Who killed Hollywood powerhouse publicist Ronni Chasen?

Nearly 13 years after Hollywood powerhouse publicist Ronni Chasen was shot to death on her way home from a star-studded movie premiere, questions remain.

Chasen was driving alone along Sunset Boulevard around midnight, near the exclusive tree-lined neighborhood on Whittier Drive, when she was gunned down.

The 64-year-old had just attended the film Burlesque, starring Cher and Christina Aguilera, at the iconic Grauman’s Chinese Theater, followed by the after party at the posh W Hollywood Hotel.

It was a celebratory night with friends, clients and colleagues. 

As Chasen was driving her Mercedes Benz E350 towards her Westwood home, less than 10 miles away, she made a call to her office. It was around 12.22am. 

Less than seven minutes later, Chasen would be shot four times, with one of the bullets striking her chest and piercing her heart.

The shots went through the passenger side window when Chasen stopped at a red light. After the shooting, Chasen’s vehicle rolled through the stop sign and crashed into a concrete lamp post.

Beverly Hills Police were on the scene in minutes and she was taken to Cedars Sinai Hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Ronni Chasen was born Veronica Cohen in Kingston, NY, and raised in the neighborhood of Riverdale in the Bronx and Manhattan’s Washington Heights. She used the surname Chasen as a nod to the epic Hollywood hotspot Chasen’s, the go-to-spot for Hollywood royalty during the 1950s and 1960s, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The power publicist represented some of Hollywood’s A-list celebrities, including the late Natalie Wood, Michael Douglas, John Travolta, as well as composer Hanz Zimmer, Grammy winning artist Diane Warren, and movie producers Dick Zanuck and Irwin Winkler.

At the time of her death, her boutique firm, Chasen & Co., which specialized in Oscar campaigns for studios, had netted at least 150 Academy Award nominations. 

Slumdog Millionaire and Hurt Locker were just two of the award-winning films she repped. 

Over the years, she also worked on the marketing campaigns for Lolita, the Oscar-winning Driving Miss Daisy, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

Other projects included Cocoon, the Rocky franchise, and Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

Before Chasen became a publicist, she dabbled in acting. She worked at Rogers & Cowan and was named senior vice president of worldwide publicity at MGM/UA in 1993.

Her violent death stunned family, friends and colleagues in the Hollywood community, and started a storm of conspiracy theories that ranged from murder-for-hire to rumored gambling debts in Chasen’s family.

After a two-week search, Beverly Hills Police zeroed in on Harold Martin Smith, 46, a person of interest in the case, after an anonymous tip was made to America’s Most Wanted. 

Smith, a career criminal, served time for robbery and had a lengthy rap sheet that included arrests, felony burglary and other offenses, as per court documents, Fox News reported. 

In 2007, he was released from prison and in 2014 discharged from parole.

Smith had been convicted and served nine years of an 11-year prison sentence for armed robbery in a Beverly Hills neighborhood near where Chasen was killed,  Lieutenant Tony Lee of the Beverly Hills Police Department told TIME in a 2011 article. 

‘[Smith] held a woman at gunpoint when she was at her mailbox approximately 2.5 miles south [of the Chasen crime scene], on Doheny and Olympic,’ Lee said.

‘She got out of her car, and he pulled a gun on her, and we caught him.’

Smith, who was often seen around town riding a bicycle, worked at a Venice Beach bike shop. When police first revealed that Smith did not own a car and got around on his bicycle, many did not believe that he committed the crime, and cast doubt on the police investigation, the news outlet reported.

But, in an interview with TIME Vivian Mayer, Ronni Chasen’s best friend, spoke of the bicycle that Smith used.

 ‘The police interviewed a lot of people, and this guy drove distances, major distances,’ she said. ‘I get in my car and turn on my ignition.. this guy rode his bike.’

She added: ‘Death does not have to arrive on foot or by car; sometimes a cyclist can indeed be the perp.’

When police executed a search warrant and went to Smith’s apartment, in the Harvey Apartment buildings, a dilapidated four-story block built in the 1930s that is covered with murals of Elvis Presley, The Beatles and Marilyn Monroe, Smith pulled out a 38 revolver and shot himself in the head.

After his suicide, police said Chasen’s death was the result of a botched robbery, despite conflicting theories that it was triggered by road rage. 

