The departing century has seen its share of genocide - both solved and unsolved, but no where else in the world has bloody murder been aroused to a true frenzy than in Hollywood. Spread out under the blazing California sun in a make-believe mirage of celluloid importance, cruel murder flashed a brusque, telltale light on Tinseltown, causing a carnival of dark conspiracy unparalleled in this nation’s history.

Curiously, as we bid the 20th Century farewell, these storified murders of Hollywood legends have not, or ever will, lose their impact with new generations of mystery readers who curiously enjoy delving into these gory criminal enigmas. To them, these magnetic victims are far more luminous than they were in life.

The tone-setter for the century’s montage of tragic scenes was the cruel and iniquitous murder of Virginia Rappe, a ravishing brunette model from Chicago, who fulfilled her marquee fantasies by sleeping with producer Mack Sennett and a assembly-line of others, while spreading crabs so fast that Sennett had to shut down the studio to have it fumigated.

From the time Sennett’s top comedian, Rosco "Fatty" Arbuckle, feasted his roving eye on Virginia’s bulging garbonzas, he wanted her despite the fact that she had been around more than a carousel. The opportunity came when Roly Poly Rosco decided to toss a lavish party to celebrate the signing of a $3-million contract with Paramount, thus, setting the scene for the first electrifying Hollywood murder of the century.

The gala event took place in September 1921 on the 12th floor of San Francisco’s luxurious Hotel St. Francis. By 3 a.m. partygoers were zombied beyond earreach and Fatty’s rapacious appetite for a gin-plastered Virginia had risen to the occasion. He steered her into the bedroom and proceeded to undress the pulchritudinous starlet.

Minutes later, reverberating screams swirled from suite 1221. When blotto guests barged into the bedroom, they couldn’t believe their eyes. Before them, on the blood-drenched bed, her naked body convulsed in quivering pain, lay Virginia Rappe. "I’m dying, I’m dying, he hurt me," she moaned.

Forensic pathologists who examined her torn intestines stated that the 25-year-old beauty had been repeatedly raped by an unusually large phallus while others said she was ripped apart by a coke bottle. The tabloids were loaded with morbid speculation that Fatty had rammed a jagged piece of ice into her vagina, tearing her flesh to shreds.

The first two trials ended in hung juries. The third ended in an acquittal for Fatty. But guardians of American virtues found another way to de-ball Fatty. They picketed the theaters and Paramount canceled his $3-million contract. Virtually unemployable as a performer, Fatty drank himself to death and died broke at age 46 in 1933.

Another catastrophe rocked the foundations of Sin City in 1922 further releasing a piranha of scandal across the sacred grounds of Baghdad-on-the-Pacific and sending literary lions scrambling to their typewriters. That February someone shot William Desmond Taylor in the study of his cozy cottage on Alvarado Street in L.A.’s tranquil Westlake district. A .38-caliber bullet entered his back and passed through his lungs splintering his collar bone and stopping just beneath the skin in his lower back.

Taylor was the pistol-packing hero of "Captain Alvarez," the film that made him a star. He held a position of authority at Famous Players-Lasky, a Paramount subsidiary. He socialized with acting plums the caliber of James Kirkwood, Mabel Normand, Mary Miles Minter, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks.

Mario Lanza

Technical refinements unearthed three strands of blonde hair on Taylor’s corpse at the morgue. The hairs belonged to Mary Miles Minter. In his bedroom, police found a flimsy negligee embroidered with the initials MMM, and a squishy love letter from the 22-year-old superstar to her 50-year-old lover. The juicy story included a .38-caliber pear-handled pistol that MMM had recently purchased and was seen with the day before the murder.

Typical of Hollywood murders, studio security chiefs were notified before the police were called and by the time the law arrived Paramount bawana’s had already sanitized the crime scene. The closest anyone has come to solving the murder was Director King Vidor who claimed to have accumulated evidence that proved District Attorney Tom Woolwine had been handsomely paid by Charlotte Selby, MMM’s mother, to quash any possible indictment of her daughter for murder.

