Shocking Celebrity Deaths and Murders Volume 3

Copyright

© Copyright 2023 Dylan Frost

All Rights Reserved.

Contents

Introduction

The Black Dahlia

Héctor Camacho

Chyna

Peter Cook

Joan Crawford

Dorothy Dell

Dustin Diamond

Bobby Driscoll

Andrés Escobar

Justin Fashanu

Fritz Haarmann

Sarah Harding

Evel Knievel

Trent Lehman

Stephen Milligan

Mya-Lecia Naylor

Richard Ramirez

JonBenét Ramsey

Christopher Reeve

John Ritter

Sean Sellers

Anna Nicole Smith

Samantha Smith

Mark Speight

Reeva Steenkamp

Patrick Swayze

Carl Tanzler

Thuy Trang

Karla Faye Tucker

Oscar Wilde

Introduction

The cases that follow are once again eclectic and darkly fascinating. Drug overdoses, murders, suicides, unsolved deaths, autoerotic asphyxiation, car crashes, plane crashes, freak accidents, doomed child stars, and so on.

Shocking Celebrity Deaths and Murders Volume 3 includes, among others, Anna Nicole Smith, Dustin Diamond, Patrick Swayze, John Ritter, Sarah Harding, Bobby Driscoll, Samantha Smith, and Mya-Lecia Naylor.

THE BLACK DAHLIA

On January 15, 1947, a body was discovered on a street in Los Angeles. The body was that of a young dark haired woman. She had been sliced in half, had her blood removed, and her mouth cut into a Joker style smile. A tattoo had been cut from her thigh and stuffed in her private parts. It was a grisly and shocking murder worthy of Jack the Ripper. The police managed - after some effort - to identify the victim through fingerprints. Her name was Elizabeth Short - though in the wake of this case she would become immortal as the Black Dahlia. The Black Dahlia mystery baffled the police. Not only was the murder brutal and gruesome it also indicated a degree of medical knowledge. The relative proximity of a medical school close to where the body was found led the police to suspect the killer might have a connection to this establishment.

The killer was deemed to be cunning, intelligent, and most likely completely insane. Elizabeth had been missing for six days when her body was found. It is presumed then that the killer kidnapped and then tortured her before the murder. The police found out that Elizabeth Short was working as a waitress at the time of her death. Like so many people she had moved to Los Angeles to become a star but she found that acting jobs were hard to come by and so she ended up waiting tables to make ends meet. That was a familiar story for those who go to Hollywood dreaming of fame.

About a week after the grisly discovery of the body, a letter was sent to the local newspaper containing some of Elizabeth Short's personal belongings. The contents had been cleaned with petrol - which was also how the killer had cleaned Short's body before he dissected it. It was pretty obvious then that the sender of this letter was the killer. How else would they have Elizabeth Short's personal affects? The police, thanks partly to these personal affects, manage to obtain the details of dozens of men that Elizabeth Short had known but investigations into these men turned out to be a frustrating dead end. The case eventually went cold. The killer was never caught. There are theories though. One theory contends that Short's murder was connected to The Cleveland Torso Murderer.

The Cleveland Torso Murderer is one of the grisliest serial killers never captured. Some suspect that this killer might have murdered Elizabeth Short. The killer was active from 1935 to 1938 and killed between twelve and twenty victims. This killer killed both men and women - which is rare for serial killers because they usually target the gender they are attracted to (which is overwhelmingly females because the vast majority of serial killers turn out to be straight men). The targets were chosen very carefully in that they were drifters or homeless people so wouldn't be missed. The victims were dismembered and beheaded. The male victims were castrated. Some of the victims had a chemical agent applied to them.

The Cleveland Torso Murderer is credited with twelve official murders but may have killed twenty people in all. There is a theory that this may have been the work of more than one killer but the truth was never really established. The famous lawman Eliot Ness was in charge of the investigation to catch the killer. At one point the killer even left the remains of one victim outside of the office building where Ness worked - simply to taunt Ness. Because the bodies were often found some time after death and many of the heads had been removed this made identification of the victims almost impossible at times. In fact, only a couple of victims were ever identified.

