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You're listening to an Oh No Media podcast. Hi everyone and welcome back to the podcast. It's December, it's Christmas time, it's the holidays. I hope you are having such a good month. I know we are over here at Oh No Media. I'm Peyton Moreland and I think I'm just going to jump right into it today. It is always shocking when a celebrity is murdered.
From John Lennon to Phil Hartman to Rebecca Schaefer, whose murder we covered on Binged back in August, to Selena, the senseless murder of a celebrity can often feel like a personal loss, the loss of a loved one. We feel we know public figures. In fact, sometimes we see the faces of some in the public eye more clearly and more often than we do people in our social circle.
If you were a child of the 80s and 90s, you probably looked at Arnold Schwarzenegger's face for an equal number of hours to time spent with a given friend. So when a famous person dies, there's a good chance their case is going to get more attention than that of your average citizen. So it's a real head scratcher when the death of a notable person goes unsolved.
And today's story, I'm gonna be upfront, is an unsolved case. But investigators feel they have a good idea of who's responsible.
Maybe you know the story already, maybe you don't. Chances are, if you're someone who likes tuning into old reruns on stations like TV Land, you're familiar with the TV sitcom Hogan's Heroes from the 1960s. And today's episode is about the star of that old TV show, Bob Crane.
So when he was growing up in Waterbury, Connecticut in the 1930s and 40s, Bob Crane had what most would describe as a relatively normal and happy childhood. His parents, Alfred and Rosemary Crane, provided a stable home for him and his older brother, Al Jr. Bob's father worked as a pharmacist and his mother took care of the household.
Bob discovered a passion for the arts very early on in his life. He developed interest in music and entertainment when he was still just in grade school. Bob saw the world as his stage. He actively participated in school performances and events. And as a teenager, Bob discovered a love for the drums and percussion. He joined the high school band, which allowed him to showcase his musical talent.
And after graduating from high school, Bob briefly attended college, but dropped out, deciding instead to follow his bliss into a career in the entertainment industry.
And that career started in radio. He began his radio career in his home state of Connecticut before moving to New York City, as one does, and honing his skills as a disc jockey. In 1949, he got married to Ann Terzian, his high school sweetheart. And in the early 1950s, he relocated to Los Angeles where his career took a significant turn.
With his velvety voice and charismatic personality, he gained popularity very quickly, hosting the Bob Crane Show every morning on KNX Radio, which was owned by CBS. By the late 1950s, Bob Crane was well known throughout Los Angeles as one of the region's favorite radio personalities.
But as TV sets became a fixture in every American household, radio had become second banana to television. And while Bob Crane had the perfect voice for radio, he also had a face for TV. With his boyish charm and all-American handsomeness, he was as easy on the eyes as he was on the ears.
His TV career kicked off when comedian and TV star Carl Reiner appeared as a guest on Bob's radio show. And this led to Reiner hooking Bob up with a guest spot on the Dick Van Dyke show, which itself led to a reoccurring role on the Donna Reed show, which caught the attention of CBS. So he kind of just...
mangled his way in here. And not long after, Bob Crane went from being a local celebrity to a household name when he was cast on the sitcom Hogan's Heroes, which premiered on CBS in September of 1965. Hogan's Heroes was set in a German prisoner of war camp during World War II.
And it starred Bob Crane in the lead role as U.S. Air Force Colonel Robert Hogan, the witty and resourceful leader of a group of allied prisoners. The show was a huge success for CBS and for Bob Crane. And anchored by Bob Crane in the title role, the show became his defining achievement up to that point in his life. Suddenly, Bob could hardly go anywhere without people recognizing him.
But behind the scenes, Crane's personal life, namely his marriage, was unraveling at the seams. One challenge after another snowballed through this peak period of success, a level of success Bob may not have handled very well.
