Courtesy | Buddy Moorehouse
Just another cold case? A robbery gone wrong? After almost 40 years, Hillsdale video storytelling instructor and documentary filmmaker Buddy Moorehouse has uncovered the mystery of movie actress Jenny Maxwell’s death.
Two years ago, Buddy Moorehouse, who teaches a course on video storytelling through the Dow Journalism Program, decided to seek answers about the death of the Hollywood star, who was also his mother’s first cousin. He told the story in his new book “Murder of an Elvis Girl,” released through Amazon earlier this year.
Moorehouse said writing a book was outside his comfort zone.
“I am a documentary filmmaker, and I was a newspaper editor and reporter for about 27 years, so I was used to telling stories, but I’d never written a book before,” he said. “It was so different from anything I’d ever done in my life.”
Moorehouse said he was accustomed to the exact quotes and quick turnaround time of the news writing he had done before becoming a documentary filmmaker. Bringing Maxwell’s story to life required almost two years of meticulous research as well as imagining what research couldn’t reveal — Maxwell’s thoughts, feelings, and conversations.
Moorehouse said his mother, who was six years older than Maxwell, was very close to her cousin’s family.
“In the summer, my mom would take the train from Chicago out to Brooklyn, and she would babysit them,” Moorehouse said.
When Jenny was only 16 years old, she was discovered by a Hollywood director, he said.
“She went off to Hollywood, and became a star,” he said.
While Maxwell’s family continued to live in Brooklyn, she stayed in Los Angeles and acted in movies and TV shows, most famously the 1961 movie “Blue Hawaii” with Elvis Presley.
“The problem was she was not ready for it at all,” Moorehouse added. “She was not ready for the stardom and the fame that came with it, because she was so young.”
When Maxwell was still a teenager she became a wife and a mother.
“She loved her son,” Moorehouse said, “but she was very neglectful.”
When she was 26, she lost custody of her son and quit Hollywood in an attempt to regain him, which was successsful.
A few years later Maxwell married Tip Roeder, a divorce lawyer from Los Angeles.
“It was a horrible, awful relationship,” Moorehouse said.
After 10 years, Maxwell filed for a divorce.
The next year, on June 10, 1981, both Maxwell and Roeder were “gunned down and murdered,” according to Moorehouse. The killing was reported as most likely being a botched robbery.
Almost 40 years later, Moorehouse’s mother, who had been devastated by her cousin’s death, was in failing health. Moorehouse decided it was time to find some answers.
He eventually tracked down Mike Thies, the detective who investigated the case back in 1981. Moorehouse said he met Thies at a coffee shop “just a block away from the murder scene.”
“I asked him if he remembered the case and if they ever had any leads,” Moorehouse said. “He said, ‘Oh yeah, I remember really well, but, in fact, we actually solved that case about 10 days after it happened. It’s just never been reported.’”
“He was able to tell me what happened,” Moorehouse said, “and I was able to tell my mom and the rest of my family. My mom passed away a few weeks later, but she was at least able to get some closure in her heart as to what had happened.”
So what had happened to Jenny Maxwell? Moorehouse said the story is “bizarre.”
“Tip and Jenny were going through this terrible divorce at the time,” Moorehouse said. “Tip had a whole lot of money, and he didn’t want Jenny to get any of it.”
Thies told him Roeder hired a hit-man, Moorehouse said.
“He was supposed to kill Jenny,” Moorehouse said. “Then he was supposed to barely
wound Tip so that he would have an alibi.”
Roeder was more than barely wounded, and his plot cost him his life. Police never identified the hitman, but Roeder’s plot was quickly discovered.
“The cops interviewed three other people whom he tried to hire to do the exact same thing,” Moorehouse said.
From the challenge of telling Maxwell’s story, Moorehouse gathered a lesson that he seeks to pass on to his video storytelling students at Hillsdale.
“There are great fascinating stories out there that you just need to find and you need to research, and you need to talk to people about because there are so many things like this, so many fascinating stories out there that really do need to be told,” he said.
Elizabeth Bachman ’21, who took Moorehouse’s video storytelling class last year, said storytelling reaches people on more of a human level.
“It’s not just facts and figures,” she said. “It’s primarily about the person, and you care a lot more about the facts and figures because you care about the person.”
Stefan Kleinhenz ’21 said Moorehouse’s skill in storytelling comes from “his passion for stories, his passion for history, his passion for investigating, and then of course, putting that all together and to tell those stories.”
“Mr. Moorehouse is an excellent storyteller, not just in the video realm,” said sophomore Carter McNish, one of Moorehouse’s current students. “Based on my experience of him as a storyteller, it’s going to be a great read.”