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.
By Allan R. Ellenberger
Arriving in the United States with her mother from Australia at the turn of the previous century, she was a young thing, fresh and luminous, and otherworldly in her grace. On the American music-hall circuit she first caused a sensation as “The Peacock Girl” in a Turkish Village act in Portland in 1905, her plumage and lustrous wide brown eyes soft and mysterious. Her reputation as a sultry enchantress preceded her to every city, growing and gaining in confidence with each one. “She creates a demand for more of her work,” one critic wrote after one show, the intoxicating heat of her presence on stage hard to describe, even then.
In 1908, Marguerete and her mother moved to Los Angeles, where they became part of the thriving vaudeville circuit at the old Empire Theatre and then on the Pantages circuit. She billed herself as "Marguerete Favar and Her Dolls" and was famous for her delicate dancing and doll-like delicacy. Admirers would crowd the stage door each night trying to get a glimpse of the vivacious beauty. Theater critics could not help but take notice.
Marriage briefly steadied her whirlwind life. She wed Captain Frank Tompkins, a retired army officer, but the union was short-lived.
Tompkins died suddenly of heart disease on May 19, 1910, leaving the young dancer widowed and alone. With bills to pay and a stage career to revive, she returned to performing under a new, flirtatious moniker: “Marguerete Favar, That Dainty Dancy Soubrette.”
Her work carried over briefly to the movies, at one of the studios in Edendale. There was an accident during a filming and she was injured. She gave up the screen and returned to vaudeville, where she had greater success than before. She was courted by wealthy men who were dazzled by her beauty and who wanted to marry her. Marguerete teased them all openly and would write to her friends laughing about their proposals. More than one wrote her that her cavalier attitude toward love would one day put her in peril. She never believed them.
In 1915, while touring the South, Marguerete met James Crowell, the wealthy manager of the Buckeye Cotton Oil Company in Greenwood, Mississippi. Their affair ignited quickly. Crowell pursued her relentlessly, joining her again weeks later in Memphis, where she was directing a musical revue.
On the night of September 21, 1915, after one of her most acclaimed dancing exhibitions, Crowell dismissed her chauffeur and drove Marguerete home himself. When they arrived, they found the back door of her apartment standing open—unusual, Marguerete insisted, as she had locked it.
Neighbors reported a disturbance in her boarding house at 4:00 a.m. Muffled voices, a thud, and something that sounded like a struggle. No one came to the door.
After daybreak, smoke billowed from Marguerete's window. Firefighters smashed the door and made a gruesome discovery.
Marguerete was dead on her bed with her skull caved in. In the hallway, was Crowell with his head bashed eighteen times, his throat cut. The room was ransacked. Drawers were pulled from dresser and clothing tossed to the floor. Police initially suspected burglary, but nothing of any value seemed taken.
Memphis police interrogated half a dozen suspects over the following week—former boyfriends, friends, local hoodlums—but the evidence just didn't point to any of them. As word spread west, Marguerete's friends in Los Angeles retained private detectives. They all claimed to know who the killer was, some jealous suitor from her past, but no one had the evidence to make an arrest.
Memphis investigators soon abandoned the burglary theory. Too much pointed to the “love trail,” as they called it—the tangled line of men Marguerete had charmed, encouraged, and left wanting more.
Her former troupe members told police that she often “played with love,” lingering just long enough to make a man dangerously jealous before turning her affections elsewhere.
Legal complications delayed her burial. Marguerete died intestate, with no living relatives, and her estate required settlement before her remains could be moved. For six months she lay in the Memphis morgue as friends in California pleaded for her return.
Finally, in March 1916, Marguerete Favar came home to Los Angeles. She was laid to rest beside her mother in Section 12 of Hollywood Cemetery, the service officiated by Rev. Dr. James Francis of the First Baptist Church. Earle Houck, who had sung at her mother’s funeral years earlier, offered a final tribute.
Over a hundred years later, the murder of Marguerete Favar remains unsolved. The identity of the jealous lover—or the mysterious intruder—who took the life of the Peacock Girl has never been found. She is remembered only in yellowing clippings, hushed gossip and the quiet grave beneath the palm-lined sky of Hollywood.
A life of beauty, flirtation and theatrical sparkle—cut short in a scandal that became the epitome of the dangerous glamour of early American show business.
CHANDLER GARDENS (SECT. 12, LOT 170NW, GRAVE 1)
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