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A CALENDAR OF MOVIES: Christmas - "The King of Kings" (1927)
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ABBOTT & COSTELLO
AMERICAN CLASSIC MOVIES INTRODUCTIONS
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ARCHITECTURE IN HOLLYWOOD
ARCHITECTURE IN HOLLYWOOD: Sets
ARCITECTURE: Ancient Egypt
ARCHITECTURE IN HOLLYWOOD: Bernheimer Residence
ARCHITECTURE IN HOLLYWOOD: The Ennis-Brown House
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ARCHITECTURE IN HOLLYWOOD: Greystone Manor
ARCHITECTURE IN HOLLYWOOD: The Hearst Castle
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ARCHITECTURE IN HOLLYWOOD: Homes of the Stars
ARCHITECTURE IN HOLLYWOOD: Jean Harlow
ARCHITECTURE IN HOLLYWOOD: Maps and Floor Plans
ARCHITECTURE IN HOLLYWOOD: Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch
ARCHITECTURE IN HOLLYWOOD: Pickfair
ARCHITECTURE IN HOLLYWOOD: The Rispin Mansion
ARCHITECTURE IN HOLLYWOOD: Royal Hawaiian Hotel
ARCHITECTURE IN HOLLYWOOD: Scotty's Castle
ARCHITECTURE IN HOLLYWOOD: Shelby House
ARCHITECTURE IN HOLLYWOOD: West Hollywood Historical Association
ARCHITECTURE IN HOLLYWOOD: Whimsy
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ARCHIVES: VOLUME 2
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CHARLIE CHAN: Asian Actors in Hollywood
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CHARLIE CHAN: Charlie's Sons
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CHARLIE CHAN: Criminal?!?!*
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CHARLIE CHAN: Maven and Rush Glick's Interview in . . . "Monster Bash"!
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CHARLIE CHAN: Murder Rate
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CHILDREN'S CORNER
CHILDREN'S CORNER: Holiday Crafts
CHILDREN'S CORNER: Boats and Planes and More
CHILDREN'S CORNER: Paper Dolls
CHILDREN'S CORNER: Fun Stuff to Read
CHILDREN'S CORNER: Boys' Town
CHILDREN'S CORNER: Colleen Moore's Castle
CHILDREN'S CORNER: Judy Bolton
CHILDREN'S CORNER: Nancy Drew
CHILDREN'S CORNER: Nancy Drew (For Older Fans!)
CHILDREN'S CORNER: Shirley Temple
COMEDIANS
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ETTA KIT
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HISTORY: Hollywood and Elsewhere
HOLLYWOOD'S SCANDALS AND CRIMES
HOLLYWOOD'S . . . CRIME: Greystone Mansion Murder
HOLLYWOOD'S . . . Crime: Jean Harlow and Paul Bern's Muder?
HOLLYWOOD'S . . . CRIME: Tate/LaBianca Murders
HOLLYWOOD'S . . .CRIME: William Desmond Taylor Murder
HOLLYWOOD'S MARRY-GO-ROUNDS
HORROR - SCIENCE FICTION
HORROR - SCI FI: Annex
HORROR - SCI FI: The Atomic Submarine (1959)
HORROR - SCI FI: Bela Lugosi
HORROR - SCI FI: Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi
HORROR - SCI FI: Boris Karloff
HORROR - SCI FI: Dracula (1931)
HORROR - SCI FI: Frankenstein (1931)
HORROR - SCI FI: Gojira (1954) & Godzilla (1957)
HORROR - SCI FI: Invaders from Mars (1954)
HORROR - SCI FI: King Kong
HORROR - SCI FI: Lon Chaney
HORROR - SCI FI: Nifty Fifty's Creature Features
HORROR - SCI FI: Nightmare Theatre with Gorgon
HORROR - SCI FI: Ray Harryhausen
HORROR - SCI FI: Stephen King
HORROR - SCI FI: Universal Studios
HORROR - SCI FI: Universal Monster Genealogy
HORROR - SCI FI: Wes Davis
HORROR - SCI FI: The Witch's Dungeon
HOLLYWOOD SQUARES
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I LOVE LUCY
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MAKEUP ARTISTS: The Westmore Family
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MARY PICKFORD AND DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS
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MAVEN'S WEBSITES TO CHECK OUT
MUSIC
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MUSIC: The Lyrics
MYSTERIES
MYSTERIES: A Warning For Those Who Give Away The Endings!
MYSTERIES: Alfred Hitchcock
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MYSTERIES: Old Dark Houses
MYSTERIES: S.S. Van Dine
MYSTERIES: S.S. Van Dine - The Kidnap Murder Case
ORSON WELLES
PERRY MASON
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QUOTES From Hollywood
QUOTES From Hollywood Movies
QUOTES From Dorothy Parker
QUOTES Dorothy Parkers' "The Waltz"
RADIO SHOWS: Vintage Series
RECIPES OF THE WEEK
RECIPES OF THE WEEK: More about the Recipes
RECIPES OF THE WEEK: A Rejuvenating Diet
REVIEWS
REVIEWS - Mini Mavens
RONALD REAGAN
RUDOLPH VALENTINO
SEX IN THE CINEMA
SHIRLEY TEMPLE
SILENT MOVIES
TAYLOR SCHULTZ: Hollywood Sculptor
TRANSPORTATION IN THE MOVIES: Aviation
VINCENT PRICE
VINCENT PRICE: Connoisseur
WHAT'S MY LINE?
THE WHISTLER
THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)

