A. P. Younger -- Thanks, Fido

In Hollywood since the mid-to-late teens, Younger either contributed the story, adapted, or wrote more than 50 films.  These included Fair and Warmer (1919), Desperate Youth (1921), The Torrent (1924, also directed), The Devil's Cargo (1925), In Old Kentucky (1927), and Five and Ten (1933).  At the height of his career as a scenarist-screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Younger was earning $1,500 a week plus bonuses.  In the late evening of November 29, 1931 (according to Younger's stepson, Frank Deering), the 41-year-old screenwriter was awakened from sleep by a dog barking in the back yard of his luxurious home at 145 South Beachwood Avenue in Los Angeles.  Fearing a prowler, Younger found his .38-caliber automatic pistol and went into the bathroom to examine the weapon.  The gun accidentally discharged, fatally striking him in the right temple.  Younger died soon afterward at the Georgia Street Receiving Hospital.

Initial police reports differed from Deering's account.  According to the investigating officer's report:  "Younger stood in front of a mirror in the bathroom, held the gun in his right hand and shot himself in the right temple."  Forensics confirmed that the gun had been placed tightly against his head when fired.  An investigation conducted for the coroner's jury uncovered two possible motives that supported a ruling of suicide.  Although Younger had $30,000 in the bank, his lucrative contract with MGM had been terminated the week before his death.  That same week, Younger had been arrested during a police liquor raid at his home.  The screenwriter's death was officially ruled a suicide.

Brian O'Hara -- Ferry Cross the Styx

Born in the depressed Dingle area of Liverpool on March 12, 1941, O'Hara and school friend Billy Hatton taught themselves skiffle and rock 'n' roll songs in the mid-fifties.  After performing around Liverpool dance halls and coffee clubs as the Two Jays, they added rhythm guitarist/singer Mike Millward and drummer Brian Redman to become the Four Jays in the early sixties.  In 1962 they placed tenth in a poll of local groups in Mersey Beat.  Changing their name to Fourmost, the group (now with drummer Dave Lovelady) attracted the attention of Beatles manager Brian Epstein.  After refusing Epstein's repeated request to turn professional, Fourmost finally accepted in 1963 when they saw the success of The Beatles.

Fourmost

 Produced by Beatles super-producer George Martin, Fourmost scored several U.K. chart successes including the John Lennon-penned tune "Hello Little Girl" (No. 9), Lennon and McCartney's "I'm in Love" (No. 17), and "A Little Loving" (1964, No. 6).  In 1965 the group released their only album, First and Fourmost, a collection of country, comedy, and rock 'n' roll songs.  Fourmost were part of a long-running variety show at the London Palladium and appeared in two 1965 British films, Pop Gear and Ferry Cross the Mersey.  Ultimately giving up trying to make the charts, Fourmost settled into the well-paying world of cabaret.  The band fragmented in 1978 with several members forming Clouds.  O'Hara continued as Fourmost with three local musicians, but sold them the name after a few years when he left to set up a used car business.

On June 27, 1999, the 58-year-old former musician was found hanged at his home in Smithdown Road in the Wavetree area of Liverpool.  Terence O'Hara, the dead man's brother, told an inquest that he found the guitarist in his underpants and shirt hanging from a ligature in an attic stairwell.  In the absence of a suicide note, authorities estimated that O'Hara had been in that position for a number of days.  According to his brother, O'Hara had financial worries.

Steve Wolf -- Death of a Concert Promoter

Wolf was in his early twenties when he joined former disc jockey and television game show host Bob Eubanks in Concert Associates, a hugely successful concert promotion business based in Southern California.  Though best-known for hosting The Newlywed Game on ABC, Eubanks was a rock concert pioneer who promoted the Beatles show at the Hollywood Bowl in 1964.  When Eubanks left Concert Associates, Wolf and fellow 24-year-old Jim Rissmiller teamed to promote some of the most notable concerts in Los Angeles including the Diana Ross and the Supremes show that sold out the 18,700 seat Forum in Inglewood, California.  The pair later sold the company to Filmways and, reconstituted as Wolf & Rissmiller, became the biggest rock concert promotion firm in California, and one of the largest in the United States, promoting appearances of the Rolling Stones, Cream, and Aerosmith.  Most recently in November 1977, the duo promoted the Los Angeles Philharmonic's "Star Wars Suite" at the Hollywood Bowl.  Producing some 130 concerts a year, Wolf & Rissmiller grossed around $6 million annually.

