Inside Hogan’s Heroes star Bob Crane’s secret double-life and unsolved murder
Bob Crane will always be remembered for playing American hero Colonel Hogan in the hit ‘60s sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, but a recent book published by his son Robert Crane has brought the television actor back to the public eye.
The paperback, titled Crane: Sex, Celebrity and My Father’s Unsolved Murder, has attempted to debunk the portrayal of the actor as a handsome, clean cut family man, while addressing rumours that surround his 1978 murder.
“I was aware that he loved women and that he probably should not have been married,” Robert told Fox News. “He probably should have been a single guy because he was not the most faithful companion in the world. I was aware of that.
“I was aware of his love of photography … When home video came out in the mid-60s, he had to have one of the first units. I was aware of him taping women with their consent … It was always consensual. There was nothing hidden. There were no drugs. Both people wanted to be there.”
Crane’s sex addiction has long been an open-secret in Hollywood, and according to his son Robert there wasn’t much he did in the household to hide it from the family.
“It wasn’t a secret,” insisted Robert. “It wasn’t a secret at all … Everybody knew that was his dark room … I was a teenager, probably around 15-16 years old when I saw my dad taping women on the road when he wasn’t doing Hogan’s.
“You got to remember that back in the ’60s and ’70s, the home video was the selfie of today … Everybody wanted to do it. Including the women that he met. So I saw some videos of different women … I put two and two together.”
Robert does have fond memories of his father however.
“He was a fun-loving guy,” said Robert. “When he was at home, we had fun. He and I co-created a baseball league in our pool … I would be the LA Dodgers. He would be the New York Yankees. We had a schedule, we had a world series.
“We did home movies. He did a movie and I [played] an FBI agent. My cousins where in it, my dad was in it … This project took months to get together and it was about eight minutes long. But those were the kinds of things we did. We just had a great time.”
After his career faded into obscurity, in June 1978 Crane was found bludgeoned to death in his Scottsdale apartment, a murder which currently remains unsolved by authorities.
Robert addressed the incident in his interview.
“The police took us to the crime scene,” he claimed. “My dad’s body had been removed. We walked around the crime scene … It was a joke. We were there touching stuff, contaminating the scene. I saw the actual bed that he was in when he was murdered. I saw blood. I think I saw brain matter on the wall.
“The next morning, I went to the morgue and I saw my dad on a slab. I went in there, just looked at him … I touched his skin. I touched his cheek on his face and it reminded me of cool clay. I’ll never forget that … And then I had to report back to my mom and sisters. And they were all shrieking … And it turned out he was hit in the head twice while he was sleeping. And [the police] theorise with a tripod of a video camera.”
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