William Desmond Taylor

 William Desmond Taylor (April 26, 1872 – February 1, 1922)

He was a popular figure in the growing Hollywood motion picture colony of the 1910s and early 1920s, having directed 59 silent films between 1914 and 1922 and acted in 27 between 1913 and 1915. In Hollywood, Taylor worked as a movie actor starting in 1913, including four appearances opposite Margaret "Gibby" Gibson. He directed his first film, The Awakening, in 1914, as an actor-director. Over the next few years, he directed more than 50 films. While in New York, he courted Ethel May Hamilton, an actress who had appeared in the stage musical Florodora under the name Ethel May Harrison. The two were married in 1901, and had a daughter. Taylor was active socially, belonging to a yacht club, and known to carry on affairs with women. The Deane-Tanners were well known in New York society and members of several clubs. He was known as a ladies' man and a heavy drinker, possibly depressed, when he abruptly vanished in October 1908, at the age of 36, deserting his wife and their daughter, Ethel Daisy. After Taylor's disappearance, friends said he had suffered "mental lapses" before, and his family thought at first he had wandered off during an episode of amnesia. His wife obtained a state decree of divorce in 1912. Little is known of the years immediately following his disappearance. He resurfaced in San Francisco, and went to Los Angeles in 1912. Towards the end of World War I, in July 1918, at the age of 46, Taylor enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force as a private.

At 7:30 am on the morning of February 2, 1922, Taylor's body was found inside his bungalow at the Alvarado Court Apartments. 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, perhaps owing to his own embarrassment, because when doubts later arose, the body was rolled over by forensic investigators revealing 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. More than a dozen individuals were eventually named as suspects by both the press and the police. Newspaper reports at the time were both overwhelmingly sensationalized and speculative, even fabricated, and the murder was used as the basis for much subsequent "true crime" fiction. 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. Taylor is interred at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.