A Cast of Killers (4 page)

4

On Monday, December 19, 1966, Vidor cruised Fifth and Flower streets looking for free parking. After twenty minutes, he pulled into a pay lot, twenty-five cents an hour. He hadn’t always been so tight with a dollar. Three marriages and two settlements had that effect on some men.

Thelma Carr met him at the south entrance of the Los Angeles Public Library, and together they walked through the wide tile hallway to the Newspaper Annex. The librarian expected him. She knew him by reputation, and she had a note from upstairs in front of her on the desk saying Vidor was to be given special access to anything the library had.

A long oak table had been set aside, stacked with canvas-bound volumes of the New York and Los Angeles newspapers, maps, and a rare 1920s telephone directory. Vidor brought the number-two pencils, a pair of sharpeners, antacid tablets, and tissues. Carr brought the lunch, ham on rye.

Vidor had read about the seventy-eight dollars found on Taylor’s body, his two-carat diamond ring, and the platinum wristwatch. What surprised him were all the variations on the rest. This was shoddy reporting at an all-time low.

Some published reports failed to mention the set of mysterious keys that fit no locks; others presented this as fact, speculating that Taylor led a double life, his keys fitting the ignition of a sports car no one knew about, an apartment where a second wife lived, or a hidden trunk where the answers to all the Taylor mysteries sat like the contents of Pandora’s box.

Such was also the case of the handkerchief said to have been found beside the body. Many accounts failed to mention it at all, while others claimed it was monogrammed with the letter S and removed by the “doctor.” Still others claimed that Taylor owned a matching set of them, offering no explanation of why the director’s own initial wasn’t on them.

Reporters agreed on Taylor’s financial profile. Taylor’s partially completed tax return showed $37,000 income in 1921. Taylor’s accounts at the First National Bank of Los Angeles revealed that he had saved only six thousand dollars in his lifetime. A second account, in New York, contained only $18.96, after initial deposits totaling $7,811.52. Though reports varied on the exact amount, Taylor was said to have withdrawn around $2,500 in cash from his Los Angeles account on January 31, the day before the murder, and redeposited the same sum, or a figure very close to it, back into the account the day of his murder. But even this couldn’t be taken as fact. A follow-up report in the Los Angeles
Examiner
stated that Taylor had not withdrawn then redeposited the money.

Despite the varying reports, the police—and in turn, reporters—claimed blackmail and pointed to Edward Sands as the most viable candidate, as evidenced by the fact that Sands had cashed some of the checks found on Taylor’s desk, and others that he had forged. The generally accepted theory was that Sands knew about Taylor’s secret past and used this information to bleed his employer until Taylor turned on him.

The police had made the connection after the second robbery at Taylor’s bungalow, when the thief, whose handwriting matched that of Edward Sands, wrote the director a mysterious letter signed, “Alias Jimmy Valentine”—a reference to the burglar in a popular play. The letter read: “Sorry to inconvenience you, even temporarily. Also observe the lesson of the forced sale of assets. A Merry Xmas and Happy New Year.” Enclosed in this letter were two pawn-tickets for the stolen jewelry and other goods. The claim tickets were listed under the name William Deane Tanner, not William Desmond Taylor.

Reporters also agreed Taylor was a drinker. Police found a cocktail shaker and two large goblets with traces of orange pulp and gin in the dining room. A full liquor cabinet was well stocked with whiskey, bourbon, gin, and vodka. Prohibition aside, this evidence was important because police were said to have known that Taylor had recently been fighting with his bootlegger. No details were released to the press, but it was generally assumed by all the major papers that the bootlegger may have been angry enough to pull the trigger. Though reports indicated police knew who the bootlegger was, no arrest was made.

In the same room as the liquor cabinet, police were said to have found an ashtray with cigarette butts. Outside, behind the back door leading to the pantry, more cigarette butts had been found, along with footprints. Again, no details were released to the press, firing more speculation: Taylor smoked, but so did Edward Sands, Mabel Normand, Henry Peavey, and Mary Miles Minter’s mother, Charlotte Shelby.

