Greystone Mansion: The Night of February Sixteenth

Edward L. Doheny Sr. struck oil in Los Angeles in eighteen ninety-two, drilling in his backyard with a tool made from a pipe and a sharpened eucalyptus trunk. By nineteen twenty, he was one of the wealthiest men in California.

In nineteen twenty-eight, he built his son Ned the most expensive private home in California: a fifty-five-room Tudor Revival mansion on five acres in Beverly Hills. The family called it Greystone.

The elder Doheny was at the center of the Teapot Dome scandal, the most significant corruption case in American history to that point. Interior Secretary Albert Fall had accepted bribes from oil executives to lease federal oil reserves. Doheny was one of those executives. His son Ned had personally carried one hundred thousand dollars in cash to Secretary Fall in a black bag.

On the night of February sixteenth, nineteen twenty-nine, Ned Doheny Jr. and his personal secretary Hugh Plunkett were found dead at Greystone. Both had been shot. The official finding was murder-suicide: Plunkett had shot Ned, then himself. No criminal investigation was opened. The finding was accepted without the scrutiny such an event would normally receive, in a case involving a family at the center of an ongoing federal corruption trial.

What actually happened that night at Greystone has not been established. The evidence was not collected. The mansion is open for picnics now.