Beverly Hills, CA—Last night they found a Mercedes-Benz E-350 crashed into a light pole on Whittier Drive, just south of Sunset Boulevard just after midnight.Inside the car was well-known Hollywood publicist, Ronni Chasen, 64 who was well-ventilated with five gunshot wounds. They pronounced Chasen dead on arrival at the nearby Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Cedars-Sinai is the last stop for so many of Hollywood's rich and famous.
Police say they’re looking for a motive but they’ve confessed anything is possible. Was it road rage perhaps? Somehow this looks to me like a targeted act of revenge.
Somewhere in Chasen’s background is a sour business deal, a failed relationship or someone with a career destroyed by bad publicity. You can bet the Beverly Hills cops are going through all of Chasens’s files and computers at this hour. They will be paying very close attention to her client list.
It was not even a year ago when Chasen named senior VP of worldwide publicity at MGM. MGM was in the news recently involving the filing of a bankruptcy petition.
It’s the publicists in Hollywood that know all the dirty secrets. The publicists must be kept well-informed so they can quickly move to defuse those nasty scandals involving their clients.
To get to the bottom of this case police need to get to the bottom of just who this woman was and who she pissed off. These kinds of cases usually end quickly in an arrest.
I suspect whoever gets put in the courtroom defendant’s chair will have some a top- drawer legal and investigative team to challenge the case brought by the cops and prosecutors. STAY TUNED!
Sitting here in the hotel in Northridge, a Los Angeles 'burb, and watching the morning news on KCBS, I am truly amazed at the number of new shooting incidents reported each day. Greater Los Angeles is an astonishingly dangerous place.
ReplyDelete"14 year-old boy shot (through a window) while sitting in his living room" is one of, but not the only, shooting-related story today.
Later this morning I'll drive a couple of miles up Sepulveda for meetings with a customer who doesn't permit firearms on their property so I'll leave it in the trunk of the car.
But the rest of the time in this dangerous city ...
Who knows who killed this woman. People do kill in California for the pure fun of it.
ReplyDeleteSo the question in this case is - was this a random murder, or not?
And as per usual with human mentality we have proclamations now that that the victim has a dark side.
The press said that about Sharon Tate and those close to her, although it was NOT true.
People love to victimize the victim who is already dead and so cannot defend her reputation. People love to blame victims for their own death, that way people justify it won't happen to them because they are such good people with no dark side, and bad things don't happen to good people.
Sorry this kinda thinking is B.S.
I think it is best to hold back on demonizing a victim of murder - until more facts are uncovered and are solid and undisputed...
In life, Chasen was surrounded by Hollywood glamour; in death, she takes her final resting place at Hillside.
ReplyDeleteBut it remains uncertain whether Chasen’s story will have a Hollywood ending.
Chasen’s colleague, Michael Levine, said. He, like most of the publicist’s inner circle, is dismissive of any murder plot.
“Life is short, and life is unpredictable, and this is extremely unsettling. So we seek explanation, we seek order, when sometimes, there isn’t.”
Yes, somebody did victimize the victim in a very big way, with a gun! As a long time investigator of real crimes it’s both rare and unusual that the victims of murder are not close to their killers. There is a lot of truth in that song, You Always Hurt The One You Love.
ReplyDeleteI will dismiss potential suspects of this crime when I see their alibis. This is a case I’m convinced will be solved in short order.
It is not wise for any investigator of real crimes to discount the possibility of a random act of murder. This may or may not be what happened in Ronni Chasen's case, but it is one theory that should not be discounted, right off the bat.
ReplyDeletePrisons are littered with innocent people who did not commit murder because when there is a murder, there is a tendency for someone to have to pay for that murder, and that someone who knows the victim might very well be the wrong person.
A good illustration of how the wrong person can be chosen, was shown in the first part of Shawshank Redemption, and even though a fiction, sometimes truth can be stranger than fiction. And we know the courts and juries are not accurate or always fair, as in Phil Spector's murder case.
