It was a commonplace homicide if such things can be commonplace.
A young, conflicted and emotionally unstable young woman at the start of her
life was strangled to death by persons unknown. However, through an odd
assortment of substandard journalism, hyperbole and speculation to the absurd,
her death has gone down in history as something much more sinister than it was.
Karyn Kupcinet, her friends called her Cookie, was a Hollywood
actress and the daughter of noted Chicago columnist and television personality
Irv Kupcinet. Called Kup around his beloved Chicago was a gossip columnist who
knew everyone in the right places. His close friends included former President
Truman, Jack Benny's, Danny Thomas, Joan Crawford’s, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope,
all big name sin Hollywood in 1960.
Kupcinet was a pioneer on television, starting a live on air
celebrity talk show in early 1945 and then joining CBC’s late night talk show/
news line up in 1952 and in 1957 he replaced Jack Paar on NBC’s “America After
the Dark,” which eventually became “The Tonight Show.” Kupcinet’s Chicago based
program ran from 1959 to 1986 in syndication and reached 70 stations nationwide
and featured international news makers.
The couple had two children, Jerry and Karyn.
Karyn Kupcinet, who stood five foot one and had an IQ of at
least 140, had a reputation for being, difficult, high strung, self-absorbed
and obsessive, particularly about her weight which led to abuse diet pills, a
problem that began in high school, and other prescription drugs to which she
eventually became addicted.
Star struck from childhood, Karyn had one ambition; to be a
movie star. She dropped out of junior college after one year to study acting in
New York with Lee Strasberg and moved to Hollywood in 1960 after Jerry Lewis, a
family friend, offered her a role in his movie The Ladies Man. Afterwards, with
her father help, she also found bit parts in the television show Surfside 6,
Hawaiian Eye and Perry Mason.
Sadly, she had chosen the wrong career path. Although she took a
beautiful photograph,
(Several years of plastic surgery on her chin, nose, ears, and
eyes, all of which that resulted in the loss of her natural beauty and
expressiveness on camera) Karyn didn’t come across well on film and she wasn’t
much of an acting talent either which producers soon leaned. Her lack of
ability, combined with her known addiction to Amphetamines, her growing
reputation for being occasionally difficult on set and her often bizarre and
erratic behavior around male actors, essentially ended her career before it
started.
Within a year, the offers for work stopped and her phone stopped
ringing. She stayed largely because she had no motivation to leave. Her parents
kept her on a generous allowance which gave her, unlike many young actors
trying to break into the business, a comfortable life style.
There were other issues to, despite her comfortable
circumstances she had been arrested at least once for shop lifting.
In December of 1962, Kupcinet made a guest appearance on The
Wide Country and met actor Andrew Prine, star of the series.
The two began a rocky relationship that included Prine’s refusal
to making the relationship exclusive and a July 1963 illegal abortion. Pine’s
career was on the way up and he was singularly focused on that and wasn’t
looking for serious, committed relationship but Kupcinet was and she became
obsessed with the actor, clinging to him and demanding his time and attention
When Prine broke off the relationship, Kupcinet began stalking
him (by cab, she never leaned to drive), she reportedly broke into Prine’s
apartment to wait for him. When he showed up with a date, she hid in the attic.
Shortly afterwords she started sending him threatening letters. (The letters
consisted of words and letters she had cut out of magazines) The death threats
were a mish-mash of words;
You will need protection, Ben Casey [the hero of a then-popular
prime-time TV drama about a hospital doctor] caught message for your beau. You
haven't much time for dreams."
"Forget fame and romance with aging Glen [sic] Ford. Devil
must kill you."
"Your lady needs surgery suddenly. Expect to get bad breaks
wherever you go. Your rich beauty has no time."
"Are you going to Latin America or Florida? Let your
beautiful virgin become lonesome and so easy to make. Bet K Kup tastes as good
as it looks. Blow."
"You are the certain girl to die."
"You may die without nobody. Winner of loneliness wants
death until someone special cares."
When Prine confronted her about the messages, she lied and said
that she had been receiving them as well, however the police found her
fingerprints on the papers and the Scotch Tape. (The print taken from
Kupcinet's 1962 arrest for shoplifting)
Six days after the JFK assassination, her body was found at her
West Hollywood, California home. She had been strangled to death.
