Marie Edith Wells -- The Forgotten Face

Wells, a former musical star on the New York stage who often appeared in Flo Ziegfeld productions, entered silent films in 1915 after a throat condition forced her to give up singing.  In her first film, The Builder of Bridges (Frohman Amusement Corporation, 1915) she starred opposite British actor C. Aubrey Smith, also making his film debut.  Wells co-starred in several silent films (The Conquest of Canaan, 1916; The Love Brand, 1923), but when talkies arrived she was relegated to an occasional uncredited extra role (Love Me Forever, 1935; Forgotten Faces, 1936; Fatal Lady, 1936).  In Hollywood on July 3, 1949, the faded silent movie queen was found dead in her room at 1114 Coronado Terrace, the victim of a lethal dose of sleeping pills.  Her suicide note read:  "Dear Eloise and Billy, forgive me please but my health is so bad and I just can't go on.  I love you.  Lots of happiness and good health.  God bless you all.  Aunt Re."  Wells was 55.

Andreas Pavley -- Windy City Death Danseur

Photo:  Eugene Hutchinson

Pavley (real name Andreas Hendricus Theodorus van Dorp de Weyer) was born in Batavia, Java, on November 1, 1892, and raised in Amsterdam.  He received his first formal dance training from Emil Jacques-Dalcroze in Geneva, Switzerland, during 1909-1911, afterward traveling to Paris and London to study with Ivan Clustine and Enrico Cecchitti.  As "Andreas de Weyer," Pavley moved to London in 1912 and performed in a few ballets before being signed in early 1913 to dance in the company of Russian prima ballerina Anna Pavlova on her upcoming U.S. tour.  As Andreas Pavley, the dancer remained with Pavlova for three years until leaving after the 1916 tour to form a studio and ballet company with fellow dancer Serge Oukrainsky.  In 1919, the Pavley-Oukrainsky Company became associated with the prestigious Chicago Grand Opera.  The association elevated the performer-choreographer to national renown and paved the way for his company to tour on the Keith-Orpheum Circuit.

Despite his popularity, however, by June 1931 the dancer was deeply in debt and the target of a blackmailer who called himself "Edgar Walls."  In a note to the 36-year-old Pavley, the extortionist threatened a scandalous exposure (most likely the dancer's homosexuality) unless he was paid $100.  Unable or unwilling to meet the demand, Pavley broke out a window screen in his apartment on the 16th floor of the Hotel McCormick at 616 Rush Street in Chicago on June 26, 1931, and leaped to his death.

Recommended Reading:
Corey, Arthur.  Danse Macabre:  The Life and Death of Andreas Pavley.  Dallas:  Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University, 1977.

Robert N. Maloney -- Willard the Wizard

Unemployed for a month since last performing his magic act in Hancock, Maryland, Maloney (billed as "Willard the Wizard"), with his wife Othello and their one-year-old daughter, Frances, moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, in November 1913.  In the Queen City, the 27-year-old magician stayed on a month-long drinking binge, often consuming a quart of whiskey a day.  In the early hours of December 29, 1913, a drunken Maloney returned to his room at the Hotel Walton and loudly accused his wife of being unfaithful.  During the ensuing argument (according to Maloney's police statement), he saw the "devil" in Othello's eyes and in the sacred pictures on the walls of the hotel room.  The crazed magician produced a gun and rapidly fired three shots into his wife, striking her in the stomach, right temple, and both ankles.  Seeing similar devils in his child's eyes, Maloney shot Frances in the back of the head, and crushed the infant's fingers with the butt of the pistol.  "I beat them like you'd beat meat and potatoes," he told sickened detectives.  Maloney was apprehended one hour later running through the streets in his underwear.  A court-ordered psychiatric evaluation of the double-murderer concluded:  "Insanity due to excessive drink, taking the form of delusions of infidelity on the part of his wife."  Awaiting trial on two counts of first-degree murder in the Central Station Jail on June 21, 1914, Maloney climbed to the second-floor tier of cells and shouting, "I said I was going to do it, and I'm going to!" dove headfirst to his death on the concrete courtyard forty feet below.

