The Story of Bob Crane. Star of Hogan's Heroes

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Bob Crane. 1928 - 1978.

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Blog Created: 9-3-2024

Last Updated: 9-4-2024

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Robert Edward Crane (July 13, 1928 – June 29, 1978) was an American actor, drummer, radio personality, and disc jockey known for starring in the CBS situation comedy Hogan's Heroes.

Crane was a drummer from age 11, and he began his entertainment career as a radio personality, beginning in Hornell, New York and later in Connecticut. He then moved to Los Angeles, where he hosted the number-one rated morning radio show. In the early 1960s, Crane moved into acting, eventually landing the lead role of Colonel Robert Hogan in Hogan's Heroes. The series aired from 1965 to 1971, and Crane received two Emmy Award nominations.

Crane's career declined after Hogan's Heroes. He became frustrated with the few roles that he was being offered and began performing in dinner theater. In 1975, he returned to television with the NBC series The Bob Crane Show, but the series received poor ratings and was cancelled after thirteen weeks. Afterward, Crane returned to performing in dinner theater and also appeared in occasional guest spots on television.

Crane was found bludgeoned to death in his Scottsdale, Arizona, apartment while on tour in June 1978 for a dinner theater production of Beginner's Luck. In the 1990s, Crane's friend John Henry Carpenter was tried for the murder but was acquitted, and the case remains officially unsolved. Crane's previously uncontroversial public image suffered due to the suspicious nature of his death and posthumous revelations about his personal life.

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Early life ~

Bob Crane was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, the younger of two sons of Rose Mary (née Ksenich) and Alfred Thomas Crane - the original spelling of the family name was Crean. He spent his childhood and teenaged years in Stamford.

Crane began playing drums at the age of 11, and by junior high was organizing local drum and bugle parades with his neighborhood friends. He joined his high school's orchestra and its marching and jazz bands. Crane also played for the Connecticut and Norwalk Symphony Orchestras as part of their youth orchestra program. He graduated from Stamford High School in 1946. Then, in 1948, he enlisted for two years in the Connecticut Army National Guard and was honorably discharged in 1950. The previous year he married his high-school sweetheart, Anne Terzian. The couple had three children: Robert David, Deborah Anne, and Karen Leslie.

Bob Crane and Anne Terzian wedding photo

Career

Early career ~

In 1950, Crane began his career in radio broadcasting at WLEA in Hornell, New York. He soon moved to Connecticut stations WBIS in Bristol and then WICC in Bridgeport, a 1,000-watt operation with a signal covering the northeastern portion of the New York metropolitan area. In 1956, Crane was hired by CBS Radio to host the morning show at its West Coast flagship KNX in Los Angeles, California, partly to re-energize that station's ratings and partly to halt his erosion of suburban ratings at WCBS in New York City. In California, Crane filled the broadcast with sly wit, drumming, and such guests as Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Bob Hope. His show quickly topped the morning ratings with adult listeners in the Los Angeles area, and Crane became "king of the Los Angeles airwaves".

Bob at KNX. c1962.

Crane's acting ambitions led to guest-hosting for Johnny Carson on the daytime game show Who Do You Trust? and appearances on The Twilight Zone (uncredited), Channing, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and General Electric Theater. After Carl Reiner appeared on his radio show, Crane persuaded Reiner to book him for a guest appearance on The Dick Van Dyke Show.

The Donna Reed Show (1963–1964) ~

After seeing Crane's performance on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Donna Reed offered him a guest shot on her program. After the success of that episode, his character, Dr. David Kelsey, was incorporated into the show's storyline, and Crane became a regular cast member, beginning with the episode "Friends and Neighbors". Crane continued to work full-time at KNX during his stint on The Donna Reed Show, running back and forth from the KNX studio at Columbia Square to Columbia Studios. He left the show in December 1964.

Donna Reed.

Hogan's Heroes (1965–1971) ~

In 1965, Crane was offered the starring role in a CBS television sitcom set in a World War II POW camp. Hogan's Heroes involved the sabotage and espionage missions of Allied soldiers, led by Colonel Robert Hogan, from under the noses of the oblivious Germans guarding them. The show was an immediate hit, finishing in the top 10 in its first year. The series lasted for six seasons on CBS, and Crane was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1966 and 1967.

After having a love affair with Hogan co-star Cynthia Lynn, the actress who played Helga, Crane became romantically involved with Lynn's replacement Patricia Olson in 1968, who played Hilda under the stage name Sigrid Valdis. Crane divorced Terzian in 1970, just before their 21st anniversary, and married Olson on the set of the show later that year, with series co-star Richard Dawson serving as best man. Their son, Scotty, was born in 1971, and they later adopted a daughter, Ana Marie. Robert Crane Jr. later revealed that his father, Bob, was not the biological father of any of Olson's children. When they were married in 1970, Patricia was already pregnant, but Bob had had a vasectomy in 1968 while he was still married to his first wife. Crane and Olson separated in 1977, and were mere weeks away from finalizing their divorce at the time of Crane's death in June, 1978.

