On the evening of October 7, 1949, a 27-year-old actress and dancer named Jean Spangler left her young daughter with her sister-in-law and said she was going to meet her ex-husband about child support. Then she walked out the door of her Los Angeles apartment.

Nobody has seen her since.

The case is 77 years old and it still won't close, which is exactly why MSN recently revisited it. And once you start pulling the threads the whole thing unravels, the way only Hollywood mysteries from that era seem to.

Days after she vanished, her black purse turned up in Griffith Park near the Fern Dell entrance. Torn handle. Inside, a handwritten note that ends mid-sentence: "Kirk, Can't wait any longer. Going to see Dr. Scott. It will cost $100."

No last name on the note. No signature. Detectives worked on the theory that the handwriting was Jean's, according to accounts of the case, though the word "Kirk" had been traced over with ink, like someone had gone back over it deliberately, and if you sit with that detail for more than a few seconds it starts to itch.

The "Kirk" sent the story into orbit. Kirk Douglas was filming in the area at the time, and that overlap alone made him a suspect in some tellings. Whether any evidence ever actually connected them, or what came of the suspicion beyond talk, the surviving record doesn't say. But 1949 Los Angeles was a company town that ran on gossip the way the studios ran on electricity, and the name was enough. "Dr. Scott" never gets resolved either. The era's grim arithmetic, a possible pregnancy, a doctor, $100, casts a long shadow toward an illegal abortion, which in 1949 could kill you twice: once on the table and once in the papers.

Her ex-husband, the man she said she was going to meet, recedes into the same fog. Whatever he knew, whoever he told, the record doesn't say. It went with him.

The purse sat in Griffith Park in the open and when it was examined it told investigators almost nothing. Except that whoever left it, if Jean left it at all, wanted it found.

What gets me is the timing. She had a child support dispute in motion, a fight she was actively pursuing, per the accounts. That's not the profile of someone planning to vanish. That's someone with an appointment with the future. Whatever happened on October 7 interrupted her on her way to something, not away from something.

Her family grew old without answers. The case has never closed, a technicality that means less every year, and everyone who could have closed it is now almost certainly gone, including probably whoever Kirk actually was.

I don't have an answer. I have a torn purse handle and a sentence that stops in the middle, and after 77 years that might be all anyone gets.