Rivet Hedderel -- Brutal Death of a Gentle Man

StageClick.com

"I've got to get out of New Orleans...I'm going to be murdered here," the 61-year-old actor told a friend in the summer of 1996 weeks before planning to retire and relocate to Natchez, Mississippi where he owned an historic home.  As "Robert Lans" Hedderel appeared in the original 1960s off-Broadway production of The Fantasticks and sang and danced in the Broadway shows South Pacific and Show Boat.  Equally well-known as a top hairdresser, he created styles for stars Elizabeth Taylor, Alice Faye, and Zsa Zsa Gabor.  In New Orleans, the owner of Rivet's Coiffures was a much beloved figure who appeared in plays at the Le Petit Theatre du Vieux Carre, Gallery Circle, and the Old Beverly Dinner Playhouse.  In Natchez, he reigned as king of the city's Mardi Gras in 1989.

Around 9:00 A.M. on August 19, 1996, a neighbor walking his dog by Hedderel's Creole cottage at 1438 N. Derbigny Street in the city's fashionable Esplanade Ridge section noticed blood puddled on the stoop and smeared on an entranceway.  Police found Hedderel in the house dead from a savage beating and multiple knife wounds.  Missing was the man's 1994 Plymouth Avenger.  Two days later authorities caught a break after the vehicle was found on a street in Chalmette, Louisiana.  Mark Jenkins, a 22-year-old ex-con with a fifth-grade education who served time in 1991 for beating and robbing a pizza delivery man, was identified as a suspect in the killing after he used Hedderel's credit card to purchase gas and jewelry.  The card was confiscated at a department store in Chalmette, but Jenkins fled the scene before police arrived.  Armed with a search warrant, detectives found several items of blood-spattered clothing in the suspect's Chalmette apartment.  Jenkins was arrested in Jefferson Parish on August 22, 1996, three days after Hedderel's body was found.

At his trial for first-degree murder in January 1998, Jenkins did not take the stand, but the jury heard a tape of an hour-long statement he made to police at the time of his arrest.  Jenkins said that he was walking in the French Quarter when Hedderel approached and offered him $100 "just to talk."  At the house on Derbigny Street, the actor added $200 to the offer just "to cuddle."  Jenkins agreed as long as there would be no sexual contact.  A struggle ensued, according to Jenkins, when Hedderel sexually attacked him.  The younger man cut his own hand when he grabbed the knife from Hedderel.  Jenkins tried to stab Hedderel in the shoulder, but missing slashed the actor's face and began punching him.  Jenkins fled the scene, but later returned to retrieve his clothes.  He told police he was forced to defend himself again when the bloodied, but remarkably resilient, sexagenarian started running at him and yelling.  "I didn't know the guy was dead.  I didn't mean to hurt him like that.  I just wanted to hurt him so he'd get off me."  Prosecutors discounted Jenkins' sordid portrayal of the actor as an intoxicated sexual predator.  Not only had Jenkins told several different versions of the deadly encounter since his arrest, bloody marks on the kitchen floor left by Hedderel were strong evidence that he was trying to claw his way to safety, not attack.  Jenkins' subsequent use of the dead man's credit cards pointed to robbery as the motive for the murder.  On January 16, 1998, Jenkins was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Paul Jung -- Everybody Doesn't Love a Clown

Jung (ca. 1950). Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey

Jung (born 1901 in Dayton, Ohio) was eight years old when he left school for vaudeville to perform an acrobatic act with his brother.  In 1916, the 15 year old quit the act to become a clown with the Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey Circus.  Jung stayed with the company until 1924 when he returned to vaudeville ultimately going back permanently to the circus in 1934.  Dubbed by his peers "the King of Clowns," the ex-vaudevillian was a "producing clown" who created some of the most funny and recognizable skits ever performed under the Big Top.  Jung devised the "Fireman, Save My Child" routine where a bevy of madcap midgets attempted to rescue another midget from a burning building.  In his "Adam Smasher" routine, a giant clown is placed in a crusher, the machine started, and six midget clowns in identical outfits emerge.  In another circus classic devised by Jung, a fat woman is placed in a reducing machine and a midget emerges.  In yet another gag, a midget is stuffed into an outsized cannon and "shot" across the circus floor to float down unharmed from the top of the tent.  After sustaining a serious hip injury, Jung turned his permanent limp into laughs by training a duck to waddle after him with a similar gait around the arena.  With wife Elsie, a former high wire performer, the man described as "a combination of an engineer and a gimmick builder," operated the Laugh Factory in Tampa, Florida.  There, Jung created gags and built machinery to rent to circuses and ice shows.

