Karyn Kupcinet

Karyn Kupcinet
Kupcinet in 1962
Born	Roberta Lynn Kupcinet (1941-03-06)March 6, 1941 Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Died	November 28, 1963(1963-11-28) (aged 22) West Hollywood, California, U.S.
Cause of death	Homicide
Resting place	Memorial Park Cemetery and Crematorium
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Pine Manor College
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1959–1963
Parent(s)	Irv Kupcinet Esther Solomon Kupcinet

Karyn Kupcinet (March 6, 1941 – November 28, 1963) was an American stage, film, and television actress. She was the only daughter of Chicago columnist and television personality Irv Kupcinet.

Kupcinet had a brief acting career during the early 1960s. One week after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, her body was found at her West Hollywood, California, home. Her death was officially ruled a homicide. Penn Jones, Jr., one of the earliest JFK assassination conspiracy theorists, speculated that Kupcinet's death was connected to the Dallas assassination. In the 1960s, Irv Kupcinet publicly dismissed the theories linking his daughter to the president's death. In 1992, The Today Show referred briefly to her alleged connection to the assassination, which prompted Kupcinet to describe the television broadcast as "an atrocious outrage" and "calumny". Her homicide remains officially unsolved.

Early life

Kupcinet was born Roberta Lynn Kupcinet in Chicago, Illinois to Irv Kupcinet, a sportswriter for the Chicago Daily Times, and his wife, Esther "Essee" Solomon Kupcinet. She acquired the nickname "Cookie" during her childhood. She made her acting debut at age 13 in the Chicago production of Anniversary Waltz and went on to attend Pine Manor College for a semester, eventually studying at the Actors Studio in New York.^[1]

Career

Kupcinet with Skip Ward in Mrs. G. Goes to College, 1961

Kupcinet was encouraged into acting by her mother,^[1] and was given access to producers through the reputation of her father and his Kup's Column in the Chicago Sun-Times.^[1] In 1961, Jerry Lewis offered Kupcinet a role in the film The Ladies Man, where she appeared in a bit part as one of dozens of young ladies in a Hollywood boardinghouse. In 1962, she appeared in the role of Annie Sullivan in a Laguna Beach summer theater production of The Miracle Worker.^[1] She appeared in guest roles on television including The Donna Reed Show, The Wide Country, G.E. True, and Going My Way. In addition to guest spots, Kupcinet had a regular role in the prime time series Mrs. G. Goes to College (retitled The Gertrude Berg Show during its short run).^[2]

Kupcinet's last onscreen appearance was on Perry Mason in the role of Penny Ames in the episode entitled "The Case of the Capering Camera." The episode aired on CBS on January 16, 1964, nearly two months after her death.^[2] Coincidentally, it was also the last onscreen appearance of long-time Perry Mason actor Ray Collins.

Personal life

By 1961, Kupcinet was living in Hollywood and was getting positive reviews for her acting.^[3] In March 1962, a Los Angeles Times interviewer, assigned to help Kupcinet promote The Gertrude Berg Show, noted her talking exclusively about food and her weight.^[4]

In December 1962, Kupcinet filmed a guest-star appearance on The Wide Country and had her first meeting with one of the series' stars, Andrew Prine,^[5] and began a relationship with him.^[1][5] However, the relationship was problematic, Kupcinet was abusing diet pills along with other prescription drugs,^[1] and she had been arrested for shoplifting.^[6]

The problems in Kupcinet's relationship with Prine were mainly due to Prine's objections to making the relationship exclusive. After Kupcinet underwent an illegal abortion in July 1963, the relationship cooled and Prine began dating other women. In turn, Kupcinet began spying on Prine and his new girlfriend.^[1] It was later determined by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department that Kupcinet had sent threatening and profane messages, consisting of words and letters she had cut out of magazines, to Prine and herself.^[1] When Prine told her by telephone about the messages that had been left on his doorstep and posted on the door of his home, she said she had received them, too.^[1] They met to show the messages to each other. She seemed puzzled.^[1] Soon after her death, investigators for the sheriff's department found her fingerprints on the papers and the Scotch tape.^[1]

