The Strange Death of a Strange Man: Howard Rushmore's supposed 1958 Murder-Suicide
or: the Geopolitical Consequences and Violent Deaths Resultant from One Deferred Movie Review
Another person whom time has somewhat forgotten, Howard Rushmore was a controversial figure in the 40s and 50s. He was a former Communist writer for the Daily Worker who quit in protest in 1939 after being pressured to write an unfavorable review of “Gone With the Wind” even though he liked it. He had offered at the time to write an overall unfavorable review but was instructed the entire review, on every point, had to be unfavorable.
Rushmore had a crisis of conscience where reality was at war with ideology.
In the battle between reality and the abstract, the Party always demanded obedience to the ethereal.
Rushmore’s editor at the Daily Worker who insisted on the negative review was Communist Ben Davis.
Rushmore’s grandmother had lived in Missouri through the end of the Civil War and had told him believable stories as a boy about the war that felt believable to him. He was at war in his head with the memories of his beloved relative and the political necessities of the Party in the moment. He chose to resign rather than write what he did not believe.
That choice, one of peculiar artistic integrity, led him to become an informer on his former fellow Communists. Through the 1940’s, Rushmore informed on a wide variety of individuals. There was a small gaggle of former Communists who made a bit of a political circus about informing the public of the deep state commies planning world revolution from within the government.
But that schtick was hard to sustain. It doesn’t make a living to be an informant or whistleblower after all.
Rushmore was a talented writer, and tried to use his talents. But as many other informants found out the hard way, and Communists exploited adroitly via the smear, every writer has to pass through the gauntlet of credibility regardless of how accurate their writing.
Rushmore was seen as a kook, a lark. I’m not sure how accurate or inaccurate his statements were. He’s an obscure figure and some of the people he’s naming are, similarly, obscure figures, so it’s not as easy as the epochal battle between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, for example.
But even on that point, it’s interesting to note, that Rushmore was the one who first brought Hiss into the limelight.
The Canwell Committee was a state-based investigation in Washington to determine the degree of Communist interference and subversion within the state government. It convened in the summer of 1948.
On July 19, 1948, Howard Rushmore testified in front of the Canwell Committee in Washington State. Here’s what he said relevant to Hiss in the second part:
Now, the timing of things 75 years ago can get lost on moderns, but this was about three weeks before the first public hearing where Whittaker Chambers would accuse Hiss, at first of generally being sympathetic to the Soviet Union.
Alger Hiss had been identified by three key defecting Communists four times previously:
Whittaker Chambers to Asst. Secretary of State Adolf Berle in 1939.
Whittaker Chambers to the FBI in 1942.
Soviet defector Igor Gouzenko to the Canadian government and FBI in September 1945.
Elizabeth Bentley to the FBI in December 1945.
But the difference of course is that none of these settings or situations were public. No one had taken the step of actually informing the public about what was going on. This of course allowed the infiltrating Communists room to maneuver and continue operating.
It’s only when bad facts become public does the government feel compelled to act in order to preserve its legitimacy. When it’s just a small group of officials in-the-know, then they can continue to protect the lies and their preferred outcomes through apathy and inaction. They can use threats and coercion to keep facts from getting to the public.
They just didn’t count on the balls on this guy:
Even Chambers was careful not to initially accuse Alger Hiss of espionage, initially.
On August 3, 1948, Whittaker Chambers told the House Un-American Activities Committee that Hiss was a Communist despite his denials, and that he was engaged in infiltrating the government on behalf of the Communists.
On August 5, 1948, Alger Hiss appeared before HUAC and denied these charges, denying that he ever knew Whittaker Chambers. Later he would say he knew someone 11 years prior named George Crosley who happened to look exactly like Whittaker Chambers and maybe gave him a car and a place to stay, but that he had had dental work done in the meantime so he couldn’t be sure.
On August 17, 1948, Hiss and Chambers confronted one another at another HUAC Congressional hearing where they exchanged barbs.
On August 27, 1948, on the then-radio program “Meet the Press” Chambers accused Hiss of being a Communist. This caused Hiss to sue Chambers for defamation, a case that would ultimately end up with Hiss in Lewisburg Penitentiary for perjury two years later.
Interestingly, before all of this, Rushmore had applied to work at Time Magazine in 1940, when Whittaker Chambers was an editor. Chambers blackballed him because he didn’t want any more Communists on staff.
