Hollywood & Crime: The Mysterious Disappearance of Jean Spangler
A bit-part actress and dancer disappeared in Griffith Park. A strange note became the stuff of Hollywood conspiracy.
2025 has been the year of James Ellroy for me. In search of a new author to obsess over, I fell deep into the rabbit hole of the man known as the Demon Dog of crime fiction. Ellroy is a hard-bitten noir writer whose works typically focus on 1950s Los Angeles stories at the intersection of Hollywood, politics, sleaze, and corruption. His books often feature real-life people being used in extremely dark ways, from Marilyn Monroe to JFK. If you’ve ever been intrigued by how conspiracies form, Ellroy’s novels are a great insight into that mindset. Anyway, reading Ellroy led me to stumble across many classic Hollywood dramas. His book The Black Dahlia takes the most notorious unsolved murder in L.A. history and spins a sordid yarn of power and abuse that had its roots in the upper echelons of power. It reminded me of another case from around that time that also remains unsolved, one that inspired many Ellroy-esque tinhat panics.
(Image via IMDb.)
Jean Spangler was like a lot of women in Hollywood in the 1940s. Born in Seattle, she married before she turned 20, but the whirlwind romance was a disaster and she filed for divorce after only six months. She had been stuck in a messy years-long custody battle with her ex over her daughter, Christine, but she eventually received custody and, alongside her mother and brother, lived together while she waited for her breakout role. Jean was a dancer in her youth and an absolute beauty. She had bit parts in a few films, like a role as a chorus girl in the Betty Grable musical When My Baby Smiles at Me, and being a dancer in the comedy Chicken Every Sunday. On the side, she worked as a dancer at the Florentine Gardens, a nightclub that would become famous for performers like The Ink Spots and Al Jolson. Gwen Verdon and Yvonne “Lily Munster” DeCarlo were dancers there before they became famous.
