Prime Crime: Solved Murders - Solved or Unsolved? The Death of Ned Doheny Pt. 2

Episode Date: December 7, 2022

The deaths at Greystone mansion were far from straightforward — at least as far as Detective Leslie White was concerned. But shortly after the DA announced they’d be launching a full investigation, they closed the case. The official narrative was that Hugh Plunkett shot Ned Doheny before turning the gun on himself. The evidence tells a different story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Due to the graphic nature of this murder case, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of murder, assault, and suicide. Please keep this in mind when deciding if, how, and when you'll listen. If you or someone you know is going through a crisis, you can contact the 988 suicide and crisis lifeline by dialing 988 or visiting 988 lifeline.org. We advise extreme caution for children under 13. Edward Doheny's worst nightmare came true on February 17, 1929. Just a few minutes after midnight, he learned that his only son was dead.

The 72-year-old oil baron could hardly process the news. It seemed like a cruel joke. Ned was his pride and joy, not to mention the heir to his company. Edward had worked so hard to shield the 35-year-old from harm, and now he was just gone. Edward had to see for himself. He dashed to the car and sped towards Beverly Hills. The guards in front of Ned's mansion escorted him to the front doors.

The tycoon remained silent as he crossed the marble landing and descended a gleaming oak staircase. A few relatives tried to stop him, but he brushed them off. He went straight to the guest bedroom. When he finally caught a glimpse of Ned's body, Edward fell to his knees. He grabbed the young man's hand and cradled it, whispering the words, My boy. Tears soaked his full white mustache. The multimillionaire had lost the person he loved most,

but he might have been weeping for another reason too. Because he might have believed that on some level, this was all his fault. Hello listeners, it's Carter. Wendy and I love to bring you stories about the many ways murder investigations can go horribly wrong or wonderfully right

on our show's Unsolved Murders and Solved Murders. But every once in a while, we come across stories that don't fit neatly into either category. Sometimes a closed case gets blown wide open. Questions we thought had been answered get thrust back into the public eye. The ensuing controversy transforms what we thought was a simple murder story

into something else entirely. You can find episodes of solved murders, unsolved murders, and all other Spotify originals from Parcast for free, exclusively on Spotify. This is our final episode on the deaths of Ned Dohini and Hugh Plunkett. Last week, we watched as Hugh's anxiety rose to a few, fever pitch when he had Ned were pulled into a national political scandal. This week, we'll cover the investigation into their deaths and explore why the official explanation left many unconvinced. We have all that and more coming up. Stay with us. Yamava Resort and Casino

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By February of 1929, he thought he'd seen the worst the city had to offer. He'd examined hundreds of dead bodies after a flood obliterated Ventura County. He'd come face to face with murderous bootleggers and millionaire scam artists alike. But none of that could have prepared him for the call that came at 2 a.m. on February 17th. It was his boss, Lucian Wheeler, telling him to get to Beverly Hills as soon as he could. Someone had killed Ned Doheny. Even in his groggy state, White immediately recognized the name. Ned was the son of Los Angeles resident Oil Tycoon Edward Doheny.

He was a junior executive in Edward's company, Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company, and lived in Greystone Mansion, which sat above Sunset. Boulevard. The Dohenies were easily the most powerful family in Los Angeles. They dominated the headlines for decades, first for Edward's incredible business success, and then for the family's possible involvement in the teapot dome scandal. Edward had allegedly bribed the Secretary of the Interior for rights to drill in oil reserves on federal land back in November 1921. He'd been dealing with the fallout for the last seven years. Detective White probably remembered that Ned was involved in this scandal, too.

The magnate in training had delivered the cash himself. Until very recently, he had bribery charges hanging over his head, too. The detective had never handled a case like this before. These weren't everyday crooks or underworld kingpins. They had reputations to uphold, and the resources to maintain them. White may have assumed his older colleagues tended to avoid cases like this,

too much political risk. But he wasn't afraid. In fact, he felt excited as he started up his Model T and zipped through the neon-lit city. At a certain point, he turned off of the main streets and a smaller road carried him up into the hills.

