This month’s entry is a house in Los Feliz, CA valued originally at $2.4 Million!

From: SFGATE.COM:

I approached a real estate sign on the edge of the property depicting artistic renderings of the home, complete with a swimming pool and manicured lawn. They looked nothing like the broken building looming over me. As I tried to get a closer look, two squirrels fought over an acorn on the wrought iron gates, carefully avoiding the razor wire spiraling above the wall, recently installed by someone to keep the likes of me out.

The most striking thing about the home at 2475 Glendower Place is not the history of violence or the mystery surrounding its abandonment. It’s the staircase. Through the grand central window, the original century-old stairs diagonally bisect the pane. The design choice makes little sense. Why boast an ornate 12-foot-tall arched window as a centerpiece to your mansion, only to cut through it with the side view of some yellow steps? The color of the stained glass isn’t dissimilar to the ochre of the acacia flowers hanging over the grass. But it seems more sour, more grimy, more, well, murdery.

If you’ve heard anything about the Los Feliz Murder Mansion before reading this, it probably goes something like this:

On Christmas Eve 1959, a successful LA doctor bludgeoned his wife to death with a ball-peen hammer and beat his daughter nearly to death inside their mansion in the Hollywood Hills. The doctor then lay on his bed and read a passage from Dante’s “Divine Inferno,” before drinking a glassful of acid, killing himself.

The bloodstained house was eventually bought by a mysterious family who never moved in, the story often goes. They locked the door, leaving the home frozen in time as it was on the night of the horror. Ribbon-wrapped children’s gifts still sit under the Christmas tree in the ballroom. The cursed home stands empty, a perfectly preserved murder scene, to this day.

“Folklore happens when facts are short and time is long,” journalist John Branch once wrote. Much of the legend isn’t true, but some of it is. Many of these wrongs were recently righted by filmmaker Stacy Astenius, who spent seven years investigating the home for “The Los Feliz Murder Mansion” podcast. In doing so, she revealed that the bodies of the doctor and his wife were not the only ones found in the house over its 99-year history.

“I wanted to get down to the truth, because everyone wants to believe the urban legend,” Astenius said of her podcast. “I thought about doing another one, but I have never found a house like this one.” 

Built in 1925, the 5,000-square-foot Los Angeles mansion was in the heart of what was then sold as Los Feliz Heights — a new development in the Hollywood foothills that catered to moneyed folks with “taste and discrimination.”

The first owners of the house were a wealthy couple who moved down the coast from Seattle named Harold and Florence Schumacher. The Schumachers made their family home on Glendower Place, albeit briefly. Death records reveal that on July 1, 1928, Florence died in the home of heart disease at the age of 40. Harold, 41, died of pneumonia a few weeks later.

Two years later, a movie magazine editor named Welford Beaton and his son Donald lived in the home. Donald soon became bedridden, suffering from an infection caused by a blister while playing tennis; he succumbed to his illness at home, just 21 years old. Welford left the home and filed for bankruptcy the following year.

The mansion on the hill was just 5 years old and had a death count of three, but it was just getting started.

‘Go back to bed, baby — this is just a nightmare’

Heart physician Dr. Harold N. Perelson, his wife Lillian, and their three children, Judy, Joel and Debbie, moved into the mansion from a far more modest home in Silver Lake in 1956. Despite the lavish purchase, Harold’s medical practice was in significant debt. A letter later found written by 18-year-old Judy to an aunt spoke of problems between her parents caused by the family being in “a bind financially.”

Here’s what we know is true about the morning of Dec. 6, 1959 (not Christmas Eve, the date often misattributed to the rampage), based on the police report, autopsies and newspaper articles at the time:

At around 5 a.m. that Sunday morning, Dr. Harold Perelson, 50, attacked his wife, Lillian, 42, with a ball-peen hammer as she was sleeping, killing her. He then went to his daughter Judy’s bedroom and attacked her with the same weapon. Judy’s screams awakened her sister Debbie, 11, in another bedroom. Harold told Debbie, “Go back to bed, baby — this is just a nightmare,” she later told police.

Debbie then awakened the Perelsons’ son, Joel, 13. This distraction allowed Judy to escape to a neighbor named Marshal Ross. Ross tended to Judy’s injury and had her go to bed, before calling the police and walking across the street to the Perelsons’ house. There, he found Debbie and Joel “dazed by the events” but unhurt and sent them to his house. Ross found Harold on the second floor and told him to lie down and then went to Lillian’s room. Police arrived and found Harold lying face down on Judy’s bed. He had swallowed 31 pentobarbital tablets. His body was found near the hammer and empty pill bottles. A copy of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” was found next to Harold’s bed.

