A Cast of Killers (29 page)

On another occasion, in 1926, Shelby had asked him to transfer more money because she “feared indictment” in the Taylor case. Shortly after the transfer, Shelby had gone to Europe, where she remained until the Keyes investigation subsided.

Each time Henry offered to submit hard evidence supporting these claims, Shelby’s lawyers blocked him, claiming it was Henry who was on trial, not Shelby.

Henry did, however, manage to introduce into evidence certain items that gave his stories credence. A large flowchart of Shelby family finances showed particular activity—withdrawals, transferals—occurring at times that corresponded directly with documented flare-ups in the Taylor investigation. Letters written to Henry by Shelby and Margaret made cryptic references to “a secret” that the family and he had to guard; other letters, written from Europe during the Asa Keyes investigation, asked equally cryptically whether it was yet “safe to return home.”

Henry also submitted documentation of monthly two-hundred-dollar payments Shelby had been making since 1922 to a man named Carl Stockdale—one of the two men who had provided Shelby’s alibi for the night of the Taylor murder.

By now Vidor felt he knew where Shelby’s $750,000 had gone. She had bought herself freedom from prosecution with it. That was why Woolwine had never indicted her. And Asa Keyes, as well. They were being paid off. Though no conclusive evidence of this was presented in the trial—because the trial was not concerned with anything other than Les Henry’s handling of Charlotte Shelby’s finances—Henry’s testimony answered perfectly the third of Vidor’s three questions: why Shelby had not been indicted.

Further proof was contained in the transcripts of
Reilly vs. Miles,
in which Minter attempted to secure the money she had earned at Flying A and Paramount studios.

After the termination of her Paramount contract in 1923, Mary Miles Minter moved to New York, where she lived on West Fifty-sixth Street until 1926. During this time, she repeatedly wrote to Shelby demanding she send money. Shelby refused, claiming Mary’s money was tied up in complex tax shelters and real estate development deals that couldn’t be tampered with. Finally, Minter turned the matter over to a lawyer. A court hearing resulted in Minter and Shelby slinging accusations at each other, blaming each other for an unnamed “tragedy” that had predicated their estrangement.

Minter estimated the value of her estate at $1,345,000, less the thirty percent due to her mother for handling the finances. Shelby did not dispute the sum, simply her ability to turn it into ready cash.

The judge who heard the case was about to hand down his decision when Minter and Shelby announced that they had reached a settlement out of court. Mary had reportedly agreed to take $25,000, to be delivered a year later. The judge, surprised by what he considered a ridiculously unfair settlement, asked both parties to explain how it was reached. Minter said simply that she and her mother had reached an understanding that she was “incompetent to handle larger sums” and that were she to persist in her legal actions against Shelby, she would “disrupt her mother’s plans.”

Shelby merely repeated what she had said all along, that Minter’s money was being carefully tended to until Minter herself was responsible enough to assume control.

Vidor found Minter’s acceptance of the settlement just as unreasonable as the judge did. There must have been considerations other than the money, he thought, that led her to it. Could Minter’s reason have been that Shelby had explained to her that the money she had tried to sue for was the only thing that had kept them out of prison since Taylor was killed? It seemed to Vidor not only possible but quite likely, Charlotte, with her love of her Millions, was certainly not one to use her own money if she could get away with using Mary’s.

In another case,
Miles vs. Minter
,
Shelby and her Louisiana relatives fought over the estate of Julia Miles, Mary Miles Minter’s grandmother. Julia had died at Casa de Margarita in 1925, leaving behind the family plantation in Shreveport. Shelby immediately set into motion a plan to sell the plantation, though her sister’s family was still living there. When her sister’s family found out what was going on, they took Shelby to court. They easily won control of the plantation, but the trial served to reveal that, along with denying Mary Miles Minter her own money, Charlotte Shelby had seen to it for years that Minter had no contact whatsoever with her grandmother, who had always been partial to little Juliet. Minter and her grandmother had regularly written letters to each other, and Charlotte had intercepted every one of them, jealous apparently of Minter’s receiving attention even from her grandmother. Marjorie Berger found out about this situation and wrote to Minter about it, but not until Julia Miles lay on her deathbed. Upon learning of her mother’s cruel and inexplicable deception, Minter immediately left for Los Angeles to see her ailing grandmother. Eddie Rickenbacker, famed World War I flying ace, donated his plane and services. Minter reportedly arrived three hours after Julia Miles had died, though this was later disputed.

