Murder, Mayhem Highlight New Hollywood Tour
Posted on August 25, 2008
Filed Under Celebrities, Criminal Law, Felonies, Law, Los Angeles, Murder, News, misdemeanor |
Murder, mayhem, drugs and the other excesses of Hollywood’s rich and famous are the highlight of a new offbeat Hollywood tour. Dubbed the “Dearly Departed” tour, entrepreneur Scott Michaels gives tourists a glimpse of the dark side of fame and fortune. Murdered starlets, brutal beatings, celebrity drug overdoses, suicides, mob hits — all provide grisly stops on a tour of Hollywood’s more sordid landmarks.
With an ominous, “Sit back and rest in peace,” Michaels pulls the tour bus away from the Hollywood Boulevard curb, just down the street from the Kodak Theater. He regales tourists with the dramatic, gory details of some of L.A.’s most horrific crimes. The tour stops at the home where the infamous ”Black Dahlia,” Elizabeth Short, was murdered and dismembered in 1947. The crime remains the city’s most famous unsolved murder. In Los Feliz, the bus halts outside the home where Rosemary and Leno LaBianca were brutally butchered by the Charles Manson family in 1969. The Beverly Hills house where notorious mobster Bugsy Siegel was machine gunned to death in 1947 is another tour favorite. Tourists gasp at the site where in 1958 Lana Turner’s daughter fatally stabbed to death her mother’s paramour, gangster Johnny Stompanato.
Michaels takes his bus past the notorious Viper Room nightclub where River Phoenix died of a drug overdose in 1993 and the hotels where Janis Joplin and John Belushi met similar fates in 1970 and 1982, respectively. Even the site of Hugh Grant’s lurid interlude with a prostitute in the back of a car in 1995 makes the tour. As does the public toilet where George Michael propositioned an undercover cop and was arrested in 1998.
Savannah, Georgia tourist, Larry Browder, judged the tour a hit. “I thought that was part of the history, the murders which took place in this city, it needs to be told, it needs to be seen. It makes things more real.”
-LegalPro
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