The press blamed the doctor’s financial problems for his murderous frenzy. Medical records would later reveal that a year earlier, Perelson had been admitted to Temple Hospital for a week; he was given Thorazine, a drug used at the time to treat schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.

The story hit some front pages in LA, and a few wire stories ran in other states, but by the week’s end, the event was old news: It wouldn’t be mentioned in the press again for nearly 50 years.

The lives of the Perelson children (after waking up that Sunday with no parents) have also been rightfully uninvestigated in the subsequent years. While reporting for her podcast, Astenius did manage to find Judy, now in her 80s, but she asked to never be contacted again.

The Enriquez mystery

A year after the murder, the home was bought at probate by an older couple named Emily and Julian Enriquez, and so began another mysterious chapter in its history.

The Enriquez family owned the infamous address for decades. Julian died in 1973, and Emily in 1994, and — as they’d always planned — the home was then passed to their son, Rudy, a record store manager in LA. Speculation and rumor centered on Rudy as an apparently elusive figure, the last line of an unknown family that may have never even moved inside the home. Why would Rudy choose to leave his bequeathed mansion empty, save for some storage boxes and the belongings of the Perelsons?

“They never lived there, they visited the place,” neighbor Sherry Lewis told CBS News in 2010. “There are no furnishings other than in the living room furniture that belonged to the Perelson family.” Countless YouTube segments on the murder mansion deduce that the home was never lived in by the new owners due to the intense paranormal activity keeping them out.

Rudy himself told a different story to Astenius when she finally found him outside his home in Mount Washington, a neighborhood around 5 miles from Los Feliz. She described Rudy as a kind man, happy to answer any of her questions.

“I kind of wanted him to be this weird guy,” Astenius said. “But he was just this sweet old man. The house was just too big for him.”

It was during Rudy’s arm’s-length ownership of the home that the story of 2475 Glendower Place took on a life of its own, largely due to a house painter who liked to prank his friends.

‘I’m not a journalist’

In 2000, Steve Kalupski was making some cash painting houses. While on a job at Glendower Place, he was told about a grisly murder-suicide that had happened years ago in the home next door. He peered through the window and saw old furniture, boxes and some wrapping paper. Over the next few years, Kalupski delighted in taking his friends up to the home late at night and telling ever more embellished tales. The rolls of wrapping paper turned into perfectly wrapped Christmas gifts under a lit tree. Kalupski spooked friends with the story of how the Perelsons were gathered around the tree and about to open their gifts when the mad doctor attacked them with a hammer.

“I’m not a journalist. I wasn’t taking people up there to tell the truth,” Kalupski told Astenius. “I was taking them up there as a form of entertainment on a Friday night to scare some people. It’s what I do. I make s—t up.”

A real reporter, however, did eventually come around to tell the story — or at least a version of it.

In 2009, the LA Times ran a story that made the “Los Feliz Murder Mansion” a sensation. In fact, the term had never been used online or in print before that year.

A version of Kalupski’s tale made it to reporters, who correctly decided it would be interesting to readers. Headlined, “On a Los Feliz hill, murder — then mystery,” the LA Times article tells almost as many falsehoods as Kalupski told his friends on Friday nights.

In recapping the 1959 murder-suicide, the story states that after the attack, Dr. Perelson “fatally poisoned himself by gulping a glass of acid.” This detail of the much-repeated story is shocking and memorable. It made it into the titillating opening lines of nearly every subsequent story on the home.

Suicide by drinking acid is extremely rare. We know from his autopsy, and the pillboxes found by his body, that Perelson died after swallowing barbiturate tablets, not by gulping acid. It’s unclear how and why the article described the death this way, but it helped color the urban myth that was about to be retold on a thousand blogs. A Google search yields nearly 1,000 videos that use the term “Los Feliz Murder Mansion,” as well as over 7,000 blogs and articles. All were published after 2009.

The LA Times article also states that “gaily wrapped Christmas gifts sit on a table.” Even Kalupski, the yarn-spinning painter, admitted the gift detail was a lie. Other anecdotes in the story include a ghost-fearing neighbor being bitten by a black widow spider when trying to enter the home, and sex workers frequenting the house.