1924 was the "Golden Era" of Hollywood, with the yellow brick road to riches paved with the most prestigious actors, directors and producers ever to fall from grace under a cloud of scandal. But none were as rich and powerful as newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst. The old codger was worth $400,000,000 and his far-reaching power could buy anyone in the oligarchy including stalwarts of the law.

A lone edition of the Los Angeles Times bannered the headline: PRODUCER SHOT ON HEARST YACHT. The Hearst-owned newspaper, The Los Angeles Examiner, by comparison, ran: SPECIAL CAR RUSHES STRICKEN INCE HOME FROM RANCH!

Hearst’s tentacles even engulfed his competition: The Times killed the truth-telling story from additional editions and all known copies have been flushed down the toilet with the rest of the crap and into the Tinseltown Cesspool.

The newspaper tycoon’s extramarital affinity with actress Marion Davies was nefarious among Hollywoodians where he owned several thousand shares of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer stocks which released the Hearst Movietone News. He was puissant enough to make deals with several movie companies to produce films solely with Davies in them, although she had as much talent as a fresh-frozen stalk of asparagus. Hearst was anointed with riches, but could his money provide enough swayability to let him get away with murder ?

When loosened tongues informed Hearst that comedian Charlie Chaplin was tampering with Davies’ private vault, Hearst reacted like a jumpy horse in a box stall. The Little Tramp would soon know the price of effrontery. The Clock of Stipendium was set to strike twelve.

Hearst invited Chaplin and Davies for a glorious weekend on his 285-foot yacht, the Oneida, so he could observe their behavior. Also aboard was movie director Tom Ince, and a contingent of merrymakers.

Out to sea, Hearst hid in the shadows above deck and watched two silhouettes in the moonlight bumpin’ uglies on the lower deck. "I’ll kill you both!" he shouted," and whipped out a gun. The shouts attracted Ince, who skedaddled on deck to see what was happening. The gun boomed, and Ince took the slug that was meant for Marion’s paramour.

Carried under the cover of darkness from the boat to his Benedict Canyon home, Ince’s death was officially listed under the humbuggery of "heart failure." His widow received a tangible settlement from Hearst and she quickly disappeared into oblivion with her three sons. Everyone else remained mum lest they join the unemployed. The architect of that taciturnity? William Randolph Hearst.

The fat hit the pot again in 1927 when Ray Raymond, 33, a song-and-dance man who appeared in "The Ziegfeld Follies." discovered that his wife Dorothy Mackaye, was playing hide the bone with his best friend, actor Paul Kelly. Witnesses to the mortal brawl said Kelly had furiously beat Ray, slammed his head against a brick wall, then kicked him in the face while he was prostrate. Ray died and Kelly was charged with manslaughter and Dottie was charged with compounding a felony to conceal the facts. The case beckoned tabloids like a neon sign and gazetteers dubbed him "Killer Kelly" and he was sentenced to serve 1 to 10 years at San Quentin. Dottie was sentenced to 1 to 3 years.

John Garfield

A model prisoner, Kelly was paroled in two years and enjoyed a successful screen career mostly as a gangster in films with Clark Gable, James Gagney, John Wayne and Betty Davis. In 1956 Kelly died of a heart attack in his California home in front of his TV while watching "Duffy of San Quentin," based on Clinton Duffy’s "The San Quentin Story, " in which he played the role of the warden.

Scenarios that fit all the facts are by and by marked "solved," filed and forgotten. But Fantasy Factory’s hottest scandals have a way of hanging on like a monkey to a vine. And none were hotter than the mysterious death of former "Miss Massachusetts" Thelma Todd, who was found slumped over the steering wheel of her Packard convertible by a hysterical maid who opened her garage door on the morning of December 16, 1935. How odd that the ignition switch was turned on with the motor dead.

