Charles "Kid" McCoy -- Down for the Count

McCoy ca. 1899

 McCoy, considered one of the greatest prizefighters in history and generally regarded as the inspiration for the term "the real McCoy," was born Norman Selby on a family farm in Moscow, Indiana, a small community 40 miles southeast of Indianapolis, on October 13, 1873.  While much of McCoy's life is bound up in self-created fiction, he did run away from home in his mid-teens to become a hobo.  He began his professional boxing career in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1890.  By 1891, the fighter had dropped the sissy sounding name of Selby in favor of McCoy, the stage name of a ham actor he had once seen perform.  According to legend, "the real McCoy" catch phrase was used both to distinguish him from other like-named pugilists and in recognition of his authentic boxing skills.  Though tall, skinny, and pale, McCoy was a scientific boxer who amassed an incredible 36-2 record from 1891-1895.  Nicknamed the "Corkscrew Kid" for a type of punch he twisted on impact, McCoy won his first world title on March 2, 1896, by knocking out welterweight Tommy Ryan in the 15th round.  On December 17, 1897, he outpunched Don Creedon for the world middleweight title.  McCoy retired in 1911 after 105 recorded bouts, posting a record of 81 wins, six losses, six draws, nine no-decisions, and three no-contests.

Outside the ring, McCoy was a flamboyant character with an eye for the ladies.  He routinely carried up to $40,000 on his person and, though married ten times (including three times to Julia Woodruff Crosselmire), had no children.  Shortly after retiring, the former fighter was arrested in Britain in 1912 on suspicion of stealing jewels from an Austrian princess in Belgium.  Though the charges were eventually dropped, McCoy's reputation was permanently damaged.  His post-fight career was filled with various unsuccessful business ventures.  McCoy briefly opened a bar in New York City (where be befriended future film directors D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett), entered the diamond business, ran a detective agency, and launched a car dealership.  In 1917, McCoy was cast as a detective investigating a jewelry robbery in The House of Glass, a silent film shot in New York by French film pioneer Emile Chautard.  In 1919, D. W. Griffith picked the retired pugilist for the role of a prizefighter in the director's masterpiece Broken Blossoms.  McCoy also appeared in The Fourteenth Man (1920) directed by Griffith assistant Joseph Henaberry, followed by The Great Diamond Mystery, released in 1924 shortly after McCoy had been arrested for murder.
 

McCoy at the LA Jail in 1924 (UCLA Library)

By May 1924, McCoy (using the alias "Shields") had lived for three months with Theresa Mors, the 39-year-old divorced wife of art and antiques dealer Albert Mors, at the Nottingham Apartments at 28819 Leeward Avenue in Los Angeles.  The divorced couple were locked in a bitter property settlement which, ironically for McCoy, centered around the disposition of some valuable jewels.  While the events of the evening of August 12, 1924, remain somewhat confused, an argument over the divorce settlement between McCoy and Theresa Mors in their apartment left the woman fatally shot in the head.  The next morning, a drunken and deranged McCoy appeared at the store of Albert Mors and wounded three people with a .32-caliber revolver before driving away from the scene.  Later that day he turned himself in to police without incident.  At his murder trial in December 1924, McCoy maintained that Theresa Mors shot herself in despair after he suggested that a property settlement could be reached if he were temporarily out of the picture.  Deliberations lasted 78 hours before the jury on their 24th ballot found McCoy guilty of manslmanslaughter and attempted murder.  The ex-fighter was sentenced to 48 years in prison.

Hotel Tuller (Burton Historical Collection)

McCoy, a model prisoner at San Quentin, was paroled after eight years due largely to the efforts of car manufacturer Henry Ford.  The multi-millionaire industrialist gave the 60 year old a job supervising 85 security guards charged with overseeing some 12,000 vegetable gardens established by Ford employees in Detroit during the Depression.  The outbreak of armed hostilities in Europe deeply affected the 66-year-old McCoy.  As the war news worsened, he became increasingly depressed, sleepless, and reliant on sleeping pills.  On April 17, 1940, days after Nazi troops invaded Denmark and Norway, McCoy told his tenth wife, Sue Cobb Cowley, that he had to go to Chicago on business.  Instead, late the next day McCoy checked himself into the Hotel Tuller in downtown Detroit and left a request for a 10:00 A.M. wakeup call for the next day.  When McCoy failed to respond to the call on April 19, hotel officials forced entry into the room.  They found him dead near an empty box of sleeping pills.  A suicide note written in pen near the body read:  "For the past eight years I have wanted to help humanity especially the youngsters who do not know Nature's Laws.  That is, the proper carage of the body, or the right way to eat, etc.  Everything in my possession I want to go to my dear wife Sue.  To all my dear friends I wish you the best of luck.  Sorry I could not endure this world's madness.  The best to you all.  Norman Selby.  P.S.  In my pockets you will find $17.78."  In 1957, "Kid" McCoy was elected to The Ring Boxing Hall of Fame.

