4 Tragic Deaths at the Hollywood Sign
- KP
- 8 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Peg Entwistle, who famously jumped from the “H” of the Hollywood Sign in 1932, isn’t the only person to meet a tragic end up on Mount Lee. At least four more deaths are connected to the Hollywood landmark.
The first occurred on New Year’s Eve 1943, when an Army truck plunged off Mount Lee, near the then-crumbling H.
It was World War II and the military had been utilizing the Don Lee television station as a base. To help the soldiers ring in the new year, a celebration was planned by the Women’s Ambulance and Defense Corps of America, a civilian organization that supported the war effort on the home front. Several WADCA members volunteered to host the holiday event, including 25-year-old bookkeeper Toby Keyser.
That night, an Army sergeant named William Wells drove Keyser and four other women up to the 1,700-foot summit, along the dark and narrow Mt. Lee Drive. Just as they reached the top, he failed to negotiate a sharp curve. The truck hurtled over the embankment and plummeted 200 feet, flipping several times on the way down.
Military police and firemen raced to the scene and extricated Keyser from the wreckage. Internally, she was hemorrhaging from a lacerated liver and spleen and she died en route to Hollywood Receiving Hospital, at 9:20 p.m. The four other female passengers—Dorothy Anderson, 21; Nina Soudakoff, 22; Mildred Markwort, 21; and Jan Woods, 22—were all critically injured but luckily survived.
The Los Angeles Times reported that as of the late hour of its publication, Sgt. Wells was still pinned under the wreck. However, the article’s accompanying photograph (see below) shows a man who looks just like Wells being helped up the hillside by a first responder.
Additional details are scarce, as the tragedy spent one day in the news—and local media packaged it with other New Year’s Eve traffic-related deaths.
Toby Keyser, who was born Thelma, was the daughter of Russian immigrants Jack and Eva Keyser and raised in Los Angeles with her sisters Elaine “Annie” and Mildred Keyser. Five days after her death, she was buried in the Garden of Shalom at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. The inscription on Toby’s headstone notes she died in the line of duty and remembers her as “the personification of benevolence, integrity & beauty.”
One of the survivors, Mildred Markwort, made history as the first female cargo inspector for the U.S. Customs Service in 1965, stationed at Los Angeles International Airport. Markwort, along with Betty Cain, broke a 175-year tradition of male customs agents.
Fellow survivor Nina Soudakoff Chordas went on to become a Russian language instructor at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. After she retired in 1985, she and her husband Michel Chordas fulfilled a lifelong dream of moving to Bonners Ferry, Idaho, where together they wrote several operas.
Twenty years after the 1943 NYE tragedy, Mount Lee claimed two more young lives.
On the night of November 29, 1963, four teenage girls drove up to enjoy the view near Mulholland. As their car attempted to turn around and descend Mt. Lee Drive, it rolled off the road and dropped 150 feet, bursting into flames upon impact. Pamela Watson, 16, and Rosamund Fearnley, 17, were trapped in the fiery wreck and perished. Their two friends only survived because they had been ejected from the car.
Mount Lee wasn’t done yet. Just seventeen days later on December 16, 1963, David Martindale, a 24-year-old man hired to paint the radio tower, slipped as he climbed the 300-foot steel structure and fell to his death. According to his brother-in-law Charles Lambert, Martindale was following him up the tower; the next time he looked back, Martindale was sprawled on the ground 150 feet below.
Interestingly, eighteen months later, Lambert was killed when he blew through a red light and crashed into a gas station in East Chicago, Indiana. Also in the car was his wife Janice, David Martindale’s sister, who fortunately survived and raised their four daughters.
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