Earlier in the day, Kupcinet arrived an hour late by cab to a
dinner party at the home of Mark Goddard, later a Lost in Space cast member,
and his wife, Marcia on Coldwater Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills. Goddard's parents
were friends of the Kupcinet's back in Chicago. It was Mark and Marcia Goddard
who drove took her to Mexico to have an abortion
Kupcinet toyed with her food and ate little. The Goddard’s
notice that "... her lips seemed numb. Her voice was funny. She moved her
head at odd angles" and that her pupils were constricted. When Mark
Goddard asked her what was wrong she began to cry, putting her arm around him
and told them that baby that had been abandoned on her doorstep earlier that
day. (Kupcinet had told Andrew Prine by telephone the same story) She left the
party at 8:30 pm by taxicab and went home.
Before she left she told her hosts that the next day,
Thanksgiving, she and Prine were going to Glenn Ford's house for day. Later
Prine and Ford said they didn’t know anything about it. She had also told her
parents that she wouldn’t be returning home to Chicago for the holiday since
she work to do on the program Perry Mason, which wasn't true.
When she returned home Edward Stephen Rubin, a freelance writer,
was waiting by her door. Rubin didn't have a car and said he had walked to
Karyn's house from Beverly Hills where he was living with another friend. Rubin
wanted to watch TV. Although it’s hard to understand by today’s standards,
although most people had a television set, very few Americans had state of the
art television sets in the 1960s as Karyn did. Her father’s money had bought it
for her.
At around 9:00 PM, according to Rubin, she said she was feeling
jittery and went for a walk around the block where she came across the actor
Robert Hathaway, a friend, and invited him up to join her and Rubin. Hathaway
and Rubin used to room together and lived next door to Andrew Prine in a
duplex.
Back at her apartment, they watched The Danny Kaye Show with
Kupcinet, they said,
till around 10:30 she served coffee and cake and then Kupcinet
fell asleep, sitting next to them on the couch. She awoke and went to her room.
Andrew Prine returned home from a date with the Bavarian actress, Anna Capri
and at about 12 am, he called Karyn spoke for less than five minutes.
The two men said that they lowered the TV’s volume (three days
later it was still playing with a low volume), and made sure the door was
locked behind them before they left the apartment at about 11:15 pm. They said
they went to the Rain Check Room on Sunset Strip for drinks.
Three days later, on November 30, the Goddard’s went to
Kupcinet's apartment at 1227 Sweetzer in West Hollywood to check on her and
found her nude body lying on the couch, on her side, with flecks of blood on
her face and a pillow. The apartment door was unlocked. There was an over
turned lamp on the floor. A coffee pot and a brandy snifter full of cigarette
butts overturned on the floor. A cup of coffee, partially consumed, was on a
stand across the room. She had been dead for three days.
Mark Goddard initially assumed that she had died from a drug
overdose. (Police found prescriptions for Dsoxyn, Miltown, Amvicel, and other
medications in the apartment)
No rape test was done (Due to the technology of the day) and
since she had been dead for several days, decomposition was advanced enough so
that an autopsy would prove inconclusive.
There was no signs of robbery but a prescription bottle for 100
Desoxyn, a methamphetamine, filled two days earlier, was found empty in the
bathroom.
There was also a note, not a suicide note, written by Kupcinet
that went over her emotional problems and issues with her parent, career and
her love life.
The note rambled over a dozen different subjects;
“I'm no good. I'm not really that pretty. My figure's fat and
will never be the way my mother wants it.”
“Why must I be so alone?”
“What's the use of living with nothing to believe in?”
“There's nothing only phony motives, selfish egoists, selfless
people, fat heads and drunks and I want out.”
“I like President Kennedy, Bertrand Russell, Theodore Reiks,
Peter O'Toole, Sydney J. Harris, Albert Finney.”
"For me -- [in her italics] I feel self-conscious about
this, like I'm going to have to get approval on it eventually. (Approval it is
-- or you're doomed to insignificance). Everything I've done, supposedly being
myself and with the promise of anonymity, I do *for* [underlined] approval
...knowing ... "this'll get 'em" "They'll love me for this"
and "They'll say nice things behind my back."I guess I've been
searching for an identity too desperately ...seized the nearest image; whether
David [a platonic friend of hers who was a script reader and the brother of
movie star Hope Lange] and doing things *his* [underlined] way and *pointedly*
not *compromising* with my traditional way -- and using it vs. my parents --
snubbing my nose at their way. Always hate to be with them after a lengthy
visit with "current" boyfriend and their families -- guilt -- I
guess. Trying to show them I can be something. Always faking it. Never tapping
my own resources. Afraid of -- what? Me or that there won't be anything.
My figure's fat and will never be the way my mother wants it. I
won't let *it* be what *she* wants. How stupid. I want to be slim and she loves
me and wants me to be slim -- intellectualization doesn't mark.
Why must I be so alone?
Have I fallen that short of my ideal? Why does my image of me
have to be so aesthetic and perfect? What's the use of living with nothing to
believe in? Have faith in?