Recommended Reading

Cantwell, Robert.  The Real McCoy:  The Life and Times of Norman Selby.  Princeton, N.J.:  Auerbach Publishers, 1971.

Yoshiaki Yasuda -- Big Hit in "Little Nippon"

Yasuda, president of the Japanese Theatre Association and owner of the Fuji Theatre in what the Los Angeles Times called the city's "Little Nippon" district, was gunned down in front of his palatial home at 241 North Dittman Street at 1:30 A.M. on June 9, 1930.  The theatre owner, accompanied by his wife and their two chauffeurs, had just returned to the residence when a pair of gunmen stepped from the shadows and pumped five shots into his chest and abdomen.  One assailant pitched his .38-caliber handgun in an alley about 150 feet from the site as he fled the scene.  Yasuda, also the head of the Japanese Wrestling Association, recently brought a troupe of Asian actors to the city to promote a series of bouts featuring Japanese wrestlers.  Police theorized the unsolved crime was the result of a long-standing feud between Yasuda and others in the L.A. Japanese community.

Herbert Heckler -- The Sour Note

Throughout their two year engagement, Pearl Palmer, a 23-year-old prima donna best known for her role in Victor Herbert's opera Princess Pat, had delayed marrying Heckler, a 27-year-old opera singer from Chicago, in order to pursue a career.  On September 26, 1915, Palmer was in her studio at the Conservatory Building at No. 240 West Seventy-second Street in New York City when a depressed Heckler arrived for a visit.  Palmer complained of being ill and dispatched her beau to a pharmacy for medication.  A friend who accompanied Heckler later told authorities that the singer had burst into tears when discussing his belief that Palmer no longer loved him.  Returning to her studio, Heckler entered the room alone.  Moments later, the sounds of a violent argument were heard followed by four gunshots in quick succession.  When police forced the door they discovered Palmer unconscious, a bullet lodged in her head and two in her body.  She died shortly afterward in the Polyclinic Hospital.  Heckler, the spurned suitor, lay dead in the center of the room, a gaping gunshot wound in his forehead.

Timothy Colwell -- Crime Watch Gone Wrong

A respected jazz saxophonist who played with the British musical institution Kenny Ball & His Jazzmen in the 1960s, the 65-year-old musician continued to receive regular BBC airplay with his group, Timothy Colwell's Jazzfriends.  On the evening of September 19, 2003, Colwell was at home in his ground-floor flat in Lymington, Hants when someone outside began shouting and banging on his windows.  The musician had been a target of verbal taunts, graffiti abuse, and violent threats for months since phoning police to report truants congregating in a park near his home.  His practice of sometimes photographing the neighborhood toughs led the youths to falsely brand him as a pedophile.  Two weeks earlier, someone (later identified as Richard Harris) crashed a tractor tire through his living room window.  When Colwell left his apartment on what proved to be the final night of his life and walked to the nearby playground to investigate the disturbance, Richard Harris, 20, and Daniel Newham, 17, knocked the elderly man to the ground, and repeatedly punched and kicked him.  Neighbors intervened, but Colwell collapsed as he walked back to his flat.  Shortly afterwards, he died in hospital without regaining consciousness.  While Colwell had a previous heart condition, it was ruled that the assault was so brutal that it could have caused a heart attack in a healthy 65-year-old while the kicks to his head were sufficient to have killed a 25-year-old.

Harris, who boasted of liking to hurt animals and acting like a vigilante, was on parole for two earlier violent assaults at the time of his attack on Colwell.  Conversely, Newham had no previous convictions and apparently came from a decent, supportive family.  At trial in February 2005, both men were cleared of murder charges, but found guilty of manslaughter.  At a hearing in London in April 2005, Mrs. Justice Harlett sentenced Richard Harris to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he serve a minimum of three years before being considered for parole.  "It is clear that, whether or not you are mentally disordered," the judge told Harris, "your personality is such that you are likely to remain a danger for many years to come, possibly forever."  Daniel Newham was sentenced to five years youth custody."

