Bob Crane
Bob Crane with future wife Sigrid Valdis on Hogan's Heroes
Born	Robert Edward Crane (1928-07-13)July 13, 1928 Waterbury, Connecticut, U.S.
Died	June 29, 1978(1978-06-29) (aged 49) Scottsdale, Arizona, U.S.
Cause of death	Homicide
Resting place	Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery
Nationality	American
Education	Stamford High School
Occupation(s)	Actor, disc jockey
Years active	1950–1978
Spouse(s)	Anne Terzian ​ (m. 1949⁠–⁠1970)​ Sigrid Valdis ​ (m. 1970⁠–⁠1978)​
Children	4
Website	www.bobcrane.com

Robert Edward "Bob" Crane (July 13, 1928 – June 29, 1978) was an American actor and disc jockey.

Crane began his career as a disc jockey in New York and Connecticut before moving to Los Angeles where he hosted the number-one rated morning show. In the early 1960s, he moved into acting. Crane is best known for his performance as Colonel Robert E. Hogan in the CBS sitcom Hogan's Heroes. The series aired from 1965 to 1971, and Crane received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his work on the series.

After Hogan's Heroes ended, Crane's career declined. He became frustrated with the few roles he was being offered and began doing dinner theater. In 1975, he returned to television in the NBC series The Bob Crane Show. The series received poor ratings and was canceled after 13 weeks. Afterwards, Crane returned to performing in dinner theaters and also appeared in occasional guest spots on television.

While on tour for his play Beginner's Luck in June 1978, Crane was found bludgeoned to death in his Scottsdale apartment, a murder that remains officially unsolved.

Bob Crane was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, but he spent his childhood and teenage years in Stamford, Connecticut.^[1] He graduated from Stamford High School in 1946.^[1] Music was important to Crane, and he started playing drums early in life. By junior high, he was organizing local drum and bugle parades with his neighborhood friends in Stamford.^[2] Later, he became involved in his high school marching and jazz bands, as well as in the school's orchestra.^[3] He also played for the Connecticut Symphony and the Norwalk Symphony Orchestras as part of the youth orchestra program.^[4] On June 21, 1948, Bob enlisted in the National Guard and was honorably discharged on May 1, 1950.^[5]

In 1950, Crane started his broadcasting career at WLEA in Hornell, New York. He soon moved to WBIS in Bristol, Connecticut, followed by WICC in Bridgeport, Connecticut. This was a 1,000-watt operation with a signal covering the northeastern portion of the New York metropolitan area where he remained until 1956. At that time CBS radio network executives plucked Crane out partly to help stop his huge popularity from affecting the suburban ratings of their New York flagship WCBS, and partly to re-energize their flagging West Coast flagship KNX in Los Angeles. Crane moved his family to California to host the morning show at KNX. He filled the broadcast with sly wit, drumming, and guests such as Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Bob Hope. It quickly became the number-one rated morning show with adult listeners in the Los Angeles 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 (uncredited), Channing, 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.

In addition to playing the drums on the theme song, Crane's musical talent can also 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".

In 1968, during the run of Hogan's Heroes, Crane and series costars Werner Klemperer, Leon Askin, and John Banner appeared, with Elke Sommer, in a feature film called The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz. The setting was the divided city of Berlin inside East Germany. Paula Schultz was being tempted to defect to the West, with Crane encouraging her to do so. Klemperer and Banner were involved as East German officials trying to keep Paula in the East.

Following the cancellation of Hogan's Heroes in 1971, Crane appeared in two Disney films, Superdad (1973) in the title role and Gus (1976) in a cameo.

In 1973, Crane purchased the rights to Beginner's Luck, a play that he starred in and directed. The production toured for five years, predominantly at dinner theaters around the country.^[6] During breaks he guest starred in a number of TV shows, including Police Woman, Quincy, M.E., and The Love Boat. A second series, 1975's The Bob Crane Show, was canceled by NBC after three months.