Touted "The Ice-cream Blonde," Thelma was 29 and easily the bounciest sexpot of her day. She lived a stormy romance with her director-lover Roland West in a chateau on a hill in the Pacific Palisades, between Malibu and Santa Monica. On the night of her death, they had fought like a thunderstorm and West locked Thelma out of the house. Their raucous spat had reached the perked ears of adjacent neighbors who heard Thelma screaming unprintable words at West and pounding on the front door.

The Grand Jury handed down a verdict of "Death due to carbon monoxide poisoning." They supposed the delicious blonde star had arrived home blotto and fell asleep in her garage with the engine running. Print cracklers had other ideas: Domineering West was furious because she went parting despite his objections and when he found Thelma in her car with the door open and the engine humming he closed the door and went to bed.

Typewriter corporals wrote that Joseph P. Schenick, co-founder of 20th Century Fox, had enough clout to keep West from going to prison, regarding Todd’s demise. In return, West testified at Schenick’s tax fraud trial that Schenick sold him $400,000 in racetrack stock for $50,000, allowing Schenick a tax loss of $350,000, thus saving Schenick from a long prison stretch. Yet no paperwork existed that would corroborate a transaction. .

On his death bed in 1951, West broke his long silence about the Todd "murder." With his last breath he whispered to his actor friend Chester Morris, that he closed the door on Thelma not realizing the car was running, and without checking to see if she was in the car. The world will see the Second Coming before this Hollywood mystery is solved.

By 1946 Al "Bummy" Davis was forgotten by everyone but diehard ring aficionados who remembered him as the gustiest brawler to ever grace the Sweet Science although they couldn’t remember him in movie bit-parts. Bummy didn’t die in Tinseltown, but in New York in November 1945. And his last fight was his best.

Bummy, with his flattened nose and cauliflower ears, should have been training for Morris Reif the night he was shot, but he didn’t think he could beat Reif, so he was sitting in the back room of Dudy’s bar guzzling beer and bragging about his brawls with Fritizie Zivic and the night he bombed out Bob Montgomery in one round. When he looked through the latticework at the bar he noticed four hoodlums brandishing guns. Thus the stage was set for Bummy to become a hero, a praise that avoided him in the ring.

Bummy stormed into the bar like a wolfhound who herd the word "bone" and flattened two of the stickup men and a third hooligan shot him in the neck. As the robbers fled, Bummy grabbed a napkin from the bar, stuffed it in his wound to stop the bleeding, and pursued them. All four bandits opened fire and Bummy died in the gutter.

The killers were caught and sentenced to 20 years to life. Newsreels took pictures of the burial and every store in Brownsville closed down to honor Al "Bummy" Davis because he died a hero.

Americans in 1947 became fascinated with two still-unsolved murders that made sticky Gargantuan headlines that to this day refuse to rub off. Machinegun bullets choked off a final, gurgling cry from Buggsy Siegal and the bisected nude corpse of aspiring actress, Elizabeth Short, alias "The Black Dahila" was found on a vacant lot near Thirty-ninth Street and Coliseum in Los Angeles.

Breakfastnookers were more interested in the Black Dahila murder and the fact that they had more suspects than Marilyn Monroe took enemas to keep her weight down. A FBI card-selector system examined over a hundred million fingerprints and 100 men confessing to the crime added further perplexity to the unsolvable case. Whoever halved Liz was as smart as a beekeeper and remains as anonymous today as he was in 1952 when matinee idol John Garfield was found stiff as a branding iron in a Gramercy Park apartment of a confidant.

A pathologist listed Garfield’s death as "heart ailment" but a swelling number of movie stars to this day insist Johnny was silenced to keep him from testifying about what he knew before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In retrospect, the fact that Garfield took the Big Sleep the night before he was to testify against Communist front organizations seems to be more than a coincidence.

