THE VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE MURDERER
The Case of Sal Mineo
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Murder is surprisingly rare in the motion picture community, although decidedly not rare in the rest of Los Angeles. Perhaps because stardom brings great wealth, enabling actors, producers and directors to reside in Bel-Air and Beverly Hills in homes which resemble fortresses with elaborate security devices, the ugly act of murder does not occur as often as in other communities.
In fact, in my experience, I recall only four cases of homicide among actors and actresses: Ramon Novarro, a Latin actor killed by two homosexual hustlers; Sharon Tate, murdered by the Manson cult; Dorothy Stratten, shot by the husband she was leaving; and Sal Mineo, the young actor from the Bronx, who was stabbed in an alley behind his apartment house by a then unknown assailant. Of the four, the Mineo case is of interest to coroners everywhere because forensic science tripped up a murderer with an apparently ironclad alibi based on what eyewitnesses at the scene of the crime told police.
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Salvatore Mineo, Jr., was born on January 10, 1939, the son of an Italian-born coffin maker. His Bronx neighborhood, East 217th Street, was tough, and at the age of eight he was already a member of a street gang—and he had been expelled from a parochial school as a troublemaker.
His mother, Josephine, met the challenge in an unusual way. She enrolled her son in a dancing class. Three years later, when Mineo was eleven, Broadway producer Cheryl Crawford, who was searching for two Italian-American children to play bit parts in Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo, saw Mineo in dancing school. Crawford asked the boy to recite the line “The goat is in the yard.”
That turned out to be Mineo’s line in the play; in fact, most of his acting ability in the play was focused on the chore of leading a balky goat across the stage of the Martin Beck Theatre night after night for a year. But the exposure won him entrance to the world of show business—and a real acting job as the young prince in The King and I.
By the age of fifteen, Sal Mineo was in Hollywood, and at seventeen, in 1956, he won an Academy Award as a troubled juvenile in Rebel Without a Cause. The movie established Mineo as a teenage idol, along with his co-stars, Natalie Wood and James Dean. They too were to die untimely deaths, Dean in a car accident in 1955, at the height of his film career, and Wood in 1981 in the sea off Catalina Island.
In 1961 Mineo won a second Academy Award nomination, this time for his role as Dov Landau, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp turned into a Zionist terrorist, in Exodus. A close relationship with his teenage co-star, Jill Haworth, followed. But then, as so often happens in Hollywood, the magic suddenly dissolved. Good roles did not come Mineo’s way, perhaps because the tough young delinquents of the fifties were no longer in style. By the 1960s the “rebels without a cause” were college students with a cause, to end the Vietnam War. Mineo was reduced to playing television roles in shows such as Ellery Queen and Joe Forrester, and his only role in a major motion picture was as an ape in Escape from the Planet of the Apes.
Through this decline, as his close friend the director Peter Bogdanovich wrote, Mineo never complained. Instead he retained his “sunny and easygoing qualities, his quick wit and infectious self-mockery.” And by 1969, with his image as a teenage “punk” far behind him, and with film roles for an adult Mineo scarce, he returned to his first great love, the theater. In that year he directed Fortune and Men’s Eyes, which opened in Los Angeles and proved a great success, eventually moving to Broadway in New York.
The play had a homosexual background, as did Mineo’s role in P.S. Your Cat Is Dead, in which he was to star in 1976. On the night of February 12 of that year, Salvatore Mineo, Jr., returned to his apartment house from a rehearsal and parked his blue Chevelle in a carport in the rear. At that moment, his assailant struck. Neighbors heard Mineo cry out, “Oh God, no! Help! Someone help!” Then they heard sounds of a struggle, more screams, then silence.
Seconds later, bystanders saw a man fleeing down the driveway and speeding off in a car—a white man with long brown hair, they later told police. By the time they reached the thirty-seven-year-old Mineo, he was near death, a long stream of blood flowing from a stab wound in his chest. A neighbor, Roy Evans, gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. “He kept gasping and after about five minutes his last breath went into me,” Evans said later, “and that was the end of it.”