 In July 2011, the Beverly Hills Police Department closed the case.

But many still wondered: Was this the whole story?

Years after Chasen’s death, The Hollywood Reporter reviewed unreleased documents from the BHPD on the murder investigation. Upon examination of the documents and other evidence, the news outlet raised questions about the police department’s core findings and how they came to their conclusion that Smith was their man.

It is unclear if the department presented the evidence to a prosecutor, though they were never required to, or to show proof to demonstrate they had caught the right person beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury.

Nor did they have to prove they were certain about how the murder was committed or whether multiple individuals were potentially involved.

When DailyMail.com contacted the Beverly Hills Police Department they did not return our request for comment. 

Years later, unsealed documents shed new light on the investigation and what police called ‘a substantial amount of circumstantial evidence’ implicating Smith, according to The Hollywood Reporter. 

The bombshell report revealed there was no physical evidence placing Smith at the scene of Chasen’s murder, which raised a litany of questions. For instance,  Did the police get it wrong? Who would want to kill Ronni Chasen?

Is Harold Smith, a man who was never placed at the scene of the crime by DNA, solely responsible for her death? 

Once Upon a Crime in Hollywood, a new true crime podcast that launched last month, delves into unsolved crimes against the glamorous backdrop of Hollywood. 

Kelly Hyman, the host, a child-star-turned-women’s rights attorney, kicked off the first season by putting a new spotlight on The Ronni Chasen story.

Hyman told DailyMail.com that she chose Chasen’s murder because it was the one story that had always ‘haunted’ her. 

‘Growing up in Hollywood and working in the business, the idea of being murdered on your way home from a premiere at a red light in Bev Hills was so disturbing, and it always felt unresolved,’ she said. 

‘I wanted to apply the skills I’ve gained as an attorney to Ronni’s story in an attempt to shed light on what really happened to her. ‘

During the six-episode podcast, Hyman spoke with leading forensics experts, police investigators, prosecutors, journalists, some of Chasen’s former clients, and Chasen’s niece, Jill Gatsby, who believes the case should be re-opened.

The last episode, which aired on iHeart radio on May 1, tried to answer the 12 most burning questions.

Chasen’s autopsy would later reveal that the beloved Hollywood publicist died from a gunshot to the heart.

When BHPD announced that the case had been officially closed, they revealed all the work that had gone into the investigation – analyzing 150,000 e-mails and texts, reviewing video and closed-circuit-TV footage that established Chasen’s route the night of her murder, following up on thousands of tips, dissecting Chasen’s financial documents and those of persons of interest in the case. 

Detectives said they logged a total of 10,000 hours of time working on the case.

‘We had a considerable amount of evidence indisputably pointing toward Harold Smith,’ Lieutenant Tony Lee told TIME. 

 ‘We’re 110% sure he committed the crime.’

Lee added that the single most important piece of evidence against Smith was the ballistics report, which showed that the gun used to kill Chasen was the same one he turned on himself when police went to his apartment building to question him. 

‘That’s as solid of evidence as you can have,’ he said.

But some disagreed with the BHPD final outcome of the case, which led to doubts about the veracity of the investigators’ conclusions.

‘I never thought they were thorough enough,’ says Kathie Berlin, a close friend and former business partner of Chasen’s. 

‘They had very few press conferences, and friends of [Chasen’s] were on their case all the time to follow up on information they had. Nobody felt the security of, “This has been covered A to Z, and this is what happened.”

‘I think most of us have accepted that it was a random act, but was it that guy? I don’t know. I don’t know,’ Berlin says.

Eight months after Chasen died, Vivian Mayer, Chasen’s best friend, told TIME that she believed Smith was most likely the culprit.

‘Ronni was in the wrong place at the wrong time, on a dark street where she was waiting for a light to turn, and a criminal was waiting in the dark for the next person alone in an expensive car. That’s it,’ Mayer said.

She added: ‘I have reconciled it in my head based on the facts. But I will never reconcile it in my heart.’

Dianne Warren, one of Chasen’s friends and clients, spent time with Chasen at the movie premiere and after party less than an hour before she was killed. She told the Hollywood Reporter days later.

‘Me and Ronni were so excited,’ she said. ‘It was just the funnest night.’