After rounding a corner, he saw the elegant, old-fashioned mansion. its bright windows shone brilliantly like beacons of distress. But White couldn't get in easily. A heavy iron fence surrounded the property. As he approached Greystone, he noticed multiple armed guards roaming the grounds. Three of them stopped him at the gatehouse, and it took several minutes to verify his identity. Finally, the gates opened, and White drove up the hill to the mansion itself.

After he parked, a tuck. succeeded butler showed him inside. According to Richard Raynor's book, A Bright and Guilty Place, the first thing White noticed was the silence. There were dozens of people at Greystone, including representatives from the Beverly Hills PD, the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, and the DA's office. Multiple servants shuffled around the house,

in addition to the family doctor, Ernest Fishbaugh. Ned's wife, Lucy, and their five children were around there somewhere, too. It's unclear if Edward Doheny had arrived at this point, but it seems likely. Yet, as White carried his camera equipment down the grand staircase, his footsteps echoed as if he were alone. And when he made it to the guest bedroom, the detective understood why. There were two bodies on the floor. The first was that of 32-year-old Hugh Plumplems. Nett's personal secretary and confidant. He was splayed out next to the doorway, face down in a puddle of blood.

35-year-old Ned Doheny lay nearby at the foot of the two twin beds. He was on his back with a halo of blood around his head. Red rivulets zigzagged all over his face. Leslie White was shaken by the scene. Still, he took out his camera and started snapping photos. trying to piece together the evidence. The first clue? Their clothes. Ned had on a green silk night robe and fancy leather slippers.

Clearly he was getting ready for bed. Hugh, on the other hand, wore a pinstripe suit. He looked prepared for a business meeting. Both men had been shot in the head. White found one bullet lodged in a wall about six feet up. It looked like this was the one that

killed Ned. He noted some of Hugh's brain matter splattered nearby, but couldn't find the bullet that took him down. It could have been lodged inside his head. There was an empty glass on the ground and an open bottle of Johnny Walker on the side table. Both Ned and Hugh had cigarettes lying on the floor right next to their hands. Ned's was unlit, but Hughes was a different story. His was stubby and covered in ash. His fingers had fresh burns on them. He'd been actively smoking when he died, and it had continued to smolder for several minutes afterward. Detective White noted the cigarette, then returned to Ned and pulled out his fingerprinting kit. He pressed the dead man's thumb into an ink pad. He died a few hours ago, so the skin was

probably cold. White didn't understand why he hadn't been called in earlier, but then again, he couldn't understand anything about the Doheny family. He knelt down next to Hugh's body to perform the same routine. Something was radiating heat nearby. The detective carefully lifted up Hughes' torso. There was a gun pinned underneath him. A very warm gun. Leslie White wrapped the weapon in a cloth, grabbed a few other pieces of evidence and headed back up the stairs. He couldn't make heads or tails of the crime scene, but he hoped the witnesses would set him straight. While he examined the guest bedroom,

other investigators were also piecing together the events of the evening. Pretty much everyone in the house was willing to talk, and their stories matched up remarkably well. The trouble started around 9.30 p.m. when Hugh arrived at the house. He parked his dark blue cabriolet next to the garage. Then he started rummaging through one of the cabinets in there, where he usually kept guns and fishing equipment. He casually walked towards the mansion's front doors,

waving hello to a security guard along the way. As one of the Doheny's most trusted staff, he didn't have any issue getting onto the property. The gatehouse attendant recognized his car and waved him right through. Hugh used his own key to open the door. He entered a huge marble landing, where he could either go up to the family living quarters or down to the guest bedrooms.

He trottered up the stairs and made a beeline for the master bedroom where Ned and Lucy slept. It was still relatively early in the evening, and the couple had just gotten into their pajamas. They jumped when they saw Hugh, who looked jittery and pale. His visit wasn't completely unambled.

expected, though. Hugh had been arguing with Ned and Lucy earlier in the day. He met with them and Dr. Fishbaugh for about half an hour that afternoon. He stormed out as soon as they recommended he go to a sanatorium. The couple visited him at his apartment after that, where they pushed the idea even harder. The conversation quickly escalated into an argument, but Ned and Lucy left before they could come to any resolution. A few hours later, Hugh called the house. He wanted, no, needed to talk to Ned. Lucy picked up the phone, though,

and she wanted Hugh to stay away for obvious reasons. She told him that Ned was just acting impulsively. It'd probably be best to wait until morning. Clearly, this wasn't enough of an explanation for Hugh. Some sources even state that he made this call from a phone in the Dohini's garage, which shows that he'd already made up his mind. Soon enough, he was standing at the doorway in his pinstripe suit. He demanded to talk with a man he once called his best friend.