Where's the security -- or habit or order -- oh shit – what good
is that going to do? What happens to me -- or my Andy (Andy Prine)
Why doesn't he want me? Why? There's no GOD [capitals hers].
There's nothing only phony motives, selfish egoists, selfless
people, fat heads and drunks, and I want *out.* [underlined]
The most promising lead when police found a packet of threatening
letters that Karyn had sent to herself and to Prine had received, which was
unknown to the police until Karyn’s prints were found on the letters. A police
lab crew searched the Karyn’s apartment and found the magazines she used to
clip the words for the notes.
The Coroner ruled her death a homicide due to a broken hyoid
bone in her throat. Her thyroid gland, tongue and larynx were crushed in a fit
of rage that left her neck bruised and badly discolored. He also estimated the
time of death at about 12:30 AM, the same time that her call with Andy Prine
ended and that because she was nude and the door was unlocked, police suspected
that she knew her killer and that the killer was left handed (None of the later
suspect in the case were left handed.)
Police named Andrew Prine as one of their chief suspects along
with Edward Rubin and Robert Hathaway and said that the motive was that Prine
snapped after he learned that the anonymous threat letters both he and Kupcinet
had received were actually sent by Kupcinet.
Famed LA crime writer James Ellroy looked into the case for
years and based his conclusions on the extensive police record on Karyn's
death. Ellroy concluded that Karyn was probably dancing nude when she slipped
and fell, hit her throat on the back of a chair and landed on the sofa.
There were 2 sets of prints not belonging to any of the suspects
but strangely none of the prints belonged to Hathaway. All the suspects all
took polygraphs and all came back as "inconclusive."
Prine would be questioned by the police once a week for several
months after the murder and according to Ellroy Prine, Rubin and Hathaway had
been questioned by the sheriff's department many times throughout the 1960s
until as late as 1969.
However, in 1988, Kupcinet's father published a memoir in which
he said that he believed that Prine had nothing to do with Karyn Kupcinet’s
murder and instead he believed that the real murderer was a neighbor in her
apartment complex in West Hollywood, California.(There were eighteen apartments
in her upper income two story Spanish style building)
"We pretty much know who did it” Irv Kupcinet said “but
unfortunately the police couldn't come up with the physical evidence to charge
him"
The person he suspected was actor David Lange, 29, the brother
of actress Hope Lange. He was a noted heavy drinker and womanizer who lived in
the apartment below Karyn Kupcinet. When questioned by the police David Lange
said that he was out on a date with his girlfriend, actress Natalie Wood, who
conformed his story. Lange said he returned home around 12:30, very drunk and
fell asleep.
Irv Kupcinet believed that the Lange's wealthy family had hired
lawyers who blocked sheriff's investigators from questioning him about the
killing. “We offered to hire a private detective,” Karyn’s mother Essee said.
“We even tried mystics. When you’re desperate, and your own daughter is
involved, you’ll do anything…..We were good friends. She called me sis. I can’t
believe it happened so long ago. Oh God, how I miss her.”
Lange went on to produce the hit films Klute and The Sterile
Cuckoo. Lange died at his home in Sharon Connecticut in 2006.
Irv Kupcinet never got over this daughter’s death. In 1966, when
the Chicago Tribune syndicate asked Kupcinet to replace the recently deceased
Hedda Hopper, offer that included moving into Hopper's Hollywood home which the
newspaper owned, he refused saying he would never move to “the Hollywood that
had sucked our daughter into its maelstrom.”
Irv Kupcinet died in November 2003, at age 91. His wife Essie,
died at age 85, in June 2001.
Apparently police also questioned actor Vince Edwards who was
then starring in a hit program called Ben Casey. Reportedly Prine’s wife Sharon
Farrell had started an affair with Vince Edwards which led to divorce actions.
Prine was asking for $250 alimony from his wife (who was defended in court by
Vince Edward's lawyer) Farrell had crossed sued Prine for alimony as well.
The story is that Karyn Kupcinet made her way onto the set of
Ben Casey and tricked Edwards into taking a subpoena to appearance in court in
the case. Edwards, a major international star at the time, wasn’t a man to toy
with. He had his own friends in Hollywood. Born Vincent Edward Zoino, Edwards
was raised in one of the roughest neighborhoods of Brooklyn, N.Y.
After deciding to become an actor--rather than a "con man
or wise guy," as he liked to say, he was often compared to Marlon Brando
and James Dean. In early 1961, Edwards went to audition for the part of an
airline pilot but walked into the wrong studio and accidently auditioned for
the part of Dr. Ben Casey. He got the role. The show ran for five years and
rated in the top 10 during the 1962-63 season.
