You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
murders and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together with
Kristin Dilly. My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a researcher,
a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the social media
manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner in
crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind Ever Murderer. I'm Kristin Dilly and
I'm Bill Thomas, and we're joined today by author Casey Sherman here to talk
to us about his new book, A Murderer in Hollywood, The Untold story
of Tinseltown's most shocking crime. Casey, thanks for joining us again. Well,
thanks for having me back as that was a pleasure. So we wanted
to start an important question. See this February thirteenth release date Is this because
you're an incurable romantic and you've convinced your publisher that coming out the day before
Valentine's Day? Is there anything more romantic build than murder in Hollywood to talk
about over a candlelight dinner with your significant other. But it's funny you mentioned
that there probably is some type of marketing decision around that because the thirteenth of
February. Where publishing is concerned, books come out in certain times of the
month or certain times of season, so the winter books are really most of
the release dates are around February thirteenth, and I do think they it is
because people are going out and they're buying things, and they're looking for gifts.
So the publishers are smart. If your loved ones the gift of murder
this Valentine's Day, Hell yeah, it's just so romantic, especially this story.
It's romance off the charts. Before we jump into so talking about your
newest book, take a minute and just remind our listeners a little bit about
your relationship with the true crime space, especially about your connection to the Boston
Strangler case. I appreciate that kristin the Murder in Hollywood, this new book
is my sixteenth book. I've been writing true crime for well over twenty years.
Just celebrated my twentieth anniversary, as I should say as a published author,
and I do call myself an accidental author. I never believed of the
writing books one day, but that is until I was thrust into the spotlight
because of my work on the Boston Strangler case. Now this wasn't just something
I picked out of thin air as a personal crusade for me. Really,
my aunt was the youngest and final victim of that notorious nineteen sixties murder spree.
So I investigated the case or kind of reopened it in the late eighties
early nineteen nineties. Wrote my first book arose from Mary Mary being my aunt
Mary Sullivan's name, and it became a surprise bestseller. And then I thought,
geez, I can do this. There are other stories that are worth
telling. And now, sixteen books later, here we are. We don't
want to do an exhaustive bibliography, but do you give us just a brief
friend and about your most recent book, which we understand is also being turned
into a series by Amazon. Yeah, I appreciate that I've been I've had
the real gift from Hollywood that producers look at my work and they see it
easily adaptable because I write in a visual way. So I wrote Boston Strong,
which became Patriots Day with Mark Wahlberg, a coast Guard rescue story called
The Finest Hours, which became a big Disney movie with Chris Pine and Casey
Affleck, and Helltown. So Helltown is a book about a serial murder case,
and you guys had me on last year or discuss it. And now
that's being adapted into an eight part limited series for Amazon Studios, and it's
going to star Oscar Isaac as our protagonist, fellow writer Kurt Vonnegut that many
in your audience remember Kurt investigated a serial murder case back in the nineteen sixties
on Cape cod and it was one of the most vicious murder cases in the
history of crime in my opinion. So we're really looking forward to the series.
And this next book, Murder in Hollywood, is also in development as
a feature film now as well. How much of a role do you play
Casey as the author of the original material when it's being adapted for something like
an eight part limited series. Yeah, that's a great question. Bill earlier
in my career, say with The Patriots stead I didn't really have a role.
I was able to review the scripts and for authenticity purposes, but I
didn't have any essay overcasting or anything like that. They'd let me know that
Mark Wahlberg had been cast in the lead, etc. But I didn't have
a seat at the table. You only get that when you become an executive
producer or a producer on the project, which I am for Healtown. That
entire creative process from a collaborative standpoint has been a amazing because I've been working
with some of the best fraidive minds in Hollywood, starting with Team Downey.
That's Robert Downey Junior and his wife Susan. They are my co producers on
the project. Our director is Edward Berger, who won a slew of Oscars
for All Quiet on the Western Front last year, and we picked up ed.