Ned knew it was useless to resist any further. He tightened his bathrobe, put on his slippers, and offered to talk with Hugh in the guest bedroom downstairs. Because the house was crawling with servants, someone probably saw the two men descending the staircase and shutting the door behind them. They likely smelled the cigarette smoke wafting out of the room and heard the quiet, intense conversation morph into a full-blown argument. The men stayed in the room for about an hour and a half.

Then Lucy heard a bang. She didn't think anything of it at first and assumed someone was moving around furniture. But just a few seconds later, there was a knocker. at the door. It was Dr. Fishbaugh. He said he'd been at the theater that evening, but was pulled out of his seat to respond to a phone call around 10.30.

Ned wanted him to come to Greystone as soon as possible. The doctor didn't know what it was about, and he could only assume it had something to do with Hugh. Lucy greeted Fishbaugh and led him down to the guest room. The door was hanging open. Just then, a crazed Hugh Plunkett leapt into the hallways. way. He glared and told them to stay out, then the door slammed shut. Then there was another bang. This time it did not sound like furniture. It was a gunshot.

When the doctor finally pushed the door open, both Ned Dohini and Hugh Plunkett were bleeding out on the floor. As far as Fishbaugh could tell, Hugh must have squeezed out the first shot just as the doctor arrived. around 11 p.m. That was the one that Lucy mistook for falling furniture. That meant Ned was already dead when Hugh screamed at the doctor. After closing the door, Hugh must have shot himself. It was an engaging story for sure, but Detective Leslie White wasn't sure he could trust it.

If the shooting occurred at 11, he didn't understand why he wasn't called till 2nd. Dr. Fishbaugh's arrival appeared to be a little too perfectly timed, and the servant's stories seemed a little too rehearsed. They all emphasized the same details, and none of them said they were alarmed by the first gunshot, which seemed odd. They also appeared to be willing to lie. Some of the staffers insisted that Ned and Hugh weren't drinking, even though Leslie White had seen an open bottle of scotch at the crime scene. This could have been an innocent impulse from the servants.

As Margaret Leslie Davis noted in her book, Dark Side of Fortune, Prohibition was still in full swing, and they didn't want their employers to get in trouble. But it did prove that everyone had the Doheny's best interests at heart. White ran through everything he'd seen in the guest bedroom. None of it added up. The gun under Hugh's body was so much warmer than it should have been. It had only been shot twice, more than three hours earlier,

but it felt like it had been sitting in an oven. Then there were those burns. Hugh died with a lit cigarette next to his left hand. If Dr. Fishbaugh and the rest of the staff were to be believed, that meant he shot Ned, slammed the bedroom door, and shot himself with only one hand. It seemed to press. apostorous. Detective White smelled a rat, and it seemed like other investigators did too.

Before he left Greystone, Chief Investigator Lucian Wheeler pulled White aside and told him to take another look at the bodies once they got to the morgue. It seemed like the Dohenies were hiding something, but the detectives couldn't be sure what. Coming up, the DA's office launches a major investigation. Of all the mysteries in the world, perhaps the greatest is, when will it all end? Or rather, how? Hi, listeners, it's Richard and Molly from the Spotify original from Parcast Unexpl Unexplained Mysteries. With the end of the year approaching, Unexplained Mysteries is taking a closer look at some of the most infamous end-of-the-world scenarios in a five-part doomsday special you do not want to miss. Throughout the month of December, discover the many ways people have prophesized our demise,

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And now, back to our story. Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett's bodies beat Leslie White to the Beverly Hills mortuary. They were stripped naked and laying on cold metal tables by the time he arrived. Around 5 a.m. on February 17, 1929. The detective hadn't slept, and his head was probably swimming with a mixture of exhaustion and frustration. But the bright, quiet examination room energized him. Finally, he could take a good look at the bodies without any staff or Doheny's breathing down his neck.