Elsie Jung (1953) .  Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey

In April 1965, the Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Baily Circus was performing to standing room only crowds of 18,000 plus in New York City's Madison Square Garden.  As he had done for the past eight seasons, the 65-year-old clown stayed at the Forrest Hotel, an unfashionable address at 224 W. 49th Street, one block from the Garden.  On the morning of  April 21, 1965, fellow-clowns became concerned when the ever punctual Jung failed to show at curtain time.  A bell captain, acting upon their request, let himself into Room 1211 and found the body of "the King of Clowns," lying face-up and stretched across a narrow entry way into the bedroom, covered by a blood-soaked bedspread.  Jung, clad in pajama bottoms and an undershirt, had his hands tied behind him with a cloth.  Death was caused by a vicious bludgeoning about the head and face.  The room showed no signs of forced entry and Jung's money and valuables were apparently undisturbed by the killer.  Informed in Tampa of her husband's murder, Elsie Jung sobbed, "It's that terrible New York City.  It's like a jungle."  Homicide detectives interviewed some 1,500 persons before charging two Harlem residents, Allen Jones, a 24-year-old unemployed laborer, and his girlfriend, Marian De Berry, 21, with the murder on June 6, 1965.  Both had police records, De Berry for prostitution.  Detectives maintained they beat Jung to death with the brass nozzle of a fire hose from the midtown hotel then robbed him of $40.00 and a typewriter to support Jones' dope habit.  In August 1966, De Berry cut a deal with prosecutors in which she agreed to finger Jones as the clown's sole killer in exchange for pleading guilty to a lesser charge of third-degree assault.  Damned by De Berry's testimony, Jones was convicted of first-degree murder on October 17, 1967 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Duke York -- "King Kala" Kashes Out

York, in films since 1933 with an uncredited role in Roman Scandals, was a stuntman and bit player in more than 100 films until his death in 1952.  While largely uncredited, York often appeared as a tough (Sworn Enemy, 1936; Never Give a Sucker an Even Break, 1941), a minor functionary (a guard in the 1952 James Stewart bio-pic Carbine Williams), and in many Westerns (Trail of the Vigilantes, 1940; Rogue River, 1950; Silver Canyon, 1951).  In 1936, York played his most memorable role, "King Kala," ruler of an underwater kingdom of shark-men, in Universal's Flash Gordon serial starring Buster Crabbe in the title role.

On January 24, 1952, the 43-year-old character actor phoned his ex-fiancee, Catherine Moench, from his apartment at 1771 North Sycamore Avenue in Hollywood.  During their three hour conversation he repeatedly threatened to kill himself.  Alone across town in her Beverly Hills apartment, Moench tried to keep York on the line while attempting to summon outside aid.  Finally, Moench heard a gunshot.  She notified a friend of York's who raced to his apartment.  York was found sprawled on the floor, the phone receiver across his chest, a gun nearby.  When authorities arrived, a detective hung up the phone.  It instantly rang and after the officer identified himself, Moench responded, "So he did it."  York (real name Charles E. Sinsabaugh) is interred in Foyer F of the Abbey of Psalms in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

Wright Lorimer -- The Shepherd King

Photo:  J. Willis Sayre

After an unsuccessful career as a Baptist pastor in Watervliet, New York, Lorimer (real name Walter M. S. Lowell) began acting at the age of 25 in stock theatre in Chicago in 1899.  Five years later he starred in a play he had written, The Shepherd King, when it opened on April 5, 1904, at the Knickerbocker Theatre in New York City.  It ran for three seasons after which Lorimer performed in Henrik Ibsen's play The Wild Duck and other plays.  In March 1911, the 37-year-old actor filed a $48,400 lawsuit against theatrical manager William A. Brady for cancelling a contract that would have put  The Shepherd King back on the stage.  While waiting for the suit to come to trial, Lorimer worked sporadically as an actor, last appearing in a short-lived vaudeville sketch entitled "The Crucifix."