But it was the beginning of the mystery—and the rumors about the actor’s death. As Newsweek magazine reported:
Police investigators were unable to establish any motive for the killing—there was no evidence of robbery. But partly because of Mineo’s recent homosexual roles and partly because the knifing occurred near the notoriously kinky Sunset Strip, long whispered reports of the actor’s alleged bisexuality and fondness for sadomasochistic ritual quickly surrounded his murder.
As the Chief Medical Examiner of Los Angeles County, I supervised the autopsy of Sal Mineo’s body, which was performed with his usual care and excellence by Dr. Manuel R. Breton, one of my deputy medical examiners. The killer has escaped, but perhaps, we thought, the body of his victim would present clues to us. So our first step was to X-ray the lower chest and the upper abdomen to see if any metallic fragments from the knife could be found. There were none. Our second step was to preserve evidence of the exact nature of the fatal wound. In the prosaic words of the autopsy report, our forensic-science decision read this way: “Sections: 1. For storage: routine representative sections of main tissue and organs, including stab wound of the skin and heart, are submitted….”
That precaution was to prove the undoing of the anonymous murderer.
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For more than a year, police pursued every lead in the Mineo case without success, until it was reported to them that a convict in Michigan named Lionel Williams had been overheard telling another prisoner, “Have you ever killed anybody? It’s very easy.” A guard, Albert Lemkuhl, told police that Williams had boasted of killing Mineo.
The reason the police were talking to guards and prisoners about Williams was that his wife in Los Angeles, Theresa, had fingered him for the murder of Sal Mineo. Mrs. Williams said that her husband had returned home on the night of the killing covered with blood, saying, “I just killed this dude in Hollywood.” Williams told his wife that he had murdered Mineo with a hunting knife.
In the Michigan jail, where he was now imprisoned on a $174 bad-check charge, Williams denied telling the guard he had killed Mineo. But police noticed an unusual tattoo on his arm: a hunting knife. As the police said, “It was almost as if he put the mark of Cain on himself.”
Concentrating their investigation on Williams, the police soon found evidence of a whole chain of vicious muggings in Los Angeles allegedly committed by Williams. Could the murder of Mineo have been the result of a routine mugging? A witness said the getaway car was a yellow subcompact; police discovered a loan agreement showing that Williams was driving a yellow Dodge Colt on the night of the murder.
The web of circumstantial evidence began to pin Williams tighter, except for one startling fact. Williams was a black man with an Afro hairdo. Every witness in the area had seen a white man run from the scene.
It was then the police remembered the chest section stored in the Los Angeles County Forensic Science Center, in which the stab wound was preserved.
When a stab wound causes a fatal injury, we always examine that wound for several characteristics such as length, width, thickness, single-edge blade or double, sharp or dull. By surgical procedure we also examine the wound layer by layer.
In effect we create what I call a “negative cast,” which is the wound itself and which is preserved in its surrounding tissues in formalin. Our goal is to provide a precise means of identifying the murder weapon, if it is recovered, by matching the wound with the knife.
At the time of the Mineo murder, we had purchased a number of knives to assist our research into stab wounds, because deaths from slashers had become p
revalent in Los Angeles. When the police arrived at our office they had a description obtained from Williams’ wife of a hunting knife owned by Williams. She even knew its price: $5.28. We had an exactly similar knife in our collection.
Normally we don’t insert an allegedly matching knife into a wound during an autopsy, because it would distort the incision. But now, because the tissues had been fixed in formalin for storage, we could do so without such distortion. We inserted the blade of this knife into the wound, and it matched perfectly.
Still, the owner of the knife was black, and eyewitnesses had seen a white man fleeing from the scene.
It was then that police discovered in their files a photograph of Williams taken by them a few years before, when he had been suspected of another crime, and suddenly we had our solution to the mystery. The picture showed that Williams did not have an Afro at that time. Instead, he had long, “processed” hair which was light brown and worn in the style of Caucasians. That was the way he had looked on the night of Mineo’s murder, and the witnesses had been wrong. The long brown hair, unusual for blacks, had fooled them.