He started with a gunshot wounds. The detective used his camera to snap a few shots of Ned Doheny's face and skull. It wasn't a pretty sight. The young oil baron still had blood caked all over his face, forming a sickening latticework pattern. It looked like the bullet had ripped up. through one side of his head and then exited from the other. But when White leaned in to get a better look at the entrance wound,

you noticed something strange. There were powder burns near his ear where the bullet struck. That meant Ned was shot at close range. Very close range. The gun was probably held less than three inches away from his temple. Based on the witnesses' stories, White had expected Hugh to be the one with powder burns. He was the one who supposedly held the gun to his own head.

The detective checked Hugh's bullet wounds again. He'd been shot in the back of the head, and there were no powder burns whatsoever. White was stunned. He'd assumed Hugh shot Ned from a few feet away, then turned the gun on himself after slamming the door. But these bodies told the exact opposite story. Ned had been shot from up close, and Hugh from further away. The murder suicide theory seemed more or less impossible. Hugh would have needed to press the revolver against Ned's skull and kill him execution style, then extend his arm all the way out to shoot himself. None of it made sense. Detective White finished up his examination and then drove downtown to the Hall of Justice. He'd been wondering about the strangely warm Colt 45 he'd found

under Hugh's torso all morning. Now it was time to test it. The detective unwrapped the revolver and dusted for Prince. There were none, not even a smudge. White knew guns like this were oiled frequently and could resist some Prince, but it was strange to see absolutely nothing. It seemed like someone had wiped it clean. White also couldn't understand why the gun had been hot when he found it. He fired it himself a few times, but it didn't heat up in any noticeable way. The warmth must have come from an outside source. By mid-morning, Detective White was thoroughly stumped.

He knew the story told it Greystone that morning was wrong and that Hugh probably wasn't responsible for both deaths, but he had no idea where to go from there. He'd only been in this job for a few months, and a case like this was far beyond his pay grade. After a quick call with Lucian Wheeler, the young detective decided to meet with a district attorney, Burrin Fitz, at his home in Hollywood.

White spread out the crime scene photographs and explained all the inconsistencies in the Doheny's story. story to Fitz. He thought the case warranted a full-on investigation, and by the end of his monologue, Fitz seemed close to agreeing. Burin Fitz was an intimidating, devout man. His knee had been blown apart by shrapnel during World War I, and he walked around with a prosthetic leg as a result. He was also fairly new on the job, and had already launched an all-out offensive on the city's bootleggers and gamblers. D.A. Fitz didn't seem like he was afraid of anything. But when Detective White finished his diatribe,

he still felt the need to address the oil-soaked elephant in the room. He asked Fitz if the Dohenies were too big to mess with. Fitz responded with a resounding no. The investigation should be launched as soon as possible. He got out of his chair and called Lucian Wheeler. He wanted to bring all of the great, Greystone witnesses back in for questioning. And there was one witness who White especially wanted to see again, Dr. Ernest Fishbaugh.

The doctor arrived at the Hall of Justice within a few hours. Detective White was new to interrogation and let the fearsome DA take the lead. As the attorney worked through a long list of questions, the detective thought about all the strange details he'd noticed that night. He couldn't overwhelm the physician. That might make him clam up. He needed to be strategic. When Burrin Fitz finished, the detective cleared his throat.

He asked a simple, clarifying question. Was Ned Doheny dead when the doctor arrived? Fishbaugh said yes, just like he had that morning. Leslie White pushed a little further, asking if he'd touched or disturbed the body in any way. Fishbah said no. He found Ned on his back and left him there. This was just the answer White wanted. He remembered the zigzagging blood stains that covered Ned's face.

If Ned was on his back the entire time, all of the blood would have moved straight down. It clearly didn't do that. Detective White asked the doctor how Ned's blood had managed to defy the laws of gravity. The doctor didn't know what to say. After a few seconds of silence, he admitted that Ned wasn't dead when he first arrived. He actually bled out for about 20 minutes.