Lorimer had been unemployed for four months when depression caused him to take his life in his room at a boarding house on 124 West Sixty-fifth Street in New York City sometime between 10:00 P.M. on December 7 and the early morning of December 8, 1911.  The lifeless actor was found on the kitchen floor next to the open baking oven in a seeping gas stove.  Three letters were found near his body.  In one addressed "To My Friends," Lorimer complained that Brady had driven him to suicide.  Reacting to the actor's death, the theatrical manager surrendered all interests in The Shepherd King to Lorimer's ex-wife and her three children by the actor.

Kay Van Riper -- Andy Hardy's Girl

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1929, Van Riper came to Los Angeles that same year and landed a job writing scripts for a local radio station.  While there, an interest in writing historical novels found expression in her creation of the series English Coronets, in which she wrote, directed, and acted.  From 1936 until 1944, Van Riper was under contract at MGM as a screenwriter.  Eventually, she earned $1,500 a week writing several installments of the studio's popular Andy Hardy series:  Judge Hardy's Children (1937), Out West with the Hardys (1938), Andy Hardy Gets Spring Fever (1939), and The Hardys Ride High (1939).  In addition to the Hardy films, the talented scenarist also wrote and collaborated on Babes in Arms (1939), The Harvey Girls (1946), and others.  For 20 years, however, Van Riper's body had been wracked with spinal arthritis and a sciatic condition of the legs that eventually became unendurable.  Forced into semi-retirement by her maladies, the writer tried to end it all with pills on September 14, 1948, but an inhalator squad managed to save her life.  On December 31 of that same year, Van Riper's mother found her pajama-clad daughter dead from an overdose of sleeping pills slumped in front of her bed in her home at 1237 Valley View Road in Glendale, California.  Authorities listed her death as suicide although the 40 year old had not left a note.

The Kay Van Riper papers are held at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

Henry Fragson -- Shades of Marvin Gaye

Born Leon Phillipe Pott in London on July 2, 1869, Fragson spent most of his early life in Belgium learning the yeast trade from his salesman father, Victor.  Equally adept in speaking English and French, Fragson did not touch a piano until 1889.  Two years later, the 20 year old was wowing Parisian audiences with a cabaret act in which the elegantly attired singer-comedian accompanied himself on the piano.  A perennial favorite in the Folies Bergere, Fragson performed almost exclusively in France until 1905 when he appeared in a role specifically written for him in the pantomime Cinderella at London's Drury Lane Theatre.  In London, Fragson appeared in the musicals Castles in Spain (1906) performing his composition, "Hello!  Hello!  Who's Your Lady Friend," Sinbad the Sailor (1906-1907), and in The Babes in the Wood at the Drury Lane during the 1907-1908 season.

In 1913, Fragson, 45, was at the height of his career and earning $750.00 a week in various revues when his relationship with music hall actress Paulette Franck led to tension between the entertainer and his 83-year-old father, Victor Pott.  Quarrels between father and son became more frequent after the actress moved into the Paris home they had happily shared for many years in the Rue Lafayette.  Concerned by his father's violent threats against him and his lover, Fragson consulted a doctor who recommended that the elderly man be placed in a rest home.  The entertainer was evidently in the process of arranging to do so when the senile Pott learned of the plan.

On the evening of December 30, 1913, Fragson returned home after dining with friends to find the door locked.  He rang the bell for several moments before his father answered the door.  The singer complained of the delay, a bitter quarrel ensued, and Pott shot his son once in the back of the head as the entertainer stormed past him.  Fragson died without regaining consciousness.  Pott later told police:  "I more than once wanted to commit suicide.  That is the reason why I had the revolver.  Life had become a burden to me.  The woman whom my son imposed on me under my roof was the cause of frequent quarrels between us.  I often made representations to my son about this cohabitation, but he would never listen to me.  This evening, after the first angry word from my son addressed to me, I intended to kill myself before him.  I produced the revolver which I was holding in my pocket.  I do not know what happened.  Instead of putting a bullet through my head I fired in the direction of my son.  I cannot explain why I did so."

Public opinion against the filicide ran high.  Ten thousand mourners and gawkers brought traffic to a standstill as the funeral procession fought its way to Montmartre Cemetery.  Souvenir hunters ripped apart floral tributes to the dead entertainer and one bystander, mistakenly though to be Victor Pott, had to be protected by police.  Pott, medically diagnosed in the latter stages of senile dementia, died in prison on February 17, 1914 awaiting trial.