The weight problems had started in high school when Kupcinet began taking diet pills. Her weight remained an issue while at Pine Manor College. The pressure to stay thin intensified after Kupcinet arrived in Hollywood, and she soon began abusing diet pills along with other prescription drugs.^[1]

Death

On the last day of her life, Kupcinet had dinner with future Lost in Space cast member Mark Goddard and his wife, Marcia Rogers Goddard, at their house on Coldwater Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills (near Mulholland Drive).^[7] She was due there at 6:30 pm, but arrived an hour late by taxicab. The couple said Kupcinet only toyed with her food during the meal. Marcia Goddard told two officers from the L.A. County Sheriff's Office that during dinner with Kupcinet "... her lips seemed numb. Her voice was funny. She moved her head at odd angles."^[5] The Goddards also noticed that her pupils were constricted. Mark Goddard told authorities that he confronted Kupcinet about her altered state during the meal, and she began to cry, putting her arm around him.^[5] At one point during the meal, Kupcinet told her friends an unsubstantiated story about a baby that had been abandoned on her doorstep earlier that day.^[5] At 8:30 pm, a taxicab arrived to take her home, and she promised to telephone the Goddards soon.^[8]

Kupcinet apparently went straight home after dining with her friends. She was visited by freelance writer Edward Stephen Rubin shortly afterward. The two were then joined by actor Robert Hathaway around 9:30 pm. They told detectives they watched TV, including The Danny Kaye Show, with Kupcinet. They all drank coffee until she fell asleep, sitting next to them on the couch. She awoke and went to her room. The men either turned the TV set off or simply lowered the volume (three days later it was still playing with a low volume), and made sure the door was locked behind them before departing at about 11:15 pm. Hathaway said Rubin and he returned to his place and were later joined by Kupcinet's boyfriend, Andrew Prine, who was also Hathaway's neighbor. The three young men watched television and talked until approximately 3:00 am.^[5]

The Goddards went to Kupcinet's apartment on November 30, after she failed to telephone the couple as promised. Mark Goddard stated that he had a "funny feeling" that something was wrong.^[1] Upon arriving at Kupcinet's apartment, the couple found her nude body lying on the couch. Mark Goddard initially assumed that she had died from a drug overdose.^[1]

Upon searching Kupcinet's apartment, police found prescriptions for Desoxyn, Miltown, Amvicel, and other medications.^[5] Authorities also found a note written by Kupcinet that reflected in some detail her emotions regarding issues in her life (i.e., parents, self-image, problems with boyfriend) and people she admired.^[9]

Coroner Harold Kade concluded that due to a broken hyoid bone in her throat, Kupcinet had been strangled. Her death was officially ruled a homicide.^[10]

Investigators from the L. A. County Sheriff's Office determined that Kupcinet had told Andrew Prine by telephone the same story about the abandoned baby that she had told the Goddards, and it was false.^[5] Neither the sheriff's office nor the Los Angeles Police Department had received a report of a baby found abandoned anywhere in her apartment building on her last day alive or the previous day.^[5]

Regarding the possibility that the murderer raped Kupcinet, her father wrote in his 1988 memoir, "Because semen lives only 18 hours, [investigators for the sheriff's office] could not determine whether she had been sexually assaulted."^[11]

Theories

David Lange

In Irv Kupcinet's memoir, he said he and his wife Essee (Karyn's mother) believed that an unemployed young man named David Lange warranted further investigation by the L. A. County Sheriff's Office.^[12] He lived in the apartment directly below Karyn's.^[13] Irving and Essee "pressed" sheriff's investigators to pursue Lange further, "but their response was that they had tried with no success because Lange by this time had moved into the home of his sister, and she had retained attorneys who refused to let him answer any questions."^[14]

Lover's quarrel

During the course of their investigation, the county sheriff's office considered Andrew Prine as one of their chief suspects, though their interest in him was not reported by newspapers. When questioned by investigators at the office, Prine said he had talked with Kupcinet twice by phone on Wednesday, the day before her murder, claiming he was trying to patch up a lover's quarrel between them.

