The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (62 page)

There was much gossip around Hollywood as to those initials, and we find Miss Normand referring to the nightgown in the press as having initials on it. But the issue is confused by the manner in which the authorities shrug the matter off. As one of the papers said: “Little importance was attached to the pink silk nightgown found in the director’s apartments. This, it was learned, had been laundered only once or twice and bore no initials or other marks by which its ownership might be determined.”

Despite the fact that William Desmond Taylor was drawing an excellent salary, his money seemed to disappear into thin air. His bank accounts melted away as by magic.

On 31 January he is asserted to have gone to the bank and drawn $2,500 in cash. And then the following day, the day of his death, he had reappeared at the bank and deposited $2,500 in cash. No explanations offered, no subsequent reason found by the police. Apparently on 31 January he had felt he would need $2,500 in cash. The next day the need had passed and the money was returned to the bank. However, later on, after this withdrawal and deposit have been accepted as a fact in the case (and apparently the report originated from the public administrator who had taken charge of Taylor’s property after his death and certainly should have known), we are to find a sudden flurry of explanations and alibis. Taylor, it seems, was going to buy some diamonds. So, quite naturally, he went to the bank and withdrew this money. Then he changed his mind about the diamonds and so redeposited the money. Simple, just like that. Then, some two weeks after the murder, there is another puzzling statement to account for this mysterious withdrawal and deposit. This one really should win a prize. On 15 February the newspapers blandly asserted that although it had been stated that Taylor withdrew $2500 from the First National Bank on 31 January and made a deposit of that sum, or of $2,350, on 1 February, it had been disclosed the day before (evidently 14 February) that he had not withdrawn any large sum from the bank within the last two weeks before his death.

Now you see it and now you don’t. These peculiar “reports” and the charming naïveté of the police—a whole two weeks. Tut, tut!

On 6 February, Miss Normand is reported as having said that when she visited Taylor on the night of the murder, Peavey answered her ring at the doorbell and told her Mr Taylor was telephoning. Not wanting to interrupt, Mabel Normand waited outside. When Taylor heard her voice, however, he hurriedly cut off his phone call and rushed to her.

Now notice what Miss Normand is reported to have said at that time about that telephone conversation. “If there is a possibility that the jealousy of another woman enters into the mystery, I feel certain that the phone call which he was receiving as I entered his apartment had something to do with it. Whoever it was calling him seemed intensely absorbed in what he had to say.”

Naturally the question arises, How did Mabel Normand know this person had called Taylor instead of Taylor having been the one to place the call? How could Mabel Normand, entering the room, and seeing Taylor hastily terminating a telephone conversation, know that the person at the other end of the line was intensely absorbed in what Taylor had to say?

Did Taylor tell her about this call during the visit which followed when he and Miss Normand were sitting there alone? Did Miss Normand’s naïve statement show that she knew a great deal more about that call than she told police? It is an interesting field for speculation.

Let us digress at this point for just a moment to mention an article which appeared in the 1 February 1929, issue of
Liberty
in which Mr Sidney Sutherland, the author, states that he had talked with Mabel Normand the year before (apparently 1928) about the Taylor murder. And at the time of this conversation she is reported to have said, “When I reached Bill’s open door, I heard a voice inside; he was using the telephone. So I walked around the flower beds a few minutes until he had quit talking and hung up. Then I rang his bell. He came to the door, smiled, and held out both hands. ‘Hello, Mabel darling,’ he said. ‘I know what you’ve come for—two books I’ve just got for you.’ ”

Sometime after that fatal night, one of Taylor’s friends was to express it as his opinion that he was the one with whom Taylor was talking on the telephone at the time Mabel Normand arrived. But a cautious reader, thinking over those several statements of Miss Normand’s, will wonder what Taylor said to her about that telephone conversation during the period when they were seated side by side on the davenport sipping their cocktails. And why did Miss Normand apparently try to point out to the police the possible significance of that telephone conversation?

