A Star is Murdered - William Desmond Taylor Historical Case

In the early days of Hollywood an Irish immigrant made a name for himself in front of and behind the camera, but who wanted William Desmond Taylor dead and how did they get away with it?

Do you have any comments, or a case you’d like to suggest?  You’ll find a comment form and case submission link at LordanArts.com.  

Thank you LA Times, the San Franciso Bulletin, Patch.com, AllThatsInterseting, FindAGrave, IMDB, BeforeThe101.com, EyesOfAGeneration.com; the Biografix, Justin Root, The Take and Buzzfeed youtube channels as well as Wikipedia for information contributing to today’s story.

Written by Frederick Crook - check out our other collaboration WRAITHWORKS - Wraithworks at Amazon https://www.amzn.com/dp/B07HXNCW4L (audiobook narrated by John Lordan) Also avaible on iTunes: https://apple.co/2OFXb8L

This is not intended to act as a means of proving or disproving anything related to the investigation or potential charges associated to the investigation.  It is a conversation about the current known facts and theories being discussed.  Please do not contact people you are suspicious of or attempt to harass, threaten or intimidate them in any way. Do not release information that can be used to do the same, or join in attacks being conducted by others.
Everyone directly or indirectly referred to is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

LordanArts 2025

Do you have any comments, or a case you’d like to suggest? You’ll find a comment form and case submission link at LordanArts.com.

This is not intended to act as a means of proving or disproving anything related to the investigation.  It is a conversation about the current known facts and theories being discussed.  Everyone directly or indirectly referred to is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

LordanArts 2025

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Early into the twentieth century, moving pictures began to evolve
into a major industry in the US, centering itself in
a small area of California we now know as Hollywood.
Many of these films were very short, just a few
minutes long, and they featured no sound. Created at the
company and under the supervision of inventor Thomas Edison, it

(00:42):
began with the kinetoscope, a single viewer device housed in
a wooden cabinet, showing the viewer a short moving picture
that played in a loop when the viewer cranked the handle.
Establishments purchased multiple kinetoscopes and placed them in dedicated shops
they called parlors, similar to how game arcades would pop
up in the nineteen eighties. Motion picture technology skyrocketed from there,

(01:06):
and the idea that the motion picture could be projected
to multiple people at once soon followed. The films became longer,
long enough to tell a story and now be accompanied
by live music. In some cases, dialogue appeared on the
screen and cutaway captions with the actors exaggerating their facial
expressions and body movements to help tell the tale. These

(01:27):
films were largely shot in Hollywood, and distributed all over
the country, and the industry expanded quickly. Audiences were drawn
into these theaters to see the faces that were becoming
familiar and generating a lot of revenue. With that, the
movie star was born. But behind the scenes, other people
grew famous as well, known for their work off camera.

(01:50):
One man in particular, William Desmond Taylor, had begun to
make a name for himself as a director of these
silent films. He was one of the few men in
Hollywood that rose to that level so early on, placing
his name amongst the pioneers of the movie industry. He
also left behind a seriously mysterious murder case that people
are still talking about over one hundred years after it occurred.

(02:13):
I'm John Lord, and today we're looking at the historical
case of the murder of William Desmond Taylor. Born in Carlow,
Ireland on April twenty sixth, eighteen seventy two, William Cunningham
Dean Tanner, was raised in a well to do family environment.
The Dean Tanners sent young William to Clifton College in Bristol, England.

(02:36):
He was expected to learn engineering and have a career
in the British Army like his father, but William wanted
nothing to do with that. Instead, he joined a theater
troupe and performed in the play Private Secretary. However, William
was recognized by an audience member who knew the Dean
Tanner family, and they contacted William's father. This would get

(02:58):
William sent off to Hart, Kansas. William farmed in Kansas
until news came to him regarding a gold rush in
the north. It was eighteen ninety six and a vein
of gold was discovered in Klondike, Canada. William decided this
was an opportunity he could not ignore, especially considering his
engineering degree. He left Kansas and took on the challenging

(03:19):
journey which would take him through Alaska and onto the
Yukon River in the Klondike region. Once there, he used
his knowledge and found some success as a gold prospector.
Now far beyond the supervision of his father, William took
on stage acting roles in between his farming and mining work.
He was determined to feed the hunger of his creative side.

