Evelyn Nelson -- Hang On Wally, I'm Coming

Often paired with Jack Hoxie in Western melodramas (Cyclone Bliss, 1921; The Crow's Nest, 1922; Desert Rider, 1923), Nelson was in her late teens when she met and fell in love with motion picture he-man Wallace Reid.  The pair began an affair that continued until the married Reid, fearful that the scandal might ruin his career, broke it off.  The relationship resumed after Reid was granted an interlocutory divorce decree, but again fearing negative press, he finally called it quits.  Ravaged by drug addiction, the so-called "King of Paramount" died in a sanatorium on January 18, 1923.  Devastated by Reid's death, the 23-year-old actress tried to go on living, but as The Los Angeles Examiner reported on June 17, 1923, "heart broken, (she) gave up the struggle and embarked on the Great Adventure."  The day before, Nelson's body was found in a gas-filled room in her luxuriously appointed bungalow as 6231 De Longpre Avenue in Hollywood.  In a note addressed to her mother Nelson begged for forgiveness, adding that she had no reason for the suicide except that "I am tired."  In another note penned moment before her death, the actress wrote:  "I am just about gone, and will soon be with my friend, Wally Reid."

Joseph Walter Leopold -- Death Via Enchilada Sauce

A member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) since 1942, Leopold was a veteran novelty songwriter ("Oh!  How She Can Dance," 1919) who, as a piano accompanist to his wife, singer Emma Carus, toured vaudeville for many years.  In the 1950s, the songwriter changed professions to work as a collection investigator for loan and credit companies.  On December 28, 1956, the 66 year old was paying for groceries in a Hollywood market at 1921 N. Cahuenga
Avenue when a gunman burst into the store and demanded money from the counter attendant.  The robber scooped $50.00 out of the register and was fleeing the scene when Leopold tossed a can of enchilada sauce at the gunman striking him in the shoulder.  The man whirled, fired a single shot from a .38-caliber pistol, and ran to the parking lot where an accomplice waited in a light green sedan.  Leopold, struck in the left temple, died a few minutes after being ambulanced to Hollywood Receiving Hospital.  Shooter Charles F. Neely, 26, and wheelman Norman Golland, 30, were arrested the next day.  Both pleaded guilty to the murder and were sentenced to terms of life imprisonment.

Lew Mason -- They Always Leave a Note

"The people who may know me
Will not miss me when I'm gone,
They have sacrificed their birthright,
With their souls put up in pawn.
I've put my house in order,
Insofar as just I can
And I'm going to meet--I wonder!
But I'm going like a man."

Mason, an assistant casting director for film producer Edward Small, penned his intention to make the "Grand Exit" weeks before inhaling gas in his room at the Christie Hotel in Los Angeles on May 18, 1924.  Friends found the unconscious film man next to an empty bottle of champagne and clutching a picture of an unidentified woman.  In a note filled with several postscripts, Mason left all his belongings to Marcella Daly, a young film actress.  Prefacing the suicide letter with "This is the note.  They always leave some kind of note," Mason observed that life was too fast paced for him, and advised his readers never "to lose their sense of humor."  Mason was removed to the Hollywood Hospital, but died the next day after failing to respond to blood transfusions taken from two of his actor friends.

Alexander Winkler -- A Perfect Wedding Gift

A dancing instructor and manager of the vaudeville act Winkler's Madcaps, the 42-year-old divorced father of an 18-year-old daughter violently opposed the young woman's upcoming marriage to a waiter when, he argued, a prominent artist wished to marry her.  Following a quarrel with his ex-wife over the proposed nuptials, Winkler inhaled gas at his apartment at 342 West Forty-fifth Street in New York City on November 18, 1916.  Winkler was found holding a picture of his mother in one hand and a miniature of his wife in the other.  He left several letters and in one, addressed "To the Public," wrote:  "He died without leaving one cent of debt."  Prior to taking his life, Winkler decided to leave his daughter a macabre wedding gift.  In a telegram sent to his wife shortly before inhaling the fatal gas, he wrote:  "Lilly's wedding present will be ready for shipment when you receive this."  The shaken woman vowed, "Even his death will not prevent her from marrying the man she loves."

