Emergency vehicles rushed to the Shoreham Towers, located just off the Sunset Strip, at 8787 Shoreham Drive, in West Hollywood, CA. on October 4, 1969. Diane Linkletter was on the sidewalk, bleeding profusely from her head. She was still alive.

A near neighbor, Jimmy George, witnessed Diane’s fall.  He ran outside to see if he could render aid. She looked up at him but could not speak. Jimmy didn’t know what to do.

The last person to see Diane other than George was Edward Durston.

Durston said she was feeling down and he was concerned about her. She asked him to come by her apartment late that night and wanted to bake cookies.

Durston told investigators that Diane had dropped acid that night. He said they talked for hours and she told him she was depressed.

Around what he thought was daybreak, they went out to the balcony.  Diane looked down and saw one of the building attendants named Scottie, walking his St. Bernard.  The leash fell off, and Scottie threw the leash at the dog and gave chase.  Diane became hysterical, convinced that Scottie was going to kill the dog.  Durston pulled her back inside the apartment and restrained her physically, until she calmed down.  Durston left the room and called Diane’s brother to tell him she had dropped acid.

She talked to her brother, and Durston thought she was even more calm and that everything was fine until she walked into the kitchen, climbed onto the drainboard and into the window.  Durston said he was shocked. He tried but failed to grab Diane.  He said she went out the window, and there was nothing he could do to stop her.

Durston’s account of events changed several times, so police investigators dug into his background deeper.

The Tate/LaBianca murders were fresh in everyone’s mind and Durston was an early suspect in the slayings. Detectives asked Durston if he was willing to take a polygraph regarding the circumstances of Diane’s death and he agreed.  The results were never made public.

Diane was placed in an ambulance and rushed to the University of Southern California Medical Center. She was dead on arrival. The pretty girl with the bright smile and future to match was two weeks away from her 21st birthday.

Investigators began to piece together her last several hours to see if her death was a suicide, an accident, or a homicide.

A first hand account of talking to Durston after Linkletter’s death was provided by Bobby Jamison:

“I went up to the apartment on Horn Ave. to talk to Ed Durston after Timmy Rooney told me Ed was in the apartment when Diane jumped from her 6th floor kitchen window. I also wanted to see Jimmy George, who lived below the apartment where Nancy and I had lived with Ed. 

From what I’d learned, Jimmy had actually been outside his apartment, and seen Diane falling to the pavement below. At first he’d thought someone was playing a practical joke and had thrown something out the window, but then realized it was a person. 

He didn’t know at first it was Diane, and he’d seen her hit the ground. He was in shock, but ran over to where the person hit the pavement, and that is when he realized it was Diane. He told me he could not do anything for her, and it made him feel like an asshole. 

He said she was still alive when he reached her, and that she looked up at him but couldn’t speak. He said she was bleeding a lot from her head, and he wanted to help her, but didn’t know what to do. I knew Jimmy, and he was a happy go lucky guy, but on this day he was broken in a way that is hard to describe, just broken. 

I tried to tell him there wasn’t anything he could have done, but how do you tell somebody that, after what he’d seen. He was the only one on the planet who had seen it; how the hell did I know how he felt, or what it was doing to him? It was the last time I ever saw him, and to this day I still don’t really know how that may have altered his life.

When I got to Ed, he was doing better than Jimmy, but he still looked like he’d been through the ringer. I asked him, ‘What the f**k happened Ed, what the f**k was going on?’ He looked up at me from where he was sitting and said, ‘I don’t know man, I really don’t know.’

‘We were just there, the two of us,’ he said, ‘talking a long time about life. You know, like half the night, and everything was OK. Then she just started acting crazy.’

‘Whatta ya mean Ed, crazy how?’ I asked.

‘Well, we were sitting on the couch, and she got up and went out on the balcony, and just started climbing up on the railing like she was gonna jump off,’ he explained. ‘I ran out there and drug her off, and pulled her back into the living room, and pinned her down on the floor and said ‘What the f**k are you doing Diane? What the f**k is wrong with you?’

Ed was wringing his hands as he told me the story. He was having a lot of trouble going over that night. ‘So did she tell you what was wrong?’ I pleaded.

‘No,’ said Ed. ‘She told me she was just screwing around and everything was OK and to let her up because it was just a joke.’

Ed kept rubbing his hands together like he couldn’t get them clean. He just kept rubbing them together. 

He continued on, ‘I made her promise me that if I let her up she wasn’t gonna do anything crazy, and she said, ‘I promise.’

‘I let her up, and she said she was going to go in the kitchen and get a glass of water,’ and I said OK. Ed looked like he might start crying at any second, and I didn’t blame him, because it was too awful to comprehend.

‘She walked into the kitchen, and I turned around to watch her, and she just climbed up on the countertop by the window over the sink. I ran in the kitchen and tried to grab her, but she just went out the window before I could get there.’

He paused for a moment, as if to get his courage up and said, ‘I had a hold of her ankle man, I had her by the ankle, but I couldn’t hold her, I just couldn’t hold her man.’

I stood there in front of Ed with this crystal clear picture of Diane’s kitchen in my head, with her going out the window, and Ed trying to hold her by the ankle. I just broke down and cried like a little boy. I just couldn’t believe that it had happened. I stood there in front of Ed crying, for I don’t know how long. I just sobbed, because there wasn’t anything I could do about it either.”

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IN GOD WE TRUST

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