The Murder Of Bob Crane – Robert Graysmith, 1993 ★★★

Too Much Sex Can Be Hazardous to your Health

He played the lead role in one of television’s strangest sitcoms, a farce about Allied soldiers imprisoned by the Third Reich. A few years later, Bob Crane was a prisoner himself, of a swinger’s lifestyle that was not only pathetic and ruinous, but as Robert Graysmith posits in his book The Murder Of Bob Crane, ultimately fatal.

A sleeping Crane was bludgeoned to death in a Scottsdale, Arizona apartment one June morning in 1978. This brought into sharp focus how he had lived, using the dregs of a once-flourishing career to hook up with all the women he could find. Suspicion quickly centered on John Henry Carpenter, Crane’s wingman during his sexcapades, yet the case was circumstantial and the horizon of others with motives too vast.

“When you go out like he did, you put yourself in positions where there are very sick scenes,” Joy Claussen, an actress who was part of Crane’s dinner-theater show at the time of his killing, tells Graysmith. “When you are that open sexually, you are that nondiscriminative in the way you pick people, you are liable to find some sick people.”

Crane at his height: Flanked by his "Hogan's Heroes" co-stars, John Banner and Werner Klemperer, Crane played a smoothie who could talk his way out of anything. Image from https://travsd.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/bob-crane-hogans-anti-hero/.

Like Auto Focus, the movie it was made into in 2002, The Murder Of Bob Crane is explicit but hardly erotic. Celibacy is preferable to living like this guy did, even minus the brutal end.

Robert Graysmith is a common starting point for a lot of us true-crime buffs. But usually it’s that other Graysmith book made into a movie people remember, Zodiac. I happened upon him through Crane.

Maybe that’s why I am more positive about Graysmith. Zodiac is a mess of a book that was made into a great movie. The Murder Of Bob Crane has its sloppy moments, yet it really hooks you into both the investigation and the weird sad life that was Crane’s:

After the failure of a long first marriage and the pain of a second, Crane obsessively sought someone he could care deeply about. He had come to tally his own worth by the number of women he slept with each day. Fearful of being alone, the star had taken to prowling relentlessly, excited more by the chase than the conquest. It was common for Bob to reject a woman for any subsequent encounters.

Crane at the end: According to Graysmith, Crane didn't much mind his show "Beginner's Luck" was playing to half-empty houses. He was more concerned with sex. Image from https://www.newspapers.com/clip/19586286/bob-crane-beginners-luck-24-jun-1978/. 

There is no “whodunit” mystery here, not as far as Graysmith is concerned. It’s obvious he thinks Carpenter, feeling betrayed by Crane’s apparent unwillingness to continue their relationship (Crane’s son Bob Jr. suggests his dad was losing his taste for the “kicks” he got with Carpenter tagging along), had motive, and it’s hard to argue with the rental car smeared with Type B-blood (which Crane shared with 10% of the population) Carpenter left behind in Arizona.

But Scottsdale police, unused to murders, left some loose ends, and there were other worthy suspects, like angry husbands, freaky girlfriends, and a future ex-wife (“Hogan” costar Sigrid Valdis) who stood to inherit Crane’s fortune.

Maricopa County Attorney Charles Hyder decided not to pursue a case against Carpenter. “Detectives had enough leads for a dozen murders,” he said. Crane left behind a sad life and a great crime story, which The Murder Of Bob Crane delivers in a compelling way as equal parts police procedural and morality tale.

On June 29, 1978, investigators gathered outside the front entrance to the apartment where Crane was found dead. A handful of bloody smudges and a knotted cord around Crane's neck were left by the killer. Image from https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/celebrities/86408066/killer-of-hogans-heroes-star-bob-crane-finally-revealed

Maybe the moral of the story is not to mess with Nazis. If “Hogan’s Heroes” seems a freak in the outrage culture of today, it was not so different back then. Maybe because of the shock value, the show was an instant hit. It lasted six seasons and remains a beloved syndication staple to this day.

Yes, the show was about prisoners of war, not concentration camp inmates (one of the series’ cast members, Robert Clary, survived Buchenwald, while the two main heavies were played by Hitler refugees.) But there is something unholy about mixing swastikas and slapstick, and the otherwise-fun show carries a taint that lasts to this day.

The Murder Of Bob Crane goes over some of this by way of developing the victim’s backstory. Before achieving fame as the face of this odd cultural moment, Crane was a Connecticut boy who dreamed of being a great drummer like Gene Krupa. He found success instead as a radio personality, moving to Los Angeles where television producers noticed his good looks and easy charm.

Crane began his entertainment career as a drummer. Jazz was his specialty, but he found work with the Connecticut Symphony Orchestra. According to Graysmith, after two years there he was fired for "clowning around" during a Bach fugue. Image from https://www.metv.com/stories/behind-the-scenes-photos-from-hogans-heroes-set.

He was the personification of ease, off-camera as well as on. He once explained his philosophy as that of a carefree charmer: “What makes Robert run? If they get you in a corner – throw a funny line and run!”

At some point – when exactly seems to depend on who is talking about it – Crane’s smooth manner and success began to pull him into a different, more dangerous orbit. He began visiting nightclubs and seeking out casual sex partners. Sometimes he brought a camera and photographed his encounters for later perusal.

