ACING THE RED CARPET in her trademark gold blouse, the well-respected Hollywood publicist kissed goodbye her glamorous friends and disappeared into the blaze of paparazzi flash bulbs. But the queen of publicity had no idea this would be her last ever premiere, and her last kiss goodnight. At 12.28am, Ronni Chasen was murdered: blasted five times through the chest as she drove home through a quiet Beverly Hills neighbourhood.
In Los Angeles’ most affluent and desirable area, terrified resident Nahid Shekarchian, 33, heard what she described as the “boom-boom-boom” of gunfire. She opened her curtains, told her daughter-in-law to call 911 and ran outside to see what had happened. There she was met with an awful scene: Chasen’s Mercedes E-350 had collided with a lamppost, and the publicist lay bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds. Blood was pouring from both her nostrils and her airbag was splattered with blood. “She couldn’t speak, and was breathing very heavily,” said Shekarchian. By the time medics had rushed Ronni to hospital she was dead.
Hollywood was rocked with the news. Ronni Chasen was a popular and well-respected figure in the movie industry: At the time of her death, Ronni was already working on the 2011 Academy Award campaigns for “Alice in Wonderland” for best picture and Michael Douglas for best supporting actor for “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” And no one gets shot dead on the street in Beverly Hills. Not among the manicured lawns and the platinum-plated homes of magnates and movie icons. The knee-jerk reaction was that a car-jacking had gone wrong, but as day broke over Hollywood, more details had emerged that would make this one of the biggest murder mysteries in Beverly Hills’ history.
No one gets shot dead on the street in Beverly Hills. Not among the manicured lawns and the platinum-plated homes of magnates and movie icons
“She had a place in the solar system of Hollywood,” said Tom Tapp, a former editor at Variety magazine. “It’s kind of like one of the planets is missing.” A fixture of the movie industry circuit for three decades, Ronni was remembered as a workaholic and a perfectionist. She ate dinner every evening at 6:30pm, not only because she got a better service, but also so she could get home to start work again, emailing endless memos to her staff. “Her hours were hideous and she organized and went to all of those functions we dread,” Academy Award-winning producer Richard Zanuck told The Los Angeles Times.
“I really didn’t know Ronni when she wasn’t working,” said producer Mace Neufeld, a client and friend of Chasen’s for 35 years, “and when she wasn’t working she was working.” Though Ronni was married and divorced in her 20s, she had no family of her own. At the time of her death, she was single and without children: Ronni was simply married to the job she loved, a job she had dreamed about since she was a child.
Born Veronica Cohen in Kingston, New York, Ronni Chasen’s introduction to the entertainment industry came as a little girl, when she met cowboy actor Roy Rogers during a personal appearance in Madison Square Garden. Star struck, it was a meeting she later admitted inspired a childhood ambition to become a publicist. After a brief stint in front of the camera as a soap opera actress in Hollywood, Ronni’s dream career began in 1980 with publicity firm Rogers & Cowan. With her networking abilities and boundless energy, she quickly rose through the ranks and was later made a top publicist for Hollywood studio MGM. Launching her own firm, Chasen & Co., Ronni worked on campaigns for more than 100 movies, including last year’s Best Picture Oscar winner, “The Hurt Locker,” as well as “Cocoon,” “Baby Boom,” “On Golden Pond” and the 1989 Best Picture winner “Driving Miss Daisy.”
The Friday before her death, Ronni threw a glitzy soiree for her latest project, the film Black Swan, in the Polo Lounge at the famous Beverly Hills Hotel. In attendance were the leading ladies; Natalie Portman and Winona Ryder, among other luminaries, and Ronni had been in her element—working the room, introducing people, and mingling among a constellation of stars. Her last week was a naturally high-profile affair, and her slaying was a scene befitting the film classic, LA Confidential.
November 15th was an unusually cold night in Hollywood, and following the premiere for “Burlesque”, Ronni dashed from Grauman’s Chinese Theater to the W Hotel in Hollywood for the celeb-packed after-party.
