Diane Linkletter, daughter of radio and TV host Art Linkletter, fell to her death on the morning of October 4, 1969. Her brother, Robert, reported that Diane had called him just before 9am, sounding upset and disoriented.

She had called a friend, Ed Durston, earlier that morning, around 3am. He came over to her apartment, they spent the rest of the morning talking and she baked cookies. He said Diane seemed “concerned with her career, despondent and depressed”. Just around 9am, she walked into the kitchen and jumped toward the window. He attempted to grab her. She fell to the sidewalk below.

Linkletter blamed his daughter’s death on her use of LSD, and gave up his media career to crusade against LSD and other drugs. An autopsy on Diane Linkletter ruled out drugs as the cause of her death. 

Carol Wayne was a beautiful, buxom TV star, often appearing in comedy sketchs on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. She was the bubbly Matinee Lady of the ‘Tea Time Movies with Art Fern’ sketches that began in 1971.

When Carson complained to NBC that a 90-minute nightly program was too much for him, the network gave in to it’s biggest star [cash cow] and the Tonight Show was cut to just 60 minutes. Later, Carson would cut back his hosting duties to just four nights a week, with various guest hosts on Friday night.

Lost in this shuffle, was Carol Wayne. With little time for comedy sketch material and few offers for other TV appearances, Wayne hit the skids. She developed a cocaine and alcohol addiction and found work as an escort for Hollywood area businessmen.

On the night of January 10, 1985, Carol Wayne checked into a Santiago Bay, Mexico hotel with a Los Angeles car salesman. When the man returned to Los Angeles the next day, Carol Wayne was not with him. They had argued the evening before and Carol supposedly stormed out of the hotel to take a walk along the beach. She was afraid of water and could not swim. Her body was found by an area fisherman three days later. The car salesman was Ed Durston, the same man in Diane Linkletter’s kitchen the morning she jumped to her death.

Ed Durston was not named as a suspect in either of these cases.