Jeanette Lafferty -- HE Took Her Off

Minutes after dropping her boyfriend off to meet a train at the Thirtieth Street Station in Philadelphia on August 14, 1950, the 24-year-old singer paid her toll at the Camden, New Jersey, bridge, drove 20 feet from the booth, and parking amidst bridge traffic, pressed the muzzle of a .22-caliber rifle against her left temple and pulled the trigger.  Lafferty, an elementary school teacher in Woodbury, New Jersey, died in Cooper Hospital three and a half hours later.  In the bloodstained car, authorities found five suitcases filled with clothes, and postcard sized photographic cards advertising the "Lafferty Sisters," Jeanette and her sister Beulah who, with a ventriloquist's dummy described as the "third member of the family," entertained on local radio and in private "Temperance Engagements Only."  A note found in her handbag read:  "I'm done living.  God put me on earth.  He is taking me off because I've failed miserably."

Jack Buchanan -- Benny and the Gas Jets

The 6 foot, 4 inch contortionist was booked at the Cat and Fiddle at 1345 Central Avenue in Cincinnati, Ohio, when he committed suicide in his apartment next door to the nightclub on July 25, 1941.  After Buchanan, 24, failed to appear for his show, the club's owner called and found the contortionist with his head covered in a blanket draped over an open gas range in the owner read:  "Benny, I tried the bath tub, but it wouldn't work.  Maybe I'll have better luck with the gas."  In a separate note, Buchanan asked God's forgiveness for his act.

Edward Mansfield -- Very Good, Eddie

Elsie Orr, 24, and sister, Helen Stolte, were known theatrically in the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn, New York, as the Carr Sisters.  Expert swimmers and divers since the age of 12, the pair was members of a water carnival show managed by Edward Mansfield, and following a two year run, were together again in the chorus of Very Good, Eddie.  Mansfield became obsessed with Helen Stolte, recently separated from her husband, but was opposed by Orr who warned her sister against having any involvement with him.  Orr was married less than three weeks to Edward Orr, a member of the Canadian Flying Corps, when Mansfield invited Stolte to Metuchen, New Jersey to pick up a car there he had promised to give her.  Suspicious of his intentions, Orr accompanied her sister to Metuchen on June 15, 1918.  Mansfield told the pair that the car was in a forest outside the town and drove them to a remote area near a rubber factory.  Stolte waited in the car while Elsie Orr walked into the woods with the theatrical manager to retrieve the vehicle.  Fifteen minutes later, Stolte heard moans coming from the woods.  Investigating, she found the theatrical manager standing beside a stream holding a bloody pen knife, his throat gashed, and drinking from a bottle.  Asked by Stolte where her sister was, Mansfield ominously replied, "Where she will never go on the road again."  Stolte fled the scene, returning minutes later with the police.  Mansfield lay unconscious on the ground from a near fatal dose of paris green while, nearby, Orr was found in a clump of bushes with her throat slit.  Mansfield expired from the overdose later that night in Metuchen's St. Peter's Hospital.

Kid Thomas -- Why He Sings the Blues

An obscure early blues and rock 'n' roll performer heavily influenced by Little Richard, Kid Thomas (a.k.a. Tommy Lewis/Louis) was born Louis Thomas Watts on June 20, 1934 in Sturgis, Mississippi.  The family moved to Chicago when Thomas was 7 and as a teen he took harmonica lessons from Little Willie Smith, a minor bluesman in the city.  By the late 1940s and early 1950s Thomas was playing harmonica at various blues clubs in Chicago sharing the stage with the likes of Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, and Elmore James.  Signed by the local King-Federal label in 1955, the harmonica playing blues singer cut two singles ("Wolf Pack" and "The Spell"), both flops.  In 1956, after a stint in Wichita, Kansas, Thomas broadened his musical horizons and moved into rock 'n' roll affecting a processed pompadour in the style of Little Richard.  In Los Angeles in early 1959, Thomas cut two singles for Modern Records for which he is best known today -- "You are an Angel" and the aptly titled "Rockin' this Joint Tonight."  The label quickly folded and the record was never promoted.  Five years passed before Thomas, renamed Tommy Louis and the Rhythm Rockers, recorded two singles for Muriel -- "The Hurt Is On" and "Wail, Baby, Wail!"  Again, the records failed.  Throughout the mid- to late-1960s Kid Thomas performed at private parties and in clubs like the Cozy Lounge in South East L.A.  One night at the Cozy Lounge, the owner of Cenco Records saw Thomas perform and brought him in the studio to record his last singles -- "(You are an) Angel" and the instrumental, "Willowbrook."  Like Modern Records, however, Cenco Records tanked.

Kid Thomas, the poor man's Little Richard, was operating a moderately successful lawn care service in Beverly Hills when what was left of his life forever changed.  On September 3, 1969, Lou T. Watts (Kid Thomas), 35, was driving his van in the 300 block of South Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills, whe he accidentally struck a child riding a bicycle.  Ethan Friedman, 10, died of his injuries later that afternoon.  The boy's father, Eugene K. Friedman, pressed police and requested the district attorney to file manslaughter charges.  Although Thomas possessed five driver's licenses (four obtained by fraudulent means), police were only able to revoke his license.  In the absence of witnesses to the accident, the district attorney refused to prosecute citing insufficient evidence.  Friedman hired a private investigator to tail the bluesman.  On March 2, 1970, police (acting on an "anonymous" tip) arrested Thomas for driving on a revoked license.  Friedman was present in court when Thomas came up on charges, but the case was postponed until April 13.  That day, Eugene Friedman waited in the parking lot of the public library across the street from City Hall for the arrival of the man he blamed for the death of his only child.  Immediately upon his arrival, Kid Thomas was confronted by the distraught father.  The men spoke briefly and then Friedman pulled a 9mm automatic pistol from a briefcase and fired point-blank into the bluesman.  Thomas ran across the street toward the rear entrance of the police station with Friedman in pursuit still squeezing off rounds.  Thomas fell to the curb, but a stray shot struck Beverly Hills Police Sgt. John Carden in the leg as he was standing at the rear door of the station.  Friedman dropped his gun and was arrested without incident.

Lou T. Watts, nominally well-known in certain musical circles as Kid Thomas, was pronounced dead at 9:20 A.M. at UCLA Medical Center.  At his first-degree murder trial in August 1970, Friedman faced the death penalty and a charge of assault with a deadly weapon in the shooting of Officer Carden.  The grieving father testified that he believed his son was standing next to him when he confronted Thomas to plead with him to stop driving.  When Thomas assumed what Friedman interpreted as a menacing position the father shot him to protect his son.  Following two days of deliberation, a jury found Friedman guilty of the reduced charge of voluntary manslaughter, but acquitted him on the assault with a deadly weapon charge.  Superior Court Judge Adolph Alexander subsequently placed Friedman on three years probation and ordered him to obtain psychiatric treatment, get a job, and not to use weapons or drugs.  "I do not condone violence in any form," added the judge, "but if it was in my power to reduce the charge to a misdemeanor I would do it."

Recommended Reading

Koda, Cub.  "Kid Thomas."  www.allmusic.com

Simmonds, Jeremy.  The Encyclopedia of Dead Rock Stars:  Heroin Handguns, and Ham Sandwiches.  Rev. ed.  Chicago, Ill.:  Chicago Review, 2008.

Wallace R. Parnell -- Killing to Keep Her?

The son of Fred Russell, a brilliant ventriloquist on the London variety stage of the teens, Parnell briefly followed in his father's footsteps before turning to theatrical promotion.  After mounting several revues like Beauty on Parade in the 1920s and 1930s, he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1934 and was in and out of British bankruptcy courts for the next few years.  Following a family dispute, Parnell went to America and distinguished himself as an advertising wonder boy.  Returning to England, yet another family fracas forced him away this time to Australia where his tireless efforts as a theatrical producer made him an important figure in that country's entertainment industry.  In 1942, Parnell immigrated to America with his sights set upon a theatrical producing career in Hollywood.  His one success, The Beaustone Affair, played for a record setting eleven weeks at the Las Palmas Theatre in 1951.  Four weeks into the show's run, the press revealed that the play's author, "L. Len Rap," was in fact, Parnell (with his name spelled in reverse).  In the mid-1940s, the theatrical producer resuscitated his advertising career and founded a highly profitable direct mail business, Canterbury Press.  He was also president of Karseal, Inc., a wax polish firm sharing offices with his advertising business at 915 W. Highland Avenue in Hollywood.

