Crane (20 page)

Upon closer inspection, investigators noticed two almost parallel gashes slightly above and behind the left ear. Blood droplets fanned the ceiling, the wall at the head of the bed, and the nightstand lamp. There was human tissue on the wall. The bedsheet and pillowcase were soaked with blood. There was a brief trail of blood indicating that the weapon had possibly been wiped toward the foot of the sheet. The blood flow originating from the two gashes by the left ear cascaded across the body’s face, resembling a Rorschach test or a map of some untraveled territory. The head’s thick, graying hair was matted. There were dried bloodlines weaving across the shoulders and back as if the person had lain down naked in a field of tumbleweed. There was semen or a sexual-aid gel on the left thigh. Later, at the autopsy, Scottsdale Police Department detective Dennis Borkenhagen asked the assistant to the medical examiner, Eloy Ysasi, to collect the specimen, only to be told, “What’s that going to tell you besides he had a piece of ass?”

The medical examiner, Dr. Heinz Karnitschnig, locally referred to as Dr. K, had, in an unorthodox manner, begun his preautopsy at the crime
scene, shaving a portion of the head around the strike zone (in the process other hairs on the bed mixed with the decedent’s), cutting the electrical cord and a portion of the sheet where the presumed weapon had been wiped, and examining a flaky substance resembling semen in the groin area. Technician Ernie Cole caught all of this out-of-the-ordinary behavior on videotape. It could have been titled
How Not to Process a Crime Scene.
When the police established that the apartment was rented by the Windmill Dinner Theatre, the theater’s manager, Ed Beck, was called in to ID the body. Beck told investigators, “There was no way I could identify him from one side; the other side—yes.”

Later, Lieutenant Ron Dean of the Scottsdale Police Department spoke to the assembling members of the press outside the crime scene and updated them in vague terms. He was followed by Dr. Karnitschnig and his assistant Eloy Ysasi; the latter, in a terrible breach of protocol, mentioned the electrical cord that had been placed around the victim’s neck. Later, Dean identified that bit of unprofessional disclosure as ground zero in the blossoming distrust between the police, medical, and legal departments assigned to the case. On average two murders a year occurred in Scottsdale, which didn’t help matters. The Scottsdale Police Department even lacked a separate homicide unit.

The only name the Scottsdale Police Department divulged to the press was that of one John Henry Carpenter. Dean and Borkenhagen theorized that their prime suspect, Carpenter, unable to handle the bad news that my dad was making changes in his life, had blown his “short fuse” and made some changes of his own—he killed his best friend. Charles Hyder, presiding over the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office at the time of my dad’s murder, felt it was premature to mention anyone as a suspect or even a person of interest.

The police refrained from discussing matters they’d screwed up, like not searching Carpenter’s room at the Sunburst Motel in a timely fashion. They had let too many hours pass after Carpenter’s hasty departure the morning of the murder, time for the maids to deploy their solvents and vacuum cleaners on all the awaiting fabric in the room. That Carpenter was even staying at the Sunburst stood out as odd from the beginning. Witnesses of the Crane/Carpenter dynamic, like Patti, frequent
Beginner’s Luck
actress Ronnie Richards, and I, knew that when he was on the road Carpenter always settled into my dad’s hotel suite or apartment for a few days of R & R in Cincinnati, Dallas, or Scottsdale, to name just a few of
the cities where they frolicked. Carpenter didn’t go into his own pocket for accommodation if he didn’t have to.

The SPD continued giving Hyder agita by discussing possible murder weapons with the press. Blunt instruments of destruction—tire irons, golf clubs, fireplace pokers—were mentioned. The police also leaked information about one of the crime scene’s only missing items, an album containing Polaroids of women displaying their bodies for Dr. Land’s invention.

The police investigators maintained that my dad had had two tripods set up in the apartment’s living room for video, still, and, possibly, eight-millimeter cameras, to photograph posing Playmate wannabes and close encounters of the cocktail waitress kind. Only one tripod was found at the murder scene, and it was not the weapon used in the crime. A Phoenix Police Department criminologist inspected a bedsheet from the crime scene and figured that a bloody mark on it had been made by a tripod, not a tire iron, golf club, or fireplace poker.

