This is

this is exactly right.

This story contains adult content and language.

Listener discretion is advised. This is one of those cases that will always interest people. You want to be able to keep looking for new clues and

new windows into these stories. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a non-fiction author and journalism professor in Austin,

Texas. I'm also the host of the Historical True Crime Podcast, Tenfold War Wicked, and the co-host of the

podcast Buried Bones on exactly right.

I've traveled around the world interviewing people for the show, and they are all excellent writers.

They've had so many great true crime stories and now we want to tell you those stories with

details that have never been published.

Tenfold War Wicked presents, Wicked Words is about the choices

that writers make good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories behind the

stories. I love 1920s Hollywood. It was full of glitz, glamor, controversy, and

murder. William Mann's wonderful book, Tinsultown, Murder, Morphene, and Madness at the dawn of Hollywood details the story of the mysterious unsolved murder of film director William Desmond Taylor.

Did Mann solve Taylor's murder 100 years later? Maybe.

So this is 1922 Los Angeles. Set the scene for me. crime, politics, mobsters, what's happening between

the Christian Right and Hollywood at the time period, everybody is side-eyeing everyone else it's very tension filled.

Yeah you know in 1920 to 1922 this was this was the critical period in the

development of the Hollywood studio system.

So the movies were still only about 10 years old

and yet they had become suddenly in the past decade,

this huge money-making enterprise

...