You know, as they say, the sudden success may have gone to his head. He began having an extramarital affair with his co-star from the TV show, Cynthia Lynn. So now we're really getting into the gossip here. And when Lynn left the show in 1968 and was replaced by Patricia Olsen, he began having an affair with her too. So Bob just was falling in love with his co-stars.
And by the end of the 1960s, all of Bob Crane's personal challenges seemed to be coming to a head all at once. The show's ratings, which were high for the first three seasons, slid down to number 39 and never recovered.
In the summer of 1970, his wife of 21 years had tired of his infidelity and divorced him. And he was ordered to pay $1,750 in monthly alimony for 10 years, on top of $600 a month in child support for the three children that they had together. So that's $2,350 a month, which adjusted for inflation would be over $18,000 today, equating
equivalent to about $218,000 per year.
But Bob was still riding high financially and career-wise, and this dent did not deter him from trying again. So he ended up actually remarrying just months after his divorce, tying the knot with his Hogan's Heroes co-star, the second one, Patricia Olsen, with the wedding taking place on the set of Hogan's Heroes and with Richard Dawson serving as Bob's best man. So I'm kind of getting like,
Brad and Angelina vibes here. But the following year, Bob's fortunes began to tumble hard when Hogan's Heroes was canceled after six seasons and work all but dried up for him. After Hogan's Heroes was finished, Bob was surprised to find himself offered few parts,
Instead, he found himself in embarrassing bombs like Disney's Superdad, in which he played the titular Superdad. And this movie just tanked.
With screen roles no longer being offered, Bob Crane was reduced to the indignity of performing dinner theater. But Bob Crane had long been getting his supply from sources other than his work at this point in his life, which is to say, Bob Crane was a voracious sex addict. Practically every night, Bob picked up women in bars and nightclubs, sometimes sex workers.
He obsessively sought out trysts with strangers. His appetite for sex, sex with new women, was insatiable. And this had long been a problem for Bob. Like I said, it put a strain not just on his first marriage, helping bring about its ends, and now it threatened his second marriage too. There's only so much a sex-addicted celebrity's wife will tolerate.
And if there was a primary enabler in Bob Crane's life, it was his close friend, John Henry Carpenter.
John Henry Carpenter was first introduced to Bob Crane by his Hogan's Heroes co-star Richard Dawson, who if you watch old reruns on the Game Show Network, you probably know as the original host of Family Feud. So when he first met Bob Crane, John Henry Carpenter worked as a regional sales manager for Sony Electrics.
and working in the Southern California area, put Carpenter in touch with many celebrities. But Crane was different. Crane and Carpenter really hit it off.
Like Crane, Carpenter was also a married man and also liked to pick up women at night spots for one night stands. So like I said, the two men hit it off and before long, they were regular drinking partners, cruising bars together and leaving with a woman on each arm. And Carpenter also found his luck in this department, the women getting department, increasing like 50%.
Now that he had Bob Crane around, a handsome celebrity like Bob Crane had no problem drawing the attention of women. And the more Weasley looking John Henry Carpenter was able to capitalize on this, especially when Bob introduced Carpenter as his manager. And the two men would often take the women they picked up in bars back to motel rooms for threesomes and foursomes. But women wasn't the only interest these two men shared.
Carpenter was a video technician and an audiovisual expert, and Crane was fascinated by emerging home video technology. This was in the late 60s and early 70s, about a decade before Betamax and VHS tapes and home video rental stores started becoming commonplace. So video cameras were a high-end item at this point, and Carpenter hooked Crane up.
Suddenly, Crane had a whole room in his house dedicated to video equipment, editing equipment, and so forth. And he now shared with John Henry Carpenter two obsessions, video and sexual exploits. It was inevitable that these two things would soon become intertwined.
The two men fused their insatiable thirst for casual sex with their fetish for video, and they began videotaping their sexual encounters. However, not all of the women Bob and John would lure into bed were comfortable with having their sexual encounters documented.
