The murder site today. Photo: M. Imlay.
Today it’s a Ross parking lot, but on the evening of Feb. 1, 1922, the tract at 404. S. Alvarado was a Mediterranean bungalow court — and the setting for Movieland’s first real-life murder mystery.
Taylor, LAPL Digital Archives
Sometime before midnight, two shots rang out, killing famed actor-turned-Paramount-director William Desmond Taylor from behind. Neighbors shrugged off the noise as a car backfiring. The next morning, however, Taylor’s personal valet Henry Peavey arrived to find his boss stiff, wide-eyed and staring at the living-room ceiling.
Peavy’s frantic screams soon had everyone in the bungalow court and beyond on tenterhooks: “Who killed William Desmond Taylor?”
The Lineup
As in every good Hollywood whodunit there was an enticing cast of suspects with deep, closely held secrets:
- Mabel Normand: The last to see Taylor the evening of his death, Keystone’s cocaine-addicted Queen of Comedy was having zany adventures between the sheets with the director, who was in the meantime trying to help her kick her not-so-funny drug habit.
- Edward Sands: Taylor’s valet before Peavy, Sands had recently helped himself to the director’s car, jewelry and checkbook before disappearing forever.
- Mary Miles Minter: A 19-year-old “virginal” starlet with a psychotic crush on Taylor, 30 years her senior.
- Charlotte Shelby: Minter’s overbearing stage mother, rumored to have a competitive lust for Taylor — or at least a killer hatred of her daughter’s delusions of marriage to the man.
- Henry Peavy: Although not a golfer, Peavy reportedly loved the togs — not to mention crocheting doilies. Never a serious suspect, the fact he was black, gay, flamboyant and facing morals charges set tongues wagging anyway.
- An Unknown Drug Thug: Some theorized a shady underworld hit man shot Taylor to end his tattling to authorities about Normand’s suppliers.
The Bungalow Back Then
Investigators at Taylor's home. LAPL Digital Archives.
Unfortunately, the killer was never revealed because the first calls reporting the crime went not to the police, but to Charles Eyton, general manager of Paramount Pictures.
By the time L.A.’s men in blue arrived, the scene resembled something out of the Keystone Cops, with neighbors traipsing about, contaminating the scene, and Paramount bigwigs ransacking and sanitizing it of incriminating evidence. Accounts differ as to who was actually involved in the madcap chaos, but suffice it to say Normand, Eyton, and a studio “cleaning crew” contrived to nab Taylor’s bootleg liquor, numerous love letters from Normand, Minter and others, and correspondence from Taylor’s daughter betraying the “bachelor” director’s hidden past, abandoned wife and all. Eventually Adolph Zukor himself reportedly joined in hampering detectives.
Still, despite their best efforts, Hollywood’s vultures missed some juicy morsels. Homicide investigators uncovered an assortment of ladies’ undergarments, including a pink lingerie item apparently belonging to Minter, along with some titillating letters and papers Taylor had tucked away. Predictably, the press swarmed in and joined the feeding frenzy.
The Scandalous Legacy
The disgraced Normand. Wikimedia Image.
The fallout from Taylor’s death rocked young Hollywood to its core, essentially killing both Normand’s and Minter’s careers. His secret exposed to the world, Peavy succumbed to syphilitic dementia years later in a Bay Area asylum. Sands’ lifeless body eventually turned up in the Sacramento River in the early 1930s.
In an odd footnote, former silent actress Margaret Gibson — who’d never featured in any of the investigations — allegedly copped a deathbed confession to the shooting in 1964. Although she had some connection with Taylor in the early 1900s, many murder-mystery fans still find her storyline less than compelling.
Coming on the heals of the Fatty Arbuckle incident and several silent-star drug scandals, the Taylor murder helped force fledgling Hollywood to “clean up its act” for a horrified public. Studios added morals clauses to contracts and enacted self-imposed industry censorship standards — along with stepped up charm offensives through their publicity mills.
Of course, Tinseltown went on to see a cattle call of enigmatic killings over the decades. But William Desmond Taylor was the first and most sensational — a dubious distinction that ensured his Hollywood immortality more than any of his films.
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