At approximately 6:00 A.M. on November 21, 1977, the 34-year-old concert promoter was shot to death in the bedroom of his luxury home on Mulholland Drive above Stone Canyon Reservoir in Los Angeles.  Awakened by the sound of a break in, Wolf left his bed and apparently confronted the intruders, possibly as many as four, who had entered the residence through a side door.  Wolf's fiancee, 30-year-old public relations consultant Linda Grey, was also in the home, but did not witness the shooting.  Stolen were two valuable cameras, a wristwatch, and diamond jewelry.  Wolf died three hours later on the operating table at Riverside Hospital in North Hollywood.  That night, a concert by the popular band Chicago promoted by Wolf & Rissmiller played the Forum.  Two days after the murder, Jim Rissmiller offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the identity of the killer(s).  As detectives continued their investigation, Linda Grey filed a million dollar palimony suit in July 1978 claiming she and Wolf had lived as husband and wife during the eleven months they were together.  According to Grey, she gave up her career as an entertainment publicist on Wolf's promise he would support her for the rest of her life.  The disposition of the case is not known.

More than a year after the concert promoter's murder, authorities caught a break when a 17-year-old in jail on an unrelated burglary charge bragged to another inmate about the killing.  Police arrested the juvenile on December 27, 1978, but did not release his name to the public until after a judge ruled in 1979 that the suspect, Keith Cook, could be tried as an adult.  On April 24, 1979, Cook pleaded out to second-degree murder and was sentenced to seven years.  Cook admitted to being one of the four men who invaded Wolf's home, but denied being the triggerman.  To date, no one else has been arrested for Wolf's murder.

Joseph Massengale -- The Last Roundup

Massengale performed rodeo and cowboy stunts in the films The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1973), The Frisco Kid (1979), Tom Horn (1979), and Stir Crazy (1980).  On television, the stuntman was seen in two made-for-television movies (The Gambler, 1980; The Gambler II, 1983), and on episodes of Little House on the Prairie, How the West was Won, and Father Murphy.  Massengale, 36, and his wife, actress Kathleen O'Haco, were estranged and living apart when he phoned her from his Burbank, California, apartment on the afternoon of December 17, 1983, to plead for a reconciliation.  During the course of the conversation, he threatened to kill himself if O'Haco would not return to him.  Having heard similar threats before, the actress did not take Massengale seriously until she heard a gunshot over the line.  Police found Massengale, still clutching the telephone in his left hand, dead from a bullet wound to his right temple inflicted by a 9mm automatic handgun.

Lotus Moore -- Songbird with a Sore Throat

Long familiar to patrons of San Francisco's Tivoli Theatre as a musical comedy ingenue and previously as a leading member of the Jim Post beauty chorus, Moore was working in the "City by the Bay" as a cabaret entertainer at the Black Cat cafe at Eddy and Mason streets.  Shortly before 7:00 A.M. on February 21, 1913, the semi-conscious woman was found writhing in agony in the rooms she shared at 1149 Divisadero Street with her mother and a 4-year-old daughter from a failed marriage.  Clutched in Moore's hand was an empty bottle of cresoline that she used regularly as a throat balm.  Moore was dead on arrival at Emergency Hospital.  Accident or suicide?  Three weeks before the popular entertainer had been severely burned about the face when an antiphlogistine preparation she was heating for throat trouble exploded.  The suicide theory advanced by the coroner that explained Moore's self-destruction as a reaction to her failing voice and lost beauty was discounted by her most intimate friends, who noted that she had fully recovered from the accident and was in excellent spirits.

