Murder Mystery Monday

By the fall of 1963, Karyn Kupcinet was an actress with a somewhat successful career that had  begun to tank, thanks to her abuse of diet pills, drugs, and booze. Not a good combo. And oh yes...that little shoplifting incident. Her relationship with actor Andrew Prine was also headed south; he saw the red flags and already had another girlfriend, which only served to make Karyn become more cuckoo. From the vintage publicity blurb that accompanied the above photo:

December 2, 1963—HOLLYWOOD, CALIF.: Police said here 12/2 that actor Andrew Prine and the late actress Karyn Kupcinet (shown together in an 10/63 photo) had both received a number of letters threatening their lives. Miss Kupcinet, daughter of newspaper columnist Irv Kupcinet, was found dead in her apartment 11/30. Authorities said she had been dead for “two or three days.” She was 22.

Turns out Kupcinet had created those threatening letters herself. Yup. Cuckoo.

The night before her death, Kupcinet had dined with actor Mark Goddard (“Lost in Space”) and his wife Marcia.



HOLLYWOOD, December 1, 1963: DISCOVERED ACTRESS’ BODY—Actor Mark Goddard and wife Marcia wait at a Hollywood police station today to tell detectives details of how they happened to find the strangled body of actress Karyn Kupcinet in her Hollywood apartment last night. The pair said they were friends of the actress and went to her apartment because they had not heard from her for several days.



I can’t help but notice the black gloves on Marcia; and Goddard’s cup of java and a cig. Do you still get free coffee today when interrogated?

Kupcinet was living in the Monterey Village apartment complex located in West Hollywood:



It really is a charming little time capsule of old Hollywood, and supposedly where Randolph Scott and Cary Grant once shacked up.



The steps up to Kupcinet’s second floor apartment:



Where it all happened, which (coincidentally) is just a few doors away from where I once spent the night with a good friend of mine who resided in this complex a number of years ago:



Somehow, Kupcinet is part of the many conspiracy theories linking her to President John F. Kennedy’s death. According to the Hazlitt website:

[S]he was the mystery woman who, just 20 minutes before Kennedy’s death, called the FBI from an Oxnard, California, telephone exchange and breathed, “the president will be shot.” Jones gave no reason for his unshakable belief that Kupcinet was the mystery woman. Her ex-lover, Andrew Prine, later stated he and Kupcinet were in another part of the state during the shooting. There is no concrete evidence Kupcinet was psychic or privy to such explosive information, and when the Today Show, in 1992, flashed her picture among those whose deaths “connected” to Kennedy’s, her father’s next Sun-Times column was irate: “That is an atrocious outrage… The list apparently has developed a life of its own and for Today to repeat the calumny is reprehensible.”

Kupcinet’s death still remains officially unsolved. If you want to read an excellent account of what happened, visit Scott Michaels’ Find A Death website

See more Movie & TV photos at my main website.