Crane poses with fellow cast member Sigrid Valdis after they were married on the studio set in Hollywood, October 16, 1970.

After Hogan's Heroes ~

In 1968, Crane and Hogan co-stars Werner Klemperer, Leon Askin, and John Banner appeared with Elke Sommer in a feature film, The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz, set in the divided city of Berlin during the Cold War. In 1969, Crane starred with Abby Dalton in a dinner theater production of Cactus Flower.

Following the cancellation of Hogan's Heroes in 1971, Crane appeared in two Disney films: Superdad (1973), in the title role, and a small role in Gus (1976). In 1973, he purchased the rights to a comedy play called Beginner's Luck and began touring it, as its star and director, at the Showboat Dinner Theatre in St. Petersburg, Florida; the La Mirada Civic Theatre in California; the Windmill Dinner Theatre in Scottsdale, Arizona; and other dinner theaters around the country.

Between theater engagements, Crane guest-starred in a number of television shows, including Police Woman, Gibbsville, Quincy, M.E., and The Love Boat. In 1975, he returned to television with his own series, The Bob Crane Show on NBC, which was cancelled after thirteen episodes. In early 1978, Crane taped a travel documentary in Hawaii and recorded an appearance on the Canadian cooking show Celebrity Cooks. Neither aired in the U.S. after his death the following June. His appearance on Celebrity Cooks was broadcast in Canada in late 1978, and was recreated in the biopic film Auto Focus.

Private life and murder ~

Crane frequently videotaped and photographed his own sexual escapades. During the run of Hogan's Heroes, Dawson introduced him to John Henry Carpenter, a regional sales manager for Sony Electronics who often helped famous clients with their video equipment. The two men struck up a friendship and began visiting bars and nightclubs together. Crane attracted many women due to his celebrity status, and he introduced Carpenter to them as his manager. Crane and Carpenter videotaped their joint sexual encounters. Crane's son Robert later insisted that all of the women were aware of the videotaping and consented to it, but several claimed that they had no idea that they had been recorded until they were informed by Scottsdale police after Crane's murder. Carpenter later became national sales manager at Akai, and he arranged his business trips to coincide with Crane's dinner-theater touring schedule so that the two could continue videotaping their sexual encounters.

John Henry Carpenter 1998.

In June 1978, Crane was living in the Winfield Place Apartments in Scottsdale during a run of Beginner's Luck at the Windmill Dinner Theatre. On the afternoon of June 29, his co-star Victoria Ann Berry entered his apartment after he failed to show up for a lunch meeting, and discovered his body. Crane had been bludgeoned to death with a weapon that was never identified, though investigators believed it to be a camera tripod. An electrical cord had been tied around his neck.

Victoria Ann Berry accompanied by the police leaves the crime scene, Crane's home at the Winfield Apartments in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Crane's funeral was held on July 5, 1978 at St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church in Westwood, Los Angeles. An estimated 200 family members and friends attended, including John Astin and his wife Patty Duke and Carroll O'Connor. Pallbearers included Hogan's Heroes producer Edward Feldman, co-stars Robert Clary and Larry Hovis, and Crane's son Robert. He was interred in Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California. Patricia Olson later had his remains relocated to Westwood Village Memorial Park in Westwood, and she was buried beside him in 2007 under her stage name Sigrid Valdis.

Bob Crane's funeral.

Crane and Valdis's gravestone, bearing their portraits and the banner 'Hogan and Hilda, Together Forever'.

Investigation ~

The Scottsdale Police Department had no homicide division in 1978, so it was ill-equipped to handle such a high-profile murder investigation. The crime scene yielded few clues; no evidence was found of forced entry, and nothing of value was missing. Detectives examined Crane's extensive videotape collection, which led them to Carpenter who had flown to Phoenix on June 25 to spend a few days with Crane. Carpenter's rental car was impounded and searched. Several blood smears were found that matched Crane's blood type; no one else of that blood type was known to have been in the car, including Carpenter. DNA testing was not yet available, and the Maricopa County Attorney declined to file charges.

John Carpenter's rental car.

In 1990, Scottsdale Police Detective Barry Vassall and Maricopa County Attorney's Office Investigator Jim Raines re-examined the evidence from 1978 and persuaded the county attorney to reopen the case. DNA testing was inconclusive on the blood found in Carpenter's rental car, but Raines did discover an evidence photograph of the car's interior that appeared to show a piece of brain tissue. The actual tissue samples recovered from the car had been lost, but an Arizona judge ruled that the new evidence was admissible. In June 1992, Carpenter was arrested and charged with Crane's murder.