Leonard Morris -- The Jealous Electrician

Spurned by Edith Creighton (real name Edith Simmons), part of a vaudeville act with her three sisters, stage electrician and former film projectionist Leonard Morris, 37, shot her to death inside a store in Theatrical City, New Jersey, near New Brunswick on July 17, 1917, before taking his own life.  Creighton was in the store with her 6-year-old son when her rejected suitor entered, produced a pistol wrapped in a handkerchief from his pocket, then fired two shots as she fled from the rear of the store into a back yard.  Morris pursued and, following Creighton back into the store, fired a lethal shot into her head.  Declaring, "I am going to finish myself," the insanely jealous electrician fired once into his own head and fell beside Creighton's body.  Morris died half an hour later as a doctor tried to remove him by stretcher to St. Peter's Hospital.  Months prior to the murder-suicide Morris had become enamored with the performer after she moved into a rooming house where he resided.

George W. Hill -- The Lone Wolf

George William Hill (born in Douglass, Kansas, on April 25, 1895) broke into pictures in 1908 as a prop boy for D.W. Griffith at the Fine Arts Studio.  Evincing an interest in photography, he graduated to the position of first cameraman and shot several films in the teens including The Sea Wolf (1913), Burning the Daylight (1914), Buckshot John (1915), Polly of the Circus (1917), and Turning the Tables (1919).  From the early twenties Hill turned to direction and made several well regarded films for MGM including Tell it to the Marines (1926), The Cossacks (1928), his 1930 masterpiece The Big House, and the classic comedy Min and Bill (1930) starring Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler.  In January 1930, the director married Frances Marion, his longtime scriptwriting collaborator, but the union ended in October 1933 amid charges of Hill's cruelty.  Despite their estrangement, the pair continued to be amicable and were working together on the script of the MGM vehicle The Good Earth, which Hill was set to direct.

While preparing for the film in June 1934, Hill was seriously injured in a car accident when he swerved to avoid a group of children running onto Venice Boulevard.  The director crashed into a telephone pole, crushing his chest and breaking several ribs.  In constant physical pain following the accident, the man known to his friends as "the lone wolf" became even more withdrawn, morose, and moody.  In the late afternoon of August 10, 1934, Hill returned to his spacious South Beach home at 5109 Ocean Front in Venice, California, after vacationing for several days at his cabin at Lake Arrowhead.  To his valet, the 39-year-old director entrusted a tin box containing a .45-caliber pistol (a memento from Hill's days as a captain in the photographic division of the Signal Corps during World War I) with the instruction to "put it away."  Hill then left and spent several hours with ex-wife Marion and studio officials on the MGM lot in a story conference concerning The Good Earth.

Shortly after 9:00 P.M., Hill returned home and phoned his valet to ask where he had placed the box containing the pistol.  At 7:35 A.M. the next morning, the valet arrived at Hill's home to find the pajama-clad body of his employer dead in the second floor master bedroom clutching a pistol in his right hand.  Sometime during the hours before, or, shortly after midnight, Hill had fired a practice shot into the ceiling, before laying in bed, placing the gun in his mouth, and pulling the trigger.  The bullet, passing through the director's skull, lodged in the headboard of the bed.  While Hill left no note, he had drawn up a will days before the suicide in which he directed that his body be cremated immediately after the death certificate had been signed.  By 4:00 P.M. the day he was found, Hill's body was cremated.  Authorities speculated that Hill had either taken his life because of the car accident or his divorce from Frances Marion, or both.

Katherine Donley -- In a Worse State

The wife of Robert Donley, former chief announcer at Pittsburgh radio station WCAE and currently with WINS in New York, was slowly driven mad by her husband's application for divorce in April 1945.  In court papers the announcer charged his 44-year-old wife with "cruel and barbarous treatment and with endangering his life with indignities."  On November 7, 1945, the distraught woman checked into a 12th floor room of the William Penn Hotel in Pittsburgh with her 8-year-old son, James Patrick.  Donley tossed the boy out of the bedroom window and then plunged after him.  Their shattered bodies were found 15 feet apart in a light well on the hotel's marquee three floors above street level.  In two notes addressed to the dead woman's brother found in the room, Donley accused the 24-year-old announcer of being more interested in his career than family.  One read:  "My nervous system is completely shattered and I can't see my way -- the financial insecurity and the worry and hurt over [son] Pat's predicament.  His father hasn't inquired about him since last spring and saw him only once in the fall though we were 20 minutes by subway from where he was.  Pat is bewildered, unsure, and afraid and I know I can't help him understand because I am in a worse state."

