William Desmond Taylor - Investigation - Margaret Gibson's 1964 Confession

Margaret Gibson's 1964 Confession

Margaret Gibson was a film actress who worked with Taylor when he first came to Hollywood. In 1917 she was indicted, tried and acquitted on charges equivalent to prostitution (there were also allegations of opium dealing) and changed her professional name to Patricia Palmer. In 1923 Gibson was arrested and jailed on extortion charges which were later dropped.

Gibson was 27-years-old and in Los Angeles at the time of the murder. There is no record her name was ever mentioned in connection with the investigation. Soon after the murder she got work in a number of films produced by Famous Players-Lasky, Taylor's studio at the time of his death. One of these films was among the last made by Mary Miles Minter. Gibson (in her words) "fled" the United States to the Far East in 1934, where she married her husband who worked for Socony (later Mobil Oil). However, she returned to Los Angeles in 1940 for medical reasons. Her husband, Elbert Lewis, died in a March 1942 Japanese attack on the Socony oil refinery at Penang, Straits Settlements (now Malaysia) during World War II. Lewis left Gibson with a small pension, which she lived on until her death.

In 1999, the widely cited newsletter Taylorology published an account that on 21 October 1964, while living in the Hollywood hills under the name Pat Lewis, she suffered a heart attack. As a recently converted Roman Catholic, before dying she confessed she "shot and killed William Desmond Taylor" along with several other things the witness didn't understand and could not remember more than 30 years later. The witness to her confession later repeated his recollection in a televised documentary.