(03:41):
With the Klondike gold rush having faded in eighteen ninety nine,
William traveled to New York City to pursue his acting career.
He met a woman by the name of ethel May Hamilton,
an actress known by the stage name ethel May Harrison.
A courtship led to the two of them becoming married,
and in nineteen oh one, the couple had a daughter
they named ethel Daisy. However, William's first love was quickly

(04:04):
becoming clear. His desire to continue pursuing a career in
acting led William to abandon his family. From his perspective,
the sacrifice may have been worthwhile. In nineteen twelve, the
New York Motion Picture Company gave him his first leading
role on film. The company had recently relocated to Los Angeles,
and filming on studio sets became the preferred way to

(04:26):
make movies. William officially changed his name to William Desmond
Taylor and starred in their premiere film, entitled The Counterfeitter,
and he went on to star in as many as
ten short films in nineteen thirteen alone. He quickly earned
the reputation of a man everyone liked. He would show
everyone the same respect on set, no matter what their

(04:46):
position was within the production. In nineteen fourteen, he appeared
in fifteen films and showed that his skills were branching out.
He had also risen to the level of director William Desmond.
Taylor went on to work as a director for many
different studios until partnering with famous Players Laski, which would
later become Paramount Pictures. He took an unexpected break from

(05:09):
directing films to cross the border into Canada to join
the British Army in July of nineteen eighteen, shipped over
to England in December of that same year. He had
arrived too late to participate in combat. However, he served
in various capacities, eventually achieving the rank of Major Major.
Taylor returned to the United States in nineteen nineteen and
resumed his film directing career. He met and directed stars

(05:32):
that had risen in his absence, such as Mary Pickford,
Wallace Reid, and the infamous Wallace Barry, a man known
for his alcoholism and spousal abuse. William also mentored a
young starlet by the name of Mary Miles Minter and
directed a couple of big movies, including Anne of the
green Gables, which starred Mentor and Huckleberry Finn. However, just

(05:56):
as William's appearance on stage had betrayed him to his father.
His appearance motion pictures did the same for the wife
and daughter he had left behind. In nineteen twenty one,
his estranged wife found her missing husband on a movie
theater screen, and she contacted him. She had already legally
divorced him as an abandoned wife. The marriage to Ethel

(06:16):
was truly over, but she and William reconciled to the
point where a relationship with his daughter could resume. William
visited the two every once in a while from then on.
During that period, he was engaged to an actress named
Neva Gerber, but that proposed marriage would never occur. At
approximately seven thirty a m. On Thursday, February second, nineteen

(06:37):
twenty two, William Desmond Taylor's personal valet Henry Peebe, walked
into the bedroom of his employer's bungalow and found William
lying on the floor facing upward. At first, Peev thought
Taylor had fainted, but upon trying to awaken the man,
he realized that Taylor was dead. Finding no blood on
the floor or any signs of traumas to the body,

(06:58):
Pheeb assumed that Taylor had died in his room of
natural causes. The police were notified well after Peeb's discovery,
and upon their arrival at the Alvarado Court apartments, they
found Taylor's duplex infested with studio executives and one actress,
Mabel Norman, who was searching the premises for documents or photographs.

(07:19):
Some of those documents were in the process of being
burned in the fireplace. Many of these papers were suspected
to be love letters to Taylor written by Mabel Norman.
But investigators would start processing the scene and when they
inspected William Desmond Taylor's body, upon turning it over, they
found a gunshot wound high on the man's back, the

(07:40):
bullet lodged between his shoulder blade and the base of
his neck. Of course, Peb's accidental death theory went up
like the burning documents in the fireplace, and the mystery
of who had shot William was now the focus of
a police investigation. The crime scene had been compromised long

(08:09):
before the police were called, so detectives had a much
more difficult job ahead of them. Searching the body further,
they found that his money and jewelry had not been taken.
Robbery was clearly not the motive. After sifting through the
witnesses found on Taylor's premises, it was discovered that Miss
Mabel Norman had likely been the last one to see William.

(08:29):
She claimed that she had stopped by for a visit
the previous evening and that she had been there no
more than an hour before. She and William bit each
other good night, and Norman left in her car sometime
before eight pm. This story was corroborated with Miss norman chauffeur.
Neighbors who heard the shot told police that it occurred
at eight pm. Silent film star Douglas MacLean lived across

(08:52):
the street from Taylor. His wife, Faith MacLean, stated that
she had heard what she thought was a car backfire
and looked across at the tailor the residence when she
saw a figure wearing a long coat walk through the
front door. Faith could not determine whether it was a
man or a woman, as the coat caller was turned
up and a cap kept the hair and face concealed.

