Killing of Johnny Stompanato

On the evening of April 4, 1958, Johnny Stompanato, a 32-year-old former Marine with ties to the Los Angeles underworld, was fatally stabbed at the Beverly Hills home rented by actress Lana Turner, his girlfriend of about a year. Turner's 14-year-old daughter, Cheryl Crane, stabbed Stompanato once in the stomach during a violent confrontation between Turner and Stompanato in Turner's bedroom. Crane and Turner said Crane, who had overheard the argument and armed herself with a kitchen knife, acted out of fear that Stompanato — who had reportedly threatened to kill Turner, her daughter, and her mother — intended to harm Turner. The relationship between Turner and Stompanato had been marked by prior incidents of physical abuse, including an assault during filming in London in September 1957 and another following the March 1958 Academy Awards ceremony.

An autopsy determined that Stompanato died from a single stab wound that penetrated his liver, portal vein, and aorta, causing fatal internal hemorrhaging. Crane surrendered to police in the early hours of April 5 and gave a formal statement describing the stabbing. She was held in juvenile hall pending further proceedings. A coroner's inquest was convened on April 11, 1958, drawing more than one hundred reporters. Witnesses included police officials, Crane's father Joseph Stephen Crane, her grandmother Mildred, and Turner herself, whose extended testimony was widely covered by the press. After roughly four hours of testimony and about twenty-five minutes of deliberation, the coroner's jury ruled the killing a justifiable homicide, and Crane was not prosecuted. She was later released into her grandmother's custody following an April 24 juvenile court hearing.

Public reaction to the case was divided; some press coverage was critical of Turner's parenting and characterized her inquest testimony as theatrical. In June 1958, Stompanato's ex-wife, Sarah Ibrahaim, filed a wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of herself and her young son with Stompanato, seeking $750,000 in damages from Turner, Crane, and Joseph Stephen Crane. The suit implied uncertainty over whether Turner or Crane had actually inflicted the fatal wound. The case was settled out of court in 1962 for a reported $20,000.

In subsequent decades, the case has been the subject of a persistent theory that Turner, rather than Crane, delivered the fatal stab wound, and that Crane took responsibility to protect her mother. This theory was fueled by claims from Turner's hairdresser, Eric Root, in a 1996 memoir, and by MGM stylist Sydney Guilaroff's separate 1996 memoir account. Crane has repeatedly denied these claims, including in a 2012 television interview. The killing has been referenced in various works of popular culture, including the 1962 novel Where Love Has Gone and its 1964 film adaptation, and was described by Time magazine in 2007 as one of the most notorious crimes of the 20th century.