King David Gray was originally from Virginia but moved to Hollywood, California as a young man to work in the burgeoning movie business in the early years of the 20th century. Starting as a lighting technician, King eventually became a cinematographer; his first credit in that profession was the 1915 film The College Orphan. He would eventually go on to work on more than fifty films, spanning from 1915 to 1938.
King was married and had two sons, but was known to be something of a womanizer who told his many lovers that he was single. Whether this proclivity contributed to his mysterious death, however, is still unknown.
On the night of June 29th, 1938, the fifty-two-year-old King had been out partying and never went home. The following day, his body was discovered in his car, which was parked in front of a post office on Wilcox Boulevard in Hollywood. He had been shot once in the chest with a .32 caliber automatic from about a foot away. Robbery was clearly not the motive, as none of his belongings or valuables were missing. The murder weapon was found a few days later in a vacant lot about eight blocks from the crime scene.
One unusual detail about the murder was the letter found in his possession, which was addressed to “Daddy Dear” and was from a twenty-nine-year-old Pennsylvania woman named Frances Blakeley who had been one of King’s mistresses for several years. King had a PO box at this particular post office where he received letters from his women friends, and it was surmised that he had picked up the letter before he was killed.
Jealousy, therefore, was hypothesized as the motive behind the slaying, but no leads along that line panned out. Several suspects were looked into, including a typewriter repairman from San Francisco named Jack Moran, who was overheard bragging about the murder in a café, but there was no evidence tying him to the crime, and he was eventually released. Another person of interest was an ex-con named Joseph Chester, though he committed suicide following a police car chase for an unrelated crime not long after the murder occurred.
The strange death of King D. Gray remains a Hollywood mystery, with neither motive nor perpetrator identified.
Crime Immemorial 