Karyn Kupcinet
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Karyn "Cookie" Kupcinet (March 6, 1941 – November 28, 1963) was a young actress who was murdered in a case that remains unsolved. It is often speculated that her death was connected to the JFK assassination,thought there is no proof of this connection.
Kupcinet was the daughter of Chicago Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet. Her dad was a former syndicated columnist and had his own television show in Chicago, Illinois. Her mother, Esther Solomon Kupcinet, was from a wealthy Near North Side, Chicago family.
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[edit] Film & TV Actress
Karyn starred in a handful of minor roles, including a small part in the 1961 Jerry Lewis film The Ladies Man. She made her acting debut in 1954 in the Chicago production of Anniversary Waltz. She played the role of Anne Sullivan in a Laguna Beach, California Summer Theater production of The Miracle Worker. She played numerous roles on television. Some of the programs include The Red Skelton Show, The U.S. Steel Hour, Hawaiian Eye, Surfside Six, and the Donna Reed TV Show.
[edit] Death
She was last seen alive on the night of Wednesday, November 27, the day before Thanksgiving. Her nude body was found on Saturday November 30 on her couch in her West Hollywood apartment by Lost In Space actor Mark Goddard and his wife, Marcia, 25. Her address was 1227 1/2 North Sweetzer Avenue. Goddard was then playing a detective in The Detective, a television series with actor Robert Taylor. The couple visited Kupcinet's apartment because she promised to call them but had not. Earlier, she had dinner with the Goddards at their residence. She was due there at 6:30 p.m., but arrived an hour late. Goddard said Karyn only toyed with her food during their meal.
The coroner concluded that she had been dead about three days. Due to a broken hyoid bone in her throat, the cause of death was officially listed as strangulation. Writer James Ellroy suggests that Kupcinet committed suicide with an overdose of pills, but his conclusion is rejected by her family.
Police questioned several of Kupcinet's friends, her neighbor David Lange, and her boyfriend, actor Andrew Prine, multiple times but no charges were ever filed. Others who were queried included free lance writer Edward Stephen Rubin, 22, (aka John Edward Manson), an unemployed actor, William Mamches, 23, and actor Robert F. Hathaway, 24. The three men shared one of two houses located at 2211 Stanley Hills Drive, Los Angeles, California. Prine resided in the other house. Rubin, Mamches, and Hathaway knew Kupcinet through their friendship with Prine. Hathaway and Rubin were the last persons known to have seen the young actress alive before she was strangled.
Miss Kupcinet apparently went straight home after dining with the Goddards. She was visited by Rubin shortly afterward and they were joined by Hathaway around 9:30 p.m. They told detectives they left her apartment about 11:15, Wednesday, after watching tv and drinking coffee until she tired and went to bed. The men turned the tv set off and made sure the door was locked behind them, before departing. Hathaway said he and Rubin returned to his place and were later joined by Prine. They watched television until early in the morning.
Kupcinet and Prine had split up a short time before the murder. Mamches said he had not seen Karyn in three weeks. He described her as very upset and frantic about her breakup with Prine. Prine was a co-star of the NBC series Wide Country. He played the younger brother of actor Earl Holliman. The latter played a rodeo champion in the television series. Prine told authorities he last spoke with Karyn on the Sunday before she was murdered. He phoned her on Wednesday around 6:30 but the two did not agree to meet again in the future. A misunderstanding led to the couple agreeing not to see one another as often. Prine was divorced from actress Sharon Farrell. He said he went alone to a movie after their conversation. He called Karyn again about midnight in another attempt to resolve their differences.
Irv Kupcinet called his daughter around 7 p.m. He said she seemed happy and had no problems. After her murder the columnist arrived in Los Angeles accompanied by his brother, Joseph, and his attorney, Arthur Morse. He paid a brief visit to Karyn's apartment on Sunday afternoon following her death. He told police he was going to carry her body and belongings back to Chicago, where she was to be buried. He commented that she was doing well in her acting career and had just completed an episode of the Perry Mason tv series. The columnist said his daughter's affair with Prine was nothing serious.
[edit] Alleged link to the JFK assassination
The connection to the JFK assassination was first made by author Penn Jones, Jr. An Associated Press story reported that an operator overheard a female caller from the area of Oxnard, California say "The President is going to be killed" about 20 minutes before the assassination. Jones, in his book Forgive My Grief II, moved the call 50 miles south to Los Angeles and the date of Kupcinet's death to November 24 and claimed that Kupcinet was the caller. Other authors, while often correcting Jones' errors, have also claimed Kupcinet's death was related to the JFK assassination, but left unexplained is why she would call from Oxnard and how she had advance knowledge of the assassination.
After her name appeared on a 1992 Today Show broadcast on a list of "mysterious deaths" connected to the JFK assassination, her father wrote in his February 9 column that linking her to JFK’s killing was "an atrocious outrage...Karyn no longer can suffer pain by such an inexcusable mention, but her parents and her brother Jerry can."
[edit] Reference
- Los Angeles Times, Three Actors Quizzed in Strangling of Actress, December 2, 1963, Page 2.
[edit] Further reading
John Austin, Hollywood's Unsolved Mysteries. New York: Ace, 1970.
