Celebrity Crime

Jan. 23, 2012

Jack Henry Abbott

Jack Abbott sold himself to Norman Mailer as the “Super Convict.” Mailer turned the letters Abbott sent him into the best-selling book, In the Belly of the Beast, and assisted Abbott in gaining parole in 1981. Six months later Abbott stabbed a waiter to death in a New York restaurant.

 by J.J. Maloney

Jack Henry Abbott started as a boy in a training school, worked his way up through the system-—getting in trouble here, being transferred there, getting into more trouble until, ultimately, he spent virtually all of his life in some form of reform school or prison.

When it became known in 1977 that Norman Mailer was to write The Executioner's Song, about Gary Gilmore, Abbott, who was incarcerated in the same Utah penitentiary, wrote to Mailer, suggesting that Mailer could make use of the observations of someone like Abbott, someone who had lived in the world Gary Gilmore inhabited.

Mailer began to correspond with Abbott, and apparently began to care about him. Abbott wrote long, grandiloquent letters, in which he discussed his fantasized perception of himself as a Super Convict. He claimed to have been subjected to more brutality than other convicts, to have risen higher above the situation than other convicts, to have been more philosophically correct than other convicts.

Mailer bought it; for his own reasons, he wanted to believe what Abbott was saying. And, of course, there was some truth in many of the things Abbott said about prisons. 

May 30, 2011 Updated Dec. 10, 2012

Dominique Strauss-Kahn

A questionable history of sexual indiscretions caught up with the man considered to be the next president of France, but not enough to bring him down.

(Editor’s Note:  On August 23, 2011 all criminal charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn were dismissed by the New York Supreme Court at the request of the Manhattan Attorney General’s Office.

On December 10, 2012 New York Supreme Court Justice Douglas E. McKeon announced in court in the Bronx that the civil suit filed against Strauss-Kahn by former hotel housekeeper Nafissatou Diallo had been settled in his chambers 10 minutes earlier. Ms. Diallo said after the hearing, “I thank everyone all over the world who supported me and everyone at the court. God bless you.” The terms of the settlement were kept confidential by agreement of both parties. Attorneys for Strauss-Kahn adamantly denied a report in a French newspaper that the settlement was for $6 million.)

by Don Fulsom

“I deny in the strongest possible terms the allegations which I now face; I am confident that the truth will come out and I will be exonerated. In the meantime, I cannot accept that the Fund—and you dear colleagues—should in any way have to share my own personal nightmare. So, I had to go.”

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in an e-mail to employees of the Washington, D.C.-based International Monetary Fund after tendering his resignation as its $500,000-a-year managing director.

Few Americans had ever heard of Dominique Strauss-Kahn when news broke that New York detectives had snatched him from a soon-to-depart Paris-bound jetliner and charged him with attempted rape. His arrest came with lightning speed on Saturday afternoon. May 14, 2011.

A powerful French politician and a top global economist, Strauss-Kahn maintained such a low U.S. profile that—even weeks after his arrest rocked the French political landscape—many people in the States still best knew him as “the French IMF Guy.”

This “guy,” it was later realized, had been the likely next president of France. Polls there had predicted Strauss-Kahn would have defeated President Nicolas Sarkozy by a 61-to-39-percent margin.

May 9, 2011

An excerpt from the book Spinning the Law: Trying Cases in the Court of Public Opinion by Kendall Coffey.

 by Kendall Coffey

The White Bronco

People love a good car chase. Or at least television news producers think we do. That's why we're treated to endless coverage of the police pursuing one felon or another on the streets – or, more likely, highways – of some major city, most often Los Angeles or Miami. In fact, Bob Tur, the "dean of LA's media helicopter journalists," pioneered the form. By June 17, 1994, he had already broadcast 128 freeway pursuits for KCBS. But no one had ever seen anything like what unfolded in the late afternoon and early evening hours of that day when a white Ford Bronco containing O.J. Simpson and his friend Al Cowlings led a phalanx of 25 police cars on a bizarre low speed chase on the freeways of Southern California.1

Simpson, who was wanted for the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, was either trying to escape justice or suicidal, or both; during the chase, he was holding a gun to his head, as Cowlings told police by cell phone. At first, Tur had exclusive footage of the Bronco's progress, but soon his helicopter was joined by six others. When the highway passed through black neighborhoods, people lined the overpasses, cheering, "Go, O.J.!" By the time the pursuit ended safely back in the driveway of Simpson's Brentwood mansion, where the former NFL great surrendered meekly to police, some 95 million Americans had watched all or part of the chase. Networks carried live coverage. NBC even broke into its telecast of Game Five of the NBA Finals.2 It was, in some ways, a fitting media beginning of what became known as "the trial of the century."