(09:13):
Hidden within the pages of a book, detectives located a
love letter addressed to Taylor, written by Mary Miles Minter. She,
along with Mabel Norman, were placed on the suspect list.
The discoverer of the victim, the valet, Henry Peavey, was
an obvious suspect, and another employee of Taylor's, a personal
secretary slash butler, Edward F. Sands, were both added to

(09:36):
that list as well. William Desmond Taylor's body was dressed
in his British Army uniform and entombed in a mausoleum
located on the grounds of the famous Hollywood Forever Cemetery
in California. The plaque is embossed with his birth name,
William C. Dean Tanner. The mystery was further convoluted by
the publicized sensationalism over the case, focusing primary on Henry Peevy.

(10:02):
It's alleged that sensationalist newspapers, some owned by Hearst Publications,
pounced on the idea that the man was certainly guilty,
being that he was a black man. In fact, it
said that reporters from the Los Angeles Examiner went as
far as offering pev one thousand dollars if he would
come down to the offices of the newspaper and give

(10:22):
them his story. Allegedly, the reporters kept Henry Peeve in
a locked room for twelve hours, with the hopes that
the man would break down and confess to the murder.
The craziness doesn't end there After the twelve hours of captivity,
the unscrupulous reporters released Peev from the room and drove
him to Hollywood Forever. Once there, it said that a

(10:43):
man came out of the darkness wearing a sort of
ghostly white costume, claiming to be the spirit of William
Desmond Taylor. This ridiculous ruse failed, of course, with PV
maintaining that he was innocent and he was falling for
none of it. The pseudo detective squad released Peace, who
never saw the promised one thousand dollars. Later, Thomas Lee Woolwins,

(11:05):
the District Attorney for the County of Los Angeles, learned
of the treatment of Henry Peeve by the Los Angeles
Examiner reporters and released a statement which condemned their actions.
Even though the captivation and treatment of Peev violated the
law and his human rights, no further action was taken
against them, at least nothing that was disclosed publicly. Mabel

(11:27):
Norman was thoroughly investigated, which brought to light the fact
that she was a heavy user of cocaine. It's theorized
that William Desmond Taylor took a deep interest in getting
the actress off of the drug, even going so far
as to report her cocaine dealers to the police. The
dealers certainly would not have appreciated that, so is it
possible that Taylor was executed by drug dealers. The method

(11:49):
of the murder fits with that theory, as it was
carried out with a quick and close shot to the back,
followed by a fast departure of the shooter. But could
it have been the controversial actress herself that pulled the trigger?
She insisted that the letters everyone seemed so interested in
were not love letters at all. Was she just covering
up information about her addiction that was going to be exposed.

(12:12):
The murder of William Desmond Taylor also struck at a
time when Hollywood was under a national microscope over the
death of Virginia Repay, an actress that had died four
days after attending a party with the then famous Fatty Arbuckle.
Mabel Norman was also somewhat involved in this scandal due
to her being friends and a co star of Fatty Arbuckles.

(12:32):
The press circulated stories that Arbuckle and Rapae had been
drinking alcohol at a party and saying that he had
sexually assaulted and tortured Rapay. However, if any of this
is true is highly questionable. While the first two criminal
trials ended and hung juris, Arbuckle was acquitted. After the third,
there was simply no convincing evidence to support that Virginia

(12:55):
Rapae had been brutally attacked. But of course these claims
were there for all to read a bat in the newspapers,
and with the country suffering under the constraints of prohibition,
those news clippings that mentioned Arbuckle and alcohol in the
same sentence effectively demonized the man ending his career. Mabel Norman,
his close friend, was too famous and separated from the

(13:16):
scandal just enough that her career could withstand both arbuckle
scandal and Desmond Taylor's murder. In the years following, it
became clear that Norman did not have an affair with Taylor.
She was romantically involved with the director and producer by
the name of Max Sennett. As for Mary Miles Mentor,
the writer of the Confirmed Love letter to William Desmond Taylor.

(13:38):
She was investigated by police and scrutinized by the newspapers.
The papers told of a torrid love affair between a
man thirty years older than Mintor, and it was speculated
that the affair had begun when Minter was only seventeen.
It's further theorized that Minter's mother, Charlotte Shelby, shot Taylor
that night after confronting the much older man about the affair.