So the two men devised a system that allowed Crane to, when necessary, discreetly record his intimate encounters with women without their knowledge or consent.
Soon, the two men began building a collection of explicit tapes. And over the years, that collection grew to a massive library containing thousands of hours of Bob Crane, often with his friend John Henry Carpenter, having sex with random women, some of whom were clearly not aware they were being videotaped.
That collection also included photographs, thousands of them, so many that Bob was having a hard time keeping them hidden from his family.
Dirty pics of naked ladies and Bob Crane's sexual escapades were popping up seemingly everywhere in the Crane home. He even liked to bring these explicit photos to set with him onto the set of Superdad, a wholesome family entertainment from Disney, and show off his carnal adventures to the cast and crew like it was a normal everyday thing to do.
When executives at Disney found out about this behavior, they realized Bob Crane might be a liability. Maybe not someone they wanted to work with again in the future. And after Superdad failed to do super box office business, the film roles disappeared completely.
Two years passed, and finally, out of seemingly nowhere, Bob was approached by NBC to star in his own sitcom. And that's when The Bob Crane Show was developed.
On the Bob Crane show, Bob Crane played Bob Wilcox, which it's kind of weird to me that they would name a show after him, but then the character that he played had a different name. Anyway, so Bob Crane played Bob Wilcox, a guy who leaves his job selling insurance to go back to medical school. The show premiered on March 6th, 1975, and...
It was a loser right from the get-go, with low viewership according to the Nielsen ratings and scathing reviews. And after just 13 episodes, the show was canceled, which it must hurt when you have a show with your name in the title that fails so miserably. But Bob kept plugging along. He earned some residuals from Hogan's Heroes reruns, but...
But with Disney not wanting to work with him anymore and his self-titled show having failed very quickly, there wasn't a backlog of job offers waiting to greet Bob on the way out of his NBC failure. And this left only traveling dinner theater productions to pay Bob's bills.
And although this new phase of his career might not have had the prestige of TV fame, it did bring Bob Crane to cities outside of L.A., cities where he was able to meet new women he could bed and then videotape.
And oftentimes, John Henry Carpenter would tag along for the ride. Not that Carpenter was always explicitly invited, but he'd make sure to arrange his business trips around the cities where Crane would be performing. So meanwhile...
The toll that Bob's unchecked sex addiction took on his second marriage and with his penchant for sleazy encounters and his obsession with videotaping them ultimately led his wife to file for divorce in 1977. And the fact that he was on the road much of the time contributed to this split.
But it was as acrimonious a split as a split can be. This was no conscious uncoupling. It was a nasty divorce. Brutal. But Bob had a home away from home in Scottsdale, Arizona. Since 1973, he had been headlining in a play there called Beginner's Luck at the Windmill Dinner Theater.
He had an apartment in Scottsdale, and especially after his second divorce, it gave him some respite from the stress and bustle of L.A., and it also had become his makeshift soundstage for sex videos.
On the morning of June 29th, 1978, the story of Bob Crane would take a turn from sordid to outright tragic. Bob had been scheduled to appear for a noon interview at the Television Academy, followed by a luncheon, but he never showed up for either.
His friend and co-star from Beginner's Luck, actress Victoria Berry, was slated to do the interview with him, and it was out of character for Bob not to have called if he were running late or couldn't make it. So at around two o'clock, Victoria drove to his apartment and saw his white Chevy parked in its usual space.
She went to his front door and knocked, expecting him to answer. But her knock was greeted by only silence. So she knocked again and once more, but nothing stirred inside. So at this point, his co-star turns the doorknob just to see. And the door she was surprised to find was unlocked. So she lets herself in to Bob Crane's Scottsdale, Arizona home.
Inside the room, it was cool. The air conditioning unit was running. She could hear people moving about in the neighboring apartments, in eerie contrast to the stillness and silence of the one that she had just entered. She called out Bob's name and received no reply. She moved from the kitchen into the living room. Over near the fireplace was a video camera mounted on a tripod pointed at the couch.