Lillian Held -- Bury Me Next to Mom

Known outside show business as Lillian Bachman, the wife of a Manchester, New Hampshire, cigar manufacturer, the 41-year-old singer-actress was formerly married to actor Frederick Russell.  On the vaudeville circuit the duo were billed "Held and Russell."  On July 31, 1920, Held's body was found across the bed of her room at 358 West Fifty-eighth Street in New York City.  The windows were sealed and illuminating gas had flooded the room for hours.  Several weeks before, Held had rented the room in the company of a man, signing the register as "Mr. and Mrs. Von Holding."  The man, whose name was withheld, was later identified as a well-known musical director.  In a brief note written on the back of a photograph of her deceased first husband, Russell, Held blamed the musical director for her death and requested to be buried by the side of her mother and her former vaudeville partner.  In a separate note, Held identified the musical director by name and mentioned that he had threatened her life a few days before.

John Arcady -- They Don't Carry Much Money

"It was a senseless, horrible thing that happened.  They don't carry much money," said the owner of Cincinnati's Towne Taxi regarding the murder of driver John Arcady.  On September 27, 1999, the 49-year-old's body was found slumped over the wheel of his idling cab at 4802 Winneste Avenue in the Cincinnati suburb of Winton Terrace.  Killed instantly by a single gunshot wound to the back of the head, Arcady still had a toothpick in the corner of his mouth and a foot on the brake.  Arcady, a former touring drummer with the groups the Platters, Los Bravos, and the Hager Twins, often drove double shifts to support himself while drumming for the Queen City-based Mary Ann Kindel Band.

Denise Lipscomb

Lemar Goss

Andrea Goss

Police, acting on eyewitness accounts, searched for three blacks seen fleeing the scene.  A few days later, brother and sister Lemar Goss, 19, Andrea Goss, 18, and their relative Denise Lipscomb, 26, were arrested and charged with aggravated murder during the commission of a robbery.  Another suspect, Sion Graham, 21, was later arrested and charged with complicity in supplying the gun to Lipscomb, and in driving the getaway car.  On the night of the murder, Arcady picked up the trio and drove them to a spot near Lipscomb's apartment where the woman shot him in the head during a robbery attempt.  In exchange for their testimony against Lipscomb, the Goss siblings pleaded guilty to reduced charges of robbery and involuntary manslaughter, and were sentenced to terms of 23 years each.  In October 2000, Lipscomb was found guilty of aggravated murder, but avoided the death penalty when a jury recommended life in prison without the possibility of parole for at least 43 years.  Lipscomb will be 69 years old before her first parole hearing.  Sion Graham, Lipscomb's boyfriend, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and to using a gun to commit aggravated robbery, and received a 23 year prison sentence.  Lemar Goss (Inmate No. A401712) is currently incarcerated at the Belmont Correctional Institution in St. Clairsville, Ohio while his sister, Andrea (Inmate No. W045814), and Denise Lipscomb (Inmate No. W048598) are both serving their sentences at the Dayton Correctional Institution.