“Bob’s growing addiction to pornography and the important part this material was playing in his lifestyle was no secret,” Graysmith writes. It was a case of “a guy getting away from his roots and all of a sudden being turned loose in that Hollywood culture,” is how one Los Angeles newsman explains it to Graysmith.

Greg Kinnear as Crane and Maria Bello as second wife Sigrid Valdis in a scene from the 2002 adaptation of Graysmith's book, Auto Focus. Kinnear and Willem Dafoe as John Carpenter serve up a sleazy good time. Image from https://www.sfgate.com/movies/article/Man-with-two-faces-Auto-Focus-an-unflinching-2759631.php

The book is a time capsule for those of us old enough to remember the 1970s, a decade when people smoked even at crime scenes and washed-up celebrities worked dinner theater and quiz shows rather than podcasts and Twitter. In large part this is why Graysmith’s book works so well: You get soaked in the ambiance of a long-gone time.

Graysmith not only charts Crane’s last days in hourly detail, but provides a 3-D floor plan of the rented apartment where he was murdered. Small details offer big clues. What were Carpenter’s swim trunks doing in Crane’s place? What clue did the killer give to his identity by cutting a wire from an almost-inaccessible location to wrap around the already-dead Crane’s neck?

Police investigators found traces of Type B blood (matching Crane's) along the passenger-side door panel of this Chrysler Cordoba John Carpenter drove the morning of Crane's murder. Their theory was he tossed the murder instrument from the vehicle somewhere in the Arizona desert. Image from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/.

Graysmith sucks up case minutiae like a Hoover, but doesn’t synthesize well. He opens with an episode involving a flat tire that seems to portend much but is left flapping in the breeze. Too often he seems to be paraphrasing the police report, with no commentary of his own.

“It had all the earmarks of a homosexual murder,” one of the investigating officers tells Graysmith. But we don’t get any real explanation of how this might have been so, beyond a suggestion the perpetrator might have ejaculated over Crane’s corpse.

The more the investigators zero in on Carpenter, the more sure I became that they missed something. Not that I think Carpenter was innocent; I just can’t see voting to convict him in a jury.

John Carpenter (above, with defense attorney Candace Kent) was charged with Crane's murder and acquitted in 1994. He died in 1998. Image from https://www.crimemuseum.org/crime-library/cold-cases/bob-crane/. 

Graysmith claims the two men were seen arguing the morning before Crane’s death, but only offers up one witness to that end, a waitress not clear about what the pair were saying to each other. Crane’s son is clear he regarded Carpenter as a hanger-on and that his father spoke of cutting ties with his leechy buddy, but they were still together the night before his death, and according to Graysmith’s account, Crane would have had to let Carpenter inside his apartment in order for him to have been murdered the way he was.

I don’t dismiss the likelihood Carpenter killed Crane. He made a suspicious rushed exit from his hotel the day Crane’s body was discovered, his rental car had fresh traces of blood that matched Crane’s type, and he was a pretty scummy character. But the cops didn’t nail down the case for Carpenter’s guilt. Neither does Graysmith.

Too many other people out there had motives for murder. Crane literally lived his sex life as an open book, travelling with at least one photo album that identified specific conquests.

Crane with fellow "Hogan's Heroes" cast member Sigrid Valdis, who became his second wife, and after his murder, a suspect. Her alibi was pretty tight, as Graysmith relates. She was vacationing on an island in Washington State. Image from https://filmdaily.co/news/bob-crane-murder/.

Graysmith explains:

The entire book contained black-and-white Polaroids of women both with and without clothes, their names written at the bottom of the pictures. When he showed off the photos, and he often did, Crane would explain where the women were from and what sex acts they had performed with him.

Graysmith even suggests Crane might have surreptitiously filmed his partners while they had sex. But the then-modern video apparatus Crane used to film them were huge, making this scenario unlikely.

A crime scene photo of Crane's apartment shows just how unlikely it was for Crane to have filmed his sex partners without their knowledge. The television screen at left would have displayed what the large camera to the right was picking up.

In fact, some of the more shocking claims Graysmith throws up, that Crane was into bondage or underage women, is ironically undercut by Crane’s own kinkiness. Given how he liked to film his sex, you would expect that some whips and kids would show up in the police archive. Instead, as Graysmith reports, Crane’s camera captured standard sex acts between consenting adults.

“He liked being Bob Crane” is how Graysmith explains it.

Despite some life dissatisfaction (he was about to be divorced for the second time), it seems Crane’s plan was to keep on keeping on. After finishing his dinner-theater run in Scottsdale, he was going on to Austin, Texas where he said the swinging scene was more open and active.

Crane's grave in Brentwood, California, where he is buried alongside Sigrid Valdis. Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org.

For all its vividness, maybe that’s why The Murder Of Bob Crane offers more curiosity than tragedy. The detritus Crane left behind in his messy bachelor pad – which Graysmith meticulously inventories – included men’s magazines, bottles of booze he kept for women he brought over, and videotapes that reflected his crazy life, with his appearances on talk shows and “Hogan’s Heroes” interspersed with bouts of intercourse. Murder almost seemed cosmically superfluous; his life was over long before.