Crane was a drummer from age 11,[2] and he began his entertainment career as a radio personality, beginning in Hornell, New York and later in Connecticut. He then moved to Los Angeles, where he hosted the number-one rated morning radio show. In the early 1960s, Crane moved into acting, eventually landing the lead role of Colonel Robert Hogan in Hogan's Heroes. The series aired from 1965 to 1971, and Crane received two Emmy Award nominations.
Crane's career declined after Hogan's Heroes. He became frustrated with the few roles that he was being offered and began performing in dinner theater. In 1975, he returned to television with the NBC series The Bob Crane Show, but the series received poor ratings and was cancelled after thirteen weeks. Afterward, Crane returned to performing in dinner theater and also appeared in occasional guest spots on television.
Crane was found bludgeoned to death in his Scottsdale, Arizona, apartment while on tour in June 1978 for a dinner theater production of Beginner's Luck. In the 1990s, Crane's friend John Henry Carpenter was tried for the murder but was acquitted, and the case remains officially unsolved. Crane's previously uncontroversial public image suffered due to the suspicious nature of his death and posthumous revelations about his personal life.[3]
Early life
Bob Crane was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, the younger of two sons of Rose Mary (née Ksenich) and Alfred Thomas Crane—the original spelling of the family name was Crean.[4] He spent his childhood and teenaged years in Stamford.[5]
Crane began playing drums at the age of 11, and by junior high was organizing local drum and bugle parades with his neighborhood friends.[5] He joined his high school's orchestra and its marching and jazz bands.[5][6][7] Crane also played for the Connecticut and Norwalk Symphony Orchestras as part of their youth orchestra program.[8] He graduated from Stamford High School in 1946.[5] Then, in 1948, he enlisted for two years in the Connecticut Army National Guard and was honorably discharged in 1950.[9] The previous year, he married his high-school sweetheart, Anne Terzian. The couple had three children: Robert David, Deborah Anne, and Karen Leslie.[10]
Career
Early career
Crane in 1963
In 1950, Crane began his career in radio broadcasting at WLEA in Hornell, New York. He soon moved to Connecticut stations WBIS in Bristol and then WICC in Bridgeport, a 1,000-watt operation with a signal covering the northeastern portion of the New York metropolitan area. In 1956, Crane was hired by CBS Radio to host the morning show at its West Coast flagship KNX in Los Angeles, California, partly to re-energize that station's ratings and partly to halt his erosion of suburban ratings at WCBS in New York City. In California, Crane filled the broadcast with sly wit, drumming, and such guests as Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Bob Hope. His show quickly topped the morning ratings with adult listeners in the Los Angeles area, and Crane became "king of the Los Angeles airwaves".[11]
After seeing Crane's performance on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Donna Reed offered him a guest shot on her program. After the success of that episode, his character, Dr. David Kelsey, was incorporated into the show's storyline, and Crane became a regular cast member, beginning with the episode "Friends and Neighbors". Crane continued to work full-time at KNX during his stint on The Donna Reed Show, running back and forth from the KNX studio at Columbia Square to Columbia Studios. He left the show in December 1964.[2]
Hogan's Heroes (1965–1971)
In 1965, Crane was offered the starring role in a CBS television sitcom set in a World War IIPOW camp. Hogan's Heroes involved the sabotage and espionage missions of Allied soldiers, led by Colonel Robert Hogan, from under the noses of the oblivious Germans guarding them. The show was an immediate hit, finishing in the top 10 in its first year. The series lasted for six seasons on CBS, and Crane was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1966 and 1967.