HOLLYWOOD SCANDALS:
Single Beds and Double Standards
 
Scandals have plagued Hollywood since very early on.  Think you know your cinema scandals? . . . .  Have  fun checking these out!
 

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The Hypnoic Eye and Caryl Chessman

The Mysterious Death of Mary Pickford's Sister-in-Law, Olive Thomas

     Doris Day . . . a name long respected in Hollywood for a very talented lady . . . and usually thought of as being extra nice without a shadow of a blemish.
     What a lot of people don't know . . . or don't remember . . . is that Ms. Day was indirectly involved in one of the most shocking murders in Hollywood history:  The murders of Sharon Tate and her friends at the former home of Day's son, Terry Melcher.
     Read on for the details from Doris Day and her son:

Doris Day and the Manson Murders

Domminick Dunne knew a few things . . . about Hollywood and New York Societies.  So click on the link, sit back and be ready to be shocked!

Dominick Dunne

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DEADLY ILLUSIONS
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JEAN HARLOW and the Murder of PAUL BERN

     Maven has a book about one of Hollywood's enduring mysteries/scandals . . .  DEADLY ILLUSIONS:  JEAN HARLOW and the Murder of PAUL BERN by Samuel Marx and Joyce Vanderveen, Random House, New York, 1990,
     Samuel Marx was one of Paul Bern's closest friends and business associates who was there at the Harlow/Bern House after Bern's body was found.  Marx's story is the intertwining of death, coverups, politics and more rolled up into a real-life whodunit.
     His co-author, Joyce Vanderveen, brought a new light on the story that compels both of them to go back and find out just what DID go on - or didn't!
     A great read!

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Fourteen Reasons to Believe
Lizzie Murdered Her Parents
1.  If not Lizzie, then who?  Only Lizzie had a good opportunity to commit the murders.  At the time of her mother's murder (around 9:30 A.M.), household guest John Morse was visiting relatives, sister Emma was out of town, Andrew Borden was running errands around town, and maid Bridget Sullivan was outside washing windows.  Only Lizzie was known to be in the house at the time of Abby Borden's murder. To commit both murders (Andrew Borden was murdered around 11 A.M.), an outside intruder would have either have had to hide in the house for 90 minutes  or departed and then returned without being seen.

2.  It looks like an inside job. Police found no signs of forced entry into the Borden home (despite the fact that the Borden's habitually locked their doors) and nothing appeared to have been stolen.  No stranger was seen entering or leaving the Borden house on the morning of the murders.

3.  Although Lizzie claimed to have been downstairs at the very time her mother was violently murdered upstairs, she said she heard no alarming noises--this despite her mother having been struck multiple times with an axe and falling to the floor.

4.  On August 3, the day before the murders, witnesses identified Lizzie Borden as having visited Smith's drug store in Fall River, where she attempted to purchase a poison, prussic acid.  She explained that she needed the acid to clean a sealskin cape.  The druggist refused to sell the prussic acid.

5.  On the night before the murders, Lizzie visited a neighbor, Alice Russell, and told her that she feared that some unidentified enemy of her father's might soon try to kill him.

6.  Lizzie told police that while she was alone in the house with her mother on the morning of the murder, a messenger came to the door with a note summoning her mother to visit a sick friend.  Lizzie told people that she assumed her mother had left.  Despite a thorough search of the Borden home, no such alleged note ever was found.

7.  When Bridget Sullivan came back inside after having finished washing outside windows, around 10:30 A.M., she reported hearing a muffled laugh coming from upstairs.  She assumed that it was Lizzie making the noise.  (Lizzie, of course, denied being upstairs during this time period between her mother's murder and her father's murder.)

8.  At the time of the murder of Andrew Borden, Lizzie claimed to have been in the loft of the backyard barn for 15 to 20 minutes looking for lead sinkers for a fishing excursion.  Police found the loft so stiflingly hot that it was difficult to believe anyone would voluntarily remain in such a place for as much as 20 minutes.  They also found no footprints in the loft that could substantiate Lizzie's story.

