 |
| Tommy Hood (lower right) met a tragic fate at the hands of James Francis Silva (upper left) in 1947. |
April 4, 1947 in Hollywood was a dry, cloudy day. The temperature had struggled to reach a below average 60 degrees by dusk and the smog was particularly bad. For several years now, industrial smoke and fumes had been choking the Los Angeles basin on a near daily basis.
Hidden beneath this hazy blanket of pollution, the Gateway Theater sat on the border between the neighborhoods of Silver Lake and East Hollywood. Twelve actors gathered that evening to tread the boards, entertain the crowd, and perhaps start their way down the fabled road to stardom. The cast of The Blackguard was a roll call of the unknown and little-known: Bob Baron, Skip Haynes, Tommy Hood, Don Nagel, Hazel Noe, Millie Phillips, Jack Ringler, Charles B. Smith, Wesley Steadman, Ted Withall, Elizabeth Wolfe, and Ed Wood, Jr.
 |
| The cast of The Blackguard including Ed Wood (lower left) and Tommy Hood (starred). |
None could guess what destiny the City of Broken Dreams had in store for them. Most would lapse back into prosaic lives of little to no significance by Hollywood standards. One would chase an ever-receding mirage of success down through the most disreputable sub-basements of the film and publishing industries only to end his days as an impoverished alcoholic. In an unlikely plot twist, he would be posthumously labelled "the World’s Worst Director" and his star permanently fixed in the lower reaches of the Hollywood firmament for all to see. For Tommy Hood, however, the Fates had a much crueler end in store.
--- --- --- --- --- --- ---
 |
| News clipping from 1942. |
Harold Edwin Sprankle was born on May 17, 1919 in Canton, Ohio. The sixth of seven children, he was a small man (5'3" and 110 lbs.) with light brown hair and grey eyes. Harold left high school after two years and went to work locally. Then, in 1937, he arrived in Southern California sporting the snappy new moniker of "Tommy Hood" and chasing the Hollywood dream. He lived with an older sister in Venice but moved several times within the greater Los Angeles area in the early 1940s.
Being an actor-in-the-making has never paid the bills, so Tommy spent his days working for Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica. His evenings were initially devoted to studying his craft at the Guy Bates Post Academy of Theatre Arts and Music (635 S. Manhattan Place; former synagogue, current-day Christ Church). Sporadic stage and radio work followed including the role of archetypal teenager Chuck Doolittle on KGFJ's late evening radio melodrama The Samuels Family. The show's writer, Wes Steadman, would later be one of Tommy's co-stars in The Blackguard.
As Michael Bay's cinema classic Pearl Harbor (2001) taught us, the Second World War had an annoying tendency to interfere with people’s everyday lives and tawdry threesomes. It was no different for Tommy, who found himself inducted into the U.S. Army Air Corps by the end of October 1942. To make matters worse, his long-ailing mother passed away in the midst of his basic training. Tommy's exact postings and contributions to the war effort are not known. It is uncertain whether he even served overseas or not. His only surviving military records indicate several illnesses of a character resulting in their redaction by the National Archives.
In any event, the war ended, and late 1945 found Tommy back in Los Angeles chasing his Hollywood dream. A long-time friend gave him a job as an automotive driving instructor at his family’s business (Cheney Brothers Driving School, 1420 N. Wilcox Avenue; no longer exists) and Tommy proved to be a model employee. In his free time, he continued to pursue acting and radio work.
In March 1948 Tommy got his biggest break yet when he auditioned for and won a role in The Blackguard, a popular, old-time stage melodrama then in its fifth season at the Gateway Theater (4212 Sunset Blvd; current-day El Cid Restaurant). Tommy would be a cast member through December 1949. The show’s original producer, Betty Olsen, remarked that he was a good character actor.
--- --- --- --- --- --- ---
 |
| Ad for the driving school (September 1950). |
On December 5, 1950, the unthinkable happened. Tommy failed to show up for a scheduled 9:00 AM driving appointment. His employer and friend of fifteen years, Richard Cheney, was immediately concerned by this completely out of character behavior. The day wore on into night, and still no one knew of Tommy’s whereabouts.
The next morning Cheney reported his friend missing to the police. Tommy’s friends told police that he did not have any health, financial, or other problems that they were aware of. Betty Olsen worried aloud that Tommy’s penchant for picking up hitchhikers might have gotten him into trouble. Cheney reported an unsettling occurrence. The previous Thursday, Tommy had given a driving lesson using a female student’s car. An acquaintance of Tommy's—a U.S. Navy sailor called "Johnny"— accompanied them and rode in the back seat. The next morning, the woman’s husband found a long knife there. Cheney had no idea who the sailor might be.
On December 7, police searched Tommy's apartment. He lived just a few blocks away from the Gateway Theater in a two-story Spanish style building dating to the 1920s (1035 Hyperion Ave; still exists). The police found the door locked and, upon gaining entry, everything appeared to be in order. They particularly noted Tommy’s aesthetic flair—an apartment gaudily decorated in green and chartreuse with billowy white drapes, Chinese prints, and statues of Nubian slaves. A police canvas of the neighborhood yielded one eyewitness that saw Tommy leave his apartment at 8:30 AM on December 5 and several others that saw him return accompanied by a sailor later that afternoon.
 |
| 1035 Hyperion as it appears today. |
The police returned to Tommy's apartment the next day, conducted a more thorough search, and this time discovered his badly decomposed body. Clad in only a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, Tommy had been wrapped in heavily blood-stained blankets and placed on a folding bed. The bed was then folded up into a storage alcove in the wall. A couch had been repositioned to hold the bed's double doors shut. A close friend who lived nearby was brought in to identify the body.
