The Tragic Life and Unsolved Death of Karyn Kupcinet

The Victim:

          Karyn Kupcinet was born in 1941 in Chicago, Illinois to a famous columnist father and a socialite mother named Essie who would never qualify as mother of the year. Essie Kupcinet valued fame and being on the A-List more than anything else, and was determined that her only daughter would achieve the fame that had eluded her in her own career as a dancer. Although Karyn has kindly been described as lacking any real talent, Essie groomed Karyn for fame her entire life, a short 23 years wrought with addictions and bad choices.

         To make sure that her daughter kept a fame-worthy figure, Karyn’s mother began giving her diet pills at roughly 13 years old, which in 1954 was essentially speed. Between 1955 and 1960, while still a minor, Karyn moved to New York to try acting on Broadway, underwent several cosmetic surgeries to improve her looks, and became addicted to prescription painkillers. Karyn had her chin, nose, ears, and eyes done all before she was 20 years old, which reportedly dulled her face and limited her acting abilities even further.

          In 1960, Karyn abandoned the stage and moved to Hollywood, where she got bit parts in movies and television shows. She began dating an actor named Andrew Prine, When Karyn’s histrionics and addictions and inappropriate behavior became too much and Andrew ended the relationship. Karyn stalked him for months, busting into his home during dinner parties, watching outside his house for hours, and hiding in his attic. According to journals found after her death, this behavior went on for months. She then cut words out of magazines and assembled them into letter form like you’d see in a B movie about a kidnapping. Her last day on Earth she called Prine twice telling him a wild story that someone had left a baby in a basket on her doorstep and pleading for him to come over. People like to speculate that lie was borne out of regret over an abortion she had traveled to Mexico for a year prior, but I imagine it was just a badly adjusted woman with too many chemicals in her system.

The Death:

         

The last time Karyn was seen by someone not considered a suspect or connected to a suspect was the day before Thanksgiving. On Wednesday, November 27^th, 1963, Karyn had dinner at the home of a married couple, family friends who said she seemed to behave in a healthy state of mind. Those same friends had not heard from her and drove to her home to check on her the following Saturday. There they discovered her laying naked, face down on the couch, dead. Several items in the home had been knocked over or spilled. Reportedly it was obvious that something had happened even outside of the home due to the odor. Mail had piled up on the welcome mat. More than a dozen nearly-empty bottles of medication were inside the home. The coroner would determine that the cause of death was manual strangulation, as her hyoid bone was fractured, and she had most likely been killed Wednesday night or Thursday morning. There was a desperate note found in the apartment, but nothing much further than what any depressed teenager would write.

The Suspects:

         Andrew Prine ran with a group of friends, many of whom associated with Karyn as well. Andrew, you will recall, was Karyn’s former beau that she had a hard time getting over. Andrew’s roommate was Robert Hathaway, Robert and a man named Edward Rubin claimed they visited Karyn that Wednesday evening, had some drinks and watched television. Andrew had a second roommate named William Mamches who reported that he hadn’t seen Karyn in weeks. They said that at some point Karyn claimed she was tired and went to bed. They finished the program they were watching, turned off the television, and left. Around midnight a phone call was made between Karyn and Andrew. The final member of Prine’s posse was Karyn’s downstairs neighbor, named David Lange. David Lange wasn’t a celebrity himself, but had a famous sister and was dating actress Natalie Wood, who would herself die under mysterious circumstances years later. David and Natalie returned from a date around midnight. David had a serious drinking problem and was likely passed out shortly after returning home. He claims he heard and saw nothing out of the ordinary that night. Prine, Rubin, and Hathaway are alibi for one another, claiming they all spent the evening having cocktails and watching a film after Prine spoke on the phone to Karyn.

        

          Karyn’s downstairs neighbor, David, was questioned at length by police because of his alcohol addiction, his history of walking into the wrong apartment when inebriated, and the fact that he made jokes about having been the one to kill Karyn. Irv and Essie, Karyn’s parents, went to their graves fully believing that Prine was somehow responsible, but there was never evidence there. Prine had a role on Six Feet Under, one of my favorite shows, and I always give him the side eye when he appears onscreen.

The Crackpot Theories:

          November of 1963 was an infamous and tragic month in American History. The Friday before Karyn lost her own life, the shocked nation mourned the assassination of President John F Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Twenty minutes before the president was shot, a woman called a phone operator in southern California screaming that the president was about to be killed. The police investigated and attempted to locate the caller, but never did. Someone at some point linked the two murders together, claiming that Irv Kupcinet had mob ties who told him of their plans in advance, which would mean one of Chicago’s most beloved newspaper columnists just knew about a pending murder of the president and not only failed to alert authorities, but casually mentioned it to his amphetamine abusing daughter, who flipped out about it twenty minutes before it happened. Kup not only denied the story but expressed how offensive he found it to be.

         James Ellroy is arguably one of the world’s premiere not-true crime writers, known for books and movies like L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia. I like to think Mr. Ellroy would hate me because I’m verbose and somewhat liberal, two things he is definitely not. Perhaps Mr. Ellroy’s greatest work of fiction is his imagined explanation for the death of Karyn Kupcinet. In the scenario he envisions, post-phone call Karyn is drunk and high and dancing naked in her apartment. She stumbles and falls, hitting straight across her neck on the edge of a table with enough force to bruise the surrounding tissue and fracture her hyoid bone, then rises, rights herself just long enough to make it to the couch where she falls face down and perishes. He based his theory off of the fact that there was a book about the benefit of naked dance in Karyn’s apartment and explains the lack of evidence by saying that the coroner was an alcoholic.

My Conclusion:

          I first read about Karyn’s murder as a kid in a book about unsolved murders related to Chicago. When I revisited it as an adult I want to say that not only was her death tragic, Karyn’s life was tragic. Her mother pushed her to be perfect and famous. She had multiple surgeries to make her more attractive before her body was likely done growing. She paired off with a man-about-town who didn’t seem to treat her that well and didn’t do her the favor of giving her a clean break. She was dependent on substances that she likely abused as a form of self-medication. And then, barely in her twenties, her life was over, with no chance of finding her happily ever after. But who killed her? DNA technology was still more than 20 years away from making headlines, and all the likely suspects save one gave alibis for the others. Alibis that, in time, proved to be flimsy and remembered differently by all parties involved. We will never know who the murderer was, but I’d like to hear your theories anyway.