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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  (#2) Jimi Hendrix

  • Dec. at 27 (1942-1970)

  The final day in the life of Jimi Hendrix was so shrouded in mystery and inconsistency that it spawned decades of alternative theories.

  The autopsy showed that he died of vomit inhalation due to an overdose of various drugs, but his companion the day he died in London gave numerous versions of what happened when she found him that morning, several of which directly contradicted each other.
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  (#3) Paul Walker

  • Dec. at 40 (1973-2013)

  Walker's death in a one-car crash in 2013 was immediately determined to be an accident caused by out of control speeding, with no drugs or alcohol involved. But as with many other celebrity deaths, a conspiracy theory that Walker was murdered soon arose - an act related to aid money meant to go to the Philippines.

  This theory wasn't taken seriously by police and was never investigated.
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  (#4) Tennessee Williams

  • Dec. at 72 (1911-1983)

  The great playwright died in New York City in 1983 under circumstances so strange that it took multiple examinations to figure out what happened - and even now, the sequence of events that led to his death has gaps. Williams died in February of that year, having choked on the plastic cap from a bottle of eye drops that he'd put in his mouth for some reason.

  The initial determination for the death was natural causes, but this verdict was changed when the bottle cap was found in his larynx. Chemical testing was done on the body, and it took months for an amended coroner's report to be released; said report revealed the presence of barbiturates in Williams's system. 
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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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  (#6) George Reeves

  • Dec. at 45 (1914-1959)

  Television's original Superman, George Reeves had fallen on hard times after the show ended and was having financial and career difficulties. In 1959, after a drunken argument with friends, including his fiancée, Reeves went upstairs in his house and shot himself in the head. The death was quickly ruled a suicide, but a number of circumstantial details led to a conspiracy theory: that Reeves was murdered by one of his houseguests.

  The LAPD claimed the gun was too thickly oiled to find fingerprints, and gunshot residue testing wasn't typically done then. Beyond that, Reeves's mother refused to believe that her son killed himself, and many of the people in Reeves's orbit believed that he'd been killed by an ex-girlfriend named Toni Mannix, the wife of an MGM big shot. None of these theories were seriously investigated, and Reeves's death has officially remained a suicide.
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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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  (#8) Albert Dekker

  • Dec. at 62 (1905-1968)

  A character actor with over 70 film appearances, Albert Dekker also served a term in the California State Assembly and was blacklisted for a time due to his denunciation of Joe McCarthy. By 1968, his career was on the decline, and after being missing for a few days, he was found dead in his LA apartment by his fiancée.

  Dekker was discovered naked, kneeling in his bathtub, bound by chains and leather thongs, with a noose tightly wrapped around his neck and looped around the curtain rod. He was also blindfolded with a scarf, handcuffed, had a ball gag in his mouth, and hypodermic needles sticking out of each arm. To add insult to the death, his body was defiled by someone who wrote homophobic slurs on it with lipstick, and camera equipment was missing.

  Despite the fact that many of these actions would have been impossible to perform alone, Dekker's death was ruled a suicide - a conclusion so absurd that both the press and the coroner rejected it. Due to the sordid, possibly sexual nature of the crime, no further investigation was done, and it was written off as an accidental death from auto-erotic asphyxiation.
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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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  (#10) William Desmond Taylor

  • Dec. at 49 (1872-1922)

  Irish-born director and actor William Desmond Taylor made dozens of films in the nascent Hollywood film industry, gaining a reputation as one of the best and most prolific. But he was found shot dead in his Hollywood bungalow in 1922.

  It took the body being rolled over to reveal a bullet hole in his back. Key evidence was either lost or stolen. With little to go on, the sensationalist press and the LAPD spewed a dozen names out as suspects, fingering spurned actors, film executives, a cult, and mob hitmen.

  After 20 years, the DA of the time ordered the case be filed away and the files then vanished. Finally, in 1964, a bit actor confessed on her deathbed that she shot and killed Taylor. The confession was followed by a string of gibberish, and it's likely she was suffering from dementia.

  The case was never solved, and was one of many deaths and scandals that nearly brought down the film industry in the '20s.
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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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  (#12) Haing S. Ngor

  • Dec. at 55 (1940-1996)

  Dr. Haing S. Ngor was a former gynecologist who had survived the Cambodian genocide led by the Khmer Rouge and fled to Los Angeles. In 1984, he found himself cast in The Killing Fields - a performance that won him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. After a decade spent criticizing the Khmer Rouge and working as an actor and author, Ngor was shot dead in a botched robbery outside his apartment in LA's Chinatown. Two years later, three suspects were sent to prison for life.

  When the suspects weren't found to have any link to the Pol Pot regime, the case was classified as gang-related. But questions in LA's Cambodian community never went away, especially since the motive for killing Dr. Ngor appeared to be his Rolex and a locket he refused to give up - not the Mercedes he was driving, nor the nearly $4,000 in cash he was carrying, since neither were taken. Even when a former Khmer Rouge official explicitly stated that the murder was a hit ordered by Pol Pot, the investigation was never reopened.
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  (#13) Paul Bern

  • Dec. at 42 (1889-1932)

  Bern was a German-American writer and director active in the '20s and '30s whose most notable act was launching the career of Jean Harlow. The two were married in 1932, but only two months later, Bern was found dead in their Beverly Hills home, shot through the head and drenched in Harlow's perfume.

  Police found a note that implied Bern killed himself due to impotence and Harlow swore to a grand jury that she "knew nothing." The matter was dropped, and it wasn't until 1960 that the public really got interested in it, due to an article in Playboy. That led to the Los Angeles DA briefly reopening the case before closing it again and calling the article's writer an unreliable source. Interest in the death piqued again in 1990 when a producer wrote a book alleging Bern was murdered by his common-law wife with whom he'd broken up to marry Harlow. This accusation has also not been investigated.
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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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