By 1958 it had become de rigueur in Never-Never-Land for all murder cases to be hushed up, but that wasn’t the reason there were no orchids for Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer’s send off. Actually, most people in the oligarchy liked Alfalfa as much as Dracula favored sunlight. A troublemaker from his Our Gang days when he mischievously urinated on the studio floodlights and nearly ruined a $10,000 camera by sticking a wad of gum in the lens, Alfalfa seemed like an excellent candidate for murder. The week before he was killed, an anonymous sniper took a shot at him and missed.

At age 31 Alfalfa was blown away in a row over $50 a partner in his big-game hunting business allegedly owned him. Since it was proven Alfalfa pulled a knife on him, his killer waved good-bye and walked off unscathed into the lighter annals of Tinseltown lore.

That same year scribes were hearkened by a much bigger celebrity murder and the results were as volatile as a match thrown into a can of gasoline. Lana Turner, Hollywood’s man-addic "Sex Goddess" was nominated for an Oscar for 1957’s Peyton Place but many thought her best work was on the witness stand in the real-life murder trial of her 14-year-old daughter Cheryl Crane. As Lana’s underworld lover Johnny Stompanato was beating her, Cheryl came to her mother’s aid and stabbed him with a kitchen knife. News of the homicide and subsequent courtroom proceedings with their revelations of steaming sex secrets kept the nation buzzing for months. The killing was ruled justifiable homicide, but Lana was crucified by an uncomplimentary press, clergymen, psychoanalysts and eventually was written into Hollywood’s doom book. Her career skidded from movie’s to TV and hadn’t fully recovered by the time she died at the age of 75 in 1995.

The following year TV’s indestructible Superman was felled by a bullet faster than a speeding train, and now, forty years later, the case is still carrying more baggage than Greyhound.

The fishify story witnesses told gullible Beverly Hills police was that George Reeves dismissed himself from a house full of guests, went upstairs and shot himself in the head. Mike Speriglio, a private eye who investigated the case said, "Not everyone believed it then, nor do they believe it now. I am one who does not. I’m a professional investigator and criminologist and in my professional opinion, George Reeves was murdered." Arthur Weissman, Superman’s business manager also believed the athletically built actor was murdered. Forty-two years later not even junk mail has caught up with Superman’s killer.

Certainly Mario Lanza passed on a love of opera to the poor people who couldn’t afford to go to the opera. His albums, his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; and his biggest screen roles -- Othello, Pagliacci and The Great Caruso, chronicles a brilliant career that ended on a sour note in October 1959. There is evidence that Lanza entered a hospital in Italy for his own protection after refusing to perform at a concert at Lucky Luciano’s urging. This then, was the condition, the atmosphere and the psyche under which Lanza was laboring when his chauffeur found him dead with an empty intravenous bottle feeding air bubbles into his arm.

All this was nothing new to Hollywoodians, a people peculiarly given to magical thinking, paganism and instant genuflection, in fact, this is what made its environment bearable. The party went on as if nothing happened until midnight, April 3, 1961, when the agonizing cry of an ambulance siren broke the silence of the desert junction town of Mojave, California.

Moments later, the ambulance carrying Mrs. Spade Cooley rocketed from the Willows Spring ranch to a hospital 25 miles away where she was pronounced DOA. Thousands of fans of the former country/western singing star were flabbergasted when they learned Spade Cooley was arrested and charged with the murder of his wife. In a fiery trial, a district attorney said Spade had beaten, choked and stomped his wife until her face looked like raw shank steak. A jury didn’t believe Spade’s tarradiddle that she slipped in the shower. He was sentenced to life, and died in prison at age 59.