(14:00):
Charlotte had an alibi for the crime, but even Mary
Mentor and Charlotte's other daughter, actress Margaret Shelby, stated that
their mother had been the shooter. Were they telling the truth?
Was Charlotte capable of such a crime. Despite a grand
jury inquiry into Charlotte Shelby, no evidence was found. Some
theorized that Mary and Margaret made be accusations out of

(14:23):
anger towards their mother. Mary Myles Mentor would drop out
of the Hollywood scene after Taylor's murder. Heart Broken after
her Mentor's death and startled by the coverage in the press,
she never made another film. Taylor's former butler, Edward Sands,
was considered a suspect by police as they discovered that
Taylor had either fired Sands or the man had abandoned

(14:45):
his job and left the area. Detectives found that Edward
had forged more than five thousand dollars worth of checks
and had stolen some other items, including jewelry. Sands was
wanted for these crimes, and despite a long multi state
hunt for the man, he had slipped away successfully. Though
the man was never found, some sources say that a

(15:06):
package was sent to Taylor which contained a piece of
his stolen jewelry along with a pawnshop's claim ticket for
another item. The center of the package signed with an alias.
Did this cause Sands to circle back to tie up
some loose ends. The murder of one of Hollywood's earliest
and more successful directors was truly integral and even inspirational

(15:27):
to the movie industry, so much so that in nineteen fifty,
Paramount Pictures, which had evolved directly from famous players, Laski
made the picture Sunset Boulevard, starring William Holden and giving
the silent film legend Glorias Swanson a return to the
big screen, this time in a talking role. Her character's
name Norma Desmond, a combination of the names Mabel Norman

(15:53):
and William Desmond Taylor. The film was created as a
tribute to those stars of the early days, those that
started at all for the flourishing industry and had perhaps
been all but forgotten as their soundless format became obsolete
and their stars faded out of the public eye. On
February twenty fourth, nineteen thirty, Mabel Norman passed away in

(16:14):
Pottinger Sanatorium in Monrovia, California, after a long battle with tuberculosis.
Many people, some newspaper columnists, still held on to the
belief that Normand had been Taylor's murderer. The investigation could
never reveal the true culprit, however. In October of nineteen
sixty four, former silent film star Margaret Gibson suffered a

(16:36):
heart attack in her home. She was seventy years old
at the time and had attracted the attention of neighbors
who had called for an ambulance. Gibson felt like she
had little time left, and she went on to say
that she was the person who had shot and killed
William Desmond Taylor. Was she telling the truth or was
Gibson trying in her final breaths to again reach some

(16:57):
level of attention by spinning a story that the newspapers could
not pass up. It's highly unlikely that the truth behind
the demise of William Desmond Taylor will ever be known.
The studios of famous players Laski, some nine acres that
were once stretched along Sunset Boulevard were leveled long before
many of us were even born. On the very spot

(17:19):
where the offices of men like Cecil b. De Mille
and William Desmond Taylor once stood are now the corner
of Sunset Boulevard and Vine Street. Over the years, numerous
entertainment companies have created and leveled the spaces over and
over again. On the corner now stands a bank with
an intriguing facade designed by Millard Sheets. You'll find a

(17:40):
wall listing the names of silent film stars and intricate
mosaic depictions of the elite actors of the time. It's
a standing tribute to the silent film industry and acknowledgment
of American contribution to the art form and part of
this nation's culture. The silent movie may be long gone,
but the trends of those early days continues. Hollywood is

(18:02):
a land of stars that are always rising, sometimes reaching
meteoric heights or falling to horrific scandalous lows. A seriously
mysterious mix of creativity, greed, power, and jealousy that will
always push people to become the best and worst of
what anyone can become. Do you have any comments or

(18:24):
a case you'd like to suggest? You'll find a comment
form and case submission link at lordenarts dot com. Thank You,
The La Times, the San Francisco Bulletin, Patch dot com,
All That's interesting, find a grave, IMDb, before the one
oh one dot com, Eyes of a Generation dot com,
the biographics, justin Root, the Take, and BuzzFeed YouTube channels,

(18:45):
as well as Wikipedia for information contributing to today's story.
This episode was written by Frederick Crook, edited by John Lordon,
and produced by lord Narts. If you appreciated today's episode,
please check out the novel Wraithworks, another collaboration between FREDS.
Crook and myself. It's available in hard copy or audiobook format.
You can find more information about Raithworks at Lordenarts dot

(19:07):
com or by searching for it on Amazon. Thank you
to our audience here for the live recording session hosted
on the YouTube channel Lord and Art's Studio Too Special
thanks to seriously mysterious financial supporters Susie B. Jones and
Robert Martin. Most of all, thank you for listening. I'm
John Lord. Please join me again next week for another

(19:28):
story I know you'll find seriously mysterious