Lana Turner was a prominent midcentury movie actress. Her first husband was a restaurantuer, named Stephen Crane. They had a daughter named Cheryl Crane. When Cheryl was fourteen years old, she stabbed her mother's lover Johnny Stompanato to death with a butcher knife. A coroner's jury found Crane's act to be criminally justifiable. Cheryl Crane testified that Stompanato had been attacking her mother when she entered her mother's bedroom. But let us backtrack to about four to five years, and analyze how she became to be a violent person. Crane was Lana Turner's only child. Turner kept her distance from her daughter, raising her through nannies and governesses. Cheryl was described as shy, polite and solemn. People said that photos of her at age two showed her to be an unsure little person who never smiled. Cheryl characterized her childhood to be "loveless". I'm guessing that Cheryl didn't get much attention from her mother, making her to be different than most kids her age. .
In 1948, Lana Turner married a wealthy Easterner named Henry Topping. Cheryl called him Papa, reserving the name Daddy for her biological father. Cheryl recalls that Topping had a low boiling point and he sometimes beat the boxer dog he gaver her, with a cane. Another time, he threw Cheryl's poodle against the wall.After this incident, I'm led to believe that Cheryl used the projection defense mechanism to acquire an idea of the world being very dangerous. When Crane's father was badly injured in an auto accident in Paris, Topping cruelly informed Cheryl that his father had been killed, even though he wasn't dead. A few days later, Cheryl's grandmother informed her that her father is O.K and is coming home. This kind of misinforming by her step-father was contributed as negative reinforcement for Cheryl. She was operantly conditioned to not trust people. This event may have shaped her personality in a way that she had become more distant from people, and prefered to live in solitary.
