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Happy 149th Birthday William Desmond Taylor
A thread
http://waldina.com/2021/04/26/happy-149th-birthday-william-desmond-taylor/
A thread
http://waldina.com/2021/04/26/happy-149th-birthday-william-desmond-taylor/
Today is the 149th birthday of the film director and unsolved murder victim William Desmond Taylor. He is one of the most famous classic Hollywood unsolved mysteries and the true crime junkie in me is fascinated with the story.
Just the fact that it happened 99 years ago and there are seven possible murderers and it never got solved is enough to be the subject of numerous documentaries and podcasts.
NAME: William Desmond Taylor
AKA: William Cunnigham Deane-Tanner
DATE OF BIRTH: 26-Apr-1872
PLACE OF BIRTH: Carlow, Ireland
DATE OF DEATH: 1-Feb-1922
PLACE OF DEATH: Los Angeles, CA
CAUSE OF DEATH: Murder
REMAINS: Buried, Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, CA
AKA: William Cunnigham Deane-Tanner
DATE OF BIRTH: 26-Apr-1872
PLACE OF BIRTH: Carlow, Ireland
DATE OF DEATH: 1-Feb-1922
PLACE OF DEATH: Los Angeles, CA
CAUSE OF DEATH: Murder
REMAINS: Buried, Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, CA
FATHER: Major Deane-Tanner (British Army)
WIFE: Ethel May Harrison (daughter of a wealthy stockbroker, m. 15-Nov-1902, div. 1912)
DAUGHTER: Ethel Daisy (b. 1903, Abandoned along with his wife in 1908)
SLEPT WITH: Mary Miles Minter
WIFE: Ethel May Harrison (daughter of a wealthy stockbroker, m. 15-Nov-1902, div. 1912)
DAUGHTER: Ethel Daisy (b. 1903, Abandoned along with his wife in 1908)
SLEPT WITH: Mary Miles Minter
SLEPT WITH: Mabel Normand (actress, b. 1892, d. 1930)
SLEPT WITH: Edward F. Sands (Taylor's chef, valet and chauffeur)
SLEPT WITH: Edward F. Sands (Taylor's chef, valet and chauffeur)
William Cunningham Deane-Tanner was born into the Anglo-Irish gentry on 26 April 1872, at Evington House, Carlow, County Carlow, Ireland, one of five children of a retired British Army officer, Major Kearns Deane-Tanner of the Carlow Rifles, 8th Battalion, King's Royal Rifle…
…Corps, and his wife, Jane O'Brien. Taylor's siblings were Denis Gage Deane-Tanner, Ellen "Nell" Deane-Tanner Faudel-Phillips, Lizzie "Daisy" Deane-Tanner, and Oswald Kearns Deane-Tanner.
One of his uncles was Charles Kearns Deane Tanner, the Irish Parliamentary Party Member of Parliament for Mid Cork.
From 1885 to 1887, Taylor attended Marlborough College in England. In 1891, he left Ireland for a dude ranch in Kansas. There, Taylor became reacquainted with acting (his first experiences being at school) and eventually moved to New York City.
While in New York, Taylor courted Ethel May Hamilton, an actress who had appeared in the stage musical Florodora under the name Ethel May Harrison.
Hamilton's father was a broker and an investor in the English antiques store on Fifth Avenue, the Antique Shoppe, which eventually employed Taylor.
The couple married in an Episcopal ceremony on 7 December 1901 at the Little Church Around the Corner, and had a daughter, Ethel Daisy, in 1902 or 1903.
Taylor and his family were well known in New York society and were members of several clubs. He was also a heavy drinker, possibly suffered from depression, and was known to carry on affairs with women.
Taylor suddenly disappeared on 23 October 1908, deserting his wife and daughter. After his disappearance, friends said he had previously suffered "mental lapses", and his family thought initially he had wandered off during an episode of amnesia.
Taylor's wife obtained a state decree of divorce in 1912.
Little is known of the years immediately following Taylor's disappearance. He traveled through Canada, Alaska and the northwestern U.S., mining gold and working with various acting troupes. Eventually, he switched from acting to producing.
By the time he arrived in San Francisco, California around 1912, he had changed his name to William Desmond Taylor; in San Francisco, some New York acquaintances met him, and provided him with some money to re-establish himself in Los Angeles.
Taylor's initial film acting was in 1913 for the New York Motion Picture Company, releasing under the brands of Bronco and Kay-Bee. His earliest known screen appearance was in The Counterfeiter.
He then acted for Vitagraph Studios, including four appearances opposite Margaret "Gibby" Gibson, and Balboa Amusement Producing Company. At Balboa, Taylor met actress Neva Gerber with whom he became engaged until 1919.
Gerber later recalled, "He was the soul of honour, a man of personal culture, education, and refinement. I have never known a finer or better man."
Taylor began directing films in 1914, beginning with The Judge's Wife for Balboa. After leaving Balboa he directed two films at Favorite Players Film Co. and then American Film Manufacturing Company, where he directed most of the 30-episode serial The Diamond from the Sky.
In October 1915 he joined Pallas Pictures. A year later Pallas became a subsidiary of Famous Players-Lasky. Except for a month working at Fox Film Corporation in 1917, all of Taylor's subsequent films were directed for Famous Players-Lasky or its subsidiary companies.
Around 1915, Taylor made contact with a sister-in-law, Ada Brennan Deane-Tanner, wife of Taylor's younger brother Denis.