During that time, Fishball rolled him over so he didn't choke on his own blood. It was a last-ditch attempt to save the young man, but it didn't work. Notably, White didn't ask some follow-up questions that, in retrospect, seemed obvious, like why Fishpaw didn't call in more medical help during those 20 minutes, or if he attempted to save Hugh Plunkett in a similar fashion. But the detective didn't need to ask those questions now. He'd proven that the official narrative had holes, and he felt confident that he'd convinced D.A. Fitz to add the case to his docket.

Soon after this, the Los Angeles Times reported that Fitz was ready to start a quote, sweeping investigation into the shooting. He didn't publicly discount anything that Dr. Fishbaugh said. According to him, the case needed a second pair of eyes to confirm the physician's story. But other sources state that he was furious at Dr. Fishbaugh and sent him out of the room after their interview. Byrne Fitz was a politician above all else and likely chose his words carefully when speaking to the press.

But even in his measured tone, one thing is clear. The official narrative needed to be re-examined. The Times devoted more than two pages to the story in their February 18th issue. They described the crime in detail, or at least one version of it. Even though Detective White and DA Fitz had caught Dr. Fishball in a lie, the press didn't know that yet. In fact, their reporting seemed to rely on the family doctor's account of the evening. All the details matched those given to the first law enforcement officers on the scene, and the paper highlighted Hughes' alleged mental struggles multiple times.

They described him as, quote, insane, mad or crazed in almost every paragraph, and mentioned Ned's pleas for him to visit a sanatorium. In contrast, they didn't mention the teapot dome scandal at all. Additionally, there are errors and inconsistencies in the newspaper coverage. For example, one part of the article states that Hugh was open to the idea of a sanatorium stay during his afternoon visit with the doctor, but another section of it says that he was angry at the mere suggestion. The paper also claimed that Edward Doheny walked from his home to grace, after hearing about Ned's death,

when these houses are roughly ten miles apart. And it appears that Dr. Fishbaugh contradicted himself on a few occasions, too. He told the Los Angeles Times that Hugh slammed the guest bedroom door, but he told another paper that the door closed gently. These small details could be honest mistakes, but it's worth noting that the Doheny family ran in the same social circles as the owners of these newspapers.

Edward Doheny even shared a lawyer with Harry Chandler, the publisher of the Times. It's not impossible to imagine Dohini pulling some strings behind the scenes and insisting that Chandler's staff repeat the party line. The reporters also might have known which side their bread was buttered on and decided not to ask too many follow-up questions. They probably assume that it was still early in the investigation and that they'd get a more comprehensive view of the shooting soon enough. With Buran Fitz on the case, it could only be a matter of time. But they would have been wrong because the DA called an emergency press conference

just a few hours after announcing the investigation. He told reporters that there would be no formal autopsy on Ned Dohini's body. The inquiry was already over. Death certificates had been signed, and both deaths were attributed to Hugh Plunkett's mental health. The strange bullet holes and warm gun weren't mentioned. The case was closed, and that was final. Many in Los Angeles were stunned by the sudden turnaround. Naturally, they began to wonder why the DA's office ate their words, and who?

might have forced them to. Coming up, Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett take their secrets to the grave. I knew about investing, but I really didn't know how to go about it. Meet Corey, a Walthfront client. With Wealthfront, it could put money in, and it would automatically distribute it into a diversified portfolio. Then it starts to compound.

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back to our story. The DA's investigation into the deaths of Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett was front page news on February 18, 1929. By the next day, it was gone. The Los Angeles Times published a long article about the shootings, but most of the focused on the plans for Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett's funerals. They reported that the investigation was closed and plainly stated Ned was murdered and Hugh died by suicide. They didn't seem interested in probing any further. Hugh's body had been examined at the coroner's office by this point in what they called an autopsy. The newspaper included a quick summary of the medical examiner's findings.

It stated that Hughes' bullet wound looked like he held the gun up against his head and that gunpowder was found inside his skull. The autopsy was completely at odds with Detective Leslie White's observations. He'd noticed powder burns on Ned's Temple, not Hughes, but it matched up with the official narrative, almost as if it were planned that way. We don't know how the detective reacted to this autopsy. but it probably wasn't pretty. In White's 1936 memoir,

he wrote that he vented his frustrations about the case to an older, more experienced colleague. The Jada detective sighed at the young man's enthusiasm and said that White moved too quickly. He should have left a case like this alone, or at least kept his mouth shut for a while longer. He needed to learn how to move in silence. silence, especially when he was up against someone like Edward Doheny.

