Irish-born William Desmond Taylor directed and/or starred in seventy-nine movies from 1913-22. The silent film star would likely have had many more credits had he not been silenced forever at the hand of another.

At 7:30 a.m. on February 2, 1922, the forty-nine-year-old Taylor was found lifeless in the bungalow of his estate in the affluent Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles. A man purporting to be a doctor initially declared he had died of a stomach hemorrhage, but a forensic scientist found he had been shot at least once in the back, most likely with a small-caliber pistol. The murder weapon was never found and the supposed doctor was never identified.

The items found in Taylor’s pockets seemed to rule out robbery as a motive: $78 in cash, equivalent to a little over $1,500 today, along with a silver cigarette case, a Waltham pocket watch, a pen knife, and a locket. In addition, a two-carat diamond ring was on his finger. An unspecified large sum of cash Taylor had shown to his accountant the day before, however, was missing.

Taylor’s time of death was determined to be approximately 7:50 a.m. the previous evening. Roughly ten minutes later, someone leaving the bungalow had smiled at Taylor’s neighbor, Faith MacLean. She believed the individual, who was clad in a long coat and cap, could have been a woman dressed as a man. He or she was never identified and Taylor’s murder remains unsolved after over a century.

William Desmond Taylor

Taylor’s body was found by his valet of six months, Henry Peavy, who had been arrested for “social vagrancy” and charged with being “lewd and dissolute” three days earlier. Taylor was scheduled to appear in court on Peavey’s behalf that day.

Peavey was cleared of involvement in the murder. He moved to San Francisco several months later and died in 1931 at age forty-nine from general paresis resulting from an untreated case of tertiary syphilis.

Police believed the man Henry Peavy had succeeded as William Desmond Taylor’s valet was the most likely suspect in the director’s murder.

Henry Peavy

Twenty-seven-year-old Edward Sands had been Taylor’s cook, valet, and personal assistant until seven months prior. While on a European vacation in July 1921, Taylor had left Sands in charge of his affairs. Upon returning home, Taylor found his car, checkbook, jewelry, and a large number of distinctive cigarettes were missing.

Sands was also gone but was subsequently determined to have wrecked Taylor’s car, cashed several blank checks after having forged Taylor’s signature, and to have sold much of the stolen jewelry in northern California.

Several months later, Taylor received a letter from Sands which included a pawn ticket in the name of William Deane Tanner, Taylor’s birth name which he had kept hidden since coming to Hollywood eight years earlier. Soon thereafter, Sands is believed to have secretively returned to his former employer’s residence to again rob him, and, perhaps after being caught in the act, to have killed him. One of Taylor’s pilfered cigarettes was found smoked and crushed on his doorstep and more of his jewelry was determined stolen and again sold in northern California, where Sands was found to have briefly worked under an alias before quitting near the time of Taylor’s murder and dropping from sight.

Sands had previously been arrested for several petty crimes and had been convicted of embezzlement, forgery, and desertion from the United States Coast Guard. The police considered him the primary suspect in Taylor’s murder, but he was never charged with the crime, perhaps because Faith McLean’s description of the person seen leaving Taylor’s bungalow did not fully match Sands’ appearance.

The Find a Grave site says Edward Sands committed suicide in East Windsor, Connecticut, on February 19, 1926, with a .45 caliber revolver he had purchased in Springfield, Massachusetts, under the name King Gibson of Thompsonville, Connecticut. A restaurant manager a few blocks from the scene identified him from a photo provided by Los Angeles County District Attorney Asa Keyes.

Other sources, however, state it is unknown when or where Edward Sands died.

Edward Sands

The locket in Taylor’s pocket held a photograph of his friend, actress Mabel Normand. She was the last person known to have seen him alive, saying she had left his home after borrowing a book at approximately 7:45 p.m., roughly five minutes before he is believed to have been killed.

Author Robert Giroux contends Taylor and Normand fell in love in the course of his helping her with her cocaine addiction, and that after learning Taylor had recently met with federal prosecutors in preparation for testifying against Normand’s suppliers, a contract killer was hired to silence the director. Giroux believes Normand suspected the motive for her lover’s murder but did not know the perpetrator.

Other authors dismiss the assertion that Taylor and Normand were more the friends. In their book Hollywood: The Pioneers, Kevin Brownlow and John Kobal say the theory that Taylor was disposed of by drug dealers was contrived by Paramount Studios for publicity purposes.

Mabel Normand was cleared of involvement in the murder of William Desmond Taylor. She died from pulmonary tuberculosis in 1930 at age thirty-six.