Eyewitness accounts, as police and medical examiners know, can be notoriously inaccurate, a constant problem for the courts. In the death of Sal Mineo, they presented a seemingly insoluble obstacle to the prosecution. Nevertheless, excellent police work, assisted by forensic science, brought the killer to justice.
ONE LAST LAUGH
The Case of Freddie Prinze
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A strange Hollywood case that was handled by the Medical Examiner’s Office during my tenure as its chief was that of Freddie Prinze, the sensational young Latino star of a hit television show, Chico and the Man, who, at the peak of his success and fame, put a gun to his head and shot himself.
Freddie Prinze was born June 22, 1954, in a Spanish-speaking area of Washington Heights near Harlem which the comic actor later described as “a slum with trees.” From the first he had an identity problem in the neighborhood because his father was a Hungarian Jew. Prinze called himself a Hunga-Rican. Also, as he recalled, he was “a fat kid, poor at sports, and I had asthma. I also studied piano and ballet, which tended to blow my credibility as a tough guy.”
But Prinze could make his peers laugh—and that talent proved to be his ticket out of the ghetto. His hard-working parents enrolled him in the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan. “But actually,” Prinze said, “I learned more in the Improvisation Club and on the street than I ever did at school.”
The Improvisation featured young amateur comics of every kind, and there Prinze developed a routine with a Latino accent, which was entirely new to the paying customers. Latino comics were, at the time, nonexistent in the entertainment world, and so the crowds roared at his particular ethnic humor:
“My mother’s always talking about the wedding. You shoulda been there, she says. She doesn’t remember. I was there, and so were my two brothers.
“Each day when I was going to school as a kid my mother gave me a dollar bill as protection. ‘Eef you get mugged, you geeve him thees!’ So, every day I geeve the mugger the buck, till one rainy day I take a chance and spend the money on a soda. But the mugger catches me anyway, and when I tell him I don’t have my dollar, he says, indignant, ‘I’m gonna tell your ma!’”
The aspiring comics at the Improvisation worked for no pay, their only reward the possibility that an agent or a producer might be in the audience, and one particular night fate smiled on Freddie Prinze. An agent thought he had promise, and bookings at the Playboy Club and on the Jack Paar television program followed.
Quickly, his career snowballed. In 1973 Prinze made an appearance on the Johnny Carson show and scored a great personal success. Carson asked him back several times, and fate kept smiling on Prinze. Television situation comedies at the time employed no Latino actors, but a producer who saw Prinze on The Tonight Show happened to be planning the first comedy ever to star a Chicano. Prinze won the role of the young Chicano who worked for a bigoted, hard-drinking old garage owner in East Los Angeles.
The situation comedy was a phenomenal success from the first, never out of the top ten in ratings. Prinze’s words to his frustrated boss, “Ees not my chob!” became a national gag line. By 1977 Prinze seemed to have everything going for him. Besides Chico and the Man, he had just signed a lucrative contract with Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. He was negotiating film deals with Warner Brothers and Universal. He had filled in for Johnny Carson as host of The Tonight Show, and more such appearances were in the offing. As Time magazine reported, “At the age of 22, he attained one of the highest status roles in show business when he performed for the President at the Inaugural Gala in Washington.”
That was one month before Freddie Prinze committed suicide.
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At 3 A.M., January 29, 1977, the telephone rang in the home of Martin “Dusty” Snyder, Prinze’s business manager. The actor wanted to talk, but he sounded “strange” to Snyder, who quickly dressed and drove to Prinze’s home.
Snyder was worried that the pressure from several areas was getting to his client. Prinze had been commuting between Las Vegas and Hollywood, doing both his nightclub act and the arduous all-day filming of Chico and the Man, which left him fatigued. Further, he and Kathy, his wife and the mother of their young son, had separated six months before. Lastly, and most ominously, the actor had become a Quaalude addict.