Lewis Harris Morphy -- The Crack Shot

Apparently depressed over the death of his mother two years earlier and the recent failure of a resort he owned in Tennessee, show business sharpshooter and stuntman Morphy, 54, murdered his wife and mother-in-law in their Hollywood Hills home on November 7, 1958.  One of the couple's three children present in the house at 2211 Stanley Hills Drive later told police that prior to the incident she heard Morphy mutter, "I've had enough.  This is it."  Around midnight, Morphy shot his wife, a 37-year-old former speedboat racing champion, in the head with a .25-caliber pistol.  When her mother came to investigate the disturbance, the 70 year old was fatally wounded when she fractured her skull against a corner of a table during a struggle with Morphy.  After phoning a friend to report that "I've lost everything," Morphy shot and killed himself at the foot of his wife's bed.

Claire Del Mar -- Rudy's Dance Partner

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

On January 10, 1959, the mutilated body of 57-year-old Clara Eloise Mohr was found in the home she shared with her aged bed-ridden mother in Carmel, California.  According to the investigating sheriff, the woman was struck over the head outside the house then carried into the bedroom where she was sexually assaulted and butchered with a steak knife.  Scrapbooks and photographs on the wall identified Mohr as one-time silent screen actress Claire Del Mar who had appeared uncredited in the films The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921, dancing with star Rudolph Valentino), The Jazz Singer (1927), The Grain of Dust (1928), and The Wedding March (1928).  A marriage to Hollywood cameraman Hal Mohr in 1926 (with Erich von Stroheim as best man) ended in divorce in 1929.  As of 2014, the case remains open.

Ihor Tanin -- The Ultimate Act of Control

Tanin, described as a fixture in the Milwaukee music scene, repaired equipment at his store, the Rock 'n Roll Hospital, for bands like the Violent Femmes and Streetlife.  Known as "E" (a nickname for the pronunciation of his first name), the 45-year-old electronics wizard began in the industry in the 1970s with Gary Tanin in the band Otto & the Elevators, and in the Skunks.  On November 15, 2003, in what friends of the dead woman called Tanin's "ultimate act of control" over her, the music equipment repairman repeatedly shot Kristy-Jo Szentes, 35, before turning the gun on himself in the townhouse the couple shared in the 1200 block of Balmoral Court in Brookfield, Wisconsin.  The bodies were found by Tanin's teenage daughter whom Szentes had raised as her own for several years.  Szentes, a 2003 graduate of Lakeland College with a degree in medical administration, worked at Zablocki Veterans Affair Medical Center.  The Szentes family had given Tanin his start in the music business 25 years earlier by letting him repair equipment in the back room of their store, Uncle Bob's Music Center, in West Allis.

Aziz Ghazal -- The Not So Brave

Ghazal (born in Israel in 1955) emigrated to California where in 1983 he became the stock room chief at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television.  While working there in 1990, Ghazal produced the low-budget alternative film The Natural History of Parking Lots, which won critical raves.  By 1993, the 38 year old was becoming noticed by industry power players hot to film a book property he had optioned, Gregory McDonald's The Brave, a novel about an unemployed father who agrees to let himself be killed for money in a "snuff" movie so that his family could reap the profits.  However, unknown to Jodie Foster's Egg Prods. and Touchstone Pictures, Ghazal had signed concurrent legally binding deal memos with both companies for the same property.  As the scheme unraveled, Ghazal was fired from USC in October 1993 following a dispute over a missing camera.  Almost simultaneously, Ghazal's wife of 16 years, Rebecca, sued him for divorce, citing years of family and spousal abuse.  In one documented incident, Ghazal arrived at 13-year-old daughter Khadijah's school and administered a brutal beating to her in front of dumbfounded classmates.
 

 Armed with a restraining order against her volatile husband, Rebecca Ghazal and her three children were living in the couple's get-away home in the small California mountain town of Pine Cove, near Idyllwild in central Riverside County.  On December 1, 1993, Ghazal arrived at the two-story cabin, bludgeoned his wife and daughter Khadijah to death and, after torching the cabin with Molotov cocktails, fled the scene.  His two sons were out of the house at the time of the slayings.  Authorities discovered Ghazal's blood-spattered car stuck in mud some 300 yards from the house, but the aspiring producer's decomposed body was not found until January 9, 1994, when two hikers in a secluded area south of Mt. San Jacinto stumbled across the scene.  A .380-caliber pistol was found near the body.  Forensics suggested that Ghazal had probably shot himself within hours of killing his estranged wife and teenage daughter.  In notes penned three days before the tragedy found in Ghazal's Los Angeles residence, the producer had written, "I can't subject my kids to anymore of this," and "Please forgive me for what I'm about to do."