Thomas Stewart Lee -- Climb Every Mountain

Pellissier Building

The wealthy son of automobile and communications magnate Don Lee, "Tommy" Lee was a pioneer in bringing television to Southern California.  In 1931 he built the first transmitter in Los Angeles and later moved it in 1939 to the top of Mt. Lee in the Hollywood Hills.  Known today as station KTSL, for years it was known only by its call numbers, W6XAO.  In another first, Lee received the initial permit in the Southland for full commercialization of television programs starting July 1, 1941.  As a result of a vertebra injury sustained in an automobile accident, Lee was declared mentally incompetent in a medical hearing on August 27, 1948.  Ironically, the court-appointed guardian picked to oversee Lee's estimated $9,500,000 estate, Lewis Allen Weiss, a board member of the Don Lee Broadcasting System, would later commit suicide on June 15, 1953 via the gunshot route.  Less than a year after being declared incompetent, Lee's petition to terminate his guardianship was denied by a judge who personally interviewed him at a Pasadena sanitarium.  On January 13, 1950, Lee flew in his private plane from Palm Springs to Los Angeles for a dental appointment in the Pellissier Building on 3780 Wilshire Boulevard.  While his nurse and pilot parked the car, the 43 year old entered the building alone, made his way to the 12th floor, and after smoking part of a cigarette, jumped out of a fire escape window.

Kenneth Bruce Jones -- Three's a Crowd in Big D

Jones, 32, a member of the Dallas, Texas, branch of the Screen Actors Guild, appeared in television commercials and several local stage productions.  On September 20, 1977, ten days before the air date of the ABC made-for-television movie The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald in which he played a policeman, Jones phoned a friend at 2:00 A.M. to report, "I've done it.  I have killed Myra and her blond-headed lover.  Call the police because by the time they get here I'll be dead."  Dallas police rushed to the apartment at 6402 Melody Lane of Jones; ex-wife, Myra Emmanuelli, and kicking in the front door, found Jones lying dead a few feet inside in a hallway.  The gun he used to shoot himself in the mouth was still clasped in his left hand.  The nude bodies of Emmanuelli and her lover, 27-year-old local business executive Michael L. Crim, were found in a bedroom.  The woman sustained gunshots to the face and chest with Crim dead from a head wound.  The next day, the secretary Jones dated found a "farewell letter" from him in a satchel on her doorstep.

Angelo Torres -- Death of a Drummer

 

Bronx Zoo, a four man rock group co-founded in 1988 by drummer Angelo Torres in Belleville, Illinois, was just beginning to attract national attention.  The group recorded their debut album, Lustful Thinking, in New York City in June 1990, and had opened for Blue Oyster Cult, Head East, the Romantics, and Gary Richrath, lead guitarist for R.E.O. Speedwagon.  Following successful dates at L.A.'s Whisky A-Go-Go and City Lights in Dallas, the group's manager predicted Bronx Zoo was "on the very edge" of making it big.  If so, the 26-year-old drummer was not fated to make the trip.  Just before midnight on November 12, 1992, Torres argued with the owner of a well-known crack house in Centreville, Illinois.  The drummer walked to a nearby liquor store in East St. Louis and encountered Alphonso "Capone" Fuller, a 21-year-old two-time convicted felon currently on probation from Menard Correctional Center on a weapons charge, and three of his cronies.  A heated dispute between the men over a car the drummer allegedly swapped Fuller for drugs culminated in the men beating the drummer and forcing him into the trunk of a car.  Fuller and friends drove the car back to the crack house where "Capone" picked up a 9mm automatic pistol.  Cruising for a couple of hours, Fuller stopped the car around 3:30 A.M. in the 100 block of 80th Street in a residential section of Centreville.  According to Delando Bell, 19, one of the abductors in the car who later cut a deal with prosecutors in exchange for his testimony, Fuller lifted Torres from the trunk and pointed the weapon at him.  When the gun jammed, Torres turned and ran making it about 150 feet before the pursuing Fuller brought him down with two rounds.  Fuller's gun jammed again, but he managed to finish the execution-style killing with a fatal chest shot delivered from less than two feet away.  Torres died two hours later in St. Mary's Hospital in East St. Louis.  Arrested days after the crime, Fuller was charged with first-degree murder while his three accomplices pleaded guilty to lesser charges ranging from unlawful restraint, concealing a homicide, and kidnapping, in exchange for their testimony against the triggerman.  Fuller was convicted of the Torres murder in a three-day trial in July 1993 and sentenced to 60 years in prison.  Inmate No. B20288 is, as of June 2014, incarcerated at the Pinckneyville Correctional Center in Pinckneyville, Illinois.  Alphonso "Capone" Fuller is eligible for parole in March 2023.