Sidney Kirkpatrick Remembered For Literary Legacy And Civic Impact

Sidney Dale Kirkpatrick III, a New York Times bestselling author, researcher, documentary filmmaker and long-time Pasadena resident, passed away after a lengthy illness on September 24 in Duarte, California. He was 69.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. on Saturday, November 15, at All Saints Episcopal Church, 132 N. Euclid Ave., Pasadena. All are welcome. To learn more, RSVP and upload memories, images and videos to share, regularly visit sidneykirkpatrick.com, which will be updated frequently.

‘A prelude to a much longer quest’

Kirkpatrick’s storied literary career launched in 1986 with his debut nonfiction book, A Cast of Killers. What began as an authorized biography of prolific film director King Vidor soon turned into something more explosive: a true account of the pioneer filmmaker’s successful attempt to solve a decades-old Hollywood murder case.

As Kirkpatrick began researching Vidor’s life, he soon discovered that the director’s papers from 1967 were missing from his archive. After 23 days of searching Vidor’s three homes top to bottom, “prying up floor boards in attics, hunting in basement crawl spaces,” Kirkpatrick finally found a locked strongbox behind the hot-water heater in the garage of Vidor’s Beverly Hills guesthouse. He eagerly grabbed a tire iron off the wall and smashed off the padlock, discovering a black binder and stacks of notes and documents inside.

“I studied the contents of that black strongbox with a deep sense of foreboding, as if this were a prelude to a much longer quest,” Kirkpatrick wrote. “At first I was intrigued, then shocked.”

The contents revealed Vidor’s secret project in 1967—his investigation of the 1922 murder of William Desmond Taylor, his friend and a fellow director. Incredibly, Vidor had solved the case, identifying an actress’s mother as the killer. However, he decided not to make the results of his investigation public, Kirkpatrick learned, so as not to destroy certain reputations and careers. A Cast of Killers told the full story for the first time.

Library champion and savior

Kirkpatrick was born on October 4, 1955, to entrepreneur Sidney Kirkpatrick Jr. and homemaker Audrey Neumann, and grew up in a literary household in Stony Brook, New York, on the north shore of Long Island. He attended the Kent School in Connecticut and Hampshire College in Massachusetts before earning an MFA in filmmaking from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

At NYU, he studied alongside Spike Lee, Ernest Dickerson and Jim Jarmusch. In 1982, Kirkpatrick wrote and directed the documentary “My Father the President,” in which Ethel Derby, the second daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, describes her childhood at Sagamore Hill with her father. He later married classmate and associate producer Thelma Vickroy, and the couple settled in Pasadena, where they raised two children, Nicholas and Alexander, before separating in 1993.

In the early 90s, Kirkpatrick served on Save Pasadena’s Libraries (SPL), a citizen-action committee that was instrumental in convincing a required but rare supermajority of Pasadena residents (about 67 percent) to approve a Special Library Tax to support the City’s library services. In June 1993, voters did just that when more than two-thirds of them approved the $1.3 million tax (about $20 per household). If not for Kirkpatrick’s and SPL’s efforts, the beloved library may well have closed. In 2007 and 2022, voters approved extensions of the tax.

“So many communities are in the same bind we are in,” Kirkpatrick told the Christian Science Monitor shortly after the original tax passed. “This shows that something can be done.”

During the 1993 campaign, he and SPL organized a funeral procession on Walnut St. in front of the Pasadena Central Library, complete with a casket filled with books on a horse-drawn buggy, pallbearers and mourners, as well as large black drapes hung on the historic library’s façade.

In 1997, Kirkpatrick helped organize a popular Friends of the Pasadena Library fundraiser called The Late Great Author’s Party, in which professional actors portrayed famous dead writers reading from their books and answering questions in different rooms of the Pasadena Central Library. Proceeds were used to install the library’s computer learning center.

