The wealthy exurb of Phoenix drowses in
the heat of the Sonoran Desert, sprinkled
with luxury resorts catering to snowbirds
in what Arizonans call the Valley of the
Sun. June 29, 1978, likely began as nearly all
Scottsdale summer days do—temperatures
soared above 100 degrees by high noon, and
well-heeled residents took refuge in their
heavily air-conditioned villas, leaving the
wide streets as empty as any Southwest
ghost town. It didn’t end that way.
Responding to a call from one of the
city’s apartment complexes, local cops hap-
pened on a very un-Scottsdale tableau: In a
dimly lit first-floor apartment, they found
the battered body of a shirtless 49-year-old
man sprawled in bed with two huge gashes
above his left ear and an electrical cord
knotted around his neck. It was clear he
had been in good shape and had salt-and-
pepper hair, but gore obliterated most
other details. Blood was splattered over the
wall and ceiling; there was so much of it,
the victim’s pillow was drenched crimson.
After learning the flat was leased to the
nearby Windmill Dinner Theatre, police
asked the theater’s manager, Ed Beck, to
identify the corpse. “There was no way I
could identify him from one side,” Beck
told the press. “The other side, yes.”
The bludgeoned form had once been
Bob Crane, a TV star known to millions as
the wisecracking title character on the
1960s sitcom Hogan’s Heroes. Crane’s
grisly murder revealed he had been doing
a very different sort of on-camera work
behind closed doors. Four decades later,
the still-unsolved slaying of the enigmatic
actor—with its links to a netherworld of
sex addiction and pornography—has
spawned a 2002 movie, at least five books,
three investigations, and a vast spider’s
web of speculation.
The seamy side of Crane’s life is no mys-
tery. His obsession with sex damaged his
career and possibly got him killed. The
actor’s son Robert recalls that his father’s
dressing room was “porn central,” where
the star stored Polaroids, negatives, and
X-rated films. Long before he met his end
on the edge of Phoenix, Bob Crane had
plunged from the heights of Hollywood
into a particularly seedy showbiz hell. But
for those who loved him, it’s the unan-
swered questions that are haunting.
“There’s still fog,” says Robert, the 68-
year-old author of Sex, Celebrity, and My
Father’s Unsolved Murder. “And when I say
‘fog,’ it’s that word closure, which I hate.
But there is no closure. You live with death
for the rest of your life.”
IN THE 1960S, SITCOMS WITH LAME
jokes punctuated by a bad laughtrack were
the norm, but only one dared to mix that
cheesiness with bumbling Nazis. Yet when
it debuted on CBS in the fall of 1965,
Hogan’s Heroes was an overnight hit. Very
loosely inspired by World War II movies
like The Great Escape (1963), Heroes fea-
tured a motley crew of inmates in a German
prisoner-of-war camp outfoxing a remark-
ably inept Third Reich for six seasons.
Along the way, it made Crane, who played
the womanizing Col. Robert Hogan, a
household name. Before going in front of
the camera, the Connecticut-born Crane
made his name as a radio host, interview-
ing Marilyn Monroe, Bob Hope, and
Charlton Heston on CBS’ L.A. flagship sta-
tion, KNX. After legendary TV writer Carl
Reiner appeared on Crane’s radio show, he
gave the broadcaster a guest gig as a philan-
dering husband on The Dick Van Dyke
Show. That led to a regular spot as a happy-
go-lucky dentist on The Donna Reed Show.
When his agent sent Crane the script for
Heroes, the actor mistook it for a drama.
“Bob, what are you talking about?” the
agent said, according to Robert’s 2015 book
about his dad. “This is a comedy. These are
the funny Nazis.”
Crane wasn’t the only one who was con-
fused. WWII had ended a mere 20 years
before the sitcom’s premiere, a genocidal
trauma within the living memory of mil-
lions. Making matters even more bizarre,
three of Heroes’ funny fascists—Werner
Klemperer (Colonel Klink), John Banner
(Sergeant Schultz), and Leon Askin (Gen-
eral Burkhalter)—were Jews who’d fled the
Holocaust, while Robert Clary (Corporal
LeBeau) had been interned at Buchenwald
and lost his parents at Auschwitz. Still,
Clary, the only living member of the cast,
makes no apologies. “It was well-written,
well-directed, and well-acted,” says the 93-
year-old, whose concentration-camp tattoo,
A5714, is still visible on his left forearm. “It
was a great group to work with. Bob never
said, ‘Hey, I’m Hogan and I’m the star.’ ”
But Crane was a star, and fame allowed
him to indulge his appetite. Married to high
school sweetheart Anne Terzian and with
three children (Robert and his sisters,
SCOT T SDA L E
IN
HAPPEN
UG L Y
T H I NGS
D O N ’ T
G E N E R A L L Y
HOLLYWOOD TRUE CRIME
.
46 SEPTEMBER 2019 EW●COM
