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He was found bludgeoned to death with a cord around his neck by a co-star who had gone to Crane's apartment to work with him on some lines from the play. It's a puzzle, and people want to work it out like they do with the Kennedy assassination."Ĭrane had been starring in a production of a play called "Beginner's Luck" at the Windmill Dinner Theater in Scottsdale when he was killed. Senate.īraudy said another factor in the ongoing fascination with Crane is the fact that the murder is still unsolved. He drew a comparison to stars from earlier Hollywood eras whose allure endured after they were linked to sexual scandal: Charlie Chaplin, who had a proclivity for underage girls, and Ingrid Bergman, whose affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini was denounced on the floor of the U.S. … Is the person we see on screen really who we think they are, or do they have a dark side?" "The whole enterprise of gossip is an effort to get behind the façade," Braudy said. "We love them on the way up, then love to hate their success," said Braudy, whose book, "The Frenzy of Renown," explores the nature of fame and the public's fascination with it. Leo Braudy, a University of Southern California professor who teaches courses in literature, popular culture and film history, agreed that the double-edged sword of celebrity helps explain why people are still captivated by Crane's story. "It was over in a second, and people were fascinated with how fast it could implode," he said. He likened it to the recent case of Roseanne Barr, who suddenly shot back to the top of the public consciousness and then just as suddenly crashed after a racist tweet. "People love to see celebrities on the rise, but after a while you want them to be human again," he said. That Jekyll-and-Hyde disconnect between the affable leading man and the darkly sex-obsessed pornographer who not only made his own films, but also performed in them, feeds into what Crane described as the "Yin and yang of celebrity-dom." View Gallery: 'Hogan's Heroes' actor Bob Crane's 1978 murder "Everybody has secrets, but his went public in a big way." Hogan and then to find out about a second sordid life shocks and baffles people to this day," Crane said. "They were all-American heroes."Īnd third, and perhaps most compelling, is the nature of the investigation, which revealed salacious details about Crane's sex life, and the fact that the murder is technically still unsolved. "It was the age of the leading man - Robert Conrad on 'Wild Wild West' and Robert Culp on 'I Spy,' " Crane Jr. Audiences loved him then and still do today. Secondly his father was a good-looking guy who played a hero who always had a wisecrack and always knew the right thing to do. "It started in 1965, and it's still a cash cow," Crane said, adding that he doesn't receive a dime from it because his stepmother inherited his father's estate when he died. And though the show was was canceled in 1971, has been in almost perpetual syndication ever since. Its World War II setting makes it timeless, and it never really ages.
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"I can't forget this date - it's still a bad dream."Ĭrane said there are a number of reasons why the public still craves information about his father.įirst, the show is still on TV. "You can't forget, that's my problem," Crane told The Arizona Republic in a recent interview. All of which signaled a generally downward career arc that led directly to the dinner theater circuit, which is how the star came to be in Scottsdale in June of 1978.
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The one-time Los Angeles radio personality had only one hit television show, and it didn't even get a farewell episode because they didn't do them back then.Īfter the show, there were only a few guest spots, minor roles in a couple of Disney films, a failed TV pilot. So why are we still so fascinated with Bob Crane? His case is popular on true-crime podcasts, and earlier this year a YouTuber posted a shaky hand-held video tour of the Scottsdale condominium complex where Crane died. RELATED: Shocking murders in metro Phoenix historyīob Crane Sr., has been the subject of a full-length feature film, several books, and numerous documentaries and TV news stories. He was found murdered in his Scottsdale apartment on June 29, 1978, his skull bashed in with a blunt object and an electrical cord around his neck. His death - and the sordid revelations that followed - stunned Hollywood, his fans and his family.Īnd though it's been 40 years, and though he now knows things that he wishes he didn't, hardly a day goes by that Bob Crane Jr. His 67th birthday was two days ago. Friday marks the 40th anniversary of his father's murder. And July 13 would have been his father's 90th birthday.Ĭrane's father was Bob Crane, the handsome, all-American star of "Hogan's Heroes," a campy 1960s TV sitcom about smart-alecky World War II prisoners of war who continually outsmart their bumbling German captors. This is a tough two-week stretch for Bob Crane Jr.