Jenny Maxwell

• Name — Jenny Maxwell • Birth Name — Jennifer Helene Maxwell • Born — 3 September 1941 • Died — 10 June 1981 • Place of death — Beverly Hills, California, U.S. • Death Cause — Homicide • Occupation — Film, television actress

Maxwell was the daughter of a construction worker from Norway (the original family name of Moksvold was changed when the family emigrated to the United States a decade before in 1949), and was also speculated to be a distant relative of Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962). This was disputed by Buddy Moorehouse, her cousin's son, who claimed that it was "entirely untrue" and merely a falsehood spread to bolster her career.

On April 17, 1959, the 18-year-old Maxwell married 24-year-old Paul W. Rapp, an assistant director. After separating two and half years later, in December 1961, they had a very public divorce and custody battle over their young son Brian, with Maxwell winning custody after testifying about Rapp's "extremely possessive and overly jealous" nature. The divorce was granted January 29, 1963. Seven years later, she married Ervin M. Roeder, a successful attorney who was 21 years her senior, on February 15, 1970 in Los Angeles.

In the afternoon of June 10, 1981, shortly after their separation, both Maxwell and Roeder were shot and killed in the lobby of Maxwell's Beverly Hills condo / apartment during what was reported at the time as being a botched robbery. She was only 39 years old. The murders supposedly remained unsolved, and the "botched robbery" story was repeatedly cited in subsequent news / feature articles about Maxwell. But in the 2021 published book Murder of an Elvis Girl: Solving the Jenny Maxwell Case, author Buddy Moorhouse (a cousin of Maxwell) reveals that in his research, that the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) had concluded at the time, that since no property was taken from the victim(s), the shooting was probably instead a botched hitman attack on Maxwell, orchestrated by Roeder over the pending divorce finances. Roeder (a defense attorney with reputed Mafia underworld criminal connections) had allegedly arranged to receive a survivable superficial wound from the attacking hit man as a diversion and to throw off blame, but in the unfortunate event, the wound to his abdomen instead proved fatal, and he died a few hours after the shooting. A further irony revealed in the book is that Maxwell's son Brian received absolutely nothing from his late mother's estate, since Roeder had survived his wife by several hours. Because Maxwell had died under the legal status of intestate (without a will), all her assets automatically passed to Roeder, and the entire combined Roeder-Maxwell estate and property / possessions was inherited by Roeder's daughters from his previous marriage, who refused to give Brian anything.