Johnny Yuma

Steve Cochran’s claim to fame was twofold; he played the "heavy" in "White Heat" with James Cagney and he had boudoir affairs with the creme de la creme of Hollywood femaledom: Mae West, Joan Crawford, Mamie Van Doren and Joan Crawford. As the sun rose, Cochran set off for Costa Rica aboard his beloved yacht Zaca, accompanied by three peaches with the prettiest pairs. The vessel arrived in Port Champerico, Guatemala, with the decomposing actor and three hysterical ladies. Howling headlines reported that Cochran died of a lung ailment, but the girls quickly disappeared to escape prying questions about what led to Steve’s fatal "accident." Hollywood whispered the possibility of a murder cover-up. Police investigated the case with aggressive determination after they found out he was having affairs in assorted motels, but the investigation withered and the law is no closer to a definitive solution than it was in 1965.

And 1965 was the worst of times for Tom Neal, who wanted something better. A John Garfield-type he-man, Neal’s mediocre ability doomed him to supporting roles in films like "Flying Tigers" with John Wayne, during the mid-1940s. Tough-guy Tom had made 180 films during his 15-year career but his difficulty was that he was extremely possessive when it came to women. In the early 1950s he beat up superstar Franchot Tone in a fight as one-sided as the Alamo over starlet Barbara Payton who later married and divorced Tone and ended up a draggletail prostitute with a cocaine habit.

As quick as a hiccup Purity leagues pounced on Neal and he was blackballed by the studios. He became a skilled gardener in Palm Springs, where he met Gail Bennet, a gorgeous receptionist. She was 25 and he was 47 when they married in 1961. It was to be the last mistake on this planet for the attractive brunette.

Four years later, on April 1st, 1965, Gail was fatally shot in the couple’s home and Tom was arrested while insisting it was an accident. It transpired that while they were making love she turned herself on by detailing her sexual experiences with her former lovers to -- of all people -- a jealous maniac who had nearly crippled a frail Franchot Tone over the favors of Barbara Payton !

The prosecutor said Tom couldn’t handle it and fired a 45-caliber bullet into her left temple. He was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 15 years at Soledad State Prison. Later he was transferred to the State’s Institution for Men at Chino. He was paroled in 1971 and eight months later his 15-yer-old son found him dead in his fly-trap Hollywood apartment. Hollywood never broke Neal’s heart. He was too tough to admit he even had one.

The tragic murder of silent film star Ramon Novarro ( found with a dildo jammed down his throat) and subsequent life sentences of the Ferguson brothers in 1968 followed the more mysterious death of Nick Adams, known to TV fans as "The Rebel," Johnny Yuma. When he had missed an appointment with Tip Roeder, the famous agent went to Adams’ home in Beverly Hills and allegedly found him propped against the wall of his bedroom, deader than a mackerel. Coroner Noguchi allowed that the dose of paraldehyde found in Adams’ body caused his death. But how Nick ingested the deadly substance, and why Roeder and his girlfriend were shot to death after threatening to tell police what really happened, suggests another Tinseltown "cover up."

Hollywood Confidential needed another scandal like a fish needs an umbrella when "The Lipstick Execution Murder" captured headlines that same year. Suspicious pathologists were never able to establish the cause of he-man actor Albert Dekker’s death. His corpse was clad in woman’s dainty silk lingerie and strung up to a shower curtain with a rope harness. The body purplish from decomposition was decorated with scrawled smutty words in lipstick. Stabbed into both armpits were dirty hypodermic needles. Dekker’s expensive camera equipment and elaborate tape recording system were missing as well as $70,000 in cash he had withdrawn from the bank to give a real estate man to complete a deal on a house. The case was never solved and faded into a shadowy spectre.

The 1969 sniper-shooting of Bill Lennon, father of the singing Lennon Sisters, and succeeding suicide of his killer was eclipsed by the slaughter of Sharon Tate by the Manson "family" that same August. But more mysterious was the death of TV’s "Farmer’s Daughter," Inger Stevens, who was found dead on the kitchen floor of her Hollywood Hills home by her roommate on April 30, 1970. What was Inger trying to tell her roommate when she opened her mouth and only spital came out and how did she get a raw gash on her chin, police never found out.

