Tom Neal -- Detour (Part II)

By 1965, the 51-year-old former actor had seemingly pieced his life back together.  Married since June 1961 to third wife Gail, a 29-year-old receptionist at the upscale Palm Springs Tennis Club, Neal operated a modest, but successful, landscaping business in the desert town.  Long forgotten by movie fans, Neal once again became press fodder by committing another violent act ... this time with fatal consequences.  At 6:30 A.M. on Friday, April 2, 1965, Palm Springs police received a phone call from Neal's Beverly Hills attorney, James P. Cantillon, requesting that they meet him and his client at an intersection one block from Neal's house.  Neal led the group to his home at 2481 Cardillo Road where authorities discovered Gail peacefully stretched out on the living room sofa, partially covered by a blanket, dead from a single .45-caliber bullet wound behind her right ear.  The bullet exited Gail's left temple and was recovered from a sofa pillow beneath her head.  A spent cartridge was found four feet from the woman's body.  The gun was never found.  Neal was cooperative with authorities, but under the advice of Cantillon refused to make a statement.  An autopsy fixed the time of Gail's death between 2:30 P.M. on April 1 and 2:30 A.M. on April 2.  As the former actor sat in the Riverside County Jail in Indio without bound, detectives worked to fix his movements during that time frame.  The outlook for Neal looked bleak after investigators questioned Robert L. Balzer, the Buddhist monk owner of the Tyrol Restaurant in Idyllwild, a mountain resort in the San Jacinto Mountains behind Palm Springs.  Balzer, a friend of the Neals, told police that the former actor showed up alone at the restaurant early in the evening of April 1.  Neal looked a "little disturbed," and in the course of their conversation told him Gail was his "whole life and he could not live without her."  Neal concluded the frank discussion with the admission that he had shot his wife "in the head" with a .45-caliber pistol.  He was subsequently charged with first-degree murder and remained in jail pending trial steadfastly maintaining his innocence.

Following jury selection (three men, nine women), the Neal trial opened in Indio on October 19, 1965.  The prosecution's case against the former actor looked solid.  The motive -- Neal shot his wife while she slept because she was involved with other men and planned to divorce him.  Adding to Neal's "confession" to Balzer, a local real estate broker testified that on April 1 he had gone to the Neal house to deliver a letter of recommendation to Gail who intended to divorce her husband of four years and relocate to Los Angeles to seek employment.  The realtor was surprised to find Neal in the home since the couple was separated since January 1965 and the one-time actor had been living in Chicago.  Embarrassed, the real estate broker quickly left the home on Cardillo Road.  He was the last person except for Neal to see Gail alive.  Nine days after calling only eight witnesses, the D.A.'s office rested its case against Neal.  Seemingly outgunned by the prosecution, Neal was forced to take the stand in his own defense.  He told the packed courtroom the shooting was accidental.  As he argued with his wife about the other men in her life, Gail suddenly became angry, produced a .45-caliber automatic, and threatened to kill him.  The gun discharged accidentally as he attempted to disarm the hysterical woman.  As a rebuttal witness, the prosecution called Dr. Armand Dollinger, the pathologist who performed the autopsy on the dead woman.  According to Dollinger, Neal's account of the shooting was "unlikely" based upon the direction of the wound.  Three of Gail's co-workers at the Palm Springs Tennis Club testified that she planned to leave town after learning her husband was returning from Chicago.  Gail was terrified Neal would kill her when he learned that she had filed for divorce on March 11, 1965, citing physical cruelty as the grounds.  In the divorce papers, the 29-year-old receptionist accused Neal of threatening her with a .45-caliber automatic.  Present in the courtroom for at least one day was Neal's old flame, Barbara Payton.  The two exchanged glances, but did not speak.  Remarkably to most observers, jurors needed only ten hours after a six-week trial to find Neal guilty of the lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter on November 18, 1965.  While awaiting sentencing, the star of Detour remained free on $2,750 bail.  Describing Neal as a "cold, deliberate" killer, Superior Court Judge Hilton H. McCabe imposed the maximum prison sentence of one to 15 years on the angry ex-actor on December 10, 1965.  There would be no probation.  Neal decried the sentence as a "railroad job" as he was hustled off to begin serving his time.  He was paroled from the California Institution for Men at Chino on December 6, 1971, after serving seven years.  Neal's freedom, however, was short-lived.  On August 6, 1972, the 58-year-old complained of heartburn prior to retiring to bed in his North Hollywood home.  The next day, Neal's 15-year-old son, Patrick, discovered his father's body.  The man with the violent past was pronounced dead from "natural causes" (congestive heart failure) by a fire department ambulance crew summoned to the scene.

Recommended Reading

Gilmore, John.  L.A. Despair:  A Landscape of Crimes and Bad Times.  Los Angeles:  Amok, 2005.

Lyons, Arthur.  "Killer Career - Actor Tom Neal."  www.palmspringslife.com

Neal, Tom.  "Neal Relates His Version of Brawl."  Los Angeles Times, p. 2, September 17, 1951.

Tom Neal -- Detour (Part I)

Neal with Ann Savage in Detour

Neal, a dependable actor in some 180 films from 1938 to 1953, is nevertheless fated to be remembered in Hollywood lore for two acts of violence committed 14 years apart.  Born in Evanston, Illinois, on January 28, 1914, Neal enjoyed a privileged life as the son of a banker.  Excelling at sports at Northwestern University, Neal became a Golden Gloves boxing champ...a skill he would later use to deleterious effect in Tinseltown.  Briefly flirting with a Broadway stage career in the early 1930s, he earned a law degree from Harvard University in 1938, but never practiced.  That same year, Neal arrived in Hollywood and appeared in his first screen role as a bit player in MGM's Out West with the Hardys.  The good-looking, muscular actor worked almost nonstop from the late 1940s until his final film, The Great Jesse James Raid, in 1953.  Often cast as the tough guy or suave leading man in grade B motion pictures, Neal's film credits include 6,000 Enemies (1939), Flying Tigers (1942), Behind the Rising Sun (1943), Thoroughbreds (1944), Crime, Inc. (1945), The Brute Man (1946), Call of the Klondike (1950), and Danger Zone (1951).  In 1946, Neal starred as the Fate-stricken character, "Al Roberts," in the Edgar G. Ulmer directed film Detour for Poverty Row production company PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation).  Shot in six days on the microscopic budget of $30,000, Detour has since become a darling of critics who laud it as a major example of film noir.  The movie was remade in 1992 starring Tom Neal, Jr., the actor's son.
    

Tone and Payton

Payton and Neal

No doubt Neal would have continued his undistinguished, but solid acting career in B movies if not for his disastrous involvement in an ill-fated love triangle.  Barbara Payton, a sexy blonde "star" of such forgettable early 1950s films as Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1950) and Drums in the Deep South (1951), was better at garnering headlines than acting.  Though only 25, Payton was very publicly engaged to the 45-year-old actor, Franchot Tone, the patrician-looking ex-husband of Joan Crawford.  The press followed the couple's every movement and, shark-like, smelled blood in the water when the buxom star broke off her engagement with Tone in July 1951.  The reason?  Payton "knew in a minute" that she "loved" Tom Neal after spying the muscular 37-year-old actor in swim trunks poised on a diving board at a mutual friend's pool party in Hollywood.  The pair generated headlines of their own when the mercurial Payton decided to renew her friendship with Franchot Tone.  On September 14, 1951, two days before Payton was set to marry Neal, the young star and Tone spent the evening dining and dancing at Ciro's.  Neal was waiting for the couple at Payton's Hollywood home at 1802 Courtney Avenue when they arrived from their "date" around 1:30 A.M. the next morning.  The fickle bombshell ordered Neal to leave and, when he refused, instructed Tone to make him.  Tone, nine years older and twenty pounds lighter, invited the 5'10", 180-pound former Golden Gloves boxing champion (who, incidentally, spent his spare time lifting weights) out on the front patio to settle the dispute.  Not surprisingly, Neal beat Tone senseless, breaking the actor's nose and fracturing his cheek.  Tone woke up in California Hospital 18 hours later suffering from a cerebral concussion.  He later underwent two hours of facial surgery to save his distinguished good looks.  Tone never landed a punch.