Recommended Reading:
Lamb, Andrew, and John Myerscough.  Fragson:  The Triumphs and the Tragedy.  Croydon:  Fullers Wood Press/Music Hall Masters, 2004.

Nita Pike - Take Me With You

A bit player in films since the 1930s (Palmy Days, 1931; Espionage, 1937; Suez, 1938), Pike married veteran stage and film actor Alan Edwards in 1938 near the end of his career.  Pike was inconsolable when Edwards, 61, died on May 8, 1954.  Four hours before Edwards' funeral service on May 11, 1954, his 41-year-old wife's body was found in her bed at their apartment at 112 1/4 North Doheny Drive in Los Angeles.  Clad in a pink embroidered nightgown, her head resting on a portrait of her husband of 16 years, Pike had ingested a lethal dose of sleeping pills.  A note found beside the body read (in part):  "Please cremate me in this nightgown with my darling Alan, at the same time."  Joint funeral services were subsequently held at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

Vallie Belasco Martin -- Nietzsche was Right

Not even being the second cousin of David Belasco, the world famous theatre impresario, could ensure the 25-year-old Milwaukee, Wisconsin-born Martin steady work on the boards although she had appeared to good notices in Very Good, Eddie, My Lady Friends, and in the road company of Abie's Irish Rose.  Martin's literary aspirations were likewise thwarted.  Weeks before taking her life, Martin's manuscript, The Evolution Poetess, or, the Amusing Musings of a Misled Maid, had been rejected by a large publisher.  The returned manuscript arrived by post the day after her death.

Discouraged by her stalled acting and writing careers, Martin was living with her mother in a seventh floor apartment at 260 Riverside Drive in New York City.  On February 28, 1924, as her mother slept in another room, Martin swallowed a bottle of shoe polish containing a small, but sufficient, quantity of cyanide of potassium.  The empty bottle was found under her pillow.  A hastily penned note on a bedside table read:  "Mother Dear:  As you know things have gone from bad to worse.  At the beginning of the week I had several good prospects, but they have all gone bluey.  I wish that theatrical managers and agents would realize that a girl's time is worth something.  I hope they will realize it after this and not keep girls waiting.  After reading Nietzsche's book I agree with his idea of the superfluity of life and so I am going to practice what he preaches.  Goodbye and forgive me.  Vallie."  Ironically, after Martin's death several theatre people called the dead woman's mother to belatedly say that had they known of the actress' despair, they would have found a part for her.

Marion Benda -- The Lady in Black

Benda (real name Marion Elizabeth Watson) was a former Ziegfeld Follies showgirl who appeared in the revues No Foolin' (1926), Rio Rita (1927), and Rosalie.  She is best known, however, as one of the "ladies in black," the women who made annual pilgrimages to mourn at the grave site of silent film star Rudolph Valentino.  Benda was said to have been at a party with the "Sheik" the night he fell ill on August 14, 1926.  Although she intimated that she was secretly married to the screen sensation, Valentino's family vehemently denied the claim.  Twice married to rich and influential men (Baron Rupprecht von Boecklin and Dr. Blake H. Watson), the statuesque redhead amassed a small fortune by divorcing them.  Since 1945, however, Benda had lived in relative poverty, and was a familiar sight in Los Angeles area hospitals where she was routinely taken after numerous overdoses of sleeping pills.  A week before her death, the 45-year-old ex-showgirl was found in her Hollywood apartment in a state of hysteria after swallowing a number of pills.  On November 30, 1951, Benda finally succeeded in taking her life with sleeping pills.  The empty bottle was found at her side.  In an act of charity, police listed her death as "possibly accidental."

Lillian Hall-Davis -- Overkill in Golders Green

In motion pictures since 1918, the elegant silent screen leading lady appeared in some 36 British films including The Better 'Ole (1918), The Wonderful Story (1922), The Faithful Heart (1922), Roses of Picardy (1927), and The Farmer's Wife (1928).  Following her appearance in the 1931 talkie Many Waters, Hall-Davis contracted neurasthenia, was placed under a doctor's care, and was unable to work.  Settling with her stage actor-husband, Walter Pemberton, and their 14-year-old son, Grosvenor, in a quiet house in Cleveland Gardens in the London suburb of Golders Green, N.W., the 35-year-old actress sunk into an increasingly deep depression.  Complaining to a neighbor that she felt "cut off" from all her theatrical associations and concerned that her nerves were not improving, she spoke openly of placing her head in a gas oven.

