The Murder of William Desmond Taylor

The case

William Desmond Taylor was not who Hollywood thought he was. The cultivated, soft-spoken director, a leading figure in the Motion Picture Directors Association and one of the most respected men at Famous Players-Lasky, had been born William Cunningham Deane-Tanner in Carlow, Ireland, in 1872. In 1908 he had walked out of his life as a New York antiques dealer, leaving a wife and young daughter, and resurfaced years later on the West Coast under a new name. He was 49 when he was shot in his own home.

Taylor lived in a bungalow at Alvarado Court, a fashionable cluster of apartments on South Alvarado Street near Westlake Park. On the evening of February 1, 1922, the comedian Mabel Normand, a close friend, called to collect a book. Taylor walked her to her car at about a quarter to eight and went back inside. Neighbors later said they heard a noise like a car backfiring, and one woman described seeing a man, or perhaps a woman dressed as a man, leaving the courtyard. Nobody raised an alarm.

Taylor's valet, Henry Peavey, found him lying on the floor the next morning. Before the police took control, studio officials, neighbors and onlookers moved through the bungalow, and some of Taylor's papers and letters reportedly disappeared. A man who said he was a doctor examined the body, declared a stomach hemorrhage and was never identified. Only when the body was turned over was it clear that Taylor had been shot in the back with a small-caliber pistol. He still had money, a watch and a diamond ring on him, so robbery seemed unlikely.

The investigation quickly collided with the movie business. In the months after the Roscoe Arbuckle scandal, the studios were desperate to protect their stars, and the newspapers were eager to expose them. Mabel Normand was questioned at length and cleared, but the revelation of her cocaine addiction damaged her career. Love letters from Mary Miles Minter, a 19-year-old star whom Taylor had directed, were found and published, ending her image as a wholesome ingenue. Her mother, Charlotte Shelby, a formidable stage mother, was rumored to have owned a pistol of the same unusual caliber and was the suspect many later writers favored.

Other suspects came from Taylor's household. His former valet, Edward Sands, had forged checks in Taylor's name and burgled the bungalow the year before; he vanished and was never found. Peavey, the valet who found the body, was questioned and released. Later theories have pointed to drug dealers whom Taylor was said to have reported to federal authorities in an effort to protect Normand, and to a hired killer.

No one was ever charged. Successive Los Angeles district attorneys declined to prosecute Shelby, and around 1940 District Attorney Buron Fitts concluded there was not enough evidence to indict her. Much of the physical evidence and many of the files later disappeared. The case remains open.