The Heideman Legacy
March 8, 2012
When I wrote about Leonard Heideman more than two years ago, the response was anti-climactic. This was the story of an important television producer with a deadly secret in his past, and a generation of repercussions from that secret, culminating in Heideman’s suicide. I’d spent three years, off and on, gathering data, watching Heideman-scripted TV episodes, and trying to convince reluctant friends and family members to share their memories of this talented but disturbed individual. Apart from the initial news accounts of Dolores Heideman’s death, almost none of what I wrote had been reported before. When I began, and knew little about Leonard Heideman except that he’d killed his wife and written for Murder, She Wrote, I thought about writing up the story as an acerbic only-in-Hollywood anecdote. Once I dug in, I realized that approach would have been in horribly bad taste, and I became obsessed with getting all the facts right and being fair to all the parties in this tragic tale.
Everyone who read the piece seemed to like it, but I guess I expected more. Comments from Hollywood veterans who knew or worked with Heideman (or, more likely, “Laurence Heath,” as he was later known). Some interest from the true crime community, perhaps, or from one of those semi-scuzzy cable magazine shows. Or, worse, angry reactions from some of the Heideman or Heath family members who declined to be interviewed and opposed my reporting of the story. In fact, apart from a one-sentence response from one of the sources I did quote in the piece, the only communication I received from the Heideman/Heath family was a recent e-mail from a distant relative and family historian, who confirmed several of the educated guesses that I couldn’t verify during my research. But when I pressed for more details, the family member never responded.
So for the most part, “Lenny the Knife” – as my research associate and I morbidly took to calling him – remained confined to this little corner of the internet. Maybe the Los Angeles Times editor who turned down my Murder, He Wrote pitch as “old news” was right.
All of this comes to mind because I noticed an obituary in Thursday’s Los Angeles Times for one of the minor figures in the Heideman saga. Maxwell Keith, one of the three-man team of high-powered lawyers who succeeded in clearing Heideman, the violent killer of his wife, with an insanity plea, died this week in Templeton, California, at the age of 87. Keith’s claim to fame was his doomed defense of two Manson acolytes, Leslie Van Houten and Tex Watson. The Times obit also mentions another famous Los Angeles murder case, that of Dr. R. Bernard Finch – a dentist who conspired with a pretty young mistress to kill his wife – in which Keith and his then partner, Grant Cooper, were the attorneys of record. The jury put Finch away for twelve years. Even though it was, locally, a high-profile case (and it would’ve broken Keith’s 0 for 3 record), I guess I’m not surprised that the Times didn’t mention Cooper and Keith’s successful defense of Heideman.
Keith is not quoted in my Heideman history for the simple reason that I couldn’t find him. Even though an odds-defying percentage of them were still alive when I was researching Heideman, I had terrible luck with the police and the lawyers who worked his case. Glen Kailey, one of the uniformed officers who arrested Heideman on the night of the killing was still living, but seemed to have fallen off the planet (or more likely into an elder care facility that defied public records searches). Both of the primary detectives on the case were alive, too, but when I tracked down O. D. de Ryk, the senior investigator, he told me that his former partner suffered from advanced dementia. As I questioned de Ryk, I sensed that he, too, suffered from memory loss; the few details he could remember about the Heideman matter were questionable. (Kailey and de Ryk both died in 2010.)
As for the attorneys, Grant Cooper was long dead. Godfrey Isaac – in his eighties but still a practicing lawyer at the time – declined to be interviewed minutes after receiving my request, and ignored my subsequent e-mails. (Although in his single curt reply, Isaac did mention a detail that allowed me to identify him amid the pseudonymous figures in Heideman’s memoir.)
As for Maxwell Keith, one reason I failed to track him down is that he was no longer licensed to practice law. The Times obit politely reports that Keith retired in 1995, but the State Bar of California’s website tells a different story. In December 1996, Keith resigned “with charges pending”; ten years before that, he had been disciplined by the Bar on another matter. The Bar association handily keeps track of its active members, but had no contact information for Keith; and all the phone numbers I found and tried led to dead ends. That was what reporting the Heideman story was like: every tangent seemed to lead down another rabbit hole of secrets and lies.
