It was called the most sensational murder of the century.
William Desmond Taylor was an Anglo-Irish-American film director
and actor at a time when Hollywood was growing at a phenomenal rate.
Taylor directed fifty-nine silent films between 1914 and 1922
and acted in twenty-seven between 1913 and 1915. But it is Taylor's murder on February 1, 1922, that brought him to infamy.
Born William Cunningham Deane-Tanner , Taylor was born into the
Anglo-Irish gentry on April 26, 1872, at
Evington House, Carlow, County Carlow, Ireland, one of five children of a
retired British Army officer, Major Thomas Kearns Deane-Tanner of the Carlow
Rifles, 8th Battalion, King's Royal Rifle Corps, and his wife, Jane O'Brien. One
of his uncles was Charles Kearns Deane Tanner, the Irish Parliamentary Party
Member of Parliament for Mid Cork.
In 1891, Taylor left Ireland for a dude ranch in Kansas and
eventually moved to New York City and fell into acting.
The Taylor were well known in New York society and were members
of several exclusive clubs. He was also known as a heavy drinker, possibly
suffered from depression, and was noted for his many affairs.
Taylor began directing films in 1914, after his move to California
but before coming to Hollywood,
Taylor had abandoned his wife and daughter and headed to Klondike to pan for
gold during the gold rush. No one knew where
he was for months, and some assumed her was dead.
On
the morning of February 2, 1922, Taylor’s cook found his boss, laying on the
floor, dead, shot in the back. The cook ran out the front lawn screaming “Mr.
Taylor is dead! Mr. Taylor is dead”
A crowd gathered inside, and someone identifying himself as a
doctor stepped forward, made a cursory examination of the body, and declared
Taylor had died of a stomach hemorrhage. The doctor was never seen again. But
the 49-year-old film director had been shot at least once in the back with what
appeared to have been a small-caliber pistol, which was not found at the scene.
When Police Lieutenant Tom Ziegler arrived
to the scene, he found actors, actresses and studio executives rummaging
through the director’s belongings.
In Taylor's pockets, investigators found a wallet holding US$78
in cash (modern day $1,210), a silver cigarette case, a Waltham pocket watch, a
pen knife, and a locket bearing a photograph of actress Mabel Normand. An
expensive two-carat diamond ring was on
his finger. With the evidence of the money and valuables on Taylor's body,
robbery seemingly was not the motive for the killing; however, a large but
undetermined sum of cash that Taylor had shown to his accountant the day before
was missing and apparently never accounted for
Neighbors
recalled hearing what they thought was a car backfiring around nine the night
before. One couple, alarmed at the sound, had looked out their window to see a
man leaving Taylor’s home.
A suspects
list drawn up by the police included a deranged stage mother, drug dealers, a
love-lorn teenage cinema star, and members of a gay opium cult, were just a few
of the convoluted leads.
Eventually
details of Taylor’s private life surfaced. Pornography (rare in those days) and
a large collection of women’s lingerie was found in the bungalow.
Police
learned that the last person to see
Taylor alive was Hollywood “it girl” Mabel Normand with whom, it was rumored Taylor was madly in love with her although a
large portion of the Hollywood colony argued that Taylor was gay. Eventually it
was learned that Normand was addicted to cocaine and Taylor had tried
repeatedly to help her get treatment. The story was that Taylor threaten to
reveal the dope dealer to the police, which led to his murder.
The
police also suspected that person seen leaving Taylor’s house that fateful
night wasn’t a man at all but Charlotte Shelby, the mother of starlet Mary
Miles Minter, a Taylor protégé. Minter had been in love with him, but Taylor
had rebuffed her, saying he was too old for the teenager. A piece of lingerie
found in his house had her initials on it.
Minter had once tried to shoot
herself with the same type of gun used in Taylor’s murder. Furthermore, Shelby had
previously threatened the life of another director who had made a pass at her
daughter. Later in the investigation, Shelby’s alibi witness received
suspiciously large sums of money. Many years later, in Minter’s unpublished
autobiography, she admitted that she and her mother were at Taylor’s bungalow
on the night of the killing..
Shelby,
an incorrigible stage mother, was outraged by the possible relationship. In the
coming years, both of Shelby’s daughters, including Mary, would accuse her of
the murder. “My mother killed everything I ever loved’’ Mary Minter would later
say.
Edward
Sands, Taylor’s former valet, who had previously robbed him, was long
considered a leading suspect, but the police were unable to find him.
In
1964, as Margaret Gibson, a silent film star who had worked with Taylor, lay
dying, she asked for a priest. She then proceeded to tell the priest and the
group of neighbors who had gathered around her, “I killed William Desmond
Taylor”
No
consensus of the true murderer ever came about and Taylor’s murder was never
solved.