↑ Clockwise from left Bob Crane posing with Hogan’s Heroes merchandise. “A lot of people were
interested in that character and the all-American part of it,” says Crane’s eldest son, Robert;
a photo from the 1978 crime scene; the front page of The Arizona Republic on June 30, 1978. “We
had some serial murderers and that sort of thing that were tied to other cases, but nobody was
as famous as Bob Crane,” says retired Scottsdale detective Barry Vassall of notorious local crimes.
“We knew from the get-go that this was going to be a hard one, because it was a whodunit. You
didn’t have any witnesses, you didn’t have any smoking guns.”
Deborah and Karen), the actor used his
celebrity to meet women, and then col-
lected nude photos of them. “There were no
drugs, no coercion, none of that,” explains
Robert. “Women just liked him, or found
him handsome, or whatever it was. They
would hook up.” Aiding Crane in his sexual
and cinematic conquests was John Henry
Carpenter, a video-equipment salesperson
from Sony who was pals with Hogan’s
Heroes cast member (and future Family
Feud host) Richard Dawson and helped
Crane acquire gadgetry to watch and make
erotica long before the birth of internet
porn. When asked about his costar’s addic-
tion, Clary responds, “Who cares? That’s
his problem. Why waste my time saying,
‘How dare you like ladies?’ That is dumb,
would not think about it. All we thought
was, your life is your life—as long as you’re
doing your job properly.”
Crane’s sexual behavior did affect other
castmates. After having an affair with
costar Cynthia Lynn, who played Klink’s
buxom secretary Helga in the first season,
he moved on to her replacement, Patricia
Olson, who stepped in to play the identical
role of Hilda the next year. Olson, who
went by the stage name Sigrid Valdis,
became Crane’s second wife in 1970
(shortly after he divorced Terzian); the
couple had two children, Scott and Ana
Marie. But Olson resented the influence
Carpenter wielded over her husband—a
dynamic captured in the 2002 film Auto
Focus starring Greg Kinnear as Crane,
Willem Dafoe as Carpenter, and Maria
Bello as Patricia. Carol Ford, who coau-
thored Bob Crane: The Definitive Biogra-
phy and serves as an unofficial spokesper-
son for Crane’s second family, says the
movie over emphasized the star’s fetish.
“As far as the amateur pornography, that
was a small part of a bigger pie, you might
say. Bob was chronicling and writing down
and filming every single thing in his life.
So when you look at it in the grand scheme
of things, it’s just a small slice.”
It was a slice that mainstream Holly-
wood couldn’t tolerate. “He made some
bad moves,” Robert says of his dad. “He
collected photographs of women and put
together these books—‘Oh, here’s Sally
from Jacksonville, Florida’—and then he
started showing them to people. He was
doing a very bad Disney film called Super-
dad, playing an all-American character
who cares about his daughter running off
EW ● COM SEPTEMBER 2019 47
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