Much was also made of the letters written by Normand and Minter. On February 7, 1922, a reporter from the Los Angeles
Times
stated that he believed a man of high position in the film industry had taken Normand’s letters and others in an effort to protect Normand’s reputation and those of others in whom he had a vested interest. For legal reasons his name was not initially mentioned, though Charles Eyton, studio manager of Paramount, was considered the number-one suspect. Inexplicably, Normand’s letters, not found when Taylor’s house was first searched, showed up in a locked upstairs closet days later. If Eyton had replaced them, the press had not been told. Like the others at the bungalow on the morning of the murder, Eyton was under police orders not to speak with reporters.

District Attorney Thomas Woolwine, head of the investigation from 1922 to 1923, announced that he had read the letters and that they contained nothing helpful to their investigation; he had returned them to Normand. Their contents were never made public, and Normand was officially exonerated when her chauffeur and maid provided alibis.

Normand, however, remained a suspect in the eyes of the press. Though she clung to her account that she had visited the director the night of the murder, had spoken and shared peanuts with him, she denied any involvement in his slaying and denied being at the bungalow looking for her letters when police discovered the murder. She told reporters that she returned to the bungalow days after the murder, at the investigator’s request, to identify the exact location of furniture possibly shifted by the killer. Retrieving her correspondence, she claimed, was an afterthought. Investigators neither supported nor denied her claims.

It was obvious that Normand and Taylor probably chatted about more than books. Less than a year later, both Normand and Edna Purviance were linked to a second shooting, again involving drugs and liquor, which suggested that these ingredients, not literature and peanuts, might have led to the Taylor murder.

At about the same time that Normand’s letters appeared, so did Minter’s, and these did find their way to the press. The first one found was a scented note on purple butterfly stationery that reportedly dropped from between the pages of one of Taylor’s books,
White Stains,
a scandalous book by black-magic proponent Aleister Crowley:

Between the last “I love you” and the bottom were ten Xes.

Other letters from Minter, hidden in one of Taylor’s riding boots, were reported to have been written in a simple schoolgirl code of straight lines and dots. One, deciphered, read:

Press accounts differed widely concerning Minter’s silk nightgown. Some stated quite bluntly that it was an expensive frilly pink one, embroidered with the initials M.M.M., and found in the top drawer of Taylor’s bureau. Other accounts claimed the nightgown was just one of many, all belonging to Minter. The
Herald-American
even claimed that the nightgown had been found along with hundreds of pairs of frilly pink panties, each labeled with the owner’s initials and a date.

Minter denied ownership of the nightgown, as she denied any involvement in the murder. When interviewed, she said she had been at home on the night of the murder, reading a book aloud to her sister, grandmother, and mother. One report claimed her to be at her at her forty-room mansion, Casa de Margarita; Minter herself said she was in her more modest but still luxurious home on Hobart Avenue, where she and her family were living while renovations took place at Casa de Margarita.

How well she had known Taylor was never a question; the frilly pink nightgown and her love letters attested to that. It was the rest that reporters wanted to know: were the rumors true that her mother owned a .38-caliber pistol, that she was jealous of her daughter’s attentions to older men, and had been seen threatening them?

As with Normand, Minter’s denials didn’t satisfy the press. Rumors persisted even years later after Mary, in a long court battle filled with mutual recriminations, successfully sued her mother for money her mother had managed for her. In the late 1930s, Minter and her mother, fed up with insinuations about them, demanded that the police reveal any evidence connecting them with the Taylor murder. None was forthcoming, and Los Angeles District Attorney, Buron Fitts, announced that his investigation was over. Still the rumors continued. If police had never had the Minter family pistol, or the Minter nightgown, why hadn’t the public been told back in 1922, before Minter’s career was killed, along with her favorite director?