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that denying a film auteur’s ability to wax poetic about “Gone With the Wind” ultimately contributed to the collapse of the neoliberal post-war consensus and arguably ignited the Cold War.
Sometimes political movements learn things the hard way.
Anyhow, the spectacle of the Hiss-Chambers meltdown, in addition to Richard Nixon ascendancy as temporary Chair of the House Un-American Activities Committee, took the spotlight off of Rushmore. A series of other American Communist defectors, Elizabeth Bentley, Hede Massing, Benjamin Gitlow, Louis Budenz, who came from better and more ensconced positions within the Communist movement, sidelined Rushmore.
Gutride, questioned by the school leadership, within two days committed suicide by putting her head in a gas oven and leaving the two jets operating. I’ve never heard of anyone dying this way, and frankly I don’t believe the official story. This seems the most awkward way to die. From Gutride’s FindaGrave page, it appears it was from carbon monoxide poisoning.
I suppose that’s more plausible, but it still seems unlikely. I’ve never heard of death by personal oven.
Here’s the address that Gutride’s body was found on Christmas 1948:
Rushmore himself talked about the Communist proclivity towards assassination before the Canfield Committee.
The transcript says “Carlos Cresta” but it likely refers to Carlo Tresca, the labor leader who was likely assassinated, possibly by the Mob, possibly by Communists, possibly by the Mob on behalf of the Communists, in 1938.
Getting away from Communist discipline was a risk to the Party, and a risk almost greater than that of a sworn enemy. An insider threat, with knowledge of critical information, was a serious threat to the entire ecosystem the Communist left was operating within.
For a brief period Rushmore worked for Senator Joe McCarthy doing research. Allegedly, Rushmore was the one who introduced infamous Roy Cohn to Senator McCarthy, a claim that Cohn later denied.
Cohn also later claimed that their relationship soured when he loaned $500 to Rushmore and not only did he refuse to pay the debt, but also ghosted him repeatedly when Cohn asked about it.
In the early 1950s, he was the Editor of “Confidential” magazine, probably between 1954-1955, which was a tabloid-style publication in existence from 1952-1978. I’m trying to pin down the dates of his involvement with a little more precision, but like many periodicals of the past, their archives are not digitized or otherwise easily accessible. It doesn’t make it any easier that Rushmore apparently used pen names for some articles in the publication.
There are three books within the past 15 years about Confidential, I have yet to check them out.
Quite a few of the issues are available on EBay. In the spare time and money I don’t have, I have considered building an archive of the publication.
It’s primarily a gossip rag about celebrities, though, so its actual interest to me is limited to its occasional forays into politics and communism.
In 1955 there’s an odd incident where Rushmore claims to have known the person quietly directing American Communists. Rushmore then disappeared and was presumed kidnapped, but then later reappeared. I haven’t dug into this claim fully, but I suspect it’s a case where the left-wing media writes the most fanciful narrative frames that are hard to unpack. It’s a layering process to take apart what bogus narratives the left foists upon its readers. It’s a moment that the left uses to delegitimize Rushmore though, and it could all be true, but it’s certainly odd.
By 1957, Rushmore was testifying against Confidential in court as a witness for then-District Attorney Pat Brown in California. It looks as though he had a bit of a falling out with his former Confidential Publisher, Robert Harrison.
Here’s part two of that story.
So the California criminal libel trial is in August of 1957. The Prosecutor is Pat Brown, future California Governor. His son, Jerry Brown, is the later four-term California Governor.
I particularly liked this exchange from Rushmore, highlighted in this article.
I, too, intend to injure The Communists.
This pithy statement, and an associated image below, pretty well sums up the entirety of my personal political beliefs:
Anyhow.
The criminal libel case against Confidential Magazine ended on a mistrial on October 1, 1957.
Rushmore would be dead 94 days later.
The official story is that, right after the new year in New York City, an alcoholic Howard Rushmore was having a fight with his wife Francesca, about her leaving on an international flight and trip soon. Then when they were in the taxi together, Rushmore shot her in the head and then shot himself, a murder-suicide.
Francesca’s daughter from a prior marriage, Jean Dobbins, said that the two had been quarreling for the prior 18 months and were under the care of a psychiatrist. Allegedly, Rushmore had chased people out of his townhouse with a shotgun a few days prior. Part of that seems like a premonition, but another part seems pretty convenient.
I’m always a little skeptical of claims that are primarily hearsay and psychological dissections in death. “Oh I knew he was crazy all along!” is easy to say when there’s a dead body.
