Crystal Spencer grew up in a small town in Northern California. She had a somewhat hard childhood having to drop out at 17 to get a job to help bring in money for her family.
In 1982 she finally moved to the L.A. area to pursue her dreams of becoming an actress. Once arriving, as many wanna be actresses she found it hard to get started and found herself working as a topless exotic dancer in order to pay the bills.
However, six years later in the spring of 1988 while she still hadn’t hit it big she was feeling hopeful! She was dating an aspiring screenwriter named Anton whom took her to places like art museums and places with more culture than she had been able to see herself. She also had a potential job offer to work in Japan for 3 months. Things were going well and looking up. She never seemed to doubt that eventually she would make it big.
May 4th Anton visited Crystal in her apartment, she had been sick with a simple cold or flu but was getting better and seemed positive during the visit. He also briefly talked to her on the phone next day and she mentioned that she was better.
May 6th she had a phone conversation with her sister… which was the last time anyone ever heard from her.
Anton tried calling her a few times, and even stopped by her work but wasn’t able to get ahold of her… he began to wonder if she had hurriedly gotten the Japan job and left without time to tell him.
A quote from Anton (found on Unsolved.com) “I was expecting, any day, to receive a very excited phone call from Crystal saying, ‘It’s wonderful here.’ And instead, I got a phone call from the Burbank police department.”
May 13th after complaints of a smell Crystal was found in her apartment. She was wearing only a top… nude from the waist down, laying in an odd corner of her apartment, her phone cord tangled around her.
Her cause of death was undetermined. They could verify that there wasn’t an overdose of any kind, but the decomposition process disrupted them from finding any other cause of death so the listed it as natural causes and she was cremated before her family ever was able to see her, despite their asking to. The family was told that she wasn’t in a state that she should be seen. She had been identified using fingerprinting… but in that state of composition and in the 80’s how accurate was that? Now days they have to do a lot of special stuff in order to get fingerprints from decomposing bodies… would they really have done all that?
Eventually, four months later and after jumping through a lot of hoops Anton was able to obtain a copy of the autopsy, (he never saw the police report) and he was shocked, so many things didn’t fit Crystal. It said 5 foot 7 inches when Crystal just hit five foot flat. It said she weight 140lbs when really she would have been closer to 105… and there wasn’t a trace of metal pins she had from a previous injury…. leading Anton to question of the autopsied body was even really Crystal’s body.
Also, unsettling, upon questioning the couple in the apartment below her admitted that on May 7th around 4am they were woken to screaming, and sounds that made them wonder if someone was being tortured. They debated calling police, however were afraid it was a domestic dispute and didn’t want to get involved. The woman in the apartment has been quoted saying: “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to live with the fact that I didn’t call the police. If I had, maybe she would still be alive.” Even with this information, the cops seemed to have brushed it off and not paid a whole lot of attention to it.
Even worse, is a quote from Anton in his talking to police. “I was told by one law enforcement official, ‘Bad things happen to bad girls.’ And I said, ‘You mean, bad girls die of natural causes?’ And he said, ‘You know what I mean’, and hung up the phone on me.”
Theories: Horace McKenna… ex highway patrol, possible owner of where she worked…. mad she was quitting? Was she feeding cops information about him? Someone who had watched her dance and finally just had to have her. She really was ill and the screams were her being violently ill as she died.
