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Robert Edward "Bob" Crane (July 13, 1928 – June 29, 1978) was an American actor and disc jockey, best known for his performance as Colonel Robert E. Hogan in the television sitcom Hogan's Heroes from 1965 to 1971, and for his 1978 murder, which remains officially unsolved.

Bob Crane was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, but he spent his childhood and teenage years in Stamford, Connecticut.^[1] He graduated from Stamford High School (Stamford, Connecticut) in 1946.^[1] Music was important to Crane, and he started playing drums early in life. By junior high, he was organizing local drum and bugle parades with his neighborhood friends in Stamford.^[2] Later, he became involved in his high school marching and jazz bands, as well as in the school's orchestra.^[3] He also played for the Connecticut Symphony and the Norwalk Symphony Orchestras as part of the youth orchestra program.^[4] On June 21, 1948, Bob enlisted in the National Guard and was honorably discharged on May 1, 1950.^[5] In 1949, he married high school sweetheart Anne Terzian, and they raised three children — Robert David,^[6] Deborah Ann, and Karen Leslie.^[7]

In 1950, Crane started his broadcasting career at WLEA in Hornell, New York. He soon moved to WBIS in Bristol, Connecticut, followed by WICC in Bridgeport, Connecticut. This was a 1,000-watt operation with a signal covering the northeastern portion of the New York metropolitan area where he remained until 1956. At that time CBS radio network executives plucked Crane out partly to help stop his huge popularity from affecting the suburban ratings of their New York flagship WCBS, and partly to re-energize their flagging West Coast flagship KNX in Los Angeles. Crane moved his family to California to host the morning show at KNX. He filled the broadcast with sly wit, drumming, and guests such as Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and Bob Hope. It quickly became the number-one rated morning show with adult listeners in the LA area, with Crane known as "The King of the Los Angeles Airwaves."

Crane's acting ambitions led to his subbing for Johnny Carson on the daytime game show Who Do You Trust? and appearances on The Twilight Zone (uncredited), Channing, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and General Electric Theater. When Carl Reiner appeared on his show, Crane persuaded him to book him for a guest shot on The Dick Van Dyke Show, where he was noticed by Donna Reed, who suggested him for the role of neighbor Dr. Dave Kelsey in her eponymous sitcom from 1963 through 1965.

In 1965, Crane was offered the starring role in a television comedy pilot about a German P.O.W. camp. Hogan's Heroes became a hit and finished in the Top Ten in its first year on the air. The series lasted six seasons, and Crane was nominated for an Emmy Award twice, in 1966 and 1967. During its run, he met Patricia Olsen, who played Hilda under the stage name Sigrid Valdis. He divorced his wife of twenty years and married Olsen on the set of the show in 1970. They had a son, Scotty (Robert Scott), and adopted a daughter named Ana Marie.

In addition to playing the drums on the theme song, Crane's musical talent can also be seen in the sixth season episode "Look at the Pretty Snowflakes," where he has an extended drum solo during the prisoners' performance of the jazz standard "Cherokee".

In 1968, during the run of Hogan's Heroes, Crane and series costars Werner Klemperer, Leon Askin, and John Banner appeared, with Elke Sommer, in a feature film called The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz. The setting was the divided city of Berlin inside East Germany. Paula Schultz was being tempted to defect to the West, with Crane encouraging her to do so. Klemperer and Banner were involved as East German officials trying to keep Paula in the East.

Following the cancellation of Hogan's Heroes in 1971, Crane was frustrated that he was offered few quality roles. He appeared in two Disney films, Superdad (1973) in the title role and Gus (1976) in a cameo.

In 1973, Crane purchased the rights to Beginner's Luck, a play that he starred in and directed. The production toured for five years, predominantly at dinner theaters from Florida to California to Texas, Hawaii and Arizona in 1978.^[8] During breaks, he guest starred in a number of TV shows, including Police Woman, Quincy, M.E., and The Love Boat. A second series of his own, 1975's The Bob Crane Show, was canceled by NBC after three months.

During the run of Hogan's Heroes, co-star Richard Dawson introduced Crane (a photography enthusiast) to John Henry Carpenter, who worked with the video department at Sony Electronics and had access to early video tape recorders. Carpenter photographed some of Crane's sexual escapades with various women.^{[citation needed]}

In 1978, Crane was appearing in Scottsdale in his Beginner's Luck production at the Windmill Dinner Theatre. On the night of June 28, 1978, Crane is alleged to have called Carpenter to tell him that their friendship was over. The following day, Crane was discovered bludgeoned to death with a weapon that was never found (but was believed to be a camera tripod) at the Winfield Place Apartments in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Crane is buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. After her death from lung cancer in 2007, his wife and Hogan's Heroes co-star Sigrid Valdis was buried next to him.

According to an episode of A&E's Cold Case Files, police officers who arrived at the scene of the crime noted that Carpenter called the apartment several times and did not seem surprised that the police were there, which raised suspicions. The car Carpenter had rented the previous day was impounded. In it, several blood smears were found that matched Crane's blood type. DNA testing, which might have confirmed whether it was Crane's blood or not, did not exist at that time. Due to insufficient evidence, Maricopa County Attorney Charles F. Hyder declined to file charges.