Kanyva -- Wannabe Rapper, True Killer

Around March 2004, wannabe rapper Kanyva (real name Juston Michael Potts) entered into a loose business relationship with promoter Shani Renee Holloway.  The 31-year-old promoter was starting her own record label, All in 1 Promotions, and wanted the performer to record music designed to garner air play on local Pittsburg, California, radio stations.  Kanyva, however, demanded that his music not be presented in a way that would be considered mainstream.  On June 6, 2004, Holloway, her boyfriend, and the 18-year-old rapper discussed his career in a parked car in the 3300 block of Peppermill Circle in Pittsburg.  Incredulous that he would not want his music widely promoted on the radio, Holloway bluntly told the rapper that his prospects for stardom were not good.  Kanyva got out of the car and walked across the street to talk to the occupants of a parked black SUV.  He returned to Holloway's car, pulled out a handgun, and shot the woman twice in the head at point-blank range, afterwards fleeing the scene in the black SUV.  Holloway died five hours later.  Kanyva was arrested the next day and admitted quarreling with Holloway about his career.  Following a failed insanity defense, the rapper waived a trial by jury and was subsequently sentenced by a judge to a prison term of 50 years to life for first-degree murder.  An appeal in 2008 was denied.  Juston Michael Potts, Inmate #F57586, is currently incarcerated in the California Medical Facility at Vacaville.

Blade Icewood -- Wiped Out

Variously known by several rap names ("Ruler of tha Great Lakes," "Motor City's Finest," "Mayor of tha Mitten"), Icewood (real name Darnell Quincy Lyndsey) grew up on Ten Mile in the Detroit suburb of Southfield.  Rap styles and the concomitant rivalries in the Motor City are generally divided between the East and West sides of the city and are believed to have played a significant role in the murders of two rappers, Wipeout and Blade Icewood, who quarreled over the origins and use of a name claimed by the musical groups of both men.  Icewood (from the West side of Detroit) joined a rap group called the Street Lordz that laid claim to the name Chedda Boyz.  Rival rapper Wipeout (real name Antonio Caddell, Jr.) was a member of the gangsta rap group The East Side Chedda Boyz.  Tensions mounted as both groups claimed the name on the streets and in dueling rap lyrics.  Ironically, in mid-2004 Icewood headlined a "Stop the Violence" rally in front of Platinum Records (the Street Lordz label) in which he urged those young people in attendance to create their own non-violent way out of the ghetto.  On September 18, 2004, Wipeout, 32, an and innocent bystander were shot to death outside the Candy Bar nightclub at Woodward Avenue and John R in downtown Detroit.  Two days later, Icewood was in his apartment in Oak Park when it was invaded by AK-47 wielding gunmen.  The rapper was shot seven times, and although surviving the attack was permanently paralyzed from the chest down.  True to the code of the streets, however, Icewood refused to cooperate with authorities who credited violence to ongoing tensions over the right to use the Chedda Boyz name.

In 2005, the 27-year-old rapper formed Icewood Entertainment and signed Candi Cane, Balee, and Cash Out to his roster.  On April 21, 2005, Icewood was in a wheelchair inside his parked Range Rover at West 7 Mile Road and Faust when another vehicle pulled alongside and a shooter pumped multiple shots into his body.  The rapper was killed instantly.  The fatal attack took place less than half a mile from the site where he had headlined the anti-violence rally seven months earlier,  The week before his murder, Icewood had released a song targeting his murdered rival, Wipeout.  The rapper's CDs include Still Spinnin, Stackmaster, and Blood, Sweat, Tears.  To date, no arrests have been made in the killings of Wipeout or Blade Icewood.

Jay G. Hull -- The Troubled Guitarist

Described as "intense," "confrontational," "mean," "eccentric," and "psychologically troubled" by acquaintances, Hull, 39, was an accomplished classical guitarist utterly devoted to his music and environmental-wildlife concerns in Lake County, California.  Over the years, Hull became well-known in the area's tight knit arts community performing at numerous local concerts, chamber of commerce functions, and political rallies.  However, he was equally well-known as a volatile, verbally abusive troublemaker not averse to threatening anyone he felt was thwarting his will.  Hull once threatened to sue the Lake County Parks Department over payment for a performance, and nearly dumped a bag of trash on the desk of the director of the county's Solid Waste Office to protest rising landfill rates.  Perhaps frustrated over the area's limited artistic opportunities, Hull immediately clashed with Patricia M. Wiley, executive director of the nonprofit Lake County Arts Council, when she assumed the post in 1990.  Over the next five years, the troubled guitarist maintained a nonstop professional dispute with the popular and respected Wiley who, by 1995, confessed to friends that she was terrified of the man.