Mabel Normand

Another actress and purported lover was also absolved. Taylor had managed nineteen-year-old Mary Miles Minter’s career since she had been a child actress. Journalists had a field day with Minter’s written coded love letters found in Taylor’s bungalow after his death, insinuating a sexual relationship between the slain director and the then teen screen star. She said she had written the letters three years earlier, in 1919.

Though Taylor was known to have had affairs with several women, Minter and others said her romantic sentiments were not reciprocated by the man thirty years her senior and that he curtailed any relationship beyond business.

Though cleared by police of involvement in Taylor’s murder, Minter’s reputation and acting career were tarnished.  She left the profession in 1923 and died in 1984 at age eighty-two.

 Mary Miles Minter

Minter and her older sister, Margaret Shelby, had a contentious relationship with their mother, former actress Charlotte Shelby, who believed Minter and Taylor were romantically involved.

In 1938, a year before her death at age thirty-nine, Margaret, suffering from alcoholism and clinical depression, openly accused her mother of murdering William Desmond Taylor.

Margaret Shelby

Investigators of the time said Charlotte Shelby’s initial statements about her daughter’s relationship with Taylor and “other matters” were evasive and “obviously filled with lies.” After it was publicly alleged that she owned a rare .38 caliber pistol and unusual bullets similar to those used in the murder, the Shreveport, Louisiana, native reportedly threw the pistol into a bayou.

Charlotte Shelby was never charged with the murder of William Desmond Taylor. She died in 1957 at age seventy-nine.

Charlotte Shelby

Actress Margaret Gibson had worked with Taylor when he came to Hollywood in 1913. No record of her name was mentioned in connection with his murder investigation and no surviving documentation refers to any association between her and Taylor after 1914.

However, shortly before she died after suffering a heart attack at age seventy in 1964, Gibson reportedly confessed to Taylor’s murder. She may also have made similar statements the previous evening while watching a local television program, Ralph Story’s Los Angeles, which featured a short segment about the killing.

No suggestion of Margaret Gibson’s possible involvement in the murder of William Desmond Taylor has been found.

Margaret Gibson

In 1901, Taylor had married actress Ethel May Hamilton, also known as Ethel May Harrison, in New York City. They had a daughter, Ethel Daisy, the following year. In 1908, before he had found success as an actor and (more so) as a director, Taylor had abandoned his family.

Ethel Hamilton obtained a state decree of divorce in 1912. She was never a suspect in her former husband’s murder.

Ethel May Hamilton

In the days following William Desmond Taylor’s murder, many reporters, including New York Daily News Hollywood correspondent Florabel Muir, suspected that Henry Peavey, his personal assistant who had found his body, was withholding information. According to Robert Giroux, Muir believed she could garner a gargantuan scoop by spooking Peavey into confessing.

Contemporary movies often portrayed blacks as being deathly afraid of ghosts. Giroux says Muir offered Peavey ten dollars if he would identify Taylor’s grave in Hollywood Park Cemetery, where Al Weinshank, AKA Albert Weinshenker, lay in wait, clad in a white sheet.

As Peavy approached Taylor’s grave, Weinshank emerged bellowing, “I am the ghost of William Desmond Taylor. You murdered me. Confess, Peavey!” Instead of trembling with fear, Peavey roared with laughter. Unbeknownst to Muir, Taylor had a noticeable British accent, while Weinshank, a Chicago gangster, spoke like the American hoodlum he was.

The Ploy To Fool Peavy Fails

A lieutenant of George “Bugs” Moran’s North Side Gang, Al Weinshank was among the seven men shot to death by Al Capone’s henchmen in the infamous 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Al Weinshank

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1940 story “Pat Hobby’s Christmas Wish,” the title character discovers a supposed confession to William Desmond Taylor’s murder from a Hollywood producer and attempts to use it to blackmail him.

The 1950 film Sunset Boulevard stars Gloria Swanson as ageing silent screen actress Norma Desmond, a name derived from William Desmond Taylor’s middle name and Mabel Normand’s last name.

The 1951 film Hollywood Story appears to be based on Taylor’s murder, though it reaches a fictional conclusion.

Gloria Swanson As Norma Desmond

“All right Mr. DeMille, I‘m Ready For My Close-up“

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/1196/william_desmond-taylor

SOURCES:

• A Deed of Death: The Story of the Unsolved Murder of Hollywood Director William Desmond Taylor, BY Robert Giroux
• Find a Grave
• Hollywood: The Pioneers, by Kevin Brownlow and John Kobal
• Los Angeles Express
• Los Angeles Times
• San Francisco Examiner