It's everyone's favourite murder mystery programme; and this time, when season four returns to screens on August 27th, the star-studded series will turn its magnifying glass on murder from the streets of New York to the glamour of Hollywood. In this feature, first published in 2015, David Jenkins questioned if peace had finally come to Jamie Blandford..
.and what sort of man he is ‘The place is unreal,’ Ethel Barrymore once said of the City of Stars. ‘The people are unreal.
The flowers are unreal – they don’t smell. The fruit is unreal. Even the streets and buildings are unreal.
I always expected to hear a carpenter shout “strike!” and the whole place come down like a stage set. That’s what Hollywood is – a glaring, gaudy, nightmarish set erected in the desert.’ It’s a sentiment that rings true to this day: at the heart of the world’s film industry often feels like a movie itself.
From superstars strutting down sidewalks to up-and-comers backstabbing their way to a big break, from plastic faces to porcelain smiles, Hollywood glamour hides an un-reality hollower than the cheeks of a starlet after buccal fat reduction. There’s a reason they call it Tinseltown. Perhaps this film set facade explains our grim fascination with the moments real-life murder comes to the .
Whether its spider web conspiracies or brutal acts of sudden violence, a murder in Hollywood is simultaneously a visceral reminder of the all-too-human nature of even our greatest stars, and an uncanny bleeding through of B-movie film plots into real life. Television, film, podcasts and documentaries: the has long cannibalised its true crime stories for high stakes dramas, from to . On the eve of the US presidential election back in 2020, friends, DC insiders and Melania herself told Ben Judah how a small-time Slovenian fashion model rose to wear the mantle of First Lady With the release of season four, it seems we’ll get a more meta take on the Based On True Events industry.
As Steve Martin, Martin Short, Selena Gomez’s characters take their sleuthing podcast to La-La Land, looks back on some of the most enduring murders to have taken place in Tinseltown – crimes that lurk not only in the American mythology, but the psyche of a world raised on blockbusters. We start with the end of an era. When one of Hollywood’s most promising young stars was found murdered by the Manson family in her Los Angeles home, it was heralded as the spiritual end of the swinging sixties.
By 1969, Tate had it all: recently pregnant with her husband, the director Roman Polanski, she was enjoying the fruits of her big break in . Renowned for her ‘faultless face’, press were already dubbing Tate ‘one of the most smashing young things to hit Hollywood in a long time.’ Alongside Polanski, she was at the centre of the City of Angels’ most illustrious social networks, often hosting parties at 10050 Cielo Drive with the likes of Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen, Joan Collins and Mia Farrow.
So when Tate, her unborn child, was found hanged in her home alongside Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski and Steven Parent, body covered in stab wounds and the word ‘pig’ drawn on the wall in her blood, the country was shaken to its core. Journalist Dominick Dunne wrote of the impact that Tate’s murder had on the Hollywood elite: ‘The shock waves that went through the town were beyond anything I had ever seen before. People were convinced that the rich and famous of the community were in peril.
Children were sent out of town. Guards were hired.’ Steve McQueen, it is said, packed a gun when we attended Sebring’s funeral.
The cult members responsible for the crime, including Charles Manson himself, were spared the death penalty, but Tate’s mother Doris dedicated her life to ensuring they were denied parole. The events in the run up to Sharon’s murder inspired Quentin Tarantino’s , but the impacts of that day were perhaps best summarised by Joan Didion: ‘Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive travelled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day.
The paranoia was fulfilled.’ Another actress murdered after finally achieving their big break, Rebecca Schaeffer was just 21 when was killed by her stalker. She had made her name in the 80s sitcom , and gone on to star in films like and .
In the latter, one scene showed her in bed with another actor – to the misogynistic outrage of 19-year-old Robert John Bardo, an obsessive fan who had been stalking Schaeffer for three years. Bardo paid a private detective agency $250 to discover the actress’ address in West Hollywood, then rang her doorbell one day in 1989. Schaeffer, who had been preparing for a audition at the time, answered.
She was shot, point blank, in the chest. In the wake of her death, prosecutor Marcia Clarke ensured Bardo was sentenced to life without parole. In 1990, America passed its first-ever anti-stalking laws.
Marcia Clarke was less successful in her attempt to prosecute O.J Simpson for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson in 1994. The case, dubbed ‘The Trial of the Century’ centred around the question of who killed Nicole and her husband Ronald Goldman.
