Occupation: Actress

Appearances: Season 6

Who’d Play Her: Susan Lucci

The Diva Who Couldn’t Outrun Her Past: Elana Hendricks was a celebrated film and television actress who appeared in several movies produced by Jonas Lamont’s Lamont 3 studio before becoming best known as the longtime diva of the daytime drama The Young at Heart. Glamorous, commanding, and accustomed to the protections afforded a major star, Elana enjoyed a successful career while hiding a violent history that the studio had helped erase.

Years earlier, Elana had struck and killed actor Greg Bender while driving under the influence. Rather than allow one of Lamont 3’s valuable stars to face prosecution and public disgrace, Jonas and his fixer, Vaughan Novak, helped make the crime disappear. Greg’s death became another secret buried beneath the glamorous mythology surrounding the studio and its performers.

Greg was not Elana’s only victim. She later struck Cheri Montessori in another hit-and-run accident. Cheri died from her injuries, and Vaughan and Jonas disposed of her body in the ocean to protect Elana. No one involved knew that Cheri had left a three-year-old boy alone at home. The child died several days later when his mother never returned.

That child had originally been born to Marilee Walker and placed for adoption. Years later, after discovering what had happened to him, Marilee began targeting the actors whose crimes Jonas and Vaughan had concealed. Elana became one of the people she held responsible—not only for Cheri’s death, but for the chain of secrecy that had also killed Marilee’s son.

The first attack against Elana was accompanied by a photograph of Greg Bender, making it clear that someone knew about the fatal accident she had escaped years earlier. The calling card connected her to a series of attacks against other aging Hollywood figures, each confronted with an image of someone whose death or disappearance had once been covered up by the studio.

Elana was eventually lured to the studios of The Young at Heart and murdered. Beside her body, the killer left a photograph of Cheri Montessori, finally connecting Elana’s death to the second woman she had struck and abandoned. The image transformed a forgotten victim into the final judgment on a star who had been protected for too long.