Henry Peavey
Encyclopedia
African American
African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have at least partial ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa and are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States...
cook and valet of Hollywood silent film
Silent film
A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, pantomime and title cards...
director William Desmond Taylor
William Desmond Taylor
William Desmond Taylor was an Irish-born American actor, successful film director of silent movies and a popular figure in the growing Hollywood film colony of the 1910s and early 1920s...
for six months. His prior history before working for Taylor included employment by Mrs. Christy Cabanne. A day or two before Taylor's murder, Peavey had been arrested for "social vagrancy" and charged with being "lewd and dissolute". On the day following Taylor's murder on February 1, 1922, Taylor was scheduled to appear in court on Peavey's behalf.
It was Peavey who discovered Taylor's body at 7:30 on the morning of February 2, 1922. He was repeatedly questioned by police and reporters for possible leads, but was of little help. Some Hearst reporters suspected that Peavey was withholding information, so they kidnapped him a few weeks after the crime and attempted to scare him into a confession.
In a 1930 interview, Peavey expressed the (widely unsupported) opinion that Mabel Normand
Mabel Normand
Mabel Normand was an American silent film comedienne and actress. She was a popular star of Mack Sennett's Keystone Studios and is noted as one of the film industry's first female screenwriters, producers and directors...
had been the person who killed Taylor.
