A popular figure in the growing Hollywood motion picture colony of the 1910s and early 1920s, Taylor directed fifty-nine silent films between 1914 and 1922 and acted in twenty-seven between 1913 and 1915.

[1] Taylor's murder on 1 February 1922, along with other Hollywood scandals such as the Roscoe Arbuckle trial, led to a frenzy of sensationalist and often fabricated newspaper reports.

[4] One of his uncles was Charles Kearns Deane Tanner, the Irish Parliamentary Party Member of Parliament for Mid Cork.

[1] After his disappearance, friends said he had previously suffered "mental lapses", and his family thought initially he had wandered off during an episode of amnesia.

[7] Taylor's initial film acting was in 1913 for the New York Motion Picture Company, releasing under the brands of Bronco and Kay-Bee.

[9] He then acted for Vitagraph Studios, including four appearances opposite Margaret "Gibby" Gibson, and Balboa Amusement Producing Company.

A former British Army lieutenant and manager of a New York antiques business (separate from Hamilton's), Denis had also abandoned his wife and children, disappearing in 1912.

After training for four and a half months at Fort Edward, Nova Scotia, Taylor sailed from Halifax on a troop transport carrying 500 Canadian soldiers.

In 1921, Taylor visited his ex-wife and daughter in New York City and made Ethel Daisy his legal heir.

A crowd gathered inside, and someone identifying himself as a doctor stepped forward, made a cursory examination of the body, and declared Taylor had died of a stomach hemorrhage.

The doctor was never seen again, and when doubts later arose, the body was rolled over by forensic investigators, revealing that the 49-year-old film director had been shot at least once in the back with what appeared to have been a small-caliber pistol, which was not found at the scene.

[24] In the midst of a media circus caused by the case, Los Angeles Undersheriff Eugene Biscailuz warned Chicago Tribune reporter Eddie Doherty, "The industry has been hurt.

With the help of two confederates, Frank Carson and Al Weinshank, she offered Peavey ten dollars if he would identify Taylor's grave in the Hollywood Park Cemetery (which she had already visited).

Weinshank, as Muir revealed in her memoirs, not only spoke like a hoodlum, but also was one of the alleged Chicago mobsters who were later gunned down in the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

[29] Mabel Normand was a popular comedic actress and frequent costar with Charlie Chaplin and Roscoe Arbuckle.

According to author Robert Giroux, Taylor was deeply in love with Normand and she had originally approached him for help to cure her cocaine dependency.

According to Giroux, Taylor met with federal prosecutors shortly before his death and offered to testify against Normand's cocaine suppliers.

[30] On the night of the murder, Normand claimed to have left Taylor's bungalow in a happy mood at 7:45 pm, carrying a book he had lent her.

Normand was the last person known to have seen Taylor alive, and the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) subjected her to a gruelling interrogation but ruled her out as a suspect.

"[21] Mary Miles Minter was a former child star and teen screen idol whose career had been guided by Taylor.

However, facsimiles of Minter's passionate letters to Taylor were printed in newspapers, forever shattering her screen image as a modest and wholesome young girl, and she was vilified in the press.

Minter made four more films for Paramount Pictures, and when the studio failed to renew her contract, she received offers from many other producers.

Shelby's initial statements to police about the murder are still characterized as evasive and "obviously filled with lies" about both her daughter's relationship with Taylor and "other matters".

[34] Perhaps the most compelling bit of circumstantial evidence was that Shelby allegedly owned a rare .38 calibre pistol and some unusual bullets, which were very similar to the kind which had killed Taylor.

Shelby knew the Los Angeles district attorney socially and spent years outside the United States, in an effort to avoid both official inquiries by his successor, and press coverage related to the murder.

In 1938, her other daughter, actress Margaret Shelby (who was by then suffering from both clinical depression and alcoholism), openly accused her mother of the murder.

For example, Adela Rogers St. Johns speculated that Shelby was torn by feelings of maternal protection for her daughter and her own attraction to Taylor.

In 1917, she was indicted, tried, and acquitted on charges equivalent to prostitution (along with allegations of opium dealing), after which she changed her professional name to Patricia Palmer.

[36][better source needed] Through a combination of poor crime scene management and apparent corruption, much physical evidence was immediately lost, and the rest vanished over the years, although copies of a few documents from the police files were made public in 2007.

Because so many of the celebrities mentioned in the Taylor case were familiar to the public through their movie performances,[38] this was the first American murder in which so many people felt such a personal interest.