Masked Marvel Murder Mystery

By Evan J. Albright

The maroon, British-made sports car weaved erratically on Washington Boulevard in Venice, Calif. one beautiful Sunday morning in September 1943. Suddenly the tiny car jumped a curb and rolled to a stop in a cabbage field. A man wearing only a pair of white swimming trunks, his body stained with blood, emerged. He took only a half dozen uncertain steps then collapsed. The attendant of a nearby gas station saw the accident and ran to help. When he reached the car, the fallen man looked up and said, "Please help me, please help me." That was all he managed to get out before his head lolled to the side.

The Masked Marvel was dead.

Twenty-eight years before, he had been born 3,000 miles away in the Cape Cod town of Barnstable. His parents named him after his father, Gaspar G. Bacon. The Bacons were one of the most prominent Brahmin families in all of Massachusetts. Gaspar Bacon the senior was a member of the board of Harvard University, and would eventually be elected lieutenant governor of the state. His father had been a close associate of J.P. Morgan, and later served as Secretary of State under Theodore Roosevelt and Ambassador to France under William Howard Taft.

Young Gaspar Jr. had all the privileges that Yankee wealth afforded. When he was graduated from Harvard, he could have done anything or, if he so chose, nothing. During his summers at the family estate in the tiny Cape Cod village of Woods Hole, he had become enamored of the stage. When he was 16, he got his first part with the University Players in West Falmouth. Soon he was in productions or on the crew of plays that starred a couple of talented up-and-comers named James Stewart and Henry Fonda.

After college, he changed his name to David Bacon, and went to New York to hone his craft. He appeared in several small productions before he was "discovered" by Howard Hughes. The millionaire signed Bacon to a three-year contract and brought him out to Hollywood. Hughes liked Bacon’s good looks and 6-foot height, and wanted the young man to play Billy the Kid in a movie he was producing called "The Outlaw." After a screen test, however, it became clear that a pampered Brahmin from New England was completely inappropriate to play the merciless William Bonnie, even though it was a small part compared to the role given to Jane Russell’s immense cleavage. Bacon’s movie career was temporarily put on hold.

Without acting jobs, Bacon found time to marry a Austrian cabaret singer, Greta Keller. They moved into a mansion in Santa Monica which had nine showers and a swimming pool on the second floor. Eventually the young man did get a few parts. He played the good-looking college kid in "Ten Gentlemen from West Point," "Crash Dive," and "Girls, Inc." Only a few months before his death he received a juicy part in "Someone to Remember," in which he played yet another college boy, but one who was a cad. Just as "Someone to Remember" hit theaters, Bacon completed an even bigger role, one of the leads in the Republic serial, "The Masked Marvel." While filming one of the serial’s big fight scenes, every actor but Bacon was seriously injured. "I’ll probably get hurt going home in the car," he had joked.

Two weeks later, after the serial had wrapped, Bacon told his wife that he was going out for a swim. She never saw him alive again.

The coroner determined that Bacon had been stabbed in the back with a stiletto. The blade had pierced his lung, and he had bled to death. His body showed no signs of a struggle, indicating that he had known the person who had killed him.

Hollywood was abuzz with what they called the "Masked Marvel Murder Mystery." Bacon had been seen driving around with another man just before the murder. Authorities discovered that Bacon had recently rented a small house in the Hollywood Hills "for a friend of his." The friend, a man, had disappeared, and newspapers hinted that their relationship had been intimate.

The murderer was never caught, and the case was never solved. In a town where scandal is a daily event, the public soon lost interest in the Masked Marvel Murder.

Bacon’s wife, Greta Keller, returned to Europe after the war. She came back to the United States in the 1950s and became a popular cabaret singer in the mold of Marlene Dietrich and Lili Palmer. She toured the world, winning the acclaim that her dead husband had once sought. A few years before her death, her voice appeared in the Oscar-winning movie, Cabaret, for which she sang the song, "Married."

Want to learn more about The Masked Marvel? You'll find a great site about the serial here. For additional details on David Bacon's murder, visit writer Tom Christopher's Web site here.

© 1998 Mystery Lane Press

rev. 12/25/02