Everybody in Hollywood wanted to work with him, but his new Oscar winning
movie hadn't come out yet. Sometimes luck plays a role in this, and
it's all about bringing the best people to the project and letting them take their
own journey with it. I wrote always the source material, but the screenwriters
are going to take it in sometimes a unique and different direction, and I'm
okay with that as long as it really, you know, grips me,
and it does. Kassi, How do you decide on your subjects for your
books? Do they do the subject kick you? Or do you go in
search of topics? Is there a master list somewhere of here's all the things
I'd like to cover and you're just ticking them off one by one. Yeah,
I've got a master list in my head. And sometimes these stories take
years to develop, so I'll have to find another project in the meantime.
And this book we're talking about today a murder in Hollywood. My agent,
Peter Steinberg at UTA United Talent, gave me this idea after Helltown. My
publisher, Source Books, was looking for another big book from me, meaning
something that you would incorporate the themes of a particular era and the names of
some of the most prominent people of that era. And he sent me probably
a list of four to five different news articles to take a look at.
And I came upon this article with regard to Lana Turner back in the nineteen
fifties, and I had heard the story about how she was involved with a
very salacious and sensational murder By nineteen fifty eight. Didn't really give it much
thought, but I thought, Okay, La Confidential is one of my favorite
books, and certainly one of my favorite films too. Yeah, excellent Bill,
and I'm a big sucker for and Chandler and all the La noir books
and films of the nineteen forties and fifties, and I would love to,
yeah, add to that large cannon in any way, shape or form.
So I told my agent, I said, I'm going to take a look
at this, give me a week. And I started to dig into the
story, and I realized the story hasn't been told in its full breath for
sixty years, and there's so much material that people don't even know about that
I have been able to dig out. And I'm very proud of it.
While we're on the La Confidential tip for one second, I would probably say,
if that's not my favorite film of all time, it's top five.
We over the holidays, we saw a wonderful holiday movie, Christmas movie with
Jamie Cromwell. James Cromwell, oh yeah, he had been on the board
of sag Aftra and I was the executive director, so I had a chance
to spend some time with him. I was told that her, I am,
he's a very intimidating guy, even though he's a lovely guy. He's
six six right, and I geez, how do I deal with this guy?
But he ended up being such a great, rounded, thoughtful, kind
man. And then I heard from other people on the staff that if he
likes you, he'll let you call him Jamie. And then at some point
when we'd work together a few months, he said to me, Bill,
call me Jamie, and I thought I've arrived when you call. When you
mentioned Jamie Crimewell, I said, jeez, he really has to know this
guy. Good for you, Bill. But that film and that book two
of my favorites. And there is a scene, if you recall him La
Confidential where Bud White Russell Crow's character Yeah, takes Guy Pears into the Cafe
Formosa and been there. One of them goes up to the booth where a
lot of Turner and Johnny stopping out are sitting, and there's a little scene
there. So I thought, oh, that's a unique way into this story.
And quite frankly, I thought there'd be much more about this crime,
and not only filmography, but books have been written, but there really wasn't
No people have mentioned it, So it was a blind canvas for me to
paint on over the past year and dig into all of the different details and
nuances that I was looking to explore with this, because it wasn't really only
a story about Lana Turner, but it was a story as well, a
murder in Hollywood, about the rise of organized crime in Hollywood, which I
was really fascinated by. I was so pleasantly surprised with the whole untold story
because you feel like everything about Hollywood is known, and this actually was a
story that I wasn't familiar with either. It's interesting that I looked at it
as the Lana Turner's story, but I wanted to really focus on the rise
of Hollywood, the studio system, and these young actors and actresses coinciding with
the rise of organized crime. I looked at Lana Turner and her rise,
and then I looked at La Gangster a gang boss Mickey Cohen in his rise,
and they were pretty similar in terms of Tommy. Both take taking over
Hollywood in different ways, shapes or forms, and I would say that for
the gangsters, you know what, they're all boat and it's fascinating to explore
that mindset. With the studios, it's a little more sinister in my opinion,
where you have these very well respected Hollywood producers who were praying on these
young actors and actresses. And the Harvey Weinstein story didn't come out of thin
air. It was born into Hollywood back in the twenties, thirties, forties,
and ultimately the fifties. This is the sort of thing that I would
love to be able to offer to my students in my film class as this
is some of the fallout of the studio system because we've been talking about it.
