Charlotte Shelby

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Charlotte Shelby

Charlotte Shelby (Lily Pearl Miles Reilly) (19 December 1877 - 13 March 1957) was a popular Broadway actress and is noted as a suspect in the never-solved murder of Hollywood director William Desmond Taylor.

Shelby was the mother of actresses Mary Miles Minter and Margaret Shelby. She was reportedly domineering and manipulative in the management of daughters' Broadway and film careers. She was widely mentioned as a suspect in the murder of William Desmond Taylor, who was romantically involved with her daughter Mary Miles Minter (born Juliet Reilly). In 1967 film director King Vidor, while researching for a possible movie about the murder, concluded that Shelby might have killed Taylor in a jealous rage over her daughter's attraction to him. The bullet that killed Taylor was reportedly an older .38 caliber type which (according to at least one expert) was quite unusual and matched an unfired bullet from a revolver owned by Shelby and which she much later threw into a bayou in Louisiana.

Shelby evenually fled to Europe to escape the adverse publicity and attention. Over a decade later, L. A. district attorney Buron Fitts concluded there wasn't any evidence for an indictment of Shelby and recommended that the remaining evidence and case files be retained on a permanent basis (all of these materials subsequently disappered). No person was ever convicted of the crime. In 1938 her daughter Margaret Shelby publicly accused Charlotte of murdering Taylor. Margaret died of chronic alcoholism a year later.

The murder had effectively ended the acting careers of both her daughters. Rumors and bad press followed all three for for the rest of their lives. In 1937 both daughters successfully sued Charlotte for mismanagement of their finances during their acting careers and won a substantial settlement. Mary Minter cut all ties with her mother, turned her back on Hollywood and lived an obscure but relatively comfortable life due to having invested wisely in Los Angeles area real-estate, until her death in 1984.

Charlotte Shelby died in Santa Monica, CA in 1957. She was originally buried in a private and locked section at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, but later Mary Miles Minter had both her mother's remains (along with those of her sister Margaret) cremated and scattered.

In 1999 it was reported that actress Margaret Gibson had made a deathbed confession to Taylor's murder in 1964.