Known by friends and business associated to be prone to spells of moodiness, Parnell also suffered from a dangerous physical condition in which any bruise he sustained could result in a life-threatening blood clot.  These maladies combined with the recent tumult in his business life, perhaps, offer an insight into the deadly rampage that was to come.  Early in 1954, Parnell became convinced that Beryl Erickson, his executive secretary at Canterbury Press, was responsible for the loss of several big accounts.  Despite being close friends with the 35-year-old divorced mother of three young children, Parnell hired a private investigator to monitor Erickson's activities.  Concurrent with the investigation, the 59-year-old businessman's house was twice burgled.  At Parnell's request, the P.I. purchased his employer a .38-caliber pistol ostensibly for home protection.  The situation apparently improved on April 7, 1954 when Parnell sold a controlling interest in Canterbury to Erickson and instructed his operative to destroy all documents pertaining to the investigation.  He seemed in a good mood and told everyone he was taking his third wife on a trip to Australia before settling down in his home country of England.

Prior to the opening hours on May 19, 1954, the janitor in the Highland Avenue building housing Canterbury Press and Karseal, Inc. made a gruesome discovery.  Beryl Erickson lay face-down on the floor beside her desk dead from a single gunshot wound inflicted at close range to the left side of her face, below the temple.  Parnell's briefcase was beside the body and among the documents found in it was a detective magazine with a front page article entitled, "She Was His Woman and He Was Ready to Kill to Keep Her!"  The businessman's body was found in a nearby executive washroom where he had shot himself in the right temple.  Attempts to explain Parnell's murder of Erickson and his suicide as motivated by any romantic interest between them were discounted by everyone who knew the close friends.

Denise Morelle -- Justice for "Dame Plume"

The popular Canadian actress (born in Montreal in 1927) was a versatile performer equally at home in films (Don't Let It Kill You, 1967; Once Upon a Time in the East, 1974; L'Amour bless, 1975; The Late Blossom, 1977) and theatrical productions (Bonjour, la, Bonjour, L'Impromptu de'Outremont).  It was, however, as the hysterical opera diva "Dame Plume" on the late 1960s children's afternoon television show, La Ribouldingue, that Morelle became an instantly recognizable and beloved figure in Quebec.  As a member of the National Arts Centre's French ensemble under director Andre Brassard, she was scheduled to appear in the premiere of Albertine, en cinqs temps in a role Michel Tremblay had written specially for her, when a tragic confluence of random coincidences resulted in Morelle's brutal death.

"Dame Plume"

On July 17, 1984, the 59-year-old actress visited a ground-floor flat she was considering renting on Sanguinet Street in central Montreal.  The landlord, unable to meet Morelle at the apartment, gave her permission to view the unlocked residence alone.  The next day, friends reported the actress missing to police after she failed to appear for her stage performance in Ste. Adele.  Authorities found Morelle's body in the empty flat savagely beaten with an iron bar which had shattered her nose, jaw and skull.  The killer had heated the bar on a gas stove and sadistically burned her before raping then strangling her to death with a rope.  Montreal police collected liquids from the scene and sent the specimens to a DNA bank in Ottawa where they failed to match any samples on file from known criminals.  Meanwhile, more than 1,000 friends, family, and mourners gathered at St. Clement's Roman Catholic Church in Montreal's east-end for a memorial service for the beloved actress.

Gaetan Bissonnette

The Morelle murder remained unsolved, but not forgotten, by Montreal police for 23 years until the department's collaboration in April 2007 with the producers of a French language television network documentary on the case aired and finally yielded the tip authorities needed to make an arrest in August 2007.  Using advancements in DNA, cold case detectives matched the sample taken at the Morelle crime scene in 1984 with a specimen in 2006 from a "solved" rape.  In both instances, the perpetrator was Gaetan Bissonnette, a 49-year-old lifelong junkie whose criminal career between 1976 and 2006 was comprised of an unbroken record of 19 convictions for offenses like theft and breaking and entering.  Two months after the discovery of Morelle's savaged body, Bissonnette was convicted of breaking into a woman's apartment and raping her at knife-point over a seven-hour period.  Remarkably, the career criminal received only a three year sentence, but the DNA sample from this case led to Bissonnette being charged for first-degree murder in the Morelle homicide.
 
Confronted with the irrefutable DNA evidence, Bissonnette accepted the Crown's offer to allow him to escape trial in exchange for a guilty plea to a second-degree murder with its mandatory life sentence, but with the possibility of parole.  As Bissonnette supplied details of his deadly 1984 encounter with the actress it became painfully aware to everyone that the murder had sprung from pure coincidence, a simple matter of a person having been in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Bissonnette, 26 at the time, was squatting in the vacant unlocked apartment when Morelle entered the flat to view it for possible rental.  While the Crown and Bissonnette's lawyer had previously agreed on the life sentence with no eligibility of parole for at least 14 years, Justice James Brunton took just twenty minutes to overturn the joint sentencing suggestion observing that it was not "harsh enough" given the seriousness of the crime.  In a later proceeding, Bissonnette was ordered to serve 20 years before the possibility of being declared parole eligible in 2027.

Wesley Eddy -- A Boy and His Mother

Eddy (real name Edward Gargiulo) was a versatile vaudeville and nightclub performer who gained renown as the one-time master of ceremonies at the Roxy Theatre in New York City as well as other large movie houses throughout the East.  Subject to fits of despondency since the death of his mother in 1926, the 31-year-old emcee had flowers placed weekly on her grave in St. Michael's Cemetery in Stratford, Connecticut.  During the night of September 16, 1934, Eddy visited the cemetery and shot himself once in the head over his mother's grave.  While police initially suspected foul play when the gun was recovered partially buried in the ground some 20 feet from the body, they decided upon suicide when they found two notes at the scene.  In one addressed to his brother, Eddy wrote:  "Please see that I am buried right away, next to our dear mother."  Authorities reasoned that an individual found Eddy's body prior to the person who notified them and, because of religious scruples, attempted to bury the gun.  The Bridgeport, Connecticut, medical examiner ruled the death a suicide.

Charlotte Carter Flather -- A Peaceful Death

Once touted as the "best dressed girl in New York," Flather, 30, had acted on stage in Turn to the Right under the name "Charlotte Carter" before taking up scenario writing for the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation.  She collaborated on the 1920 film Devil's Garden starring Lionel Barrymore.  When her career as a scenarist fizzled, Flather turned to short story writing, but actually supported herself by working for the Features Syndicate, Inc., interviewing political leaders like Benito Mussolini and Georges Clemenceau.  In 1921, the troubled woman attempted to end her life by drinking veronal laced with opium.  Flather survived for another four years until bankruptcy, ill health, and the failure to find a publisher for a recently completed novel prompted her to try again.  On March 13, 1925, the despondent writer penned eight exit notes, bathed and styled her hair, swallowed a dose of sodium cyanide, and peacefully crossed her hands and died in her New York City hotel room.

Anne Duane -- No Money + No Friends = The Exit

Unable to sustain herself by playing small roles like the maid in the vaudeville act "Cave-Man Love" at the Wintergreen Theatre in 1921, the 19-year-old actress ingested six bichloride of mercury tablet in the restroom of the Pennsylvania Station in New York City on July 3, 1922.  When asked by a physician why she did not tell her friends at the scene of the poisoning, Duane replied, "When you have no money in the theatrical business you have no friends."  Destitute, the actress had not eaten for four days at the time of her suicide attempt.  Duane died on July 8, 1922.  With monies jointly contributed by an actress-friend and the Actors' Fund, Duane was buried at the Evergreen Cemetery.