Police then realized that Tommy’s 10-inch TV set and dual control-equipped, cream-colored 1950 Ford business coupe were missing. An autopsy later revealed that Tommy died from a fractured skull, and the condition of his body pointed toward December 5 as the date of death. A funeral service was held for Harold Edwin Sprankle on December 16 at Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Glendale), where he now lies at rest in an unmarked grave alongside greats like Carole Landis, Jimmy Stewart, Humphrey Bogart, and Helen Holmes, among others.
--- --- --- --- --- --- ---
Tommy had not garnered much media attention during his thirteen years of chasing dreams in Hollywood. His grim fate, however, was the stuff that newspaper copywriter's dreams were made of. The local press lost no time in exploiting Tommy's disappearance and death with punchy, front-page headlines designed to sell more papers. The police investigation, meanwhile, quickly appeared to have reached an impasse. You would think that looking for a tattooed youth in a U.S. Navy uniform last seen driving a very distinct dual-control Ford would not pose any difficulties. The public certainly thought as much. But more than a week would pass without any apparent developments in the case. Then, on the day of Tommy's funeral, the police moved in and nabbed their man.
 |
| Silva in 1951. |
Following a lead phoned in by a local service station owner, police arrested 21-year-old James Francis Silva while he was sleeping at the Victory Service Club (220 South Main Street, no longer exists)—a shelter that offered free beds, showers, a canteen, games, and social spaces to servicemen. Despite being discharged from the U.S. Navy in July 1949, he was still wearing his uniform over a year later. Silva was a semi-employed nightclub tap dancer and something of a drifter who considered Oakland to be his home. He readily confessed to the crime, telling police that he had known Tommy for about two months, had gone out drinking with him regularly, and had spent the night before the murder with him at his Hyperion Avenue apartment.
Silva alleged that early in the evening of December 5 Tommy made unwanted advances toward him. This angered Silva, and he struck Tommy over the head with a cast iron frying pan. Claiming that he thought Tommy was only unconscious, Silva put his body onto the folding bed anfd hid it in the wall alcove. He then stole the actor's TV set and distinctive car, and fled. Silva drove to downtown Los Angeles where he pawned the TV set. At that time, South Main Street, on the edge of the Financial District, was ground zero for those down on their luck with no less than two dozen pawnshops doing a brisk business. The TV set bearing Silva’s fingerprints was later recovered in a pawn shop there.
Silva then decided to leave town for a spell and drove to Las Vegas and San Diego. He returned to Los Angeles on December 15 and dropped Tommy’s car off at Inatomi’s Auto Repair (640 South Wall Street; no longer extant) for routine maintenance, leaving word that he would be at the Victory Service Club when the car was ready. The garage owner recognized the unusual Ford from press accounts and immediately notified police. They recovered Tommy’s fingerprint-covered car and arrested Silva the following day.
Silva was held in prison until trial. Following a March 1951 conviction, he was sentenced to 5 years to life for second-degree murder, plus 1 to 10 years to be served concurrently for theft. Silva was immediately sent to San Quentin Prison where he was confined in the psychiatric ward for an extended period of time. As it turned out, his prison saga was just beginning.
--- --- --- --- --- --- ---
 |
| Silva confesses to the crime. |
In March 1953, Silva stalked and attacked a fellow inmate. During his subsequent trial for the attack, Silva observed that he was "cold, calm and collected" as he stabbed his victim in the back with a six-inch knife. He freely admitted his guilt and begged for death in California’s gas chamber. Section 4500 of the state penal code mandated the death penalty for deadly assault with a weapon by life termers. Four court-appointed psychiatrists agreed that Silva was sane, immature, and a very dangerous person. His defense attorney described him as having "a perverted and twisted mind."
Silva was convicted in July 1953 and sentenced to death. After sentencing, he shook hands with the District Attorney and Assistant District Attorney, picked up a cigarette, and walked happily out of court. He was moved to death row at San Quentin with an execution date set for April 9, 1954.
Prison reform advocates in California had long had Section 4500 in their crosshairs. After much lobbying, they prevailed upon Governor Goodwin J. Knight to intervene in Silva's case. The state constitution allowed the Governor to grant clemency to multi-felony convicts if the State Supreme Court concurred. Governor Knight and the Court agreed on the case and Silva’s death penalty was commuted to life imprisonment without possibility of parole in March 1954. Silva was not pleased with the Governor's interference and repeatedly petitioned the Court to carry out his execution, but to no avail.
The State of California, however, was not yet done with its efforts on behalf of the convicted murderer. After he had served a total of 20 years and 6 months for both crimes, the California Adult Authority side-stepped around Silva’s "no parole" status by recommending in January 1971 that his sentences be commuted on the grounds that he was stable and rehabilitated. The California Supreme Court agreed and commuted his sentences in October 1971. When Silva was released as a free man a month later, no one beyond Harold Edwin Sprankle’s family either cared or noticed. There was no press coverage. Silva vanished into anonymity until his death in 1998.
Sources:
Ancestry.com
Daily Independent Journal (San Rafael, CA)
Find a Grave.com
Hollywood Citizen-News
Journal of the Senate, Legislature of the State of California, February 23, 1972.
Los Angeles Mirror
Oakland Tribune
Radio Life magazine, 1941-1942
South Gate (CA) Press
The Californian (Salinas, CA)
The Los Angeles Times
The Sacramento Bee
The San Bernadino County Sun
The San Francisco Examiner
The Van Nuys News and Valley Green Sheet
Valley Times (North Hollywood, CA)
Yellow Pages, Los Angeles Central District, September 1950