Buddy Moorehouse was a third-year student at the University of Michigan in 1981 when his mother’s cousin, a former actress, was shot dead in Los Angeles.
At the time, he worked on the Michigan Daily student newspaper’s sports team along with colleagues such as Detroit sports columnists Bob Wojnowski and the late Drew Sharp.
Crime, not his rhythm. When she used a phone in the Daily’s workplace to call the Los Angeles Times, she was looking to get more information about Jenny Maxwell’s violent death.
“My mom called me crying when she found out Jenny had been murdered. We didn’t know,” says the 1982 college student, who grew up in Ypsilanti and now lives in Livingston County.
“There was a great rumor in our circle of relatives immediately that it had something to do with the crowd. I said, ‘Let me see what I can locate. ‘”
Someone from the Times writes enough to read her a brief account of the death of Jennifer Roeder, 39, and her husband, Tip, 60, in “an obvious attempted robbery as she enters the lobby of her apartment near the Beverly Hills-Los Angeles border. “
What the Times didn’t reveal is that Jennifer Roeder is best known as Jenny Maxwell, a rising star in 1960s Hollywood who was given some screen immortality for her role in Elvis Presley’s 1961 film “Blue Hawaii. “
Nearly 40 years later, motivated by his mother’s poor health, Moorehouse set out to find out what had happened to his relative and learned that the cops who investigated Jenny’s death did not believe it was the result of a failed robbery. of the detectives involved told her that they had formed a detailed theory of why she had been killed, a location that had remained on a police record for decades.
Moorehouse was able to share his discovery with his mother about a week before his death in February 2019 at the age of 84. He believes that possibly, despite everything, he felt somewhat closed after wasting the young cousin he loved.
She has now written an e-book about her investigation, “Murder of an Elvis Girl: Solving Jenny Maxwell’s Case. “It is a polar phenomenon, but it covers more territory than its name suggests.
Mixing truth and fiction, it is the story of a talented young woman, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, who was propelled to the hollywood spotlight at the age of 16 and who, after developing too early, suffered a series of private setbacks. At the age of twenty-something, he left the exhibition business to find a sense of peace that remained elusive in his adult life.
Moorehouse, former editor of Livingston County Daily Press
He is also a more productive documentarian known as “Black and Blue: The Story of Gerald Ford, Willis Ward, and the 1934 Michigan-Georgia Tech football game” of 2012, which explored how a racist request from a Southern school cemented the continued friendship between an American president and Wayne County succession judge.
Moorehouse admits he made a eebook about genuine crimes outside his zone of convenience. He used Amazon’s Kindle Direct to publish “Murder of elvis ‘Daughter Murder” himself, and followed fellow director Brian Kruger’s suggestion to write the eebook in the form of a novel based on facts of interviews and archive research.
As the page of the moment states, “some characters, conditions and conversations have been romanticized. “The dramatic narrative, and the discussion he invented, infrequently reads like the script of a lifelong film because it recreates a 1960s film and television industry that was glamorous and starry, but treated the stars as disposable products.
According to Moorehouse, her studies of Jenny began with conversations with her mother, Vera Cunningham, a theatre instructor and figurehead at the Howell Community Theatre. Growing up, she adored her younger cousin, but lost contact with her as an adult.
“My mom and Jenny were very when they were little girls.
During those trips, Moorehouse’s mother helped spark Jenny’s interest in making plays that they would perform in combination for the children of the community.
Moorehouse then searched the online site journaux. com any articles that mentioned Jenny. He soon began to realize that she had completed more in her career than once betting with Elvis.
After moving from New York to Los Angeles to audition for director Vincent Minnelli for a role in a 1958 Frank Sinatra film, “Some Came Running,” which she didn’t have, Jenny began looking for roles in successful TV shows, adding “Father Knows Best,” “Bonanza,” “Dr. Kildare”, and “Route 66. “One of her memorable portions in an episode of “The Twilight Zone” as the nanny of a child talking on the phone with her deceased grandmother.
Her functionality in “Blue Hawaii” attracted a lot of attention and an Elvis ad photo with her on her shoulders circulated widely. Even before this exhibition, Jenny had been named one of the 1960 Deb Stars, which earned her an appearance on “The Bob Hope Buick Hour” and an advent in the air through Joan Crawford.