The case was reopened in 1990, twelve years after the murder. A 1978 attempt to test the blood found in the car that Carpenter had rented resulted in a match to Bob Crane's blood type, but it failed to produce any additional results. DNA testing in 1990 could not be completed due to an insufficient remaining sample. The detectives in charge, Barry Vassall and Jim Raines, instead hoped that additional witnesses and a picture of a possible piece of brain tissue found in the rental car^[9] (which had been lost since the original investigation) would incriminate Carpenter. He was arrested and held for trial after a preliminary hearing before a Superior Court Judge finding that evidence presented justified a trial by jury.

During Carpenter's 1994 trial, defense attorneys attacked the prosecution case as circumstantial and inconclusive. They denied the claim that Carpenter and Crane were on bad terms just before the slaying, and they said the police theory that a camera tripod was the murder weapon was sheer speculation based on Carpenter's occupation. They also disputed the claim that the rediscovered photo showed brain tissue, and they noted that authorities did not have the tissue itself. The defense pointed out that Crane had been videotaped and photographed in compromising sexual positions with numerous women, implying that a jealous person or someone fearing blackmail might have been the killer.

Carpenter was found not guilty. He maintained his innocence until his death on September 4, 1998, and the murder remains officially unsolved.^[10]

In July 1978, Bob Crane was interred in Oakwood Memorial Park in Chatsworth, California. More than 20 years later, Crane's family had the actor's remains exhumed and transported about 25 miles southeast, to another cemetery, Westwood Village Memorial Park, located in Westwood.

Crane's life and murder were the subject of the 2002 film Auto Focus, directed by Paul Schrader and starring Greg Kinnear as Crane. The film, based on Robert Graysmith's book The Murder of Bob Crane: Who Killed the Star of Hogan's Heroes?, portrays Crane as a happily married, church-going family man and popular Los Angeles disc jockey who suddenly becomes a Hollywood celebrity, and subsequently declines into sex addiction.

Crane's son, Scotty, bitterly attacked the film as being inaccurate. In an October 2002 piece he wrote on the movie, Scotty said that his father was not a regular church-goer and had only been to church three times in the last dozen years of his life, which included his own funeral. There is no evidence that Crane engaged in S&M and director Paul Schrader told Scotty that the S&M scene was based on his own personal experience. Scotty also claims that his father and John Carpenter did not become close friends who socialized together until 1975. Also, Crane was a sex addict long before he became a star, who started recording his sexual encounters at least as early as 1956.^[11]

Scotty and his mother had shopped a rival script for a Bob Crane movie biography. The script, alternately entitled "F-Stop" and "Take Off Your Clothes and Smile". The spec script was written up in Variety by columnist Army Archerd, but after "Auto-Focus" was announced, interest in Scotty's script ceased.^[12]

At the time of the article denouncing Auto Focus, Scotty Crane was operating the Web site www.bobcrane.com, which included a paid section that featured outtakes from his father's pornographic films and videos. It also included the autopsy report, which Crane claimed proved his allegation that his father did not have a penile implant. The site, renamed the "Bob Crane The Official Web Site", is now far more sedate and does not include any controversial material.

• Return to Peyton Place (Uncredited, 1961)
• Man-Trap (Uncredited, 1961)
• The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz (1968)
• Patriotism (educational film, 1972, re-released by Rifftrax in 2008)
• Superdad (1973)
• Gus (1976)

• The Twilight Zone (1 episode, 1961)
• General Electric Theater (2 episodes, 1953–1961)
• The Dick Van Dyke Show (1 episode, 1962)
• Your First Impression (1 episode, 1962)
• The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1 episode, 1963)
• Channing (1 episode, 1963)
• The Donna Reed Show (63 episodes, 1963–1965)
• Hogan's Heroes (168 episodes, 1965–1971)
• The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1 episode, 1967)
• Arsenic and Old Lace (1969)
• Love, American Style (4 episodes, 1969–1971)
• Night Gallery (1 episode, 1971)
• Here's Lucy (1 episode, 1972)
• The Delphi Bureau (1972)
• Tenafly (1 episode, 1974)
• Police Woman (1 episode, 1974)
• The Bob Crane Show (14 episodes, 1975)
• Joe Forrester (1 episode, 1976)
• Spencer's Pilots (1 episode, 1976)
• Ellery Queen (1 episode, 1976)
• Gibbsville (1 episode, 1976)
• Quincy, M.E. (1 episode, 1977) as Dr. Jamison on Season 2, episode 7 "Has Anybody Here Seen Quincy?"
• The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries (1 episode, 1977)
• The Love Boat (1 episode, 1978)
• Celebrity Cooks (1 episode) - never broadcast due to his death

Emmy Award

• Nominated: Outstanding Continued Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Comedy Series, Hogan's Heroes (1966)
• Nominated: Outstanding Continued Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Comedy Series, Hogan's Heroes (1967)

• Hogan's Heroes

• The Donna Reed Show

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Bob Crane.

• Bob Crane at IMDb

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