On the afternoon of October 25, 1933, Grosvenor returned home from school to find a note from his mother on a hall table informing him that the kitchen doors were locked and directing him to contact a neighbor.  The home reeked of gas.  Hall-Davis was found lying on the kitchen floor, her head placed inside a gas oven with the taps left open.  In her right hand the actress clasped an old fashioned razor she had used to cut her throat.  A coroner's inquest determined she had died from the throat wound and not coal gas poisoning.

Seton Margrave, film correspondent for the London Daily Mail, wrote of the actress:  "Miss Hall-Davis was a brilliant representative of typical English beauty.  As a film heroine she played romantic parts with great intelligence, and infinite charm, and with that delightful whimsical sense of comedy which, with better fortune, would have made her one of the greatest stars of the talking-picture world."

Ned Finley -- Persistence Pays

In films since 1912 (The Curio Hunters), Finley was once making $2,000 a week as head of Ned Finley, Inc.  Dubbed the "Bill Hart" of his day, the actor was featured in the Western and frontier films, O'Garry of the Royal Mounted (1915), West Wind (1915), Britton of the Seventh (1916, as "General Custer"), and The Blue Streak (1917).  Finley lived for 17 years in the premier suite of New York's Hotel de France, but as acting and directing jobs became more scarce and his marriage to a woman named Henri disintegrated he was forced to move into a more modest room in the hotel.  Henri abandoned him around 1918 shortly before the depressed actor, now a heavy duty morphine addict, slit his left wrist in a futile suicide attempt in Central Park.  Finley survived, but lost his left hand to blood poisoning.

Forty-eight years old and with no prospects in sight, Finley spent his last dime buying cyanide of potassium from a local pharmacy on September 27, 1920.  The pharmacist, alarmed over the actor's odd demeanor, substituted bicarbonate of soda for the deadly poison.  Alone in his room, its walls covered with one sheets of his bygone film successes, Finley took the "drug" and recorded his final moments in a series of notes.  "I have taken what the druggist said was cyanide.  I write this at 2:30 o'clock, ten minutes after taking the supposed fatal dose.  I feel very much live--no bad effects."  Minutes later in another note:  "It is 2;45 A.M.  I have some strychnine which I am going to give a try next.  I will wait until 3 o'clock.  I hope it will work.  Goodbye, N.F."  At 3 o'clock, a final note:  "I have just taken the strychnine.  Don't know much about it.  The druggist said it would kill half a dozen dogs.  The acid didn't work.  I suffer no pangs of conscience.  Don't believe I have any such thing.  Hope this is goodbye.  If it isn't I shall have to cut my throat."  Hours later, a chambermaid found Finley dead from strychnine poisoning.  A one cent piece, used as a paperweight, was found atop pawn tickets, bills, and a note addressed to the hotel staff apologizing for any inconvenience and thanking them for their kindness to him over the years.

Virginia Engels -- Beauty Kills the Beast

Photo:  J. Willis Sayre

Voted "Miss Streamline," out of a field of 250 Pacific Coast lovelies at San Francisco's Golden Gate International Exposition in April 1940, the striking blonde's other beauty titles included "Miss Los Angeles, 1940" and "The Orchid Queen."  As official hostess for the San Francisco Fair, Engels caught the eye of movie producer Joe Pasternak who cast her in a microscopic uncredited role in Universal's 1940 Deanna Durbin vehicle, It's a Date.  In fact, Engels was destined to become nothing more than uncredited "eye candy" in most of her 26 other feature appearances for studios like Universal, RKO and MGM in films like Arabian Nights (1942) as a "harem girl," From This Day Forward (1946) as "girl in the window," and her final role, "woman on trial" in MGM's 1952 Just This Once starring Janet Leigh.  Ironically, she had just appeared as an uncredited "inmate" in the 1950 Warner Bros. prison drama Caged when she was booked into a Hollywood police station on August 16, 1950 on suspicion of drunk driving.

