Initially convicted of second-degree murder of actor Tommy Hood, James Silva received a sentence of five years to life in prison. Yet his violent history did not end with Tommy Hood’s death. While incarcerated at San Quentin, Silva committed another shocking crime that once again thrust his name into California headlines. In 1953, he confessed to stabbing fellow inmate Kenneth King with a homemade knife after allegedly brooding over a perceived insult for weeks. Because California law at the time mandated the death penalty in certain repeat violent felony cases, Silva was condemned to die in the gas chamber.

Beyond the spotlight of Hollywood’s stars and studio elites, there was a different world filled with struggling actors, bit players, chorus performers, and hopeful men and women whose names rarely lasted past the credits of forgotten films. Among them was Tommy Hood, a small-framed character actor whose life ended in one of the strangest and most disturbing murder cases Los Angeles had seen in the early 1950s. The crime was so sensational that newspapers across California called it the “folding bed murder.”

It was evening on September 25, 1931, and twilight had fallen over Hollywood Boulevard. Sally's Candy Shop at 6711 Hollywood Boulevard was closing up shop for the night. Inside, 28-year-old Wilma Etta McFarland was preparing to end another typical day at work. Described by newspaper reports as a dark-haired, neatly dressed, reliable saleswoman, she would be dead within hours. Her murder would become another entry in Los Angeles' infamous list of unsolved homicides.

Hollywood has always been good at hiding its bodies. Long before the neon sins of Sunset Strip hardened into cliché, men drank too much, stayed up too late, and settled arguments with their fists—or worse—behind respectable doors. One such door closed forever on the morning of July 31, 1944, when Harry Lucenay, a thick-shouldered, middle-aged gambler and dog owner, fell dead on the floor of the Hollywood American Legion Post 43, shot down after an all-night poker game curdled into accusation, fear, and gunfire.

Los Angeles in 1948 was selling dreams by the square foot. The war was over. Veterans were home. Hillsides were being carved into subdivisions. Real estate advertisements offered sunshine and citrus trees. Buy a house and you could look out toward tomorrow. If you had a decent job and a little bit of moxie, you could own a piece of the future. Gladys Eugenia Kern believed in the future.

By the summer of 1947, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel stood out as one of America’s most complicated crime figures. He had once been the country’s most feared gangster and, by 1942, led the New York syndicate’s Murder, Inc. on the West Coast. Later, Siegel reinvented himself as a well-dressed Hollywood insider, making friends with actors and studio executives while promoting his Las Vegas projects as legitimate businesses. Some people thought he was trying to go straight, while others saw a gangster who had become too noticeable and costly.

Long before Hollywood learned to manufacture scandal, Marguerete Favar had lived a life that was enough to make a dozen scripts. A dancer whose beauty blazed across the vaudeville circuit from sea to shining sea, her life ended in a murder that remains one of the decade’s most sensational unsolved crimes. It was also one of its most decadent.