A Hollywood Dancer Left for a Night Shoot That Didn't Exist. Her Torn Purse Held a Note About "Dr. Scott."

At about five o'clock on the evening of Friday, October 7, 1949, a young woman in Los Angeles kissed her five-year-old daughter goodbye and left her with her sister-in-law.

She said she was going to meet her ex-husband about a late child support payment. Then she was going to work on a movie shoot that night.

She called home a couple of hours later and said she would be working late.

She never came home.

When police checked, no studio in Los Angeles had been filming that night.

Two days later, her purse turned up near an entrance to Griffith Park, its straps torn loose. Inside was an unfinished note, in her handwriting.

"Kirk: Can't wait any longer. Going to see Dr. Scott. It will work best this way while mother is away."

Nobody ever found out who Kirk was. Nobody ever found Dr. Scott. And nobody ever found Jean Spangler.

Jean

Jean Elizabeth Spangler was born on September 2, 1923, in Seattle, Washington. She was the youngest of four children. Her family moved to Los Angeles, and she graduated from Franklin High School there in 1941.

As a teenager, she was already dancing professionally, at famous Hollywood nightclubs like the Earl Carroll Theatre and the Florentine Gardens.

In 1942, she married a manufacturer. They had a daughter, Christine. The marriage did not last. They divorced in 1946, and a long, bitter custody fight followed. In 1948, Jean was awarded custody.

That same year, she started getting work in movies. Mostly small, uncredited parts. A chorus girl. A dancer. An extra in a church. A showgirl. A hula dancer in a jazz movie called Young Man with a Horn.

By the fall of 1949, she was twenty-six, living in the Park La Brea apartment complex with her mother, her brother, her sister-in-law Sophie, and her daughter. She was working, raising Christine, and fighting with her ex-husband over money.

October 7, 1949

On the evening of October 7, Jean's mother was out of town, visiting family in Kentucky.

At around five o'clock, Jean told Sophie she was going to meet her ex-husband about a late child support payment, and then she was going to work a night shoot on a film. She left Christine with Sophie.

At around six o'clock, a saleswoman at the Farmers Market, a few blocks from Jean's home, noticed her browsing. The saleswoman later said Jean seemed to be waiting for someone.

That is the last confirmed sighting of Jean Spangler.

About two hours after she left home, Jean called the apartment. She spoke to Sophie and to Christine. She said she would have to work the full eight hours, and would probably not be home that night.

She was not home the next morning. On October 8, Sophie reported her missing.

The shoot that didn't exist

The police checked the studios. They checked with the Screen Extras Guild, the union for background actors.

There was no record of Jean working anywhere that night. As far as anyone could tell, there was no night shoot.

They questioned her ex-husband about the child support meeting. He said he had not seen Jean in several weeks. His new wife, whom he had married only a month earlier, backed up his account.

So where had Jean really been going?

The purse

On October 9, two days after she disappeared, Jean's purse was found near the Fern Dell entrance to Griffith Park, about five and a half miles from her home.

It was in bad shape. Both straps on one side had been torn loose, as if someone had ripped it from her arm.

There was no money inside. But Sophie told police Jean had not had any money when she left, so the police did not think it was a robbery.

And there was the note.

It was in Jean's handwriting, addressed to someone named Kirk. It said:

"Kirk: Can't wait any longer. Going to see Dr. Scott. It will work best this way while mother is away."

The note ended with a comma. As if she had been interrupted, or had stopped in the middle of a thought.

Kirk and Dr. Scott

The police set out to find Kirk and Dr. Scott.

Neither name meant anything to Jean's family or friends.

Detectives questioned every doctor named Scott in Los Angeles. None of them had a patient named Spangler, or under her married name.

Jean's mother later told police that a man named Kirk had picked Jean up at the house twice, but he had never come inside. She did not know who he was.

There was public speculation about a well-known actor who had a part in Young Man with a Horn, the movie Jean had just worked on. He issued a statement saying he did not know her. He later told investigators that he had talked and joked with her on set, but had never seen her outside of work. There was never any evidence connecting him to her disappearance.

"Going to see Dr. Scott"

Then Jean's friends told the police something that changed how they read the note.

They said Jean was about three months pregnant. And that she had talked about having an abortion, which at that time was illegal.

Witnesses described a former medical student, known as "Doc," who performed illegal abortions for money. The police tried to find him. They could not locate him, or even confirm that he existed.

Seen in that light, "Going to see Dr. Scott" took on a different meaning. And so did "It will work best this way while mother is away."

One theory is that Jean went to have an illegal abortion, something went wrong, and she died. And whoever was responsible got rid of her body and her purse to cover it up.

A friend of Jean's, the actor Robert Cummings, told police she had recently mentioned a casual affair. When he asked if it was serious, she said, "No. But I'm having the time of my life."

The search, and the rumors

Sixty police officers and more than a hundred volunteers searched Griffith Park, which covers more than four thousand acres. The next week, more than two hundred people searched again.

They found almost nothing. A volunteer's dog dug up a denim jail uniform from a shallow hole. It was never connected to Jean.

The newspapers had their own theories. Some noted that Jean looked a bit like Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, murdered in Los Angeles less than three years earlier, and wondered whether the cases were connected. There was no evidence that they were.

There were also rumors of connections to organized crime. Jean had danced at the Florentine Gardens, whose owners had ties to mob figures. There were reports she had been seen in Palm Springs and Las Vegas with associates of a Los Angeles gangster, and one of those men disappeared two days after she did. His body, and that of another man, were later found, likely victims of a mob killing. Jean's family insisted she was not the kind of woman to get involved with gangsters, and her sister testified that neither of them knew those men.

For years after, there were unconfirmed sightings. A hotel in El Paso, Texas. Northern and Southern California. Phoenix. Mexico City. None of them led anywhere.

Christine

There was one more tragedy in this story.

Less than three weeks after Jean disappeared, her ex-husband was temporarily given custody of Christine. Jean's mother tried to keep seeing her granddaughter. In 1950, when he refused to allow visits and defied a court order, he was sentenced to jail for contempt, and then left California with Christine.

Jean's mother spent years looking for her daughter. And she lost her granddaughter as well.

What we still don't know

As recently as 2017, the Los Angeles Police Department still considered Jean Spangler's case open. Her whereabouts have never been discovered.

What we know for certain is this. A twenty-six-year-old dancer and mother told her family she was going to meet her ex-husband and then work a night shoot. Neither of those things appears to have happened. She was seen alone at the Farmers Market, apparently waiting for someone. She called home and said she would be working all night. And two days later, her torn purse was found at the edge of Griffith Park, with an unfinished note to someone named Kirk about going to see Dr. Scott.

Who was Kirk? Who was Dr. Scott? And where was Jean really going that night?