She continued outside, looking for Bob at the complex pool, but there was no sign of him there either. So she re-entered the apartment, calling out Bob's name once more, continuing to go farther into the bedroom, where there on the bed was the figure of a man, half covered in a bed sheet, his head caked with blood. The man wasn't asleep. He was dead.
with a black plastic electrical cord wound around his neck and the walls around him covered in blood spatter.
She couldn't be entirely sure who the man was, for he had been beaten so badly he was unrecognizable, but she assumed it must be Bob in Bob's bedroom. Though Victoria was horrified, she still had the presence of mind to take note of her surroundings. She saw no sign of a struggle, either inside the bedroom or elsewhere in the apartment, and on the bed was a large black bag, unzipped and empty.
Victoria bolted from the apartment and flagged down a neighbor for help. The police arrived a short time later and sealed off the unit. One team began processing the crime scene while others went door to door to canvas the building and talk to neighbors. Victoria told the police that the man inside was probably either Bob Crane or his friend, John Henry Carpenter. She remembered that John was supposed to leave for LA that morning at 10 a.m. and Bob had agreed to drive him to the airport.
But because she had no contact with Crane since the previous day, she had no idea if John had actually made it out to the airport that morning or not. She also noted to the police that she observed beer inside the refrigerator and bottles of scotch and gin on the counter and
And to her knowledge, neither Bob nor John drank beer, scotch, or gin. In fact, John didn't drink at all. So the origin of the alcohol and the reason it was there was just one of multiple mysteries that presented that afternoon. But the first one to be solved was the identity of the dead man. It was Bob Crane. A week away from his 50th birthday, bludgeoned to death and then strangled for good measure.
And given Bob Crane's proclivities, it was perhaps all too poetic an irony that the murder weapon was determined to have been a camera tripod. He was beaten with a camera tripod. But aside from just being an ironic twist of fate, was it also a clue?
Another possible clue was that there were no indications of a struggle and no signs of forced entry. Whoever killed Crane was most likely invited inside the apartment. It was definitely someone he knew. And the camera tripod that police believed was used to kill Crane was missing from his apartment. Like, they couldn't find the murder weapon. And spoiler alert: the murder weapon would never be found.
Another problem here was that the Scottsdale Police Department rarely dealt with homicide cases. Scottsdale was a city with very few murders each year, and it quickly became clear they were in over their heads with the Bob Crane murder. I mean, a celebrity.
They were apparently unaware of the protocols of crime scene processing and collecting evidence because they allowed Bob's family to come into town and remove personal items from his apartment before the scene had been thoroughly processed.
But they did remove hundreds of videotapes from Crane's apartment. And when they began sifting through his countless hours of sex tapes Crane had amassed over the years, John Henry Carpenter's presence in many of them did not go unnoticed. And they learned that Crane had spent the evening before his death in the company of John Henry Carpenter.
And that turned up the dial on their interest even more. So police start putting together Bob Crane's last moments. And Crane was seen in the company of Carpenter and two women shortly after performing at the Windmill Dinner Theater. And the two men were last seen together at the Safari Hotel coffee shop in Scottsdale at around 2 in the morning, which would have been not long before Crane's death.
Also, while police were at the apartment, Carpenter called the apartment and when he got police on the phone, he never asked them why they were there. So he calls the apartment.
apparently looking for Bob Crane. And when police are on the phone, he never says, "Police, why are you there?" Which this seems a bit suspicious. So Carpenter was definitely someone that police wanted to talk to. And when they did, John adamantly denied killing his friend, Bob Crane, asserting that Bob was his best friend and he'd never do anything to hurt him. He claimed that his friend seemed in good spirits when they parted ways at around 2:45 in the morning.
