Cheryl Crane

Cheryl Crane (born July 25, 1943) is the daughter of the actress Lana Turner and her second husband, actor-restaurateur Stephen Crane (who Lana married twice).

At the age of 14, on April 4, 1958, Cheryl stabbed her mother's gangster boyfriend Johnny Stompanato to death. This was ruled a justifiable homicide: she was deemed to have been protecting her mother. Stompanato was well known to have been abusive, extremely jealous of Turner, and had previously pointed a gun at actor Sean Connery, her costar in Another Time, Another Place, only to have Connery take the gun from him, beat him, and force him from the movie set.

Following Stompanato's death, Crane was made a ward of the State of California and sent to a home for problem girls, from which she escaped in 1960. She was recaptured and then released in 1961. In 1969, Crane was detained by the Los Angeles police when three half-grown cannabis plants were discovered in the back seat of her car.

Years later, Cheryl publicly revealed her lesbianism to her mother, who accepted the news well. She said she regarded Cheryl's girlfriend Jocelyn "Josh" LeRoy "as a second daughter".

In her autobiography Detour: a Hollywood Tragedy - My Life With Lana Turner, My Mother (1988) Crane discussed the Stompanato killing publicly for the first time, and admitted to the stabbing. She further alleged that she was subject to a series of sexual assaults at the hands of her mother's fourth husband, actor Lex Barker.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1998 and underwent a mastectomy and was treated with radiation and chemotherapy. She has since been in remission.

She currently lives in the Palm Springs, California area, where she works as a real-estate agent with her partner of thirty-seven years, Jocelyn "Josh" LeRoy.

Bibliographic References

• Lamparski, R. (1970) Whatever Became Of...?, Ace Books, New York.

In-Citations

External links

• The Death of Johnny Stompanato at The Crime Library