Robert Edward Crane (July 13 1928 – June 28 1978) was an American disc jockey and Emmy award-nominated actor, best known for his performance as Colonel Robert E. Hogan in the television sitcom Hogan's Heroes from 1965 to 1971, and for his violent and unsolved death.

Crane was born in Waterbury, Connecticut. He dropped out of high school [1]in 1946 and became a drummer, performing with dance bands and a symphony orchestra. In 1949, he married high school sweetheart Anne Terzian; they eventually had three children, Deborah Ann, Karen Leslie, and Robert David (known as "Bob, Jr."). He later divorced and remarried, producing another son, Robert Scott Crane.

In 1950, Crane started his broadcasting career at WLEA in Hornell, New York, from which he quickly moved to WBIS in Bristol, Connecticut, followed by WICC in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a 500-watt operation where he remained until 1956, when the CBS radio network plucked Crane out to help stop his huge popularity from affecting their own station's ratings. Crane moved his family to California to host the morning show at KNX in Hollywood. He filled the broadcast with sly wit, drumming, and guests such Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Bob Hope. It quickly became the number-one rated morning show in the LA area, with Crane known as "The King of the Los Angeles Airwaves."

Crane's acting ambitions led to his subbing for Johnny Carson on the daytime game show Who Do You Trust? and appearances on The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and General Electric Theater. When Carl Reiner appeared on his show, Crane persuaded him to book him for a guest shot on The Dick Van Dyke Show, where he was noticed by Donna Reed, who suggested him for the role of neighbor Dr. Dave Kelsey in her eponymous sitcom from 1963 through 1965.

In 1965, Crane was offered the starring role in a television comedy pilot about a German P.O.W. camp. Hogan's Heroes became a hit and finished in the Top Ten in its first year on the air. The series lasted six seasons, and Crane was nominated for an Emmy Award twice, in 1966 and 1967. During its run, he met Patricia Olsen who played Hilda under the stage name Sigrid Valdis. He divorced his wife of twenty years and married Olsen on the set of the show in 1970. They had a son, Scotty (Robert Scott), and adopted a daughter named Ana Marie.

Crane's drumming ability can be seen in the sixth season episode, "Look at the Pretty Snowflakes," where he has an extended drum solo during the prisoners' performance of the jazz standard "Cherokee".

Following the cancellation of Hogan's Heroes in 1971, Crane continued to act, appearing in two Disney films and a number of TV shows, including Police Woman, Quincy, M.E., and The Love Boat. A second series of his own, 1975's The Bob Crane Show, was cancelled by NBC after three months.

During the run of Hogan's Heroes, sitcom costar Richard Dawson introduced Crane to John Henry Carpenter, an electronics expert who sold VCRs. Carpenter is alleged to have turned Crane onto a life of sex and pornographic movies made by the two. Although Crane's family contests this version of the story, it is a fact that Crane made home videotapes of numerous sexual orgies, using video technology supplied by Carpenter, with Carpenter often participating in the orgies. Crane is known to have made pornographic films as early as 1956.^[1]

On a late night in 1978, Crane allegedly called Carpenter to tell him that their friendship was over. The following day, Crane was discovered violently bludgeoned to death with a weapon that was never found (but was believed to be a camera tripod) at the Winfield Place Apartments in Scottsdale, Arizona. Crane had been appearing in Scottsdale in a production of a play titled Beginner's Luck at the Windmill Dinner Theatre.

According to an episode of A&E's Cold Case Files, police officers who arrived at the scene of the crime noted that Carpenter called the apartment several times and didn't seem surprised that the police were there. This immediately raised suspicion, and the car Carpenter had rented the previous day was impounded by the police. In it several blood smears were found that matched Crane's blood type. At that time DNA testing didn't exist to confirm if it was Crane's or not. Due to a lack of sufficient evidence, the district attorney declined to file charges and the case went cold.

