The oil heir who carried $100,000 to the Interior Secretary was shot dead in his new mansion five months after moving in

Oilman Edward L. Doheny gave his son Ned 12.58 acres in Beverly Hills in 1926. The estate cost $3,166,578.12, of which the mansion, Greystone, cost $1,238,378.76. In late 1921 Ned, with his friend and secretary Hugh Plunkett, had carried $100,000 in cash from his father to Interior Secretary Albert Fall. Senate investigators treated it as a bribe tied to federal oil leases. Ned, his wife Lucy and their five children moved into Greystone in autumn 1928. On 16 February 1929 Ned, 35, and Plunkett were found shot dead in a guest bedroom. Lucy called the family doctor before the police. Police concluded that Plunkett shot Ned and then himself. The gun was Ned's, and the two men were buried in a secular cemetery despite the family's Catholic faith. In October 1929 Fall was convicted of accepting a $100,000 bribe from Doheny. A different jury acquitted Doheny of paying it. Doheny's parents gave $1.1 million to the University of Southern California for a library in Ned's name, opened in 1932. Lucy remarried and stayed until 1955, then sold most of the land to the developer Paul Trousdale. In 1956 the mansion and 18.3 acres went to Henry Crown for about $1.5 million. When Crown planned to demolish and subdivide, Beverly Hills bought it in 1965 for about $1.3 million and built a 19-million-gallon reservoir under the grounds. In 2026 it is a city park and film location.