Edward was a degenerate gambler with a preference for racetracks
and card games. He became a regular at Hollywood Park race track and when he
had no money he borrowed from mob connected off-track bookies. Even that went
back to his childhood. Edwards told the story that at age 14, he pawned his
twin brother Bob's clothes for spending money and advised his sibling never to
borrow $10 from one person; borrow 50 cents from 20 people and "you'll
never have to pay them back,".
Unfortunately one of the people Edwards borrowed from was a
shylock named Marty Allen. When Edwards stiffed Allen on a loan, Allen called
in Anthony “The Animal” Fiato to collect. Fiato didn’t get the money but he
beat Edwards senseless.
Police would later hold the subpoena action over Prine's head,
claiming her had some sort of Svengali hold on Kupcinet with out understanding
how insanely obsessed she was over Prine.
Karyn Kupcinet was buried back home in Chicago, wearing a white
gown. Some 1500 people attended Karyn Kupcinet funeral including the state
Governor and the Mayor of Chicago.
The death faded into obscurity until 1967 when a man named Penn
Jones, Jr. published a book in which he noted an AP wire service story about an
unidentified woman, in the area code of Oxnard, California, approximately 50
miles north of Los Angeles, who, on November 22, 1963, dialed a telephone
operator 20 minutes before President Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas,
telling the operator that Kennedy was going to be shot.
The following report ran in the Washington Post:
“Mystery Call Foretold Fate of President”
LOS ANGELES, Nov 22
What could be an intriguing mystery in the President’s
assassination might center in the Oxnard-Camarillo area, near Los Angeles.
Fifteen minutes before Mr. Kennedy was shot, an Oxnard telephone
supervisor overheard a woman caller whisper to someone:
“The President is going to be killed.”
The strange call was intercepted by supervisors of the General
Telephone Co. in Oxnard at 1:10 p.m. EST. The fatal wounding of Mr. Kennedy in
Dallas occurred shortly after 1:25 EST.
Telephone company executives said it was impossible to trace the
mysterious call other than to know that it originated in nearby
Oxnard-Camarillo area.
The state mental institution is located at Camarillo.
Ray Sheehan, general manager of the telephone company there,
said: “One of our supervisors picked up the call. The caller kept dialing
although her call was connected. Then she started whispering. Another
supervisor listened in and was able to hear the woman saying, “The President is
going to be killed.”
Sheehan said the mysterious call was reported to police — but
after the President had been shot.
The FBI investigated the phone call during its probe of the JFK
assassination and concluded that the call lasted ten to fifteen minutes.
The called had a voice of middle-aged woman
The call came in at 10:07-10:08 a.m.: “The President is going to
die at 10:10” (12:10 CST) but it was said very fast by the caller and it might
have been “The Justice, the Supreme Court, there is going to be a fire in all
the windows; the Government is going up in flames.” And then named “12 courts
in order of importance starting with the Supreme Court to Probate Court and
Juvenile Court.”
The caller then repeated “The President is going to die at
10:30” and mentioned the courts again and said “The Government takes over
everything; lock, stock, and barrel.” and then mumbled “thermostat, rheostat,
heostat.”
According to the book Legacy of Doubt, Bobby Kennedy was
interested in the call and investigated it as well. Supposedly Oxnard Det. Sgt.
Ed gave Kennedy documents, phone records, while he was in Oxnard, California,
during a campaign stop.
They records revealed that the call had been made from Federal
Commissioner Ben Nordman’s and Ventura Superior Court Judge Jerome Berenson’s
law office over twenty minutes before JFK was assassinated that “he was going
to be killed.” RFK was also given the names of the persons making the phone
call.
The author of the story provided no sources or corroboration for
the tale. Jones alleged that the caller was Kupcinet, because she lived in the
Oxnard area code where the call came from and reasoned that he well connected
father, a Chicago news columnist had told her about the pending assassination
by the Chicago mob on Kennedy. Jones reasoned that the call was why Kupcinet
was murdered.
Jones left out the fact that on November 22, 1963 Kupcinet was
in Palm Springs with six friends including Prine. He also omitted the fact that
Karyn Kupcinet was murdered almost a week after the JFK assassination and two
days after the JFK killing as he had originally written.
The insane and groundless rumor made its way to NBC's Today
Show, which presented a list of people who died violently in 1963 shortly after
the death of President John F. Kennedy and may have had some link to the assassination.
The first name on the list was Karyn Kupcinet. After that, hundreds of books
used Karyn Kupcinet's tragic death as proof that there was a conspiracy to kill
Kennedy and an urban legend was born.
Kupcinet's murder remains officially unsolved.