Ned Doheny, the only heir to one of the world's richest oil baron was found shot to death next to his childhood friend and secretary Hugh Plunkett in 1929. Investigators at the time ruled it a murder-suicide. But to this day, the crime is a source of rumor and speculation. Was it a muder-suicide or just made to look that way? Or was it tied to a bigger scandal involving millions of dollars, government contracts and bribery of a cabinet member. Conspiracy Theories is on Instagram @theconspiracypod and TikTok @conspiracy.pod! Follow us to keep up with the show and get behind-the-scenes updates from Carter and the team. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What happened on the night of February 16th, 1929?
Due to the nature of today's story, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of murder and suicide. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. To get help on mental health and suicide, visit Spotify.com resources. The night of February 16th, 1929 was cool and cloudy. The mountains around Los Angeles were nearly uninhabited.
The Hollywood sign cut through the trees, but at the time it read Hollywood Land, advertising a local real estate development. The city was growing fast in the suburban lowlands, but if anyone looked up at the hillsides, they'd see huge washes of chaparral and sagebrush, A little to the west lay a cluster of mansions. Beverly Hills. And one of these grand houses especially stuck out.
It loomed over Sunset Boulevard, looking more like a medieval fortress than a breezy California estate. It was angular, old-fashioned, and elegant, with walls covered in smoky limestone. That's how it earned its name. Greystone. Greystone. On some nights, the mansion's glowing windows could be seen for miles. It was only natural for Angelenos to wonder what was going on inside.
Of course, they all knew who resided there. Ned Doheny, the son of the city's most prominent oil baron. But hardly anyone could imagine how someone like that lived. And no one who glanced up at Greystone that night would have guessed that Ned Doheny was dead. Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. New episodes come out every Wednesday.
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I'm standing here with Joe Loya. Over 14 months, Joe robbed so many banks, he lost count.
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Chapter 2: Who were Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett?
Some of Pan American Petroleum's wells had gone from gushers to tricklers if they were producing oil at all. Edward knew that global demand was rising, but he worried his supply couldn't keep pace. But he also knew there were large, untapped oil deposits under certain swaths of federal land. These were earmarked as reserves for the U.S.
Navy, but Edward and his fellow oil barons saw them as a potential source of profit. Luckily, Edwards' friend Albert just happened to control these naval reserves. And after a prolonged battle with conservationists, he'd convinced the federal government to lease them out to private companies. Companies like Pan American.
It was under these circumstances that Ned and Hugh paid Albert a visit in November 1921. Their brief meeting ended with Albert walking away $100,000 richer. In later years, both Albert and Edward would claim that this money was simply a personal loan between friends. Albert even gave Ned a promissory note, which showed he intended to pay the money back.
But there are some other factors to consider, like the fact that Albert never actually fulfilled this promise, or that he gave Edward the lease to two of the naval reserves in Elk Hills, California, just a few months later. When those facts come into play, this meeting between Ned, Hugh, and Albert looks a bit like a bribe.
They might have gotten away with it, though, if Albert didn't lease another one of the naval reserves to a different oil man named Harry Sinclair. While Pan American got access to the land in California, Sinclair's company was allowed to drill on a piece of land that's now considered infamous. Teapot Dome, Wyoming.
In April 1922, Harry Sinclair and Edward Doheny's oil companies were given exclusive drilling rights on federal land. But within a few weeks, the word got out. People started questioning how these oil tycoons secured the land and why other companies weren't given the opportunity to submit competitive bids. Before long, the U.S.
Senate launched a formal inquiry into Teapot Dome, along with Edwards' lease in Elk Hills. The whole thing stank of corruption, and it looked like Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall was at the center of it. He denied any wrongdoing, but still he resigned in March of 1923.
In the eyes of investigators, this seemed like a tacit admission of guilt, giving them even more reason to look into his deals with Edward Doheny and Harry Sinclair. In August of 1923, the Senate investigators found evidence that at the very least, Sinclair had bribed Albert. According to a reporter in New Mexico,
Albert was deep in debt, with 10 years in unpaid property taxes, when Sinclair paid him a visit in the winter of 1921. After Sinclair left, Albert's financial status went through a marvelous transformation. He paid the back taxes on his ranch, bought another piece of land, and spent at least $40,000 on home improvements. Clearly he'd gotten a windfall while Harry Sinclair was staying with him.