Carpenter told police he then returned to his hotel room, took a cab to the airport early the next morning, and flew back to LA. But police already knew from his co-star that Bob Crane had agreed to drive his friend to the airport that morning. Yet John took a cab instead, so why the change of plans? Also, before leaving, John had laid out items he intended to return to Bob, like Bob's swim trunks, and left them behind in his hotel room.
So there were too many unresolved questions in John's story and detectives just felt like he was lying. So they tracked down the rental car that Carpenter had used while he was in town. They impounded it and had crime scene analysts comb it for evidence.
And inside, they found traces of human tissue in the car and seven blood stains on the inside of the passenger door. And the blood type was found to be blood type B, which is found in only 9% of the population. And it also happened to be the same blood type as Bob Crane's.
But that's as far as the investigation could go with the blood at the time. DNA profiling was still eight years away, and Carpenter claimed he had no idea how the blood had gotten inside his rental car. Maybe it was from a previous renter. Although investigators had grown confident that Carpenter was responsible for Bob Crane's murder, the evidence and motive at the time was purely circumstantial. So Carpenter was not charged.
and he was not at the time publicly named as a suspect. But for Bob's family, Carpenter was suspect number one. And during the investigation, they had revealed to police that in the months leading up to Bob Crane's death, Bob had complained to his family and friends that he was growing sick of his best friend Carpenter and wanted to cut off their relationship. And for John Henry Carpenter, he knew that without Bob's
Without Bob Crane's celebrity status, he wouldn't be able to score nearly as many random sleazy encounters on his own. In fact, his whole life would probably change if Bob Crane wasn't his friend, considering that he had now molded his life after Bob Crane. He needed Bob.
The family noted that when John visited Scottsdale, he would normally stay with Bob at Bob's apartment. But this last time it was different. Bob instead got John a room at a hotel down the street. This is a solid indication that Bob may have been planning to end their friendship, wanted space. And perhaps John's brain got clouded over with rage and resentment and waited till Bob was asleep before picking up a camera tripod and bashing his head in.
But there was no way to prove it, and Carpenter stopped cooperating. And over the years, the investigation went cold. Twelve years passed, and the mystery of who killed the infamous Bob Crane lingered on.
But then in 1990, Scottsdale investigators decided to retest the blood and tissue samples from Carpenter's rental car. Devastatingly, they realized that the tissue samples had been lost due to an administrative error. And the one blood stain they did test from the rental car was too degraded for 1990 technology to extract a DNA profile from.
But they did have a photograph of the tissue found in the rental car, a photograph that had previously been overlooked. And when analyzed by a forensic pathologist, it was determined that this tissue was human brain matter. Human brain matter in the rental car used by John Carpenter, the man Bob Crane was last seen with before being beaten to death.
With a tripod, what are the odds of the prime suspect in a murder investigation having brain matter and blood stains in their rental car and the suspect not being the perpetrator?
It took a couple of years to mount the case, but prosecutors felt like this was an impossibility. They concluded that the mere presence of brain matter in Carpenter's rental car and the fact that the blood samples matched Crane's blood type was sufficient probable cause to charge John Henry Carpenter with the murder. And in 1992, he was placed under arrest for Bob Crane's murder. He continued to maintain his innocence and he pleaded not guilty.
At his trial, Carpenter himself never took the stand. The defense's case focused on the inexperience and ineptitude of the Scottsdale Police Department and the way they did not properly secure the crime scene and allowed it to become contaminated.
They also argued that because Crane was an indiscriminate sex addict, it was just as likely that he was murdered by a jealous husband or boyfriend or perhaps by a woman. It was also noted that Bob's family also suspected his second wife, Patricia Olson, maybe had something to do with the murder because after all, she was the one who stood to gain the most from it. And after his death, she took control of his estate and was the sole beneficiary.