White didn't appreciate this advice. He didn't understand how someone could find the truth if he wasn't allowed to look in the first place. The veteran just shrugged, as if to say that it was the way the world works, and White should just get used to it. White would be haunted by that exchange for the rest of his life. He continued to believe the day of the day Deaths at Greystone were not a straightforward murder suicide. In fact, he was certain Hugh Plunkett had not shot himself, as the Doheny's claimed. He knew there was some manipulation of the crime scene before the police could arrive. He knew the investigation was killed abruptly, and he suspected Edward Doheny was somehow behind it.

The detective was also shocked at how quickly lost. Los Angeles stopped talking about Ned and Hugh. There was only one article about the crime in the Los Angeles Times on February 20th, just four days after the shooting. Within a week, it had disappeared from the paper entirely. This doesn't mean that everyone bought the official story. Alternative and underground newspapers boldly proclaimed that Byr and Fitts was lying. Some openly wondered if Ned and Hugh's deaths had to do with the T-Eye.

pot dome scandal. In hindsight, it's surprising that so few people seem to make this connection at the time. Hugh had accompanied Ned when he delivered $100,000 to Albert Bacon Fall in 1921. Both of them were about to become key witnesses in Falls bribery trial, as well as Edward Doheny's. Ned had been granted immunity in these trials, and Hugh hadn't. This disparity probably ratcheted up the tension between the two men. If Dr. Fishbaugh is to be believed, it might have affected Hughes' mental health as well.

But as the years went on, researchers began to call that narrative into question two. In Richard Raynor's book, A Bright and Guilty Place, he points out that all of the information about Hughes' alleged instability came from Fishbaugh and Doheny family instability. insiders. Other friends and relatives actually said Hugh was fine in the months leading up to his death. The upcoming trials were incredibly stressful, but he was far from the raging madman, the Doheny family circle portrayed him to be. These theories didn't make it into the mainstream, though. Most people seemed to accept the murder-suicide theory and rode it off as a singular tragedy. A massive crowd gathered outside of Ned's funeral to pay their respects.

A few hundred showed up to mourn Hugh as well. After both men were buried, the Dohenies did their best to retreat from public life, but they couldn't stay out of the headlines for long. The Teapot Dome trials resumed less than two months after the shooting in April of 1929. Edward Doheny was called to testify at Albert Bacon Falls bribery trial on October 7th of that year. He was still deep in grief and had hardly spoken to anyone since Ned died. He'd found Los Angeles too overwhelming and relocated to a ranch they just built in Ventura County. At least there, he wouldn't need to look at Greystone every day.

The 73-year-old oil baron looked frail and sad. in the courtroom, a shadow of his former self. He tried to convince the court that he'd loaned Fall $100,000 for personal reasons, and that Fall didn't have any criminal intent in taking the money. But the jury didn't seem to buy his arguments. On October 24, 1929, Albert Bacon Fall was ruled guilty of accepting a bribe. Doheny's trial was up next, and as the man who always offered the alleged bribe, his chances didn't look good. When he took the stand in March of 1930, he repeated the same arguments he'd been using for years, but his voice caught when he tried to speak about Ned.

These emotional displays probably weren't intentional, but they did buy Doheny some sympathy. On March 22nd, he was ruled not guilty of bribery, even though Albert Bacon Fall was already in jail. It was an unprecedented verdict and caused Doheny to break down in tears in the middle of the courtroom. It's hard to guess what he was thinking, but the sickening image of Ned and Hugh's bodies might have flashed into his mind. He knew they would have testified at the trial if they were alive.

Their perspective could have changed the outcome entirely and landed Doheny in jail. That was the outcome. come Hugh had been so afraid of, so afraid that he might have resorted to violence. Or Edward might have thought further back to the beginning of the whole ordeal. He might have thought about his thirst for those federal oil leases and the strange errand he'd sent his son on in 1921. If he hadn't done that, perhaps Ned would still be around. Edward returned to California, a broken man. Over the next few years, he spent time with his grandchildren and dealt with more of the legal fallout from the scandal.