King D. Gray -- Death, the Great Revelator

At noon on June 30, 1938, a pedestrian walking by a parked car outside the Hollywood post office at 1615 North Wilcox Avenue noticed a man slumped in the vehicle's front seat.  The driver, dead from a single .32-caliber gunshot wound to the chest, was identified as studio cameraman, King David Gray, active in films since 1915 when he shot The College Orphan for Universal Film Manufacturing Company.  Born in Danville, Virginia, on March 9, 1886, Gray photographed over 50 films (The Mark of Cain, 1916; The Scarlet Car, 1917; Forgive and Forget, 1923) in a twenty year career.  From 1932, he worked exclusively for Universal Pictures as either a camera operator (The Invisible Man, 1933) or as second cameraman (The Black Cat, 1934).  When found, the 52-year-old married father of two was holding a letter in his right hand postmarked from New Castle, Pennsylvania bearing the salutation, "Dear Daddy."  Police established the identity of the letter writer as Frances Bleakley, a 29-year-old University of Southern California student once employed in the art department of a Hollywood department store, but now living in Pennsylvania.  During their four year relationship the cameraman passed himself off as unmarried and rented a secret post office box to hide the deception from his family.

Although baffled police ultimately settled on the theory that Gray was shot during a robbery attempt no valuables were taken from the dead man or his car.  The death weapon, a .32-caliber automatic, was retrieved a few days later from a vacant lot at Santa Monica Boulevard and El Centro Street eight blocks from the murder scene.  Ex-convict Joseph L. Chester, considered a suspect in the Gray murder, committed suicide to avoid capture on an unrelated matter on July 20, 1938, following a high speed car chase with authorities in Ventura County.

Max J. Jelin -- Death of a Deadbeat

A former picture exhibitor in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Jelin moved to New York City in the 1940s to try his hand as a theatrical producer.  The career change marked the beginning of a period of bad luck and shady financial dealings that left the producer one of the most despised men in theatre.  Jelin leased the Belasco Theatre, presented flop after flop, and when pressed by the owners for rent, filed numerous court actions to fight dispossession.  The 40-year-old producer was finally ousted in October 1947, but had already leased the International Theatre.  After two flops there, The Magic Touch and the short-lived black musical Calypso, Jelin was in serious tax trouble, owing the Internal Revenue Service some $140,000.

On January 22, 1948, four days after losing the lease on the International, Jelin was home alone in his 13 story apartment at 300 East Fifty-seventh Street when he opened four gas jets on the kitchen stove.  The resulting blast instantly killed the producer and ripped out the walls adjoining two other suites in the new 18 story residential building.  Jelin died owing $12,000 in back rent.

Leslie Ray Raymond -- Brother Bob's Family Affair

Once familiar to Oakland, California, radio audiences as "Brother Bob," Raymond, 41, left the business, relocated to Los Angeles, and worked as a salesman in an air conditioning concern until his complicated personal life ultimately drove him to tragedy.  On December 6, 1935, a motorist in the Palos Verdes Hills off Western Avenue noticed a parked car, engine running, with a 12-foot piece of rubber hose leading from the exhaust pipe in through a window of the vehicle.  Investigators found Raymond's body in the car along with two scrapbooks filled with clippings chronicling his career as "Brother Bob."  In his hat, lying on the seat beside him, was a note addressed to his wife expressing grief and shame over an affair he had been having with his young niece, Esther.

The suicide note read:  "Tubbsy Dear, I have done about every bad thing to you that any one person could--you are going to like Esther.  She is a sweet, sweet girl--she is at a hotel in San Pedro--get her and start her on her way--give her a break--she, too, was wrong because she loved the wrong person--in my Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde existence there has never been anyone like you--be a good gal--here is zero hour and nothing more to say...."

John W. Fletcher -- The Seer Sucker

In 1912 the well-known palmist moved into a luxurious fourth floor suite in Boston's Hotel Pelham at 74 Boylston Street after a crusade against the practice drove him from New York City.  Fletcher, 60, conducted discreet readings there until early 1913 when authorities received a rash of complaints from several young men who accused the seer of attacking them.  An undercover officer managed to secure enough incriminating evidence to have an assault warrant issued against the palmist.  On April 22, 1913, police served the warrant in Fletcher's suite.  According to published reports, Fletcher turned white, moved hesitatingly towards a telephone, but instead of placing a call removed poison from the pocket of his vest and swallowed it.  Seconds later he staggered across the room and fell unconscious to the floor.  Fletcher died two hours later.

Ernest William Steele -- Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down

A trapeze artist with the Ringling Brothers Circus, Steele left the tour and returned to Boston after arguing with his partner.  Soon afterward, the 37-year-old aerialist's marriage to wife Jenny, 28, dissolved under the strain of his jealousy and uncontrollable fits of melancholy.  On January 31, 1915, the acrobat had not lived with his estranged wife and their two young children for 17 months.  As was his custom, Steele picked up the older child every Sunday morning so the boy could spend the day with his grandmother.

While in the 4th floor apartment at 1366 Washington Street that his wife shared with her mother and three grown brothers, Steele took exception with the manner in which she was caring for their 20-month-old son, David.  After making a few insulting remarks to his wife, Steele whipped out a homemade blackjack from his pocket and struck her three times in the head.  A scuffle broke out between the acrobat and two of her brothers, but Steele wrenched himself free and, scooping up his infant son, stepped out of the window onto the ledge of the apartment building.  Moments later, he tossed the child to the street below in full view of a crowd of worshipers leaving church after mass.  Steele, brandishing a hunting knife, re-entered the apartment long enough to threaten, "I've got rid of one of them, and now I'll get the other," before retreating back onto the narrow ledge.  When a policeman attempted to move toward him, Steele dropped the knife, put his arms to his side, and dove headfirst to his death.  Remarkably, both mother and child survived.

Ward C. Fritz -- Hard Landing

With partner Betty Wetenkamp, Fritz (under his professional name "Paul Ward") was a well-known stage, ballroom, and nightclub dancer in Omaha, Nebraska.  In 1937, the pair danced in a benefit for a "free shoe fund" sponsored by the local newspaper, The World-Herald.  On May 15, 1938, the 22-year-old dancer left the home he shared with his parents in good spirits and took a taxicab to a nearby airfield, Dodge Park, in Council Bluffs, Iowa.  Fritz bought a ticket for an aerial sightseeing tour, making a point to tell the pilot that he preferred to be the only passenger in the two-seater, open cockpit plane.  The plane took off from the field and had reached its cruising speed of 100 miles per hour when, 2,000 feet up, the pilot noticed that Fritz had climbed out onto the lower wing of the biplane.  Before the pilot could shout, the dancer jumped, hurtled through the air, and smashed face-up into the ground below just ten yards from a man working in his vegetable garden.  The impact drove Fritz 18 inches into the ground, split his clothes up the back, knocked the heels of his shoes, and threw the watch he was wearing four feet away from the body.  A woman sitting in her home 75 feet away reported that the body's impact jarred her entire house.

Donald F. Taylor -- He Ain't Go No Body

[The following is offered in acknowledgment of the birthday of Rebecca Baumann, stalwart friend and "First Lady of LaffLand."]

The sixth husband of wannabe sex symbol Marie "The Body" McDonald, Taylor produced the 1963 sex farce Promises!  Promises! starring his wife and Jayne Mansfield, who appeared nude in the Tommy Noonan-directed film.  Despite a massive publicity campaign that touted McDonald's impressive physical dimensions, the bonde glamour girl never achieved star status.  On October 21, 1965, Taylor found his 42-year-old wife's lifeless body slumped at her dressing table in their ranch-style home in the Hidden Hills section of Hollywood.  An initial coroner's inconclusive finding of suicide or accidental death by "acute drug intoxication" was later ruled "accidental" based on a review of McDonald's past life and normal pattern of living.
  

On January 3, 1966, Taylor, 47, was found dead in the same house at 5337 Jed Smith Road by his 16-year-old stepdaughter and her boyfriend.  His fully-clothed body was discovered lying on the floor alongside his bed.  An empty bottle of Seconal was found on the nightstand.  Taylor left two handwritten suicide notes and a will instructing that his mother be fiven the remainder of his estate after the payment of bills.  In a note addressed to Robert N. Hirte, his business partner in the Marie McDonald, Inc., cosmetics firm, Taylor wrote:  "Please go on with the cosmetics business.  It was Marie's fervent desire to give women a product that would do them some good at a reasonable price."  The fact that the note was dated two days before the discovery of his body led police to believe that Taylor actually took his life on January 1, 1996.