Given the current politics in my school district, I'm not going to be
able to keep this on my shelf, unfortunately, but it is very interesting
and so as I was reading this, I was sitting there going, this
is definitely a story of that era, but it is a story for the
twenty first century and the Me Too movement. You mentioned Harvey Weinstein a couple
of minutes ago, and what I was really interested in is the fact that
you have shown a light on the abuse of women in Hollywood, starting from
very early on. What do you think are some of the ways that Hollywood
has changed as a result of that Me Too movement and what are some of
the ways that it hasn't. That's a great question, Chris. I think
that my goal was to provide some agency for Lana Turner in the book,
really give her her power back. And I think female actors in Hollywood now
are starting to get that power back and really starting to make decisions for the
industry. Where they were always on the sideline or isolated. Even the most
paid actresses over the past twenty years, or Julia Roberts here, Jennifer Lawrence
is they never really had a creative seat at the table, which is ridiculous,
Steven, think about. But there was this mindset that goes all the
way back to the nineteen twenties in Hollywood, where Hollywood was a man's world
for a long time. And there are so many celebrities that we've in and
out of the pages of a Murder in Hollywood, from Sean Connery to marylan
Monroe, Judy Garland, Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz who died tragically in
her late forties and everybody looked at her and said, oh, what a
tragic story that was she became an alcoholic and a drug addict, But she
didn't just become that. The studios had put her on drugs when she was
a young teenager, when she was almost a pre teen. They had fed
these young actors and phetamines to keep them working for seventy hours a week to
crank out movie after movie. And these kids persisted on chicken brow from cigarettes.
That was their diet along with these bills. It's surprising that there weren't
more Judy Garlands in the world than there was even Lana Turner. When I
was doing a little bit of research to get ready for today, I had
forgotten that she died of throat cancer. I know, even going back to
my parents' generation. We were talking recently about the fact that so many adults
when I was a kid, so many adults used to smoke cigarettes. But
then it would be endemic in a place like Hollywood, and like you say,
surviving on broth and cigarettes and drugs and alcohol. Yeah, and these
kids were thirteen years old at the time. And yeah, it's funny you
mentioned that. Bill. My wife and I just maestro the other day with
Bradley Cooper about Letter Bernstein and I had to go outside and breathe some fresh
air because of all the smoking in the film. I was I can breathe,
and again, it was a short time ago when we all grew up
in that type of environment with our parents and grandparents. And here you have
Hollywood where they're putting these young actors on the fast track when they're so young.
Alana Turner has got one of the greatest introductions to Hollywood in history.
She's the original discovery story. She was discovered sitting at a soda fountain in
Hollywood. That was her, and that led to thousands, if not a
million, starlets or would be starlets, making their way to Hollywood in the
subsequent decades, sitting on a stool at a soda fountain, waiting to be
discovered. But that's she was just a kid at Hollywood High School. She
had moved to Hollywood from San Francisco because her own father was murdered when she
was quite young. And I started the book with a chapter to explain why
she was always drawn to dark men in her life. I think that's what
she was plagued by for much of her life until she decided to get her
power back. A lot of people are probably familiar with the name Lenna Turner,
but I think there may be some people who are not familiar with the
name Johnny Stompinado, and I certainly was not. Can you just give us
a quick rundown. Who is Johnny Stompanado. Yeah, that's a great question.
