Friday, November 2, 1923. A person of interest.

Actress Margaret Gibson was arrested on charges of running a blackmail and extortion ring.  The charges would later be dropped,   She would keep working in the film industry until 1929.

During her career she performed under the names Patricia Palmer, Patsy Palmer, Margie Gibson, Marguerite Gibson, Ella Margaret Lewis, Ella Margaret Arce, Pat Lewis and perhaps others.  She started running into legal trouble in 1917, when she was arrested for vagrancy with allegations of opium dealing.  She was acquitted, but her career did thereafter decline.

On this day in 1923 she was arrested on federal felony charges. As things developed, George W. Lasher told authorities he had paid Gibson $1155 to avoid prosecution for a reputed violation of the Mann Act. Charges were, however, later dropped.

She married in 1935 to oil executive Elbert Lewis. They lived overseas, and the marriage was successful.  In 1940, at age 45, she returned to the United States without her husband for surgery.  World War Two intervened, and they would not be reunited as her husband was killed when the Japanese bombed Socony-Vacuum's oil facility at Penang, Malaysia on March 15, 1942.

She returned to Hollywood in 1964, and at that time, converted to Catholicism.  Only shortly thereafter, she became gravely ill, called for a priest, and confessed to neighbors the February 1, 1922, murder of Hollywood film director William Desmond Taylor.  The murder of Taylor remains officially unsolved, and while there were a handful of suspects, Gibson was never one of them.  In spite of her deathbed confession and her being distraught at the time, there are still those who doubt she committed the crime.  

Gibson with Taylor in a still from the 1914 film "The Riders of Petersham".

Given her conversion to Catholicism, and the sudden deathbed conversion, my guess is that she was the killer.  Suspicion on this is tied to her earlier efforts at extortion, and a flurry of that which occured following the Fatty Arbuckle episode.

U.S. Navy Lieutenant Harlold J. Brow set a new flight airspeed record of 250 mph, making him the first person to fly faster than 400 kph.  His plane was a Curtis racer.

The three Socialist members of Gustav Stresemann's cabinet resigned in protest over the governments refusal to curtail the dictatorial government in Bavaria.

Oklahoma's Governor Walton wasn't prepared to give up.

Ceremonies were held at Arlington National Cemetery for twenty-three U.S. Navy sailors and Marines from the USS Pittsburgh who died of influenza in 1918 and were returned to the United States from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

And it was a busy day on the Panama Canal, like most days.

Panama Canal - West Lirio slide 11/2/23.

Are there lessons from today's entry?  Almost surely.  Redemption after a long journey to one who ultimately pursued, but also life cut short.