53. Bob Crane

Ah, the joys of minor league stardom. For Bob Crane, his six-season sentence making the world laugh at Nazis in Hogan’s Heroes brought him just that. The dedicated sex addict lived a life full of barflies with rug-burned knees and sheets crusted with dried jizz.

When his friend John Carpenter (no relation to the Halloween director) got him a prehistoric video camera, he started filming his sexcapades–many of them co-starring his techie pal. The orgy came to a premature end in 1978, when Bob was found bludgeoned to death in an Arizona hotel. Carpenter was the prime suspect, but DNA tests on the blood found in his car were inconclusive.

The 2002 film Auto Focus revived Crane’s notoriety, portraying him as a churchgoing family man who ends up screwing his brains out. The Cranes were disgusted. “My father had been having extramarital affairs and photographing hundreds of nude women engaged in sexual activity since the 1940s…He was an overly sexual person from an early age,” protested son Scotty–who, to prove it, posted prehistoric porn loops featuring Pop on the Web. Even his father might agree that some things are better left behind closed doors.

Watch Bob perform “These Boots Were Made for Walkin’”–on the drums!:

[Charles Bottomley]

On April 20, 1999, two Columbine High School students walked into their school in Littleton, Colorado, shot and killed thirteen people, and injured twenty-three others before turning the guns on themselves. The massacre shocked the country into a wave of introspection and accusation. Just who or what could have led these young men to commit such a gruesome act?

Fingers flailed and landed on a skinny man caked in face paint and dressed in gothic garb similar to that favored by the murderers. He also had a few hit albums under his black leather belt, but that didn’t stop critics from blaming Marilyn Manson for influencing the teens to kill. Pundits and politicians, including Senator Joe Lieberman, attacked Manson, labeling the artist a “shock rocker” whose band was the “sickest group ever promoted by a mainstream record company.” Manson fought back with a piece in Rolling Stone: “When it comes down to who’s to blame for the high school murders in Littleton, Colorado, throw a rock and you’ll hit someone who’s guilty…when these tragedies happen, most people don’t really care any more than they would about the season finale of Friends or The Real World.”

In 2001, the band’s “Fight Song” video, featuring goth kids battling jocks,
was alleged to be a commentary on the tragedy. Manson replied to the rumor: “People will put into it what they want if it helps them sell newspapers…Flak isn’t my job.” True. Now that he’s divorced from burlesque babe Dita Von Teese, his job consists mostly of feeding tabloids news of his romance with 19-year old actress Evan Rachel Wood–but even when it’s just about sex, Manson is still scandalous.

As a record producer, pint-sized Phil Spector created the sound of the 1960s, using a multitude of instruments to re-create the feeling of a first kiss and the fracture of a broken heart. Through the 1970s and ’80s, the reclusive Spector earned a reputation as a borderline psycho and gun-nut. He has waved pistols at John Lennon and Leonard Cohen.

Bad craziness undid Spector when, in 2003, a dead B-movie starlet was found in his home. Lana Clarkson had died of a gunshot wound that Spector blamed on “accidental suicide.” In an interview given a week earlier, he had described himself as “relatively insane.” Phil didn’t help his sanity’s cause when he appeared at his second-degree murder trial in a variety of wigs that made him look like everything from a blond pageboy to a collision between TV’s Screech and a bottle of Rogaine.

In 2007, a deadlocked jury resulted in a mistrial. In public, the jury is still out on Phil Spector. Phil is just out to lunch.

Watch Tina and Ike Turner perform Spector’s “River Deep, Mountain High”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KkMSkmx7sM

-Charles Bottomley

Although he was best known for his soulful odes to racial harmony and sexual bliss, singer Marvin Gaye’s personal life was anything but laid back. At age 44, Gaye publicly admitted he was long-time “drug addict and sex freak”, a Safe-for-Work version of one ex-wife’s accusations that Gaye was a porn fiend and chronic masturbator prone to violence and coke binges.

Gaye’s double life mirrored that of his father, Marvin Pence Gay Sr., a fundamentalist preacher in Washington, DC. Despite vowing to wipe out vice in all its guises, Gay Sr. was also a cross-dresser who whipped his children. (Marvin Jr. later changed his last name to “Gaye” to distance himself from his father.) In 1984, in a house filled with guns, booze, and blow, the Grammy-winning singer and his father had their final skirmish, this time over misplaced business papers. After Gaye knocked his father to the floor, 70-year-old Marvin Sr. got up, retrieved the pistol his son had given him for Christmas, and shot him twice at point blank range, killing him instantly. In a jailhouse interview, Gay Sr. was asked if he loved his son. He responded, “Let’s say that I didn’t dislike him.”

America reeled when, in 1996, six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey was discovered strangled and sexually assaulted in the wine cellar of her family’s home in Boulder, Colorado.

The former Little Miss Merry Christmas’s painted Kewpie-doll face became a nightly news fixture, and America was gripped by a necromantic furor. Armchair detectives pondered clues such as the undigested pineapple found in her stomach and the unidentified male DNA found in her underwear. As the case ground on, everyone from the police to supermarket tabloids to Colorado’s governor began to suspect the parents’ involvement. Allegations of a cover-up raged; grand juries were convened. But no one was ever charged.

In 2006, just as public interest had waned, ex-schoolteacher John Karr confessed to Ramsey’s murder. Karr fit the profile–if the profile is looking like someone you’d never leave your six-year-old alone with. But no positive DNA match was made, and Karr was found to be living in Alabama at the time of the murder.

In July 2008, the Colorado D.A. officially cleared the girl’s parents of any wrongdoing in her death.  “JonBenét” can now be filed away in the bulging Cold Case album of American scandals.
[Charles Bottomley]

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