On March 20, 1995, Hull showed up unannounced at the Arts Council office demanding an audiotape of an interview he had given for the group's publication.  Hull, though adamant that he wanted the tape and agitated when it could not be quickly located, was reportedly civil to Wiley's assistant.  Early the next morning, Hull phoned Wiley, 56, insisting that they meet at her office.  According to the musician, he secured a donation of $35,000 to the Arts Council from a retired guitar player who wanted to fund Hull's program to teach kids to play the instrument at the Lake County Juvenile Hall.  The donor wished to deliver the check to the director that morning before her Lakeport office opened at 10:00 A.M.  Wiley reluctantly agreed to meet with Hull and the anonymous donor then phoned several friends to express her trepidation over the meeting.  She asked a couple of friends to "check up" on her shortly after the 8:00 A.M. meeting was set to commence.  At least three people phoned and Wiley assured them that the meeting with Hull (the donor, if one ever existed, had yet to show) was cordial.  After repeated calls went unanswered, however, a friend entered Wiley's office around 10:00 A.M. to find the arts director slumped behind her desk dead from a single bullet wound in her right eye.  Meanwhile, around 7:50 A.M., Hull's wife had frantically phoned authorities to report her husband had just left their house packing a .380-caliber pistol and threatening suicide.  A sheriff's deputy posted outside their Upper Lake home on Witter Springs Road saw the guitarist rush into the residence after 9:00 A.M., then heard a single gunshot.  Ambulanced to a nearby hospital, Hull died hours later from a self-inflicted pistol wound to the head.  Commenting on Patricia Wiley's death, a co-worker said, "It's just so incredible to have someone snatched away like that, just taken, because someone couldn't cope with life....There are no words for that kind of pain."

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

Paul Kelly -- Slide, Kelly, Slide (Part II)

On April 20, 1927, a grand jury indicted Paul Kelly for the first-degree murder of Ray Raymond.  In between fainting spells, Dorothy Mackaye testified she precipitated the fatal meeting between the two men by informing Kelly her husband had accused them of adultery.  Continuing to insist that their relationship was purely "platonic," Kelly had angrily phoned the man and stormed over to the house on Cheremoya Drive.  The next day, a coroner's inquest sought to fix responsibility for Raymond's death and, more importantly, determine whether Dr. Sullivan and Mackaye had made attempts to conceal the true facts of the case.  The doctor insisted that in the absence of information regarding the fight between the two men, he told the autopsy surgeon A.F. Wagner that the bruises on the dead man's body had been the result of a drunken fall from his bed.  Days later, Sullivan and Mackaye were indicted by a county grand jury on charges of "compounding a felony" and with being "accessories after the fact" in an alleged plot to cover-up the details surrounding the beating death of Ray Raymond.  The jury interpreted the doctor's "rather high" fee of $500 paid by the grieving widow as an attempt to conceal Raymond's condition and cause of death.  Both remained free on $5,000 cash bond each while the L.A. District Attorney's office built a murder case against Paul Kelly.

