Linda Bradley was nineteen years old when she gave the Omaha World-Herald her account. It ran on the front page the following morning, June 25, 1969. She kept it short, the way people do when they are still processing what they witnessed. “We were playing records in the alley,” she said. “We do it all the time. I even went around to the neighbors to see that it would be alright.” When two police officers arrived at the Logan Fontenelle Housing Project that night, the group of teenagers inside a vacant apartment scattered out the back. One officer fired a single shot into the group without a shout, without warning of any kind.
Fourteen-year-old Vivian Strong was struck in the back of the head. She died there.
“He didn’t holler, or shoot in the air or anything,” Bradley told the paper. “There was only one shot.”
The officer who fired was thirty years old, a former Air Force serviceman and a relatively recent addition to the Omaha Police Department. In Omaha, his name was James Loder. In a different world, one built around a Beverly Hills address and a celebrated surname, he was James Lamarr Markey — the adopted son of actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr.
Not one of the dozens of articles written about him has printed Vivian Strong’s name.
Table of Contents
Who Was James Lamarr Markey
James Lamarr Markey was born on January 9, 1939, in Los Angeles, California. He was adopted in infancy by Hedy Lamarr and her second husband, screenwriter Gene Markey. He was subsequently adopted a second time by Hedy’s third husband, British actor John Loder, and carried three legal names across his life: James Lamarr Markey, James Lamarr Loder, and James Lamarr. A DNA test, discussed publicly by his half-sister Denise Loder DeLuca after a screening of the 2017 documentary Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, confirmed he had no biological connection to Hedy Lamarr, John Loder, or either of his half-siblings. His biological parents remain unknown.
In a March 1940 interview with Movie Mirror, Hedy told a reporter his biological parents were dead. That is the only statement about his origins on record.
The First Adoption: Gene Markey and Hedgerow Farm
The man who first gave James his surname was not a peripheral Hollywood figure. Eugene Willford “Gene” Markey was a Dartmouth graduate who fought at the Battle of Belleau Wood in World War I, then went on to write and produce films at Twentieth Century Fox and MGM. During World War II, he left Hollywood for the US Navy, reached the rank of Rear Admiral, earned the Bronze Star with Combat V for leading a reconnaissance mission in the Solomon Islands in 1942, France’s Legion of Honor, and Italy’s Star of Solidarity. He threw away any mail not addressed to “Admiral Markey” for the rest of his life.
Markey and Hedy Lamarr married in early 1939 and adopted James that same year. Their home during those years was Hedgerow Farm, at 2727 Benedict Canyon Drive in Beverly Hills. The property still stands.
The marriage lasted two years. In divorce proceedings, Hedy said they had spent only four evenings alone together throughout the marriage. The judge reportedly told her she might consider knowing her next husband longer than four weeks before marrying him. When the divorce was finalized in 1941, Hedy went to court to keep James. She won custody of the boy she called “little Jamesie.”
Two Adoptions, Three Names
In 1943, Hedy married British actor John Loder, born William John Muir Lowe in Knightsbridge, London, in 1898. Loder formally adopted James after the marriage, giving him his third legal identity: James Lamarr Loder.
Hedy and John Loder had two biological children. Denise was born in 1945. Anthony Loder was born on March 1, 1947, the same year the marriage ended in divorce.
James was the oldest child in the household. He is also the only one Hedy Lamarr’s biographers consistently treat as someone whose story stops at age twelve.
Chadwick School and the Estrangement
James attended Chadwick School, a private boarding institution on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in Los Angeles County. A significant number of articles about him describe it as a military school. This is factually wrong. Founded in 1935 by Margaret Lee Chadwick and Commander Joseph Chadwick — the founder’s naval title almost certainly the source of the confusion — Chadwick was a nonsectarian open-air boarding and day school. It maintained its residential program until 1968, which means when James was enrolled in the late 1940s, he was almost certainly living on campus.
Around age eight or nine, he was asked to leave following a disciplinary incident that has never been documented publicly. A teacher named Ingrid Gray and her husband offered to take him into their home so he could keep attending school during the day. James agreed to the arrangement.
He described it himself, years later, in words recorded by biographer Stephen Michael Shearer in Beautiful: The Life of Hedy Lamarr:
“I went to Chadwick and I got into trouble…and they told me I couldn’t go there anymore. But there was a teacher by the name of Ingrid Gray…She said I could live with her and her husband and go to school during the daytime…and since all my friends were there, everybody I knew, I agreed. And my mother was disenchanted with that, and she didn’t want anything more to do with me.”
Hedy resisted the arrangement initially but eventually accepted it, setting up a trust fund for James’s care and education. By around age eleven or twelve, roughly fifth grade, she had stopped all contact. She returned his letters. Asked about him years later, she said only: “He hurt me.”
Her daughter Denise confirmed, after Hedy’s death, that James had done something their mother never recovered from. The specific incident is not part of any public record.