Charlotte Shelby was clearly as ruthless and heartless a human being as Vidor had ever encountered. Furthermore, this story provided Vidor further evidence that Shelby had killed William Desmond Taylor. In the letters that Marjorie Berger wrote to Mary Miles Minter in New York, she mentioned a couple of people who were living at Casa de Margarita with Shelby. Vidor knew the names well: Carl Stockdale and Jim Smith—Shelby’s two ‘alibi providers for the night of the murder. Vidor had just learned that Stockdale was receiving monthly payments from Shelby; now he learned that Jim Smith, who had always been identified in the press and the police files as Shelby’s night watchman, was also an employee of District Attorney Woolwine. And they were both living under the same roof as Charlotte Shelby!

Remaining doubts about Shelby’s guilt disappeared when Dick Marchman handed him the file of a 1937 civil case,
Fillmore vs. Shelby
.
Fillmore was daughter Margaret, who had married in 1926, and who sued her mother for $48,000 and a home in Laguna Beach that she claimed her mother owed her for services Margaret had provided in 1921, 1923, and 1926. Asked before a jury what those services had been, Margaret said she had provided false testimony during the William Desmond Taylor murder investigation, and had further protected her mother from suspicion by aiding her in private conferences with D.A. Woolwine, and by acting as a barrier between her and the press.

The judge, aghast at this testimony, awarded the settlement to Margaret, and ordered her to appear before District Attorney Buron Fitts along with the transcript of her testimony, and to answer any further questions Fitts might have about Shelby and the Taylor murder.

The reasons Margaret had decided to make public this information now seemed to be rooted in trouble that had begun between her and Shelby in 1925, when Margaret met Hugh Fillmore, the grandson of U.S. president Millard Fillmore. After a whirlwind secret courtship, Fillmore had proposed to her. Charlotte opposed the marriage, saying that Margaret, who was then twenty-seven, was not prepared for such a step. Charlotte couldn’t stop the wedding, but she could cut the young couple off financially.

Margaret married Fillmore despite her mother’s threats. A year later, Charlotte left for Europe (for reasons Les Henry made clear in his own trial in 1931). Charlotte liquidated assets before she left, taking much of the family’s fortune with her.

Another year later, Margaret and Fillmore divorced. Margaret wired Charlotte for funds, then sailed to Europe to join her. When they returned in 1929, they went into business together, developing real estate in Los Angeles and Culver City. The business failed. Charlotte blamed Margaret but, caught up in her suit against Les Henry at the time, took no legal action against her. They seemed to be getting along fairly well.

Then in 1937, Margaret fell in love again, with film director Emmett J. Flynn. Again, Shelby opposed her daughter’s romance. But despite her protests, Margaret and Flynn eloped to Yuma, Arizona. Shelby went after them. Days later, Shelby and Margaret returned with Margaret’s marriage annulled.

Immediately after arriving back in Los Angeles, Shelby had Margaret confined to the psychopathic ward of a mental hospital. It was the same hospital—coincidently—where Shelby allegedly had had another potential witness in the Taylor murder case confined. Belle Simpson, Shelby’s live-in cook and housekeeper at the time of the murder, was said to have been illegally declared insane and held in solitary confinement. Vidor could only wonder if it had been the same physician who had committed them. A physician on the Shelby payroll?