After 2009, dozens, if not hundreds, of “urban explorers” illegally entered the home, all while Rudy still owned it. One told Astenius he stole an army jacket that he thought must have belonged to the Perelsons (it turned out to be Rudy’s). Another woman unscrewed and stole Judy’s painted light switch from her bedroom, which appeared to have a small bloodstain on it next to her name. A Tumblr post from 2013 appears to show the actual “Christmas” scene from up close.

Rudy Enriquez died in 2015. Shortly before his death, he told Astenius that his mom had indeed lived in the home before she died. He never moved in himself but couldn’t bring himself to sell the property because it was a gift from his parents, whom he sorely missed, and he didn’t need the money. He also said that he used the rooms for storage, including some Christmas paraphernalia.

Some of the mysteries around the home went to the grave with Rudy, such as why neighbors were certain that his mom never lived there or why so many of the Perelsons’ belongings — such as Judy’s hand-painted light switch and Dr. Perelson’s medical records — were never removed.

Rudy “was very sentimental,” Astenius said. “He kept the house like a treasure trove. He was maybe a hoarder but was really just a sweet old man.”

In 2016, TV attorney Lisa Bloom and her husband Braden Pollock bought the home at a probate sale for $2.3 million. But neighbors who hoped the decrepit house would finally be lived in were left disappointed. After tearing the interior of the house down to the studs, the couple told Astenius that they never completed their planned renovation due to permitting issues.

The home was purchased by a developer named Ephi Zlotnitsky for $2.35 million in 2020. Zlotintsky has never spoken to the press about the house and did not return a request for comment for this story. It does appear, however, that he allowed one person inside. In 2023, Zak Bagans and his “Ghost Adventures” team went into the home for a “very tactical-style investigation.” While inside, they found an unusual force pushing them up the stairs by the arched window, and they all freaked out.

It appears that the new owner has no intentions of moving in. His website bio says, “Mr. Zlotnitsky has purchased, stabilized and sold over 80 real estate assets.” His development company put up the renderings of a luxurious future home I found on the gate. The flashy new plans apparently didn’t work — the property was listed again in the summer of 2022, and subsequently delisted in November that year, having not found a buyer.

It’s hard not to attribute some sentience to homes like the Glendower mansion. If it has a personality, it’s one of loneliness. Everyone wanted the home to be something it wasn’t. The Schumachers wanted a place to live out a sunny California retirement. The Enriquezes wanted a home for their beloved boy Rudy. The LA Times wanted the house painter’s spooky stories to be true. Zlotnitsky wanted another million-dollar house flip to add to his portfolio. Bagans wanted to find a cosmic ghoul.

But save for a five-minute burst of violence on a terrible Sunday morning 65 years ago, the Los Feliz Murder Mansion is really just an empty house, waiting for a family.

SOURCE: SFGATE.COM

D.B. Cooper. Amelia Earhart. Jimmy Hoffa. All prominent Americans whose unexplained disappearances have fascinated and confounded armchair historians and professionals alike—and created fertile ground for all manner of wild explanations and conspiracy theories.

Ditto for Glenn Miller, one of the University of Colorado Boulder’s most illustrious alumni, who was the nation’s most famous big-band leader when he disappeared Dec. 15, 1944, after heading out over the English Channel on a small military plane bound for Paris.

Almost from the moment the world learned Miller had gone missing, conspiracy theories began to emerge like puffs of smoke from the Chattanooga Choo Choo. And they’ve never really stopped, as each new generation discovers the mystery and publishes books and articles purporting to have solved it.

But Dennis Spragg of the College of Music’s American Music Research Center—and Miller’s family—is doing his best to end all the crazy speculation.

“In 2009, Steve Miller, Glenn’s son and a big donor to the Glenn Miller Archive”—the definitive Miller collection, housed at the AMRC—“asked me if I would consider dealing with the latest series of sensationalistic conspiracy books. He said, ‘enough is enough,’ says Spragg.

The three most prominent theories over the years:

Miller never boarded the plane, but was assassinated after Gen. Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower sent him on a secret mission one or two days earlier to negotiate a surrender from Nazi Germany.

He made it to Paris, where he died of a heart attack in a bordello.

The small plane he was on was destroyed by bombs jettisoned from a phalanx of Allied bombers passing overhead on their way back from an aborted mission over Germany.

