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.