His health declined, and in September of 1935, he died at age 79. In the years since, the Doheny family has remained tight-lipped about Ned and Hughes' deaths, and historians have been hard-pressed to find any more information in Edward's personal papers or diaries, because his wife is said to have burned them right after his funeral. This has made the deaths of Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett even more mysterious. They've been labeled as solved since 1929, but a lot of evidence calls that into question.

And plenty of alternative theories have shown up in the years since. Some have said that Hugh was blackmailing Ned. Others wondered if a third person, was in the room and shot both of them. Many have speculated that Ned and Hugh were romantically involved. A few have even wondered if Ned's wife pulled the trigger. But there's one theory that shows up more than any other. It has to do with where Ned and Hugh were buried.

It wasn't fully appreciated until Edward was in the ground, too. The young men's graves were placed just a few feet away from each other at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. The Dohenies bought Ned a huge mausoleum that had been shipped over from Italy, but left his sarcophagus unmarked. Hughes Gravestone was much smaller. Its placement seemed intentional, though. It's a bit unusual to bury a murderer and his victim that close together,

almost as if they weren't a murderer and victim at all. When Edward Doheny died, he opted for a Catholic cemetery that matched up with his beliefs, one far away from Ned and Hugh. It's only natural to wonder why Edward would choose not to be buried next to his beloved son. Some have wondered if Ned was disqualified from a proper Catholic burial. At the time, the Catholic Church considered dying by suicide to be a mortal sin. They've changed their views in the time since, but in 1929, this meant that those who took their own lives couldn't be buried on consecrated ground. Remember the powder burns that Detective White found on Ned's temple? They indicated the gun was within three inches of his skull when it fired, which might mean he was holding it up to his own head.

In other words, the standard narrative might have gotten things backward. Ned could have killed Hugh and then himself, not the other way around. This theory seems to fit the physical evidence fairly well, but it's unclear why Ned would have killed his right-hand man, or himself for that matter. Because the investigation was shut down so fast, it's impossible to speculate with any degree of accuracy. The newspaper reports seem highly biased, and any scrap of Edward Doheny's perspective is long gone.

The closest thing we have is Detective Leslie White's memoir, and even that fails to find any neat conclusions. As the years go on, it seems less and less likely that anyone will figure out what really happened at Greystone on that February night, but the mansion still looms over the sunset strip, just like it did in the 1920s. Though the estate has been turned into a public park, the city of Beverly Hills decided to keep the thick iron gates up.

In some ways, they're the most important feature of the mansion. They remind visitors of the extreme levels of privacy and control that the Dohenies had in their heyday. And the secrets they were allowed to hide. Thanks again for tuning into our solved or unsolved, crossover special. We'll be back next week with new episodes. If you or someone you know is struggling emotionally or thinking about suicide, you can contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988. They're available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, at 988. Or you can speak to them

online at 988 lifeline.org. For more information, on Ned Dohini and Hugh Plunkett, amongst the many sources we used, we found two books extremely helpful. A Bright and Guilty Place, Murder Corruption and LA's Scandalous Coming of Age by Richard Rayner, and Dark Side of Fortune, Triumph and Scandal in the Life of Oil Tycoon Edward L. Doheny by Margaret Leslie Davis. You can find all episodes of solved murders, unsolved murders, and all other Spotify originals from Parcast, for free on Spotify. We'll see you next time. Solve murders, true crime mysteries,

and unsolved murders, true crime stories are Spotify originals from Parcast. They are executive produced by Max Cutler. Sound design by Michael Langsner, with production assistants by Ron Shapiro, Nick Johnson, Trent Williamson, and Carly Madden. This episode was written by Kylie Harrington, edited by Maggie Admiere and Terrell Wells,

Fact-checked by Lori Siegel, researched by Mickey Taylor, and produced by Freddie Beckley. It stars Wendy McKenzie and Carter Roy. An alien invasion, nuclear warfare, the second coming. How will the world end? Will we be prepared? And will it matter? This December, join Unexplained Mysteries for a five-part Doomsday Special, examining the many theories about humanity's ultimate demise.

We're counting down to the end of the year with the most infamous end-of-the-world scenarios of all time. Listen to the Unexplained Mysteries 5-part Doomsday Special, free and only on Spotify.