Moreover, William Desmond Taylor had been the victim of mysterious burglaries. In fact, only some two weeks before his death his place had been burglarized and someone had stolen some jewellery, also a large number of specially made cigarettes which the director had had tailored to his individual taste. Then pawn tickets
in the name of William Deane Tanner
had been placed in an envelope and mailed to William Desmond Taylor so that he could, by using his right name and paying the amount of the loan, redeem the jewellery which had been stolen from him.

Some six months or so prior to his death, Taylor had returned from a trip abroad and had accused his secretary, a man by the name of E. F. Sands, of forgery. Apparently the charge was that while Taylor was abroad, Sands had forged checks, charged bills for expensive lingerie and women’s clothing and had generally looted the apartment. At about this time Sands disappeared, vanishing into thin air, and has never since been located by the police although every effort has been made to find him.

Keep this man, Sands, in mind. On 10 February, newspapers asserted that a Denver man who “asked that his name be withheld” declared that Sands was none other than Taylor’s brother! This man was reported to have known both brothers well. Sands, it seems, was engaged to a beautiful girl and the older brother won the love of that girl. Years later the younger brother entered the office of this mysterious informant and tried to find out about the whereabouts of the older brother. This mysterious informant is reported to have said, “I will stake my life that when Sands is caught the mystery of Taylor’s murder will be cleared up and a number of events and elements in the man’s life which now seem obscure will be made plain. Revenge is the motive behind the murder of William Desmond Taylor.”

Mabel Normand’s testimony at the inquest, as reported in the
Los Angeles Times
of 3 February, and which purports to give the gist of her statement, is that a certain “Edward Knoblock had Mr Taylor’s house while Mr Taylor was in Europe last summer, and that Mr Taylor had Mr Knoblock’s London house. Sands apparently stayed right along in Mr Taylor’s service in Los Angeles, and also assisted Mr Knoblock. Two or three days before Mr Taylor was to arrive from London, Sands told Mr Knoblock that he thought he would take two or three days leave of absence, but would be back again Sunday. He never showed up again. When Mr Taylor arrived from London, he said he found that Sands had stolen everything, had forged his name to checks and had gone to Hamburgers and bought lingerie . . . A few weeks ago Mr Taylor’s house was robbed again. Then from Stockton he kept getting anonymous letters, and he received a pawnbroker’s ticket, showing that things had been pawned in the name of a Mrs Tennant, who is Mr Taylor’s sister-in-law. The way Mr Taylor knew it was really Sands was because he had always spelled Mrs Tennant’s name wrong, and the wrong spelling was on the ticket. Mr Taylor knew that Sands wasn’t out of California by this fact.”

Apparently there is some confusion about the name on these pawn tickets. This may have been due to the fact that there were several pawn tickets and more than one burglary. In the 1936 interview previously referred to, Captain Winn is authority for the statement that at Fresno on the record of a pawnshop where the names of all borrowers were kept, there appeared “in handwriting that was readily identified by experts as that of Edward Sands, the name of ‘William Deane Tanner.’ ”

There is evidence that William Desmond Taylor felt very bitter toward his former secretary. Apparently when Taylor was asked by the police whether he would be willing to go to the trouble of having Sands extradited from another state, Taylor replied, “I would go to any trouble or expense to extradite him not only from a neighbouring state but from any country in the world. All I want is five minutes alone with him.”

In the
Examiner
of 4 February, Claire Windsor recalled a conversation she had had with Mr Taylor about a week before his death. Apparently that was only about a week after the mysterious burglary of Taylor’s house. And according to Miss Windsor, Taylor had said, “If I ever lay my hands on Sands I will kill him.”

There were, of course, the usual reports and rumours. Sands was reported to have been arrested in various parts of the country; he was called upon by the officials to appear and establish his innocence. He was even offered immunity by the district attorney if he would establish his innocence of the murder of William Desmond Taylor and furnish information which would assist the authorities in locating the actual murderer.

Sands made no move.