Yolanda Presburg -- Hypochondria in High C

The wife of a wealthy Chicago banker, Presburg, 41, sang for a decade in the chorus of the Chicago Civic Opera Company and was a member of the New York Grand Opera Choral Alliance.  Obsessed with the notion that she had tuberculosis, the Hungarian-born singer checked into a sanitarium in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Despite being given a clean bill of health by specialists, she refused to accept their diagnosis.  On August 20, 1926, Presburg boarded a North Shore Line train in the Windy City bound for Milwaukee.  Registering at the Wisconsin Hotel as "Yolanda Sugar," Presburg took a 7th floor room overlooking an inner court.  At 2:50 P.M. guests heard a thunderous crash as the singer slammed into the roof of the hotel ballroom.  Barely conscious, Presburg murmured, "I am from Chicago, my husband is not to blame," a phrase she reiterated during the five hours she clung to life in Milwaukee's Emergency Hospital.  In her room at the hotel two notes were found, one in Hungarian to her husband, the other addressed to police.  The message to authorities read:  "Do not blame me for this act and do not blame my husband.  I am sorry to do it.  I have been suffering from what the doctors call T.B.  My husband has done all he can do to cure me, sent me to sanitoria in the south, but it is no use."

Viola Gordon Munro -- It's Raining Blood

Viola, 55, a former stage actress, and husband Alfred, 75, a one-time theatrical representative of the Schubert organization in Boston, occupied a modest apartment over a two-car garage in Norwich, Connecticut.  On the morning of June 21, 1949, their downstairs neighbor noticed blood dripping from the ceiling as he went to get his car out of the garage.  Police entered the Munro's apartment and found the former theatrical manager dead in bed from a gunshot wound to the head inflicted by his wife, who had then fired a fatal shot through her right ear.  Facing imminent eviction, the pair had been unemployed for several months and known to be heavily drinking.

Percy C. Melrose -- Always Blame the Wife

Melrose, 57, a former circus performer in a bicycle act, made a small fortune in the teens manufacturing patent medicine in the Columbus, Ohio, area.  Married with two children, Melrose began an affair with his neighbor's wife, Eva Tootle, the 27-year-old mother of a small child.  The affair ended in tragedy on May 16, 1918, with the discovery of their bullet-riddled bodies in the front seat of Melrose's car near Lockbourne, just south of Columbus.  A passing motorist found the pair when she noticed that the windshield of the car was covered with newspapers and its curtains were drawn.  Ballistics and a note found on the car's rear seat told the story of a murder-suicide.  According to authorities, Melrose shot Tootle three times in the head during a struggle (as evidenced by defensive wounds on the woman's hands) then fired one bullet into his head just behind the right ear.  A note found at the scene read, in part:  "Facts:  A ruined home and a ruined life, all because my wife was so extravagant.  We have not loved each other for three or four years.  I love little Eva because she is so pure.  God have mercy on my soul and grant that my wife will rear my two children in the right way."

Jerome Cady -- I Did It. I Did It. I Did It

Cady (born in West Virginia in 1904) worked for several Los Angeles daily newspapers prior to becoming one of the top screenwriters at 20th Century-Fox.  His screen credits include Guadalcanal Diary (1943), The Purple Heart (1944), Forever Amber (1947), and the classic James Stewart film Call Northside 777 (1948).  On November 8, 1948, less than one week after suffering a severe heart attack, Cady 44, was entertaining some friends aboard his yacht, the Harp, moored in Avalon Bay off Santa Catalina Island in California.  According to witnesses, Cady entered the cruiser's galley, poured sleeping pills into his hand, and gulped them down with a glass of water.  As the dying screenwriter writhed in agony on his bunk, he kept moaning, "I did it.  I did it.  I did it."  Shortly before dying Cady instructed a friend to call his wife and tell her he had just committed suicide.

Harry Lud Hamilton -- 4 Cents and a Note

Eden Park Reservoir

A native of Marysville, Kentucky, Hamilton, 65, spent 43 years in theatrical work and served as manager of Gus Sun's vaudeville houses throughout Ohio.  In his career, he was also an advance manager for stage productions, carnivals, and circuses, and business manager to former heavyweight boxing champion of the world Bob Fitzsimmons, and magicians Howard Thurston and Blackstone.  The veteran showman, however, had been unemployed since the beginning of 1940 and living in a room at the Oxford Hotel in Cincinnati since June 4.  Shortly after 7:00 A.M. on November 18, 1940, a passerby stopped to investigate a coat and hat hanging on the west wall of the Eden Park Reservoir in that city.  Nearby, Hamilton's body was visible close to shore standing upright in some ten feet of water.  Authorities found 4 cents and a note outlining his burial arrangements in the showman's pockets.  Personal effects in Hamilton's hotel room included insurance policies and several notes.  One to a hotel clerk read:  "What is the use of fooling myself any longer.  I will take the step that will part us.  You will find my body over near the band stand in the park.  I am going with my chin up.  No regrets!  Good wishes." Police determined that Hamilton probably drowned himself two days before he was found.