There were plenty of little ‘baby smears’ spread about Rushmore even in death. It was shared that the police found a lot of pornography/erotica in his apartment, along with a great deal of guns. Turns out a ‘lot’ of guns is the number seven. For a guy that writes for a gun magazine, that seems like a shockingly small number. But these are all great smears that no one can counter, since the subject is dead after all.
In any case, anti-Communists can be bad people, they can do bad things, domestic violence situations obviously transcends politics or ideology. But I have to say I’ve never heard of a murder-suicide in a taxicab before.
I’ve also never known dead people to move their arms.
If you compare the Getty photo on the right and reprinted in the center, used by most publications, in its original state you can compare it to the way it was slightly retouched for the press in the center. They shaded some of the dress to hide the dead wife Francesca’s legs.
But comparing it to the second photo from Getty on the far left, apparently coming from the New York Daily News Archive, there are several inconsistencies beyond just the moving arm.
Here are the things I notice between the two images:
Blood pools on the floor look unnatural. Yet the seat looks clean if it was pooling off.
The hat appears to be slightly moved.
There’s a blood pool on the floor in the published photo, to the right of the hat, that doesn’t exist in the photos at all.
Rushmore’s hand and arm have clearly been moved.
Rushmore’s head seems to have been slightly moved.
The woman’s legs seem in an unnatural position for a dead body. They are almost suspended in mid-air, as though the muscles are still operating and flexing to keep her stuck in that odd pose.
The bullet hole visible in the upper right of the photograph on the chassis of the vehicle also seems poorly placed and not quite lining up for a passenger shooting another passenger.
The blood coming out of the bullet wound on his head is going up, against gravity. It apparently dried and then he slumped over? The blood pattern on the top of Rushmore’s head doesn’t match the cabbie’s story.
If the police had taken the gun from his clenched hand, the fingers would not be neatly curled and at a consistent length as they appear in the photographs.
The number of shots and the placement of the bullets changes in various news accounts. This might be sloppy reporting, or it might be an inconsistent story.
Oddly, the car exit bullet hole changes between the two Getty photos.
Again I can hear the fact-check-industrial-complex in my head already: “maybe the police probed the bullet hole and changed its shape!”
Now, I think a lot of this is conjecture, sure. It’s a lot of smoke, but there’s no fire. So let me bring your attention back to the supposed exit wound on Rushmore’s head. The one where the police say he self-inflicted by virtue of a .32 Colt put to his own right temple.
In this photo, you can see that the blood is running the wrong direction. It’s going against gravity, at about a 2:00 O’Clock angle. In fact, it even runs due north for an inch, and then goes for two o’clock.
Now compare to the other photo, focused again on Rushmore’s head.
Someone noticed the inconsistent blood trail on the top of his head. They rubbed the blood away. You can tell because they messed up his neatly combed hair in the process. The blood is spread all around his head. His hair, previously straight, is now curled in a way where someone rubbed it in circles.
Do dead people muss their own hair?
We know someone was in there moving his dead hand around. Who else could it be? What would their motive possibly be to mess up his hair and rub his head?
The cops were in on this, and there was a cover-up to conceal the way in which Rushmore died.
If you want to keep making cop excuses, you could say they were probing for the bullet hole, or that they were trying to stop the bleeding. Modern sophistry knows no limits. The Occam’s Razor here is not that they wanted to tussle with Rushmore’s bald hairdo, but that they were aware the blood trails in the photo did not match the placement of the bodies.
If I were to posit an alternative theory, I would say the cab driver drove up to a shooter, and the shooter shot through the front passenger window. Perhaps the shooter reached in and the gun was close. That accounts for the angle of the shot going through the back of the cab, and best protects the driver from being hit. The woman’s legs in the air would be the frantic and panicked action trying to both get out of the vehicle but also to try and stop the shots from being absorbed by the victims. The shooter then dropped the gun on the floor. The bodies were posed for pictures for the press. The cab driver had a coherent story that matched the situation, the police didn’t ask questions, everything was open and shut.
Contained in a cab is a great mobile crime scene. It’s self-contained, there are going to be few witnesses, it’s simple. Driving directly to the police station is a great alibi, it helps create the confirmation bias in the responding police officer.
That may all be complete fantasy, but it seems to fit the situation and photos a little better.
