Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood (42 page)

Bushnell was also married, with three children. Rose hadn’t let that inconvenient little detail get in the way of a good time. She let Bushnell show her the town, and in return she showed him a few things herself.

Several months later, after Rose had settled in Los Angeles,
Bushnell wrote asking her to join him in New Orleans for the annual horse races at the Fair Grounds. Bored with her job at Hamburger’s department store, she jumped at the chance. One hundred dollars soon arrived to cover a first-class train ticket and expenses.

Osborn, who hadn’t yet expressed his romantic feelings for his niece, objected to the trip, but Rose brushed him off. She took the train to Beaumont, Texas, where Bushnell had met her. There they’d spent the night at a hotel, registered as man and wife. As an investigator would note prosaically later,
“Bushnell had sexual relations with her there.”

The fun was just beginning. The next night the pair took the train to New Orleans, occupying the lower berth together. Arriving in the Big Easy, they registered at the Gruenwald Hotel as Mr. and Mrs. John L. Bushnell. Rose enjoyed the masquerade. In the basement of the posh hotel was the Cave, a jazz nightclub known for its waterfalls, stalactites, and bootleg gin. Rose danced, drank, and wore pretty clothes. Bushnell took her on a tour of the charming French Quarter, buying her expensive meals and gifts. To Rose, this was living.

When the weekend ended, however, Rose returned to Los Angeles and the monotonous grind of her daily life. That seemed to be the end of Bushnell.

But now her usually possessive uncle and lover was suggesting that Rose write to Bushnell again. Remembering how much money the millionaire had spent on her, Rose happily complied.

Gibby had no millionaire in her sights. But she had something almost as good. If she ever wanted to get
The Web of the Law
out of hock, there was only one option.

She went back to Famous Players and asked Jesse Lasky to put her in another movie.

Remarkably, Lasky agreed.

Just why was anyone’s guess, but in the fall of 1922 Patricia Palmer was cast in a second Famous Players picture, to start shooting in late November. And it wasn’t some low-budget programmer, either.
Mr. Billings Spends His Dime
was set to star box-office champ Wallace Reid, and every picture with Reid was a major release.

With an utterly undistinguished filmography, a record for prostitution, and a desire to form a company that would compete with Famous Players, Gibby should have been a pariah in Lasky’s office. But instead she had now been hired for a second major feature at the biggest, most prestigious studio in the industry.

Gibby seemed to be the absolute luckiest actress in Hollywood.

Making his way to the property room at police headquarters, Eddie King was feeling encouraged. Things were finally proceeding on the Taylor case. The item about the spiritualist had accelerated a very convincing theory, and most of King’s fellow detectives were now convinced that Charlotte Shelby was their culprit. With Mary’s love for the dead man common knowledge, the cops finally had a motive that made sense.

King expected to make an arrest at any time. Even though the “spiritualist” had never made good on the threat to name names, the detective was certain Shelby was desperate enough that she’d tip her hand at some point. So, to prepare the case against her, King and Winn decided to have another look at the physical evidence.

But when they peered around the property room, Taylor’s clothing was gone. His jacket had definitely been there at one point—King had tested the burn marks on it himself—but now the detectives discovered everything had been sent back to the Overholtzer mortuary. How could Woolwine have allowed it? This rose to the level of tampering with evidence.

King and Winn hopped on their motorcycles and arrived at the mortuary just in time. “They were about to burn the clothing,” King would recall, “as it was covered with blood, and they considered it of no value.”

The detectives brought the garments back to the police station.

King had never been allowed a thorough examination of the dead man’s clothes, other than to test the bullet holes. Now that Woolwine was in the final, fevered days of his gubernatorial campaign, King had the freedom to do so.

Inspecting the fabric with the aid of a bright light and a magnifying glass, he made a very interesting discovery under the collar of the coat.

Three long, blond hairs.

Clearly not Taylor’s.

With a tweezer the detective removed the hairs and placed them in a sealed envelope.

Now he just needed to match them to someone’s head.

At the moment, Mary Miles Minter was making a picture at the Famous Players–Lasky studio on Sunset Boulevard. In and out of the busy studio all day long were charwomen and delivery boys, many of them glad to make an extra dollar running errands or doing favors.