As Tone slowly recovered, Payton informed the press that her engagement to Neal was off.  The star of Bride of the Gorilla (1951) now intended to wed Franchot Tone as soon as he was able to stagger down the aisle.  Neal, left to twist in the legal wind while awaiting Tone's decision whether or not to file felony assault charges against him, told his side of the "parlor man" versus the "athlete" story in a September 17, 1951 Los Angeles Times article bearing his by-line.  Maintaining his love for Payton, Neal said she instigated the confrontation with Tone over a period of months by playing the two men off against one another.  Of the altercation:

"Barbara came out and asked Franchot when he was going to get rid of me and then threw her arms around him and kissed him.  That's what touched it off.  Tone said, "Let's go."  He threw a right and I threw a right and mine got in faster.  I struck him several more times and it was all over.  I saw them carry him into the house....  It was one of those things, where I had to defend myself and where the sight of the girl I love kissing another man just made me see red.  I mean, when you're fighting for a girl -- well, you just lose your head a little, I guess.  I have nothing against Tone whatever.  I'm sorry he's in the hospital and I'm ready to do anything I can do to help him.  And I hope he and Barbara will be happy."

On September 27, 1951, Tone announced that would not file charges against Neal for their one-sided fistfight.  The next day, Payton and Tone married in the sexy star's hometown of Cloquet, Minnesota.  The couple separated after 53 days of marriage amid rumors Payton was still in love with Tom Neal.  Tone divorced the fickle actress on May 19, 1952, citing "extreme mental cruelty."  The court papers did not mention his former rival, but Payton had resumed a torrid relationship with the actor that eventually fizzled after they appeared together in Neal's final film, The Great Jesse James Raid, in 1953.  Rendered unemployable by the scandal, Neal was forced to leave Hollywood for Palm Springs where the broke former B-movie actor was reduced to working as a gardener.  Still, he fared better than Barbara Payton, who was also made persona non grata in the film capital by the scandal and her subsequent bizarre behavior.  After making her last movie in 1955, Murder Is My Beat, Payton descended into a nightmare world of alcoholism, check kiting, homelessness, and prostitution.  The sexy woman movie stars once fought over died on May 8, 1967, at the age of 39 from heart and liver failure in San Diego.

Richard Israel -- A God in Heaven

At one time the owner of a chain of small motion picture theatres that business reversals had recently forced him to sell, Israel, 42, checked himself into the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, complaining of chronic laryngitis.  On the morning of February 17, 1930, a nurse noticed Israel was missing from his bed and the window of his fourth floor room was open.  The former theatre owner's broken body was found on the street below.  An unsigned note found in the room read:  "I am shocked at myself as much as the rest of the world.  There is a God in heaven and one cannot break His laws and be unpunished."

Ben Muller -- Iodine and Ant Paste Cocktail

  

Lodi Theatre.  (Cinematreasures.org)

The manager for many years of the Lodi and State theatres in Lodi, California, Muller, 42, had become increasingly depressed over business matters.   Weeks before his death, he often threatened suicide to his wife and was never without a bottle of iodine laced with ant paste on his person.  On January 3, 1938, Muller's wife and a friend found the theatre manager in the basement of his Lodi home at 710 South Street suspended from a cord attached to a ceiling joist.  A note addressed to his wife and son found on the dining room table upstairs read:  "Dear Ruth and Dickie:  Forgive me for this act but I am going mad...sorry I made you both so much trouble....Goodbye and good luck to you both."  Evidence at the death scene suggested that Muller had ingested some of the deadly mixture prior to slipping a double noose around his neck and then kicking an 18 inch high box out from under his feet.

Monica Rose -- Sky's the Limit

Rose and Green.

Born in London on February 11, 1948, the 4 foot, 9 inch tall Cockney was a 15-year-old junior accounts clerk when, in 1964, she was given tickets to Hughie Green's popular ITV quiz show Double Your Money.  Selected as a contestant from the studio audience, Rose only won 8 pounds but so impressed Green with her vibrant personality that he invited her back as a guest hostess six weeks later.  She stayed on the show for three years, toured with Green in a stage act based on the program's format, and even gave a Royal Variety Performance before leaving to escape the pressures of stardom.  She was reunited with Green in Sky's the Limit (1971-1974), a game show in which contestants could win free air miles plus spending money.  After the show ended, the popular performer put together a song and dance cabaret act, but left show business for good in 1977.

Three years later, Rose was admitted to a hospital suffering from depression and nervous exhaustion.  Shortly afterward, she married a Baptist lay minister, became a Christian, and took a job as a cashier in a supermarket near their home in Leicester.  On February 8, 1994, after suffering ill health for several years, Rose, 45, killed herself with a combination of anti-depressants and painkillers in her home in Whetstone, Leicestershire.

Claude Jutra -- No One Home

The former medical student turned film director was best known for his classic 1971 movie, Mon Oncle Antoine, a cinema verite exposition of a boy's coming of age in rural Quebec that won best picture at the Canadian Film Awards that year.  In 1985, an international film panel at the Toronto Festival of Festivals declared the motion picture to be the best-ever Canadian film.  Other films directed by Jutra include Kamouraska (Cannes Prize winner in 1972), For Better or Worse (1975), Surfacing (1979), By Design (1980), and La dame en couleurs (1985).  In addition to acting in films, Jutra also directed several television dramas for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and was a founding member of Quebec's Association of Professional Cineastes.

 

Depressed over the onset of Alzheimer's disease, the 56-year-old Jutra walked out of his downtown Montreal apartment on November 5, 1986, and vanished.  Friends fearing the worst, remembered a recent interview he had given in which he discussed the disease:  "I can face death, but I cannot facing watching myself disappear from within.  Nowadays, when the world comes knocking at the door of Claude Jutra, there's no one home.  I don't know who I am anymore."  At his home, Jutra left notes to his friends stating that if he did not see them again soon, they would meet in the hereafter.  On April 23, 1987, the filmmaker's body was found in the St. Lawrence River near Quebec City.  A note written in French contained in a money belt said, "My name is Claude Jutra."  The body, estimated to have been in the water for two to three months, was positively identified as Jutra's by dental records and a small tattoo found on the right arm.  It is generally believed that Jutra leapt to his death from Montreal's Jacques Cartier Bridge soon after his disappearance.

Solomon B. Stein -- "Tired, He Rests..."

Forced into bankruptcy by a $50,000 gem heist on October 8, 1928, the theatrical jeweler had recently been subpoenaed by the District Attorney's office to appear as a witness at trial for two men charged with the hold-up.  Police speculate that the mental strain combined with Stein's poor health drove the 36-year-old jeweler to take his life in the 12th floor office of the A. S. K. Jewelry Manufacturing Company at 74 West Forty-sixth Street in New York City on May 13, 1929.  A salesman found Stein's body face-down in the office propped up on cushions against a chair.  A tube leading from a gas jet attached to an open blow torch had fallen from his lips.  A poetic note written in pencil found beside the body read:  "Tired, he rests, and life's poor play is over.  Approach thy grave like one who draws the draperies of death about him and lies down to dream, and so falls the curtain on the last act of my life.  Good-bye, everybody."  And in a postscript:  "It takes a lot of gas to kill a man, but it is not so bad."

Eric Frachet -- Death on the Hooligan Express

Frachet, 33, had acted in small roles in a few films (La Cible, 1997; Le Demenagement, 1997; Vidangel, 1998) and in several television commercials in his native France.  In 1997-1998, he worked as a high speed stunt driver on director John Frankenheimer's film Ronin, starring Robert De Niro.  After spending the day of June 30, 1998, visiting his grandparents in Nouyaery, the actor boarded a train at Grenoble bound for Lyon on his way to Paris to audition the next morning for a television commercial.  Unfortunately for Frachet, who had no interest in football, a World Cup game between bitter rivals England and Argentina was being played that evening in nearby St. Etienne.  Sitting opposite the Frenchman in the train car was Paul Birch, a 43-year-old self-employed engineer from the Isle of Dogs, East London.  Birch, though not on file with Scotland Yard as a known football hooligan, was an ardent England supporter and was in France to attend the match.  He apparently believed Frachet was an Argentinian and felt the man was smirking at him and mocking the English team.  When the train arrived at the village station of of St. Andre-le-Gaz, Birch pulled out a hunting knife, plunged it into Frachet's stomach, and fled across a field.  The Frenchman bled out en route to the hospital from the 3 inch deep wound in his gut.  The next day, French police responding to a disturbance in a hotel in Grenoble, arrested Birch for attacking a porter with a broken bottle.  Under questioning, he admitted knifing Frachet after the "Argentine" mocked England's football team (England later lost the match to Argentina on a penalty kick).  Prophetically, at the time of his arrest authorities felt Birch was "mentally deranged."