Ultimately, all 12 members of the jury believed that John Henry Carpenter was responsible for Bob Crane's murder, but they acquitted him. They couldn't deny the reality of the prosecution's case, which is there wasn't sufficient evidence to convict, and there was sufficient reasonable doubt to acquit. So Carpenter walked free.
In 1998, four years after his acquittal, John Henry Carpenter suddenly dropped dead in his home in California of a heart attack at the age of 70. He was survived by his wife of 42 years, who stuck by him in spite of the many reasons she could have and perhaps should have divorced him. The murder of Bob Crane remains officially unsolved, and various theories continue to circulate about the identity of the killer.
Some believe that Carpenter was responsible, while others suggest alternative suspects. The lack of definitive answers has contributed to the enduring mystery surrounding Bob Crane's murder. In the aftermath of the murder, Bob Crane's legacy became a mix of his professional achievements and the scandalous aspects of his personal life. The explicit tapes he had recorded, along with the unresolved circumstances of his death, added layers of complexity to his public image.
Shockingly, in 2001, Scotty Crane, Bob Crane's son from his second marriage, wrote a book called The Face of Bob Crane and created a so-called tribute website for his father. A website where, for a fee, you could view some of the explicit photos and sex tapes and videos of orgies that were part of his father's lurid legacy.
He went on to the Howard Stern radio show to promote it, as one does, and sold subscriptions to the website for $19.95 a month. This was met with a mixed reception. And in response to criticism, Scotty Crane argued that he was doing this to protect his father's image, which, okay, whatever.
His father's children from his first marriage were repulsed by Scotty's lack of respect for their father. His sister publicly called him the slime of the earth, and eventually the website came down. But over the years, several other books, documentaries, and films have explored the life and death of Bob Crane, delving into the details of his relationships, the murder investigation, and the impact on his family.
In 2002, a major motion picture about the life and death of Bob Crane was released to theaters. The movie was called "Autofocus" and was based on a book by Robert Gray Smith, who most famously wrote the best known books about the Zodiac Killer. In 2016, Fox 10 Phoenix interviewed the lead investigator in Arizona and persuaded him to package up the surviving blood samples from Bob Carpenter's rental car and send them off to a private laboratory in Maryland.
They'd hoped that advancements in forensic science and DNA testing since the early 90s would shed new light to whom the blood in the car belonged to. It was a last-ditch effort. And when the results came back, the news was shocking. The DNA from the blood in John Henry Carpenter's rental car did not match Bob Crane's.
The DNA test determined that the blood, in fact, came from two different sources. One DNA profile that was of an unknown male who was not Bob Crane, and the other DNA profile was too degraded to connect it to any one individual. So the outcome so many were hoping for and expecting that it would match Bob Crane and prove once and for all that John Henry Carpenter was responsible for his murder, that outcome never arrived.
But it does not totally rule out Carpenter either. Investigators have acknowledged the possibility that the sample that was sent to the lab was not part of the door panel. Or perhaps testing and retesting multiple times over the years had wiped away the original DNA. And perhaps the DNA profiles were those of people who had handled it.
it could have been contaminated or not preserved correctly because the evidence had been mishandled by Scottsdale police from the very beginning. As it stands, we'll likely never know for sure who killed Bob Crane.
But for many close to the case, John Henry Carpenter remains the number one suspect and for investigators who worked the case, the only suspect. I should close by saying that Bob Crane's children acknowledge the complicated legacy of their father while also remembering him as a loving, doting father who always had time for them and was never ugly or abusive.
His proclivities were lurid for sure, and the evidence suggested he was videotaping sexual encounters surreptitiously, which is criminal, as well as immoral, unethical, and honestly just effed up. But he didn't deserve to get his head bashed in. And if you're intrigued by cases in proximity to power, celebrity, with threads of illicit sex, and dirty secrets, then you'll want to stick around for next week's story. It
It has all of these elements, but instead of Hollywood power, it's a story steeped in political power. And I can't wait to dive into it with you. So I'll see you next week, bingers. Bye.