The murder of silent movie director William Desmond Taylor is one of those enduring real-life mysteries that continues to pique interest even eighty years later. This documentary, however, does not do it justice. It is by no means worthless, but it is severely flawed. There is absolutely no mention whatsoever of the revelation during the original, official investigation that Taylor was an alias, and that this man had walked out on his wife and children back east and disappeared before resurfacing in California under his new name. Furthermore, late in the program, it is asserted that Taylor was secretly gay, and that this undercut almost every theory about the case. This claim is followed not by the least little shred of supporting evidence, but by a description of how the publicizing of this "fact" would have been devastating to the Hollywood film industry at that time, and so it was consequently suppressed. This contention is in fact flatly contradicted by much evidence in the case, one piece of which is shortly thereafter repeated! One would be much better off finding and reading a copy of the book, "A Cast of Killers," whose author, Sidney Kirkpatrick, is one of the interview subjects here. A strange fact of this production is that it was in fact several years old at the time of its apparent premiere, on the Biography Channel. Its copyright notice bears the year 2000, and it is narrated by Paul Winfield, of "City Confidential" fame, who passed away in early 2004. In fact, several members of this production's staff and crew worked on that A&E series, and the presentation style here bears a marked resemblance to the other's. Given its extended running time, were it not for the fact that no such subject can be found in the "CC" episode guide on A&E's official website, one would think that this was a special edition of that series. Was it intended as such and shelved due to the inaccuracies in the content described above, finally getting "thrown away" on a channel available to a much smaller audience than the parent? We may never know.
UPDATE: I stand by everything that I said about this. No CC episode guide that I can find, not just A&E's own, includes it, which would not be the case if it had been aired as one. I fully intend to submit to the IMDb that the presences of both the series title and 2007 as "year of release" are incompatible, which they are. To deal with dpmccauley1's counter-claims to my criticisms of the program on its own terms: The amount of time that had passed since the murder and official investigation happened does not justify either failing to mention Taylor's original identity and family, or flatly asserting that he was homosexual in direct opposition to evidence that is even presented in the program. Too much of this was too well documented for that oversight and the factual error to be defensible.
UPDATE: I stand by everything that I said about this. No CC episode guide that I can find, not just A&E's own, includes it, which would not be the case if it had been aired as one. I fully intend to submit to the IMDb that the presences of both the series title and 2007 as "year of release" are incompatible, which they are. To deal with dpmccauley1's counter-claims to my criticisms of the program on its own terms: The amount of time that had passed since the murder and official investigation happened does not justify either failing to mention Taylor's original identity and family, or flatly asserting that he was homosexual in direct opposition to evidence that is even presented in the program. Too much of this was too well documented for that oversight and the factual error to be defensible.