The pornographic photographs were as difficult to trace through the newspaper accounts as Minter’s nightgown. Early accounts didn’t mention them at all. One later, highly-suspect account, stated that the photographs did in fact exist, and that Edward Sands was the photographer who captured his employer on film with famous actresses. More reliable reports claimed that the only photographs found were tasteful, signed portraits of actresses Taylor had directed. Official police spokesmen neither confirmed nor denied any of these accounts, merely claiming it was in the best interests of their investigation that the truth not be made public until arrests were made.

As Vidor read more, he began to notice that, though no drugs had been reported found in Taylor’s bungalow, they were mentioned in many of the later articles. One report said Taylor was a pusher, another just an innocent by-stander. Both stories were based on statements by Assistant U.S. District Attorney Tom Green, who claimed that Taylor came to his office in 1920 with stories of a dope ring operating out of one of the studios. Green went on to claim that the director told him a certain prominent actress was buying upwards of two thousand dollars worth of narcotics from them every week. Taylor urged Green to ask federal authorities to undertake a war on dope in Hollywood. Other story sources were based on supposed eyewitness accounts of Taylor’s haggling with a known pusher. All the reports stated that police had begun a war on dope traffic in the studios, but none claimed any arrests had ever been made.

By the end of 1923, over a year after the murder, the District Attorney’s Office had over three hundred suspects and confessions in the Taylor case, and they were still coming in, sometimes as many as ten a week. But still no convictions.

One of the most promising leads came from a rancher living near Santa Ana, some forty-five miles south of Los Angeles. The rancher claimed that shortly before the murder, he had picked up two tough-looking hitchhikers who said that they had served in the Canadian Army under a captain they called “Bill,” a man they said had been responsible for their being “sent up.” The rancher thought nothing of the story until one of the hitchhikers dropped a .38-caliber revolver onto the floor of his Ford pickup.

Another story, recounted in a letter to police from a former British Army officer, described a meeting the officer had had with Taylor in a London hotel in 1918. Taylor and the officer were seated in a hotel dining room when an unidentified individual in a Canadian Army uniform crossed the room. Taylor told the officer, “There goes a man who is going to get me if it takes a thousand years to do it.” The man appeared to resemble one of several descriptions given by Faith MacLean, and the rancher’s gun-toting hitchhiker as well.

Shortly after the police took the rancher’s testimony, a man fitting his description was arrested in Mexicali. The rancher identified him as one of the hitchhikers. The suspect, Walter Kirby, was reported to have worked as a chauffeur in Los Angeles, possibly for Taylor.

The facts about Kirby looked suspicious. Along with fitting the suspect’s description, he was reported, in one account, to have been wearing a brown cap at the time of his arrest, the same kind MacLean’s stranger wore. A search of his room uncovered a pair of Army breeches and several .38-caliber bullets. In this same report, by his own admission he had served in the Canadian Army under Bill Taylor. Then, within twenty-four hours of his arrest, Kirby produced an airtight alibi, and the Santa Ana rancher who had positively identified him suddenly changed his mind.

Kirby was released from custody, but not from the news. A friend of his told police that Kirby was a notorious drug addict, and that someone was after him and would “end him quick.” In May 1922, Kirby was alleged to have been found dead in the swamps of New River, west of Calexico, in the Imperial Valley. Journalists posed a question that police were not able to answer: had Kirby actually died of exposure, as some accounts claimed, or had he died of a forced lethal overdose of drugs?

Inexplicably, that same month, the same Walter Kirby, along with five others, were reported to have been arrested for the Taylor murder. The men were being held principally on the strength of information given by a woman who claimed that she overheard the men threaten Taylor with his life the night before his murder. She said the men operated a bootlegging outfit that had sold liquor to Taylor and many of his friends. Their threat had terminated an argument with Taylor. During the arrest, detectives seized what they called a “quantity of evidence” but provided no specifics. The only other information given the press was that two of the suspects had recently arrived in Los Angeles from Chicago, where they had reputations as hired gunmen.