Coroner Noguchi’s report that Inger had died of "acute barbiturate poising" went phfft when Isaac Jones, a black, former UCLA football player, said he lost their marriage certificate but produced a document signed by Inger that indicated she had wished to keep their 8-year-marriage a secret because a mixed-marriage could endanger her career as it had May Britt’s when she married Sammy Davis Jr.

Detectives learned that Inger was on a emotional rollercoaster and wanted to jump off so she could marry actor Burt Reynolds, whom she had been dating. Conversation heard many times a day accused Jones of panicking when he saw his future toppling like so many diminos. There were those who scoffed at Noguchi’s ruling of suicide: The star of 15 films had a prosperous career, she was financially set, she was madly in love with Reynolds and they were planning to be married. People privy to the situation provided a motive: All community property and half of separate property went to Jones. The trail has grown colder than blixens.

Murders of celebrities were happening so fast by the time Sal Minio was stabbed to death in the gloomy carport of his apartment just below the Strip, that the tabulators were losing count. Legal eagles claimed robbery was the motive, but no money was taken because Lionel Williams scooted from the scene as fast as a scutting lizard when a resident approached. When Judge Martin sentenced Williams to 50 years confinement, the cocky defendant popped a stick of gum in his mouth and sniggered.

In 1978 Oscar winner Gig Young shot his wife of 3 weeks through the temple in the bedroom of their New York apartment then shot himself and the tragic was attributed to Gig’s severe alcohol problem. But the two murders that turned the nation’s innards that same year proved to be far more ghastly and ironically similar to one another. Linda Scott, a rising Country-Western singer was found naked in bed, her head reduced to oatmeal by a ballbat, and Bob Crane, star of "Hogan’s Heroes," was sent to the big projection room in the sky in similar fashion. Michael Spearman, Linda’s black chauffeur killed her because she wanted to unburden herself from their spicy affair before her meal ticket found out. While Linda’s killer got life in penal servitude, Crane’s killer remains as safe as a possum in a chunk hole.

Sal Mineo

Who was the last person to see character actors Victor Killian and Charles Wagenheim alive in 1979? And by a strange coincidence they were both killed exactly the same way only two weeks apart. They were both in their 80s. They lived a few blocks from one another in Hollywood. They never met before they appeared together on the Feb. 15 episode of "All in the Family." Both lived alone. Both apartments were ransacked. Both were bludgeoned beyond recognition and the implication was that the same burglar was involved. The fact that neither of these cases were ever solved has remained controversial among the Oligarchy.

That same year Paul Kelly, the fourth generation of clowns who carried on the family tradition of "Weary Willie" the pathetic hobo who wandered around the Ringling Brothers Circus, was arrested on suspicion of clubbing to death Henry Kuizenga, a minister he met in a homosexual bar. Kelly admitted he was high on "acid" and agreed to have sex with Kuizenga. "When he tried to force me to have anal sex with him I clubbed him over the head," said Kelly. 15 times the coroner said. Kelly received a life sentence instead of honoring a contract to play his grandfather in a movie. As he left the courtroom a reporter asked the former circus clown to describe Kuizenga’s reaction during the death throes. Paul replied, "He didn’t die laughing."

In life Dorothy Stratton’s doleful look of innocence mesmerized Playboy readers, who voted her Playmate of the Year. Her career skyrocketed and movie offers poured in. She got parts in several films and recently signed a contract to play the lead in "Galaxina." Movieland was shocked when her agent/lover Paul Snider blew her head off with a shotgun in a jealous rage, then took his own life. Someone at the crime scene cut off a lock of her hair, blonde, sticky and red, and sold it for $75.