Investigators considered it possible that Prine learned the anonymous threatening messages that Kupcinet and he had received were actually sent by Kupcinet, and his discovery plus their unresolved argument motivated him to confront her angrily. In addition, both Edward Rubin and Robert Hathaway, the two men who had possibly been the last to see her alive, were friends of Prine. They were also considered suspects and questioned occasionally throughout the 1960s, according to documents at the county sheriff's office that were unearthed in the 1990s,^[5] but newspapers dropped the Kupcinet story after December 1963.^{[1][5][15][16]}

Questionable connection to JFK assassination

Kupcinet's death was first mentioned in connection with the assassination of JFK in 1967 by researcher Penn Jones, Jr., in the self-published book Forgive My Grief II.^[17] Jones cited an AP wire service story about an unidentified woman who placed a phone call on November 22, 1963, from the vicinity of Oxnard, California, approximately 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles, and Jones asserted the woman was Karyn Kupcinet. The woman, who dialed her local operator approximately 20 minutes before the shooting in Dallas, stated that the president of the United States was going to be shot without providing any details about where it would happen or who was involved, even though she continuously talked at the operator for 15 minutes.^[18] Jones alleged that Kupcinet was attempting to warn someone of the impending assassination after she had been given advance notice of it by her father Irv, who allegedly had learned of it from Jack Ruby.^[9]

Jones speculated that her death was a result of a mob hit to silence her and to send a message to Irv Kupcinet to remain silent about his knowledge of the assassination.^[19] Jones claimed that Ruby and Irving Kupcinet had met or known each other as young men who were roughly the same age in Chicago. Ruby's sister Eva Rubenstein Grant said in 1977 (according to a 2013 article in The Forward)^[20] that she and all her siblings had had passing acquaintances on Chicago sidewalks with many people, both Jewish and Italian-American, "but that doesn't mean Jack was connected with them."^[20]

Irv Kupcinet denied that he or his daughter had prior knowledge of the assassination. This was supported by his daughter's friends, actor Earl Holliman, Holliman's then-girlfriend, and Karyn's boyfriend Andrew Prine, all of whom traveled from Los Angeles to Palm Springs with Karyn Kupcinet on November 22 and remained there during and after the network television broadcasts of Ruby shooting Oswald on November 24. Kupcinet reportedly seemed shocked by and upset about round-the-clock news coverage of the shootings of JFK, Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit and Oswald, and she did not reveal foreknowledge of any of them.^[9]

In 2013, the Ventura County Star commemorated the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination by noting that the Associated Press indeed had circulated a short article about the Oxnard, California woman who had dialed her local telephone operator.^[18] Newspapers published the report immediately after the assassination and before Jack Ruby shot Oswald.^[18] According to the 2013 Ventura County Star piece, which quotes from an FBI report, two telephone operators listened to the unidentified woman talking for approximately 15 minutes and they believed, based on her voice, that she was middle-aged.^[18] Because she provided no rational explanation of why anyone would want to kill the president, and because she rambled without identifying a possible assailant or group who could be involved or which Dallas location posed a danger to the president, the telephone operators believed she was "quite disturbed."^[18] The woman's voice, which was a whisper to begin with, eventually became inaudible. That forced the operators, who were busy answering other incoming phone calls, to disconnect the "quite disturbed" female caller without the opportunity to trace the phone number she was using.^[18] Regarding the possible geographic location of the woman, the Ventura County Star reported:

While the origin of the call wasn't clear, the switchboard served about 12,000 lines in the Oxnard area. News reports at the time said that included Camarillo, Oxnard and surrounding communities. Of those, 60 percent were party lines, and the telephone company was unable to identify the caller or the call's origin.^[18]

JFK was shot approximately five minutes after the operators disconnected the call.^[18] Penn Jones, Jr. was deceased when the Ventura County Star revealed all the pertinent facts from the FBI report of the November 22, 1963 incident in the vicinity of Oxnard, California, and why he identified the woman as Karyn Kupcinet, who lived in West Hollywood, cannot be determined.