Robert Love -- "I'm Brave, I'm Brave"

http://life.time.com/

Known as a set designer under his real name, Abraham Levine, Love, 34, was a bit player in several films including the 1938 Norman Foster vehicle I Cover Chinatown in which he played an unnamed cop.  According to his roommate, Daniel Harris, Love had been brooding for days over the suicide of actress Carole Landis, whom he had never met.  On the morning of July 8, 1948, Harris entered the kitchen of the home he shared with Love at 1737 North Whitley Avenue in Los Angeles to find his roommate standing with his head over an open gas jet.  When Harris turned off the gas, Love displayed a razor blade and, pointing to a minor cut on his neck, said:  "This was too painful--I couldn't do it that way."  Later that day, Harris took love to visit a doctor with an office on the third floor of the Guaranty Building in downtown Hollywood.  While waiting, Love suddenly jumped up (cutting his finger on a piece of overturned furniture) then ran up two flights of stairs to the fifth floor office of another doctor.  According to the receptionist there, the actor muttered, "I'm brave, I'm brave.  I can stand it," as he pushed through the crowded waiting room and dove through a half-opened window facing Ivar Street just off Hollywood Boulevard.

Jake Wells -- Two Strikes You're Out

Known as the "Father of Vaudeville" in Atlanta, Wells managed the Richmond Bluebirds of the Atlantic League to three pennants before purchasing his first theatre in Richmond, Virginia, in the late 1890s.  In his nearly 30 year career as the "Dean of Southern Vaudeville," the showman purchased several other theatres and opened a chain of summer amusement parks throughout North Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia.  Five weeks before committing suicide on March 16, 1927, the 63-year-old promoter suffered a nervous breakdown precipitated by concern over his own ill health and that of his wife.  On the fatal day, Wells accompanied by Betty Schaeffner, manager of his Park Hill Inn, was driving near Hendersonville, North Carolina, when they stopped to pick wild flowers.  Schaeffner began picking flowers while Wells leaned against a pine tree.  Moments after uttering, "It'll all be over soon," the promoter drew a revolver from a pocket and shot himself under the chin.  The woman vainly tried to wrest the gun from Wells before he fired a second deadly bullet into his head.

Roy G. Daniels -- Mr. Clean Meets Death

Failing in his bid to control all the popular priced vaudeville and picture theatres in Arkansas, Daniels, president of the Arkansas Amusement Company of Hot Springs, lost his business to creditors in 1909.  In ill health and facing imminent financial ruin, he returned to Topeka, Kansas, where longtime residents remembered him as a wild young man who as a bartender in the 1890s beat a man to death with a beer mallet in a seedy dive.  Tried for the murder, Daniel was acquitted in a controversial verdict that had turned the town against him.

On October 4, 1909, the promoter (age unreported) took a room in the National Hotel and committed one of the most fastidious suicides on record.  After writing notes to his mother, the press, the undertaker, and the coroner, Daniels removed pillows and a sheet from the bed, spread them on the floor and laid down to wait for the strychnine he swallowed to take effect.  Fearful the poison would act too slowly, he shot himself once over the heart and in the side of the head with an old fashioned cap and ball revolver.  The notes revealed Daniels' unusual attention to detail and a concern over how he would be remembered.  In one he wrote:  "This medicine is too slow.  I have taken off the clothes I wish to be buried in, so as not to soil them."  Another addressed to the newspapers begged:  "Please be merciful...I have been unsuccessful...This and sickness caused me to do this and for God's sake be merciful, this, the last, time."  And to the coroner:  "No investigation is necessary.  I have done this myself owing to business failure, sickness and despondency."

George Augustus Kelly -- Dancing into the Dark

Palais de Danse - Hammersmith

Kelly, a native of Omaha, Nebraska, joined the U.S. Army at the outbreak of World War I, but transferred to the British Air Force where distinguished service in the sky over France gained him a captain's commission.  Described as possessing a "magnetic personality," the handsome 30-year-old ex-flyer was acting as the manager of the Palais de Danse in Hammersmith when he met the attractive divorcee and dancer Sophia Erica Taylor, 29, there in 1920.  Known as "Babs" to her friends, Taylor was a chorus girl at the Gaiety Theatre and Hippodrome and was notorious for making the rounds of London nightclubs to dance.  The pair became lovers and dance partners, appearing in private exhibition dances in London though working principally in the suburbs.  Their extravagant lifestyle coupled with Kelly's gambling and addictions to alcohol and drugs soon cooled the relationship.  A pattern of violence developed.  Taylor, looking for a new benefactor, flirted with men while Kelly, drunk and insanely jealous, beat her.  Weeks prior to the impending tragedy (during which time the ex-soldier would often disappear for days) the dancer confided to a friend:  "I am very unhappy and Kelly is so strange.  He has hit me many times, and threatened me.  I do not know what to do."  Taylor became intimate with Captain Allan Leslie, formerly in the Golden Highlanders, and the two arranged to live together in Brighton.

Shortly after receiving a notice cancelling his appointment as manager for a circuit of suburban movie houses, Kelly entered Taylor's London flat at 8 St. James Street, Piccadilly, W., on December 17, 1920.  In the presence of her maid, he attempted to strangle his former lover to death on her bed.  The maid broke his grip, but Kelly fired a fatal shot into the fleeing Taylor before shooting himself in the head.  Among items found on Kelly's body were a quantity of cocaine and notes to Babs in which he wrote:  "Wish we could have fallen in love with each other as we have gotten along splendidly."

Harry Rush Raver -- Killed by a Gentleman

A leading film distributor in the teens, Raver was among the first to hold press previews for films.  In 1914, he previewed the Italian film Cabiria in the Gold Room of New York City's Astor Hotel.  Crippled by arthritis, Raver retired from show business and operated an antiques store before going blind.  On September 5, 1941, a burglar broke into the 62-year-old man's home at 1366 N. St. Andrews Place in Los Angeles.  Ignoring Raver's pleas not to hurt him because he was blind, the robber took $39 and beat him severely.  "If I verify the fact you are blind," Raver quoted the bandit, "I'll send your money back."  Raver died of his injuries on September 14, 1941.  A nightclub entertainer appearing before a Coroner's jury stated that for the last year or so Raver wrote the scripts for Busy Blind, a radio program featuring sightless talent.

Harold Blake Van Alstyne -- The Unbalanced Acrobat

A member of the hand balancing team of Van and Emerson, the 24-year-old acrobat became infatuated with Marian MacLaren of the vaudeville musical troupe the Five MacLarens while touring on the same circuit with them in 1922.  MacLaren, 30, accepted Van Alstyne's marriage proposal, but later broke off the engagement and returned his ring.  In September 1922, the acrobat turned up on the doorstep of the MacLaren home in Philadelphia demanding to speak to his former fiancee.  MacLaren's father intercede informing Van Alstyne that not only would the marriage break up the family act, but their age difference was also too great.  When finally allowed to see Marian MacLaren she refused to explain her reasons for cancelling the marriage although it was later reported she planned to marry another.  On the night of January 12, 1923, Van Alstyne attempted to talk to MacLaren backstage at New York City's Grand Theatre where the family was performing.  She again refused.  The acrobat waited until after the last show and followed the four MacLarens (three sisters and a brother) to the Autodine Cafeteria on 8th Avenue.  Van Alstyne walked up to their table, produced a pistol, and fired five shots instantly killing Marian and wounding her brother.  He shot himself in the chest, but survived.  The performer pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years to life imprisonment on April 13, 1923.  Three days later, Van Alstyne hanged himself with a belt from his bunk in the Tombs.

Mildred O'Keefe -- Black Bottomed Out

A Ziegfeld Follies dancer, the St. Paul, Minnesota, native performed on the New York stage in Rio Rita (1927) and with the Marx Brothers in Animal Crackers (1928).  O'Keefe toured in Monte Carlo and Paris where she was credited with being among the first dancers to introduce the Black Bottom dance to the continent.  O'Keefe was working as saleswoman in the gown department of New York City's Saks Fifth Avenue when she suffered a nervous breakdown in 1936.  The 32-year-old former dancer returned to Minnesota and was visiting relatives in Minneapolis when she checked into the West Hotel as "M. Brown" on October 8, 1936.  Two days later, O'Keefe's body was found in her room next to a pound can of potassium cyanide from which a teaspoon had been taken and dissolved into a nearby glass of water.  An unsigned note expressed regret and said, "You will be better off without me."