Pulling up alongside the studio on his motorcycle, King spotted a good candidate for his errand. With the promise of some cash, he gave a delivery boy instructions to sneak into Mary’s dressing room, pull a few hairs from her hairbrush, and bring them back out to him.

A short time later, King got what he needed. Mary was none the wiser.

Back at the station, the detective called in a follicular expert to compare the two sets of hairs. With the aid of a microscope, the expert declared that the hairs taken from Taylor’s jacket and the hairs taken from Mary’s brush came from the same woman.

To King, it seemed obvious now: Mary had been in an embrace with Taylor, her head resting on his chest, when her mother walked in and pulled the trigger.

It was time to talk with little Miss Mary again.

Trooping back to the Hall of Records, Mary insisted “she could add nothing to her previous statements.” Since King kept no record of what Mary revealed during this particular visit, whether she told him about her late-night Christmas Eve visit to Taylor—which could have explained the hairs—would never be known. But King knew that Henry Peavey brushed his employer’s clothes frequently. Could the meticulous valet really have missed those hairs for five full weeks?

Possibly. But King decided it wasn’t likely.

In King’s opinion, the hairs were enough evidence to warrant a full-scale investigation. Both Mary and her mother needed to be subjected to intensive questioning. More people were coming forward now to tell stories of Shelby’s threats and temper. She was a shrew. She was mean-spirited and vengeful. She flew off the handle at the slightest provocation. She’d assaulted Monte Blue when she’d caught him with Mary. She’d made enemies right and left.

In Tinseltown, Charlotte Shelby made for a very popular suspect.

But not in the district attorney’s office.

Shortly after this, Woolwine ordered King to cease and desist in his attempts to interview Mary and Shelby.

There was no arguing with him. The district attorney was in a foul mood. He’d lost his campaign for governor, crushed by his Republican opponent, Friend Richardson, by more than 100,000 votes. And Thomas Lee Woolwine, the Fightin’ Prosecutor, wasn’t used to losing. So he took out his disappointment on his staff. When he told King to back off Shelby, it was a direct order.

King was flabbergasted. He had come so close.

In dismay, he watched as Woolwine confiscated all the evidence in the Taylor case and brought it to his office. Everything was now under his control: Taylor’s clothes, the pink nightgown, the handkerchief with the initials MMM, the letters, the photos, the jewelry. Even the blond hairs King had so carefully sealed away. All of it was placed in a cabinet under lock and key; no one could touch it without going through Woolwine.

And then, not long after that, the evidence disappeared again.

When King requested to see it, he found the cabinet in Woolwine’s office nearly empty. All that was left was Taylor’s jacket and vest.

Now King was certain that Woolwine was protecting Mary and her mother.

And from the detective’s point of view, only the guilty required protection.

The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway steamed through the Great Plains en route to Chicago. In a first-class cabin, Don Osborn and Blackie Madsen were riding in style, smoking cigars and sampling the canapés brought around by porters. They had left Los Angeles on November 28. If everything went according to their plan, they’d be returning very rich men.

Tucked away in Blackie’s sack were a bundle of letters—letters that were worth a great deal to the man who had written them. Osborn and Madsen were planning to visit this man and make a deal with him in exchange for the letters.

John L. Bushnell, president of the First National Bank of Springfield, Ohio, did not know they were coming. He was expecting to see his beautiful ladylove Rose Putnam.

How Osborn despised the man, whose lily-white, delicately manicured hands had once caressed Rose’s flesh. Every time another letter arrived at Beachwood Drive postmarked Ohio, Osborn burned with jealousy. But the correspondence had been necessary for his plan. On orders from Osborn and Madsen, Rose had written to the fifty-year-old banker and rekindled their romance. In reply, Bushnell had sent her little gifts of money. Rose made sure to keep every note the millionaire wrote her, in which he poured his heart out about how
“unhappily situated” he was in “relations with his wife.”