Eight Years in the Air Force, Then Omaha
Following his departure from the Lamarr household, James served eight years in the United States Air Force. He subsequently joined the Omaha Police Department.
Vivian Strong and the Night That Made National Headlines
On the evening of June 24, 1969, James and his partner, officer James W. Smith, were dispatched to the Logan Fontenelle Housing Project after a call reporting juveniles breaking in. Nine teenagers were inside a vacant apartment playing music at a party. When officers arrived, the group ran out the back.
James Loder fired once, without warning or verbal command.
Vivian Strong, fourteen years old, was hit in the back of the head and killed. His partner Smith and Strong’s sister Carol both asked immediately why he had fired. He gave no answer.
What followed over the next three days:
- 88 people injured across Omaha’s Northeast neighborhood
- More than one million dollars in property damage
- 56 arrests, every one of those arrested African-American
- The Black Panthers stood armed watch over Black churches and the Omaha Star newspaper
The shooting made national headlines. James was suspended and then fired. He was charged with manslaughter and entered a not guilty plea. AFL-CIO Local 531 contributed at least $3,000 to his legal defense. In March 1970, after a trial in which he personally testified, he was acquitted by an all-white jury. He then served two more years on the Omaha police force.
Hedy Lamarr’s Death, the Will, and the Fight That Followed
Hedy and James re-established telephone contact in the late 1980s, nearly four decades after she stopped returning his letters. He recalled that she sounded “totally hip and chic.” In the years before her death, she mailed him a photograph of the two of them together, with a handwritten inscription: “Dear Jim, I thought you would want a photo of us. Much love to you and your family, From Mom.”
The sentiment did not carry into her estate planning.
Hedy Lamarr died on January 19, 2000, in Casselberry, Florida, from congestive heart failure. She was 85. Her son Anthony spread part of her ashes in the Vienna Woods, as she had wished.
The will she had signed two months before her death distributed her estate of approximately $3.3 million as follows:
| Beneficiary | Amount |
|---|---|
| Denise Loder DeLuca | $1.2 million |
| Anthony Loder | $1.8 million |
| Lt. Charles Stansel, close friend and will witness | $83,000 |
| James Lamarr Markey | Nothing |
A 1961 will, a physical document later sold at RR Auction, had already made her intentions clear in writing. It named him by all three of his legal names and stated she had “specifically excluded” and “generally disinherited” him. She wrote those words nearly forty years before she died.
When Denise and Anthony called to invite James to the funeral, he did not attend.
He contested the will in Seminole County, Florida. He was sixty-one years old at the time and working as a security guard. He argued Hedy was not of sound mind when she signed. Estate lawyers brought witnesses who testified she was clear-headed and deliberate. The estate offered $20,000 to end the case. James refused. He ultimately settled for $50,000, paid by Denise and Anthony from their own portions of the estate.
The Birth Certificate and What the DNA Test Settled
After the settlement, James produced a document he believed was his original birth certificate. It listed Hedy Lamarr and John Loder as his biological parents. The New York Post published the story on February 5, 2001, under the headline “Hedy News: Lamarr’s son not adopted.”
The document had a problem that the Post did not catch. It listed a home address the family did not purchase until 1946, seven years after James was born in 1939. It was not an original birth record. It was a secondary certificate issued when John Loder formally adopted James around the time the family moved from Hedgerow Farm to Roxbury Drive. The address gave the adoption away.
Denise demanded a DNA test. Results confirmed James had no biological connection to Hedy Lamarr, John Loder, Denise, or Anthony. He had been adopted from the beginning. His biological parents, described by Hedy in 1940 as already deceased, remain unidentified.
Denise discussed the DNA findings publicly at a Q&A session in Nashville following a screening of the 2017 Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story documentary, directed by Alexandra Dean and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival.
What Is Known Now
Anthony Loder, the half-brother James never lived alongside as a child, died on May 23, 2023, in Los Angeles. He was 76. He had spent a significant part of his adult life working to secure Hedy Lamarr’s recognition as an inventor, including a fourteen-year effort to obtain an honorary grave for her in Vienna.
As of the mid-2010s, James Lamarr Loder was reported to be living in Millard, a suburb of Omaha near the airport. He would be 87 years old in May 2026. No authenticated public record confirms his current status.
The story of Hedy Lamarr’s adopted son, as it exists across most of what has been written about him, concerns a woman who fought a court for a child she later discarded. That account is accurate, as far as the documents support it.
What those documents also contain — across a Wikipedia article, Douglas County court records, and the front page of the Omaha World-Herald dated June 25, 1969 — is the account of a fourteen-year-old girl named Vivian Strong, who was dancing at a party when she was shot and killed by an Omaha police officer who happened to be Hedy Lamarr’s adopted son.
Her name has never appeared in the same article as his. Both accounts come from the same public record. That has been the gap in this story, and until now, nobody filling in the life of James Lamarr Markey has looked far enough to find it.