She arrived at about 10:30 p.m., pinging off a to-do list for her staff from her Blackberry en route, reported her friend and longtime Hollywood publicist Vivian Mayer-Siskind. On leaving the after-party, Ronni steered her Mercedes Benz coupe west along Sunset Boulevard, down the neon-lit Sunset Strip, before hooking a left into the darkness of Whittier Drive, a residential street lined with palms, pines and sprawling mansions.
Her last week was a naturally high-profile affair, and her slaying was a scene befitting the film classic, LA Confidential.
“The street would have been quiet as a cemetery,” Ronni’s neighbour Claudia Berkeley, 43, tells Grazia, “local kids sometimes use it as a test track for their Father’s Ferraris, it’s that deserted,” she adds. Ronnie was heading south from Hollywood to her luxury apartment in the Wilshire corridor of Westwood, where she lived alone. Police recorded that she sent a second email from her car to staff at 12:22a.m, but six minutes later she was dead. And mysteriously no one knows what happened in those terrifying last moments.
Police sources confirmed that the car’s driver-side window was broken yet nothing was taken from Chasen’s purse. It wasn’t robbery, and Ronni hadn’t used her hands-free phone to report any road rage incident to cops. Then speculation that Ronni Chasen was murdered by a professional hit man gathered pace on Wednesday, when Beverly Hills Police spokesperson Lt. Tony Lee admitted, “It’s something we are looking into,” and that a professional hit was “absolutely possible.”
Former FBI Special Agent and Forensic Accountant Harold Copus concludes that the murder does ‘feel like’ a professional hit:
“It seems to be somebody who knows exactly what to do with no hesitation, somebody familiar with military or weapons who was watching their target closely. Investigators will now have to try establish anybody she may have had a problem with in the past.”
The New York Post reports that Chasen believed she was being followed in March and was “scared.” But songwriter and client Diane Warren dismisses the idea, saying: “She’s probably the most loved person in this town. Who would want to hurt her? Nobody would want to hurt her.”
John Nazarian, a former LAPD detective and Hollywood’s most famous Private Detective tells Grazia: “My first thought was ‘Jesus, five bullets? That is some serious rage. This is not the work of a professional hit man,” he says, “It’s like, Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam! Blam!”
While Nazarian admits the crime scene was ‘clean’ enough to be a hit man job, the detective speaks with some authority when he says: “Hit men use silencers and aim for the head.” It’s true.
Nazarian, also a ballistics expert, believes the weapon was a five-shot revolver. “This would mean the shooting was even angrier,” he tells Grazia, “it means the killer had to ‘pull and point’ five times. Each time, he enjoyed the experience even more. This is not a ‘hit’, this is a murder.”
With Palm Springs Film Festival offering a $100,000 reward and with Hollywood being the capital city of gossip, talk is rife of theories and hunches. Everyone in 90210 is an armchair sleuth this week, and a myriad comments on the LA Times website suggest the killing could have even been a gang initiation ceremony: Gang-bangers have been known to be sent on a mission to earn their stripes in an act of mindless violence, but to Beverly Hills? Another theory is mistaken identity.
“A petit lady with blonde-grey hair driving a black Mercedes through Beverly Hills? That describes half the population of the town,” says Detective Nazarian. “Whoever it was could have got the wrong lady.”
And so today Beverly Hills remains a city in fear, with a killer on the loose, while Whittier Drive has once again fallen silent. At the crime scene lay several bunches of flowers, all white roses- clearly Ronni’s particular preference. There’s also a dog-eared front page of the LA Times that reads: “Publicist Killing Stuns Hollywood”, and as a candle flickers, a packed “Haunted Hollywood” tour bus, quite morbidly, rolls to a stop by the flowers. Sixteen tourists stare and take photographs, and the driver announces: “Ronni Chase, publicist to the stars. Shot dead in cold blood. Case still unclosed.”
This article appeared in Grazia in England, and Australia.
By Jeff Maysh