Jury selection began in Los Angeles on May 5, 1927, with eight women and four men seated to determine the young actor's fate.  When the court was not in session, the jury was "locked down" in a downtown motel to prevent possible intimidation.  Although Kelly maintained his innocence (insisting Raymond died of acute alcoholism, not the beating), he faced an uphill battle against a mountain of damning evidence.  Autopsy surgeon A.F. Wagner testified Raymond died of a subdural hemorrhage caused by nothing else than the result of a violent kick or blows, not the drunken fall suggested by the defense.  Charlotte Ethel Lee, the prosecution's star witness, was unshakeable in describing Kelly as the aggressor in his confrontation with the "almost helpless" song-and-dance man.  Further, during the time Raymond was on the road touring Mackaye spent many nights away from the house.  According to Lee, she often located her absent employer by phoning Kelly's apartment the next morning.  In riveting testimony, Dorothy Mackaye continued to assert her relationship with Kelly was chaste and platonic.  Though present at Kelly's apartment at the time he placed a phone call, Mackaye insisted she did not know it was to her husband, nor did she have any idea where the actor went when he angrily left his apartment.  The prosecution next produced its "trump" evidence -- love letters and telegrams from Kelly to Mackaye to establish a motive for the premeditated attack.  In the letters, Kelly often referred to Mackaye as "my wife" while others were written in a lover's code deciphered by the embarrassed actress for the jury.  In one letter dated March 20, 1927, Kelly wrote to Mackaye:  "Darling Mine:  Oh, I am so terribly in love with you -- so terribly -- I am miserable here without you -- I love you -- love you -- love you."  While Mackaye admitted to often speaking of marriage with Kelly while her husband was on the road, she did so only in a "kidding way."  The final nail in the defense's case came when Kelly's Japanese houseboy, Teno Yobu, was called by the prosecution to corroborate parts of Charlotte Ethel Lee's testimony.  Known as "Jungles," Yobu stated he served gin drinks on at least half a dozen occasions to Mackaye and Kelly in the actor's apartment,  Mackaye sometimes spent the night there and Jungles saw them together in Kelly's bedroom in the morning.  When the houseboy was present, the pair often resorted to a "love language" (perhaps Pig Latin) to disguise what they were saying.  According to Yobu, Kelly had at least two gin drinks prior to leaving the apartment to confront Raymond.  Kelly's appearance on the stand was almost anti-climactic.  The actor admitted to slapping Raymond twice for vilely insinuating that he had an improper relationship with Mackaye and was forced to defend himself when the smaller entertainer unexpectedly attacked him.

On May 25, 1927, the jury returned after two days of deliberation to find Kelly guilty of the lesser crime of manslaughter.  Sentenced to 1 to 10 years in prison, the actor initially vowed to appeal, but soon told his attorney he would "take his punishment like a man and then begin life anew when society's debt had been paid."  Transported to San Quentin on July 2, 1927, to serve his posted 5 year sentence, Inmate No. 43,814 became a trusty in the prison library and took voice culture lessons to prepare for a post-prison career in talking pictures.  His lover, Dorothy Mackaye, and Dr. Walter Sullivan still faced separate trials for covering up the facts of Raymond's death.  On June 29, 1927, a jury needed less than three hours to find the actress guilty.  Mackaye was sentenced to a year in San Quentin, her lover's new address.  Her appeal denied, Mackaye did her time operating a sewing machine.  She was released for "good behavior" on January 1, 1929, after serving only 8 months.  The actress drew on her time in prison to co-write with Carlton Miles the play Women in Prison.  The play served as the basis for the 1933 Warner Bros. film, Ladies They Talk About, starring Barbara Stanwyck.  The studio remade the film as Lady Gangster in 1942 with Faye Emerson in the title role.  And what of Dr. Sullivan?  He was the only "winner" in the ordeal.  On October 28, 1927, the case against the Hollywood physician was dismissed after the D.A.'s office determined the evidence against him was "too thin" to win a conviction.

 On the strength of his "excellent behavior," Paul Kelly won parole from San Quentin on August 2, 1929, after serving two years and one month of his manslaughter conviction.  "I'm going straight to New York," Kelly told reporters.  "I'm headed straight for the comeback trail.  I've got a job with the New Century Play Company in New York and I'm going to hit it hard."  The job, apparently, was as a clerk for the company.  On Broadway, however, Kelly earned the dubious distinction of being the lowest-salaried leading man ever to appear in a show on the Great White Way.  As a parolee, the actor was limited under California law to earn no more than $30 a week, the salary he was paid in February 1930 to work in the Nine Fifteen Revue.  On a happier note, Paul Kelly and Dorothy Mackaye married in February 1931 and remained together until she was killed in a car crash near their Northridge, California ranch in 1940.  The actor returned to an uncharacteristically forgiving Hollywood in 1932 and worked nonstop amassing credits in some 88 films often in supporting roles in "A" and "B" features as well as the occasional lead in programmers.  Kelly's post-conviction films include Broadway Thru a Keyhole (1933), The Song and Dance Man (1936), The Roaring Twenties (1939), Not a Ladies' Man (1942), The Glass Alibi (1946), Crossfire (1947), The Painted Hills (1951), The Square Jungle (1956), and his final film, Curfew Breakers (1957).  In a filmic act of self-expiation smacking of gimmick casting, Kelly appeared as Warden Clinton D. Duffy in the 1954 production of Duffy of San Quentin, a chronicle of the maximum security prison where the actor spent 25 months of his life in the late 1920s.  Kelly also found time to appear onstage (winning a Tony Award as Best Actor in 1948 for Command Decision) and in television series guest shots.  On November 6, 1956, the 57-year-old actor suffered a fatal heart attack in his Los Angeles home at 1148 Club View Drive shortly after returning from casting his vote at the polls.  The "actor Hollywood forgave" is buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.