Engels was effectively "out of the business" when she was arrested for the knife murder of her 47-year-old husband, Charles H. Brown, on June 8, 1954.  According to the 37-year-old former actress, her marriage to Brown, a parking lot attendant, was "hell."  Once married to radio store operator James Robert Dennis in 1946, she divorced him the next year.  Introduced to Brown by friends, Engels married him in 1950, but soon had cause for regret.  According to the one-time beauty queen, Brown "had a lot of meanness in him" that violently manifested itself in once a month beatings of his unhappy wife.  Engels walked out five times, but always came back after he tearfully promised to change.  The beatings continued and in November 1953 she was admitted to a Hollywood hospital with a broken shoulder after Brown knocked her down and stomped her.  One month before his death, the parking lot attendant slugged his wife in the mouth with a bottle.

At 12:45 A.M. on June 8, 1954, Brown returned home to their apartment at 6027 Barton Avenue in Hollywood after a night of heavy drinking.  The couple argued, Brown punched her in the mouth, then went after Engels' father who had been living with them for a week while looking for another place to stay.  According to Engels, she picked up a 5" paring knife from a table to frighten Brown away when her drunken husband rushed her like a "madman."  She lashed out, Brown grabbed his chest, reeled into the bathroom, then moments later stumbled back out into the living room and, asking his wife to call a doctor, collapsed.  Engels called an ambulance, but Brown died around 1:00 A.M. at Hollywood Receiving Hospital without making a statement.  Following a coroner's inquet that ruled the actress was "probably criminally responsible" for Brown's death, Engels was formally charged with murder and bail set at $5,000.  At the time of his death, Brown's blood alcohol content was .15 percent, well above the legal level of intoxication.  A first trial ended on November 6, 1954 after a jury deadlocked 8-4 for acquittal.  Engels was acquitted in January 1955 after the jury in the second trial needed less than an hour to rule that she had acted in self-defense.  In what has since become almost a Hollywood cliche for beauty queens turned failed actresses, Engels lived alone and forgotten until making the news one last time.  Concerned that she had not seen her tenant for a couple of days, Engels' landlady let herself into the flat at 5200 Marathon Street on December 6, 1956, to find the former actress lying on the floor beside her bed.  "Miss Los Angeles, 1940" had died of meningitis hours earlier.

Margaret Campbell -- Mother Murder by Moonlight

In films since 1919 (Please Get Married and The Price of Innocence), Campbell (born April 24, 1883) was a second female lead and character actress in at least 24 films including Their Mutual Child (1920), Legally Dead (1923), The Lady from Hell (1926), Children of Divorce (1927), and her last documented appearance, Take the Heir, in 1930.  By 1939, the 56-year-old mother was employed as a W.P.A. elocution instructor at Los Angeles City College, and served as secretary of the Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'i.  On June 27, 1939, the manager of the Hollywood rooming-house at 7058 Hawthorne Avenue where the former actress lived with her 25-year-old son, Campbell McDonald, became alarmed when, after not seeing her tenant for two days, noticed a key hanging above the door of Campbell's room.  Entering, she found Campbell's half-nude body sprawled across an unmade bed, her head shattered by multiple blows from a bloody claw hammer nearby on a pillowcase.  Campbell's nightclothes were disarranged and two bloody handprints were found on her thighs.  Placed carefully near the body were a candle, a whistle, a key and a Bible tract.  A forensics team determined Campbell had been dead for two days.  A statewide manhunt for the woman's missing son, a former crossing guard and a student of spiritualism last seen on the night before the murder, led to Campbell McDonald's arrest two days later in Santa Monica.  McDonald, who spent the days since his mother's death sleeping on park benches in the area, readily admitted to murdering the woman.  However, as police continued interrogating the soft-spoken, well-mannered suspect they began to doubt his sanity.  Those who know Campbell and McDonald painted a disturbing portrait of the mother and son relationship.  A sickly child, McDonald spent only three weeks in school before his overly protective mother took over tutoring him for the rest of his education.