Accidental death

Crime writer James Ellroy visited the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office in the 1990s to research Kupcinet's death. In his book Crime Wave, Ellroy states that sheriffs found a book, lying on a table in her apartment, that recommended naked dancing to free one's inhibitions.^[5] It had been placed on the table as if someone had removed it from a shelf and bookmarked the pages that explained the dancing.^[5] Ellroy has theorized that she followed the advice in the book, started dancing, and fell, clipping her hyoid bone on a chair.^[5] He also theorized that Kupcinet may have accidentally or intentionally overdosed on pills.^[1]

Ellroy also claimed that the coroner who performed Kupcinet's autopsy, Dr. Harold Kade, who had been called from his bed at approximately 2:00 a.m. to respond to the death, was a "juicehead" (alcoholic).^[5] Ellroy added that Kade may have botched the autopsy in such a way that he could have been responsible for fracturing her hyoid bone instead of an intruder in her home doing it.^[5]

Kupcinet's family has disputed Ellroy's theories. For many years before the deaths of her mother in 2001 and her father in 2003, both of them told people she had been murdered.^[10] No one has ever been charged with Kupcinet's murder and it is now considered a cold case by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office.

Media attention

During the production and subsequent release of Oliver Stone's film JFK, Irv Kupcinet attacked the movie and the conspiracy theories surrounding it.^[9] When the film's box office success led to a wave of media attention about the JFK conspiracy, NBC's Today Show broadcast a list of mysterious deaths, including that of Karyn Kupcinet. Irv Kupcinet responded to the Today broadcast in his column in the Chicago Sun-Times of February 9, 1992:

The NBC Today Show on Friday, [February 7] carried a list of people who died violently in 1963 shortly after the death of President John F. Kennedy and may have had some link to the assassination. The first name on the list was Karyn Kupcinet, my daughter. That is an atrocious outrage. She did die violently in a Hollywood murder case still unsolved. That same list was published in a book years ago with no justification or verification. The book left the impression that some on the list may have been killed to silence them because of knowledge of the assassination. Nothing could be further from the truth in my daughter's case. The list apparently has developed a life of its own and for Today to repeat the calumny is reprehensible. Karyn no longer can suffer pain by such an inexcusable mention, but her parents and her brother Jerry can.^[9]

On September 30, 1999, an episode of E! True Hollywood Story, entitled "Death of a Dream: Karyn Kupcinet", detailed Kupcinet's life and theories regarding her death.^[21]

Legacy

Irv and Essee Kupcinet established a playhouse at Shimer College in her honor.^[22]

In 1971, Irv Kupcinet and his wife also founded the Karyn Kupcinet International School for Science, a summer research internships program at the Weizmann Institute of Science.^[23]

In 2007, Kupcinet's niece, actress Kari Kupcinet-Kriser, and Washburn University professor Paul Fecteau, began work on a book about Kupcinet's unsolved murder.^[24]

Filmography

References

Further reading

• Austin, John. Hollywood's Unsolved Mysteries. Shapolsky Publishers. 1990. ISBN 0-944007-49-X.
• Kupcinet, Irv and Paul Neimark. Kup: A Man, An Era, A City. Bonus Books. 1988. ISBN 978-0-933893-70-2.

External links

• Karyn Kupcinet at the Internet Movie Database
• Karyn Kupcinet at Find a Grave