Roy Edgar Schuster -- The Sing Sing Minstrel

A former vaudeville dancer, Schuster, 26, took a job as a dance instructor for theatrical producer Ned Wayburn in New York City to support his one-time actress wife, Amy, and their four-year-old daughter.  The four-year marriage crumbled in mid-1930.  Schuster was living alone and struggling to pay a court ordered alimony settlement of $40 a week while attempting to reconcile with his wife when he lost his job in January 1931.  On the morning of May 2, 1931, the dancer showed up at the fourteenth-floor office of his wife's attorney, Israel Siegel, at 49-51 Chambers Street to make one last attempt at reconciliation.  Schuster argued with his estranged wife in an outer office of the law firm and became even more irate when Siegel told him to stay put while he conferred alone with his client in a private office.  Schuster drew a .32-caliber revolver and shot his wife twice in the head killing her instantly.  Before the crazed dancer fled past dazed office workers he emptied his gun leaving Siegel with two flesh wounds in the arm.  On May 28, 1931, the former dancer was arrested in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was living under the name "Anderson" and writing a book on dancing.  While awaiting extradition to New York on a murder charge, Schuster insisted he only went to the law office with the intention of killing himself if the reconciliation failed.  "I guess I'll get the electric chair," he told authorities, "for no jury will listen to my story.  But the killing was accidental...I went to the door and I supposed Siegel was trying to dissuade my wife from coming back to me.  I pulled out a gun to end it all.  But Siegel thought I was going to shoot him and he rushed toward me.  We grappled and the gun went off several times as we scuffled.  When I regained my senses my wife was dead and Siegel was gone."  Schuster was found guilty of second-degree murder on October 22, 1931, and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.  At the state penitentiary in Ossining, New York, Schuster was a member of the Sing Sing Minstrels, a group of talented prisoners who put on public shows with proceeds earmarked for a relief fund for families of inmates.

Claude Bornais -- Another Destroyed Him

Claude Bornais

On the morning of August 24, 2000, horrified neighbors of Canadian-born Claude Bornais, 65, and his 51-year-old Dominican wife, Carmen, witnessed the knife-wielding woman chase the big bandleader-jazz musician of of their home, and down the street of a gated community in Boca Raton, Florida.  When Claude Bornais finally crumpled to the pavement he had been gravely wounded from at least 20 slash marks and stab wounds ranging from the top of his head downwards.  The tip of the knife blade broke off in his body.  Bornais died the following day and Carmen was charged with second-degree murder.  She told police her husband of eight month had been abusive, and that she had merely acted in self-defense after Bornais had attempted to stab her.  A sheriff's report, however, indicated the wounds on her left arm looked to be self-inflicted.  Although the marriage appeared outwardly tranquil according to the bandleader's professional associates, a note found in Bornais' car after his death listed 21 domestic problems with his wife.  Bornais wrote, "(she) Cannot fill out job application," "(her) closets and drawers (are in) total disarray," and complained that she spoke little English, and was unable to read street signs or music.  The laundry list of complaints closed with the cryptic entry, "Don't let others destroy me!"

Attorneys for Carmen, a hairstylist in Boca Raton, mounted a "battered spouse defense" arguing

Carmen Bornais (Florida Dept. of Corrections)

Bornais was such a controlling tyrant that he forced his wife to give him all her money while physically punishing her for offenses as minor as bringing him the wrong brand of beer.  Insanely jealous by Carmen's account, the bandleader barred her from taking English lessons because he feared she might meet Latin men.  Often, she claimed, Bornais dragged her by the hair, slapped her, and afterwards begged her not to leave him.  The prosecution countered this image of the battered spouse justifiably driven to protect herself from an abusive husband, by casting Carmen as a "weeping-but-wily" woman attempting to manipulate events to stay out of the penitentiary.  On February 13, 2002, a jury rejected Carmen's battered spouse claim and found her guilty of second-degree murder.  After hearing the verdict, she fell to her knees and prayed.  In June 2002, Carmen Bornais was sentenced to the maximum prison term of 20 1/2 years and, following her release, ordered placed on probation for another 20 years.  As of January 2014, she was listed by the Florida Department of Corrections as serving her sentence in minimum security at the Hernando Correctional Institution in Brooksville with a projected release date of January 22, 2018.

