Judy Gilford
on February 1, 2026
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Jan. 31, 1966 - Police reported today that a young Yugoslavian actor apparently shot and killed the estranged wife of Mickey Rooney and then took his own life, a case detectives said may have been linked to resentment over a possible reconciliation between the Rooneys.
The bodies of Mrs. Barbara Rooney, 29, and Milos Milosevic, 24, were found early in the afternoon in the bathroom of the Rooneys’ $200,000 home in Brentwood, Calif. Mrs. Rooney, the actor’s fifth wife and a former model, had been shot in the lower jaw. Milosevic, shot in the temple, was found sprawled across her. A .38-caliber automatic lay nearby.
Mrs. Rooney had visited Rooney earlier at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, where he was recovering from an intestinal infection contracted during filmmaking in the Philippines.
“Mickey told me they’d had a very good talk and they were very close to reconciliation,” said Rooney’s personal manager, Red Doff. “I think Milos may have resented it.”
According to Mrs. Rooney’s attorney, Harold Abeles, she returned from the hospital to the Brentwood home with a private detective, Herm Schlieske, and met Milosevic and two women friends. The group discussed Rooney’s divorce suit of Jan. 24 and Mrs. Rooney’s suit for separate maintenance filed the same day. In his suit, Rooney said his wife “was allowing, permitting, encouraging or harboring Milosevic at the Rooney home” and asked that he be ordered out.
Abeles said Schlieske left at 7:30 p.m., and Mrs. Rooney and Milosevic entered the master bedroom at 8 p.m., the last time they were seen alive. The bodies were discovered later when a house guest and a maid, unable to obtain a response from the bedroom, unlocked the door and looked in the bathroom. Police said no one apparently heard the shots.
Milosevic, known professionally as Milos Milos, had appeared in “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming” not yet released, and in “Incubus.”
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