Jack Thompson -- The East River "Floater"

Hobbled by a career-ending injury to a tendon in his right leg, the popular 32-year-old musical comedy and vaudeville dancer in shows like Peggy Ann and A Connecticut Yankee announced his decision to kill himself at a party in his Manhattan Towers apartment on the night of November 3, 1931.  No one took the threat seriously and Thompson was permitted to leave the apartment.  The dancer remained missing until December 5, 1931 when a badly decomposed body was fished out of the East River.  A former roommate recognized the expensive imported shoes on the corpse's feet as those of the dancer.  Ironically, the "floater" was not positively identified until the surgeon who performed the unsuccessful surgery on Thompson's tendon confirmed the position of the scar on the body's right leg.

Frank Messenger -- A Not so Merry Xmas

Messenger served as an assistant director on the 1920 Universal film The Virgin of Stamboul before moving to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the early thirties.  While continuing to assistant direct at MGM (Eskimo, 1934), Messenger became widely known as a production (or unit) manager for his work on Maytime (1937), Rosalie (1937), and his final film, Northwest Passage, released in 1940 after his death.  On December 19, 1939, the 48-year-old production manager was helping his wife, Dorothy, decorate the Christmas tree in their home at 6617 Maryland Drive in Hollywood when he suddenly left the room, went to the garage, and fatally shot himself in the head with a pistol.  Messenger, according to authorities, had been unemployed for several months.

Lester Renaudin -- The Downhearted Emcee

Renaudin, a 21-year-old emcee at the Club Plantation in New Orleans, was married to his childhood sweetheart, Mary Lee Roberts, a 19-year-old dancer at the Club Avalon in Metairie Ridge, Louisiana, for two years when their recent estrangement exploded into a murder-suicide on January 26, 1933.  Shortly before midnight, Renaudin waited in his car outside the Club Avalon for Roberts to report to work.  When she arrived, he invited her into the car to talk.  Minutes later, Renaudin pulled out a revolver, shot her through the heart, then fired a bullet into his brain.  Roberts continued to scream, "Please don't let me die," until expiring (with her husband) en route to the hospital.  A letter addressed to his father found on the dead emcee read:  "I can't possibly live without Mary Lee and can do anything living with her.  She is the only girl that could ever enter my life.  I suppose I am crazy -- I must be to do a thing like this.  I would have gone crazy before the day was over.  I never was happy in my life, so don't worry, my poor, good, sweet family.  I loved you more than I could ever express.  I would write more, but you know how I feel.  Your downhearted son, Lester."

T. D. Crittenden -- In the Line of Duty

Born in Oakland, California, on September 27, 1878, the character actor appeared in several silent films (Jewel, 1915; Love Never Dies, 1916; Polly Put the Kettle On, 1917; The Devil's Wheel, 1918; The Hottentot, 1922; The Fast Worker, 1924) under the names "T.D." and "Dwight" Crittenden (Crittendon).  Long retired from acting, the 60 year old was a deputy city marshal in Los Angeles when he was killed in the line of duty in that city on February 17, 1938.  Crittenden and his partner, Leon W. Romer, 60, were serving a $67.50 eviction notice on George Farley, a 57-year-old black laborer, when the man fired a large caliber rifle through the door of the small frame house at 1741 East 23rd Street.  The bullet struck Romer full in the chest killing him instantly.  A retreating Crittenden was able to gain the street before he was dropped by a bullet in the head.  Summoned by neighbors, police surrounded the house and for an hour pumped volleys of bullets and tear gas into the structure.  Detectives cautiously entered the home to find Farley slumped on his face in a rear room severely wounded five times in the thighs, arms, and chest.  The laborer survived, and was convicted on two counts of manslaughter in June 1938.  Farley, unsuccessful in his insanity defense, was ordered to serve to consecutive 5 to 10 year terms in San Quentin.

Kitty Melrose -- Soon Forgotten

Adelphi Theatre

Kitty Melrose (real name Agnes Butterfield) last appeared onstage in The Quaker Girl during the early teens at the Adelphi Theatre in London.  On June 13, 1912, the actress (age unknown) was found dead lying on her back with her head in a gas oven in her flat in St. Stephen's mansions, Smith-square, Westminster.  Three months earlier, she had attempted to take her life with an overdose of veronal.  Brought to self-destruction by her former lover's refusal to go against his family and marry her, Melrose left the man two letters.  In one she wrote:  "Eddie, my dear one, I cannot bear any more, and everyone has told me you won't, and have done with me.  I am heartbroken, and cannot bear any more. Please forgive me, but I know as you do not love me, you will soon forget me.  All my love, and good luck to you.  Your Kit."  And in a postscript:  "It was wrong for every one to keep you from me.  It has made it too impossible.  I cannot fight alone, but I did believe in you, and did not think you would fail me.  But God's will.  I know you thought you were doing right. -- K."  In the other:  "Eddie -- By leaving me alone you thought you were doing right, but it was all wrong and cruel.  God forgive you, as I hope he will forgive me. -- Kit."

Dorothy Smoller -- Chain of Torture

Smoller, a one-time dancer in the company of Anna Pavlova, acted on Broadway in Checkerboard and What's in a Name in 1922 until a severe case of pulmonary tuberculosis exiled her to the Cragmore Sanitarium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 1923.  There she met fellow patient Benjamin Strong, governor of the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, who (with others) helped subsidize the cost of Smoller's protracted stay at the facility.  In 1925, Smoller left the sanitarium to live with her parents in California, but a chance to act in the Broadway play Howdy, King lured her back to New York in November 1926.  Advised by her doctor that a return to stage work posed a significant health risk, the 25-year-old actress flatly stated that she would rather die than not make the attempt to fulfill her ambition.

One week before the opening of the play, Smoller suffered a hemorrhage that effectively ended her acting career.  On December 9, 1926, she drank a three ounce bottle of shoe polish containing cyanide of potassium as a base in her room on the 28th floor of the Hotel Shelton in New York City.  She died fifteen minutes after the arrival of the hotel physician.  Smoller left three notes.  One was to Strong thanking him for his kindness and another was to a friend instructing him how to dispose of her property.  In the note to her mother, the actress referred to her illness as a "chain of torture" that "pains all the time."

Mina Rudolph -- Just One Person to Look at Me

Photo:  J. Willis Sayre

her twenties, Rudolph had been a noted beauty and a musical comedy star of shows like The Red Feather at the Mason Opera House in Los Angeles and a former singer of the San Toi Opera troupe of San Francisco.  Now a 55-year-old former opera star beset by financial worries, Rudolph was rescued by police in the fall of 1936 after attempting to gas herself to death in the bathroom of her home at 508 North Bedford Drive in Beverly Hills.  Weeks later on November 27, 1936, Rudolph registered at the exclusive Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills and requested "a room high up, where I can really rest."  Moments after being escorted to her room on the seventh floor, Rudolph wrote a note, removed her hat and glasses, then jumped from a window fatally landing on a skylight over the ground floor.

The note, addressed to her former husband, Jefferson James Grove, read:  "Dear Jeff:  I have left a will giving everything to you, also the contents of my safety deposit box, which is under the name of Mrs. J. George Faber, Box No. 970.  There is plenty of money to pay all expenses.  Keep what you want here, and as to the rest, telephone the Goodwill .  Well, I don't feel like retiring -- much.  Lovingly, Mina."  In a postscript she added:  "I don't want a minister, music nor praying at my funeral.  Just one person to look at me.  If I can't be put with Maude in 'Frisco, just scatter mine also.  I'll be so glad when it's all over with."

Douglas McPhail -- The Cost of McFailure

Jaynes and McPhail in happier times

Described by Metropolitan Opera star Lawrence Tibbett as "one of the best young baritones I have heard," McPhail appeared with nightclub bands in South America before extra work in motion pictures led to romantic singing parts in features.  Paired with Betty Jaynes in such films as Sweethearts (1938) and Babes in Arms (19139), McPhail secretly married the actress in 1938.  When they divorced in 1941, Jaynes was awarded sole custody of their daughter.  Shortly afterward, a distraught McPhail drank poison, but phoned his mother in time to be saved.  The singer volunteered for the Army in 1943, but a fall incurred during basic training kept him bedridden for eight months.  Medically discharged with the rank of private, the 30 year old worked four hours a day as a gardener while pursuing his musical studies in the hope of appearing in a concert.  Suffering from acute nervous exhaustion, McPhail swallowed poison in his home at 1818 N. Vine in Hollywood on December 7, 1944.  He died shortly afterward in General Hospital.