After having a love affair with Hogan co-star Cynthia Lynn,[12] the actress who played Helga, Crane became romantically involved with Lynn's replacement Patricia Olson in 1968, who played Hilda under the stage name Sigrid Valdis. Crane divorced Terzian in 1970, just before their 21st anniversary, and married Olson on the set of the show later that year, with series co-star Richard Dawson serving as best man.[13][14]
Their son, Robert Scott "Scotty" Crane, was born in 1971,[1] and they later adopted a daughter, Ana Marie. Robert Crane Jr. later revealed that his father, Bob, was not the biological father of any of Olson's children. When they were married in 1970, Patricia was already pregnant, but Bob had had a vasectomy in 1968 while he was still married to his first wife.[15] Crane and Olson separated in 1977,[14] and were mere weeks away from finalizing their divorce at the time of Crane's death in June, 1978.[16]
Following the cancellation of Hogan's Heroes in 1971, Crane appeared in two Disney films: Superdad (1973), in the title role, and a small role in Gus (1976). In 1973, he purchased the rights to a comedy play called Beginner's Luck and began touring it, as its star and director, at the Showboat Dinner Theatre in St. Petersburg, Florida; the La Mirada Civic Theatre in California; the Windmill Dinner Theatre in Scottsdale, Arizona; and other dinner theaters around the country.[17]
Between theater engagements, Crane guest-starred in a number of television shows, including Police Woman, Gibbsville, Quincy, M.E., and The Love Boat. In 1975, he returned to television with his own series, The Bob Crane Show on NBC, which was cancelled after thirteen episodes. In early 1978, Crane taped a travel documentary in Hawaii and recorded an appearance on the Canadian afternoon cooking show Celebrity Cooks. Neither aired in the U.S. after his death the following June. His appearance on Celebrity Cooks was broadcast on CBC Television five times beginning in 1978, and was dramatized in the biopic film Auto Focus.[2] Claims that Crane had been distraught during the taping and had made inappropriate jokes about death and sex have been denied by the show's producers and production staff who have stated that if anything inappropriate had been said, they would have stopped the taping or cancelled the episode.[18][19]
Private life and murder
Crane frequently videotaped and photographed his own sexual escapades.[20] During the run of Hogan's Heroes, Dawson introduced him to John Henry Carpenter, a regional sales manager for Sony Electronics who often helped famous clients with their video equipment.[21] The two men struck up a friendship and began visiting bars and nightclubs together. Crane attracted many women due to his celebrity status, and he introduced Carpenter to them as his manager. Crane and Carpenter videotaped their joint sexual encounters.[22] Crane's son Robert later insisted that all of the women were aware of the videotaping and consented to it, but several claimed that they had no idea that they had been recorded until they were informed by Scottsdale police after Crane's murder.[23] During their friendship, Carpenter became national sales manager at Akai and he arranged his business trips to coincide with Crane's dinner-theater touring schedule, so that the two could continue videotaping their sexual encounters.[24]
Apartment 132A of the Winfield Place Apartments (now condominiums) where Crane was murderedA funeral wreath on the door of apartment 132ACrane and Valdis's gravestone, bearing their portraits and the banner "Hogan and Hilda, Together Forever"
In June 1978, Crane was living in the Winfield Place Apartments in Scottsdale during a run of Beginner's Luck at the Windmill Dinner Theatre. On the afternoon of June 29, his co-star Victoria Ann Berry entered his apartment after he failed to show up for a lunch meeting, and discovered his body.[25] Crane had been bludgeoned to death with a weapon that was never identified, though investigators believed it to be a camera tripod. An electrical cord had been tied around his neck.[26]
The Scottsdale Police Department had no homicide division in 1978, so it was ill-equipped to handle such a high-profile murder investigation. The crime scene yielded few clues; no evidence was found of forced entry, and nothing of value was missing. Detectives examined Crane's extensive videotape collection, which led them to Carpenter, who had flown to Phoenix on June 25 to spend a few days with Crane. Carpenter's rental car was impounded and searched. Several blood smears were found that matched Crane's blood type; no one else of that blood type was known to have been in the car, including Carpenter. DNA testing was not yet available, and the Maricopa County Attorney declined to file charges.[29]
In 1990, Scottsdale Police Detective Barry Vassall and Maricopa County Attorney's Office Investigator Jim Raines[30] re-examined the evidence from 1978 and persuaded the county attorney to reopen the case.[31] DNA testing was inconclusive on the blood found in Carpenter's rental car, but Raines did discover an evidence photograph of the car's interior that appeared to show a piece of brain tissue. The actual tissue samples recovered from the car had been lost, but an Arizona judge ruled that the new evidence was admissible.[31] In June 1992, Carpenter was arrested and charged with Crane's murder.[32][33]
Trial
At the 1994 trial, Crane's son Robert testified that Crane had repeatedly expressed a desire to sever his friendship with Carpenter in the weeks before his death. He said that Carpenter had become "a hanger-on" and "a nuisance to the point of being obnoxious".[34] "My dad expressed that he just didn't need Carpenter kind of hanging around him anymore," he said.[29] Robert testified that Crane had called Carpenter the night before the murder and ended their friendship.[35]
Carpenter's attorneys attacked the prosecution's case as circumstantial and inconclusive. They presented evidence that Carpenter and Crane were still on good terms, including witnesses from the restaurant where the two men had dined the evening before the murder. They noted that the murder weapon had never been identified or found; the prosecution's camera tripod theory was sheer speculation, they said, based solely on Carpenter's occupation. They disputed the claim that the newly discovered evidence photo showed brain tissue, and alleged that the police work had been sloppy, such as the mishandling and misplacing of evidence—including the crucial tissue sample itself.[30] They pointed out that Crane had been videotaped and photographed in sexual relations with numerous women, implying that any one of them might have been the killer.[35] Other potential suspects proposed by defense attorneys included angry husbands and boyfriends of the women, and an actor who had sworn vengeance after a violent argument with Crane in Texas several months earlier.[29]
Carpenter was acquitted,[36][37][38] and he continued to maintain his innocence until his death in 1998.[39]
After the trial, Robert speculated publicly that his father's widow Patty Olson might have had a role in instigating the crime. "Nobody got a dime out of [the murder]," he said, "except for one person," alluding to Crane's will, which excluded him, his siblings, and his mother, with Crane's entire estate left to Olson. He repeated his suspicions in the 2015 book Crane: Sex, Celebrity, and My Father's Unsolved Murder.[40] Maricopa County District Attorney Rick Romley responded, "We never characterized Patty as a suspect," adding "I am convinced John Carpenter murdered Bob Crane."[13] Officially, Crane's murder remains unsolved.[39]
Later DNA testing
In November 2016, the Maricopa County Attorney's Office permitted Phoenix television reporter John Hook to submit the 1978 blood samples from Carpenter's rental car for retesting, using a more advanced DNA technique than the one used in 1990.[41] Two sequences were identified, one from an unknown male, and the other too degraded to reach a conclusion.
