Ronnie Levin

Ronnie Levin is a missing man whose possible murder enters Andy Warhol’s diary through a chain of reports: a customer’s complaint, a newspaper account, an interview, and a police inquiry. The diary records no direct encounter with Ronnie in these episodes. Instead, his disappearance gathers meaning through what other people say about him and through the efforts to establish whether he is still alive. His body is not reported found in the entries, and the case remains unresolved there even as people are tried for his killing.

A Disappearance First Reported as a Business Dispute

In October 1984, a woman from Los Angeles told Warhol about a table she had bought from Ronnie Levin. She said he had taken her money but had not delivered the table. After she contacted his mother, the woman learned that Ronnie had disappeared. The complaint initially concerned a specific failed transaction, but the mother’s answer changed its scale: the missing table pointed toward a missing person.

Warhol asked Pat Hackett about the report. Pat said the situation was serious: nobody had heard from Ronnie for weeks. She reasoned that, given his talkative nature, he would have contacted someone if he were alive. This was not confirmation of his death, but it shows how the absence of ordinary contact became a troubling piece of evidence for people who knew of him. At this stage, Ronnie’s fate is inferred from silence, not established by a recovered body or a formal finding.

Reports of a Suspected Killing

In December, Warhol read an article from a Los Angeles newspaper about Ronnie’s murder. The account described a theory that a group of wealthy young men had killed him and had also killed the father of one of them, an Iranian man whose body had been found in the desert. Ronnie’s body had not been found; investigators believed it might be nearby. Warhol found the article compelling enough to read twice, but the diary preserves the distinction between the reported suspicion and what was known: the suspected perpetrators, the proposed connection between the killings, and Ronnie’s possible location were presented as beliefs, while his body remained missing.

That distinction persists in a later diary entry. In May 1986, Warhol noted an article about the “Billionaire Boys Club” defendants going on trial in Los Angeles for killing Ronnie. The trial transformed the earlier newspaper theory into a public legal proceeding, but the diary does not report a verdict or resolve the uncertainty about Ronnie’s remains. His death is treated as the basis of the prosecution; the account still leaves the reader without confirmation through the discovery of his body.

A Connection to Don Johnson and the Investigation

In June 1986, Pat Hackett returned from Miami after interviewing Don Johnson. She told Warhol that Johnson had known Ronnie during Johnson’s down-and-out period, when the two had been involved in scams in Los Angeles. This detail gave the case a personal link to a figure Warhol’s circle had recently interviewed, and it connected Ronnie’s reported past to the ongoing effort to reconstruct his final circumstances. The diary supplies no further particulars about the scams, so their nature and any relationship to the suspected killing remain unstated.

By September, a Beverly Hills police detective in charge of the case called Interview looking for Pat. He had read her interview with Don Johnson, in which Johnson discussed knowing Ronnie. Pat provided the detective with the names of two people in Los Angeles he should speak to, to help establish that Ronnie was not still alive somewhere. That possibility mattered because the men on trial for his murder were claiming he remained alive. The interview had therefore become more than a celebrity profile in the diary’s account: information gathered for it was being pursued by a detective as part of an active investigation.

An Unresolved Figure in the Diary

Ronnie’s appearances form a progression from a missing delivery to a presumed murder and then to a contested question about whether he survived. Each stage comes through a different source, and each carries a different degree of certainty: the customer’s account of the table, Pat Hackett’s report that Ronnie had vanished, a newspaper’s account of suspected killings, and the detective’s attempt to counter the defendants’ claim that Ronnie was alive. The diary does not settle the competing claims or provide a final outcome.

That mediated presentation is central to Ronnie’s narrative role. He remains absent from the scenes in which his story is discussed, while objects and records stand in for direct knowledge: the undelivered table, the newspaper article, the published interview, and the names passed to police. The sequence shows how information about him moves from personal complaint into press coverage and then into investigative work, without closing the gap left by his disappearance. Ronnie is consequently present in the diary as both the subject of an alleged crime and the unresolved fact around which witnesses, journalists, and investigators try to make a case.