Who Killed William Desmond Taylor? The Sensational Hollywood Murder Mystery That Continues To Baffle People Today.

Mary Miles Minter and Mom

Indeed, many people suspected that Taylor was done in because of his love life. A director has a great deal of power and Taylor was a handsome man. He also had an ingratiating personality and a generous streak. This combination of characteristics made him very attractive to women.

Mary Miles Minter was known to be in love with Taylor. She was a lovely young actress who hated acting. Born Juliet Reilly in 1902, her mother, Charlotte, changed the family name to Shelby after her marriage to Juliet’s father, J. Homer Reilly, collapsed. Shelby appears to have been a classic “stage mother.” She was determined to see that little Juliet become a successful actress. Mom wanted her child on stage or in the movies rather than in school so she decided that Juliet had to depict herself as older than she was. To that end, Charlotte got hold of the birth certificate of her dead niece, Mary Miles Minter, and christened her daughter with a new age as well as a new name.

Mary Miles Minter recalled how her ambitious mother had robbed Mary of her childhood. “My mother tried to keep me a ‘little girl’ with curls down my back,” she said, “but earlier she made me appear and act older than I was. When I was eight, I was passed off for 16, twice my age, and dressed as a midget, with high heels and long skirts, so that I could play the stellar role in The Littlest Rebel at the Chicago Opera House.”

When Mary met Taylor in 1919, she was 16 and he was approaching 50. However, the teenager was already established as a screen presence, having appeared in well-received movies like Emmy of Stork’s Nest and Barbara Frietchie. She soon had a crush on Taylor. Did he reciprocate her feelings? Did he actually become intimate with her? She was under the age of legal consent so to have sex with her would have been a crime on Taylor’s part. Some observers believe Taylor had an affair with her. Others think he was only friendly with the young woman who was so obviously smitten with him.

The death of the man she loved would be both a personal and a professional disaster for Mary. The revelation that she had, or at least wanted to be, involved with the older man caused a wave of public revulsion. Her films were boycotted.

However, Mary had never enjoyed acting so the loss of her career did not appear to cause her much grief. She seemed to just want to forget her days as a star. Unlike so many of those close to the murdered director, she had a long, if not always happy, life and lived to be 82.

Some who looked at the Taylor mystery years later would wonder if Mary had been involved in it. Others would suspect her strong-willed mother, Charlotte Shelby. Adela Rogers St. John in The Honeycomb claims certainty that Shelby did in Taylor. Her motive? She disapproved of her daughter’s infatuation with a much older man. If she believed that the older man was actually enjoying sexual relations with Mary, she would have been outraged at such exploitative behavior on Taylor’s part.

How to explain the man seen by witnesses at the time of the shooting? Simple. Those who think Charlotte Shelby did it believe she cross-dressed to kill. Adela Rogers St. John in The Honeycomb champions this view. In that book she quotes Faith MacLean as saying that she saw a person in a man’s outfit “pulling her coat collar up and her hat down the way a woman does” and that she was certain it was “a woman dressed as a man.”

In A Cast of Killers, a story is told of a meeting between King Vidor and an elderly, obese Mary Miles Minter. He describes her as looking pitiful, surrounded by photographs from her silent film heyday, and giving the impression of being an overweight version of Sunset Blvd.’s Norma Desmond. She supposedly told him, tears in her eyes, “My mother killed everything I ever loved.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeEy7fAwxok&w=420&h=315]

In fairness to Charlotte Shelby, it must be remembered that many investigators are convinced that the person who entered Taylor’s apartment was a man, not a cross-dressing woman. Actor Carl Stockdale testified that he had been with Shelby in her house between 7:30 and 9:30 PM on the night Taylor was killed. In 1937, Shelby asked for a grand jury investigation into Taylor’s murder; this was hardly the action of someone who feared having the facts come out. Furthermore, Los Angeles district attorney Buron Fitts said that there was no evidence on which to indict Shelby.

The depiction of an aging Mary Miles Minter as wrapped up in her past glory should also be taken with a grain of salt. She had never enjoyed her career and, after leaving the movie business behind, supposedly said at a party, “Don’tever discuss my career, bravo!”

Mabel Normand and drugs

Taylorology says that Peavey has been misquoted in saying that a young actress and her mother were responsible for Taylor’s death. That magazine claims that Peavey said it was “an actress” and that the context clearly indicates Mabel Normand.

Mabel Normand took naturally to show business. Born in 1892 on Staten Island to two Vaudeville entertainers, she grew into a vivacious adolescent beauty with a mass of dark, curly hair, big, expressive brown eyes, and a slim, but shapely body. Her career as an artist’s model began at the tender age of 15. By 1909, Mabel was making comedies for Vitagraph. Her perfect timing and cute, clownish ways were divinely suited to the new medium of film and she would eventually be known as “the Queen of Comedy” and called “The Female Chaplin.”

