This is where 49-year old Taylor lived at the time of his murder in 1922.
Taylor's butler Henry Peavy found the director dead on the floor of his Alvarado Street bungalow upon arriving for work at 7:30am the morning of February 2.
Comedy actress Mabel Normand was the last person known to have seen Taylor alive. An alcholic, cocaine addict and close friend of comedians Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle, Mabel became a prime suspect ... and saw her film career ruined as a result.
Police also suspected 21-year old actress Mary Miles Minter.
Because of her obsessive fear that Mary had become romantically involved with Taylor, her mother Charlotte Shelby was also considered a prime suspect.
Officially the murder remains unsolved, but in 1964 actress Patricia Palmer (a recent convert to Catholicism) purportedly made a deathbed confession admitting she'd fired the shot that killed Taylor. No possible motive was ever mentioned.
Several modern-day authors have re-investigated Taylor's murder:
William Desmond Taylor : A Dossier - Bruce Long
Dishing Hollywood: The Real Scoop on Tinsel Town's Most Notorious Scandals - Laurie Jacobs
Murder in Hollywood: Solving A Silent Screen Mystery - Charles Higham
images scanned from
A Cast of Killers - Sidney D. Kirkpatrick 1986
Saturday's "Play One for Mary" playlist:
The Wind Cries Mary - Jimi Hendrix (Monterey Pops live version, if you can find it)
Along Comes Mary - The Association
Mary - Blackbone
Mary - Take 6 (live)
Links & Resources for Taylorologists:
www.literateweb.com/taylor/index.htm
www.angelfire.com/az/Taylorology/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Desmond_Taylor
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