On July 3, 1998, the Briton was formally charged with murder and faced a 30 year prison sentence for the unprovoked attack.  One year later, the prosecutor's office stated that psychiatric tests conducted while he was in custody established that Birch was suffering from "psychic problems" that significantly hindered his judgment and limited the control he had over his actions.  While French authorities repeatedly sought cooperation from the British Government to determine whether the engineer had a documented history of mental illness before ultimately deciding his case, Birch managed to smuggle a letter out of prison to Frachet's family.  In it, he stated that he killed Frachet under orders from a neo-Nazi gang of English fans who wanted to insure that England would stage the World Cup in 2006 (it was held in Germany).  In February 2000, a French appeals court upheld the lower court ruling that Birch was mentally unfit to stand trial.  Outraged, the victim's family and friends marched through the streets of Grenoble demanding "Real justice for Eric, the forgotten dead of the World Cup 1998."  Birch was returned to England in December 2001 and removed to a mental institution in London at the request of French authorities.

Jawed Wassel -- Welcome to America

Driven from his native Afghanistan in 1979 by the Soviet invasion, Wassel came to America, learned to speak six languages, worked his way through the City College of New York, and became a U.S. citizen.  Convinced the medium of film could be used to foster world peace and understanding, Wassel spent six years writing and directing Firedancer, an autobiographical story chronicling the pain suffered by the Afghani people under the twenty year Soviet occupation.  To cut costs, the director lived with his three brothers in a rundown apartment in Chelsea, used nonprofessionals in the film, and exercised his considerable charm to secure financial backing for the project.  Bruce Hathaway, composer for Firedancer, described Wassel as a "visionary" who would "promise the world" to get what he needed for the film, but disappointed many when his promises were not fulfilled.  Wassel allegedly promised Nathan Chandler Powell a producer's credit and 30% of the gross for Firedancer in exchanged for becoming the film's principal financial backer.  On the afternoon of October 3, 2001, hours before the film's New York City premiere, the 42-year-old filmmaker showed up at Powell's Long Island City apartment in Queens in a bid to convince the investor to take a smaller percentage.  The pair argued and Powell struck Wassel in the throat with a pool cue stabbing him to death as the filmmaker fought for breath.  Powell dismembered Wassel's body with a hacksaw and stored the severed head in the freezer of his refrigerator.  Afterwards, the producer attended the screening of Firedancer.

 The following evening, a Nassau County police officer made a routine stop of a motorist driving a van erratically with its lights off in the area of Bethpage State Park on Long Island.  "I knew I wasn't dealing with somebody going home from work," commented the patrolman after seeing a shovel, a pickax, and two bloody boxes stuffed with body parts in the vehicle.  The van's driver, Nathan Powell, was arrested and authorities believed their murder case against the producer was air-tight after they retrieved Wassel's head from his freezer.  In the first recorded use of the "9/11 defense," however, Powell claimed he was traumatized by the recent terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.  Wassel, he claimed, told him the attack was "America's just deserts" and made similar pro-Taliban statements against his adopted country.  The Afghani-American filmmaker also allegedly threatened to use his Taliban contacts to have Powell's family killed.  Outraged by Wassel's anti-American remarks, the "patriotic" producer killed the traitor during a fit of temporary insanity.  Powell's accusations, however, did not jibe with Wassel's actions.  In the wake of 9/11, the director took to the streets to film various victims' memorials for a planned documentary entitled New York Shrines.  Wassel had also given U.S. intelligence authorities over 80 hours of film shot in Afghanistan showing roads and mountain passes to aid in the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan.  On the eve of his trial in June 2003, Powell scrapped the dubious "9/11 defense" and pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter.  Sentenced to 20 years in prison, Powell could be out in 15 with time off for good behavior and time already served.  In 2002, Firedancer became Afghanistan's first submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award.  As of April 2014, Nathan Chandler Powell, Inmate #03A4785, was housed in the Auburn Correctional Facility in Auburn, New York.

Melita Powell Rovig -- A Sour Note

During the years 1910-1912 Rovig sang with the New York Metropolitan Opera Company under the stage name "Horatia Powell."  Relocating to Los Angeles, the retired singer started manufacturing an exclusive line of cosmetics targeted at an upscale clientele.  In 1935, she married Charles Rovig, a 53-year-old sales manager for a liquor house.  On the night of January 13, 1936, the pair was enjoying a quiet evening in their apartment at 706 South Mariposa Avenue when Rovig, 44, accused her husband of numerous marital indiscretions.  A loud argument ensued in which Melita Rovig, brandishing a revolver, threatened to kill him.  The liquor salesman disarmed the hysterical woman, hid the gun in a bureau drawer, and retired to bed.  Shortly after daybreak, the opera singer shot the sleeping man in the stomach and chest, and turned the gun on herself.  He survived long enough to notify police and give a dying declaration.  In a note addressed to her sister, Melita Rovig wrote she was contemplating suicide because she feared her husband planned to leave their marriage.

John E. Sampson -- Listen to the Kid

Employed at Desilu Studios as a film editor on the ABC television doctor drama, Ben Casey, Sampson, 50, was at the center of a troubled homelife.  For two years the editor and his wife, Jeane Sampson, 40, had violently quarreled in front of their ten-year-old child, Terry, in their home at 1103 Eilinite Avenue in the Verdugo Hills section of Glendale, California.  On the afternoon of May 6, 1962, the distraught woman phoned her parents in Palm Springs and threatened to end it all.  They begged her to do nothing until they arrived and hastily left to return to Glendale.  During the evening, however, Jeane called her daughter into the bathroom and locked the door.  The child screamed when she saw her mother clutching Sampson's .38-caliber pistol.  Sampson came to the door and, ignoring his daughter's plea, "Go away, Daddy, or you'll get hurt," broke into the bathroom.  During the struggle with his wife the film editor was shot point-blank in the abdomen.  He died hours later during emergency surgery in the Glendale Memorial Hospital.  Jeane could not explain why she locked herself in the bathroom with her child, but told authorities she meant her daughter no harm.  She intended to kill herself, not Sampson, because "I...got tired of being used as a punching bag."  While awaiting trial, Jeane Sampson was found dead from an overdose of barbiturates at her home in Glendale on the weekend of August 11-12, 1962.

David Oliver Huffman -- The Good Samaritan

A veteran actor equally at home in films (F.I.S.T., 1978; The Onion Field, 1979; Blood Beach, 1981; Firefox, 1982) and television movies (Eleanor and Franklin, 1976), Huffman (born May 10, 1945) was currently appearing in San Diego, California in the Old Globe Theatre stage production, Of Mice and Men.  On February 27, 1985, the 40-year-old actor was walking in Balboa Park not far from the theatre when a Canadian couple spotted someone rifling their motor home.  Huffman gave chase to the intruder, but when he failed to return, the tourists assumed the prowler escaped and their protector left the park.  Later that day, Huffman's body was found in a narrow crevice off a nature trail by a group of school children on a field trip.  An autopsy determined that he had been stabbed five times in the chest and abdomen with a screwdriver.  The Canadian tourists notified San Diego police after seeing Huffman's photo in a newspaper account of the murder.  Their description of the intruder combined with fingerprints left in the motor home led to the arrest of Mexican-born Genaro Samano Villanueva, a 16-year-old illegal alien living in the city with relatives since November 1984, was ordered to stand trial as an adult.  While admitting that he stabbed Huffman to death out of fear that his pursuer would either kill or turn him over to police, Villanueva pleaded for forgiveness insisting he never meant to kill the man.  Rejecting a defense motion to place the teenager in the California Youth Authority until the age of 25, Superior Court Jude Norbert Ehrenfreund sentenced Villanueva to the maximum term of 26 years to life on June 2, 1986.  In asking the judge for the stiffest possible sentence, Huffman's wife, Phyllis, stated, "I adored that man for 20 years.  He was life, not just to me but to all of us.  The loss is immeasurable and is impossible to articulate."  As of April 2014, Inmate #D30762 was incarcerated at the California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison in Corcoran under the name "Genaro Villanueva-Samano."