9.  Lizzie had a strained relationship with her step-mother.  They usually ate their meals separately. Some theorize that Lizzie resented the fact that her father transferred a Falls River property to Abby's sister, rather than to her.  Police noted that during her interview, Lizzie insisted that Abby be described as her "step-mother," not her mother. 

10.  Although Lizzie appeared to have a somewhat better relationship with her distant and forbidding father, there were problems there as well.  Lizzie was outraged, for example, when her father beheaded pigeons in the barn loft for which she had built a roost.  (Her father thought the pigeons attracted neighborhood boys, who broke into the barn to hunt the pigeons.)

11.  In the week before the murders, following an apparent family argument, Lizzie and her sister Emma left Fall River by coach for New Bedford.  When Lizzie returned, she chose to stay in a rooming house for four days, rather than in her own room in the family residence.

12.  In 1891, cash and jewelry were stolen from the master bedroom in the Borden home.  It was an open secret that Lizzie was suspected as having been the thief.  Lizzie also had been accused by several local merchants of shoplifting.  (Yes, murder is far different that stealing--but it does suggest that Lizzie was hardly a model daughter.)

13.  Immediately after the discovery of her parents' bodies, Lizzie sent various persons who came to help off on various errands.  It seems strange that a woman would choose to remain alone in a house if she thought a murderer still might be nearabouts on the loose.

14.  On August 7, three days after the murders, Alice Russell observed Lizzie burning a blue corduroy dress in a kitchen fire.  When asked about it, Lizzie explained that she chose to destroy the dress because it was stained with old paint.


Trial of Lizzie Borden Homepage

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Los Feliz Murder Mystery…*

Posted by Allan Ellenberger on Feb 6th, 2009
2009
Feb 6

LOS ANGELES HISTORY

On a Los Feliz hill, murder — then mystery

Los Feliz murder house

 Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times
The hilltop Los Feliz mansion where Dr. Harold Perelson killed his wife and then himself in 1959. It has sat vacant ever since.

Inside a mansion, it’s as if time stopped in 1959 when a doctor killed his wife and then himself. Gifts still sit, unopened. Why?

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By Bob Pool
Los Angeles Times
February 6, 2009

It’s a murder mystery that has puzzled a Los Feliz neighborhood since 1959.

The criminal-case part was solved quickly enough. Homicide investigators found that Dr. Harold Perelson bludgeoned his wife to death with a ball-peen hammer, savagely beat their 18-year-old daughter and then fatally poisoned himself by gulping a glass of acid.    (Click on ‘Continue Reading’ for more)

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Authorities removed two other children from the sprawling hillside estate that overlooks downtown Los Angeles, locked the front door to the 5,050-square-foot mansion, and left.

Fifty years later, the Glendower Place home remains empty.

The estate’s terraced grounds are pockmarked by gopher holes and overgrown with grass that sprouted after recent rains — growth that neighbors know will turn brown when summer returns. A pond is partly filled with rainwater. Weeds poke through cracks in a curving asphalt driveway.

On the outside, the mansion itself appears to be slowly decaying.

Through grimy, cracked windows, one can see dust-covered furniture, including a 1950s-style television set, seemingly frozen in time. What appear to be gaily wrapped Christmas gifts sit on a table.

And in the hills near the Greek Theatre, the questions linger

Why has the current owner kept the home as it was on Dec. 6, 1959? Will another family ever again bring life to the estate once described in a sales ad as “beautiful” and “delightful”?

Built in 1925, the three-story Spanish revival-style home has a basement that boasts a maid’s quarters. The first floor features an entrance hall flanked by a glassed-in conservatory and large living room. Toward the back is a den, a dining room and the kitchen.

Four master-bedroom-size sleeping chambers are on the second floor. A bar-equipped ballroom measuring 20 feet by 36 feet is on the third level.

Real estate experts have suggested that the mansion, with its spectacular view of the Los Angeles Basin and the Palos Verdes Peninsula, could fetch as much as $2.9 million if sold.

“No one has lived there since the murders,” said Dr. Cheri Lewis, who grew up across the street from the mansion and still lives in the neighborhood.

Lewis vividly remembers the predawn morning when Perelson, 50, killed his 42-year-old wife, Lillian, and severely beat his teenage daughter.

When two younger children were awakened by the victims’ screams, Perelson told them they were simply having a bad dream, his youngest daughter told police. “Go back to bed. This is a nightmare,” he told 11-year-old Debbie. She and her 13-year-old brother, Joel, escaped injury.

Eighteen-year-old Judye Perelson ran from the mansion and staggered to a neighbor’s house. She was treated at Central Receiving Hospital and then taken to General Hospital with a possible skull fracture, The Times would report the next day.