The couple were found with their throats slashed outside Nicole’s LA condo. The prime suspect was O.J Simpson, considered one of the greatest American Football players of all time.
What followed was stranger than fiction: televised car chases, a murder trial that made headlines more for Marcia Clarke’s perms than her prosecution, and a not-guilty verdict than turned on one singular glove. Robert Kardashian defended O.J Simpson, and Kris Jenner considered Nicole one of her best friends.
The proceedings were televised, and with an audience of 100 million people became ‘the most highly publicised Hollywood murder case of all time’. Ryan Murphy would go on to dramatise the events in Nicole's sister, Tanya Brown, paid tribute to Nicole's loving spirit: ‘Nicole was a mom: she put her kids first, she put everybody else first. My sister had the ability to live life, live it bright, live it large.
’ Sal Mineo shot to fame after winning an Academy Award nomination for his role in in 1955 aged just 17. Starring alongside James Dean, Mineo played Plato Crawford in the iconic Hollywood blockbuster, and would go on to win acclaim for breaking out of lovesick type casting in films like and . Openly bisexual, it was said that Mineo ‘dated the most beautiful women in Hollywood and New York City’ – he dated both Jill Haworth and Courtney Burr III.
His life was cut tragically short in 1976, when he was stabbed in the street walking home from rehearsals for the play . Aged just 37, his murderer’s identity remained a mystery for three years until Lionel Ray Williams, a pizzman, confessed to the stabbing. Williams described the events as a random mugging, claiming he had no idea who Mineo was, or the stardom of the man he had just killed.
Mineo is buried at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in New York. 22-year-old Elizabeth Short never made it as an actress, but she moved to Hollywood with dreams of stardom in 1946, following the father she had presumed to be dead her entire childhood. The following year, her body would be found, severed in half with a bloodless wound, in an abandoned Los Angeles lot.
The violent nature of the murder – Short’s face was slashed in a Glasgow Smile and portions of her flesh had been sliced away – and the mysteriously pristine crime scene garnered the attention, and the horror, of the nation. Dubbed the Black Dahlia by the press after Raymond Chandler’s film noir , Short was a cipher in the American imagination. Her killer was never discovered.
A letter, cleaned from fingerprints with gasoline, was sent to police once her body had been discovered. Claiming to be written in the killer’s hand, it contained her birth certificate and business cards, alongside photographs and an address book. A suicide letter from another supposed suspect was also discovered in the following months.
The precise handling of Short’s wounds lead inspectors to believe her murderer must be some sort of medical professional. These and countless other leads (including many fake confessions) have led to numerous suspects named in the case, from mobster Bugsy Siegel to Hollywood legend Orson Welles. The story of Elizabeth Short has inspired countless media adaptations, most notably James Ellroy's 1987 novel, To this day, however, the case remains one of history’s most notorious unsolved murders.
We may never know whether Natalie Wood was murdered. After starring in blockbusters like , (alongside Sal Mineo), , and the screen legend was filming her would-be comeback film in 1981 when she drowned during a weekend on her husband Robert Wagner’s yacht, . The cause of her death was never fully explained, and the events off of Santa Catalina Island remain shrouded in mystery.
Her body was found, bruised in her nightgown, one mile away from Wagner’s boat, which had been playing host to Wood, Wagner, the captain Dennis Davern, and Wood’s co-star, Christopher Walken. Witnesses say they heard a woman screaming for help the night Natalie died, and her sister would go on to refute a coroner’s claim that the actress had been drinking, claiming Wood could not swim and had spent her life deathly afraid of the water. Her funeral was attended by the great and the gilded of Hollywood history, with Frank Sinatra, Elia Kazan, Elizabeth Taylor, Fred Astaire, and Rock Hudson all gathering in Los Angeles’ Westwood Village Memorial Park to pay tribute to the already legendary actress – one of the few screen icons to successfully transition from childhood stardom to adult acclaim.
Decades later, Davern would claim that he had witnessed a fight between Wagner and Wood aboard on the night that she died, confessing that he had previously lied to police about the way events unfolded. Wagner corroborated the story in his memoir , but the authorities have confirmed that he is not a suspect in the cold case. Wood’s death certificate lists her cause of death as ‘drowning and other undetermined factors’.
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