On the evening of June 29, 1978, the man who had played America's most charming prisoner of war was found beaten to death in a Scottsdale, Arizona apartment. Bob Crane — the easy-grinning Colonel Robert Hogan of "Hogan's Heroes" — was 49 years old. He had been struck repeatedly in the head while he slept, and an electrical cord had been knotted around his neck. The murder weapon was never recovered. Nearly five decades later, no one has ever been convicted of the crime, and the Scottsdale Police Department still carries it on the books as open.
Crane had come to the desert the long way around. Born July 13, 1928, in Waterbury, Connecticut, he spent his early career as a fast-talking radio disc jockey before breaking into television. In 1965 he landed the role that would define him: Colonel Hogan, the wisecracking ringleader of Allied prisoners running circles around their captors in a German POW camp. "Hogan's Heroes" ran until 1971 and made Crane a household name, the very picture of wholesome, charismatic American television.
The work that followed never matched it. Like many actors whose signature series ends, Crane found the parts thinning out. By 1978 he had moved into theater, and it was a touring dinner-theater production of the comedy "Beginner's Luck" that brought him to Scottsdale, where he was staying in a modest apartment far from the Hollywood life he had once known. He was discovered there by a colleague from the production who had come to check on him — the beginning of an investigation that would stretch across decades and end with no resolution.