Lucy Cotton -- The Unhappy Princess

Cotton (born in 1891 in Houston, Texas) began working on Broadway in the mid-teens as a chorus girl in The Quaker Girl before graduating to larger roles in Turn to the Right (1916), Lightnin' (1918), and Up in Mabel's Room (1919).  In films, Cotton had bit parts in Divorced (1915) and Life Without Soul (a 1915 version of Frankenstein) before receiving co-star billing in The Prodigal Wife (1918), The Sin That was His (1920), and the 1921 George Arliss vehicle, The Devil.

Cotton's personal life, however, was her greatest role.  Married five times, her first in 1924 to Edward Russell Thomas, publisher of The New York Morning Telegraph, left her a multi-millionaire when he died two years later.  In 1927, she married Colonel Lytton Ament.  They divorced in 1930, and a year later she married Wall Street broker Charles Hann.  The union ended in divorce in 1932, and the next year she married William M. Magraw, a former newspaperman.  When this marriage ended on May 4, 1933, she married Prince Vladimir Eristavi-Tchitcherine at Key West, Florida, on the same day.  She divorced the exiled Russian prince in 1941 charging "extreme cruelty."  The divorce decree gave her the right to retain the title of princess.

At 9:00 A.M. on December 12, 1948, the 57-year-old owner of the beachfront Macfadden-Deauville Hotel was found in a coma by the butler in her palatial home at 943 Venetian Way in Miami Beach, Florida.  A note asking that a Miami doctor be called and an empty bottle of sleeping pills were found on a bedside table in her room.  Princess Lucy Cotton Thomas Ament Hann Magraw Eristavi-Tchitcherine died hours later without regaining consciousness at St. Francis Hospital.

Lynn Reynolds -- Next Stop...Deadwood

Reynolds, a director-scenarist best known for Westerns like The Deadwood Coach (1924), The Buckaroo Kid (1926), and Hey!  Hey!  Cowboy (1927), had originally planned to spend only three days in the High Sierras shooting scenes for Universal's Back to God's Country starring the sexy Renee Adoree on loan-out from MGM at $3,500 a week.  Instead, the company was snowed in for three weeks at Bishop, California, before Reynolds could complete the pivotal shots.  Afterward, the 36-year-old director phoned his wife in Hollywood to let her know that he would not only be coming home on the evening of February 24, 1927, but would also like to have a dinner party with friends to mark the occasion.

Arriving at his home at 8281 Fountain Avenue, a tired and emotionally spent Reynolds was displeased to find only one couple, Mr. and Mrs. William H. White, had been invited by his wife, formerly known on screen as "Kathleen O'Connor."  At dinner, the woman playfully "accused" Reynolds of having shared a lunch basket, which she had prepared for him, with Renee Adoree while on location.  Shouting, "It's a lie!" Reynolds countered by accusing her of adultery.  Enraged, the woman tossed an ashtray at her husband, prompting him to storm off to the sunroom at the rear of the house with his wife in hot pursuit.  Mr. White followed the pair into the room and saw the woman, her eyes puffy from being used as a punching bag and pleading for her life, on the floor with Reynolds above her brandishing a .38-caliber pistol.  The director then placed the pistol to his head and fired.  He died the next day at Receiving Hospital.  Back to God's Country was finished by director Irvin Willat and released on September 4, 1927.

Emilia Da Prato -- Never Date a Dry Cleaner

Da Prato in 1927.   (Photo:  J. Willis Sayre)

"I have killed my sweetheart," Umberto Giusti, 37, told San Francisco police moments after he surrendered to them following the fatal shooting of Emilia Da Prato, his 26-year-old girlfriend, on December 19, 1933.  Da Prato, a promising opera singer, was one of two winners in the Western district of the Atwater Kent national radio audition contest in 1927.  She later placed second in the New York City portion of the contest.  According to Giusti, an employee of a dry cleaning establishment, he fell in love with Da Prato two years earlier and acted as her booking and press agent.  Giusti bankrolled her career and was buying his lover a car when he learned Da Prato was seeing another man, and planned to leave the Bay area for an audition with the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York City.  On the day of the killing, Giusti called at the Da Prato family home in South San Francisco and angrily confronted the woman, shooting her three times in the back.  He turned the gun on himself, but the weapon jammed and he wandered away in a daze.  Shortly afterwards, Giusti gave himself up at a local police station.  Neighbors and relatives of the dead woman shouting "Lynch him" attempted attempted to mob the self-confessed killer at the South San Francisco jail prompting authorities to hastily transport Giusti to the county jail at nearby Redwood City.  At trial in February 1934, the jealous dry cleaner turned opera impresario pleaded "not guilty by reason of insanity," but a jury needed less than two hours to convict him of first-degree murder with a recommendation of leniency that carried an automatic life sentence.

Benjamin Krause -- The Greatest Show on Earth

Widely known in the South as the owner-operator of Krause Greater Shows, the 57-year-old veteran showman's business had all but been wiped out by a freak storm that struck the fair in the winter of 1936.  On January 6, 1937, a depressed and suicidal Krause, accompanied by a concerned brother, was en route by train to a sanitarium in Philadelphia when he eluded his traveling companion at the Union Station in Savannah, Georgia.  Earlier on the trip, Krause had twice tried to take his life, first by jumping off the train into a river and then later my breaking his glasses and attempting to slash his wrists.  Ten hours after his brother reported him missing, Krause's body was found by blacks searching for driftwood on the north bank of the Savannah River.  Burns on the showman's lips suggested that he had ingested a corrosive dose before jumping off the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad train into the river.

Bantcho Bantchevsky -- The Fat Lady Sings

A well-known musical comedy performer in the thirties on "Bulgaria's Broadway," a theatrical section of Sofia, Bantchevsky left Bulgaria after it became a Soviet ally during World War II.  He continued to perform as an actor and singer throughout post-war Europe before emigrating to the U.S. in the early 1950s with the dream of starring in American theatre.  In New York, he supported himself as a singing coach, and by writing political satire for Radio Free Europe.  A devoted opera enthusiast, Bantchevsky, 82, was a fixture at Metropolitan Opera House performances, and had cultivated friendships with many of its Bulgarian stars.

On the morning of January 23, 1988, Bantchevsky refused a friend's dinner invitation with the comment that he could not eat because "I'm going to die tonight."  Attending the Met's matinee performance of Verdi's opera Macbeth, Bantchevsky seated himself in the "Family Circle," the fifth and highest balcony in the opera house where desks are provided for patrons to study the score during the performance.  During the first intermission two ushers had to pull Bantchevsky away from the top railing where he was seated rocking slowly back and forth.  Ten minutes into the second intermission, the singing coach plunged 80 feet from the top railing, bounced off a lower balcony rail, and mercifully landed on unoccupied seats ten rows from the back of the orchestra with a broken seat atop him.  The rest of the opera, broadcast live on nationwide radio over the Texaco Metropolitan Opera Network, was cancelled.  Friends of Bantchevsky said that the elderly man had recently suffered from poor health, and had constantly talked of suicide.

Lulu Leslie -- Leave Nothing to Chance

Fearful that she would die among strangers and receive a pauper's burial in potter's field, the 75-year-old woman known to fellow boarding house tenants as "Mrs. Eva Smith" was in daily contact with a Staten Island undertaker.  Once assured by the firm that she would be buried with her family in Philadelphia, the single woman gassed herself to death in her two-room basement apartment at 139 W. 101st Street in New York City on September 27, 1929.  "Mrs. Smith" was found lying on the floor of her kitchen near a gas jet with one of its three jets wide open.  A canvas bag strapped around her waist contained $720 in new bills.  A letter from the Staten Island funeral home confirming her burial plans was found atop one of several trunks filled with tattered costumes, press clippings, and handbills identifying the gas victim as former burlesque and vaudeville queen Lulu Leslie, who 50 years earlier had danced in the musical extravaganzas The Black Crook and King Cole the Second, and with Billy Watson's Beef Trust.