As a victim of a real and random crime I have experienced a real crime and the false tracks of the investigators, & it is cruel and unusual punishment to associate me with the attacker, when the association does not hold true, since I have experienced a random attack in a Mercedes on Sunset Blvd where I did not know my assailants, or vice-versa, and they had no reason to do this apart from wanting cash and for their "pleasure"
If the investigator strikes off the list the idea of a random attack at the outset - this can produce a false trail, blaming the victim for being attacked through the investigator - who was not there - imagining the victim's association with known attackers or imagining a retaliation for the victim's past dirty deeds, and
if the victim of a felonious attack on Sunset is still alive as I am, investigators who impose this association with my attackers on me- is in essence re-victimizing me - the victim - as I don't want to be associated with the people that kidnapped, robbed me with two guns and a knife, and who may have murdered me, because these people were strangers!!!
It has been proposed that one cause of victim-blaming is the "just-world phenomenon". People who believe that the world has to be fair may find it hard or impossible to accept a situation in which a person is unfairly and badly hurt. This leads to a sense that, somehow, the victim, in this case Ronni Chasen must have surely done 'something' to deserve their fate. Another theory entails the need to protect one's own sense of invulnerability. This inspires people to believe that rape only happens to those who deserve or provoke the assault (Schneider et al., 1994). This is a way of feeling safer. If the potential victim avoids the behaviors of the past victims then they themselves will remain safe and feel less vulnerable.
▪ Lerner, Melvin J. The Belief in a Just World A Fundamental Delusion (Perspectives in Social Psychology) (1980)
Lerner, M. and Simmons, C.H. (1966). Observer’s Reaction to the "Innocent Victim": Compassion or Rejection? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4, v. 2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_phenomenon
Random crimes do happen but they are rare. Investigators always begin with obvious leads. The search begins with those closest to the victim. Real evidence not theory should guide investigators. That real evidence is often in plain sight.
ReplyDeleteThis murder will be solved as the Beverly Hills Police get their case ready for prosecutors. This has no signs of a random crime, this woman was stalked and killed and police already know the motive.
I agree that real evidence should guide investigators, but what if there is no real evidence. Is it forbidden for an investigator to have a theory?
ReplyDeleteAnd what is real evidence anyway?
Real evidence to County of Los Angeles Judge Larry Fidler and his juries - was a bunch of old girl friends, none of whom were a witness to who pulled the trigger of the gun in Lana Clarkson's case.
These old girlfriends led the jury to believe that Phil Spector had a motive to kill Lana Clarkson, even though he did not know her, and had just met her, solely because she wanted to leave his house.
Real evidence to County of Los Angeles Judge Larry Fidler and the County of Los Angeles prosecutors was a star witness who had not witnessed the shooting who was not entitled to work in U.S.A., but who was paid a US. residency for his testimony against Phil Spector.
And what about the "real" forensic evidence in Phil Spector's case. It was discounted.
It is true that real evidence may often be in plain sight, but sometimes that real evidence may have been tampered with to throw off the lead, as in Roman Polanski's extradition papers, which omitted former County of Los Angeles prosecutor Roger Gunson's testimony concerning that Roman Polanski had already served his time.
You say the police already know the motive for the killing of Ronnie Chasen, but a motive does not absolutely guarantee that someone acted on that motive. It still could be a random killing.
Many have a motive to kill their nearest and dearest but never act on it, as illustrated in the Shawshank Redemption the Tim Robbins character had a motive to kill his wife but did not act on it. He was convicted because he had a real motive to kill, and the real evidence that would have cleared his name - a gun -he threw into the river. Yes I know this is a fiction, but surely similar things happen in real life.
If you are looking for the truth, it can be hard to find, because certain people for their own purposes want to distort the real evidence and cover it up, whether those people be members of the general public, or police, prosecutors and Judges, and in this way people are easily framed.