Christ And for those who don't know, what was Marilyn Monroe before Marilyn
Monroe, Lana owned Hollywood. Marilyn Monroe adored and idolized Lana and actually took
her whole image from Lana. Turner dyed her hair platinum blonde, and Lana
was in her mid thirties by the time Marilyn came around and passed the baton
of Hollywood superstar to Marilyn Monroe. So a lot of tournament was huge in
Hollywood and certainly is in Hollywood history. Johnny Stompanado was a World War Two
veteran bad guy who grew up in the Woodstock, Illinois, and made his
way to Hollywood and wanted to get on the fast track with organized crime.
And he was a jigglow in his first days in Hollywood, which a lot
of people were at that time praying on men and women, which is what
Johnny did. And suddenly young crime boss named Mickey Cohen took Johnny under his
wing. Mickey liked Johnny because Johnny was a combat vet, and Johnny knew
his way around weapons, and Johnny was pretty smart and pretty tough. Johnny
started to really have an influence on Mickey Cohen and his criminal activities. And
Mickey Cohen's interesting because for much of the book of Murder in Hollywood, the
reader is going to be reading about these shooting attacks on Sunset Boulevard right in
the middle of broad daylight, or bombing attempts at Mickey Cohen's home in Brentwood,
from where oj Simpson eventually live. Hollywood was under attack by organized crime
on the glory days of Hollywood, and people don't realize that. And as
Mickey got a little older, he wanted to probably get away from the gangster
violence, so to speak, so he and Johnny started to extort Hollywood starts,
putting them into compromising positions, and that's how this affair with Lana Turner
started. Were you able to spend some time in Los Angeles doing research for
the book you're based in Massachusetts. Do you end up making trips out there
to just refamiliarize yourself with the lay of the land. Yeah, Bill.
As a writer, for me, you have to look, touch and feel
it. I can't write about something unless I've seen it. I did spend
quite some time out in Los Angeles and Hollywood going over the ghosts of Lana
Turner and Mickey Cohen, walking up Sunset Boulevard and recognizing where Mickey Cohen's headquarters
once was, where all of the nightclubs that he had owned, and there
that street is so famous, so you can recognize where these places were,
and I certainly did that. I went to Lana Turner's home in Beverly Hills,
where the culmination of this story takes place, and this story ultimately is
it's a collision course between Hollywood glamour and gangsterism that ended up in a bloodstained
bedroom in Beverly Hills. How do you gain access to someone's home like that.
I couldn't walk the grid there. I've done that in the past.
I gained access to Whitey Bulger's apartment in Santa Monica a few years ago when
I wrote my book Hunting Weddy. But now that Lana's home is in private
hands, going up and knocking on the door probably would have freaked somebody out,
and I didn't want to do but just to familiarize myself with the street,
with the home standing across the street, and I'm sure they realized that
this is an infamous home in Hollywood and a lot of people gock at it
to take photos. I was no different from any other tourists doing the same
thing. But I also had to not knowledge of everything that I had learned
up to that point to allow me to picture what it must have been like
on Good Friday nineteen fifty eight when there was a swarm of police cars in
front of that beautiful mansion in Beverly Hills, wondering what the hell happened inside.
What kind of media and archival records were available to you? Did you
have to FOI at anything or all of this available? All of it's available
if you just know where to look. The La Times was a great resource.
The Los Angeles Police Department was a great resource. Beverly Hills Police Department
was a great resource. There is a you can use now for journalists and
writers called newspapers dot com, and it's a subscription. But if you buy
the subscription, and that's a nominal fee. But you can go all the
way back to the eighteen hundreds and start digging through every newspaper article that has
been digitized, and I was shocked at how many newspaper articles there were,
not only about a lot of Turner, I knew that, but about Mickey
Cohen at the time, and about Johnny Stampanado. He didn't just come out
of thin air. He'd been written about and reported on in Hollywood for almost
a decade before he'd even met Lana Turner. So does that mean that Johnny
Stompanado in praying on both women and men, is he bisexual himself? Yeah,
he never looked at I don't think he ever looked at himself that way.