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Chapter 3: What was the Teapot Dome scandal?
Chapter 4: How did Ned and Hugh's relationship evolve over time?
The floor plan laid out 55 rooms at over 46,000 square feet, with a private movie theater, a speakeasy-style bar, and a two-lane bowling alley. There was a custom wine cellar, a walk-in fur closet, and a room just for wrapping gifts. But the mansion was just the beginning. Multiple outbuildings were planned. The Dohenys wanted their own fire station and a garage complete with a mechanics shop.
And Hugh had to coordinate all of it. Needless to say, he was overwhelmed. But he knew he couldn't say no to the Dohenys, especially now. December 1926 brought a small victory for the family. Edward was ruled not guilty of conspiracy, but his impending trial for bribery was more of a problem because that implicated Ned, too.
Hugh was also nervous for that trial, certain he would be called to testify. For the next 18 months, Hugh immersed himself in Greystone's construction. He spent all his time there, even moving out of his family home to live in an apartment closer to the building site. And then, in April of 1928, his boss and friend Ned was ordered to appear in Harry Sinclair's criminal trial for conspiracy.
Federal prosecutors wanted Ned to testify about the $100,000 he'd given Albert Bacon Fall. This was an issue. If Ned described the transaction to the court, he would essentially be admitting to bribery. Because his own trial was still on the horizon, his lawyers pleaded the fifth.
The federal prosecutors were desperate to secure a conviction against Sinclair, and they thought Ned's testimony could increase their odds, so they offered him a deal. If Ned participated in the case against Sinclair, they would drop his bribery charges. Ned's legal team accepted the offer.
He took the stand in Sinclair's trial and told the jury about his meeting with Albert to show that Albert was open to taking bribes. Despite this testimony, the jury wasn't swayed. They acquitted Harry Sinclair of conspiracy charges on April 21st, 1928. This caused a nationwide uproar, but two trials still remained. The first was Albert's for accepting a bribe.
The second was Edward's for offering it. Hugh was certain that he and Ned would be called to speak against Albert. If either of them admitted to delivering the cash, they could be sent to jail. Or rather, Hugh could be sent to jail. Ned had immunity now, which gave him more of an incentive to tell the truth. Hugh knew that he would have to bear the consequences.
Still, the loyal secretary couldn't give up on Greystone. He pushed himself harder than ever throughout the summer of 1928 and finished up construction in September. Ned and Lucy were delighted by their new home, but Ned was worried about Hugh. According to later statements, Hugh wasn't sleeping regularly. He developed reliance on prescription pills and seemed more nervous with each passing day.
He'd spent so much time working on the mansion, his wife officially divorced him, claiming that he'd deserted her. The Doheny family physician, Dr. Ernest Clyde Fishbaugh, later said that Hugh developed a painful issue with his jaw and began to suffer from tremors. He fainted at the family's Christmas Eve gathering and was ordered to stay in a guest room at Greystone for his own safety.
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Chapter 5: What role did bribery play in Ned Doheny's life?
He tightened his robe, put on his slippers, and offered to talk with Hugh in the guest bedroom downstairs. The men stayed in the room for about an hour and a half. Then Lucy heard a bang. She didn't think anything of it at first and assumed someone was moving around furniture. But a few seconds later, there was a knock at the door. It was Dr. Fishbaugh.
He said he'd been at the theater that evening, but was pulled away to respond to a phone call around 10.30. Ned wanted him to come to Greystone as soon as possible. The doctor didn't know what it was about, but he could only assume it had something to do with Hugh. Lucy led him down to the guest room. The door was hanging open. Just then, Hugh leapt out into the hallway.
He glared and told them to stay out. Then he slammed the door shut. There was another bang. This time, it did not sound like furniture. It was a gunshot. When the doctor finally pushed the door open, both Ned and Hugh were bleeding out on the floor. As far as Fishbaugh could tell, Hugh must have fired the first shot as the doctor arrived around 11 p.m.
