallet found in a nearby desk drawer containing $78.20 caused police to rule out robbery as the motive for the killing.

Taylor’s body was delivered to the Ivy Overholtzer Mortuary, where an autopsy was performed immediately. The autopsy report, filed later that day by Dr. A. F. Wagner, stated that Taylor was shot in the back, six and a half inches below his left arm pit. The bullet passed through his lungs and came to a stop just beneath the skin in his lower neck. Ballistics expert Spencer Moxely reported that the bullet was made of lead, weighed 144.83 grains, carried five land marks, and was fired, in all probability, by a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver, the rifling of which was in fair condition. Though there was no indication that the bullet or the pistol was of an “ancient” or “old” variety as had been popularly reported, the press correctly stated that the bullet holes in Taylor’s jacket and vest did not line up. Taylor had had at least one arm raised when he was shot.

By noon the bungalow complex was swarming with detectives. Captain David Adams of the Central Station was put in charge of the case. He dispatched two detectives, Murphy and Cahill, to question Mabel Normand about the meeting that witnesses, notably the MacLeans, said she had had with Taylor the previous night.

In Taylor’s bedroom, a pink nightgown was found, embroidered with the initials M.M.M., as well as a signed photograph of Mary Miles Minter. Here was one detail that jibed with newspaper accounts.