Henry Peavey
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Henry Peavey was William Desmond Taylor’s African American valet. His prior history before working for Taylor included arrests for vagrancy and public indecency. On the day of Taylor's death, Taylor was scheduled to appear in court on Peavey's behalf.
Although Peavey had run screaming into the courtyard after he arrived for work and discovered the body at 8:00 AM on February 2nd, when the police arrived he was in the kitchen calmly doing the dishes with Taylor's body on the floor only meters away. Initially suspected of the crime, he was cleared by police. Before his death in 1937 a magazine published an interview in which he stated that the murder had been committed by “a well known actress and her mother." A rival magazine published his comment as “a well known actress."
Peavey's conflicting and changing accounts of what he saw, his bizarre behavior at both the inquest and the funeral along with his likely spiteful accusations that Mabel Normand killed Taylor have led many investigators to discount Peavey's credibility. He may, however, have been involved in some sort of studio-directed misinformation effort related to it but there is neither no proof of this, nor any that he killed Taylor. Later claims that he confessed to killing Taylor are widely regarded as spurious. At least one source relates that Peavey died in an insane asylum, crying out in paranoid delerium that his "master's killer" was stalking him (this is unconfirmed by most sources and Peavey may have died in a sanitarium, which during the mid-twentieth century could also have meant a long term health care facility or hospice).