Finally Bushnell had suggested that Rose come east to see him. He offered to set her up in an apartment in Columbus, a little more than an hour’s drive from Springfield. Rose replied that she’d make plans to leave as soon as possible. Bushnell sent her $300 for her trip, which Osborn and Madsen used to float their posh accommodations and Cuban cigars.

When they arrived in Chicago, the two blackmailers booked a weekend at the stately Monarch Hotel on North Clark Street. From the front desk, Madsen sent several telegrams in Rose’s name, assuring Bushnell that his paramour would soon be in his arms.

The craggy-faced con artist had a lot of laughs at the millionaire’s expense.

Blackie Madsen was a very cruel man.

He was also edgy and hot-tempered, which left Osborn worried. He knew that Madsen was unpredictable. His old revolver, which dated back to the Spanish-American War, was permanently lodged at his hip. A number of unfortunate souls had learned the hard way that Blackie Madsen had an itchy trigger finger.

Osborn hoped Bushnell wouldn’t be one of them.

For their plan to succeed, they needed Bushnell alive and cooperative. Osborn could only hope their millionaire banker didn’t get Blackie mad.

On the afternoon of December 4, 1922, they set out from Chicago for Springfield. It was a cloudy, chilly day. A cold mist stippled the windows of the train as the two blackmailers headed eastward. They sat in different compartments; from now on, they traveled separately. They couldn’t risk being spotted together.

While Osborn had masterminded the plan, it was Blackie Madsen who’d pushed him into it. Madsen was always nudging Osborn to go bigger, take more risks. Osborn, like Gibby, wanted success and money and nice things. But Madsen, in contrast, simply knew no other way to live. Cheating and swindling were his way of life. Hustling came as naturally to him as eating or sleeping, and he needed it just as much to survive.

Blackie Madsen was fifty years old. He stood between five six and five eight and was noticeably bow-legged—walking “with his feet out,” as the many police reports written about him over the years usually put it. Recently he’d grown a bushy gray mustache. His dark eyes and dark complexion—some people thought he was perpetually sunburned—had given him his nickname.

Madsen, of course, was an alias. Hailing from a respectable midwestern family, he was born Ross Garnet Sheridan. His father had been a stock dealer in Iowa, affluent enough to employ a servant to help his wife in the house.
“His early youth,” one reporter wrote, “was spent amidst refinement and cultured surroundings.”

But when Sheridan père died, the family fractured. With too many bills to pay and no money to pay them, Mrs. Harriett Sheridan moved her two sons and one daughter to Independence, Missouri, where
eighteen-year-old Ross took a job as an agent for the Midland Accident Insurance Company. His attempt to help support the family turned into a crash course in con artistry. During Sheridan’s tenure, the company was investigated by the state and found to have pocketed half of its advertised capital.

Meanwhile Harriett launched a career for herself as a journalist, writing for Chicago newspapers and becoming
“highly respected” in her field. But much of her time was spent despairing over Ross, who at twenty-five was constantly finding himself in minor skirmishes with the law.
When the United States declared war on Spain in April 1898, Ross signed up for a three-year stint in the army. It wasn’t a good fit. Sheridan never liked being told what to do, and less than a year into his service, he was dishonorably discharged.

Bitter at the government,
Sheridan at least got to keep his gun.

A few years later, that proved dangerous.

Thrown over by his ladylove, the beautiful Clara Williams, Sheridan watched in fury as she attached herself to one Arista “Writ” Berkey, a barber from Geuda Springs, Kansas. “It was known that
the two men were jealous of each other,” a reporter wrote, “and the tales that were carried back and forth by their friends only fanned the flame of jealousy.” Sheridan learned that Berkey had vowed to “do” him if he ever spoke to Clara again.

Ross Sheridan was not someone who walked away from a threat like that.

On October 28, 1901, Sheridan was lurking on the streets of Independence, waiting for his quarry. Late in the afternoon, he spotted Berkey and Williams strolling up Osage Street, a parasol shielding Clara’s pretty head from the sun. At a safe distance, Sheridan followed them to the depot of the electric trolley that ran to nearby Kansas City.

“I did not intend to shoot him,” Sheridan would later explain. “All I wanted to do was to call him down.” His pride was at stake. He could not let Berkey think that he had scared him off.