It didn’t end that way.
“There was no way I could identify him from one side,” Beck told the press.
“The other side, yes.”
Crane’s grisly murder revealed he had been doing a very different sort of on-camera work behind closed doors.
The seamy side of Crane’s life is no mystery.
His obsession with sex hurt his career and possibly got him killed.
But for those who loved him, it’s the unanswered questions that are haunting.
“And when I say ‘fog,’ it’s that word closure, which I hate.
But there is no closure.
You live with death for the rest of your life.”
Yet when it debuted onCBSin the fall of 1965,Hogan’s Heroeswas an overnight hit.
Along the way, it made Crane, who played the womanizing Col. Robert Hogan, a household name.
That led to a regular spot as a happy-go-lucky dentist onThe Donna Reed Show.
When his agent sent Crane the script forHeroes, the actor mistook it for a drama.
“Bob, what are you talking about?”
the agent said, according to Robert’s 2015 book about his dad.
“This is a comedy.
These are the funny Nazis.”
Crane wasn’t the only one who was confused.
Still, Clary, the only living member of the cast, makes no apologies.
“It was a great group to work with.
Bob never said, ‘Hey, I’m Hogan and I’m the star.'”
But Crane was a star, and fame allowed him to indulge his appetite.
“There were no drugs, no coercion, none of that,” explains Robert.
“Women just liked him, or found him handsome, or whatever it was.
They would hook up.”
When asked about his costar’s addiction, Clary responds, “Who cares?
That’s his problem.
Why waste my time saying, ‘How dare you like ladies?’
That is dumb, would not think about it.
All we thought was, your life is your lifeas long as you’re doing your job properly.”
Crane’s sexual behavior did affect other castmates.
Bob was chronicling and writing down and filming every single thing in his life.
It was a slice that mainstream Hollywood couldn’t tolerate.
“He made some bad moves,” Robert says of his dad.
That hurt him because the executives found out.
People talk, and it started getting in publications like theNational Enquirer."
The son maintains his father’s sexual proclivities never veered into dangerous territory.
“My dad loved women.
But I never looked at it as dark because it was consensual.
There weren’t hidden cameras or anything.”
Robert isn’t embarrassed by his father’s sordid enthusiasms.
“He just loved it because he was meeting all these porn stars.”
Work dried up for the middle-aged actor, who was soon getting by with gigs on the dinner-theater circuit.
Two days before his death, he called his eldest son.
“He was two weeks shy of 50,” says Robert.
“He says, ‘I am making changes.
I’m divorcing Patti.’
He wanted to lose people like John Carpenter, who had become a pain in the butt.
He wanted a clean slate.”
“They had a breakup, of sorts,” claims Robert.
“Carpenter lost it.
He was being rejected, he was being spurned like a lover.
A few hours later, Crane was dead.
The son believes what happened next compromised the hunt for the killer.
You only have one or two people in there.
But that doesn’t always happen.
DNA testing wasn’t available in 1978, but all roads led to CarpenterCrane’s partner in porn.
But there was even more damning evidence than that.
“At the scene, there was blood everywhere,” Vassall recalls.
There was a red stain on the curtain.
We found blood in [Carpenter’s] rental car and on the passenger door.
It was Crane’s blood pop in.
Nobody else who handled that car had the same blood bang out as Crane.
It was punch in B blood, all of it.”
But what cops found in Carpenter’s Chrysler Cordoba wasn’t enough.
Absent a murder weapon, detectives couldn’t persuade the county attorney to issue an arrest warrant.
Vassall doubts vengeance for infidelity was a motive.
“Bob was a non-confrontational guy, and these women liked him,” he says.
“I don’t think I ever interviewed one that disliked him or was mad at him.”
“We did the best we could,” Vassall says.
“We went through all the evidence.
It would have been a slam dunk with the DNA testing.”
Hook, like Vassall, believes Carpenter was Crane’s killer.
“She was in the middle of a divorce with my dad.
Vassall and the other cops have never taken those accusations seriously.
In death, Crane got the Hollywood treatment.
A man who’d sought love in dangerous places suddenly had it, in abundance.
In the years since, the star’s family members have battled griefand one another.
With them goes an intriguing part of a curious Hollywood career.
“It’s bizarre to me,” he says.
“I’m not expecting a let’s-hold-hands-at-the-table, but we’ve just never talked about it.”
“I don’t know what else to do,” he says.
“Carpenter’s dead.
Time is just taking people away.”
