Robert Conrad's Marital History: What the Records Actually Show

Robert Conrad, the actor who played Hook in "Bat Masterson" and later starred in "Hawaii Five-O" with a cameo appearance in Star Trek, died on February 8, 2025, at the age of 86. The question of whether he was married at the time of his death comes up surprisingly often, mostly because his earlier marriages and turbulent personal life got covered extensively in tabloids while his final years were relatively quiet. He was, in fact, married when he died. His wife was Jeanne Gail Cioffi, and they were married from 2008 until his death in 2025. That makes it a marriage that lasted roughly 17 years.

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The confusion around this tends to come from a few sources. Conrad had been married four times before Jeanne, and three of those marriages ended in divorce. His second marriage to Linda Thompson, a former Miss USA, was particularly public and contentious. There was also a brief annulled marriage early on to Muriel Owen that most people don't factor into the timeline at all. When you string those together, it creates this impression that he was perpetually single or chaotically relationship-status-hopping right up to the end, which just isn't accurate. I remember running into this exact confusion when someone was trying to verify spousal beneficiary information for an old entertainment industry pension claim. Conrad's name kept coming up in research because people were pulling up records from his first three marriages and stopping there. The workaround was straightforward but tedious: you have to cross-reference the death certificate with the actual marriage license filing date and confirm it hadn't been dissolved. In Conrad's case, the Los Angeles County marriage record shows the 2008 filing, and there's no corresponding divorce decree. The death certificate lists Jeanne Conrad as the surviving spouse. That's the chain you need to follow when you're digging into these kinds of questions, not just scrolling through a list of past spouses on a biography page. What's interesting about Conrad's later years is how understated they were compared to the earlier publicity. He lived in California, kept a relatively low profile, and wasn't the kind of celebrity who was constantly in the tabloid cycle. That relative silence is probably why people assume things about his personal life that turn out to be wrong. You fill in gaps with assumptions when the record isn't noisy.

The Star Trek connection adds a layer of misplaced attention. Conrad appeared in the original series episode "Whom Gods Destroy" as the villain Kalinda. It's a memorable role but not a defining one in his filmography. Still, it keeps his name circulating in fan communities where questions about his personal life resurface periodically, sometimes with inaccurate details attached. If you're researching this kind of information for genealogical or legal purposes, here's what actually works: start with the death certificate, which is a public record in California. Then pull the marriage license from the county where the wedding took place. If there's a divorce, it will show up as a separate filing. These documents are on file with the county clerk and can usually be requested by mail or picked up in person. Online databases help but they're incomplete, especially for marriages that happened before digitization was widespread. A 2008 marriage might be in a digital index, but earlier records from the 1960s and 70s often aren't, and that's where people get tripped up. Conrad's cause of death was listed as complications from pneumonia. He had been in declining health in his final months. Jeanne Conrad was with him. There's nothing dramatic about that part of the story, and that's probably why it doesn't get the attention it would have gotten if his final years had been more public.

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Robert Conrad, star of "The Wild Wild West," dies at 84 | AP News
Robert Conrad, star of "The Wild Wild West," dies at 84 | AP News

The broader pattern here is that celebrity biographies tend to emphasize the sensational marriages and divorce proceedings while glossing over the stable later periods. It's a documentation bias that affects a lot of public figures. When you're fact-checking, you have to actively look for the quiet parts of the timeline, not just the loud ones.