At the time of his death Crane had recently taped a travel documentary in Hawaii, and had recorded an appearance on the Canadian cooking-talk show Celebrity Cooks. Neither was aired. (Crane's appearance on Celebrity Cooks was recreated in the biopic Auto Focus.)

Crane became a fixture on the dinner theatre scene and performed there for ten years. In 1969, he starred with Abby Dalton in Cactus Flower. He also performed in Send Me No Flowers, but his most popular performances were in Beginner's Luck, which he toured at The Showboat Dinner Theatre in St. Petersburg, Florida, La Mirada Civic Theatre in California, and the Windmill Dinner Theatre in Scottsdale, Arizona. Crane was performing at the Windmill at the time of his death.

In 1949, Crane married his high school sweetheart Anne Terzian. They had three children — Robert David, Deborah Ann, and Karen Leslie. The couple divorced in 1970.^[7]

Later that year, Crane married his Hogan's Heroes co-star Sigrid Valdis on the set of the series.^[8] They had a son, Scotty.^[9] Valdis and Crane separated in 1977, but reportedly reconciled shortly before his death.^[8]

During the run of Hogan's Heroes, Crane met John Henry Carpenter, an employee at Sony Electronics.^[10] Carpenter, a regional sales manager, helped clients learn how to set up and use the latest video equipment. His clients included Red Skelton, Elvis Presley, and Crane's co-star Richard Dawson who introduced the two.^[11]

Crane and Carpenter struck up a friendship after Carpenter showed Crane how to operate video equipment. Prior to their meeting, Crane had been making home movies and taking Polaroid pictures of himself engaged in sexual activity with various women. Carpenter and Crane began going to bars together to pick up women. Crane attracted women due to his celebrity status and would introduce Carpenter as his manager. The two would later videotape themselves having sex with the women they picked up (according to author Robert Graysmith, some of the women Crane and Carpenter had sex with were unaware they were being filmed). Carpenter later got a job as the national sales manager at Akai. He began arranging business trips to coincide with Crane's dinner theater touring schedules so the two could continue picking up women. At some point, however, the friendship began to deteriorate.^[12][13][14]

During Carpenter's trial in 1994, Crane's son Robert testified that in the weeks before his father's death, Crane had expressed a desire to sever his friendship with Carpenter. Robert stated that his father said that Carpenter had become, "a hanger-on, a nuisance to the point of being obnoxious." Robert also stated that his father said that Carpenter was cramping his style and that Crane stated that he needed to "make a change. He's [Carpenter] becoming a pain in the ass." Robert testified that two days before his father's death, the two spoke on the phone and Crane again expressed his feelings about breaking off his friendship with Carpenter.^[15] The night before his death, Crane reportedly called Carpenter and ended their friendship.^[16]

In June 1978, Crane was living in the Winfield Place Apartments in Scottsdale, Arizona while he was appearing in his play Beginner's Luck, at the Windmill Dinner Theatre. On the afternoon of June 29, 1978, Crane's co-star, Victoria Ann Berry, found his body in his apartment after he failed to show up for a lunch meeting.^[17] Crane was bludgeoned to death with a weapon that was never found (investigators believed it to be a camera tripod) and had an electrical cord tied around his neck.^[18]

Crane's funeral was held on July 5, 1978 at St. Paul the Apostle Catholic Church in Westwood. Around 200 family members and friends attended including Patty Duke, John Astin, and Carroll O'Connor. Pallbearers included Hogan's Heroes producer Edward Feldman, co-stars Larry Hovis and Robert Clary and Crane's eldest son, Robert. Crane was interred in Oakwood Memorial Park in Chatsworth, California.^[19]

More than 20 years after his death, Crane's widow, Sigrid Valdis, had his remains exhumed and transported approximately 25 miles southeast to Westwood Village Memorial Park, located in Westwood. After her death from lung cancer in 2007, Valdis was buried next to him.