“Judye came to our door. I remember having my hand in her blood,” recalls Lewis, now a Beverly Hills dentist.

“I used to baby-sit the children there. I was supposed to spend the next night there, in fact.”

Police found Perelson lying dead on the floor next to his wife’s blood-soaked bed. He was still clutching the hammer. On a nightstand next to his bed, investigators found an open copy of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” which was opened to Canto 1.

“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost . . . ,” read the passage.

Detectives speculated that Perelson, a physician affiliated with an Inglewood medical clinic, was distressed by financial difficulties.

In Judye Perelson’s sports car, police found a note written to an aunt that told of the family being “on the merry-go-round again, same problems, same worries, only tenfold. My parents, so to speak, are in a bind financially.” The teenager spoke of getting a job to help the family out.

After the rampage, relatives took the younger Perelson children to the East Coast, Lewis said. The current whereabouts of the three are unknown.

The story of the murder-suicide and the locked-up mansion has been told and retold ever since, each time a newcomer moves into the neighborhood or when visitors come upon it.

House painter Steve Kalupski was puzzled one summer day eight years ago when he glanced over at the mansion from a neighboring dwelling where he was working. Through a grimy window, he said he could see gifts piled next to what in the dimness appeared to be a Christmas tree.

“I asked the owner of the home where we were working why it was there, and she told me the story,” said Kalupski, a Hollywood resident who now is an ad agency producer.

His friends didn’t believe him when he told them what he’d seen. So he began a ritual of driving them to the Los Feliz hillside to show them the abandoned mansion. He took Hollywood Internet entrepreneur Babette Papaj there two months ago. “It was dark and scary. I was afraid to get out of the car,” she said.

Neighboring Glendower Place resident Sheree Waterson said a friend of hers tried one night to check out the mansion in what she describes as “a Nancy Drew moment.”

The woman pushed open a rear door and walked in, but she didn’t get far before a burglar alarm went off. She turned around and left, joking later about “ghosts” when she returned to Waterson’s home. Soon, her hand was throbbing painfully.

“She’d been bitten by a black widow. There was a red vein going up her arm. She had to go to the doctor,” said Waterson, a clothing company executive.

“Two nights later the alarm kept going off at my house on my back door. But there was no one there. It was like the ghost was following us.”

A year after the murders, in 1960, the mansion was sold in a probate action to a Lincoln Heights couple, Emily and Julian Enriquez. Neighbors remember that the pair visited the house and brought property there to store but didn’t move in.

In time, the place gradually fell into disrepair. Antique light fixtures dating from the 1920s disappeared from the outside.

Over the years, neighbors say they have helped maintain the property by painting a street-side garage and tidying up the frontyard. They placed a chain across a driveway that leads to the rear of the mansion, giving each nearby resident a key to its lock.

Several years ago the city required current owner Rudy Enriquez to replace stucco that had peeled from the sides of the house and front walkway walls and to repaint the place, neighbors say.

“We had major problems.,” explained Jude Margolis, a former neighborhood resident who now lives in Hancock Park.

“Hookers were coming in. Everybody was bringing guests up there. One night I was sitting outside and I noticed that people were over there having a picnic in the backyard,” said Margolis, an artist. (The burglar alarm was installed after that.)

Enriquez inherited the mansion when his mother died in 1994. Since then, he has been approached many times by potential buyers but has steadfastly refused to sell. He tells everyone he hasn’t decided what he wants to do with the property.

“I asked him why not lease it, at least. You can’t have a house sit empty for 50 years and not expect it to fall apart. It’s a tear-down now. It’s a shame,” Margolis said.

Enriquez never invited her into the mansion when he visited it. Another neighbor, Steven Hurley, has never been inside, either.

“There are all kinds of stories about the house. Rudy’s a very nice man. He’s just not interested in doing anything with that house. He’s never going to sell it,” said Hurley, a lighting company sales manager.

Enriquez, a 77-year-old retired music store manager who lives in the Mount Washington area, said he remains uncertain about his plans. “I don’t know that I want to live there or even stay here,” he said. He might relocate to Hawaii or Arizona, he added.

But it has nothing to do with the mansion’s violent past.

“I’ve never looked at it as being haunted,” he said. “For a time I had two cats inside there and I had to go often to feed them. I still go there often — I was there last night, in fact. I think now I’ll be going more often.

“The only spooky thing there is me. Tell people to say their prayers every morning and evening and they’ll be OK.”

bob.pool@latimes.com

Times researcher Robin Mayper contributed to this story.

*http://allanellenberger.com/book-flm-news/los-feliz-murder-mystery/comment-page-1/#comment-28896