Police in Los Angeles said Edwin Hiatt, who lives in North Carolina, admitted during a police interview in March to killing Crane in 1985. Talking to reporters as he was guided into a jail in Burke County, Hiatt was asked by a WSOC-TV reporter if he could have been the killer.
“Anything is possible back then,” he said, because “I was big into drugs.”
The case went cold for decades, but investigators were led to North Carolina in 2018 when a fingerprint specialist matched a print from Crane’s car to Hiatt, according to The News-Herald. An FBI surveillance team took a disposable coffee cup and discarded cigarette butts without Hiatt’s knowledge, according to court documents seen by the newspaper.
Hiatt’s DNA matched cigarette butts recovered from the ashtray of Crane’s stolen car, the court documents said, according to the newspaper.
Hiatt was charged with murder and is scheduled to appear in court Friday morning.
Crane, who was born Barry Cohen, directed episodes of several popular television shows in the 1970s and 1980s, including “The Incredible Hulk,” “Hawaii Five-O” and “The Six Million Dollar Man.” He produced “Mission Impossible” and “The Magician.”
On weekends, he traveled across the country to play bridge, and rose through the ranks to become one of the game’s greatest players. At the time of his death, he was the career leader in master points, which are awarded to bridge players to rank their performance. He was crowned national champion 13 times.
He remains a recognizable name among elite bridge competitors. The person who wins the most master points in a year wins the Barry Crane Trophy, and the list of top players is known as the Barry Crane Top 500.
“By a wide margin the 57-year-old Crane played more tournament bridge, won more titles and collected more master points than anyone else,” The Times wrote in 1985 after his killing.
Crane was inducted into the American Contract Bridge League Hall of Fame in 1995. The organization said he was “widely recognized as the top matchpoint player of all time” and that he arranged his television production schedule so he could play in tournaments.
The arrest of Hiatt brought few answers to the decades-old question of why Crane was killed. A housekeeper discovered Crane’s body wrapped in bedding on the floor of his garage, according to the Los Angeles police.
Hiatt told reporters he had no memory of the attack and did not recognize Crane from a photograph. He said he lived “a different life today” and thanked God for “the miracles he’s given me.”
“Everything that I’m at today is a totally different lifestyle from where I was before,” he told reporters.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.