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| Source:Brandon Behle- Cheryl Crane, testifying? |
"It was a scandal that captured the attention of the nation: the gangster boyfriend of Hollywood starlett Lana Turner murdered in her Beverly Hills home and her teenage daughter Cheryl is the prime suspect. KMIR 6 News anchor Elizabeth Cook sits down with Cheryl to talk about that fateful night.
2009 NATAS Emmy Award winner for Best Historical/Cultural Story."
From Brandon Behle
If you're familiar with the movie Where Love Has Gone with Susan Hayward and Mike Connors and many other great actors and actresses, you're probably familiar with the Cheryl Crane-Johnny Stompanato story as well. Because Where Love Has Gone is based off the Crane-Stompanato story ( at least unofficially ) and is about a rough relationship between the Hayward character and her boyfriend with her daughter being present with it getting violent and the daughter believing she needs to step in to save her mother and herself and sees a gun and shoots and kills the boyfriend. The difference being in the Hollywood movie that case goes to trial and the girl ends up in a home for juveniles. The Crane-Stompanato case, never even goes to trial.
Lana Turner, as adorable as she was with always looking like she could still be a little girl in and outside of her movies, wasn't as sweet and innocent in real-life as she appeared on screen. She lived the life not only of a wild child, but a soap opera character who always needed danger and drama in her life for her life to seem exciting enough for her. Which certainly explains why she was married seven times. Which might be more marriages than your typical soap character and would rival all of the marriages at least in numbers that another Hollywood Goddess and Babydoll Elizabeth Taylor had. Lana, was not only a Hollywood actress, but a real-life soap opera character no naturally she would be physically and personally involved with a Italian gangster like Johnny Stompanato or any other gangster.
Just because of the life that Lana lived and who Johnny Stompanato was in real-life, that Lana's daughter Cheryl was just 14-15 at this point in 1958 and there is no evidence that the shooting was planned, I would have to assume that this was justifiable homicide and that Cheryl was simply trying to protect herself and her mother from an abusive gangster. The only detail that doesn't make a lot of sense and isn't very believable and looks more like a scene from a Hollywood soap opera or movie or soap movie like Where Love Has Gone is that you have a 14-15 year old girl who knows how to use a gun and acts immediately and uses it to shoot Stompantao who presumably at least was getting too physical with Lana. But every other detail about this case falls into place.