More than four years—and dozens of trips to Washington, D.C., London and U.S. Air Force archives—later, Spragg is confident he knows what happened: The plane went down in mere seconds over the channel, instantly killing Miller, another officer and a young pilot, likely because fuel lines from wing tanks froze. The steel-framed, wood and fabric plane all but disintegrated, sending its heavy Pratt-Whitney engine plunging to the bottom.

Ironically, as Spragg told the producers of the PBS show “History Detectives,” which will air “The Disappearance of Glenn Miller” nationwide on July 8, that not-so-mysterious conclusion was reached by investigators just days after the plane went down. But documents from the investigation were boxed up after the war, sent to the United States and locked away.

“It was right there all this time, but all the researchers trying to follow the trail of Glenn Miller just didn’t have access to it,” says Alan Cass, founder and curator of the Glenn Miller Archive.

But Spragg, who surely knows more about Miller’s time in the U.S. Army Air Force and his mysterious disappearance than anyone else alive, was as driven as Sherlock Holmes in his quest to find the answers.   

“I just went for it. I didn’t realize it would take four years. Nobody else had been in the files at Maxwell Air Force Base until me,” he says by phone from Cape Cod, where he is spending the summer.

The more melodramatic tales simply don’t stand up to scrutiny, based on unambiguous documentation from a board of inquiry investigation at the time.

A little background: The musician, who attended CU—he received an incomplete in the only music class he took—for three semesters before leaving, became the nation’s most popular band leader from 1939 to 1942. He enlisted for the war effort and as a captain led band performances in England.

In 1944, after the Allies recaptured Paris from the Germans, Eisenhower asked Miller to head up a joint British-American radio production team, to perform for troops and to record for broadcast back home. Miller was agitated by complications in Paris and when weather grounded normal transport flights, he hitched a ride on a small C64 Norseman with his friend Lt. Col. Norman Baessell and a 20-year-old pilot.

“He was mad, he was in a rush. He was a type-A personality with the intestinal fortitude of a general,” Spragg says. “He was a leading celebrity in America and he got his own way.”

Contrary to popular myth, the flight was not unauthorized, and conditions were not foggy, as depicted in the film “The Glenn Miller Story.” It was a “casual” flight in a plane whose model had been recalled due to defective carburetor heaters, but it was at the end of the triage line behind combat planes and bombers. Heavy clouds aloft had the pilot flying on “visual flight rules” relatively close to the water and the temperature was below freezing.

“The guy flew right into freezing conditions,” says Spragg, who strongly believes fuel-line freezing, engine overheating and circumstances doomed the plane.

The mystery arose in part because the Germans launched the counteroffensive that became known as the Battle of the Bulge the next morning, and nobody knew Miller was missing for 72 hours. As soon as Orville A. Anderson of the U.S. 8th Air Force—coincidentally Miller’s cousin by marriage—was notified of the missing aircraft on Monday, he said, “They’ve had it. I can mount a search but it won’t matter.”

“This was a non-survivable accident with immediate trauma,” Spragg says. “Anybody who thinks this plane could have been ditched has rocks in his head, but even if it could, they would have survived just 20 minutes in the water because of the temperature.”

And the other yarns told and repeated over the decades? All easily disproven by clear, documentary evidence.

·      More than a dozen witnesses saw Miller board the plane on the 15th with Baessell.

·      Those titillating rumors of a heart attack in a French bordello were concocted by Nazi propaganda chief Hermann Goering and broadcast only after the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force announced Miller’s death on Dec. 24. (“And he was a straight arrow,” Spragg says. “Anyone who says that has just been regurgitating a story that originated with the Germans.”)

·      Using flight logs and the discovery that another plane actually was accidentally bombed, Spragg has shot holes in the friendly-fire theory. In order for Miller’s plane to have been taken down by the flight of Lancaster bombers, time would have had to shift by an hour and the small plane would have had to be 20 degrees off course. This theory grew out of a tall tale told by one of the Lancaster pilots in a bar in South Africa in 1984, Spragg says—“So why not tell the story in 1944?”

Spragg is absolutely confident about his conclusions—“Nobody else has gone to the documents”—but not at all sure it will lay the myths to rest.

“I went through a logical process of elimination,” Spragg says. “I went through all the possibilities and knocked them down or verified them. Of course, there is always a segment of the public that will never be convinced by logic.”

SOURCE COLORADO.EDU