The main suspect in the case was Dr Francis Sweeney. It is said that Ness thought Sweeney was the killer. Sweeney was a former medic in the army who had performed amputations in combat zones. Sweeney also failed a lie detector test when he was in police custody. However, Sweeney was never charged or prosecuted for the murders - apparently because Ness thought there was little chance of securing a conviction. One thing that complicated matters was that Dr Sweeney was a cousin of Congressman Martin L. Sweeney. Congressman Martin L. Sweeney was known for his dislike of Eliot Ness and wouldn't have taken too kindly to these murders being pinned on a relative.

Dr Sweeney was therefore not put on trial. He was bitter at his treatment by Ness and sent Ness threatening letters until he died. A man named Frank Dolezal was actually arrested for the murders and had a confession beaten out of him but it transpired that he was innocent. Dolezal is believed to attracted suspicion because he knew one of the victims. The question of who The Cleveland Torso Murderer really was therefore remains a mystery. All we really do know is that this was an especially disturbed and grisly killer who clearly enjoyed the attention his crimes were affording him. He was one of the deadliest serial killers never to be captured.

The same year that Elizabeth Short was murdered, a woman named Jeanne French was found dead in Los Angeles. She had been stomped to death and a cryptic message was scrawled on her body in lipstick. Some believe that the deaths of Short and French are connected and that they both encountered the same killer. The police did not believe in this theory themselves though and felt these two deaths were not connected but simply disconnected tragedies. Naturally, the police had to deal with a lot of time wasters during their investigation into Short's murder. Many people came forward to claim they had killed Elizabeth Short but were then revealed to be fantasists or liars. There are a number of genuine suspects in the Elizabeth Short murder case but the actual killer has never been verified.

Among the Black Dahlia suspects are Walter Bayley. Bayley was a surgeon who lived only a few minutes away from where Short's body was found. He was suffering from a degenerative brain disease at the time. This has led to a theory that he was acting in a crazy unhinged manner and might have been capable of murder. The counter argument is that the 67 year-old Bayley was not really in any fit state to carry out a murder like this - which would have required planning, stealth, and physical strength. Bayley's status as a Black Dahlia suspect comes from the fact that he had medical training (so would have known how to dissect a body) and also easy access to properties in the area where Short was disposed of.

Another suspect was a bellhop and former mortician's assistant named Leslie Dillon. Dillon began writing to Los Angeles Police Department psychiatrist Dr. J. Paul De River with his theories about Short's murder. Dillon's detailed knowledge of the case and obvious dark fascination with sex and sadism led the police to believe he could well be a suspect. Dillon even claimed he knew the man that had killed Elizabeth Short. Dr. J. Paul De River took this claim to be a proxy confession by Dillon. Dillon was placed in custody at one point and many detectives came to suspect he was the killer. The stumbling block though was that Dillon's whereabouts at the time of the murder could not be proven. It could not be established that he was in Los Angeles and so there was no case against him without this vital evidence. You can only convict someone of a murder if you have some proof that they were actually in the place where the murder took place!

Another suspect in Short's death was Mark Hansen. Hansen was a nightclub owner and Elizabeth Short's landlord. It transpired that he was one of the last people she spoke to before she went missing. The police believed that Hansen was infatuated with Short but she'd rebuffed his romantic and sexual advances. What made the police especially interested in Hansen was that he was friends with a number of doctors and there was evidence that as a young man he had attended a medical school. One can see how these details, when factored in with his personal connection to Elizabeth Short, made Hansen a person of interest. Mark Hansen died in 1964. He was never charged with Short's murder. The police detectives from the time and in recent years who have studied the case seem to have conflicting views concerning Hansen as a suspect. Some believe he murdered Short and others think he was a red herring who had nothing to do with the case.