She left Vitagraph for the rival company of Biograph where she met Mack Sennett, a director who would be nicknamed “The King of Comedy”. Since she was a good swimmer, Sennett suggested Biograph use that fact to show her off in bathing suits. It was good advice as Normand’s career took off in films like The Diving Girl, A Squaw’s Love, and The Water Nymph, all of which demonstrated her skill in the water while regaling the audience with the svelte loveliness of her figure.

In 1912, Sennett began the history-making Keystone Comedies and Normand became their primary actress. The relationship between Sennett and Normand blossomed into a romance and they got engaged. Then disaster struck. Normand caught Sennett in bed with another woman.

Normand was severely injured shortly after this, but there are at least three different versions of how that wound occurred. The newspapers carried stories saying she had had an accident on the set. Other accounts say the woman Sennett was in bed with attacked Normand with a heavy object. Still others say she attempted suicide by trying to drown herself and was rescued.

At any rate, the wedding was off.

This disappointment apparently led Normand to take stock of herself. She became interested in more serious subjects and began reading widely and deeply.

She kept up her acting career and appeared with Fatty Arbuckle in several comedies including Fatty and Mabel’s Married Life, Fatty and Mabel Adrift, and Fatty’s Tintype Tangle.

Normand decided that she was being underpaid in comparison with similar stars. Giving Sennett (for whom she still worked) an ultimatum, she told him she would take her services to another company unless she got a raise. Sennett still hoped to win her back romantically and desperately wanted to keep her on as an actress. Not only did he instantly grant her the money she requested but he also set up a production unit within Keystone that he called The Mabel Normand Film Company.

It would make only one film for Normand. That motion picture was called Mickey and was a great hit with the public. However, during the making of it, Sennett lost economic control of Keystone. Mickey was a great moneymaker for Keystone, but not for Normand who was quite fed up.

She quit Sennett for the Goldwyn Motion Picture Company. Samuel Goldwyn soon took a more than professional interest in his high-spirited star. Some authors believe that, in 1918, Normand gave birth to Goldwyn’s child. It was stillborn.

Sometime during these periods of upheaval, Normand turned to narcotics to help her cope and got hooked. She also became involved with William Desmond Taylor, either as a close friend or a girlfriend. There are some reports that Taylor may have used narcotics but it is certain that he never became addicted. He sometimes broke into tears over Normand’s condition.

Concern over Normand’s drug dependency may have led Taylor to violence. Deed of Death recounts his having gotten into a fistfight with a dealer who was making a delivery to Normand. Assistant US Attorney Thomas Green said publicly that Taylor had asked the government’s assistance in combating dope pushers who sold their goods to film people.

Some who thought Mabel Normand was having an affair with Taylor suspected her of killing him. They thought she might have been jealous of his relationships with other women. Others speculated that Mack Sennett, who was known to still be in love with Normand and always hopeful of rekindling their romance, had murdered Taylor.

Still others believe that a drug dealer Taylor had angered in his efforts to save her from addiction had killed him or hired a hit man to do it.

Normand’s career faded after Taylor’s death, partly because of the suspicions that followed it. Her addiction and emotional problems may also have contributed to her being out of work for awhile.

Less than two years after Taylor was murdered, Normand found herself in the midst of yet another shooting scandal. She was at a New Year’s celebration on January 1, 1924, hosted by the wealthy Courtland Dines. Normand’s chauffeur, Joe Kelly, got into a fight with Dines and shot him. The latter suffered only superficial wounds and easily recovered. Kelly claimed he acted in self-defense and a jury believed him. The shooting further damaged Normand’s reputation leading to the banning of her films in some states and boycotts in others.

She made a comeback in 1926. It was welcomed by Mary Pickford who, far from treating her fellow actress as a rival, took out an advertisement in Motion Picture World in which she said, “welcome back to the screen” to the dark-haired comedienne. The movie was called The Nickel Hopper. She made a few more movies but never got back to the top of her game.

Tuberculosis took Normand’s life on February 22, 1930 at the age of 35.

Blast from the Past?

It has been theorized that someone from Taylor’s past who had long nursed a grudge murdered him. One version holds that Edward Sands was really the director’s brother, Denis Gage Deane-Tanner. A purported tipster wrote to the police saying that William had once stolen Denis’ fiancée and that the younger brother was bent on revenge.

Denis Gage Deane-Tanner was a mysterious figure. He was born four years after William, their parents’ fourth and last child. Unlike William, Denis was able to please his father by getting into the army as a youth. He was a lieutenant in the British Army during the Boer War in 1899-1902. He traveled to New York in 1903. Like his elder brother, Denis went into the antique business. He would eventually become the manager of an antique store. Denis wed Ada Brennan in 1907. The couple would have three children but one would die while still a baby. Ada’s health was not good and she had to be treated for tuberculosis. In 1912, while she was in a sanitarium for that purpose, Denis, like his brother before him, deserted his family without either warning or explanation.

It is rumored that he eventually he got in touch with the brother he seemed to imitate and played a small part inCaptain Alvarez. George Hopkins has said that Denis worked for William unofficially and without many people knowing about it.

