Bob Crane : June 29th, 1978

"I don't smoke, I don't drink. Two out of three ain't bad." - Bob Crane

For several years Crane led an increasingly dissolute life which affected his public image and his ability to get steady work. Finally, one late night in 1978, Crane allegedly called Carpenter to tell him that their friendship was over. The following day, Crane was discovered violently bludgeoned to death with a weapon that was never found but believed to be a camera tripod at the Winfield Place Apartments in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he had been appearing in a dinner theatre production of a play entitled Beginner's Luck at the Windmill Dinner Theatre. According to an A&E program on the subject, initial police investigation turned up few clues but a large number of suspects, due to the dozens of homemade pornographic videos found at the murder scene. Countless female participants and their spouses were questioned. Although Carpenter was the prime suspect, he wasn't arrested until 1992 - fourteen years after the murder. During Carpenter's trial in 1994, the prosecution showed videotape of Crane and Carpenter engaging in sex with the same woman to demonstrate their close relationship. Carpenter was acquitted. Both the murder and the motive remain unsolved. Carpenter maintained his innocence until his death on September 4 1998. Crane's life and murder were the subject of the 2002 film Auto Focus, directed by Paul Schrader. The film portrays Crane as a happily married, churchgoing family man and popular L.A. disc jockey who suddenly becomes a Hollywood celebrity, and just as rapidly becomes a sex addict, hanging out at strip clubs and participating in orgies. He documents his exploits on video tape, and is compelled by his addiction into ever more salacious excesses, which eventually crowd everything else out of his life: marriage, family, non-sexual friends, career. Crane's second wife and their son Scotty objected to the way Crane was portrayed in the film, and took to the media to present their side of the story. Shortly before the film's release, Scotty also started the website www.bobcrane.com to provide documents and testimony that would contest the movie's version of his father's story. The website notably featured clips from a pornographic home video Bob Crane had made in 1956, before his meeting with Carpenter. (Scotty later removed the pornographic clips from the site.) In an interview posted to the site, Scotty stated, "My father had been having extramarital affairs and photographing hundreds of nude women engaged in sexual activity since the 1940s. He did not suddenly become a 'sex addict' when he met my mother. We have amateur home erotic movies of his that date back to 1956, and I can assure you that the women in those movies were not his wife at the time. "My father did attend church -- when people died. He wasn't religious and he didn't raise me to be religious. The whole mythology about him being this church-going saint that was brought down and corrupted by the evils of Hollywood -- is really just a dramatic way to dress up a story. But it's totally untrue. He was an overly sexual person from an early age. In the twelve years that my mom knew him, he went to church three times: my baptism, his father's funeral and his own funeral. He never had a family priest for a ‘buddy’ as Auto Focus depicts".