Murray M. Steele -- Saturday in the Park

Three days after Mabel Foy, a vivacious 22-year-old divorcee and vaudeville actress, turned down his proposal of marriage, Steele, the 38-year-old former manager of San Francisco's Kinemacolor Motion Picture Company, sent a bunch of white roses to her apartment in that city on September 28, 1912.  The accompanying note read, "I am going to the Park, sweetheart."  Later that day, Steele was found under the bridge just inside the Golden Gate Park, a victim of a self-administered dose of cyanide of potassium.  He died en route to Park Emergency Hospital.  Inside the man's clothes, authorities found $114.92 in cash, a picture of his beloved, and notes to his father and Foy.  To the actress he wrote:  "My Dear Little Mabel:  I am still so sorry and brokenhearted about your not wanting to marry me, that I do not care to live any longer.  I wish you good luck, and may God bless you.  Your devoted friend, Murray M. Steele."  Foy, who previously knew Steele back in his hometown of St. Louis, explained that the only reason she had not married him was that having been divorced for only three weeks she feared a bigamy charge.

Robert Lees -- Saying Sorry Isn't Enough

On June 13, 2004, Morley Hall Engelson, a 67-year-old retired physician, was on the phone with a Southwest Airlines booking agent when the conversation was abruptly ended by a commotion.  The agent immediately notified the Los Angeles Police Department and after they arrived minutes later at Engelson's home on Stanley Avenue they spotted his body through a window.  Forcing entry, officers verified that Engelson was dead from multiple stab wounds then made the grisly discovery of a severed head in another room of the house.  While examining the scene, investigators received a call from the Los Angeles Fire Department reporting that they had responded to a call at a neighboring house in the 1600 block of North Courtney Avenue belonging to Robert Lees, 91.  Lees, who had served in Frank Capra's Army film unit during World War II, was best known as the comedy film writer (often with partner Frederic I. Rinaldo) of scripts for Abbott and Costello (Hold That Ghost, 1941; Buck Privates Come Home, 1947; The Wistful Widow of Wagon Gap, 1948; Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, 1948; Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man, 1951; Comin' Round the Mountain, 1951; and the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis vehicle Jumping Jacks, 1952).  The laughter and the scriptwriter's film career, however, abruptly ended on April 10, 1951, when actor Sterling Hayden named him to the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).  Lees joined the Communist Party in 1939 and steadfastly refused to name names when called before the committee.  Blacklisted by Hollywood, the studio attempted to removed his name from the credits of Jumping Jacks, but was prevented by the Screenwriters Guild.  Lees was working as a maitre d' in the dining room of the Hotel Westerner in Tucson, Arizona, when the Martin and Lewis smash opened in a theatre up the street.  Under the alias "J.E. Selby" Lees wrote episodes for the television programs Rawhide, Flipper, and ironically given future events, Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Kevin Lee Graff

Lee's longtime friend, Helen Colton, arrived to pick him up for a social function to discover the scriptwriter's bloody and headless corpse lying under a comforter with a big heavy drawer on top of him.  Police theorized that the random killer decapitated Lees, hopped a backyard fence between the properties carrying the writer's head, and murdered Engelson.  A massive manhunt in the surrounding Hollywood neighborhood culminated in a televised news conference on June 15 in which police showed a photograph of 27-year-old drifter, Kevin Lee Graff.  Within minutes of the broadcast, a security guard at nearby Paramount notified police that a man answering to that description was currently outside the studio's front gate talking to himself and making obscene gestures at passing cars and pedestrians.  Graff was quickly taken into custody by LAPD officers, but during subsequent questioning admitted that he was high on methamphetamines and Ecstasy and had no memory of the horrific murders.  "If I did this man, I just want to say I'm sorry," he told detectives.  "I'm so sorry.  I know saying sorry isn't enough.  It isn't going to do nothing.  But I'm no criminal, dude.  I'm a really good kid.  I don't know how all this happened."  Graff escaped a possible death penalty by pleading guilty on February 26, 2008, to two counts of first-degree murder along with eight other charges including torture, mayhem, and burglary.  In April 2008, the killer was sentenced to two life terms without the possibility of parole and ordered to pay $9,000 in restitution and court fees.  As of January 2014, Graff is incarcerated at Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, California.