A picture from the inside of John Carpenter's rental vehicle that police said appeared to be brain matter and was the smoking gun.

Trial ~

At the 1994 trial, Crane's son Robert testified that Crane had repeatedly expressed a desire to sever his friendship with Carpenter in the weeks before his death. He said that Carpenter had become "a hanger-on" and "a nuisance to the point of being obnoxious". "My dad expressed that he just didn't need Carpenter kind of hanging around him anymore," he said. Robert testified that Crane had called Carpenter the night before the murder and ended their friendship.

Defendant John Henry Carpenter talks with his attorney Gary Fleischman in a Los Angeles courtroom on June 1, 1992.

Carpenter's attorneys attacked the prosecution's case as circumstantial and inconclusive. They presented evidence that Carpenter and Crane were still on good terms, including witnesses from the restaurant where the two men had dined the evening before the murder. They noted that the murder weapon had never been identified or found; the prosecution's camera tripod theory was sheer speculation, they said, based solely on Carpenter's occupation. They disputed the claim that the newly discovered evidence photo showed brain tissue, and alleged that the police work had been sloppy, such as the mishandling and misplacing of evidence—including the crucial tissue sample itself. They pointed out that Crane had been videotaped and photographed in sexual relations with numerous women, implying that any one of them might have been the killer. Other potential suspects proposed by defense attorneys included angry husbands and boyfriends of the women, and an actor who had sworn vengeance after a violent argument with Crane in Texas several months earlier.

Carpenter was acquitted, and he continued to maintain his innocence until his death in 1998. After the trial, Robert speculated publicly that his father's widow Patty Olson might have had a role in instigating the crime. "Nobody got a dime out of [the murder]," he said, "except for one person," alluding to Crane's will, which excluded him, his siblings, and his mother, with Crane's entire estate left to Olson. He repeated his suspicions in the 2015 book Crane: Sex, Celebrity, and My Father's Unsolved Murder. Maricopa County District Attorney Rick Romley responded, "We never characterized Patty as a suspect," adding "I am convinced John Carpenter murdered Bob Crane." Officially, Crane's murder remains unsolved.

Later DNA testing ~

In November 2016, the Maricopa County Attorney's Office permitted Phoenix television reporter John Hook to submit the 1978 blood samples from Carpenter's rental car for retesting, using a more advanced DNA technique than the one used in 1990. Two sequences were identified, one from an unknown male, and the other too degraded to reach a conclusion.

John Hook with Bob Crane's blood evidence.

This testing consumed all of the remaining DNA from the rental car, making further tests impossible. Hook's investigation turned up two blood vials, samples from Crane and Carpenter, located in evidence storage at the Maricopa County Attorney's Office. Carpenter voluntarily gave a sample to Scottsdale Police when he was questioned in 1978. Crane's blood vial was recovered during his autopsy the day after the murder. Both were used as comparison samples for Hook's DNA tests on the blood stains found in Carpenter's rental car.

Auto Focus ~

Bob Crane's life and murder were the subject of the 2002 feature film Auto Focus directed by Paul Schrader and starring Greg Kinnear as Crane. The film is based on the book by The Murder of Bob Crane author Robert Graysmith and was described as "brilliant" by critic Roger Ebert. It portrays Crane as a happily married, church-going family man who succumbs to Hollywood's celebrity lifestyle after becoming a television star. He meets John Carpenter, played by Willem Dafoe, and learns about the new home video technology. He then descends into a life of strip clubs, BDSM, and sex addiction.

Crane's son Scotty challenged the film's accuracy in an October 2002 review. "During the last twelve years of his life," he wrote, "[Crane] went to church three times: when I was baptized, when his father died, and when he was buried." His son further stated that Crane was a sex addict long before he became a star, and that he may have begun recording his sexual encounters as early as 1956. There was no evidence, he said, that Crane engaged in BDSM; there were no such scenes in any of his hundreds of home movies, and Schrader admitted that the film's BDSM scene was based on his own experience while writing Hardcore. Before production on Auto Focus was announced, Scotty and Olson had tried to sell a rival script titled F-Stop or Take Off Your Clothes and Smile, but interest ceased after Auto Focus was announced.

Robert David Crane, son of the late slain actor Bob Crane, gives an estimate of the height of one of his father's tripods on Oct. 3, 1994. He was testifying in the first degree murder trial of John Henry Carpenter in Phoenix.

Patricia Crane, wife of slain actor Bob Crane, testifies in Phoenix Supreme Court on September 29, 1994. She was talking about a trip to Scottsdale that she took with her son Robert Scott to visit Crane before the actor was killed.