Raoul J. Levy -- And God Created Stupid

Brigitte Bardot

Born in Antwerp, Belgium, on March 14, 1922, the producer-director who launched the meteoric career of Brigitte Bardot served as a  pilot with the Royal Air Force during WWII before embarking on his own film career as a production assistant for his uncle at RKO on Mexican films after the war.  Returning to Europe as a representative for an American producer, Levy formed his own production company in France in 1950.  After a few undistinguished films, Levy produced Et Dieu Crea la Femme (And God Created Woman) in 1956, which unleashed sex kitten Brigitte Bardot and director Roger Vadim on the international film scene.  Levy used the film's popularity to establish himself as the only French-related film producer to occupy a position in the industry comparable with that of major Hollywood producers.  In 1962, Levy's attempt to make a big-budget Hollywood-type spectacular on the life of Marco Polo ended in financial ruin.  The film, La Fabuleuse Aventure de Marco Polo (Marco the Magnificent), was eventually completed by another director and production company in 1965.  Levy bounced back as a small independent producer-director and made Montgomery Clift's final movie, The Defector, in 1966.

On December 31, 1966, in the resort town of Saint-Tropez, the jilted 44 year old shot himself in the stomach with a rifle before the door of his 24-year-old script girl and textile heiress Isabelle Lons.  He died before arriving at the hospital.  Levy had attempted suicide with sleeping pills years earlier, but was saved when his secretary found him in his office.

Homer S. McFarland -- Suicide Interruptus

In a combination of personal persistence and police ineptitude, the 27-year-old Walt Disney Studios artist was able to finally end his life on his second attempt.  On February 18, 1937, a WPA worker in the Coldwater Canyon section of Los Angeles found McFarland slumped unconscious over the steering wheel of his car.  The man pulled a piece of garden hose from the car's exhaust, opened the door, and summoned police.  The groggy artist was taken to the Van Nuys station and questioned about the suicide attempt, which was apparently motivated by financial troubles.  McFarland was ultimately released, but authorities retained the suicide note found in his car.  The artist drove for
some time before parking on Ventura Boulevard in front of the Encino Country Club where he completed his interrupted carbon monoxide-induced suicide.  The note left to his wife read:  "Blanche, Am going to write with every grind of the motor.  I am approaching death -- terrible? -- not so bad.  My own, I love you, but I can't see the whole thing.  I'm perspiring -- HO!  I wonder how long I can keep this up.  I have got much time -- no courage -- terrible?  What!  Do you realize, my lamb, that I am bust?  I'm perspiring like hell.  Imagine what people think of me.  Not much time left.  I love you."  And in an added postscript:  "Bigger and better world I hope, O God.  Will meet after the encore -- heck!  I need love -- no sickness."

Pauline Armitage -- Read All About It

The Nashville, Tennessee-born actress appeared in several Broadway plays before accepting a role in a ten week roadshow production of Naughty Cinderella starring Irene Bordini.  During the tour, the production's "script doctor," Wilson Mizner, became enamored of the 28-year-old Armitage, and apparently promised to marry her when the show returned to open in New York City's Lyceum Theatre in early 1926.  Shortly after arriving in the city, however, Mizner broke off the engagement, and Armitage left the show at his request.  Ten days prior to her death, a visibly shaken Armitage visited a friend at a newspaper and stood transfixed before the large presses.  "Do you know my reaction to all this," she asked her acquaintance.  "I seem to see printed in great type across the front page of your newspaper, `Pauline Armitage Commits Suicide.'"

On the morning of February 16, 1926, Armitage was in the bedroom of her suite on the 14th floor of the Hotel Shelton at Lexington Avenue and Forty-ninth Street in New York City when the telephone rang in the sitting room.  When the maid left the room to answer the phone, the nightgown-clad actress locked the door, leaped from the window, and fell with a crashing thud on the sidewalk below between two laundry truck drivers.  Notified of the tragedy in Palm Beach, Florida, Mizner denied ever having been engaged to Armitage.

Jeannette Journee -- Sad Death of a Marmoset Lover

Jimmy?

The 30-year-old vaudeville dancer married Henri Journee, a foreign middleweight boxer, over the strong objections of her wealthy physician father in Noble, Illinois.  Quitting their jobs to open a beauty parlor in the Bronx, the couple lost their life savings when the business failed.  Financially ruined, the former fighter took a job as a hairdresser in a New York City beauty shop.  Worried over their finances and distressed by her father's opposition to the marriage, Jeannette Journee became increasingly moody.  At noon on august 3, 1931, Henri Journee returned to their basement apartment at 247 West Seventy-sixth Street to find the door chained and a strong smell of gas seeping from under the door.  Fearing the worst, Journee summoned a policeman and together they forced the door of the apartment.  Inside, they found the former dancer dead in a chair beside the kitchen range, with gas escaping from four open jets.  Prior to taking her life, the woman had removed a pair of love birds, Jeanette and Henri, and Jimmy, a marmoset, into an adjoining sealed room to escape the fumes.  In a note to her husband scrawled on a piece of wrapping paper she wrote, "I have been bad luck to you, so I am leaving you never to return."  In a separate note, for "Dear Pop," she added, "You have killed me.  Give Henri my trunk for being so good to me.  I want to go to the morgue.  Be good to him for my sake."

Wallace McCutcheon -- Have a Drink

The son of a Brooklyn, New York, stage manager, McCutcheon acted in some theatrical productions and also directed two films for Biograph in 1908 (At the Crossroads of Life and At the French Ball) before entering the British army at the outbreak of World War I.  He later transferred to the British Royal Flying Corps where his battlefield heroics earned him the rank of major.  Shortly after sustaining a severe head injury in combat, McCutcheon was dismissed from active service and returned to America with a metal plate in his skull.  In 1917, the war hero married actress Pearl White, famous star of the 1914 Pathe serial The Perils of Pauline.  Together they appeared in the 1919 serial The Black Secret and The Thief (1920).  She divorced him in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1921.

Depressed and unemployed throughout most of the 1920s, the 47-year-old actor shot himself through the right temple with a large caliber handgun in his room at 6326 Lexington Avenue in Hollywood on January 27, 1928.  At the scene, authorities found two cents, several newspaper clippings related to Pearl White's activities abroad, and a note from McCutcheon that read, "Have a drink," under a half-filled gin bottle.

Herbert W. Mannon -- Death of a Really Bad Philosopher

Betty Montague Gottlieb, a divorcee employed as a photo retoucher in Hollywood's Austin Studio and a sometime film extra, maintained a torrid 18 month affair with Herbert W. Mannon, vice-president of the Tec-Art Studios, before he tried to end the relationship in mid-1927.  Although friends warned the film executive that the fiery 25 year old could be dangerous, he assured them, "Man is master of his destiny.  Nothing can ever happen to me, for I will it otherwise.  There is nothing to fear.  I shall hold the thought that it is impossible for her to harm me."  In the early morning of August 5, 1927, the pair were parked in a car near 1346 Formosa Avenue in Hollywood when Mannon, attempting to disentangle himself from Gottlieb, let her read a love letter from a woman he had become infatuated with during a recent trip to New York.  According to the police reconstruction, Gottlieb handed the letter back to her lover, then slipped her left arm around Mannon, and asked for a goodbye kiss.  As he leaned forward, the divorcee produced a small caliber pistol from her dress, pressed its muzzle against Mannon's ear, and fired an instantaneously fatal shot.  Seconds later the woman who had spent the earlier part of the day reading Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet shot herself in the head.  Gottlieb lingered for several hours before dying.

Nan Wyatt -- She Didn't Deserve This

Wyatt (legal name Nandray Ann Walicki) was the popular co-host of KMOX radio's "Total Information A.M.," the top-rated morning drive-time news show in St. Louis, Missouri.  Known for her winning personality and in-depth political analysis, the 44 year old won several journalism awards including the prestigious National Associated Press Award for Enterprise Reporting in 1995, and had been a regular since May 1998 on the KETC-TV Thursday night panel news show, "Donnybrook."  While briefly working at the Chicago radio station WBBM-AM during the mid-1990s, Wyatt met her husband, Thomas Joseph Erbland, Jr.  Despite numerous attempts to fix their troubled marriage, Wyatt confided to friends in 2003 that she planned to divorce the 43-year-old unemployed computer consultant and petition for custody of their seven-year-old son, Drake.

