Random Famous Deaths That Were Never Investigated (14 items)

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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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  (#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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  (#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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  (#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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  (#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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  (#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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