This testing consumed all of the remaining DNA from the rental car, making further tests impossible. Hook's investigation turned up two blood vials, samples from Crane and Carpenter, located in evidence storage at the Maricopa County Attorney's Office. Carpenter voluntarily gave a sample to Scottsdale Police when he was questioned in 1978. Crane's blood vial was recovered during his autopsy the day after the murder. Both were used as comparison samples for Hook's DNA tests on the blood stains found in Carpenter's rental car.[42]
Auto Focus
Bob Crane's life and murder were the subject of the 2002 feature film Auto Focus directed by Paul Schrader and starring Greg Kinnear as Crane. The film is based on the book by The Murder of Bob Crane author Robert Graysmith and was described as "brilliant" by critic Roger Ebert. It portrays Crane as a happily married, church-going family man who succumbs to Hollywood's celebrity lifestyle after becoming a television star. He meets John Carpenter, played by Willem Dafoe, and learns about the new home video technology. He then descends into a life of strip clubs, BDSM, and sex addiction.[43]
Crane's son Scotty challenged the film's accuracy in an October 2002 review. "During the last twelve years of his life," he wrote, "[Crane] went to church three times: when I was baptized, when his father died, and when he was buried." His son further stated that Crane was a sex addict long before he became a star, and that he may have begun recording his sexual encounters as early as 1956. There was no evidence, he said, that Crane engaged in BDSM; there were no such scenes in any of his hundreds of home movies, and Schrader admitted that the film's BDSM scene was based on his own experience while writing Hardcore.[44] Before production on Auto Focus was announced, Scotty and Olson had tried to sell a rival script titled F-Stop or Take Off Your Clothes and Smile, but interest ceased after Auto Focus was announced.[45]
In June 2001, Scotty launched the bobcrane.com website,[23] which remained active as late as May 2017.[46] It included a paid section featuring photographs, outtakes from his father's sex films, and Crane's autopsy report that proved, he said, that his father did not have a penile implant as stated in Auto Focus.[47][48] The XXX-rated photographs and videos from Bob Crane's private archive of sexual liaisons involving him and various women could also be purchased for a monthly subscription fee of $19.95.[49] The site was renamed "Bob Crane: The Official Web Site", but is now abandoned. An "Official Licensing Website of Bob Crane" was maintained by CMG Worldwide elsewhere on the internet—it was active as late as February 2023,[50] but the website is now defunct.
^Hind Posz, Darcie. "Robert E. Crane of Hogan's Heroes and his Hogan and Crean Ancestors of Waterbury and Stamford." Connecticut Ancestry, Vol. 64, no. 1 (August 2021): 31-40.
^TV Radio Mirror, October 1967, pp. 33, 76–79; Bridgeport Symphony Orchestra, formerly Connecticut Symphony Orchestra, Bridgeport CT; Stamford High School, Class of 1946 Alumni.
^Newark Advocate, July 24, 1965, "Crane Gambles $150,000," p. 7; Stamford National Guard records, Stamford CT.
^ ab"Sigrid Valdis, 72". Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. November 22, 2007. p. 8E. Retrieved December 15, 2012.
^Fryer, Christopher (2015). Crane: Sex, Celebrity, and My Father's Unsolved Murder. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. pp. 93–94. ISBN9780813160757.
^ abPhilbin, Tom (2012). The Killer Book of Cold Cases: Incredible Stories, Facts, and Trivia from the Most Baffling True Crime Cases of All Time. Sourcebooks, Inc. ISBN1-402-25356-7 p. 191