Missouri Department of Corrections

On the evening of February 18, 2003, Erbland phoned police and tearfully confessed, "I've just shot my wife."  He was kept on the line while officers rushed to the couple's home in the 1300 block of Woodland Oaks Drive in the St. Louis County suburb of Twin Oaks.  Wyatt, shot five times with a .357 Magnum handgun, was found dead in the master bedroom.  Erbland, threatening to take his own life, was arrested hours later in the parking lot of an optical store where he had agreed to meet police.  Under questioning, Erbland said that while his son was in the house at the time of the murder, he dropped him off without explanation at the home of Wyatt's parents prior to calling authorities.  Interviewed in jail while awaiting trial on a charge of first-degree murder, a contrite Erbland confessed that while the murder was premeditated he felt great remorse -- "I stole Nan from everybody.  I stole her from Drake.  She loved him so much.  I stole Drake from her.  She didn't deserve this."  According to Erbland, the murder was precipitated by his discovery of Wyatt's private journal in which she had written their marriage was irretrievably broken.  In an agreement with the prosecutor's office, Erbland escaped life imprisonment without the possibility of parole by pleading guilty to second-degree murder on March 13, 2004.  Sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison, he will be eligible for parole in 26 years at the age of 70.  As of March 2014, Inmate #1110940 was incarcerated at Missouri's Jefferson City Correctional Facility.

Deon Van der Walt -- They Killed Him Years Ago

South Africa's most famous opera star, Van der Walt (born July 28, 1958 in Cape Town) studied voice at the University of Stellenbosch making his debut as "Jaquino" in Fidelio while still a student.  In 1981, the lyric tenor was studying abroad on scholarships when he won the International Mozart Competition in Salzburg playing "Tamino" in The Magic Flute.  In 1985, the 27 year old made his Covent Garden debut as "Count Almaviva" in The Barber of Seville.  In addition to these professional accolades, he became the first South African-born singer to complete the "operatic grand slam" -- performing at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, the Vienna State Opera, La Scala in Milan, and London's Covent Garden.  A familiar face on the international festival circuit, Van der Walt performed in Salzburg, Vienna, Barcelona, and Zurich and was regarded as one of Mozart's most skilled interpreters.  After years of almost nonstop touring, the tenor decided to spend more time in South Africa to help train young singers and oversee his winemaking business.  In 1988, Van der Walt purchased property near Paarl in a valley near the Klein-Drakenstein mountains 35 miles outside of Cape Town, christened the estate Veenwouden (after the Dutch village of his ancestors), and started producing highly regarded "boutique wines" known for their excellent taste and limited production.  The tenor left the management of the estate to his father, Charles, and the winemaking to his brother, Marcel, a former professional golfer.  When not performing internationally, he returned to Veenwouden to host intimate musical dinners in the winery's fermentation cellar.

The relationship between Van der Walt, 47, and his father had always been stormy, but it quickly deteriorated after the singer informed the 78-year-old man of his plans to move his parents off the estate when he took up permanent residence.  Around 2:00 P.M. on November 29, 2005, Van der Walt's mother, Sheila, returned to Veenwouden to find her son in his bedroom dead from two gunshot wounds to the chest.  Husband Charles was found in another bedroom with a fatal bullet wound in his right temple, a .38-caliber pistol next to his body.  Lore Schultz, Van der Walt's agent, said the constant bickering between father and son about the farm led directly to the murder-suicide.  "It really wore Deon down," Schultz told the international press.  "He may have been shot on Tuesday, but they (his family) killed him years ago.  Sometimes when he told me about it I just couldn't bear to listen to the horrible stories any more."

Nat Ross -- The Man from Rag-Town

Ross (born in San Francisco, California, on June 13, 1902) directed several pictures for Universal Studios in the 1920s (Ridin' Wild, 1922; Pure Grit, 1923; The Slanderers, 1924; College Love, 1929) before turning to producing in the 1930s with films like The Man from Gun-Town (1935), The Outlaw Deputy (1935), and Crash Donovan (1936).  The one-time assistant to producer Irving Thalberg was out of the movie business by 1941 and was the co-owner-night foreman at a rag factory on S. Broadway in midtown Los Angeles.  On the night of February 21, 1941, Ross was informed by a co-worker that Maurice ((M.) L. Briggs, 25, was outside waiting to speak with him.  A few weeks earlier, Ross fired the man, an ex-convict who served three years in a South Carolina prison for bank robbery.  Less than two weeks earlier an intoxicated Briggs had turned up at the factory and threatened Ross with a pocket knife.  Complicating the situation was the ex-con's 21-year-old estranged wife, Betty Susan Briggs, a worker at the rag factory supervised by the 38-year-old former film director.  After only two weeks of marriage, the woman left Briggs in December 1940.  Convinced that Ross was "chasing around" with his wife, the jealous ex-con decided to confront him.  When Ross went outside to meet the disgruntled former-employee, Briggs fired two rounds from a .25-.35 caliber rifle into the man's chest killing him instantly.  Twenty-five horrified employees witnessed the murder and saw the assailant flee the scene on foot.  Briggs was arrested a few minutes later after he was observed tossing the rifle on a lawn.  Stopped by a pedestrian and asked why he was discarding the gun, Briggs reportedly answered, "Oh, I just killed a guy.  Better call the cops."

In custody, Briggs told police he would have killed Ross ten days earlier, but had to wait for his unemployment check before purchasing the weapon for $8.00  "Am I sorry I shot him?," Briggs allegedly told detectives, "Yes -- I'm sorry I can't do it again."  A distraught Betty Briggs denied ever having a relationship with the murdered man.  Following months of bragging about the murder, Briggs pleaded "not guilty by reason of insanity" when told that he faced the death penalty if convicted of capital murder.  At trial in July 1941, Briggs testified he was driven into a deep depression by the breakup of his marriage and suspicions Ross was "chasing around" after his unhappy wife.  The situation reached its crisis, according to Briggs, when he allegedly learned the woman had obtained an abortion, perhaps funded by Ross.  Briggs bought the gun with the intention of killing himself at the rag factory, not Ross.  To no one's surprise, a jury found Briggs to be both sane and guilty of first-degree murder on July 21, 1941.  His appeal for executive clemency rejected by the governor, Briggs was executed in the gas chamber in San Quentin on August 7, 1942.

Jackie Neal -- Gone Too Soon

Daughter of internationally renowned Baton Rouge blues man Raful Neal, "Jazzy Jackie" was born on July 7, 1967, the eighth of ten children.  A hairdresser and owner of Jazzy Jackie's Beauty Salon in Baton Rouge, Neal released four CDs on small independent labels (The Blues Won't Let You Go, 1995; Lookin' for a Sweet Thang, 2000; Money Can't Buy Me Love, 2002; Down in da Club, 2005) all characterized by an eclectic blend of soul, pop, funk, and blues.  Since the mid-1990s, Neal's career was steadily building in the Southeast thanks to airplay on black radio stations in cities such as Mobile, Birmingham, and Baton Rouge.  In support of songs like "Nooky Thang," "Right Thang, Wrong Man," and "Twurk It," Neal crisscrossed the region by bus often playing weekend gigs.  In early-2003, Neal met James Haskell White at her concert in Baton Rouge.  White wooed the singer with flowers and for a time drove her tour bus until his increasing jealousy over her access to fans prompted the entertainer to end their relationship in December 2004.  Unwilling to accept the breakup, the 39 year old threatened to kill Neal and, in early March 2005, punched the windows out of her car in the parking lot of a local nightclub.

On March 10, 2005, Neal, 37, was getting a manicure at T'Nails and Hair Salon on 4369 Florida Boulevard in Baton Rouge prior to a weekend tour in Alabama.  At 6:00 P.M. White entered the crowded shop and calmly talked to Neal before leaving without incident.  He returned ten minutes laters, however, fired a shot from a .45-caliber revolver into the ceiling, and yelled "Get the fuck out of here!"  During the mass exodus out the front door, White shot customer Angela Myers, who survived the attack.  Neal, now alone with White in the shop, was not so fortunate.  The singer's estranged lover shot her three times, laid on her body, then shot himself in the chest.  Neal was pronounced dead at the scene while White, briefly hospitalized under police guard, survived and was charged with first-degree murder (Neal) and attempted murder (Myers).

As the killer recuperated in hospital with a cop posted outside the door of his room, Baton Rouge said goodbye to a performer many felt was just beginning to be recognized as a major talent.  Nearly 3,000 mourners thronged Neal's funeral service in the Great Hall at the Bellemont where the singer, her lips and eyelids painted red and her hair close-cropped on the sides and spiked on top, lay in state for hours.  The massive turnout led one family member to comment, "I just wish they could have turned up for her like that while she was living.  If she could have had this much love when she was living, how great would that be?"  Neal was buried in Roselawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum.