He looked at This was the price of doing business in Hollywood. By
right about Johnny having alliances with Liberaci merv Griffin and again back in the nineteen
fifties, these gay actors and gay celebrities, they had to stay in the
closet and the only way that they could have that type of companionship they were
looking for were to get into business with people. Johnny Stompanado and Johnny Stampanado
recognized it, and he knew that the only way to get into Hollywood was
to use his body both as a weapon and as a tool for sex.
So really he's a hustler more than anything else in terms of that's how he
started relationships. He started to as a hustler. I think he morphed into
a gangster under Mickey, and then I think he became a hustler at the
end of his life as he was trying to hustle Lana Turner out of millions
of dollars that she was worth at the time. You're listening to Mind Over
Murder. We'll be right back after this word from our sponsors. We're back
here at Mindover Murder. Were you able to interview Lana Turner's daughter, Cheryl
Crane for this book. No. What I was told was Cheryl is.
I think she's almost ninety now and in a firm a pretty affirm I don't
think she's in good health. But I did read her book Detour, which
goes into at length her childhood, and it's a very tragic childhood. I
think I don't think we see I to I in terms of what happened in
the bedroom in nineteen fifty eight, and I do think I've got my heart
breaks for Cheryl Crane, and I think she spent her whole life trying to
protect her mother. I think Lana spent her whole life trying to protect Cheryl.
So it was a symbiotic relationship. So do you regard Johnny Stampanado's murder
as a case of self defense as they claim? I would say that it
was about time for Lana to take her life back. Now, I take
the reader in a murder for Hollywood, in murder in Hollywood, rather through
her life and through all the bad decisions that she had made regarding men in
her life and men that abused her physically, mentally, emotionally, financially,
and ultimately she couldn't take it anymore. And when Johnny Stampanado got extremely violent
against her and then threatened the life of Lana's mother and Cheryl, who was
fourteen years old at the time, Lana decided to take her future in her
own hands and kill Johnny Stampanado. That's what I believe, and I think
that's what the evidence in the case dictates. And I think it would have
been justifiable homicide because he was going to kill her at some point, and
she just was a little quicker than he was. This was really high profile
case back then. How did the media treat the major players in this case?
You read all of the newspaper reporting. What was the media like toward
Lana and toward Johnny. Well, it's a great question, Christen, because
Lana for sixty years has been looked at as a femme fatal by Hollywood.
What this book does is it elevates her to a rightful position as a feminist
icon. I think that anytime a crime like that happens, the focus immediately
is on the alleged perpetrator, and I think the media dragged Lana through the
bushes, if you will, and really cast the negative eye on her,
which is one of the reasons why decision was made not necessarily by Lana,
but by her attorney at the time, the Hollywood fixer named Jerry Giesler,
who was basically the Johnny Cochran of the nineteen fifties who it was the first
call she made after the knife had gone into Johnny's torso and he's lying dead
on her bedroom floor. She calls the lawyer before she calls police. The
lawyer gets there and the crime scene is manipulated for the next hour, and
then a narrative is created. Who wielded the knife? Was it Lana?
If it was Lana's going to go to trial, and there's a likelihood that
Lna could get the death penalant, which was very real in nineteen fifty eight.
But if we put the knife in the fourteen year old daughter's hand,
now we can look at a justifiable homicide case. Because an all male jury,
Remember guys, jury's were all male in nineteen fifty eight, an all
male jury, many of those men would have daughters that they would be sympathetic
for. And I think that there would be a lot of sympathy and empathy
for Cheryl. I don't think there would have been for Lana if she was
facing the same charges. Cheryl's a lovely fourteen year old girl, but she
really is a girl's So it's a lot easier to dismiss people's darkest thoughts about
what happened that night because there's a kid involved. That's right, And I
think, as I said, nobody could imagine that a child would be put
into prison, or a child who would be allowed to stand trial as an
adult. That just didn't happen back in nineteen fifty eight, especially in Hollywood.
