This list features the most famous murders that have occurred in the state of California but have never been solved. Some cases were riddled with messy evidence and strange, cryptic puzzles, while others astoundingly had nothing. What are the most famous unsolved murders in California? Read through the list below to find out.
In some of these cases a suspect was named, or was even imprisoned, only to be released later for a lack of evidence. In many other of these cases, no suspects or murder weapons were ever found. Though these murders may have happened decades ago, California police still receive leads every year on each of these cases. Most bring them nowhere, leaving the murder just as mysterious as ever. But sometimes, new evidence surfaces, bringing new light and momentum to old cases.
This list names the most famous unsolved murders in California.
27 Famous Unsolved Murders in California,
George Reeves
After the "Superman" series, Reeves had trouble finding work and was in dire financial straits due to his extravagant Hollywood lifestyle. According to the police report, between approximately 1:30 and 2:00 a.m. on June 16, 1959, Reeves reportedly shot himself in the head in the upstairs bedroom of his Los Angeles home, while his fiancée, playwright Leonore Lemmon, and friends William Bliss, writer Robert Condon, and Carol Van Ronkel were partying downstairs. The houseguests allegedly heard a single gunshot and Bliss ran into the room to find Reeves' lifeless body.
Police reports at the time said that Reeves was depressed because he wasn't earning roles. Lemmon and Mannix became suspects of the death, but no one was ever convicted or arrested.
Marilyn Monroe
Born Norma Jeane Mortenson, Monroe died in her Brentwood home on August 4, 1962, at 36-years-old. Her housekeeper and psychiatrist discovered Monroe naked in bed with an empty bottle of sleeping pills nearby. Before her death, Monroe had been hospitalized for psychiatric problems and was receiving long-term psychiatric care. Her death was ruled a probable suicide, but many believe Monroe was murdered, possibly to make sure she wouldn't talk about her liaisons with both John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert. Although rumors and speculation continue, there is no definitive answer about Monroe's death.
New evidence recently surfaced in 2014 about Monroe's last hours from the late Hollywood private detective Fred Otash, whose work documents on Monroe were recently discovered by his daughter. According to Otash, who had bugged Monroe's house, she had been sexually involved with both John F. Kennedy and his brother, Bobby, and that Monroe had commented that she "had been passed around like piece of meat."
Otash wrote, "I listened to Marilyn Monroe die." In his notes, he recorded that she had been in an heated argument with the Kennedys about being passed between them like "a piece of meat," when he then said, "she was really screaming and they were trying to quiet her down.
"She's in the bedroom and Bobby gets a pillow and muffles her on the bed to keep the neighbors from hearing. She finally quieted down and then he was looking for a way to get out of there."
Otash later discovered that Monroe had died. His notes don't contain any additional information about what he discovered at Monroe's apartment, nor were the tapes recording her encounter with the Kennedy's ever discovered. He also had a red filing cabinet that contained his most sensitive information, but was removed from his house by his lawyer after he died. The contents were never seen again.
Natalie Wood
Born Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko, Wood was known for her roles in West Side Story and Rebel Without a Cause, as well as high-profile relationships with many men, from Elvis Presley to Dennis Hopper. On the evening of November 28, 1981, she was on Catalina Island taking a break from filming the sci-fi film Brainstorm with her co-star, Christopher Walken, and her husband, Robert Wagner, when she and Wagner began to argue about her relationship with Walken.
The next morning, Wood's body was found along with a dinghy floating in the water. A passenger on a boat nearby claimed she heard someone yelling cries of help that evening. In the wake of Wood's death, her lawyer said, "It was not a homicide… not a suicide. It was an accident."
While many thought Wagner was the culprit, police officially declared him not a suspect in 2011. In 2013, her death certificate was mysteriously changed, from the reason of death being an "accidental drowning," to drowning caused by "undetermined factors."
Peter Ivers
Peter Ivers was the host of the New Wave Theater when he was found bludgeoned to death in his bed in downtown L.A. in 1983.Evidence was later unearthed by the Los Angeles Police Department to reopen the investigation. Upon his death, dozens of friends went to Iver's apartment to mourn him, though in doing so, they accidentally tampered with the evidence.
A number of theories abound about the cause for his murder. Some say he was killed as the result of a robbery; others speculate that he was killed by one of the attendees of the New Wave Theater. Little headway has been made in solving the Ivers murder case.
Thelma Todd
Thelma Todd, also known as “Hot Toddy,” was an actress in the late 1920s and early 1930s. She owned café that she ran on the Roosevelt Highway (now called the Pacific Coast Highway), where she lived in the above apartment with her boyfriend at the time, Roland West. She was found dead inside a garage, behind the steering wheel of her car. At the time, some believed that she had committed suicide or accidentally killed herself while warming up her car when she got locked out of the house.
Todd had no signs of struggle on her, though she did have a broken nose. Her blood alcohol level was too high to have allowed her to climb the steps to the garage, and her sandals were too clean if she had, in fact, climbed the stairs herself.
