William Desmond Taylor

William Desmond Taylor (born William Cunningham Deane-Tanner April 26, 1872 in Carlow, Ireland ? February 1, 1922 in Los Angeles) was a successful US film director and a popular figure in the growing Hollywood film colony of the 1910s and early 20s. He was the victim of a murder that remains officially unsolved.

Possible confession in 1964

In 1999 there was a report that in 1964 silent film actress Margaret Gibson (aka Patricia Palmer), who had worked with both Taylor and Minter and was by then living in the Hollywood Hills on a widow's pension from an oil company, confessed to the murder while dying from a heart attack. About a year after the murder, Gibson had been indicted (but not convicted) in an unrelated blackmail scheme.

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