Henry M. Spitzer -- Cruising Down the River Styx

Spitzer, 54, president of a New York City-based music publishing business bearing his name, was formerly an executive with the Edward Morris Music Company and the Chappell Music Publishing Company as well as a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).  Gone, however, were the days that spawned his one big song hit, "Cruising Down the River" (1945), and by September 22, 1952, the veteran Tin Pan Alleyite was tired, sick, and financially ruined.  That day, Spitzer committed suicide by inhaling illuminating gas in his Manhattan apartment at 333 Westr Fifty-seventh Street.  The music publisher left four notes in which he attributed his self-destruction to illness and financial reverses.

Harry Leonard -- Tragedy in Laughter's Wake

For three years 55-year-old film character actor Harry Leonard (reported in the news as being in Ramona, 1916) longed to marry Anneska Frolik, 24.  Shortly after dusk on August 31, 1917, Frolik's 24th birthday, Leonard arrived at her home at 1115 South El Molino Street in Los Angeles carrying two packages.  While waiting for the young woman to return, Leonard spoke amiably with her sister-in-law and mother.  Opening one of the packages to reveal a pile of unpublished screenplays tied with a red ribbon, Leonard declared that they would be valuable properties after the war.  The women's patronizing smiles elicited a strange comment from the aging actor, "Ah, you laugh.  Tragedy follows in the wake of laughter."  Leonard fell into a dejected silence for the rest of the evening until Frolik returned at 9:00 P.M.  The women left them alone to talk.  Whispers in the parlor were interrupted by three pistol shots in quick succession.  Rushing into the room, Frolik's family saw her (bleeding profusely from two shots to the chest and one in the stomach) grappling with the actor.  Leonard produced a pint bottle of steaming sulfuric acid from his coat, tossed it in Frolik's eyes, and in the general direction of the horrified pair, before taking another bottle filled with carbolic acid from his pocket and drinking it.  The actor staggered out of the house brandishing the automatic weapon.

Leonard was quickly found  and returned to Frolik's home.  Shortly before passing out from the pain, the actor indicated two type-written letters addressed to the girl's father lying near the manuscripts.  Both Anneska Frolik and her aged suitor later died.  One of the letters, addressed "Not to be opened under any circumstances while I am in existence," willed the packaged screenplays to Frolik's father.  The other, also written to the man, intimated that while the young woman once promised to marry him, she experienced a change of heart.  Leonard concluded, "I must show you I cannot live with her in this Hell and I will try my best to live with her in Heaven, if there is one.  I will take her with me through my act and I hope that you will forgive me.  I hope we all will meet over there."

Robert Sorrells -- Don't Fuck with the Cowboy

Sorrells in 1967 (aveleyman.com)

Born in 1930, Sorrells was a bit player in films, especially Westerns, from the early to the late 1960s.  His films include All Fall Down (1962), Morituri (1965), Gunfight in Abilene (1967), The Last Challenge (1967), The Ride to Hangman's Tree (1967), Death of a Gunfighter (1969), Bound for Glory (1976, as Woodie Guthrie's father), Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978), Fletch (1985), and Nowhere to Run (1989).  Sorrells also landed small parts in three made-for-television movies (San Francisco International, 1970, NBC; Female Artillery, 1973, ABC; Gus Brown and Midnight Brewster, 1985, NBC), and was seen on a variety of Western television series (Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Rawhide, Lancer, Cimarron Strip).

Sorrells in 2002

The 74-year-old actor was retired and living in a low income senior citizens complex in Simi Valley, California, when an argument in a bar on July 24, 2004, turned deadly.  The night before, Sorrells drank until closing at the Regency Lounge, a seedy downtown bar located on Los Angeles Avenue and Galt Street about twenty miles northwest of L.A.  The next morning, he revisited the tavern to inquire about a lost credit card, returning later in the afternoon to resume drinking.  Sorrells harassed a female bartender to the extent Arthur DeLong, a 45-year-old painting contractor who was drinking at the tavern, escorted the elderly man outside.  Sorrells drove his Volkswagen minibus back to his apartment in Heywood Gardens, retrieved a semiautomatic pistol, and returned to the Regency Lounge around 5:00 P.M.  What next transpired was captured on silent videotape from a surveillance camera mounted in the ceiling above the bar.  Sorrells, a silver-haired man with a Col. Sanders-type goatee, walked into the bar, held the gun to DeLong's back, fired, and shot another round at the man as he lay dead on the barroom floor.  The former Western actor then turned the gun on another patron seated at the bar, Edward Sanchez, 40, shooting him in the face and back.  Sanchez survived the attack.  Stunned patrons recalled prior to exiting the bar, Sorrells shouted, "Does anybody else want to fuck with the cowboy?"  Simi Valley police apprehended the retired actor in his van minutes later three blocks from the shootout, and booked him in the Ventura County Jail on suspicion of murder and attempted murder.  A detective later testified that five hours after the shooting Sorrells' blood-alcohol level was still more than twice the legal limit.

Interviewed by detectives, the former actor's friends painted a sad picture of a man in emotional decline.  Friendly and outgoing, Sorrells was a practicing vegetarian who kept a small shrine to an Eastern god in his apartment.  Proud of his former screen accomplishments, he often showed friends residual checks from the Screen Actors Guild.  The death of his mother and poodle in 2003, however, radically changed Sorrells' personality.  He cut himself off from others, and resumed drinking.  Paramedics once called to his apartment described Sorrells in their report as a "babbling drunk."  A friend who spent the last decade performing with Sorrells (a talented guitarist) in a weekly jam session reported how after the deaths the elderly man began acting "weird."  Sorrells started calling the man to complain of how he felt he ruined his life by "pickling his brain" with alcohol and drugs.  Later, he received a threatening phone call from Sorrells announcing their friendship was over.  "I don't like you," the actor said.  "I have a gun and will come after you."  The music group banned the aging actor, a self-professed celibate yogi with the email username "yogibob," after he propositioned one of its female members.  A woman in Heywood Gardens sadly commented, "He was my friend, but he was a wacko, no doubt about it.  My intuitive reaction is that he's nuts....  It's just so heartbreaking."

The damning videotape recorded by the surveillance camera in the Regency Lounge was played at a preliminary hearing in October 2004 to determine a trial date.  The prosecutor likened Sorrells to a "gunfighter" in one of his 1960s Westerns.  The trial date was set, Sorrells later pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and attempted murder in May 2005 after a psychiatric examination determined he was sane at the time of the shooting.  On July 13, 2005, Sorrells was sentenced to a prison term of 25 years to life.

Homer M. Walters -- He Lost It at the Movies

sbtos.com

Walters and Lillian Tyler, both 32, played together in the orchestra at the Loew's Park Theatre in Cleveland, Ohio.  During his 12-year courtship of Tyler, Walters spent $15,000 on the organist in an unsuccessful bid to marry her.  In early March 1925, the musician struck the woman when he caught her entertaining a young college boy in her apartment.  He was arrested for assault and battery, but released after Tyler refused to testify against him.  On March 25, 1925, the frightened woman phoned authorities to report Walters had repeatedly threatened to kill her.  At a joint meeting before the police prosecutor, Lillian Tyler intimated to her frustrated suitor that she "might" place him on probation and, if he behaved himself, possibly later marry him.  At 5:30 P.M. on March 28, 1925, Tyler was seated alone in the front row of the Loew's Park Theatre during a non-musical interlude of the comedy film, The Burglar.  Walters, who recently quit the orchestra to become the treasurer of his father's coal company, sat down beside her.  Although an estimated 200 patrons were in the theatre, no one was seated in the next ten rows behind the couple.  During an action scene in the film punctuated by some fifty sound effect shots, Walters produced a revolver and pumped four rounds into Tyler's cheek, temple, neck, and eye.  Afterwards, he shot himself in the head.  Unaware the pistol reports they heard were not part of the movie, the audience laughed and applauded as two people lay dead in the front row.  Their bodies, Tyler's slumped in her seat and Walters' splayed on the floor at her feet, were discovered by an usher ten minutes later.