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 did not seem surprised that the police were there, which raised suspicions. The car Carpenter had rented the previous day was impounded. In it, several blood smears were found that matched Crane's blood type. DNA testing was not available at that time. Due to insufficient evidence, Maricopa County Attorney Charles F. Hyder declined to file charges.

In 1990 the Maricopa County Attorney re-opened Crane's murder case; investigators reexamined and retested the evidence found in June 1978.^[20] Although DNA testing of the blood found in Carpenter's rental car was inconclusive, Detective Jim Raines discovered an evidence photograph of the car's interior that appeared to show a piece of brain tissue. The blood and tissue samples themselves, which had been found in Carpenter's car the day after Crane's murder, had been lost; but an Arizona judge ruled that the new evidence was admissible.^[20] In June 1992 Carpenter was arrested and charged with Crane's murder.^[21][22]

At Carpenter's 1994 trial defense attorneys attacked the prosecution's case as circumstantial and inconclusive. They denied the claim that Carpenter and Crane were on bad terms just before the slaying, and they labeled the determination that a camera tripod was the murder weapon as sheer speculation, based on Carpenter's occupation. They also disputed the claim that the rediscovered photo showed brain tissue, noting that authorities did not have the tissue itself. The defense pointed out that Crane had been videotaped and photographed in compromising sexual positions with numerous women, implying that a jealous person or someone fearing blackmail might have been the killer.

Carpenter was found not guilty. He maintained his innocence until his death on September 4, 1998. Crane's murder remains officially unsolved.^[23]

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, based on Robert Graysmith's book The Murder of Bob Crane: Who Killed the Star of Hogan's Heroes?, portrays Crane as a happily married, church-going family man and popular Los Angeles disc jockey who suddenly becomes a Hollywood celebrity, and subsequently declines into sex addiction.

Crane's son with Sigrid Valdis, Scotty, bitterly attacked the film as being inaccurate. In an October 2002 piece he wrote on the movie, Scotty said that his father was not a regular church-goer and had only been to church three times in the last dozen years of his life, which included his own funeral. There is no evidence that Crane engaged in BDSM and director Paul Schrader told Scotty that the BDSM scene was based on his own personal experience (while writing Hardcore), not Crane's. Scotty also claims that his father and John Carpenter did not become close friends who socialized together until 1975. Also, Crane was a sex addict long before he became a star, and he started recording his sexual encounters at least as early as 1956.^[24]

Scotty and his mother, Sigrid Valdis, had shopped a rival script for a Bob Crane movie biography. The script, alternately entitled F-Stop and Take Off Your Clothes and Smile. The spec script was written up in Variety by columnist Army Archerd, but interest in Scotty's script ceased after Auto Focus was announced.^[25]

At the time of the article denouncing Auto Focus, Scotty Crane was operating the Web site bobcrane.com, which launched in June 2001. The site included a paid section that featured outtakes from his father's pornographic films, photographs, and Crane's autopsy report, which, according to Scotty, disproved the allegation that his father had a penile implant.^[14][26][27] The site has since been renamed "Bob Crane The Official Web Site", is now more sedate and does not include controversial material.

• Katz, Hélèna (2010). Cold Cases: Famous Unsolved Mysteries, Crimes, and Disappearances in America. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 0-313-37692-1
• Newton, Michael (2009). The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes (2 ed.). Infobase Publishing. ISBN 0-8160-7818-1
• Philbin, Tom (2012). The Killer Book of Cold Cases: Incredible Stories, Facts, and Trivia from the Most Baffling True Crime Cases of All Time. Sourcebooks, Inc. ISBN 1-402-25356-7

• The Murder of Bob Crane by Robert Graysmith, published by Crown Publishers, New York, NY, 1993
• "The Bob Crane Story: Everything but a Hero," by A.O. Scott, New York Times, October 4, 2002

• Official website
• Bob Crane at IMDb
• Template:Amg name

Template:Persondata