Photo by A.J. Marik

 Recommended Reading

"Kelly, Guilty, Asks New Trial."  Los Angeles Times, May 26, 1927, sec. A, p. 1.

"Kelly is Indicted for Raymond Death."  The New York Times, April 21, 1927, p. 29.

"Platonic Friendship Given Blame for Tragedy in Hollywood."  Los Angeles Times, April 20, 1927, sec. A, p. 2.

Paul Kelly -- Slide, Kelly, Slide (Part 1)

Hollywood, as witnessed by its treatment of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and others who have fallen from grace, is not usually the most forgiving of places.  Yet, even Tinseltown can occasionally be moved by a tragic love story.  Paul Michael Kelly (born August 9, 1899, in Brooklyn, New York) first appeared onstage in 1907 at the age of eight in A Grand Army Man and continued to perform in stock companies for many years.  Signed by the New York-based Vitagraph studio, Kelly appeared in juvenile roles in several silent shorts, before logging his first adult lead in the 1919 feature Anne of Green Gables directed by future murder victim William Desmond Taylor.  Kelly's other feature films of the period include Uncle Sam of Freedom Ridge (1920) and The Great Adventure (1921).  In 1917, Kelly met the Scottish-born actress Dorothy Mackaye while both were appearing in legitimate stage roles in New York City.  The friendship remained strong even after Mackaye married song-and-dance man Ray Raymond, then her castmate in the Big Apple production of Blue Eyes in 1921.  Ironically, prior to leaving the New York stage to try his hand in Hollywood, Kelly appeared in a stage production that strangely presaged the impending tragedy.  In August 1925, the actor portrayed "Charlie Watts" in The Sea Woman.  The character, a combination rum runner and lady killer, conspires with a woman to deceive another man.  In early 1926, Kelly arrived in Hollywood to appear in the feature film, The New Klondike.  The athletic actor next appeared in the 1927 baseball film Slide, Kelly, Slide, though not in the title role.  That "Kelly" was actor William Haines whose career would abruptly end in 1936 amid a homosexual scandal.  Another cast member, Karl Dane, would commit suicide on April 14, 1934.  For Paul Kelly, his role as a baseball player in the film would later serve only to underscore in the public mind his physical superiority over the man he would be tried for killing.

Dorothy Mackaye

 Raymond and wife Dorothy Mackaye were based in Los Angeles when Kelly arrived to break into motion pictures.  Raymond, often on the road in various musical productions, never had to worry that his wife was neglected.  Kelly and Mackaye were seemingly inseparable and were often seen at gin parties and taking long car rides together.  Weeks before the tragedy, Raymond drunkenly ordered Kelly out of his house and told his wife to end her relationship with the actor.  Mackaye insisted that nothing unseemly was happening between them and flatly refused to end the friendship.  When the song-and-dance man left on tour with the musical Castles in the Air, Mackaye and Kelly continued seeing one another.

On Saturday, April 16, 1927, an exhausted Ray Raymond arrived at his home at 2261 Cheremoya Drive in Hollywood following an all night train trip from San Francisco where several hours earlier he had concluded the final performance in Castles in the Air.  The 33-year-old performer immediately resumed arguing with Mackaye about her 26-year-old "friend" and she left the house on the pretext of shopping for Easter supplies.  Mackaye drove across town with a friend to Paul Kelly's apartment where she downed at least two gin fizzes.  Mackaye informed her ardent admirer that Raymond had baldly accused them of having an affair.  Paul Kelly, enraged and most likely inebriated, angrily phoned Raymond at 7:00 P.M. and told him he was coming over to discuss the matter.  Charlotte Ethel Lee, the Raymond's black maid and the only witness (besides the couple's 4 1/2-year-old daughter, Valerie) to the incident told police in her statement:

Ray Raymond

"I knew he was talking to Paul Kelly, and I heard Mr. Raymond say, "All right, come on over."  He told me Paul was coming.  Five minutes later Paul knocked at the door.  Paul spoke up right away, "I understand you have been saying things about me."  He was very angry.  Mr. Raymond told him to sit down with him on the davenport.  Mr. Raymond then said something to Paul and he struck Mr. Raymond on the jaw.  "Where is Mrs. Raymond?"  Mr. Paul asked.  "I don't know," Paul replied.  "Yes, you do," said Mr. Raymond.  Then Paul struck him again.  Mr. Raymond remonstrated.  He said:  "I haven't eaten.  I'm a wreck and I can't fight.  I'm thirty pounds underweight and have been drinking."  "That's your alibi," Paul cried.  Paul hit Mr. Raymond three or four times and knocked him down.  I went to the kitchen.  I begged Paul not to hit Mr. Raymond again.  Then Mr. Raymond called him.  "I'll beat you," Paul said.  He then hit him three or four times.  This was in the dining-room.  Mr. Raymond got up and Kelly grabbed him and put one hand behind his neck and beat him with the other, and then threw him on the couch.  He fell to the floor.  "I'm a man and can't take a blow, but I'll fight you," Mr. Raymond said.  Kelly keep knocking him down as he got to his feet.  His face was cut and bleeding.  Finally, with one crushing blow Paul knocked Raymond out."

Kelly left the scene, returned to his apartment, and related the events of the violent confrontation to Mackaye.  Raymond was at home nursing his blackened eye and other injuries when Perry Askom, a friend and fellow-cast member of Castles in the Air, accompanied by his wife dropped in on him moments after the beating.  Askom later related to police that Raymond told him, "Kelly came over and beat (me) up and that (I) never had a chance."  Charlotte Ethel Lee would concur in her police statement noting that the 5'6",  140 pound Raymond was little more than a "punching bag" for the younger, more athletic 6'0, 190 pound Kelly.  The Askoms left shortly after Mackaye returned home.  The next morning at 6:00 A.M., Raymond was found by housekeeper Lee lying flat on his back on the bedroom floor near the side of the bed unconscious, breathing unnaturally, and "frothing at the mouth."  Dr. Walter Sullivan was called, examined the song-and-dance man, and ordered him rushed to the Queen of Angels Hospital.  According to published reports, Mackaye continued to visit Kelly in his apartment up to the moment her husband died without regaining consciousness at 5:20 A.M. on April 19, 1927 -- two days after the altercation with the actor.  Dr. Sullivan, paid $500 by Mackaye for his two day treatment of Raymond, was poised to sign a death certificate stating the man had died of "natural causes" when the coroner, demanding an autopsy, hurriedly reclaimed the body from the mortuary.  The autopsy confirmed that Raymond had sustained a bad beating at the hands of the younger man.  Raymond suffered two fractured ribs, cuts on his forehead, a damaged left eye, bruises on his chest, shoulder, arms, and shins, and a serious head injury resulting in a hemorrhage covering the right portion of the brain.  The cause of death was officially listed as hypostatic pneumonia following an extensive subdural hemorrhage on the right side of the brain.  Dr. Sullivan's supposed ignorance of the fact that Raymond had been in a fight prior to his death opened the medical man up to allegations that the exorbitant $500 fee he received from Mackaye made him a co-conspirator in trying to cover up the facts of his patient's death.

Jack Ronald Merker -- The Voice Stilled

Merker enjoyed a long and distinguished career in San Diego, California, radio as an executive producer at KNSD/Channel 39, program director at both KOGO/AM 600 and KSDO/AM 1130, and as an on-air broadcast news personality.  Colleagues credited him with making radio news in the area more lively and competitive as well as for launching the talk show career host of Michael Reagan, son of former President Ronald Reagan.  In 1996, the openly gay Merker produced a radio show about AIDS that was honored with the New York International Radio Award.  He served as the county's director of media and public relations until ill health in 1999 prompted him to retire to the desert community of Palm Springs, California.  The 63-year-old former radio executive was staying at the home of a friend in Palm Springs when he was last seen leaving a local bar on November 28 or 29, 2001, with a man later identified as Erick Lavonne Wright (reported in the press as "Erik Levaughan Wright"), a 22-year-old resident of nearby Rancho Mirage.  Days later on December 1, a real estate agent showing the home of Merker's friend to a prospective buyer discovered the radio man's body tossed into a laundry room.  Merker, bound and gagged, had died of "compression of the neck."  Prime suspect Erick Wright proved easy for Palm springs authorities to find.  The day prior to the shocking discovery of Merker's body, Wright had been arrested by local police for the recent robbing and repeated stabbing of a motorist who had given him a ride.  At trial, Wright admitted choking Merker, but only to disable him after the elderly man became violent during their sexual encounter.  The prosecution maintained Wright deliberately killed Merker to get money for drugs.  Found guilty of second-degree murder on January 6, 2004, he was subsequently sentenced to a prison term of 15 years to life.  As of May 2014, Erick Lavonne Wright, Inmate #V26049, is incarcerated at the Chuckawalla Valley State Prison in Blythe, California.