Broadway producer Roy Radin arrived in Hollywood in 1983 bent on producing motion pictures. Twelve hours later his bullet-riddled remains were found near his car in the foothills of Los Angeles. He was fuller of holes than a colander. To make sure, a stick of dynamite was stuck in his mouth and ignited. A gun-toting, cocaine-sniffing Demond Wilson of "Sanford and Son" fame was hired to follow Radin that night but dozed off.

Cocaine dealer Karen DeLayne Greenberger was given a life term for masterminding the kidnapping that led to Radin’s murder in a dispute over financing the movie, "The Cotton Club." Her three hired goons will probably die in prison.

More dramatic was the nauseating murder of aspiring actress Vicki Morgan whose death generated a whirl of mystery and allegations of perverted sex that has grown with posthumous worship into millennium. Few believe that mentally disturbed Marvin Pancoast, who died of aids in a California prison, bashed Vicki’s head in with a Louisville Slugger. When he strolled into the North Hollywood police station and confessed to the crime he was clean of blood. This and the fact that Pancoast had later recanted his confession was never mentioned at his marathon murder trial. Neither was the fact that he had confessed to the Manson murders.

According to intelligence files, Vicki’s bare body was found cosmetized with blood on a kong-size bed in her Studio City condo provided to her by millionaire Al Bloomingdale, who gave her an allowance of $18,000 a month for kinky sex with him and others, which he took delight in taping. In death, her face looked like undercooked chicken. The walls, floor and ceiling were awash with geysers of gore and blood.

According to available information, Vicki also serviced important figures in the Reagen administration. Detective Bill Welch did nothing to secure the crime scene in the true tradition of supporting the oligarchocal society and the mucky-mucks of Culver City. In an effort to wrap up the homicide probe with the least amount of speculation he "conveniently" overlooked the sex tapes that showed several members of the administration unburdening their sadistic sexual fantasies with Vicki. Twenty-four hours later the tapes disappeared as if an interplanetary vacuum cleaner had sucked them up.

When Betsy Bloomingdale stopped her husband’s payments to his well-paid mistress, Vicki filed a $5 million suite against Bloomingdale’s estate. When she was murdered she was in the process of writing a book about her affair with Bloomingdale, and the sado-masochistoc sex she provided for ex cathedra political leaders with bizarre sexual appetites.

Many more rumors and innuendoes have surfaced about the enigma of Vicki Morgan’s death, but just as the case of Marilyn Monroe’s puzzling demise and obvious cover-up in 1962, all clues have dried up like a back water pond and the phenomenon ascends on wings of soaring theories.

A fisherman was shocked to high heaven when he snagged the horribly bloated body of buxom blonde actress Carol Wayne off Santiago Bay at Manzanillo in 1985. Tattle sheets linked her romantically with Johnny Carson but the thrice divorced star was vacationing in Mexico with the same Ed Durston who was with Diane Linkletter when she mysteriously "fell or leaped" from a sixth floor apartment balcony adjacent Sunset Strip. Guests at the Playa de Santiago Hotel reported a heated argument between Wayne and Durston earlier in the day. Manzanillo police avoided any theory other than that she slipped on the rocks and accidentally fell into the water and drowned. Wayne’s family was certain then, and are still certain "she was murdered."

The near-fatal stabbing of "Raging Bull" actress Theresa Saldana in 1982 and the spine-tingling murder of "Poltergeist" actress Dominique Dunn the year before, both had striking parallels to the tragic slaying of Rebecca Scheaffer in 1989. Rebecca’s hopes of landing a role in Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming film "The Godfather, Part III," were thwarted when she opened the front door of her Fairfax apartment and was shot dead by a schizophrenic stalker named Robert John Bardo who was sentenced to life in prison in 1991. The obsessed fan obtained the address of the star of "My Sister Sam" from the California Department of Motor Vehicles, which since has restricted access to DMV records.

The cameras of Hollywood have caught many a thrilling scene, but none equal to the real-life dramas of the 20th Century.

What famous star will be the first to be murdered in the coming century?