THE
BLACK DAHLIA
ŠLee Paul
Few unsolved murders have captured the public imagination as completely as that of the Black Dahlia. It wasn't so much that she had been killed---it was the method of her destruction that horrified the nation. The autopsy revealed she had been bound and savagely mutilated while still alive. The case was never solved, and it stands as one of the most celebrated murder investigations in American history.
The Black Dahlia was incredibly beautiful in a mysterious, sensual sort of way. With jet-black hair and a penchant for wearing only black, she exuded a somber sexiness that was indelibly emblazoned on the soul of any man who knew her. And she knew a lot of men. Those who knew her best said she had a tattoo of an exotic flower on her inner thigh. In 1947, she became the victim of a Jack-the-Ripper-like madman who, some say, escaped the clutches of Eliot Ness, one of the greatest and most respected lawmen in the world.
It began on the cool, blustery morning of 15 January 1947 in the quiet Crenshaw neighborhood of southwestern Los Angeles. A woman and her daughter, walking down Norton Street, spied a sight that sent them shrieking into the street to flag down a passing police car patrolling the area. Pointing with shaking fingers to the weed-infested vacant building site often used as a local "lovers' lane," the woman incoherently stammered something about a "dead body." When the patrol car crew pulled into the garbage-strewn expanse, they were horrified by a sickening sight. Before them lay the nude, multilated halves of a once-brautiful young woman---her body destroyed beyond all recognition.
What made the murder so heinous was the barbaric nature of the crime. The woman's body had been neatly severed in half at the waist, gutted, and drained of all blood. Each half was tied with ropes, and the killer had carved the initials "BD" deep into one thigh. Her face had been very brutally cut from ear to ear in a macabre grin across the chin, and her throat was ripped open. Everywhere on the bare skin were cigarette burns.
The repulsion the police felt was further heightened when an autopsy revealed that the body had been revoltingly mutilated sexually---that most of the injuries had been inflicted before death, probably while she was suspended, head down, by ropes or wires. She might even have been still living when her murderer began the incisions to cut her in half. Upon reading the reports, one of the men of the Los Angeles Homicide Squad and no stranger to barbaric crime, was heard to mutter, "I hope to God she died of shock first---before the bastard had finished." She was the worst case of a sex crime in Los Angeles County history.
Whoever did it was incredibly thorough. She was scrubbed down, cleaned up, and just dumped. There was absolutely not a drop of blood anywhere to be found. The cuts on the body were clean and precise, almost as if they were done professionally. She had not been dead long when she was found, and the immediate theory was that she had been killed somewhere nearby and then tipped onto the lot from a car.
There were---literally---no obvious clues to the dead woman's identity. The police were also just as completely baffled by the initials carved into her leg. But as a matter of routine, they took fingerprints from the few fingers that had escaped mutilation and sent them to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C. They held no real hope of finding a match from the millions on file at the Bureau, for the FBI only maintained the prints of people with criminal records or people who were alien citizens or people who worked in sensitive government jobs. Consequently, the police were taken by surprise when a message arrived a few hours later. The dead woman's prints matched those on file for twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short.
Elizabeth was the product of what is known today as a dysfunctional family. She was born in the small manufacturing town of Medford, Massachusetts, in 1925. Since her parents were unhappy and disillusioned by their lot in life, Elizabeth never really knew what it was to have a childhood. Before she was six-years-old, her parents had separated. Her father further split the family by moving west to California with her brother, leaving her mother saddled with four small children in the throes of the Great Depression. Unequal to both making a living and caring for the other youngsters, Elizabeth's mother left her small daughter feeling alone and completely abandoned.
As she matured, Elizabeth's one main ambition grew into an obsession: as soon as she was able, she would leave home and make a new life for herself. The opportunity came in 1942 when she was not yet seventeen-years-old. Taking advantage of the war effort to seize a job opportunity for herself, she headed to Miami, landing a job as a waitress in a cafe near an air base. It was here that she voluntarily gave her fingerprints to the FBI, and it was here that she met a young serviceman and fell deeply in love.