In June 2001, Scotty launched the bobcrane.com website, which remained active as late as May 2017. It included a paid section featuring photographs, outtakes from his father's sex films, and Crane's autopsy report that proved, he said, that his father did not have a penile implant as stated in Auto Focus. The XXX-rated photographs and videos from Bob Crane's private archive of sexual liaisons involving him and various women could also be purchased for a monthly subscription fee of $19.95. The site was renamed "Bob Crane: The Official Web Site", but is now abandoned. An "Official Licensing Website of Bob Crane" was maintained by CMG Worldwide elsewhere on the internet—it was active as late as February 2023, but the website is now defunct.

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Bob in 1963.

Bob in his Hogan's Heroes dressing room.

Bob at home.

Crane peeks through the evergreens in the garden of his home in Tarzana, California, May 12, 1967.

Bob Crane wedding photo with his first wife.

Bob with wife, Anne Terzian and their three children (Robert and his sisters, Deborah and Karen).

Bob Crane spending time with his family.

Bob at home with his kids.

Wedding photo of Bob and wife, Sigrid Valdis.

Crane with family.

Robert Crane Jr. talking with author John Hook.

Bob's half-brother Donald Francis Crane Sr.

Bob with co-stars.

Abby Dalton.

Cynthia Lynn and Patricia Olson, aka Sigrid Valdis.

Bob Crane at the radio station with actress Angie Dickinson.

Bob with co-workers at station WICC.

WLEA Radio.

The Bob Crane Show-

Crane promotes the series — and his drumming skills — on The John Gary Show in 1966.

Bob Crane and his son, Robert Crane Jr. on the Hogan's Heroes set.

Bob Crane as Colonel Hogan from the television program Hogan's Heroes.

Bob Crane as Colonel Hogan with future second wife Sigrid Valdis (who played Fräulein Hilda) on the set of 'Hogan's Heroes' on September 5, 1969.

Bob with the cast of Hogan's Heroes.

Cynthia Lynn as Fräulein Helga from the television program Hogan's Heroes.

Bob in a German uniform.

The Hogan's Heroes filming set.

The original gate to Stalag 13.

Overhead view of the 40-Acres backlot shows the Hogan's Heroes loction at upper right.

This is the former Hogan's Heroes set as it appears today. 40-Acres is gone.

Robert Clary as LeBeau in Hogan's Heroes with Fräulein Helga (Cynthia Lynn).

John Banner as Sergeant Schultz.

Larry Hovis.

Bob talking to co-star, Werner Klemperer, (Col. Klink).

Werner Klemperer relaxes with his children, Erika and Mark, at home.

Show's opening credits.

Howard Craine.

Ivan Dixon.

John Banner.

Kenneth Washington.

Leon Askin.

Richard Dawson.

Robert Clary.

Sigrid Valdis.

Sigrid Valdis.

Warner Klemperer.

Crane with his daughter and co-stars, Ivan Dixon and Richard Dawson at home.

Sigrid Valdis.

Bob with co-stars from The Bob Crane Show.

Bob Crane with an unknown girl in one of his amateur videos.

A picture from Crane's apartment.

Apartment 132A of the Winfield Place Apartments (now condominiums) where Crane was murdered.

A funeral wreath on the door of apartment 132A.

Detective removing the cord from around Bob Crane's neck.

Crane's apartment bedroom was set up with video equipment.

Authorities remove the body of actor Bob Crane from a Scottsdale apartment where he was discovered beaten to death June 29, 1978.

A camera tripod from Bob Crane's apartment. There were two. One was missing after the murder.

A tape of police interviewing John Carpenter.

John Carpenter's rental car.

Blood stains on Bob Crane's bed.

Bloody pillowcase from the crime scene.

Bob Crane's fingerprints.

Video camera equipment at the crime scene.

Boxes of murder scene evidence.

Door panels from John Carpenter's rental vehicle. Cut outs are where samples of blood splatters were removed for testing.

Crime scene fingerprints.

Equipment Bob Crane used to make pornographic photos. This was in his bathroom at the time of his death.

Evidence from the crime scene.

Blood samples and other evidence.

Police and detectives at the crime scene.

John Carpenter's swim trunks and a movie.

John Hook looking over the evidence.

Some of Bob Crane's home movies.

Video cassettes from Crane's apartment.

Police carry Crane's body from his apartment.

Packaging up Bob Crane's evidence to be re-tested.

Vial of Bob Crane's blood.

John Henry Carpenter, left, and defense attorney Candace Kent at trial.

St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church, Westwood, Los Angeles, California.

Crane and Valdis's gravestone, bearing their portraits and the banner 'Hogan and Hilda, Together Forever'.

Alfred John Crane. No gravestone

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