[UA] A reading suggestion, and two totally unrelated questions

[daniel r. lackey]

Stacy Stroud wrote:

> >  Sadly, the book also keeps alive the myth that Fatty Arbuckle
> >killed Virginia Rappe, but other than that it's top-notch.
>
> I've read about this myself recently, in a couple of sources, but usually
> it's presented as a maybe-he-did-and-maybe-he-didn't sort of thing.
> (Granted, usually the authors are kind of pushing the juicier maybe-he-did
> end.)  Are there elements of the story, perhaps usually left out or glossed
> over in the sensationalized accounts, that make it very likely that
> Arbuckle was innocent?

It came out in the final trial, I believe, that Rappe had recieved an abortion a
day or two before the day of her death; abortions were, if I recall correctly,
illegal at the time and thus not particularly safe to undergo.  It has been
suggested that complications from the procedure would have been in line with her
death.

There are a couple of other things, including the fact that Rappe's madam (Rappe
was moonlighting as a prostitute) had changed her story about the implement
Arbuckle used to do the deed (on several occasions she had described it as being a
champagne bottle; on others, a Coke bottle).

If you have cable, E! has a quite entertaining weekly show called "Mysteries and
Scandals" which did an excellent summary of the Arbuckle case.  (It also, in an
episode on Jayne Mansfield, debunks the myth that she was decapitated in the car
crash that killed her, and thus, Anton LeVey's story that he accidentally caused
her death by cutting the head off of a picture of her.)

--
daniel r. lackey
drlackey at mindless.com
http://home.earthlink.net/~jmdreyfuss/
--
"Be regular and orderly in your life,
that you may be violent and original in your work."
                                    -- Clive Barker