In Lana Turner’s Bedroom

It was because it was night-time and raining that I decided to drive up to Lana Turner's old house in Beverly Hills. The crime had taken place forty-six years earlier, on a stormy Good Friday. This was Ash Wednesday, and if I went now, who knew, maybe I would get some sense of the atmosphere that night, when Johnny Stompanato was murdered.

At 9.20 p.m. on April 4, 1958 Cheryl Crane, Lana Turner's fourteen-year-old daughter, stabbed her mother's lover in the stomach. Johnny Stompanato was a suave, well-known gangster who had escorted other stars around town and had once been Mickey Cohen's bodyguard. Two weeks earlier, Stompanato and Lana had had a violent fight because she refused to take him with her to the Oscars (she had been nominated for the first time, for her role in Peyton Place). On numerous occasions he had threatened to disfigure her or harm her family if she left him—he had visited her in London on the set of her most recent movie and reportedly had such a clash with her young co-star, Sean Connery, that Scotland Yard had him deported. That Friday night the arguments escalated to such a degree that Cheryl, hoping to protect her mother, ran down to the kitchen to get a knife. She stood outside Lana's bedroom door, and when the door opened she saw Stompanato behind her mother with his arm raised, as if to strike her. She ran at him, and he fell. Lana didn't see the knife. She only saw the stab wound in her lover's dying body.

This is what Lana and Cheryl told Clinton Anderson, the Beverly Hills chief of police, when he arrived an hour and a half later. Anderson said their stories matched exactly. In the 1980s, Lana and Cheryl both wrote memoirs; their stories still matched. But let's go back to 1958: in that hour and a half before Anderson arrived, the two women were joined by six other people, not counting the corpse. Cheryl called her father, Stephen Crane, who ran a restaurant nearby (Crane was Lana's second husband; she would eventually marry eight times). Lana called her mother, Mildred Turner, because she couldn't remember their doctor's number. Mildred Turner called the doctor, and the doctor, on pronouncing Stompanato dead, suggested to Lana that she call the most celebrated criminal lawyer in Los Angeles, Jerry Giesler. Giesler was nicknamed 'the magnificent mouthpiece'; he had got Errol Flynn cleared of two rape charges and Bugsy Siegel cleared of murder. He arrived with a private eye, Fred Otash, who was a former vice cop and fed stories to Confidential magazine on the side. By now the house was surrounded—by medics, policemen and neighbours in bathrobes—but one last person made it into the bedroom before Anderson: James Bacon, a journalist who slipped through by pretending he was the coroner's assistant.

Not only was the room a little crowded, but two crucial things happened in that hour and a half which made the facts unverifiable—and which have preserved the mystery in people's minds ever since. The body was found quite a way from the door with very little blood around it (that is, it had most likely been moved), and the knife was found in the bathroom, covered with smudged and unidentifiable fingerprints.

There was gossip from the start—that Lana made Cheryl take the rap in order to avoid the death penalty and save her career, that Lana found Cheryl and Johnny in bed together—and given that so many people want a piece of the celebrity puzzle, how can we know who to believe? Turner had a word for people who were obsessed with her: Lanatics.