The tables would have been turned to had Lana done that. But the
interesting thing reading the book or what I found in my research is Lana was
eventually sued by the Stampanado family for wrongful death, and she settled the case
before without going to trial. So what does that tell me? That tells
me that Lana did not want this to go to civil trial because there's no
statute of limitation on murder and she could have been put on trial eventually for
Johnny Stampanado's death and she avoided that at all costs. One of the disconnects
for me Casey is we talked about the studio system and how they controlled these
actors and actresses when they were younger. How does a situation like this develop
where Lana Turner is unfortunately involved in all of these abusive relationships and there's so
much negative energy surrounding her. I feel like there's a disconnect between the studio
system and then all the terrible things that were happening in Lana's life. Would
they not able to protect their stars from some of this stuff? It's a
great question. Bill. Not only were they not able to protect their stars,
they were I would say there was culpability on the studio side because Lana
Turner had a morality clause with a studio MGM at the time. If she
was in a relationship with someone, she would have to marry that person.
First of all, she couldn't just have a boyfriend because that was not looked
at in the right way in nineteen fifty eight. And then she was stuck
in a loveless, violent marriage until that marriage ended, until she divorced whomever
she was with at that time. And one of the shocking things I found
out in my research going through BI case files was that they had a case.
Jade Goarhover had a full file on Lana Turner and there is an episode
in the book where an FBI agent follows Lana to New York City and Lana
was dating an African American jazz musician at the time. Somehow that agent gets
that information to j Edgar Hooover. Jed Goarhoover calls up Louis B. Mayor
at MGM and says, the Queen of Hollywood, which is what Lana was
at the time, is dating an African American the a Lota almost lost her
job at the studio just for that. So these actors were under incredible pressure
at the time to paint what we would call a wholesome picture of the movie
industry. But it was really anything but for anyone who isn't clear on the
concept of morality clause and I had to explain that to my film class,
and we were talking about the studio system. Was a morality clause something that
applied equally to male and female stars or would it mainly have been female stars
that had a morality clause added to their contract. That is a great question,
Kristen, Well, you look at the moraleality clauses of male stars,
and I mentioned this in the book. Lana Turner is a teenager. Lana
Turner is a minor, but the studio is demanding that she escort their male
adult stars, including a future president named Ronald Reagan, to the regular And
so you have these adult stars that are in their late twenties, thirties,
even forties, squaring around these underage female starlets and nobody that's an eye,
which is what made me sick as I was writing this, But I wanted
to again lift the veil of that toxic masculinity that Hollywood had at the time
and probably still has. I was reading the scene about Errol Flynn and his
yacht and I just had to put the book down for a little bit.
I absolutely could not believe some of the hijinks that were going on with the
biggest stars in Hollywood at that point. It really was just sick. Name
some of them was Robin He was the biggest action star, really the first
action star in Hollywood history, and he was basically a serial rapist of young
women and he actually eventually went to trial for that. So again, the
studios look the other way while these older actors were preying on these young stars.
You're a dad, and you're a dad of teenage daughters. Now they're
now in their twenties. But yes, in writing something like this, do
you find yourself talking to your daughters about this and this is you're looking at
this from a twenty twenty four lens. Yeah, But at the same time,
this stuff still goes on. As Kristin mentioned the me Too movement a
few minutes ago, do you find yourself discussing these things with your daughters?