Taken to the still bloody scene of the crime, an unemotional McDonald informed police, "I feel soiled.  I want to shave and put on a clean shirt, if I may."  After being permitted to do so, he related how his mother had returned late from a religious meeting on the night of the murder.  She warned him that reading too much would lead to another nervous breakdown (he suffered one two years earlier) and threatened to commit him to a mental asylum if he did not obey her.  Later that night after they went to bed, McDonald could not sleep.  Looking down into the murder bed, he calmly told police:  "I stood here...I'm left-handed.  I remember it was moonlight enough so I didn't turn on any lights.  Everything seemed like a dream.  It does now, it is all hazy like, but I remember she didn't scream.  I hit her first on the forehead.  Then some more.  I know my hands were bloody and sticky so I washed them.  Then I found her pocketbook.  It had $10.00 all together.  It was just getting dawn when I left the house."  McDonald dimly remembered placing the candle, whistle, key, and Bible tract near the body, but insisted they held no symbolic significance.  Though McDonald was arraigned for the murder and insisted that he was mentally competent to stand trial, three court-appointed psychiatrists disagreed.  The judge, citing that no sane man could fail to shed a tear over the death of his own mother, ruled on September 5, 1939, that McDonald was insane, and sentenced him to the Mendocino State Hospital until such time as he was ruled psychologically fit to stand trial for the murder.  McDonald was briefly considered a suspect in the bludgeon murder of Russian dancer Anya Sosoyeva on the campus of Los Angeles City College on February 24, 1939 and the near fatal clubbing of 17-year-old actress Delia Bogard in Hollywood on March 28, 1939, but DeWitt Clinton Cook, a 20-year-old printer, was ultimately convicted of the crimes.

Adele Ritchie -- Murder and Suicide in Laguna Beach

Once known as the “Dresden china doll of the musical comedy stage,” Ritchie was born in Philadelphia in 1877.  In 1893, she made her first public appearance in the light opera, The Algerian.  Leading roles in other operas ensued, followed by a stint in vaudeville.  On November 3, 1916, the recently divorced actress married stage actor Guy Bates Post in Toronto shortly before his matinee performance as the lead in Omar the Tentmaker.  After the marriage, Ritchie all but retired from the theatre although she did America’s World War I recruiting effort by singing patriotic songs in vaudeville in 1917.  The couple divorced in 1929 and the 52-year-old actress relocated to the exclusive artist colony of Laguna Beach, California where she directed plays for the Community Playhouse.  There, Ritchie became close friends with Doris Murray Palmer, dubbed the “most beautiful woman in Laguna Beach,” a wealthy divorcee some twenty years her junior.  The pair was inseparable companions until Palmer’s popularity in the community’s closely knit social circle began to eclipse that of Ritchie’s.  A past collaborator with Ritchie in the Community Playhouse, Palmer had designed all the stage settings and scenery for the theatre’s latest offering, The Lady from Memphis, and was set to direct alone.

The pair’s relationship reached a flashpoint on April 24, 1930, at Palmer’s hillside bungalow at 2337 Glenneyre Street in Laguna Beach.  Ritchie was visiting her friend when she learned that Palmer had been invited to a luncheon and she had not.  Ritchie insisted on attending, but Palmer was equally adamant that she was not invited, and angrily turning her back on the former actress, walked down a hallway leading to the garage.  Ritchie pulled a nickel plated, pearl-handled .32-caliber revolver from her purse and shot the 35-year-old woman once in the back (the bullet entering under the left shoulder blade, and piercing the heart) and once at close range in the back of the head.  According to the police reconstruction of the crime, Ritchie then spent the next two hours driving around the beach community trying to decide upon a course of action.  Finally, she returned to the crime scene and moved Palmer’s body to a room adjoining the living room.  Ritchie carefully arranged the murdered woman’s body:  folded her arms across her chest, straightened out her clothes, combed her hair, placed a pillow beneath the head, then applied rouge, lipstick, and powder to Palmer’s face.  She then retired to the adjoining living room and, after first firing a shot at her head that missed, reclined on the sofa, placed the gun to her right ear, and pulled the trigger.  In the throes of her death agony, the actress rolled to the floor.  Their bodies were later discovered by a mutual friend who stopped by the bungalow to return Palmer’s lost dog.  Guy Bates Post, informed of his former wife’s murder-suicide before a performance of The Play’s the Thing in Hawaii, said, “We lived together fourteen years, but frankly I never felt I knew her.  She was very proud.”