LANA TURNER Secrets, Jealousy & MURDER

NEW BOOKS RAISE QUESTIONS ABOUT THE DEATH OF THE MOVIE STAR'S MOBSTER BOYFRIEND

- LOUISE A. BARILE

Still in a state of shock, the teenage daughter of Lana Turner allowed herself to be led outside by her father on April 4, 1958. "The door opened and the pop-pop-pop of flashbulbs produced a moment of daylight," Cheryl Crane writes in her memoir Detour: A Hollywood Story. "The night was filled with the crackle of police radios, reporters' shouts, sirens, and the rustling speech of onlookers. Dad slid me into the police car, and we sped off to the Beverly Hills Police Station."

The stabbing death of mobster Johnny Stompanato at the home of silver screen siren Lana ignited one of the biggest scandals Hollywood has ever known. Over the course of the investigation into his death, the lurid details of Lana's romance with Stompanato, his threats against her and her family, and Cheryl's rush to the defense of her mother would make headlines around the world. The court would call Johnny's killing "justifiable homicide," but more than 60 years later, people still wonder if Lana actually killed her abusive boyfriend and let Cheryl, then 14, take the blame. "Her daughter was a minor at that point, so she wouldn't have suffered the same consequences in a prosecution," explains Josh Young, one of the authors of The Fixer: Moguls, Mobsters, Movie Stars and Marilyn, a recent book on Hollywood detective Fred Otash. Adds co-author Manfred Westphal: "Otash was called in to clean up and help minimize the collateral damage of what almost everyone there that night knew would become a tremendous scandal, which was Lana's worst nightmare."

MAN TROUBLE