Bob Crane: What Happened to Hogan’s Hero?

Bob Crane was an American actor, known most for his starring role in the CBS sitcom, Hogan’s Heroes. On June 29, 1978, he was found bludgeoned to death in his Scottsdale, AZ apartment. To date, his murder remains officially, unsolved.

WARNING: The following content may be considered graphic, shocking, or depict adult situations. Read at your own risk.

Bob Crane, was born July 13, 1928 in Waterbury, Connecticut. As a kid, he enjoyed drumming, and in the 1950’s, began a career as a radio personality. In the early 1960’s, he moved from radio to television, starting with guest-hosting gigs for Johnny Carson, and then guest appearances on The Twilight Zone, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and then booked a recurring guest role on The Donna Reed Show. Then, i n 1965, he was offered the starring role in the television comedy, Hogan’s Heroes, about a German POW camp.

Bob had married his High School sweetheart, Anne Terzian, in 1949 and together they had three children – Robert David, Deborah Anne, and Karen Leslie. Life seemed picture perfect, but after almost 21 years of marriage, Bob and Anne divorced.

His son, Robert, later published a book titled, Crane: Sex, Celebrity, and My Father’s Unsolved Murder, in which he wrote, ‘The impact on my life of my folks’ separation was truly the shattering of a dream.’

‘They had always seemed so safe, so certain. Perhaps they had thought so themselves, complacent that they could weather any storm. The family was conservative by nature, politically and in terms of family values.

‘There were no drugs; there was no alcohol. There was no pill-popping craziness, schizophrenia, suicide attempts, physical or mental abuse.

‘We were a small-thinking, small-town family,’ he writes, ‘living in a suburban community with a dad who just happened to be on radio and television. However, by the time of the separation and divorce, my dad was a very well-known television star.’

Bob went on to marry his co-star Patricia Olson, who played the character Hilda in Hogan’s Heroes under the stage name Sigrid Valdis. Their son, Scotty, was born on June 4, 1971, and also adopted a daughter, Ana Marie. Life was good, so when Bob Crane was found in his apartment, bludgeoned to death, people everywhere were in shock.

Appearances aren’t everything though, and what people didn’t see was the darker side of Bob Crane.

Bob Crane was a self proclaimed sex-addict, using his fame from Hogan’s Heroes to entice girls into risqué photo shoots, or videotaped escapades. When his son, Robert, was only 16 years old, he introduced him to his world. While Robert was visiting, Bob decided to have a woman over, who had previously been arrested in Texas for performing oral sex.

In his book, Robert said, ‘She refused to do that on film, but she did just about everything else before my unblinking teenaged eyes. This might have been my dad’s clumsy, Hollywood way of having a “birds and bees” talk with his coming-of-age son, but what strikes me now looking back is that his equipment-laden room was another in a series of tech-heavy habitats that grew progressively darker.’

Bob Crane set up a darkroom in a separate bedroom in his apartment where he would spend his free time developing pictures of actresses and Playboy Playmates in compromising positions. The girls were always stopping by to see him on the Hogan’s Heroes set, where it was believed that if you were young, female, and had a good body, you could go places.

When Bob met John Henry Carpenter, a regional sales manager for Sony Electronics, things went even further. John was familiar with video equipment and greatly enjoyed the company of Bob and his entourage of ladies. They frequented bars together, Bob attracting women, and introducing John as his manager. Then later, they would videotape their sexual encounters.

Some sources say that the women were aware of and consented to the videotaping, others say they had no idea until they were informed by the Scottsdale Police after Bob’s murder.

After Hogan’s Heroes aired its last episode, Bob had hoped to find work on another television series, but he had been typecast, and could only book guest roles. He did pick up a new series, titled The Bob Crane Show, but critics didn’t like it, and it was cancelled almost as soon as the second episode aired. Other network executives had heard rumors about his insatiable sexual appetite and began to shun him, leaving him with nothing new to work on.

