of Vassall,” Robert wrote in his book. “We
added our fingerprints, footprints, and
hair samples to an already contaminated,
lackadaisically investigated, casually con-
sidered...murder scene.”
Vassall, now retired from the force and a
private investigator in Scottsdale, sees it
differently: “In a perfect world, you have a
crime scene, nobody’s allowed in, and
nobody’s allowed out. You only have one or
two people in there. But that doesn’t
always happen. I don’t think there was any
contamination of the crime scene, which is
what you really worry about.”
DNA testing wasn’t available in 1978, but
all roads led to Carpenter—Crane’s partner
in porn. Not only did cops know that the
pair had been fighting, there was no sign of
forced entry into Crane’s apartment, which
suggested that the victim knew his assail-
ant. But there was even more damning
evidence than that. “At the scene, there was
blood everywhere,” Vassall recalls. “There
were some traces of blood on the back of
the exit door, the front door, the doorknob.
There was a red stain on the curtain. We
found blood in [Carpenter’s] rental car and
on the passenger door. It was Crane’s blood
type. Nobody else who handled that car
had the same blood type as Crane. It was
type B blood, all of it.”
But what cops found in Carpenter’s
Chrysler Cordoba wasn’t enough. Absent
a murder weapon, detectives couldn’t
persuade the county attorney to issue an
arrest warrant. However, 12 years later,
Scottsdale detective Jim Raines uncov-
ered a previously unseen crime-scene
photo that showed a speck of brain tissue
in Carpenter’s car. The actual tissue sam-
ple was long gone, but the image was
ruled admissible by a judge, and Carpen-
ter was eventually charged with Crane’s
murder in 1992. Prosecutors had an
uphill battle: DNA testing of the blood
proved inconclusive, and witnesses came
forward to say Crane and Carpenter had a
friendly dinner the night before the kill-
ing. Carpenter’s attorney shot down
speculation that a missing tripod could
have been the murder weapon and
reminded the jury that there was no proof
of its existence. Meanwhile, Crane’s pre-
dilections gave the defense plenty to play
with—they suggested an enraged hus-
band or boyfriend could have attacked
the actor. Vassall doubts vengeance for an
infidelity was a motive. “Bob was a non-
confrontation guy, and these women
liked him,” he says. “I don’t think I ever
interviewed one that disliked him or was
mad at him.”
In the end, there wasn’t enough evi-
dence to convict Carpenter, who was
acquitted in 1994 and died four years later.
“We did the best we could,” Vassall says.
“We went through all the evidence. We
talked to all the witnesses that we could
possibly talk to, and we came up with what
we came up with. A lot of times when you
have an old case like that, it’s very difficult
to get a conviction. It would have been a
slam dunk with the DNA testing.”
In 2016, Phoenix TV reporter John
Hook convinced the county DA to allow
him access to the old blood samples so he
could send them to Bode Cellmark Foren-
sics—a firm that (under a previous name
and owner) helped with the JonBenét
Ramsey and O.J. Simpson cases. “It’s
absolutely unheard of that a county attor-
ney’s office would allow a reporter to
reopen a cold case and do DNA testing,”
Hook says. It made for a compelling TV
special, but the testing only revealed the
presence of a previously unidentified
male; the rest of the results were
inconclusive.
Hook, like Vassall, believes Carpenter
was Crane’s killer. Robert is willing to go
along with the theory but has also pointed
the finger at his stepmother, who died of
lung cancer at 72 in 2007. “She was in the
middle of a divorce with my dad. If there’s
no divorce, she keeps what she gets, and if
there’s no husband, she gets the whole
thing.” Vassall and the other cops have
never taken those accusations seriously.
In death, Crane got the Hollywood
treatment. About 150 mourners attended
the funeral at St. Paul the Apostle Church
in Westwood, Calif., including Patty Duke,
John Astin, Carroll O’Connor, and Crane’s
Heroes castmates. A man who’d sought
love in dangerous places suddenly had it,
in abundance.
In the years since, the star’s family
members have battled grief—and one
another. Before her death, Patricia Olson
moved her husband’s body from its origi-
nal resting place to another cemetery
without telling Crane’s first family, then
set up a memorial website with her son
Scott that peddled some of Crane’s ama-
teur pornos. Scott Crane declined to
comment for this article, but Ford says he
regrets his actions and has shuttered the
site. He’s now focused on getting his dad
inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, and
has destroyed his father’s massive collec-
tion of Polaroids and porn films. With
them goes an intriguing part of a curious
Hollywood career.
Robert Crane does not speak to his step-
siblings, and his mother and sisters refuse
to talk about what happened so many
years ago in blistering Scottsdale. “It’s
bizarre to me,” he says. “I’m not expecting
a let’s-hold-hands-at-the-table, but we’ve
just never talked about it.” And yet, like
all the strangers fascinated by the sunny
public life and mysterious death of Bob
Crane, he cannot seem to let it go. “I don’t
know what else to do,” he says. “Carpen-
ter’s dead. Patti’s dead. Time is just taking
people away.” �
↑ Willem Dafoe and Greg Kinnear as John Carpenter and Bob Crane in Auto Focus. The 2002 film is a
sore subject with Crane biographer Carol Ford: “If you thought you knew Bob Crane because you
watched Auto Focus, or because you were looking at some of the other sites that had just the murder
and the scandal, you don’t know Bob Crane at all.”
HOLLYWOOD TRUE CRIME
EW ● COM SEPTEMBER 2019 49
© COLUMBIA PICTURES/EVERETT COLLECTION