In 1992, fourteen years after the murder, the case was reopened. An attempt to test the blood found in the car Carpenter rented failed to produce any result due to improper preservation of the evidence. The detective in charge instead hoped a picture of what appeared to be a piece of subcutaneous tissue found in the rental car (which had been lost since the original investigation) would incriminate Carpenter. He was arrested and indicted. During Carpenter's trial in 1994, the prosecution showed a videotape of Crane and Carpenter engaging in sex with the same woman to demonstrate their close relationship. However, Carpenter was acquitted on a lack of convincing evidence. Both the murder and the motive remain officially unsolved. Carpenter maintained his innocence until his death on September 4, 1998.

Crane's life and murder were the subject of the 2002 film Auto Focus, directed by Paul Schrader and starring Greg Kinnear as Crane. The film portrays Crane as a happily married, churchgoing family man and popular L.A. disc jockey who suddenly becomes a Hollywood celebrity, and just as rapidly becomes a sex addict, hanging out at strip clubs and participating in orgies. He documents his exploits on video tape, and is compelled by his addiction into ever more salacious excesses, which eventually crowd everything else out of his life: marriage, family, non-sexual friends, career.

Crane's second wife and their son Scotty objected to the way Crane was portrayed in the film, and took to the media to present their side of the story. Shortly before the film's release, Scotty also started the website www.bobcrane.com to provide documents and testimony that would contest the movie's version of his father's story. The website notably featured clips from a pornographic home film loop Bob Crane had made in 1956, before his meeting with Carpenter. (Scotty later removed the pornographic clips from the site.)

In an interview posted to the site, Scotty stated, "My father had been having extramarital affairs and photographing hundreds of nude women engaged in sexual activity since the 1940s. He did not suddenly become a 'sex addict' when he met my mother. We have amateur home erotic movies of his that date back to 1956, and I can assure you that the women in those movies were not his wife at the time. [...]

"My father did attend church -- when people died. He wasn't religious and he didn't raise me to be religious. The whole mythology about him being this church-going saint that was brought down and corrupted by the evils of Hollywood -- is really just a dramatic way to dress up a story. But it's totally untrue. He was an overly sexual person from an early age. In the twelve years that my mom knew him, he went to church three times: my baptism, his father's funeral and his own funeral. He never had a family priest for a ‘buddy’ as Auto Focus depicts".^[2]

His last televised appearance was in the Canadian cooking show Celebrity Cooks.

• Crane is mentioned in the Family Guy episodes "Peter, Peter, Caviar Eater" & "He's Too Sexy for His Fat".
• Crane is mentioned in the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode "Wandering Bear". Larry David and his friend Jeff are about to watch Girls Gone Wild and Larry asks him, which character he's going to be, Jeff replies: "Bob Crane".

• Return to Peyton Place (Uncredited, 1961)
• Man-Trap (Uncredited, 1961)
• The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz (1968)
• Superdad (1973)
• Gus (1976)

• The Twilight Zone (1 episode, 1961)
• General Electric Theater (2 episodes, 1953-1961)
• The Dick Van Dyke Show (1 episode, 1962)
• The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1 episode, 1963)
• Channing (1 episode, 1963)
• The Donna Reed Show (1 episode, 1963-1965)
• The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1 episode, 1967)
• Arsenic and Old Lace (1969)
• Hogan's Heroes (167 episodes, 1965-1971)
• Night Gallery (1 episode, 1971)
• Love, American Style (4 episodes, 1969-1971)
• The Delphi Bureau (1972)
• Tenafly (1 episode, 1974)
• Police Woman (1 episode, 1974)
• The Bob Crane Show (14 episodes, 1975)
• Joe Forrester (1 episode, 1976)
• Ellery Queen (1 episode, 1976)
• Spencer's Pilots (1 episode, 1976)
• Gibbsville (1 episode, 1976)
• Quincy M.E. (1 episode, 1977)
• The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries (1 episode, 1977)
• The Love Boat (1 episode, 1978)

Emmy Award

• Nominated: Outstanding Continued Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Comedy Series, Hogan's Heroes (1966)
• Nominated: Outstanding Continued Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Comedy Series, Hogan's Heroes (1967)

• Hogan's Heroes

• Bob Crane at IMDb
• Template:Tv.com person
• Bob Crane tribute site, operated by son Scotty
• Bob Crane at Find a Grave on Find a Grave
• Bob Crane at Find a Death