Screenwriter Robert Lees was best known for his collaborations with the legendary comedy team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in the 1940s and ‘50s. Along with his writing partner, Frederic I. Rinaldo, Lees wrote seven films for the duo, starting with the 1941 scare comedy Hold That Ghost. He also helped pen two of Abbott and Costello’s famous crossovers with the Universal Monsters: 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and 1951’s Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man. Here’s a clip from Meet Frankenstein, one of the most popular films Lees was ever involved with:
Lees’s career came to a screeching halt when his name ended up on the Hollywood blacklist in 1951. He refused to answer the House Un-American Activities Committee’s questions about communism and was forced to write under a pen name from that point forward. Lees retired in 1983, but surfaced years later to protest the Academy Awards for giving an honorary Oscar to director Elia Kazan, who’d named names during the blacklist era. A few years after that, Lees would turn up in the news again for a much darker reason.
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On the morning of June 13, 2004, LAPD detectives discovered the body of Dr. Morley Engelson in his Hollywood home. Somewhere nearby was the decapitated head of a then-unidentified man. A Southwest Airlines ticket agent had been on the phone with Engelson and heard a commotion just before the line went dead. A headless corpse in his next-door neighbor’s house was later identified as that of Robert Lees. The retired screenwriter was 91 years old.
Police quickly arrested a homeless ex-Marine by the name of Keven Lee Graff that afternoon; he eventually confessed to murdering the two men without motive. Graff, who was found carrying a Bible and a can of Mace, broke into Lees’s house during the early morning hours and beheaded him with a cleaver. He then carried the head with him next door, where he stabbed Engelson to death. Graff’s lawyer described his client as “very, very mentally ill” right before he was sentenced to life in prison for his crimes in 2008.