Evelyn Childs -- All for Love

Lawrence S. Mueller, 32, a sign painter-artist from the California desert town of El Centro, married New York showgirl Evelyn Childs (real name Evelyn Pearl Tatum) on March 26, 1927.  The 25-year-old performer quickly tired of life away from the footlights and, on May 26, went to Los Angeles following a quarrel with her husband.  Checking into the Rosegrove Hotel at 532 Flower Street, Childs made the rounds of Hollywood studios and theatrical agencies looking for work.  Distraught and anxious to save their marriage, Mueller sent a flurry of letters and telegrams addressed to his "golden girl" begging her to come back.  Childs advised him not to come to Los Angeles on the pretext that it might discourage producers from casting her.  In a final letter before driving to the "City of Angels," Mueller pleaded with his wife for "one week of happiness" together during which time he would look for work in the city and, if they still proved incompatible, would accept a position in Chicago.  On the morning of May 30, 1927, the maid at the Rosegrove let herself into Childs' room to clean.  The young showgirl, clad only in a flimsy pink nightgown, lay on the bed strangled to death with a bedsheet.  Mueller's nude, lifeless body was found a few feet away suspended by a bedsheet wound tightly about his neck attached to a closet door lintel.  The record "All for Love" was on a running phonograph beside the bed.  Among numerous letters chronicling the buildup to the tragedy was a picture of Mueller with the following written across the corner:  "To Pearl, my perfect pal.  Yesterday, today, and I hope, forever."

Charles J. Chic -- Rubber Death Mask

The Philadelphia-born Chic (real name Schick) came to Los Angeles in his youth, attended the University of Southern California, and began his motion picture career in 1918 as a prop boy at Universal.  Serving his film apprenticeship as an assistant director under William Duncan and W. S. Van Dyke, he moved to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1927 and by 1938 had worked his way up the studio ladder to become a $1,000 a week production manager.  Although active in his work, the 48 year old had recently worried over his poor health.  On April 26, 1941, Chic's Japanese servant girl found a brief note addressed to her after arriving at her employer's Beverly Hills home at 151 1/2 Bedford Drive.  It read:  "I have killed myself.  First call Helen Lawson [his secretary].  If you can't get her call Rachel Chic [his ex-wife].  I thought that the garage would be too noisy, so I'm near the lot in Beverlywood."  Police found the production manager's body under his limousine at a dead-end road at South Beverly Drive and Oakmore Street in Beverly Hills.  Chic has fashioned a death mask out of a rubber hot water bottle by slashing its bottom and stretching the opening tightly over his face.  Next, he fitted the funnel end of the container over the car's exhaust pipe after starting the motor.

Carl C. Erickson -- Divorce, the Hard Way

A contract writer at Warner Bros., Erickson, 27, started as a reader at the studio in 1930 before collaborating on the screenplays of Silver Dollar (1932), Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), Easy to Love (1934), Sweet Music (1935). and Black Fury (1935).  On August 29, 1935, Erickson's body was found by two teenaged hikers slumped beneath a eucalyptus tree off Wonder View Place, a popular lover's lane area in the hills near Hollywood Lake overlooking the Warner Bros. studio.  The writer had shot himself in the base of the skull just above the neck with a 2.9mm Luger automatic found under the body.  The coroner estimated that Erickson had been dead about two days.  In his home at 2139 Fairfield Avenue, detectives found an opened letter from an attorney in Reno, Nevada, informing Erickson that his wife had established residence there "for the purpose of securing a divorce on grounds of mental cruelty."

John C. Olsen -- Don't Look in the Attic

Ole Olsen, father to a suicide

Despondent over the death of his 5-year-old daughter from leukemia two years before, Olsen, the 38-year-old television actor and son of movie comedian Ole Olsen of Olsen and Johnson fame, was found dead in the attic of his apartment in Flushing, Queens, New York, on May 5, 1956.  Last seen alive on April 13 when he apparently left home to work in Los Angeles, Olsen was reported missing by his wife five days later when she failed to hear from him.  During his absence, the woman stayed with her sister, and together on May 5 they visited the apartment at 69-01 150th Street to pick up some draperies. They found Olsen in the attic, a narrow air space above the ceiling, surrounded by a pitcher of water, three empty bottles of sleeping pills, and a suitcase.  A police examiner estimated that the actor had been dead about five days.