Murder, He Wrote
December 7, 2009
Today, over on the main Classic TV History website, I have published a feature story entitled Murder, He Wrote. If the names mentioned therein are unfamiliar, the story may read like an outline of a fictional crime show, an episode of Dragnet or Cold Case or, yes, even Murder, She Wrote. But the people in this story are real, and the events that it records actually happened.
More than three years have passed between the day when I first heard a rumor about the TV writer who killed his wife back in the sixties. I did not know the man’s name, or any other information about him, apart from a few details of the crime (some of which turned out to be inaccurate). But immediately I realized this story fell so squarely into my area of study that I had to report it. Many times during those three years, I thought I knew the whole story. And each time, just as I was about to close the file, I learned some new fact that added another tragic, touching, or bizarre layer to it. Finally, it’s time to turn the tale of Leonard Heideman (or, as he came to be better known, Laurence Heath) over to my readers.
True crime is a new area of reporting for me, and a sobering one. The violent act committed by Leonard Heideman in the early morning hours of February 23, 1963, continues to reverberate in the lives of his family and friends nearly fifty years later. Some of those family members and friends were courageous enough to discuss this difficult subject with me. I hope that I have done justice to them and to all the other parties involved in this story.
As always, I welcome readers to offer their reactions in the comments area below.
In Memoriam: Bernard L. Kowalski (1929-2007)
December 21, 2007
Bernard L. Kowalski died on October 26. He was one of the most creative director-producers of the ’60s, whose passing rated more attention in the press than this sole, belated Variety obit. I guess his primary claim to fame is having directed the Mission: Impossible pilot, and later several of the good, early Columbo segments.
Mission was the culmination of a brief, productive collaboration with its creator, Bruce Geller, with also included some good episodes of The Dick Powell Show and one amazing, postmodern, ahead-of-its-time season of Rawhide. (Too ahead of its time: they got fired.) Sam Peckinpah made their partnership a trio for a time, but he was too volatile for it to last.
The year that Bernie launched Mission: Impossible, he directed or produced a total of five successful series pilots – for Mission, The Monroes, The Guns of Will Sonnett, The Rat Patrol (Kowalski produced, Tom Gries directed), and NYPD. I can’t imagine that’s not a record. The NYPD pilot would never be broadcast; Kowalski’s show featured Robert Hooks, Frank Converse, and Robert Viharo as a multiracial team of young detectives. When the show went to series a year later, Viharo was gone, replaced by Jack Warden as an older police captain.
Bernie had two flirtations with feature careers – early on, as a director of low-budget sci-fi and action films (Attack of the Giant Leeches) for Gene and Roger Corman, and for a while in the late ’60s and early ’70s after his TV career had peaked with that string of hit pilots. Those movies (Krakatoa – East of Java, Macho Callahan, SSSSS) were eclectic but not very good, and Bernie slid back into episodic TV. His credits include long stints on a raft of classics or, at least, popular hits: The Rebel, The Untouchables, Perry Mason, Banacek, Columbo, Baretta, Knight Rider, Airwolf, Jake and the Fatman. The conclusions one draws from that list, I guess, are that Bernie had a skill for handling masculine action material, and that he was a good man to call in if you had a temperamental star who liked to throw his weight around. Bernie was an easygoing guy, but he didn’t take any crap from anybody.
I met Bernie in January 2006, and we spent more than three hours at his Northridge home, just covering the pre-Krakatoa years (plus a little bit of Columbo). His memories were vivid, funny, and forthright (he admitted, for instance, that the visual style of Mission: Impossible was cribbed straight from The Ipcress File). Plus, it’s always a bonus to talk to someone in the house where they’ve lived for many decades. At one point Bernie gestured toward the front lawn as he was telling me a story about a fistfight that erupted between Sam Peckinpah and the writer James Lee Barrett, and I realized I was sitting in the same den where Peckinpah and Lee Marvin and many others had caroused with Bernie over the years.
Bernie and his wife Helen were very warm and hospitable that afternoon, and I wish I’d stayed in touch; I still don’t even know how Bernie died (he seemed in pretty good health two years ago). It’s a common occurrence for an historian, but it still makes me sad.