501 Doheny Rd
Beverly Hills, CA 90210, USA

Doheny Road – Greystone Manor

By any measure – size, cost, or boldness of vision – Greystone was the grandest estate ever completed in Southern California. The fifty-five room, 46,000 square-foot mansion sat on a lofty knoll at 501 Doheny Road, high above the estates of the mere millionaires on Sunset Boulevard and Lexington Road. It had cost an astounding $4 million upon its 1929 completion, which would have purchased dozens of large homes in the Beverly Hills flats below Sunset Boulevard.

The Tudor-style mansion was the centerpiece of the 429-acre Doheny Ranch, which stretched from Doheny Road far up into the hills. Greystone and its immediate grounds could be seen from miles away.

The impressive – indeed, forbidding – Greystone was more than an unmistakable emblem of the Doheny family’s unrivalled wealth and authority, which was anchored in Southern California and extended to the national level. The estate’s sheer size and its cost also symbolized the rough-and-tumble world of the early 20th century oil industry in which the Doheny family had made its vast fortune. Then, in 1929, the estate became a crime scene in one of Los Angeles’ most talked about, and most misunderstood, murders. To this day, the estate is wrapped in layers of mystery. It is even said to be haunted by the ghosts left behind in an era of misdeeds.

By the early 1920s, Doheny Senior had decided that Ned should build a mansion on the family ranch. He set aside twenty-two acres at the southern end of the property for the residence and grounds.

While Greystone’s exterior was grand, the interior was given a pleasing sense of proportion combined with careful craftsmanship, a sense of stateliness, and wealth. The front entrance – a set of plate-glass doors decorated with elaborate hand-wrought iron grillwork – opened onto a marble stair landing. At the right were marble stairs to the second floor. Ahead was a grand marble staircase that led down to the first-floor hallway, which ran perpendicular to the main stairway for the length of the building. At the bottom of the grand staircase was a set of carved and polished oak archways that led into a marble-floor reception room with a fountain. Beyond, through arched French doors, was a terrace with sweeping views of the immense, steeply sloped lawn and the entire Los Angeles basin.

But this psychic phenomenon does not seem to be the ghost of either Ned Doheny or Hugh Plunkett who both died so mysteriously in the mansion. Rather, the strange sound that has been heard seems to be that of a woman, weeping inconsolably. Perhaps it is the spirit of a young Lucy Doheny mourning her dead husband, or her family, which rose so high in the world only to be brought down by bold over-reaching and by scandal.

Ned Silence (graphic picture warning)

The crime scene drawing shows murder victim Ned Doheny, Jr. in the bedroom of his Los Angeles mansion after being killed by a gunshot to the head, along with a superimposition of where police imagine he was just before he was shot. From the above angle the event looks clinical, but a reverse view reveals an unholy mess, with Doheny's face and robe drenched in blood, and a dark pool spread across the carpet.

Out of sight in the hall leading to the bedroom is the body of Hugh Plunkett, Doheny's presumed murderer, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. For a time this was the most famous crime in L.A. history. Doheny was the son of oil tycoon E.L Doheny, who was in trouble for passing bribes to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall. The investigation and legal circus, known as the Teapot Dome scandal, had ensnared not just the senior Doheny but Doheny Jr. and Plunkett. They had both been indicted for conveying the dirty money from Doheny Sr. to Secretary Fall.

Realistically speaking, there was no serious threat of the Dohenys going to jail. But working class Hugh Plunkett was not a tycoon nor a tycoon's son, which meant for him the possibility of incarceration was real. When Jr. was offered immunity and Plunkett was not, their close friendship began to fray. Plunkett's growing instability spawned attempts to get him into a mental facility—whether to save his mind or save him from testifying remains a subject of debate—but it never happend. Today in 1929 he visited the Doheny mansion to talk with his pal Ned and hours later the result is what you see in the crime scene photos.

There's much more to the case—rumors of a sexual relationship between Doheny Jr. and Plunkett, rumors that Doheny Sr. pulled the trigger on both men, etc.—but we'll leave all that aside. The truly interested can find at least a dozen websites that dig into every aspect of the case. We just wanted to show you the photo illustration, which is yet another police photo from the University of Southern California digital archive.

Doheny Mansion in Beverly Hills

- Significance: A huge eclectic mansion that combines Gothic and Classical motifs, Greystone was built by oilman Edward L. Doheny as a gift for his son. The house has excellent marble and carved oak details, palatial rooms, and a terrace overlooking Los Angeles.
- Survey number: HABS CA-2193
- Building/structure dates: 1929 Initial Construction

Doheny Mansion in Beverly Hills

- Significance: A huge eclectic mansion which combines Gothic and Classical motifs, Greystone was built by oilman Edward L. Doheny as a gift for his son. The house has excellent marble and carved oak details, palatial rooms, and a terrace overlooking Los Angeles.
- Survey number: HABS CA-2193
- Building/structure dates: 1929 Initial Construction

Scandal at Greystone

On February 16, 1929, four months after Ned Doheny, his wife Lucy, and their five children moved into Greystone, Doheny died in a guest bedroom in a murder-suicide with his secretary, Hugh Plunkett. The official story indicated that Plunkett murdered Doheny either because of a "nervous disorder" or because he was angry over not receiving a raise. Others point out that Doheny's gun was the murder weapon and that Doheny was not buried in Los Angeles' Calvary Cemetery, a Catholic cemetery, with the rest of his family, indicating he had committed suicide. Both men are buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, within a few hundred yards of each other. Both were involved in the trial of Doheny's father in the Teapot Dome scandal.

Doheny's widow, Lucy, remarried and lived in the house until 1955, when she sold the grounds to Paul Trousdale, who developed it into Trousdale Estates and sold the mansion to Chicago industrialist Henry Crown, who rented it to film studios. In 1963 Crown planned to subdivide the property and demolish the mansion. Beverly Hills stopped the demolition by purchasing the mansion in 1965. The estate became a city park on September 16, 1971, and on April 23, 1976 was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The city leased the mansion to the American Film Institute from 1965 to 1982 for $1 per year, hoping the institute would pay for repairs and upkeep.

Doheny Mansion, 501 Doheny Rd, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles County, CA

A huge eclectic mansion which combines Gothic and Classical motifs, Greystone was built by oilman Edward L. Doheny as a gift for his son. The house has excellent marble and carved oak details, palatial rooms, and a terrace overlooking Los Angeles.