Patrick O'Reilly was an interesting suspect in the Black Dahlia murder case. O'Reilly was a doctor who was friends with Mark Hansen. They apparently visited sex parties together. It seems reasonable to presume then that O'Reilly must have known Elizabeth Short. O'Reilly had criminal charges for violent sexually motivated crimes and he certainly had the medical knowledge required to dissect and clean a dead body. Despite all of these apparent connective details though he was never charged with having anything to do with Short's murder. O'Reilly was married to the daughter of a police captain. This has led to theories of a police cover-up.

George Hodel was also a suspect and placed under police surveillance at one point in relation to the murder of Elizabeth Short. Hodel was a physician accused of raping his teenage daughter. He was known to be a dodgy and troubled sort of character. The police manage to get some evidence that Elizabeth Short may have been one of George Hodel's patients. In the end though the evidence collected was not sufficient for a formal charge or a trial. Steve Hodel, George HJodel's son, later wrote a book in which he claimed his father was the killer of Elizabeth Short. Steve Hodel then rather damaged what little credibility he had by writing another book in which he claimed his father was also the Zodiac killer. These books were taken with what you might describe as a pinch of salt. I daresay Hodel is now working on a book claiming his father had access to a time machine and was Jack the Ripper.

George Knowlton is often listed as a Black Dahlia murder suspect - thanks mainly to the efforts of his daughter. Janice Knowlton claimed that her father George murdered and dissected Elizabeth Short in their garage. Janice Knowlton (inevitably) wrote a book about this and said that Elizabeth Short was a sex worker who would find children for child abuse gangs. Janice Knowlton claimed that she was later sold to a sex gang herself and ended up being abused by no lesser figure than Walt Disney. Janice Knowlton died in a prescription drugs overdose in 2004. The police - you will not be surprised to hear - were never terribly convinced by her outlandish claims concerning her father although they did arrange a dig at her childhood home. Nothing suspicious relating to a murder was found on the property though.

Other theories include the possibility that Elizabeth Short was killed by a woman that she may have been sharing a room with and fallen out with. This theory doesn't explain though why this disgruntled room mate would have then undertook such a grisly and complicated - not to mention risky - manner of disposing of the body. Donald H. Wolfe wrote in his 2006 book The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles, that Elizabeth Short was murdered by the gangster Bugsy Siegel at the request of newspaper publisher Norman Chandler. Short, so the theory goes, was pregnant with Chandler's child and so Chandler wanted to get rid of her.

There is no evidence though which connects Bugsy Siegel to the murder of Elizabeth Short. The craziest theory concerning this murder was that proposed by a childhood friend of Elizabeth Short. He concluded that the killer in this awful case was none other than the film director Orson Welles! The real truth about the Black Dahlia case has yet to be verified. It's a case which seems set to keep armchair detectives busy for many years to come.

HECTOR CAMACHO

Héctor (Macho) Camacho was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico in 1962. When he was about three his family moved to New York and he grew up in Spanish (East) Harlem. Camacho was a tearaway as a youngster constantly getting into trouble and had a spell in prison when he was fifteen. Life on the streets as a petty criminal seemed to be his destiny. That all changed though when he was encouraged to try boxing by a high school teacher. Camacho was a natural when it came to the sweet science. He had cat like reflexes and fists that moved faster than a laser beam. He had great movement too and could dazzle his opponents with footwork and constant motion. Camacho had a great ring IQ too - which is something you can't really teach a boxer. Hector Camacho was at home in the ring and knew exactly what he was doing inside that squared circle.

Camacho won three Golden Gloves and only lost four times in 100 amateur fights. It was professional boxing though that Camacho craved because it was in the pro ranks where the money is made. His ambition was to buy his mother a house. He turned professional in 1980 and claimed he could already beat the great featherweight champions Salvador Sánchez and Eusebio Pedroza. In reality though he would have to wait five years for a title shot. Camacho was taken under the wing of networks like CBS and HBO - who believed he was destined for superstardom. He was certainly a huge attraction in the early to mid eighties.

Camacho was something of a pioneer when it came to the showbusiness elements of boxing. It was Camacho who first did those crazy theatrical ring entrances which the likes of Prince Naseem Hamed would later mimic. Camacho would wear sequinned glittery trunks (or