Random Famous Deaths That Were Never Investigated (14 items)

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  (#1) Brittany Murphy

  • Dec. at 32 (1977-2009)

  Murphy died in December 2009 of what the Los Angeles County Coroner's office determined was heart failure brought on by pneumonia. A number of conspiracy theories sprouted up in the wake of her death, blaming it on everything from toxic mold to a Homeland Security hit. But four years later, a laboratory analysis requested by her father showed signs of heavy metal poisoning, and he sued the County to reopen the investigation. They never did.

  In June 2016, author Bryn Curt James published A Case For Murder: Brittany Murphy Files. In the wake of the book's publication, several people who worked with Murphy attested to her poor health in the weeks before her death, a refutation of James's thesis. The case remains one of the biggest mysteries in recent Hollywood history.
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  (#11) Peter Tosh

  • Dec. at 42 (1944-1987)

  Reggae star Peter Tosh was shot dead in a 1987 home invasion by a group of men who attempted to rob and extort Tosh for money. When Tosh claimed he didn't have money at home, the group's leader, Dennis Lobban, is alleged to have panicked and shot Tosh in the head at point-blank range, then opened fire on a group of Tosh's friends approaching the house.

  Lobban was found guilty of triple murder in a closed trial but has always proclaimed his innocence. The other two men were never named or investigated.
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  (#5) Leslie Howard

  • Dec. at 50 (1893-1943)

  Best known for playing Ashley in Gone with the Wind, English actor Howard was a two-time Academy Award nominee for Best Actor. In 1943, Howard was on a flight from Lisbon, Portugal, back to the UK that was shot down by a flight of German bombers over the Bay of Biscay.

  While the flight was a known civilian plane flying over undisputed water, the German planes went out of their normal operating path to shoot it down - leading to theories that Howard was targeted as a high-profile passenger whose death would demoralize England. Another theory held that German intelligence believed Winston Churchill himself was on the flight because Howard's manager was with Howard and the two men looked similar. Other theories state that British intelligence cracked a German plan to shoot down Howard's plane thinking it was Churchill's and allowed the flight to go ahead for fear the Germans would discover their codes had been broken.

  With the war raging, it was impossible to conduct a thorough investigation of the attack. As Foreign Office files related to Howard's death are still classified, it's fallen to journalists to try to piece together what happened.
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  (#9) Bob Crane

  • Dec. at 49 (1928-1978)

  The former Hogan's Heroes star died one of the strangest and most sordid deaths in Hollywood history, bludgeoned to death with an unknown implement and strangled in an apartment in Scottsdale, AZ. The local police were unprepared to handle such a high-profile murder and were only led to the main suspect through Crane's extensive collection of homemade porn.

  That suspect, electronics sales manager John Henry Carpenter, had helped Crane set up his elaborate taping system, and was the only real suspect. But the Scottsdale police couldn't build a case against him, and the crime sat cold, until it was reopened in the 1990s and Carpenter was arrested in 1994. He was acquitted and died in 1998. The case hasn't been investigated since and remains unsolved.
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  (#14) Thomas H. Ince

  • Dec. at 44 (1880-1924)

  Thomas H. Ince revolutionized the nascent film industry, founding the first modern film studio and creating the "assembly line" process used to create and edit films - a process still used today. He's credited as acting in, producing, writing, or directing over 600 silent movies - and essentially invented the genre of the Western. To celebrate his 44th birthday, Ince went out on William Randolph Hearst's yacht. Four days later, he was dead.

  A cursory investigation found that Ince had died of heart failure, but the Los Angeles press immediately sensationalized the death, proclaiming that Hearst shot Ince on the yacht. Rumors shot through Hollywood, fueled by misinformation and the fervent gossip of the era. Additionally, no autopsy was done, and Ince was quickly cremated. Virtually no investigation was ever performed and the heart failure verdict was accepted by the mainstream press.
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  (#7) Bobby Fuller

  • Dec. at 23 (1942-1966)

  In 1966, rocker Bobby Fuller was riding high from the success of his first Top 10 hit, "I Fought the Law." It would also be his last, as he was found dead in a car in LA on July 18 of that year. A cursory examination was done and concluded Fuller had killed himself by pouring gasoline on himself and sitting in a hot, sealed car. But the autopsy also showed signs that Fuller was beaten, and the boxes for both "accident" and "suicide" were checked on his intake form.

  While some theories have put forth that Fuller was killed by the mob, Charles Manson, or the LAPD, a 2015 book put the blame on a much more plausible idea: LA's longtime police chief William Parker had died a few days earlier, and in the chaos that followed, a minor rock musician's death simply wasn't given the thorough investigation it merited. The case has never been reopened and likely never will.

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