A former British Army lieutenant and manager of a New York antiques business (separate from Hamilton's), Denis had also abandoned his wife and children, disappearing in 1912.
Ada and her daughters moved to Monrovia, California, where Ada could be treated at the Pottinger Sanitorium for tuberculosis. Ada's sister, Lillian Pomeroy, was married to the sanitorium's physician in charge, Dr. John L. Pomeroy.
This would become public after Taylor's murder, and the press descended upon the little town of Monrovia.
Towards the end of World War I, in July 1918, Taylor enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force as a private. After training for four and a half months at Fort Edward, Nova Scotia, Taylor sailed from Halifax on a troop transport carrying 500 Canadian soldiers.
They arrived at Hounslow Barracks, London on 2 December 1918.
Taylor was ultimately assigned to the Royal Army Service Corps of the Expeditionary Forces Canteen Service, stationed at Dunkirk, and promoted to the temporary grade of lieutenant on 15 January 1919.
At the end of April 1919, Taylor reached his final billet at Bergues, France, as Major Taylor, Company D, Royal Fusiliers.[18] Upon returning to Los Angeles on 14 May 1919, Taylor was honoured by the Motion Picture Directors Association with a formal banquet at the Los Angeles…
…Athletic Club.
After returning from military service, Taylor went on to direct some of the most popular stars of the era, including Mary Pickford, Wallace Reid, Dustin Farnum and his protégée, Mary Miles Minter, who starred in the 1919 version of Anne of Green Gables.
By this time, Taylor's ex-wife and daughter were aware that he was working in Hollywood. In 1918, while watching the film Captain Alvarez, they saw Taylor appear on the screen. Ethel responded, "That's your father!" In response, Ethel Daisy wrote Taylor in care of the studio.
In 1921, Taylor visited his ex-wife and daughter in New York City and made Ethel Daisy his legal heir.
At 7:30 am on the morning of Thursday, 2 February 1922, Taylor's body was found inside his bungalow at the Alvarado Court Apartments, 404-B South Alvarado Street, in Westlake, Los Angeles, a trendy and affluent neighborhood.
A crowd gathered inside, and someone identifying himself as a doctor stepped forward, made a cursory examination of the body, and declared Taylor had died of a stomach hemorrhage.
The doctor was never seen again; when doubts later arose, the body was rolled over by forensic investigators revealing that the 49-year-old film director had been shot at least once in the back with what appeared to have been a small-caliber pistol, which was not found at the…
…scene.
In Taylor's pockets, investigators found a wallet holding US$78 in cash (adjusted for inflation in 2020 would be approx. $1,190), a silver cigarette case, a Waltham pocket watch, a pen knife, and a locket bearing a photograph of actress Mabel Normand.
A two-carat diamond ring was on his finger.
With the evidence of the money and valuables on Taylor's body, robbery seemingly was not the motive for the killing; however, a large but undetermined sum of cash that Taylor had shown to his accountant the day before was missing and apparently never accounted for.
After some investigation, the time of Taylor's death was set at 7:50 pm on the evening of 1 February 1922.
While being interviewed by the police five days after the director's body was found, Minter said that following the murder, her friend, director and actor Marshall Neilan, had told her that Taylor had made several highly "delusional" statements about some of his social…
…acquaintances (including her) during the weeks before his death. She also said that Neilan thought Taylor had recently become "insane".
In the midst of a media circus caused by the case, Los Angeles Undersheriff Eugene Biscailuz warned Chicago Tribune reporter Eddie Doherty, "The industry has been hurt. Stars have been ruined. Stockholders have lost millions of dollars.
A lot of people are out of jobs and incensed enough to take a shot at you." According to Robert Giroux, "The studios seemed to be fearful that if certain aspects of the case were exposed, it would exacerbate their problems."
King Vidor said of the case in 1968: "Last year I interviewed a Los Angeles police detective, William Michael Cahill, Sr., now retired, who had been assigned to the case immediately after the murder.
He told me, 'We were doing all right and then, before a week was out, we got the word to lay off.'"
Suspects and witnesses
Suspects and witnesses
Through a combination of poor crime scene management and apparent corruption, much physical evidence was immediately lost and the rest vanished over the years, although copies of a few documents from the police files were made public in 2007.
Various theories were put forward after the murder and in the years since, and many books were published, claiming to have identified the murderer, but no conclusive evidence has ever been uncovered in linking the crime to any particular individual.
FILMOGRAPHY AS DIRECTOR
Nurse Marjorie (4-Apr-1920)
Huckleberry Finn (22-Feb-1920)
Anne of Green Gables (23-Nov-1919)
Appears in articles:
I Know Who Killed Desmond Taylor, 1997, DETAILS: Ed King
Nurse Marjorie (4-Apr-1920)
Huckleberry Finn (22-Feb-1920)
Anne of Green Gables (23-Nov-1919)
Appears in articles:
I Know Who Killed Desmond Taylor, 1997, DETAILS: Ed King
Is the subject of books:
William Desmond Taylor: A Dossier, 1991, BY: Bruce Long
Murder In Hollywood: Solving A Silent Screen Mystery, 2004, BY: Charles Higham
William Desmond Taylor: A Dossier, 1991, BY: Bruce Long
Murder In Hollywood: Solving A Silent Screen Mystery, 2004, BY: Charles Higham
This thread can be read here: http://waldina.com/2021/04/26/happy-149th-birthday-william-desmond-taylor/