Oct. 20, 2002

Barbara Payton

Barbara Payton reached the pinnacle of Hollywood in 1950. Blonde and beautiful, her libido was robust, her taste ribald; her lovers formed a who's who of Hollywood leading men from Bob Hope, George Raft, Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Guy Madison to Tarzan -- with dozens and dozens of lesser lights in between. The tabloids feasted on her liaisons. When she flouted Hollywood's code by taking on a black lover in 1955, her career was over at age 27. She went from making $10,000 a week at Warner Brothers to utter destitution and ruin, turning tricks for $5 on Sunset Strip.

by John O'Dowd

At first the sanitation workers thought it was a bag of trash scattered beneath the dumpster in the parking lot behind a Thrifty Drug Store on Sunset Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, in the heart of Hollywood. As they drew closer they discovered instead the body of a woman lying on her side, clad only in a thin, cotton shift and a pair of slippers. With a smudge of dried blood caked thick around her nose and upper lip, the woman appeared, at first glance, to be dead. Standing over her, the men could see the mass of old bruises and welts that covered her arms and legs — like purple inkblots, vivid, even in the subdued light of dawn. The woman's brassy blonde hair, with two inches of dark roots, was bunched in knots atop her head, like some tangled bee's nest gone awry. So battered was her appearance that it made it almost impossible to determine what she actually looked like underneath all the layers of dried blood and dirt. One of the men later said that the sight of her crumpled body lying on the pavement made it appear as if she had been "dumped out of the sky." When at last they noticed that she was still breathing, the two workers rushed to get help.

Later that morning, word spread quickly down Sunset Boulevard and then across Los Angeles that the woman the men had found was none other than Barbara Payton, a former movie star and tabloid queen — and a longtime denizen of Hollywood's Skid Row. Those who remembered the name were not surprised, for despite the fact that her film career had ended 12 years earlier — in a blaze of sordid scandal and poisonous publicity — Payton had never really left Hollywood...at least not for long.

March 14, 2011

John Paul Getty III

By the time John Paul Getty III died on February 5, 2011 – at age 54 – he had lost far more than the ear his Italian kidnappers had sliced off when he was 17 years old.

by Denise Noe

The old saying that “money can’t buy happiness” may never have been more dramatically illustrated than by the life of the recently deceased Jean Paul Getty III, grandson of the wealthiest man on earth. His father was scion Jean Paul Getty II and his mother was former actress Gail Harris. Paul, as Jean Paul Getty III would be called, was the oldest of four children.

It was quite unlikely that when he was born in England on November 4, 1956 that he would become best known for a crime committed against him. Grandfather J.  Paul Getty, a billionaire oil tycoon, described Paul during his early boyhood as “a bright, red-haired little rascal” and called him “most cheerful and cute.” The Los Angeles Times reported that as a toddler Paul “was said to be one of his grandfather’s favorites.” 

J. Paul Getty was often described by the moniker of The Richest Man in The World. Despite his vast fortune, he continued being a workaholic into his elderly years, putting in hours each day to try to make his almost unimaginable wealth even larger. He was also known for certain eccentricities such as an intermittent phobia of the telephone.

November 22, 2010 Updated Jan 8, 2013

Rodney Alcala

A registered sex-offender, Rodney Alcala got his 15-minutes of fame as a successful contestant on "The Dating Game" in 1978.  Before that appearance, he had already been convicted of raping an 8-year-old girl and had murdered four women. He would go on to murder a 13-year-old girl.

Update: On death row at San Quentin since 1979, Rodney Alcala, now 69, was sentenced in New York Supreme Court on January 7, 2012 to two concurrent 25 years to life in prison sentences for raping and murdering two women in New York in the 1970s. In 1971, Cornelia M. Crilley, a 23-year-old TWA flight attendant, was raped and strangled in her Upper East Side apartment. Seven years later, the body of Ellen Jane Hover, 23, an aspiring orchestra conductor, was found at the Rockefeller estate in Westchester County. Alcala pled guilty to the two murders on December 14. He will now be returned to death row at San Quentin. Since 2006, there has been a court-ordered moratorium on executions in California over the lethal-injection controversy.

By Denise Noe

Bachelor Number One

Airing in the 1960s and 1970s, “The Dating Game” was a popular show about singles finding romance. Usually, a young woman would be on one side of a partition asking a series of quirky and often sexually suggestive questions of a trio of bachelors on the other side of it. Without seeing them, and not being allowed to ask their names, occupations, ages, or incomes, she would think over their answers during a commercial break and then select one of the three for a date.

Occasionally, the roles were reversed and a man would do the selecting from a group of three “bachelorettes.” The show did not use the term “spinsters” for its unmarried female guests probably because that word, so strongly associated with starched gingham and hair-in-a-bun prudishness, would have been out of place in the time period.

“The Dating Game” was hosted by Jim Lange who began every episode by stepping through a flower-speckled partition that suggested the “flower power” that would become a cliché in that hippie era.

In 1978, a program aired in which Lange introduced “Bachelor Number One” as “a successful photographer who got his start when his father found him in the darkroom at the age of 13 – fully developed.”  Lange paused while the audience laughed appreciatively at the double entendre. Then the host continued, “Between takes you might find him skydiving or motorcycling. Please welcome Rodney Alcala.”

The audience saw Bachelor Number One, a handsome, dark-haired young man with a ready smile.