Mary Miles Minter found out about Margaret’s incarceration and after a month-long effort managed to have her sister released. A team of doctors from the hospital examined Margaret and announced her perfectly sane, declaring that Charlotte’s confining her there had been unnecessary and cruel.

No effort, on behalf of the Minter family was apparently made to help Belle Simpson. She would reportedly live out her remaining years as an inmate at Napa Asylum in Northern California, where Henry Peavey died.

It was shortly after Margaret’s release that she took Shelby to court and openly accused her of murdering William Desmond Taylor. “She was scared that someone would take away Mary, the goose that laid her golden egg,” Margaret claimed.

Why Shelby had Margaret committed was not in the records, but Vidor suspected it had been to keep Margaret quiet, just as years earlier, she had had Belle Simpson committed.

Another thing not mentioned in the file for
Fillmore vs. Shelby
,
but that Vidor had learned for himself earlier, was what later became of Margaret’s second husband.

In 1937, at the age of forty-four, not long after his marriage to Margaret, director Emmett J. Flynn was found dead in his Hollywood apartment, rumored by some to have been killed by a blow to the back of the head. His murderer was never found.

Vidor set the file on the table, stunned. Had he just discovered a second murder committed by Charlotte Shelby fifteen years after she killed Taylor? The similarities between the two crimes were frightening: two Hollywood directors, roughly the same age, killed under mysterious circumstances after being involved with a daughter of Charlotte Shelby’s.

Relieved as he was to have finally answered all three of his big questions, Vidor still felt confounded by a brand new question that presented itself.

With a fully detailed account of Charlotte Shelby’s guilt in the murder and subsequent cover-up, why hadn’t District Attorney Buron Fitts closed this case once and for all? Could Shelby have gotten to him, too? Was that overbearing, amoral, money-grubbing murderess powerful enough to buy yet a third Los Angeles District Attorney all those years after the crime she was, in her own diabolical way, paying for?

Vidor suspected he already knew the answer, and feared that when he found out for sure, yet another obstacle would present itself. Was Vidor willing to lock horns with Buron Fitts? Vidor had to know the truth.

And before he and Dick Marchman even reached the car, three blocks away, he had decided where he was going to look.

36

“Six dollars?”

Vidor shoved the parking ticket into the pocket of his blazer. Colleen Moore’s flight from Chicago, on June 16, 1967, had arrived five minutes late, just long enough for the time to run out on Vidor’s parking meter.

Vidor checked the rear-view mirror for Highway Patrol, then eased the T-Bird smoothly above the 70 mph speed limit. He said, “I’m not sure the Taylor murder is the story we should tell.”

“Just who I suspected. Only the story’s a lot more involved than that. The deeper I get into it the more sordid the whole thing is.”

“I should think that would make the story all the more interesting.”

“Oh, it’s interesting,” Vidor said. “But the story we should be telling is the Charlotte Shelby story, or Lily Pearl Miles Reilly story. Bill Taylor getting killed is only a part of it. A small part.”

Vidor then spelled out the principal turns in the story: Shelby’s early ambitions for herself and her daughters, her abandonment and subsequent reclaiming of them. He told Colleen of Shelby’s preference for Margaret over Mary, and her domination over both of them. He outlined Shelby’s growth as the prototypical stage mother, living off of Mary’s earnings and attacking anything that seemed even remotely threatening to her parasitic existence—the most shocking examples being the mysterious deaths of Taylor and of Emmett J. Flynn. Vidor listed Shelby’s cruelties to her daughters—bleeding them financially; starving them emotionally; refusing them private lives; undermining Minter’s loving relationship with her grandmother; committing Margaret to a mental ward; and her attempts to make others—accountants, chauffeurs, cooks and housekeepers—appear culpable for her own deeds. And he listed the accomplices to her wickedness that she had bought over the years with her daughter’s money: Thomas Woolwine, Jim Smith, Carl Stockdale, Asa Keyes, and, quite possibly, Buron Fitts.