Quaalude is a brand name for methaqualone hydrochloride, described in physician’s terms as a sedative-hypnotic. It is a dangerous drug often implicated in suicides. Addiction leads to such symptoms as loss of memory, inability to concentrate, tremors and finally depression.
But when Snyder appeared at Prinze’s house, the actor didn’t seem disturbed; instead Prinze greeted him at the door with a smile. Dressed in his favorite karate pants, he went to the sofa while Snyder sat in a nearby loveseat. Prinze wrote something on a piece of notepaper, then pushed it across the coffee table to Snyder, saying, “Is that legible?”
Snyder read the words “I cannot go on any longer.” Before he could reply, Prinze picked up the telephone and called his estranged wife. In that conversation he informed her that he was going to “end it all,” but Snyder didn’t hear this as he quietly slipped out of the room to telephone Prinze’s psychiatrist, Dr. William S. Kroger, and ask what to do.
Dr. Kroger reportedly replied, “He’s been behaving this way all this week. He’s just crying out for attention and help, but I’m not concerned with his doing harm to himself.”
When Snyder returned, he found Prinze now on the phone to his secretary, Carol Novak. By the end of that call, the actor seemed to relax, quietly bending over the coffee table and adding more words to the note that he had written.
Finished, he put the pen down, then suddenly reached under a sofa cushion and pulled out a revolver. Instinctively Snyder reached out to grab it, but Prinze gestured with the gun for Snyder to sit back. Snyder talked desperately to Prinze. He reminded him of his mother and his baby, and that his insurance policy had a suicide clause which would mean they wouldn’t get the money.
Prinze listened, but then pressed the muzzle of the gun against his temple and squeezed the trigger.
The close contact muted the sound, but the results were catastrophic. Blood spattered everywhere as the twenty-two-year-old actor toppled sideways on the sofa, dead.
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Prinze’s body was brought to our Forensic Science Center, and a week later, as I studied the autopsy report, I was worried. On its face, Prinze’s death was one of the most obvious suicides in my experience. Not only had he shot himself in front of an eyewitness a few feet away, but he had telephoned both his estranged wife and his secretary to inform them he was going to do so. Further, he had written a suicide note and handed it to Snyder. And finally, his blood revealed a high level of Quaaludes, which causes suicidal depression.
And yet, I was puzzled by one factor: a witness had been present. In my long and sad expe
rience with suicides, victims almost always perform the act in solitude. Prinze had committed suicide in front of a friend. Why?
I remember telling associates that I expected trouble in this case. In fact, I called Dr. Robert Litman, the suicide psychology expert, to discuss the matter. Taking all the facts into consideration, however, including the telephone call to his ex-wife, and the other circumstantial and eyewitness evidence of a suicide, which was overwhelming, we both believed Prinze’s death was by suicide, and that was the coroner’s official verdict.
But a few months later I received my first hint that my earlier concerns had been correct. An attorney for Prinze’s mother called me and said the family would claim that Prinze’s death was an accident, not a suicide. As insurance money was involved, I wasn’t surprised by the action. Nor was I surprised that there might have been another aspect to Prinze’s death. But I asked the attorney how he intended to prove that it was not suicide.
In reply, he informed me that on the very day of his death Prinze, while high on Quaaludes, had waved the gun in front of his secretary, Carol Novak, in his apartment, pulled the trigger, then collapsed to the floor. When Novak rushed to his side in horror, the actor sat up, laughing.
According to both Carol Novak and Prinze’s psychiatrist, Dr. Kroger, Prinze had been fooling around with the gun for some time, “showing off.” The family was going to claim in court that his death was not a suicide but, instead, an accident that had occurred while Prinze, under the influence of Quaaludes, was showing off or playing a prank, and forgot that the safety was off.
On January 20, 1983, the family’s claim was upheld by a jury, and $200,000 in insurance money was paid to them. The attorney said afterward, “It has been the mother’s feeling in her heart and in her mind that Freddie did not intend to commit suicide; that if it had not been for the drugs he would not have done what he did.”
The Coroner Series Page 30