Now you see it and now you don’t. These peculiar “reports” and the charming naivete of the police — a whole two weeks. Tut, tut!
On February 6th, Miss Normand is reported as having said that when she visited Taylor on the night of the murder, Peavey answered her ring at the doorbell and told her Mr. Taylor was telephoning. Not wanting to interrupt, Mabel Normand waited outside. When Taylor heard her voice, however, he hurriedly cut off his phone call and rushed to her.
Now notice what Miss Normand is reported to have said at that time about that telephone conversation. “If there is a possibility that the jealousy of another woman enters into the mystery, I feel certain that the phone call which he was receiving as I entered his apartment had something to do with it. Whoever it was calling him seemed intensely absorbed in what he had to say.”
Naturally the question arises, How did Mabel Normand know this person had called Taylor instead of Taylor having been the one to place the call? How could Mabel Normand, entering the room, and seeing Taylor hastily terminating a telephone conversation, know that the person at the other end of the line was intensely absorbed in what Taylor had to say?
Did Taylor tell her about this call during the visit which followed when he and Miss Normand were sitting there alone? Did Miss Normand’s naive statement show that she knew a great deal more about that call than she told police? It is an interesting field for speculation.
Let us digress at this point for just a moment to mention an article which appeared in the February 1, 1929, issue of Liberty in which Mr. Sidney Sutherland, the author, states that he had talked with Mabel Normand the year before (apparently 1928) about the Taylor murder. And at the time of this conversation she is reported to have said, “When I reached Bill’s open door, I heard a voice inside; he was using the telephone. So I walked around the flower beds for a few minutes until he had quit talking and hung up. Then I rang his bell. He came to the door, smiled, and held out both hands. ‘Hello, Mabel darling,’ he said. ‘I know what you’ve come for — two books I’ve just got for you.’ ”
Sometime after that fatal night, one of Taylor’s friends was to express it as his opinion that he was the one with whom Taylor was talking on the telephone at the time Mabel Normand arrived. But a cautious reader, thinking over those several statements of Miss Normand’s, will wonder what Taylor said to her about that telephone conversation during the period when they were seated side by side on the davenport sipping their cocktails. And why did Miss Normand apparently try to point out to the police the possible significance of that telephone conversation?
Moreover, William Desmond Taylor had been the victim of mysterious burglaries. In fact, only some two weeks before his death his place had been burglarized and someone had stolen some jewelry, also a large number of specially made cigarettes which the director had had tailored to his individual taste. Then pawn tickets in the name of William Dean Tanner had been placed in an envelope and mailed to William Desmond Taylor so that he could, by using his right name and paying the amount of the loan, redeem the jewelry which had been stolen from him.
Some six months or so prior to his death, Taylor had returned from a trip abroad and had accused his secretary, a man by the name of E. F. Sands, of forgery. Apparently the charge was that while Taylor was abroad, Sands had forged checks, charged bills for expensive lingerie and women’s clothing and had generally looted the apartment. At about this time Sands disappeared, vanishing into thin air, and has never since been located by the police although every effort has been made to find him.
Keep this man, Sands, in mind. On February 10th, newspapers asserted that a Denver man who “asked that his name be withheld” declared that Sands was none other than Taylor’s brother! This man was reported to have known both brothers well. Sands, it seems, was engaged to a beautiful girl and the older brother won the love of that girl. Years later the younger brother entered the office of this mysterious informant and tried to find out about the whereabouts of the older brother. This mysterious informant is reported to have said, “I will stake my life that when Sands is caught the mystery of Taylor’s murder will be cleared up and a number of events and elements in the man’s life which now seem obscure will be made plain. Revenge is the motive behind the murder of William Desmond Taylor.”
Mabel Normand’s testimony at the inquest, as reported in the Los Angeles Times of February 3rd, and which purports to give the gist of her statement, is that a certain “Edward Knoblock had Mr. Taylor’s house while Mr. Taylor was in Europe last summer, and that Mr. Taylor had Mr. Knoblock’s London house. Sands apparently stayed right along in Mr. Taylor’s service in Los Angeles, and also assisted Mr. Knoblock. Two or three days before Mr. Taylor was to arrive from London, Sands told Mr. Knoblock that he thought he would take two or three days leave of absence, but would be back again Sunday. He never showed up again. When Mr. Taylor arrived from London, he said he found that Sands had stolen everything, had forged his name to checks and had gone to Hamburgers and bought lingerie... A few weeks ago Mr. Taylor’s house was robbed again. Then from Stockton he kept getting anonymous letters, and he received a pawnbroker’s ticket, showing that things had been pawned in the name of a Mrs. Tennant, who is Mr. Taylor’s sister-in-law. The way Mr. Taylor knew it was really Sands was because he had always spelled Mrs. Tennant’s name wrong, and the wrong spelling was on the ticket. Mr. Taylor knew that Sands wasn’t out of California by this fact.” Apparently there is some confusion about the name on these pawn tickets. This may have been due to the fact that there were several pawn tickets and more than one burglary. In the 1936 interview previously referred to, Captain Winn is authority for the statement that at Fresno on the record of a pawnshop where the names of all borrowers were kept, there appeared “in handwriting that was readily identified by experts as that of Edward Sands, the name of ‘William Deane Tanner.’ ”
There is evidence that William Desmond Taylor felt very bitter toward his former secretary. Apparently when Taylor was asked by the police whether he would be willing to go to the trouble of having Sands extradited from another state, Taylor replied, “I would go to any trouble or expense to extradite him not only from a neighboring state but from any country in the world. All I want is five minutes alone with him.”
In the Examiner of February 4th, Claire Windsor recalled a conversation she had had with Mr. Taylor about a week before his death. Apparently that was only about a week after the mysterious burglary of Taylor’s house. And according to Miss Windsor, Taylor had said, “If I ever lay my hands on Sands I will kill him.”
There were, of course, the usual reports and rumors. Sands was reported to have been arrested in various parts of the country; he was called upon by the officials to appear and establish his innocence. He was even offered immunity by the district attorney if he would establish his innocence of the murder of William Desmond Taylor and furnish information which would assist the authorities in locating the actual murderer.
Sands made no move.
Since we have previously mentioned this 1936 newspaper story about Captain Winn’s impression of the case, we may as well incorporate some other things which were in that interview. For instance, Captain Winn’s statement, “From another source, a source that even now I do not wish to reveal, we learned that Sands, within twenty-four hours of the time of Taylor’s murder, had made the statement: ‘I came back to town to get that — Taylor.’ The same person who heard Sands make this rash threat emphatically declared that he again saw Sands — he could not be mistaken in his identification — within a block of the Alvarado court less than an hour before the fatal shot was fired.”