Helene Jerome -- Three and Out

A graduate of the Royal Dramatic Academy in London, Jerome acted on stage in China, but never appeared in films.  On August 27, 1958, Jerome's ex-husband Edwin, became alarmed after the switchboard operator at the Hollywood apartment where the former actress lived informed him that her phone had been off the hook for several hours.  Edwin Jerome entered the apartment at 1738 N. Las Palmas Avenue and found Helene's naked body in the rear, a victim of strangulation.  Investigating officers found a screen torn away from a painted window which allowed the killer access to the apartment.  A few days later, Edgar G. McAdoo, a 25-year-old carhop from Texas, was arrested on suspicion of murder due to his resemblance to a police sketch based on descriptions of witnesses who saw with the 50-year-old onetime actress in a bar shortly before her death.  McAdoo admitted being with Jerome and to escorting her back to the apartment, but insisted he then left.  The case against McAdoo collapsed due to a lack of physical evidence and his passing of a lie detector test.

Only momentarily deterred, authorities arrested Miller F. Dowdy, 42, on September 6, 1958.  The operater of a newstand on Hollywood Boulevard only a block away from Jerome's apartment on N. Las Palmas, Dowdy admitted briefly dating the woman, but maintained he was at work on the day of the killing.  As with McAdoo, the case against Dowdy soon fell apart.  The Jerome murder remained a cold case until November 21, 1962, when Michael John Donahue, a 26-year-old shipping clerk from La Puente, California, walked into a Portland, Oregon police station and confessed to the strangulation.  Guilt-stricken over the murder, he fled to Oregon to "try and get away from it all."  Donahue pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced in April 1963 to a prison term of 5 years to life.

William H. Lothrop -- The Last Round-Up

On May 2, 1913, moments before the curtain at the Boston Theatre was lifted on the first act of The Round-Up, the theatre's 38-year-old treasurer and assistant manager chatted amiably with a cast member.  Lothrop retired to his office on the second balcony floor and soon afterward a shot rang out.  He was found on a couch clutching a revolver in his left hand and bleeding profusely from a gunshot wound to the head.  Lothrop died at Boston's Relief Hospital a half hour later without recognizing his wife of a year at his bedside.  Shortly before shooting himself, Lothrop had phoned her and their conversation had sufficiently worried the woman to leave for the theatre.  While no reason was publicly stated for the suicide, Lothrop's brother added an element of mystery to the affair when he stated that the man suffered from a paralysis of the left side that made it impossible for him to have committed the deed with his left hand.

Pasqual Fabris -- The Martyrdom of the New Christ

Frances Langford -- "No" to Samoa

Repeated career disappointments and the refusal of film star and vocalist Frances Langford to marry him prompted the 25-year-old violinist to run a length of fire hose from the exhaust pipe of his car into the closed compartment.  On April 27, 1937, police in Los Angeles found Fabris slumped in the seat of his car, the engine still running, a victim of carbon monoxide poisoning.  A rambling 16 page note left in his apartment at 6326 Lexington Avenue listed a litany of professional and personal rebukes that had driven the mentally unbalanced musician over the edge.

Born in Dalmatia on October 28, 1901, Fabris had studied under the noted Viennese conductor Carl Flesch, made his concert debut in Berlin in 1924, and from 1927 to 1931 was first violinist with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.  In the City of Angels, Fabris' life began to unravel.  In 1933, Fabris failed to win the post of conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra recently vacated by Artur Rodzinski.  Afterward, a major studio's refusal of his offer to direct a cycle of Wagner operas was quickly followed by his dismissal from Raymond Paige's Orchestra, a position obtained through Frances Langford.  The sexy screen actress, however, dealt the final blow to the violinist's teetering sanity when she nixxed his marriage proposal and subsequent scheme to retreat to Samoa where he planned to write a system of philosophy in which he heralded himself as a new Christ.

Mary Lygo -- Death by Any Other Name...

Chicago Daily News/Chicago History Museum

Lygo (born Irene Goodall in Akron, Ohio) joined the Ziegfeld Follies in 1918, and later worked for producers Simeon and Morris Gest in the New York stage production of The Wanderer.  Madly in love with Chicago millionaire Gordon C. Thorne, son of one of the founders of Montgomery Ward & Company,  Lygo wanted to marry the man, but was blocked by Thorne's mother who strongly disapproved of her.  After the breakup, Lygo twice tried to take her life.  In May 1921 she slashed her wrists with a razor at the home of her plastic surgeon, and in 1922 she lay in a coma for a week after ingesting poison.  One year later, Lygo filed a $100,000 breach of promise suit against Thorne, which was quietly settled out of court for $8,000.

In January 1927, Lygo traveled to the West Coast to play a nun in the Gest production of the Miracle Play.  Hoping to break into films, she took the name "Irene Fuller" to avoid any negative connotations associated with her true stage name.  On May 31, 1927, "Fuller" was found unconscious by her roommate on the floor of their room in the Vivian Apartments at 637 North Bronson Avenue.  A half-empty bottle of veronal tablets was found at the scene along with notes signed by "Fuller" in which she disposed of her possessions, requested that her mother not be told, and warned:  "Be most careful as to the name `M.L.' as it means so much to the press."  Lygo's identity was subsequently established by a fellow actor who visited the comatose woman at the Receiving Hospital.  Conjecture raged as to the reason for the act.  Some ascribed the deed to her broken love affair with Thorne while others noted that she was despondent about not quickly breaking into films.  The 25-year-old showgirl died in the Receiving Hospital on June 2, 1927.  A steamer trunk found after her death contained several tattered theatrical dresses and five pawn tickets.

Andrew Selkirk -- The Old Ball Game

A one-time cellist with various radio orchestras, Selkirk began a business arranging packaged radio programs until severe financial reverses left the 37 year old on the verge of bankruptcy.  Forced to send his wife to live with her mother, Selkirk was scheduled to vacate their Chicago apartment at 180 East Delaware on September 7, 1934.  That morning, he handed the bellboy two notes, one addressed to the manager of the building instructing him to break down the door of the apartment and to notify his wife, and the other to his wife explaining the deed.  Selkirk then fired a bullet into his brain.

To his wife, he wrote:  "Terese Dear:  These are the last and honest words of a soul in turmoil.  For what has happened to us I am entirely to blame.  Living, I am of no use to anybody, not even myself.  I want you to put all of this tangle out of your mind and begin anew.  Good luck, and I wish you a new and better deal."  In a message found at the scene dated August 7, Selkirk left a whimsical verse epitah addressed to a female friend of the family:  "Dear Honey:  Since we got into this argument, let's have a lot of fun, shall we?  What do you think of this paraphrase as an epitaph:

'Here lies the last work of Andy Selkirk;
For him life held no terrors;
He lived like a fool and died like a fool;
No runs, no hits, some error.
But no one left on bases.'

To get the full significance of the above you should listen to two full baseball broadcasts from beginning to end.  Yours in martyrdom, hi-de-hi, Andy."

Charles Dundas Slater -- One Way Death Cab

London Coliseum

Connected with the management of London's Empire Theatre from 1889 to 1895, Slater was also the business manager of the Alhambra before leaving in 1907 to manage the London Coliseum music hall.  Following years of faithful service, the 60 year old was dismissed on June 29, 1912 when rheumatic gout and failing eyesight prevented him from discharging his business duties.  At 4:30 P.M. on July 8, 1912, Slater flagged down a taxi cab and told the driver to take him to Charing Cross Hospital.  Minutes later, the cabbie heard what he believed was an exhaust backfire.  Arriving at the hospital, the cabbie discovered his fare lying on the back seat with a gaping wound in his head and blood flowing from his mouth.  A seven chamber revolver, with one spent round, was between his knees.  Slater died two hours later.

In a letter found on his body, Slater wrote:  "On the rocks.  No hope.  No daylight.  God forgive me for this act, but I am hopeless, and if there is one among my English and American friends who will have a friendly thought left for me let them now show it by doing all they can for my poor, faithful wife.  I have led a white man's life, but this is a degraded dog's finish,  I am broken-hearted, but not insane.--C.D.S."  On September 10, 1912, a distinguished company of artists gave a performance at the London Coliseum for the benefit of Slater's widow and children.