Ada desperately tried to track Denis down. She was unsuccessful in finding her wayward husband but did locate William Taylor. At first Taylor told her she was mistaken, that he was not a Deane-Tanner and had no relationship to Denis Deane-Tanner. Then Ada burst into tears. She and her children were destitute. She did not know how she could possibly pay the bills. Taylor relented. He told would give her $50 per month and did until his death.

One reason people have speculated that Denis Gage Deane-Tanner was Edward Sands is that both had a talent for disappearing from their environments. Additionally, the pawn tickets Taylor received were from someone who knew his real name. However, since Sands read Taylor’s mail, it is likely he learned his employer’s real name from letters. Photographs exist of both Denis and Sands and they look nothing alike with Denis being lean and lanky and Sands quite overweight.

Some have said that Taylor made an enemy while in the army. A rancher named Andrew Cock reported picking up a couple of hitchhikers from Mexican border towns on the day before the Taylor slaying. Cock said that one of the men, “Spike,” started talking about a Canadian captain under whom he and his fellow hitchhiker, a man the hitchhiker called “Shorty,” had served. This captain had supposedly been unusually strict. At one point the Spike said they were going to Los Angeles to kill this captain and Shorty brusquely told him to shut up. Cock was getting afraid and when he got to the main street in Santa Ana, stopped the car and told the men he was not traveling any farther. As Shorty exited the car, he dropped a gun that Cock recognized as a .38 caliber revolver.

Investigators took Cock to the border towns of Tijuana and Mexicali from where it seemed likely the men might have come. The group went in and out of resorts and saloons until Cock pointed out someone he recognized as one of the hitchhikers. That turned out to be a mouthy drug addict called Walter “Red” Kirby who had previously been arrested after saying Taylor “got what was coming to him.” Kirby had been cleared.

After getting a better look at him, Cock said Kirby was not one of the men he had seen after all. The army enemy lead, like so many others, hit a dead end.

Hitman

Robert Giroux in A Deed of Death does not pretend to be able to identify the murderer by name but puts together a reasonable case that Taylor was done in by a professional hit man.

He rejects the idea that the killer was a woman because he believes that a man seen by several witnesses before the slaying was the person who entered Taylor’s apartment and took his life.

According to Giroux, two gas station attendants reported seeing a dark-haired male they did not recognize at around 6:00 PM. The man, who was in his late 20s and weighed about 165 pounds, asked where William Desmond Taylor could be found and they pointed him to Alvarado Court. A Mrs. M. S. Stone, on her way to her daughter’s apartment near Taylor’s in Alvarado Court, saw a young, male stranger standing at the corner. A streetcar conductor and motorman remembered a man boarding their trolley at Alvarado and Maryland. They described him as “about five feet ten inches tall, around 165 pounds, about 27 or so.”

Going on the assumption that all of these are the same person and the individual who killed Taylor, Giroux believes the hypothesis of a woman dressed as a man can be ruled out. Charlotte Shelby in particular, a petite woman in her 50s, would have been unable to impersonate the man seen by these witnesses. Race rules out Henry Peavey. Age and build exonerate Edward Sands, Denis Deane-Tanner, and Mack Sennett. The killer was unknown to the neighborhood since he had to ask directions.

That the killer was a professional is supported, in Giroux’s view, by his “true professional brilliance at the single moment of real crisis. Having accomplished Taylor’s murder without detection…he emerged to find Faith MacLean in her doorway, looking straight at him. Instead of panicking, he solved the crisis by instantly going back to Taylor’s door, pretending he’d forgotten something.” It is hard to imagine an amateur showing this type of “cool” under pressure.

Giroux believes it unlikely that a jealous lover or Charlotte Shelby hired this professional killer. Instead, he believes dope dealers had the strongest motive to want Taylor out of the way as well as the easiest access to hitmen. Taylor had gotten into physical fights with pushers and he had approached the US Attorney for help in putting such gangsters behind bars.

In Bruce Long’s William Desmond Taylor: A Dossier, flaws in Giroux’s theory are pointed out. “Would a professional killer deliberately expose himself to witnesses shortly before killing Taylor?” the author asks. “Isn’t it more likely that a professional killer would learn where Taylor lived and then commit the murder some other day, speaking to no one near the murder scene on the day of the killer? And wouldn’t a professional killer have used a silencer so as not to disturb the neighborhood?”

Theories abound but none are without major problems. The mysterious death of William Desmond Taylor continues to fascinate. Part of the reason for the ongoing interest lies in the contradictory character of the victim, a man who could fecklessly flee his deepest responsibilities to wife and daughter but also express the greatest generosity and caring.

Another reason is the unsolved nature of the crime and the likelihood that, no matter how many plausible theories are advanced, there will never be a solution satisfying to all observers, keeps interest in the case strong. So does the fact that so many of early Hollywood’s best and brightest are on its list of suspects. Last but by no means least is the environment in which this mystery took place, the post-World War I Hollywood of high spirits and hard crashes, Prohibition booze and illegal drugs. To explore the facts and fancies around this baffling murder is to be temporarily transported back in time to the birth and infancy of that uniquely modern art form, the motion picture.