Hugh Plunkett

He was not alone.

Also lying dead in the bedroom was his longtime friend and assistant, Hugh Plunkett.

The events of the night were pieced together from Ned's wife, Lucy.

She said that Plunkett had let himself into the house with his own key, as he always did, and went to the East Wing.

This bribery incident that took place during the administration of President Warren G. Harding and involved Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall, who leased Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming and two other locations in California to private oil companies at low rates without competitive bidding.

One of those companies was owned by Doheny, and in 1929, Ball was found guilty of accepting a $100,000 bribe from him.

Both Ned and Hugh Plunkett had been implicated in the case, and it's most likely that the murder-suicide, regardless of who killed whom, was the result of a growing fear about their illegal business practices and the very real threat of prison time they were now facing.

one of the men killed the other and then turned the gun on himself.

Without pause, Lucy leads the doctor to the east wing, where she claims to have heard a gunshot, and then she and the doctor, they're in the west wing.

They start going to the door, and all of a sudden she claims Hugh Plunkett comes s- running out of the bedroom with a pistol in his hand.

He's in anguish, she claims.

He's distraught.

He can't be consoled, and when he sees the doctor, he runs back into the bedroom and slams the door behind him and locks it.

Lucy says that she and the doctor then try to enter the room, but when they did so, they heard another gunshot.

Lucy and the doctor then allegedly forced their way into the room, where they found both Hugh Plunkett and Ned Dohany dead in puddles of their own blood side by side.

That was the official story that was given to the papers, and that was the official story that would circulate for years, but the Hollywood rumors persisted.