Photo:  William Tatum

Found mentally competent to stand trial in December 2005, White was advised by counsel to accept the D.A.'s offer of life imprisonment rather than risk a proceeding where death by lethal injection loomed as a probable outcome.  In January 2006, Neal's family (who approved the plea offer) was in a Baton Rouge courtroom where they expected White to accept the generous deal.  At the last minute, however, the killer stunned everyone by insisting that he go to trial.  White's attorneys were busy preparing for a pre-trial hearing in February 2006 when he informaed them that he was now ready to accept the deal.  Later that month, White pleaded guilty to the original charges and was sentenced to a prison term of life plus 50 years.  As of March 2014, Inmate #507066 was incarcerated at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.

Theodore "Rocky" Salanti -- Silk Stalkings Trunk Murder

Following the advice of his doctor, the Pittsburgh native relocated to San Diego in a bid to find relief from an acute sinus condition.  A draftsman by trade, Salanti apparently gave up the profession in San Diego and, as a member of the Screen Actors Guild, briefly pursued a career in the early 1990s appearing in bit parts on the television shows Silk Stalkings (filmed in the city) and Renegade.  By 2005, the 57 year old was allegedly a drug user who dealt methamphetamine.  On September 30, 2005, a friend (unable to reach Salanti after repeated phone calls) drove to the former actor's condominium in the San Diego suburb of Santee.  Confronted at the door by an overwhelmingly foul odor and suspecting the worst, the man immediately called 911.  Paramedics forced their way into the residence and were overcome by what one called "the smell of death" emanating from a large green suitcase covered in a blanket by the front door.  The place had been ransacked, blood was everywhere, the carpet torn up in several areas, and holes punched in the wall.  Drag marks on the bloody floor from the suitcase led from a back room to the front door.  The case was opened to reveal a badly decomposed "Rocky" Salanti, bound and gagged with duct tape, stuffed inside.  Amid obvious signs of a struggle inside the condominium, several items appeared to be missing including Salanti's car.  An autopsy confirmed Salanti had been dead for several days with death attributed to "homicidal violence including asphyxiation."  Simply stated, the duct tape over Salanti's face caused him to suffocate as his assailant searched the residence for items to steal.

Photo:  KGTV

On October 12, 2005, police arrested Amy Heather Davis, 25, an "escort" Salanti had met two years earlier in an internet chat room.  Addicted to meth, Davis once stole $30,000 from Salanti, but he forgave her despite being warned by friends to terminate the relationship.  In custody, Davis told authorities she was standing outside Salanti's condo smoking a cigarette on September 23, 2005, when two men approached and forced her at knifepoint to help the rob the former actor.  She did so under duress and the influence of her drug addiction.  At trial in San Diego on March 12, 2007, Davis faced a first-degree murder charge with special circumstances (murder committed during a robbery).  If convicted, she would receive an automatic sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.  Rather than an unwilling participant in the crime, Davis was painted by the prosecution as a woman who betrayed Salanti's friendship for the opportunity to rob him of drugs and cash.  She knew the combination to Salanti's safe, and more damningly, her fingerprints were found on the duct tape used to bind the Silk Stalkings bit player.  Three days into the proceedings, a mistrial was declared after the evidence of a polygraph test administered to Davis was inadvertently entered into the trial record.  A new jury was quickly impaneled and after deliberating for three days found Davis guilty of first-degree murder with special circumstances on April 11, 2007.  As of March 2014, Inmate #X28708 was incarcerated at the Central California Women's Facility in Chowchilla.

Paul Alan Ott -- The Grip Ripper

On the afternoon of January 19, 2004, a scantily clad barefoot woman with duct tape hanging from her wrists and ankles pounded on the door of a house in the 13900 block of Sherman Way in Van Nuys, California, frantically screaming, "He's going to kill me, he's going to kill me!"  According to police who responded to the homeowner's 911 call, the hysterical woman said she was kidnapped by a white man in the Rampart area of Los Angeles, forced to help him load a dead body into an SUV, driven to an apartment in Van Nuys, and forced to commit oral sodomy on him.  Left alone when her attacker went to buy beer, she escaped her bonds and fled the scene.  Police located the plastic-wrapped corpse of Edith I. Mejia, a 42-year-old mother of ten, in a Ford Explorer parked in the carport of a Van Nuys apartment building in the 7100 block of Costello Avenue.  The parking space was registered to Paul Alan Ott, a 35-year-old Hollywood grip on films including The Breaks (1999), Michael Jordan:  An American Hero (1999 -- made-for-television movie), The Puzzle in the Air (1999), Brother (2000), and Sueno (2003).  Ott matched the victim's physical description of her attacker (bald, 5'9", 170 pounds, heavily tattooed, white) and police sought him for questioning.  The man with a devil's head and the word "Otter" inked on his upper body remained at-large until the early morning hours of January 22, 2004 when detectives assisted by the FBI arrested the unarmed film grip after he jumped from the second-floor window of an apartment building at 7130 Hollywood Boulevard.  Ott was charged with the knife murder of Mejia, the rape of the escaped woman, as well as the sexual assault of another woman on January 15, 2004, who stepped forward after seeing the laborer's photo on television.

At trial in May 2004, Ott insisted he acted in self-defense when Mejia, a casual friend, lunged at him with a knife.  Jurors discounted the idea in favor of the prosecution's characterization of Ott as a murderer acting under a week long "drug-induced rampage."  On May 11, 2006, the 38-year-old grip was found guilty of second-degree murder in Mejia's death and of the sexual assault of his escaped captive.  The earlier sexual assault case was dropped before trial.  He was sentenced to a combined prison term of 61 years to life (31 years for murder, 30 years for forcible oral copulation).  "It was one of the sickest cases I have known," Deputy District Attorney Shellie Samuels, prosecutor in the Robert Blake murder trial said.  "It's a sad case for everyone involved because [Ott] has two little girls, but I'm happy with the sentence."  In July 2007, a state appellate court upheld Ott's conviction.  As of March 2014, Inmate #F35486 was incarcerated at Kern Valley State Prison in Delano, California.

Gito Baloi -- Bad Night in Joburg

One of South Africa's leading jazz musicians, Baloi was born in Maputo in the war-torn country of Mozambique in 1964.  Learning to play music on discarded paraffin tins and water reeds, Baloi was 14 when he borrowed a bass guitar for his first public concerts.  He toured extensively in Mozambique with the band Afro 78, and formed Pongola in 1986 ultimately settling in South Africa to escape the strife in his home country.  In 1987, the bassist-vocalist co-founded the jazz/jive fusion trio Tananas with drummer Steve Newman and guitarist Ian Herman.  Combining Baloi's knowledge of traditional African music with the co-members' innovative jazz fusion background, Tananas became a hit with both black and white South Africans.  The group signed with independent South African label Shifty Records in 1988 and later that year released their revolutionary self-titled debut album, Tananas.  A skillful blend of several musical styles (jazz, township jive, Mozambican salsa), the record cemented the group's cult status in South Africa, and led to tours on the African continent as well as in Japan, France, and Sweden.  Other successful albums on different labels followed (Spiral, 1990; Time, 1992) prior to the group;s disbanding in 1994 to pursue different musical paths.  Tananas briefly reformed with its original members in 1996 to release the album Seed, but Baloi spent most of the 1990s as either a solo performer, a founder and encourager of other groups, or in collaboration with international artists like Sting and Tracy Chapman.  In 1992, the bassist toured France with musicians from Zaire and Mali, and formed the bands Skabenga and Somewhere Else.  Baloi's first solo album, Ekaya, was released in 1996 and peaked at Number 2 on the Johannesburg Metro Radio charts.  Albums Na Ku Randza and Herbs and Roots followed in 1997 and 2002, respectively.

Baloi, 39, was returning from a poorly attended show with Landscape Prayer's Nibs van der Spuy in Pretoria's Lucit Candle Gardens to his home in the Kensington district of Johannesburg when he was shot three times by two gunmen in a central street in that city in the early morning hours of April 4, 2004.  Struck in the neck, the musician managed to drive his car fifty yards before getting out, staggering a few feet, then collapsing dead on the pavement.  The robber's took Baloi's wallet, but left his instruments in the car.  South Africa, long known as the murder capital of the world, has a crime rate estimated at eight times the overall homicide rate of the United States.  A spokesman for the African National Congress Youth League characterized the dead musician as "an icon for millions of young people" who contributed "to the creation of a free South Africa through art."  Acting on a public tip in late April 2004, police arrested four men (ages 21-28) in connection with the murder and confiscated three guns, two of them unlicensed.  As of May 2005, however, no one has been charged with Baloi's murder and the case remains open.