That was the one that Lucy mistook for falling furniture. That meant Ned had already been shot when Hugh yelled at the doctor. After closing the door, Hugh must have shot himself. It was an engaging story, for sure. But Detective White wasn't certain he could trust it. If the shooting occurred at 11, he didn't understand why he wasn't called till 2 a.m.,
Dr. Fishbaugh's arrival appeared to be a little too perfectly timed, and the servants' stories seemed a little too rehearsed. They all emphasized the same details, and none of them said they were alarmed by the first gunshot, which seemed odd. The gun under Hugh's body was much warmer than it should have been.
It had been fired more than three hours earlier, but it felt like it had been sitting in an oven. Then there were those burns. Hugh died with a lit cigarette next to his left hand. If Dr. Fishbaugh and the rest of the staff were to be believed... That meant he lit a cigarette and held it with one hand while shooting Ned, slamming the bedroom door and shooting himself with the other.
It seemed preposterous. Before he left Greystone, Chief Investigator Lucian Wheeler pulled White aside and told him to take another look at the bodies once they got to the morgue. It seemed like the Dohenys were hiding something, but the detectives couldn't be sure what. Around 5 a.m., Detective White went to the Beverly Hills Mortuary.
Finally, he could take a good look at the bodies without any staff or dohinis breathing down his neck. He started with gunshot wounds. It looked like the bullet had ripped through one side of Ned's head and then exited the other. But when White leaned in to get a better look at the entry wound, he noticed something strange. There were powder burns near his ear.
That meant Ned was shot at close range, very close range. The gun was probably held less than three inches from his temple. Based on the witnesses' stories, White had expected Hugh to be the one with powder burns. He was the one who supposedly held the gun to his own head. Then the detective checked Hugh's bullet wounds.
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Chapter 6: What were the consequences of the Teapot Dome scandal for the Dohenys?
Both of them were about to become key witnesses in Albert and Edward's trials. Ned had been granted immunity in these trials, and Hugh hadn't. This disparity probably ratcheted up the tension between the two men. If Dr. Fishbaugh is to be believed, it might have affected Hugh's mental health as well. But as the years went on, researchers began to call that narrative into question too.
In Richard Raynor's book, A Bright and Guilty Place, he points out that all the information about Hugh's alleged instability came from Fishbaugh and Doheny family insiders. Other friends and relatives actually said Hugh was fine in the months leading up to his death. The upcoming trials were incredibly stressful, but he was far from the raging madman the Doheny family circles portrayed him to be.
These theories didn't make it into the mainstream, though. Most people seemed to accept the murder-suicide theory and wrote it off as a singular tragedy. After both men were buried, the Dohenys did their best to retreat from public life. But they couldn't stay out of the headlines for long. The Teapot Dome trials resumed less than two months after the shooting in April of 1929.
Edward was called to testify at Albert's bribery trial on October 7th of that year. He tried to convince the court that, as he'd been saying, he loaned his friend $100,000 for personal reasons and that Albert didn't have any criminal intent in taking the money. But the jury didn't seem to buy his arguments. On October 24th, 1929, Albert Bacon Fall was found guilty of accepting a bribe.
Edward's trial was up next, and as the man who offered the alleged bribe, his chances didn't look good. When he took the stand in March of 1930, he repeated the same arguments he'd been using for years, but his voice caught on his throat when he spoke about Ned. These emotional displays were probably unintentional, but they did buy Edward some sympathy.
On March 22nd, he was found not guilty of bribery, even though Albert was already in jail. In the years since, the Doheny family remain tight-lipped about Ned and Hugh's deaths, and historians have been hard-pressed to find any more information in Edward's personal papers or diaries because his wife is said to have burned them right after his funeral.
This has turned the deaths of Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett into a bit of a black box. They've been labeled as solved since 1929, but so much evidence calls that into question. And plenty of alternative theories have shown up in the years since. Some have said that Hugh was blackmailing Ned. Others wondered if a third person was in the room and shot both of them.
Many have speculated that Ned and Hugh were romantically involved. A few have even wondered if Ned's wife pulled the trigger. But there's one theory that shows up more than any other. It has to do with where Ned and Hugh were buried. It wasn't fully appreciated until Edward was in the ground, too.
The young men's graves were placed just a few feet from each other at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. The Dohenys bought Ned a huge mausoleum that had been shipped over from Italy, but left his sarcophagus unmarked. Hugh's gravestone was much smaller. Its placement seemed intentional, though. It's a bit unusual to bury a murderer and his victim that close together.
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