When her lover went off to war, she refused all other suitors, content only to work and count the days to his return. It never occurred to her that her love would be short-lived. When she received news that her serviceman had died on the battlefield, the blow sent her spiraling. She never recovered. She began drinking, and to ease her pain, she took to men---all men. Her readiness to go to bed with any man who would buy her a drink and a meal quickly spread around the Miami bars. It wasn't long before the police arrested her and put her on a train back to Medford.
But Elizabeth never wanted to go home. She was incredibly beautiful---desirable---and she knew it. One gaze from her hypnotic grey-green eyes drew men like a honey pot drew files. When the train stopped in the next town, she got off, and quickly formed an attachment to Army Air Force Major Matt Gordon, Jr. In 1944, deeply in love again for the second time in her young life, she finally agreed to return to her mother and await the Major's homecoming from the Far East---and the promise of marriage that would follow.
On the morning of 22 August 1946, Elizabeth answered the doorbell. On the porch was a taciturn postal messenger with a telegram addressed to her. The message inside was from the mother of the major. It bluntly stated, "Have received notification from the War Department my son, Matt, killed in air crash." Elizabeth headed straight to the nearest bar. The next morning, terribly hung-over and devoid of all emotion, she packed her meager belongings and left Medford for the last time. Less than six months later, she would be dead.
Elizabeth, tall and gracefully thin with a flawless milk-white complexion which set off her striking mass of luxuriantly raven hair like white walls on black rubber tires, chose for her new beginning a place where her poise and stunning good looks seemed to be perfectly fitted: Hollywood, California. It was here that she learned to establish a particular identity. Her method was to match her raven hair, which she often highlighted with a beautiful white flower, with black. She never wore anything but black: tight-fitting black dresses, silky black stockings, the sheerest black underwear, flattering black shoes. She even wore a jet stone ring on her pale hand. As strange as it seems, the ploy worked, and someone dubbed her the "Black Dahlia." The name stuck, and she began to use it herself. Few men who passed in and out of her life were unaware of it.
In Hollywood, calls went out almost every day for "extras," and it wasn't long before the Dahlia enjoyed steady, well-paid work. But Elizabeth was out to make a name for herself. She began to devote most of her spare time into going to bed with almost all men who invited her, in the hopes of finding the producer or director who could further her budding acting career along. She took and discarded lovers the way some women accept and discard clothing fads.
The Dahlia was wild and independent. She finally fell in with a certain section of the film colony whose morals were in inverse proportion to their potential influence. Some of the men she lived with for brief periods of time. Eventually, as the Hollywood movie empire declined and it was obvious stardom was not waiting around the corner for her, she drifted from town.
When the police finally traced Elizabeth's mother, Phoebe Short, the woman was unable to positively say that what she looked upon was the remains of her daughter...so thoroughly had the killer carried out his fiendish work. But Mrs. Short was able to provide the police with one clue: Elizabeth, Phoebe Short claimed, was supposed to be living in San Diego. She had found work there in an Army hospital or in some connection with the Armed Services. Why was she in Los Angeles?
Why, indeed, wondered the police as they began an exhaustive study of Elizabeth's short life.
The police were able to determine that Elizabeth Short had left her rooms in San Diego six days before her death. She had taken no luggage, indicating she had been planning to stay in Los Angeles with a woman friend who could provide her with extra clothing and makeup. Also, other detectives scoured the unsavory back streets of Hollywood for anyone who might have seen her during her last visit. They found witnesses who saw her leaving a diner with a "man with red hair" on the night of her murder. This man was apparently the last person to see the Dahlia alive, and a massive manhunt was soon underway for the mysterious stranger. At one point, one hundred policemen were engaged on different aspects of the case.