Oh? I think you have to, and I have these conversations with my
wife as well, but with our daughters. They're now getting into the workplace
for the first time. They're leaving college, and it's a whole different world
out there. Hopefully the world is a lot better now than it was even
a few years ago, but they have to know that these things are real,
and these demons exist in every way, shape or form in every industry
they're out there. Do you think Hollywood has made enough changes as a result
of the Me Too movement? Has Hollywood come a good distance since what happened
with Lana Turner? Are they just hiding it better? They probably just that's
a great question. I don't know that would be a question for a female
actor to answer. I can't put myself in those shoes. I knew what
it was like as I wrote about it. I hope Hollywood's come a great
deal further from Lana's time, and especially from this awakening that's happened over the
past few years. But Hollywood's cyclical, and these bad characters always somehow get
second chances. Not the Harvey Weinstein's because he's in jail, but some of
these other people that weren't brought to justice or trial. They still have their
careers in Hollywood, and they go into what they call Hollywood jail for a
couple of years, and then they come out and people forget what they had
done. You have to google. Thank god there's the internet now, because
you can read out very quickly on their litany of offenses. This story is
so amazing, and I'm thrilled that you've written the book as a result,
because it does shine a spotlight on something that I think had been somewhat forgotten.
What I don't quite get is this obviously was a very high profile story
back in nineteen fifty eight when it happened, yet it seems to have been
forgotten. Is it just the passage of time, or is there some other
reason why the Lenna Turner Johnny Stamponado's story hasn't been more top of mind.
That's a great question, Bill. I think if we're talking about if this
was Marilyn Monroe now, it probably would have been a story that immediately was
recognizable to the masses. But I think that Hollywood always goes on to the
next project right after the Lana Turner scandal. Hollywood has been right for scandal
for the last sixty years, whether it's Helter Skelter or the OJ Simpson case,
or what's happening in Hollywood right now the producer's son who was accused of
murdering his wife. So there are always scandals in Hollywood. This was certainly
the biggest at the time, and probably the biggest I would say over a
span of maybe a couple of decades, because it was so sensational and Lana
was the biggest actor in Hollywood at the time. Imagine Margot Robbie, for
example, if this had happened to her yesterday, That's what it would be
like. Lana was as big as star, if not bigger than Margot Robbie
in nineteen fifty eight. I know that when you go into each book project,
you're going into it to write an excellent book. But is there anything
else aside from a great true crime story that you're hoping the reader will get
out of a murder in Hollywood? Yeah, I would say that. I
call myself an archaeologist of words. I get excited when I learned something that's
that I don't know, and I can't wait to write about it in a
way that makes it entertaining. And informative for the reader. As I said,
I think my goal here is to examine the toxic masculinity of Hollywood,
to show the reader how Hollywood began and grew over several decades. It wasn't
all of these beautiful sachronesque Hollywood movies that they were churning out. There was
darkness behind the screen, and that darkness bled onto the streets of Sunset Boulevard
with a crime wave that was unsurpassed in many ways some of the gangster episodes
that I read about in Murder in Hollywood. I was really shocked to know
that these things actually happened in a place that everybody is either seen on television
or film or who have been there. Some of your most popular books have
had a Massachusetts theme or have a connection to Cape cod where you're from.
This seems like a very deliberate shift away from East Coast themes to West Coast
themes. So is that a conscious decision on your part? I would say
it was a subconscious decision. It probably wasn't. I didn't lead with that,
but it was on my mind. I wanted to break out of the
regionality of some of the books that I've been writing most recently, because they
all have a New England or a Boston bent if you will. A good
story is a good story no matter where you find it, So I'm always
looking for stories that speak to me anywhere. It just so happens that New
England is such a great place for these stories that organically come up. But
Hollywood is. I'm out there, if not several times a year as much
as I can, so I'm very familiar with that topography and that geography,
and I understand the streets there as well as I do Boston. Does your
wife lobby for Tahiti or some other really wonderful location for I wish she wants
me to just she likes me to stay home, don't go too far and
get it. There's a certain risk involved with some of the books that I
write. With the Murder of Hollywood, the great thing is everybody was long
gone by the time Casey Sherman knocked on Lana's door in Beverly Hills, so
I was able to write this through the prism of history and get the story.
