Joe Cole murder.

His father was actor Dennis Cole and his stepmother was Charlie’s Angel Jaclyn Smith. Joe was murdered on December 19, 1991, at the age of 30 in a botched robbery that has never been solved.

Joe Cole was an actor, writer and roadie for the punk rock bands Black Flag, Rollins Band and Hole.

Joe and his best friend Henry Rollins shared a house at 809 Brooks Avenue in Venice Beach, California.

They were returning home after attending a Hole concert at the Whisky-A-Go-Go in West Hollywood. They stopped off on the way at an all-night grocery store.

As they walked toward their house two armed black men in their 20s came up from behind, forced them to the ground and demanded all their money.

Joe and Henry only had about $50 between them.

The gunmen ordered them inside the house to come up with more cash. Henry was pushed inside first while one of the muggers forced Joe to his knees on the front porch.

“The guy who was on me,” Henry recalled, “said, ‘If you yell or if you scream, I’m going to blow your head off.’”

It was at that moment that Henry said he heard a scuffle on the porch and then a gunshot. He ran further into the house as a shot was fired at him.

Henry ran out the back door. The two bandits fled. Henry called the cops.

Police said Joe Cole died instantly from a point-blank gunshot to the head. A second bullet that had been fired at Henry Rollins was recovered inside the house.

Henry Rollins never got over Joe’s brutal murder and has remembered his friend through various songs and spoken word pieces such as ‘The Story of Two Boys.’

In a bizarre aftermath, Henry Rollins dug up a piece of the blood-soaked ground where Joe Cole had fallen. He keeps it in a plastic container in his house. “I’ve got all the dirt here, and so Cole’s in the house,” he told an interviewer. “I say good morning to him every day.”

FOOTNOTES: Henry Rollins is 62 and still active as a musician, writer, television and radio commentator and podcaster. Dennis Cole died in 2009 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at the age of 69. Jaclyn Smith was treated for breast cancer in 2003. She is 78.

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