Bob’s marriage wasn’t doing so well either. His wife, Patricia, also knew about his other side, but they were trying to make things work. Bob wanted to reconnect with his family, his children, and prove to Hollywood that he could be a serious actor. He began to see a therapist, finding he couldn’t stop the urge for sex on his own.

In the meantime, to pay the bills, he took to live theater. He went on the road, starring in Beginner’s Luck and was scheduled to begin work with a psychologist specializing in sex addiction in Los Angeles as soon as the play closed in Scottsdale Arizona, on July 1, 1978.

At that same time, John took a national sales manager job at Akai, so he could arrange business trips and travel with Bob along his touring schedule; then the two could continue seducing and videotaping women across America. Except Bob was trying to turn his life around, even telling his son that he was going to end his relationship with John because he was becoming “a pain in the ass.”

On June 29, 1978, Bob failed to show up for a lunch meeting. When his co-star on Beginner’s Luck, Victoria Berry, went to check on him, she was sent screaming from his apartment.

Bob was lying on his right side, dead in his queen sized bed, wearing only his boxer shorts and a wrist watch. An electrical cord was fastened tightly around his neck, and a pillow stood vertically at the top of his head. Examination showed two parallel gashes above and behind the left side of his head, which had sent a fan of blood across the ceiling, the wall behind the top of the bed, and the nightstand lamp.

Human tissue was on the wall, and the bed sheet and pillows were soaked with blood. Semen or a sexual lubricant was stuck on his left thigh, the medical examiner commenting, “What’s that going to tell you besides he had a piece of ass?”

All of his polaroid’s of naked women were gone, as well as a second tripod. Investigators believed Bob had two tripods setup in the living room for video, still and eight millimeter cameras to photograph and record women. When a criminologist inspected a bedsheet from the crime scene, he came to believe that a bloody mark on it had been made by a tripod, and not the one recovered from the scene.

The scene of the crime was described by police as “a very passionate murder scene,” and not a Mafia hit. The murder weapon had been wielded with enough anger and force to kill Bob in just two blows.

Police immediately looked to John as being their prime suspect, but could not come up with a motive to proceed. As they reviewed video tapes Bob had possessed, they found footage of John making love to women simultaneously with Bob. They began to suspect John, who was bisexual, was in love with Bob, and when he tried to end the relationship, he responded with rage.

Police got a warrant to examine John’s rental car. They found a thin, three inch smear of blood from the padding near the top of the passenger door, and a one-sixteenth speck of fatty tissue or brain matter on the same door panel near the blood sample. DNA testing was in its infancy, and all they could determine was that the blood was type B – Bob’s blood type. Only one in seven people have type B blood, and John was not one of them.

Meanwhile, it was discovered that Bob’s wife, Patricia, had gotten his will changed, so that she and her children were the sole inheritors of his estate. What also was discovered was that Bob was not the father of any of her children. When they were married in 1970, Patricia was already pregnant, but Bob had had a vasectomy in 1968 while he was still married to his first wife.

With the focus on John Carpenter, Patricia went on to sell crime scene photos, copies of the autopsy report, and fifty XXX-rated photos and videos of her husband with a variety of women – all for a monthly fee of $19.95. She also had t-shirts made and marketed bearing an image of Bob having sex with a woman.

Patricia and her son, Scotty, quickly spent all of Bob’s two large life insurance policies – each being worth $400,000, in addition to proceeds from the sale of the home they had lived in with him (worth 1 million dollars), and the yearly receipts from the Hogan’s Heroes residuals.

The trial against John Carpenter didn’t actually go to trial until 1993, and by then the police had lost the brain tissue that had been found in his car. And while his estranged son, John Merrill, described John as having ‘had a violent problem in the past and he called it tunnel vision,’ where he got into inflamed arguments with other men, the verdict was ultimately “not guilty.”

Who killed Bob Crane? Was it his wife? John Carpenter? The husband or boyfriend of one of his many conquests? We may never know.

If mysteries surrounding celebrities interests you, check out this story about the Black Dahlia.