I think the reporters in nineteen fifty eight were trying to outdo each other
with sensational reporting and headlines, but they weren't seeing what the story was.
And when I looked at it from a thirty thousand foot level, I was
able to see where the pieces fit For the first time. People didn't realize
that Lana and Johnny Stampanado didn't just fall in love. This was an extortion
plot from day one, and poor Lana it was being victimized yet again and
decided once Johnny Stompanado after a very violent beating that he gave her on Oscar
night when she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, the biggest night of her
professional career, and she does not invite Johnny to the Oscars. Instead,
she takes her daughter and her mother, and when she gets back to her
hotel room, her bungalow late at night, of course, Johnny has found
his way in there and he's waiting for her and gives her the beating of
her life. And she knew at that point there was no other way to
rid herself of this man. If she tried to leave him, he'd kill
her. If she tried to leave him, he'd kill her daughter and her
mother, So she had to protect her family at all costs. And I
think that's what she did. You had spoken earlier about feeling like you wanted
to make sure that Lana Turner had her agency back and her voice back.
Do you feel like you accomplished that for her? I hope so, I'd
like to think so. I think the way I ended the book because Lana
had a career much longer than nineteen fifty eight, but I wanted to end
it with a very triumphant moment for not only Lana, but for her daughter
and her mother. And it was amazing to me that Lana outlasted all of
her enemies and so she I think she does get her voice back, her
agency back, and I hope with this book her reputation back as well.
The book is a murder in Hollywood, the untold story of Tinseltown's most shocking
crime. What's next on the agenda for you, mister Sherman. I know
you're always working. Yeah, so I have just I'm completing my seventeenth book
as we speak. It's called Deadly Depths and it's another New England story,
but it's a story that made national headlines back in twenty sixteen when a young
man with Aspergers syndrome took his mother on a deep sea fishing trip off the
coast of Rhode Island, and she never came up. She never came back,
and he was later discovered by on a life raft after seven days at
sea by a Chinese cargo ship. Right, there is a story that's worth
telling, but turns out years prior to that episode, this young man was
also accused of murdering his multi millionaire grandfather in his bed in Connecticut. So
this really makes the Murdo story. Look, this is the murder story on
steroids. Yeah really, I will say that. Of course, I always
into these projects with my eyes wide open, and the story is not what
I thought it was going into it. And that's what I love about the
work I do. I love to be changed and turned around by the facts
and the evidence. And I can't wait to get this story out there as
well. Wow, So when will Deadly Depths come out? If all goes
according to plant twenty twenty five or yeah, twenty twenty five, We're going
to let my murder in Hollywood breathe this year. Same publisher. I've got
a great relationship with Source Books. They've been my they were my publisher for
Helltown and they're like family to me. So we're looking at twenty twenty five
for Deadly Depths. And then I've got a few other ideas kicking around my
head right now. And are we going to see you at Crime Con again
in June. We've got a really fast turnaround on crime Con this year,
good time. So I'm talking to my marketing team at Source Books right now
just about that. So if they're there and they have a presence, then
I'm sure they're going to want me there. Yeah, Nashville, right,
Yeah, Nashville. We'll be there with bells on, so we hope too.
And the book A Murder in Hollywood, the owntelled story of Tinseltown's most
shocking crime, is available February thirteenth, wherever books are sold. Casey,
thank you so much for joining us today. We appreciate it. Thank you
guys, always a pleasure. I appreciate it. That's going to do it
for this episode of mind Over Murder. Thank you so much for listening.
We'll see you next time. Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero
and Another Dog Productions. Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley.
Our logo art is by Pamela Arnois. Our theme music is by Kevin McLeod.
Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with crawl Space Media. You can
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page on the Colonial Parkway Murders on Facebook, and finally, you can follow
Bill Thomas on Twitter at Bill Thomas. Five six. Thank you for listening
to mind Over Murder.