Three days after the murder, the police made their first arrest. The suspect was a thirty-eight-year-old cook named Edward Glen Thorpe of Laramie, Wyoming. He had fallen asleep on a cross-country bus trip and fellow passengers had heard him mutter in his sleep, "I forgot to cut the scar off her leg." Brought in for questioning, he categorically denied all knowledge of the crime, except what he had read in the papers. Since Thorpe was unusually nervous during interrogation and since police found what they believed to be blood stains on his jacket, the police thought they had their murderer. But the evidence soon fizzled out and the "Man from Laramie" was released. Among other things, Thorpe did not fit the "man with red hair" profile for whom the police were searching.
A few hours after Thorpe was released, detectives did find a man with red hair whom the Dahlia did know. While in San Diego, the Dahlia had established a brief liaison with tall, red-haired Robert Manley. He was a twenty-five-year-old salesman and a former musician with the U.S. Army Air Force. But Manley, who had a wife and four-month-old daughter, denied any connection with the Dahlia's death. He admitted to going on a drunken binge with her and leaving her at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. "She said she was going to meet her sister at the hotel. I left her there and I have no idea what happened to her afterwards or where she went." Manley was dropped as a suspect when he was able to prove that he and his wife were visiting friends at the time of the Dahlia's murder.
Other men who were involved with the Dahlia were also brought in for interrogation, but each, like Manley, had an airtight alibi. Under Captain Jack Donohue of the Homicide Squad, detectives questioned literally thousands of people. They came to know every place where the Dahlia had worked, her likes and dislikes, and her personal habits. They spread out from her known friends and began to amass a list of more casual acquaintances, one link in a chain leading to the next. And since her circle of acquaintances was large and indiscriminate, the task was painstakingly tedious and slow. No further clues were found. The detectives were stumped.
For the authorities, the trail set by Elizabeth Short ended at the front entrance to the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel. Somewhere, she had met the man who was to slay her. So completely had the city swallowed her trail that the police never found her clothing, even after extensive searches in drains and sewers for miles around the murder scene.
Then a week after her murder, a mysterious package was mailed to a local newspaper---a package from the killer. On the outside were words clipped from the headlines and crudely pasted onto the envelope: "Here is Dahlia's belongings. Letter to follow." Inside the envelope was Elizabeth Short's birth certificate, social security card, and address book. One of the pages in the book was missing, and police suspected that the page held the name of the man who actually killed her. They checked out the remainder of the names, some of them surprisingly prominent with one actually being a Hollywood millionaire, and when they finally finished the task, it was as if they had never started it.
The package also contained another clue---an exceptionally clear set of fingerprints. This time, however, there was no record of the fingerprints in the files of the FBI or anyone else. Further analysis of the newspaper headlines (down to the exact editions) and the paste revealed that the items could have been purchased anywhere in the city and surrounding area---and the Los Angeles area covers a larger area than any other city in the world. The killer never sent a follow-up letter.
The police were hampered in their investigation by two other important factors. Close on the heels of the much-publicized Dahlia murder came the copy-cat killings. Elizabeth's death, and the enormous amount of space devoted to it by the newspapers, touched off at least a half-dozen sex killings of a similar type in the Los Angeles area alone. Some of the mutilations suggested that they were inspired by the manner of Elizabeth Short's death. One came only three days after the Dahlia was found. The victim, Mary Tate, was savaged and then strangled with a silk stocking.
The police had to check and cross-check the gruesome murders of Mrs. Jeanne French, who was found mutilated with obscenities written all over her body in lipstick; Mrs. Evelyn Winters, who had been mutilated and then slashed to death; Rosenda Mondragon, who was clawed with some instrument and then strangled with a silk stocking; Mrs. Dorothy Montgomery, who was stripped naked and mutilated; Mrs. Laura Trelstad, who was ferociously beaten and then strangled. It was always possible that any one of the murdered women could have been victims of the Dahlia's killer. Not only did the police have to investigate and solve these crimes, they had to rule out any direct link to the Dahlia.