Victoria Howden -- The Unhappy Brit

In pursuit of the dream of a career in acting, the attractive 26-year-old blonde left the British seaside resort of Torquay for Hollywood in 1990.  In Tinseltown, the Devon native landed a single appearance on a November 1990 episode of the NBC sitcom Dear John, but found steadier employment as a part-time stripper at private parties.  Desperate to remain in America, Howden secured a Green Card by marrying Charles House in a Las Vegas ceremony in December 1990.  House, a 40-year-old former cop from Kentucky, was in training to become a police officer with the Los Angeles Unified School District.  On May 8, 1991, California Highway Patrol Officer Ronald Webb, 34, shot himself alongside a freeway in the San Fernando Valley after Howden refused to marry him.  The next day, Howden went to the home of Webb's estranged wife and threatened to commit suicide.  She was subsequently held for 72 hours on a psychiatric evaluation and released.

At 2:00 A.M. on June 10, 1991, neighbors heard a gunshot from the apartment Charles House and Howden shared in the 4600 block of Willis Avenue in Sherman Oaks.  Howden called a friend to report House had shot himself, and when paramedics arrived they found the man dead in the dining room from a gunshot wound.  In the bedroom lay the body of the actress.  The .357-Magnum she used to shoot herself in the chest was recovered near a note in which she apologized for her death and asked to be buried next to her lover Ronald Webb.  While police initially believed the event was a double suicide, the coroner's report and forensic evidence proved that Howden shot House in the head while he slept at the kitchen table, placed a phone call to her friend, and took her own life.  Immigration authorities noted that Howden had been granted permanent resident status five days prior to the murder-suicide.

Larry Stromberg -- Washed in the Blood

For the past five years the 30-year-old struggling actor worked as a fitness trainer at the Riverside Racquet and Fitness Club in the Philadelphia suburb of Bala Cynwyd.  Stromberg appeared the 1989 horror-comedy Blades, and in minuscule parts in two films partially shot in Philly (12 Monkeys, 1995; Up Close & Personal, 1996).  The actor was writing a script about a serial killer when his troubled three year marriage to Stefan Stromberg, 30, finally disintegrated amid his wife's alleged infidelity and subsequent abortion.  In mid-April 1996, the woman obtained a protection-from-abuse order against her husband citing his threats and violence.  On April 28, 1996, eleven days after the decree was filed, Paula Rathgeb, Stefan Stromberg's mother, was helping her daughter move out of the married couples' apartment in the Germantown section of Philadelphia.  Larry Stromberg slashed and stabbed both women to death and fled into the woods in suburban Montgomery County.  He surrendered to police a few days later and was charged with one count of first-degree murder (his wife) and one count of second-degree murder (his mother-in-law).  At trial in May 1997, Stromberg pleaded "not guilty" by reason of insanity.  Arguing his client was psychotic on the day of the killing, defense attorney Nino V. Tinari maintained Stromberg was the product of a mentally ill mother and a domineering father who had been molested as a child by babysitters and his mother's boyfriends.  "He couldn't interact with women," Tinari said.  "At age 30, he still played with dolls given to him at age 10."  When Stromberg learned of his wife's alleged affair, pregnancy, and abortion, he became irrational and fatally inflicted a total of 34 wounds on his two victims.  Prosecutors presented a simpler theory of the case -- the actor killed his wife and mother-in-law out of rage.  Stromberg was found guilty on both murder counts on June 6, 1997, and sentenced to two consecutive life sentences (plus 10 and 20 years) after a jury deadlocked over imposing the death sentence on the double killer.  While doing his stretch, Stromberg formed The Redeemed Theater Ministry and, according to the group's website, "has written and directed over 25 original plays for the prison population and the glory of God."  As of February 2014, Inmate #DG6379 was incarcerated at the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution in Coal Township.

Sampih -- Gotta Dance, Gotta Die

Photo:  Auke Sonnega

The most famous traditional dancer of his day, Sampih was a boy living in the small village of Sayan in southeast Bali when Canadian composer Colin McPhee, residing in the area to study its music, adopted him.  Under McPhee's tutelage, the youngster trained under the finest Balinese dancers and within a year was a nationally recognized prodigy.  Later, British impresario John Coast showcased Sampih in a "Dancers from Bali" troupe that performed to sold out venues across the United States from September 1952 through January 1953.  The ambitious undertaking marked the first time in a generation the outside world was permitted to see Balinese performers dancing to a traditional Gamelang orchestra using xylophones, gongs, drums, and cymbals.  Although Sampih served as the chief artistic adviser to Coast and was paid the same $75 a week salary as the other dancers, he was the acknowledged star of the troupe.  The dancer's popularity and financial success, however, led some in the company and his home country to feel he had somehow changed and now considered himself to be better than others.  In Bali's rigid social system, Sampih belonged to the lowest caste and his purchase of a modest motorbike, and the fact that prominent people in higher castes now recognized him, made many of his fellow-countrymen angry and jealous.  Evidently oblivious to the undercurrent of hostility around him, Sampih continued to ride his motorbike around his home village of Sayan where he lived with his wife and small child.

While on an official trip to Bali on February 28, 1954, President Sukarno of the Indonesian Republic requested that Sampih dance for him later that evening at a festival near the town of Sayan.  When the 28-year-old dancer failed to appear, messengers were dispatched to his home and were informed by Sampih's wife that he left on his motorbike earlier that afternoon.  Either that afternoon or three days later (accounts vary), the dancer's body was found floating in the Lauh River that flows past Sayan.  Sampih had been strangled and his face beaten almost beyond the point of recognition.  His motorbike, the apparent symbol of the dancer's sin against Balinese society, was smashed and buried nearby.  Sampih's murder remains unsolved.

Recommended Reading

Bowers, Faubion.  "Letter from Bali," New Yorker, 31(7):  114, 116-26, Oct. 29, 1955.

McPhee, Colin.  A House in Bali.  Singapore; New York:  Oxford University Press, 1979.
New Yorker

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.

Robin Ross -- "Mummy, We're Poor Now..."

The 33-year-old actress (also known as Wendy Ross) who once dated Burt Reynolds and John Wayne's son, Patrick, did guest shots on the hit television shows Dallas, St. Elsewhere, and Charlie's Angels.  Ross was living in Canada when she lost $185,000, her entire life savings earned during a 15 year acting career, in the U.S. stock market crash in October 1987.  Concerned over her daughter's mental health, Virginia Kent convinced the actress to come live with her in Westgate-on-Sea, England.  Although Ross was under a doctor's care and taking prescription sleeping pills and anti-depressants, she was still deeply troubled.  According to Kent, her daughter kept repeating, "Mummy, we're poor now, we're poor."  Kent later told a coroner's inquest, "I moved our beds together so I could reach out to her when she wept in the night."

 On the morning of April 11, 1988, Ross told her mother that she was going shopping.  Instead, the disturbed actress went to Westgate Bay, near Margate, Kent.  Witnesses saw the fully-clothed woman wade into the sea then swim out about a quarter of a mile into a section of water known for its treacherous tide.  Ignoring the shouts of terrified onlookers, Ross calmly stretched out face-first in the water and let herself be taken under by the tow.  Her lifeless body kept resurfacing every few moments until it was retrieved by a helicopter rescue crew.

Charlotte Vidot -- Fiddle Dee Dead

Photo:  J. Willis Sayre

The actress-wife of comedian Clarence C. Kolb (star with Max Dill of the vaudeville show A Peck o' Pickles) inexplicably swallowed a glass of cyanide of potassium in her room at the St. Dominic Apartments, 980 Bush Street, in San Francisco, California, on March 5, 1915.  While Vidot, 37, had been under a doctor's care for nervousness and depression, she never intimated that she was suicidal.  Kolb, who cut short his performance at L.A.'s Morosco Theatre, maintained that she had inadvertently taken a fatal dose of the sedative to make her sleep.  The pair married in 1902 while playing together in the Fiddle Dee Dee company.

Earl Cavanaugh -- Home Again!

