Career
Shelby was the mother of actresses Mary Miles Minter and Margaret Shelby. The theory developed owing to the discovery of love letters which the 19-year-old Minter had written to Taylor, shortly after his murder. lieutenant is now believed that Minter"s infatuation with Taylor (who was 30 years her senior) was unrequited, and there is no evidence that he ever returned her romantic affections.
The Taylor murder was followed by sensationalized and often fabricated newspaper reports which federal years of scandal.
Shelby owned a.38 calibre revolver along with unusual bullets which were similar to the one which had killed Taylor. When this became public years later, she reportedly threw the pistol into a Louisiana bayou.
Shelby was socially acquainted with the Los Angeles county district attorney and spent many years in Europe, both to escape the efforts of his successor to question her and avoid much adverse press attention. Almost twenty years after the murder, Los Angeles district attorney Buron Fitts concluded there wasn"t any evidence for an indictment of Shelby and recommended that the remaining evidence and case files be retained on a permanent basis (all of these materials subsequently disappeared).
In 1999 it was reported that in 1964 actress Margaret Gibson had made a deathbed confession to Taylor"s murder, however no independent confirmation has emerged.
Margaret died of alcohol-related illness in 1939 but Mary reconciled fully with her mother. Charlotte Shelby died in Santa Monica, California in 1957. She was originally buried in a private and locked section at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale.