Kirkpatrick continued to write true-crime books in the 90s. In 1991’s Turning the Tide: One Man Against the Medellín Cartel, he and Peter Abrahams relayed the story of a hammerhead shark researcher who went head-to-head with drug lord Carlos Lehder and the infamous Colombian cartel. In 1992’s Lords of Sipán, Kirkpatrick recounted how a Peruvian archeologist overcame looters, smugglers and government interference to unearth one of South America’s richest pre-Columbian sites.

‘Before Cayce and After Cayce’

Kirkpatrick’s career trajectory took another turn when he met and later married Nancy Webster-Thurlbeck, who encouraged him to write about the American psychic Edgar Cayce. Cayce, known as the “Sleeping Prophet,” was reported to have an ability to diagnose diseases and recommend treatments for various ailments while in a deep hypnotic state. Cayce became the primary focus of much of the rest of Kirkpatrick’s work.

“In many respects, I view my life as ‘BC and AC: Before Cayce and After Cayce,’” Kirkpatrick said in 2021, adding that Cayce changed every aspect of his life. “It changed how I treat my children, how I treat my wife, how I treat subjects. It’s such an incredible thing.” 

In his writings and some 14,000 transcribed readings, Cayce expounded on thousands of topics including holistic health, nutrition, inventions, geology, world affairs, ancient mysteries, dreams, the afterlife, reincarnation, past lives, Atlantis and future events. 

Kirkpatrick was at first skeptical of psychics but soon became a diehard Cayce convert. Alongside Webster-Thurlbeck, the duo conducted in-depth research and documented Cayce’s life and work. They wrote two books about him, served as editors of the quarterly Cayce magazine Venture Inward, launched CayceUniverse.com and traveled the country by RV to research and lecture about his life and teachings.

Kirkpatrick wrote several other nonfiction books as well, including The Revenge of Thomas Eakins (2006), a biography of the realist painter; Hitler’s Holy Relics: A True Story of Nazi Plunder and the Race to Recover the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire (2010), an account of Nazi plunder and Germanic mysticism; and Pharmageddon: A Nation Betrayed: A National Trial Lawyer Reveals an Industry Spinning out of Control (2016, with Stephen Sheller). Kirkpatrick also ghost-wrote several books.

His critically-acclaimed work was featured on the History Channel, HBO, the Discovery Channel, A&E Television Networks and more. He was a popular, entertaining and inspiring public speaker and presenter, welcomed at dozens of conferences throughout North America over the years.

‘A natural drive’

Kirkpatrick was a longtime Pasadenan who had many strong passions and interests. He enjoyed fishing, playing golf and tennis, skiing, traveling, going on adventures, cooking, cycling, boating, gravestone rubbing and working on handyman projects. He was always playing sports or building something—the last big thing he built was a treehouse for one of his grandkids.

His wife noted that he loved to spend time with his family, especially his two young grandchildren. He took pride in his Scottish heritage. He was an avid reader and a prolific author and researcher, with an amazing memory for details he had written about even decades ago, all while helping to raise two young children and later two stepchildren as well.

“Sid loved life,” Webster-Thurlbeck said. “He was a sociable and popular person who made friends easily and loved people—and people loved him back. He introduced a new generation to Cayce’s work and has thousands of fans in the Cayce community, many of whom he interacted with on a regular basis. They had personal relationships with him.

“He had a natural drive that looked like exceptional discipline from the outside,” she added. “He never ran out of steam and he was consistent in his daily routine. He never wasted a minute of his time and until he got sick, he had lots of energy for anything and everything.”

Kirkpatrick is survived by his wife, Nancy Webster-Thurlbeck; his sisters, Jennifer Kirkpatrick (with her family, Eric and Alice Zicht) and Katherine Kirkpatrick (with her family, John, Gwen and Alex Tait); his children, Nicholas Kirkpatrick (with partner Rosanna Dixon) and Alexander Kirkpatrick; his stepdaughters, Mercedes Blackehart and Vienna Thurlbeck; his two grandchildren, Rowan and Sienna; and extended family.