Dawn Hope Noel -- Like Mother, Like Daughter

Married to dance band leader Herbert James Noel, the 19-year-old stage actress was best known as the daughter of stage and film actress Adele Blood Hope who committed suicide on September 13, 1936, after suffering business reversals.  On the afternoon of Saturday, July 16, 1939, Herbert James Noel, 36, and his teen-aged wife checked into a nudist camp on Rancho Glassey, in Tunas Canyon above Roscoe, California.  From that day through Monday, the couple drank with others at the camp, returning periodically to their home at 13050 Riverside in North Hollywood to feed and walk their dogs.  At 6:00 P.M. on Monday, July 18, the young actress left the camp to again feed the animals, and did not return for four hours.  Noel and Dawn returned to their home later that night where he learned that two men and a woman who had been at the drinking party had been at their home with his wife during her extended absence from the camp.  Noel refused to accept Dawn's explanation of her absence, and was angrily speaking with one of the men on the phone when he heard a sound "like the snap of a cap pistol" from the bedroom.  The band leader dropped the phone, and ran to the bedroom where he found his dying wife splayed on the floor, bleeding from the right temple, with a .22-caliber rifle beside her.