In the days following the killing, a thin, three-inch smear of blood was collected from the padding near the top of the passenger door of Carpenter’s Chrysler Cordoba rental. A lab determined the blood sample was type B, my dad’s blood type, which only one in seven people have. Carpenter was not one of those seven. Police also determined that no one had bled in the car. In addition, a one-sixteenth-inch speck of fatty tissue or brain matter was also visible on the same door panel near the blood sample. With today’s forensics the case would likely have been solved in less than twenty-four hours, and it probably would have been “Turn out the lights, the party’s over” for John Henry Carpenter.

Police interviews with family, friends, coworkers, and business associates began in earnest. I was interviewed that summer by Borkenhagen and Dean of the Scottsdale Police Department, Larry Turoff and Ron Little of the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, and by the DA himself, Charles Hyder. Hyder called me on the phone at my apartment in Los Angeles. He asked, “Excluding Mr. Carpenter for the time being, do you know of anybody that might have had a motive to kill your dad?”

My reply, recorded in police transcripts, was immediate. “Patti, my stepmom, because of their [Patti and dad’s] situation … the will … is clearly one sided and cuts everybody else out of the thing except her. And according to Carpenter, Patti and my dad had a fight on the telephone at approximately eleven o’clock the night before the murder, and it would not be unlike Patti to fly into Phoenix unannounced. Or, any city unannounced.
She had just flown into Phoenix two weeks before his death unannounced.”

That thread of Patti’s spontaneous appearances was picked up by Maricopa County deputy attorney Turoff during an interview he conducted shortly thereafter in the Beverly Hills office of Lloyd Vaughn with Vaughn, Bill Goldstein, Chuck, and me. The married Vaughn mostly kept mum on the subject of the second Mrs. Crane, since he was the only one at that table who had spent many evenings squiring her around town.

“Some years earlier didn’t Patti come in cold turkey to California [from another vacation in Seattle], too?” Turoff asked the group.

Goldstein, talking to me, said, “Remember when your dad was here [Los Angeles], and Patti found out that he left your sister Karen at the Tilden house unsupervised?” He turned to address Turoff and continued, “Patti was in Seattle, jumped on a plane, flew down here. Hung out in town for two days, and then went to the house and confronted Bob.”

Turoff was a bit baffled. “She hightailed it here from Seattle in the middle of the night, and then didn’t confront him immediately?” he asked.

“No, she waited,” Goldstein replied. “She was hanging around town for two days.” Goldstein was trying to illustrate to Turoff the cunning and calculating nature of Patricia Crane.

I added, “Our family was divided in two halves. Patti hated my grandmother, my dad’s mom. She hated my two sisters. She accused my older sister [Debbie] of streetwalking in Westwood. She accused Karen of breaking Scotty’s arm three or four years ago. Patti also accused Karen of sleeping with my father. Patti is insanely jealous of other females.” I continued my mini-rant: “I just recently found out about my dad’s will. It’s totally one-sided in favor of Patti, Melissa, her daughter, and Scotty, my half-brother.”

“When was this will made?” Turoff asked.

“The main portion of the will was done in January ’75,” I said, “but the codicil, which completely cut my two sisters and me out of any kind of inheritance, was done shortly before the murder.”

“Who drew up the will?” Turoff followed up.

I looked at Lloyd Vaughn, who sat grim and poker faced. “Lloyd did,” I said, continuing, “Patti saw the end in sight. My dad was not going to get back with her; he had in fact bought a house of his own. He had asked me if I wanted to move in with him again in the new house in
Sherman Oaks. I told my dad he was a slave in terms of his own marriage. He was the one making all the money. Patti never worked again after
Hogan’s Heroes
.”

Turoff was turning off. I could tell he wasn’t really listening to what I was saying. He said, “We need to wind it up; we’ve got another appointment.”

But I wasn’t quite finished. “Look,” I said. “My dad, from everything I could tell in the last couple of months was a new guy, optimistic, new directions, just didn’t want to be part of that whole kind of slavery trip that he had been into in terms of Patti running the show. The other thing was that according to Carpenter, my dad called Patti in the Seattle area [Bainbridge Island] on the final night at eleven—”

Turoff interrupted, “Yeah, we know about that. We’re starting to run a little short on time and we have another interview.”