A rumor spread that West confessed on his deathbed that he had unknowingly locked Todd in the garage. Todd's body was cremated, lending some to believe it was done to cover up her death by the corrupt District Attorney's office. Others suggest that it could've been her ex-husband or gang leader Charles "Lucky" Luciano who could've killed her, as she had had confrontations with both of them shortly before she died.
The Notorious B.I.G.
Rapper Christopher George Latore Wallace was better known by his stage names The Notorious B.I.G., Biggie, or Biggie Smalls. He became a central figure in the East Coast hip hop scene during a time when the West Coast scene was dominant in the mainstream, leading to an ongoing feud between the two groups, including his longtime rival Tupac Shakur. After Shakur's death in 1996, Biggie became concerned about his own life.
He was killed in 1997 after leaving the Soul Train Music Awards in L.A. when he was sitting in an SUV and another car pulled up beside him and shot him. No one was ever named a suspect in his death. He was 24 years old.
Virginia Rappe
1920s actress Virginia Rappe was at a party at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on Labor Day weekend 1920 with silent film star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. Virginia Rappe died a few days after the party from peritonitis, caused by a ruptured bladder.
Arbuckle was charged with murder for the death of Rappe in 1921. Some believed he squashed her to death with his weight while raping her at the 3-day rager. Others believe he raped her with a foreign object, causing peritonitis. According to Arbuckle, he found Rappe in his hotel room vomiting when he had gone back there to change his clothes. He cleaned her up, put her to bed, and returned to the party, assuming she was just drunk. Other party members found her in his room later, ripping her clothes off. Hotel employees were called and she got moved to another room to rest.
Knowing other people were looking after Rappe, Arbuckle returned to LA the following day. Three days later, when she showed no improvements, she was taken to a maternity hospital, which was known for performing abortions, where she died the next day of peritonitis.
After going through three trials and making headlines of the newspapers every day, Arbuckle was finally found not guilty. Additionally, the jury wrote and apology to him:
Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done him. We feel also that is was our only plain duty to give him this exoneration. There was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of a crime.He was manly throughout the case and told a straightforward story on the witness stand, which we all believed.The happening at the hotel was an unfortunate affair for which Arbuckle, so the evidence shows, was in no way responsible.We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgement of fourteen men and women who have sat listening for thirty-one days to the evidence that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.
William Desmond Taylor
Taylor was a successful silent film director, who debuted with The Awakening in 1914 and worked in Hollywood until his 1922 murder. He was found shot in the back in his home on February 2, 1922, though when he was discovered dead, an alleged "doctor" claimed he had died of natural causes.
Several suspects were listed, including two of Taylor's butlers, one of whom used a fake cockney accent and had run off with Taylor's money. Young actress Mary Miles Minter's mother became the prime suspect, as she disapproved of her teenage daughter's relationship with Taylor. Additionally, she had threatened another director before for making a pass at Minter, and Minter's nightgown and a love note from her to Taylor were found in Taylor's apartment after the murder. According to director King Vidor, Minter had insinuated that her mother was the one who murdered Taylor after she found Minter with him in his apartment. Minter also has an unpublished autobiography in which she claims her mother is the culprit. However, no arrests were ever made.
Ronni Chasen
A Hollywood publicist, Chasen was a veritable institution in the movie industry, representing everyone from filmmakers to producers and composers. She orchestrated the Oscar campaign for Driving Miss Daisy, and worked with actor Michael Douglas.
In the early hours of November 16, 2010, while driving home from the Hollywood premiere of the film Burlesque, Chasen's Mercedes was shot at four times and her body was found slumped over in her car. The murder had many in Hollywood scratching their heads and sparked a massive police hunt, with some sources claiming it was a planned hit. Adding to the mystery, the lead suspect, Harold Martin Smith in the murder reportedly committed suicide, though the case was closed after that.
The Black Dahlia
Los Angeles's most famous murder,The Black Dahlia refers to Elizabeth Short, who was murdered in 1947. Her body was discovered in a park in Los Angeles and her death has been publicized repeatedly, mostly because of how particularly gruesome the murder was. Her body was found, nude, posed, mutilated, and sliced in half at the waist. She had been completely drained of blood and scrubbed clean.
WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGE
In 2013, the case made headlines again when police did an extensive search of Dr. George Hill Hodel's house (one of the main suspects), where incriminating evidence of human body decomposition had been found before. Soil samples from the house were taken in to be tested. A conversation was also recorded between Hodel and an unknown person when Hodel said, "Supposin' I did kill the Black Dahlia. They couldn't prove it now. They can't talk to my secretary because she's dead."
The craziest part? Hodel's son, Steve Hodel, was the police officer in charge of the case and is convinced is father is the one who killed Elizabeth Short. He also believes his father killed an additional dozen women throughout the L.A. area.