Since we have previously mentioned this 1936 newspaper story about Captain Winn’s impression of the case, we may as well incorporate some other things which were in that interview. For instance, Captain Winn’s statement, “From another source, a source that even now I do not wish to reveal, we learned that Sands, within twenty-four hours of the time of Taylor’s murder, had made the statement: ‘I came back to town to get that – – – Taylor.’ The same person who heard Sands make this rash threat emphatically declared that he again saw Sands—he could not be mistaken in his identification—within a block of the Alvarado court less than an hour before the fatal shot was fired.”

In this interview Captain Winn also takes up the claim that Edward Sands was none other than Dennis Gage Deane Tanner, the mysterious missing brother. “Clear, distinguishable photographs of Sands were virtually nonexistent,” Winn is reported to have declared. “Pictures of Dennis Deane Tanner were even scarcer, one faded print of the man being the only likeness ever turned up. It was hard to say that a similarity existed between the pictures of Sands and the faded print of Dennis Deane Tanner. But it was as hard to say they were dissimilar.

. . . Our investigation revealed that William Deane Tanner had made no less than three trips to Alaska in quest of gold, and that, on at least one of these trips, his brother, Dennis, accompanied him.”

A peculiar conflict developed in connection with the testimony of William Davis, Mabel Normand’s chauffeur. A moving-picture machinist, George F. Arto, insisted that either on the night of the murder or on the preceding night he saw Peavey talking to some man in the alley back of Taylor’s house. Two days after that statement, Arto was reported to have said that on the night of the murder a man other than Davis was talking with Peavey in front of the court where Taylor lived. Davis, Arto is reported to have said, was sitting in his (presumably Mabel Normand’s) car at the time. Davis and Peavey both denied this. For a time newspapers mentioned this conflict in the stories of witnesses, then seem to have let it drift into oblivion.

This was during a period of relative normalcy as far as the case is concerned. For a few days one could read the newspaper reports and forget that he was dealing with anything other than the usual mysterious murder. The Alice-in-Wonderland quality was apparently all finished.

Then of a sudden the whole case skyrocketed once more into fantasy.

There entered into the picture a motion-picture executive who told a story that could well have graced one of the pictures of the time.

It seems this person had employed Taylor some years before, and that during that time Taylor had told him of having been imprisoned in England for three years. Taylor was perfectly blameless. He had, it seems, been arrested while holding money in his hand which he wanted a woman to put back in the safe. The husband of this woman unexpectedly appeared upon the scene and accused Taylor of theft; and Taylor, like a gallant gentleman, had kept silent, protecting the good name of the woman at the expense of three years in jail.

There are elaborations of this story, some of them going to the extent of putting together a plot containing a wicked gambler, a scheming husband, a betrayed woman, the gallant Taylor, and at the dramatic moment, Taylor stepping forward to stand between the woman and disgrace, bowing his head in silence and going to jail for three years rather than do anything which would cast a reflection upon the character of the woman. It was typical of the silent drama of the time.

On the 24th, one Tom Green, an assistant United States Attorney, disclosed that Taylor had wanted him to “clean out” a certain place. Taylor, it seems, was protecting a woman from drugs. She was a woman who was paying $2,000 a week for dope.

The newspapers gravely published this story, with no explanation as to why no disclosure had been made earlier.

Two thousand dollars a week was a lot of dope.

Then suddenly came the weirdest development of all. A rancher living near Santa Ana, some forty-five miles from Los Angeles, announced that he had picked up two hitch-hikers, rough characters, who confided to him that they had been in the Canadian Army where they had suffered under the harsh discipline of a captain whom they referred to as “Bill.”

It was at least intimated that this “Bill” had been responsible for one of these men being “sent up.” Both hitch-hikers avowed their intention of “getting” Captain Bill who was living in Los Angeles whither, apparently, they were making their way on a mission of vengeance. One of the hitch-hikers happened to drop a gun. The Santa Ana rancher saw that it was a .38 caliber revolver.