Formerly of the vaudeville team "Cavanaugh and McBride," the 33-year-old comedian had been out of work for four months when, on September 16, 1926, he sent his wife and their 6-year-old daughter to a birthday supper at a local restaurant in the girl's honor.  Alone in their apartment at the Hotel Alpine in New York City, Cavanaugh brooded over the fact that he did not have enough money to buy his daughter a present or to visit his dying mother in Chicago.  When wife and child returned hours later, they found his pajama-clad body face down in bed.  Cavanaugh had strangled himself by tying a valise strap around his neck and fastening the other end to the bedpost.  Cavanaugh's wife denied that he had killed himself, insisting instead that the unemployed vaudevillian had died accidentally while rehearsing a new comedy skit called "Home Again!" in which an estranged husband tries unsuccessfully to hang himself with his belt.

Kadamba Simmons -- Ending Up with a Loser

Born in London in May 1974, Kadmaba (Hindi for "flower of enlightenment") Simmons was better known for her non-stop partying lifestyle than her career as a model and film actress.  Dropping out of school and leaving home, the 16-year-old rented a flat in Notting Hill, West London, and soon became a reqular on the club scene.  Strikingly beautiful, the sultry wannabe attracted the attention of a string of celebrity lovers including Bros singer Matt Goss, record producer Nellee Hooper, rock star Liam Gallagher of Oasis, and by age 21, champion boxer Prince Naseem Hamed.  Although some reports stated Simmons converted to Islam to be "spiritually closer" to the boxer, Hamed broke off the relationship seemingly alarmed by her flamboyant lifestyle characterized by heavy drinking and drug abuse.  Professionally, Simmons modeled in ads for Martini, Pantene shampoo, and appeared in small roles in the films Grim (1995), Mary Reilly (1996), Cash in Hand (1998), Breeders (1998), and The Wonderland Experience (2000).

By 1997, however, Simmons had become increasingly disenchanted with the endless cycle of work and all-night parties.  According to family members, she stopped being the "London party girl," began reading D. H. Lawrence, watched classic films, and gradually transformed into a "daytime girl."  Seeking spiritual fulfillment, Simmons traveled with her sister, Kumari, to India for a six-week holiday in the spring of 1998.  While vacationing in Goa, a former Portuguese colony on the country's west coast, the 24-year-old actress was approached by Yaniv Malka, a 22-year-old former Israeli soldier.  Living in a rented shack, the near penniless Malka was barely surviving on a small
pension from the Israeli army.  Infatuated with Malka, Simmons moved in with him the day after they met.  Obsessed by his lover's beauty, Malka picked fresh flowers for her every morning, and placed them with candlewax formed into the shapes of hears around her pillow before she woke.  When sister Kumari returned to London, Simmons and Malka left India for Berlin where they eked out a living working in a fruit juice stall.  According to Kumari, one month in Germany alone with Malka convince the actress she had made a terrible mistake.  Malka was too reliant on her, she said, and things had deteriorated to the point where they stayed in different rooms all day and did not speak.

In June 1998, Simmons managed to disengage herself from her lover and returned alone to London.  After receiving several hysterical call from Malka in which he threatened to kill himself, Simmons agreed to see him.  The night before their fateful meeting, she told her father, "He is a loser.  I don't want to end up with a loser."  On June 13, 1998, Malka arrived in London and, after spending the day with Simmons, went with her to a friend's borrowed flat in Islington, North London.  The next day, Simmons' naked body was found in the blood-smeared apartment hanging in the shower from a leather strap.  Later that morning, police spent ninety minutes coaxing a sobbing Malka off the
fifth-floor ledge of a residential block at University College, Central London.  In custody, the former soldier denied strangling his lover to death in anger over her desire to end their relationship.  Instead, he claimed her death was the culmination of a suicide pact they had forged in Germany.  After making love in the apartment, she asked him to strangle her.  Unable to do so with his hands, Malka used a ligature fashioned from a luggage strap to hang her in the shower.  Afterwards, he repeatedly slashed his wrists, arms, and neck with a knife in an unsuccessful attempt to complete the pact.  None of the injuries were remotely life-threatening.  He was still allegedly trying to keep his side of the bargain when police foiled his suicide attempt.  At trial in London's Old Bailey in March 1999, the prosecution discounted the suicide pact theory maintaining Simmons was manually strangled to death by a jealous lover then placed in the shower with a noose around her neck.  The subsequent "faked" suicide attempt was made to bolster Malka's claim of a mutual death pact.  Displaying no emotion, Malka was sentenced to life imprisonment on March 29, 1999.  In February, 2000, an Appeals Court upheld the killer's conviction.

Marguerite Calvert -- Zing Went the Strings of Her Heart

Calvert, a popular 24-year-old vaudeville dancer and violinist, was married for less than a year to W.D. Harris, a New York-based automobile tire dealer, when she took her life in San Francisco's Palace Hotel on October 22, 1922.  Days before arriving at the hotel following an exhausting cross-country car trip, the pair had visited the grave of Calvert's brother in Portland, Oregon.  At the hotel, Calvert's depression and fatigue were exacerbated by a quarrel with her husband over his attentions to other women.  Good-naturedly teased by another couple in attendance, Calvert burst into hysterics, and locked herself in the bathroom.  When a night clerk opened the door, the alarmed spectators found the violinist lying on the bathroom floor with the muzzle of a gun pressed against her heart.  Ignoring their pleas not to harm herself, Calvert pulled the trigger.

George Fitzalan Bronson Howard -- God's Man

Howard (born in Howard County, Maryland, on January 7, 1884) was already a successful playwright (The Snobs, 1911) and novelist (God's Man, 1915) when he volunteered for service in the British Army in 1915.  Commissioned as a lieutenant in the Intelligence division, he was on active duty in France in 1916 when a mustard gas shell exploded near him.  The writer spent five hours in the field before a stretcher could reach him.  For the next 18 months Howard recuperated from the effects of mustard gas poisoning in a British hospital.  Though released, Howard's health was shattered and he was addicted to the drugs the doctors had prescribed for his condition.

 In Hollywood, Howard wrote the screenplays for The Power of Evil (1916) and The Spy (1917) while several of his stories were made into films (Come Through, 1917; Queen of the Sea, 1918; Sheltered Daughters, 1921; Don't Shoot, 1922; Borrowed Finery, 1925).  In 1922, Howard, 37, was working in Hollywood developing film stories for Universal when his estranged second wife and young child were living in Baltimore, Maryland.  In the early morning hours of November 20, 1922, Howard and his secretary, J.C. Dubois, were working on a film treatment for Universal in the writer's apartment at 2500 Highland Avenue in Los Angeles.  According to Dubois, Howard repeatedly questioned him about the effects of gas on the human body and how long it would take to die of gas poisoning.  Dubois left the writer in apparent good spirits around 2:00 A.M.

 Around 8:30 A.M. other tenants, alarmed by the smell of gas, entered Howard's fume-filled apartment through an outside window.  Howard's body, dressed in pajamas and a bathrobe, was found in a small closet adjoining his bedroom.  A long length of rubber tube clutched in his hand ran from under the closet door across the floor of the bedroom to an open gas outlet.  Howard had sealed the window crevices with paper.  A letter written in pencil to his wife, Jean Bronson, was found on a bedside table next to a copy of his novel, God's Man.  In it, Howard cryptically referred to his drug addiction and his inability to send her money.  It read (in part):

"Jean:

I got your unsteady and insulting letter.  Now there is no use in writing me in such a crazy strain.  I am going to send the baby $10 a week until I manage to get on my feet.  Whenever I can I will send you some but after what has happened I think you have a nerve to expect me to send you anything...Do you realize that the money I was sending you is being eaten up altogether by what I have to pay for what you know about?  If you worry me too much, I will probably give up in disgust."

Florence Reynolds -- Through with Mankind Forever

Reynolds (real name Walsh) fell in love with fellow vaudevillian Bruce Healy while acting with him in the Reynolds Trio.  Despite learning that Healy was married, she pawned $500 worth of her jewelry and borrowed money against a life insurance policy to post his bail on a bigamy charge.  Healy repaid the kindness by leaving her.  On May 25, 1928, a housekeeper found the young actress' body in her fourth-floor room at 148 West Seventy-eighth Street in New York City.  Reynolds, clad in a nightgown, lay on the floor with her mouth pressed over an open floor board gas jet.  Two notes found on a dresser in the sparsely furnished room asked that her family be notified and gave instructions for disposing of certain personal effects.  Also lying on the dresser was a five page letter neatly written in green ink addressed "Dear Uncle Charlie."  In it, Reynolds wrote:  "I wish God would take me for I don't see how I can go on and on.  My faith in mankind is gone.  I am through with mankind forever."