After “Blue Hawaii,” Jenny had more professional moments, co-starring jimmy with Jimmy Stewart and Sandra Dee on “Take Her, She’s Mine” in 1963. But after rushing into marriage and motherhood as a teenager, she sank into a cycle of parties, alcohol and drugs that wreaked havoc, according to the book. After wasting custody of his young son, he left the game in the mid-1960s to rebuild his relationship with him.
In 1970, Jenny married her husband, Tip Roeder, a divorce lawyer in Los Angeles with an abrasive reputation and alleged ties to organized crime. At the wedding, her bridesmaid, “Mod Squad” star Peggy Lipton (another of her smart friends, Sharon Tate, who killed in 1969 through Manson’s family circle and played Margot Robbie in the 2019 film “Once Upon a TimeArray. ” Hollywood”).
On June 10, 1981, they were in the building lobby where she lived when an unidentified assailant shot Jenny twice in the head and shot Tip in the stomach. Jenny died at the scene. Tip crawled out of the building and died a short time later near Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
Moorehouse’s e-book covers the resulting investigation, the main points he learned from Police sources in Los Angeles. Calling from Michigan, he was able to succeed in the original officer at the scene, who told him he was only on the case for a day and directed him to the department’s main crime office.
He then spoke with someone from that branch who, intrigued by Moorehouse’s search, reviewed the old files that had not yet been digitized and remembered with the names of two detectives who treating the case.
One of them had died. Moorehouse located the other detective, Mike Thies, who spoke to him on the phone in February 2019 and shared the unhappy and frightening main points of what he and his wife concluded as intentional murder.
In the end, Moorehouse ended with an account of Jenny’s life, right about her death. In May 2019, he traveled to Los Angeles to do several long interviews, adding one with Thies. They met in a café near the scene. homicide and walked together to the site.
On that same trip, he knocked on the door of Jenny’s son, Brian Rapp, and met him for the first time. Moorehouse says Rapp had been close to Jenny in the years leading up to her death. Rapp had no idea he had a relative. in Michigan than about his age. Moorehouse came here with a gift talking about his circle of family ties.
“I had an image of him and his grandfather that I had of my uncle, and I gave him this image. And he just thought it was the coolest thing out there.
The two had a long verbal exchange and saw a component of “Blue Hawaii” in combination on the Rapp DVR. A poster of the same film displayed on Rapp’s wall.
More: “Elvis: That’s Right”: The King brings “Heartbreak Hotel” to the screen in his re-editing
Moorehouse has never met Jenny, but feels that he has come to know her through her studies and conversations with her son and others close to her. “I don’t feel like she’s just someone I wrote an eBook about. She’s my mother’s cousin, whom I adored and loved. It’s that woman I have a narrow circle of kinship with,” she says.
Towards the beginning of the book, he traced these ties through several generations: his grandfather, Elling Jacobson, who came to the United States from Norway in the 1920s, brother of Jenny’s father, Johnny Maxwell.
Moorehouse announced his e-book on social media and listened to members of the extensive network who are still fascinated with Elvis Presley: “There are many Elvis enthusiasts who love Jenny,” she says.
Two months ago, when “Murder of an Elvis Girl” reached number 62 on Amazon’s biographies list (two include a biography of MSNBC host Racheld Maddow), he joked on Facebook, saying, “I’m in the top spot with Joan Rivers and Willie. Nelson, and now I’m going for Rachel Maddow. “
Given the popularity of genuine crime on television screens like “Dateline NBC” and on platforms like Netflix, it’s not unexpected to hear Moorehouse say he was contacted through others interested in the project in Los Angeles.
Whether or not it’s suitable for a small or large screen, the eBook will keep the story of Jenny Maxwell, a woman who will be young and colorful in “Blue Hawaii” like Elvis’ daughter.
Buddy Moorehouse will talk about the “Murder of an Elvis Girl” on a virtual occasion at 6:30 p. m. Tuesday presented through the Howell Carnegie District Library. Registration in the library is mandatory and will end one hour before the program.
Contact Julie Hinds, pop review of Detroit Free Press at jhinds@freepress. com.