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The most decorated American war hero in World War II, Audie Murphy returned home with no place to go but down. What could top his spectacular battle feat? After lying about his age to join the army at 17, he had been wounded three times and credited with killing 240 Germans. Of 235 men in his company, Murphy was one of two who survived. Not yet 21, he won twenty-seven medals, including three from the French and one from Belgium.
After the war, Murphy was recruited to Hollywood by James Cagney, and in 1955 he starred in a movie version of hit autobiography, To Hell and Back. He said it was “the first time, I suppose, a man has fought an honest war, then come back and played himself doing it.” Murphy joked about his lack of talent, but in twenty years his boyish face and freckles appeared in forty movies, mostly war films and Westerns in which he played eager fighters. It was a far cry from his youth as one of eleven children of a Texas cotton sharecropper – and from the battle fields of Europe – and the transition was not smooth. Murphy said the war left him with nightmares for years. He slept with a loaded automatic pistol under his pillow, and when he was asked how people survive a war, he said, “I don’t think they ever do.”
One of Murphy’s friends, cartoonist Bill Maudlin, said, “Murphy wanted the world to stay simple so he could concentrate on tidying up its moral fiber wherever he found himself.” Murphy became a quasi law-enforcement officer in the 1960s. He was made a special officer of a small California police department and rode around with police during drug busts. In 1970, he and a bartender friend beat up a dog trainer in a dispute over treatment of the friend’s dog. Murphy was acquitted of attempted murder.
Though he had earned more than $2.5 million in his film career, Murphy was forced by too many bad business ventures to declare bankruptcy in 1968. Three years later, hounded by creditors and still trying to rebuild financial security for his wife and two teenage sons, he became interested in a company in Martinsville, Virginia, that manufactured prefabricated homes. He was on a small charter flight from Atlanta to see about making an investment when the plan crashed in a wooded mountain area during a light drizzle. The region, northwest of Roanoke, was so isolated that the wreckage, including the bodies of Murphy and five company officials, was not found for three days. The war hero was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery.
To learn more about the death of legendary characters read Tales Behind the Tombstones: The Deaths and Burials of some of the West’s Most Nefarious Outlaws, Notorious Women, and Celebrated Outlaws.