I just kept talking, “They were on the phone, and got into a big argument. They hung up. Patti tried to call him back later, according to what she told me, but there was no answer. Carpenter, who had been in the other room listening to the argument, and my dad had left the apartment. It’s conceivable to me that she would, she could, hop on a jet and fly into Phoenix—it only takes two and a half hours—knocks on the door. My dad answers. They either make it or they don’t. He knows her obviously, and eventually he goes to sleep. She gets up and lets him have it. There’s really nothing at this point to be lost, and a lot to be gained financially.”

Chuck added his two cents. “One other time we [Dad and Chuck] had talked about burglaries and Bob related a situation, it may have been in Chicago, where Bobby and Karen were with him, and someone had come into the room and rifled their wallets and taken some money. As a result of that incident he always locked his doors.”

“Again, and this is according to Carpenter,” I added, “my dad positively dead bolted the front door every time. I assume the person at the door he readily let in. It was obviously somebody he was comfortable with.”

Turoff and Little packed up their gear and left us then, but reconvened the meeting a day or two later with more questions. They wanted to know if Bill Goldstein had contacted Patti after initially hearing about the incident involving my dad.

Goldstein told him, “Immediately upon getting my call from Lloyd
Vaughn that there was a rumor out that something is going on at Bob’s apartment [in Scottsdale], I felt that it was important to call her [Patti’s] attorney.”

“Now this was between 3:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. on the day of the murder?” Turoff asked.

“It was between 3:30 and 4:30,” Vaughn volunteered.

Goldstein elaborated. “I know for a fact he [Patti’s attorney] couldn’t reach her right away. He finally did, but it was substantially later. She was not to be found, though she did finally get back to him after 7:30 that night.”

I chimed in, “Don’t forget that Patti had dropped into town [Scottsdale] a couple of weeks before the death, so obviously her fingerprints are going to be there. She knows where the apartment is. In past history, my dad had told me she had hit him with coffee cups, drinking glasses. She threw a videotape box at him once, hitting him in the lip, and opening a big cut.”

Ron Little asked me, “When was the last time you spoke to your father previous to his death?”

“I spoke with him on my birthday, Tuesday, June 27th.”

“Did he indicate who was with him?”

“Yes, John Carpenter.”

“Did he say when John had come into Phoenix?”

“He had in a previous phone conversation the week before. He said Carpenter would be coming into town, I believe, on that Saturday, which was the 24th.”

“What percentage of time would Carpenter actually live in the same apartment that your father did?”

“I assumed it was a hundred percent of the time,” I said. “Every time my dad called me, and Carpenter was in town with him it always seemed to me that Carpenter was in the background.”

“Were you ever specifically told that by either your father or by Carpenter?”

“I was told that by my father.”

Bill Goldstein added, “I asked that same question of Patti, and she said to the best of her knowledge Carpenter always did stay with Bob.”

“Know any reason why Carpenter had rented the hotel room at the Sunburst?” Turoff asked.

“I didn’t even know that he had rented a motel room,” I responded. “I just assumed he was staying with my dad.”

Turoff continued, “Your father never indicated to you that they had an argument of any type, so that he told him to get out or you can’t stay with me or anything like that?”

“There was an indication before Phoenix,” I told him. “In a conversation I had with my dad regarding Carpenter coming into town, he said that Carpenter was getting to be a pain in the ass. He said he just didn’t need Carpenter hanging around him anymore.”

Then Turoff subtly put the spotlight on me, asking, “Now Bobby, I saw you the Sunday after your father was killed, right?”

“It was Friday,” Goldstein corrected.

“It would have been the 30th,” Ron Little added.

“You had just come in from L.A., I gather,” Turoff continued.

“We had come in Thursday night,” I said.

“Were you in L.A. Thursday morning?” Turoff asked.

“Yes.”

“And Wednesday evening?”

“Yes.”

“Where were you?”

“I was at the apartment on Midvale.” Had I become a suspect? I wondered. “I was home all that week up until Thursday night transcribing an interview with Chevy Chase because I had an assignment with a magazine.”

Turoff continued, “We know your dad was alive somewhere in the early morning about 2:00 a.m. He was killed somewhere between 2:00 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. on the 29th. Where were you at that time?”