Another non-conspiracy theory would be that they checked for a pulse from the body and that accounts for the moving hand and arm. A little police carelessness. The bodies still seem oddly placed, but crime scenes aren’t cookie cutter.
I’ve tried before to get NYPD police reports, and most were trashed from 1970 or so and older. It’s a shame, but the files are probably lost. A few news stories mention that the wife was shot in the head and neck, and that he shot himself in the right temple.
Yet you’ll notice the clear dark spot on the top of his head. It’s hard to angle that bullet if it entered your right temple. The exit wound of a .32 Colt wouldn’t necessarily be larger than this. The police also told the news that the gun was found in his right hand, but that does not appear to be true from the photographs.
Now I suppose if you want to keep making cop excuses, you could say that it fell onto the floor, or that it had already been ‘secured’ by the police so that the dead body didn’t start shooting people before the media arrived. There are excuses here, but there are also details that don’t line up.
Prominent controversial person dies violently with only one witness. When there’s an obvious motive, why run to long-tail excuses and equivocations? There’s plenty of problems with this crime scene.
The NYPD Homicide Detective assigned to the case was Joseph Basteri, who later shows up on one of my favorite shows of all-time, Unsolved Mysteries, in a segment about the “Son of Sam” killings, decades later.
The taxicab driver’s name was Edward Pearlman, aged 37 in 1958. That provides a birth year of somewhere around 1921. He operated taxicab number 019637 and lived at 2396 Morris Ave. in the Bronx, New York.
Pearlman said he picked up the couple at 97th and Madison Ave.
Rushmore demanded to ride with Francesca and pushed his way into the cab.
The shooting happened around 102nd and Lexington, about seven blocks into the trip, according to Pearlman, around 7:05PM.
The wife was demanding to be taken to the 104th Street Police Precinct, two and a half blocks away, at 177 E 104th St. - it’s now the 28th Police Precinct.
Because the streets have been re-directioned in the decades since, the driving directions are a little confused, but you get the general idea. This was a very short trip.
According to taxicab driver Pearlman, it all happened fast.
This news report says that five shots were heard by Pearlman, a detail in conflict with other news reports. This report says three shots hit the wife, one missed, and the other was Rushmore’s fatal shot.
Later the cops said three shots.
There are seven potential names for Edward Pearlman on FindaGrave, but none line up to the birthyear. There is a 1920 “Edward Pearlman” born in the New York area, which might be him. There’s one Census record at age 5, and seven potential graves. Having done a decent amount of research on obscure folks, this is an extreme paucity of records. There should be a lot more. I’m not sure what this means, if anything.
Communists were known for using fake names, and one notorious Soviet killer George Mink, was a taxicab man in Philly and organized cab drivers around the country. It might be nothing.
But Rushmore definitely hit assassination motive bingo. He managed to offend International Communism, Hollywood Elites, American Political Elites, most of the mainstream media, the magazine industry, his own Publisher of Confidential. The guy had almost every power vector possible coming at him. Confidential apparently paid off NYPD elites to get information and check sources, so after his departure he potentially had the police angry at him for potentially exposing their bribes.
People with every major power base angry at them, tend to end up dead.
Interestingly one of the key celebrities mentioned in the California criminal libel trial was Clark Gable. Gable was accused by Confidential of having an affair with Francesca de Scaffa. De Scaffa was doing so to get stories for Confidential magazine.
Prominent anti-Communist George Sokolsky quickly disavowed Rushmore, referring to him as a ‘troubled man’ in a widely-published column. An outlet that Rushmore used to write for, the New York Journal-American, ran a two-part series called “Confidentially Rushmore” that appears to be another posthumous hit-job and smear. The Journal-American is another publication whose archives are rather difficult to access remotely, having gone defunct in 1966.
Jan 5, 1958 - “Confidentially Rushmore” - by Theo Wilson - pt1 (p29), pt2 (p41)
Jan 6, 1958 - “Confidentially Rushmore” - by Theo Wilson - pt1 (p2), pt2 (p28)
The townhouse at 16 E. 93rd Street that Rushmore was living in at the time of their deaths looks to be the same style as it was before. Here’s a picture from Google Street View of their townhouse close to Central Park, with two guys eating lunch on the stoop:
Rushmore’s body lay unclaimed for several days. His ex-wife Ruth claimed it after his 19 year old stepdaughter publicly expressed reluctance to do so, cremated Rushmore, and that was the end of the story and all that anyone apparently looked into the matter.