The second big hindrance to police progress were the false confessions, the "tip-offs" that led nowhere, the fantastic interference from the most ordinary members of the public. The need to be involved hampered everything. In the early days following the discovery of the Dahlia's body, twenty-eight people professed to be the killer---far more than for any previous killing in U.S. criminal history.
Captain Donohue revealed that two weeks after the Dahlia's death, a thirty-three-year-old man, Daniel S. Voorhees, had telephoned the Homicide Department to come pick him up: "I can't stand it any longer," Voorhees wailed. "I want to confess to the murder of the Black Dahlia." Ten days later, Captain William Florence, of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Unit, announced the arrest of twenty-nine-year-old Joseph Dumais, a combat veteran of Fort Dix, New Jersey. Dumais had just returned from a forty-two days' leave where he had been in the company of Elizabeth Short on 9 January. "It is possible that I committed the murder," Dumais said. "When I get drunk, I get rough with women."
One of the most outlandish confessions came from a man looking for his wife. He had separated from her and could not find her, and he thought that by confessing, he would get his picture in the paper. Two Homicide men even figured in one incident when they discussed the case over a cup of coffee at a restaurant near police headquarters. The men walked into their office in time to receive a frantic telephone call from the waiter at the restaurant claiming he had just "served coffee to the killers." The police merely checked all suspects and leads against facts known only to themselves, and went on with their work.
With her final movements shrouded in mystery, the case baffled law enforcement officials and crime buffs alike. It seemed that the package mailed to the newspaper office, which contained the Dahlia's personal belongings, was the closest anyone ever got to the Dahlia's killer---until writer Lawrence Scherb began to research the case in 1989 for a book he was preparing. Scherb claims he found evidence, which linked the Black Dahlia murder to another notorious murder---Cleveland's famous Torso Slayer. That investigation, known as the Kingsbury Run Murders, is best remembered for having eluded the famous crime-fighter, Eliot Ness.
In 1935, after leaving Chicago's renown crime-busting team, "The Untouchables," Eliot Ness became Public Safety Director of Cleveland, Ohio. During his tenure, Cleveland was terrorized by a string of sadistic, unsolved murders, which Scherb believed was directly connected to the Black Dahlia case. Between 1934-1938, no less than thirteen mutilated bodies were found. The victims were all prostitutes and drifters, which the killer dismembered and bisected with surgical precision, as would happen nine years later to the Black Dahlia.
By the end of 1938, the Cleveland horror had ended. At about the same time, the city police chief received a letter from the Torso Slayer indicating that he had moved West. It was to be bad news for California. In the butcher's letter, which was postmarked from Los Angeles, he bragged that he was performing medical experiments on new guinea pig victims. He boasted that he had already killed another woman and buried her head in a gully in southwestern Los Angeles. Describing himself as a D.C., Doctor of Chiropractic, his letter said, "I felt bad operating on those people, but science must advance." The butchered body of the Black Dahlia would be found in that same area eight years later.
The letter was just the beginning of the Torso Slayer/Black Dahlia connection that Lawrence Scherb found. According to Scherb, the killer described going to Los Angeles in 1938, and since the last Cleveland torso murder was committed in 1938, it corresponded chronologically with the fact that the torso killer had stopped killing that year in Cleveland. The Dahlia's killer also had a fetish for cleanliness. He cleaned Elizabeth's body very carefully by washing her hair and scrubbing her with a bristle brush so severely that he left bristles embedded in her skin. The Cleveland victims were also cleaned up, indicating that the killer was attempting to get rid of trace evidence. A butcher knife was used to bisect the Dahlia, and a butcher knife was definitely used to dismember, bisect and decapitate the victims in Cleveland.
There are other similarities. Police determined that Elizabeth Short had been held captive and tortured for several hours before being killed. She had wounds on her neck, arms, and legs that indicated she had been tied with ropes. Several of the Cleveland victims had exactly the same kinds of marks suggesting that they had been tortured in the same kind of manner. Also, the Dahlia's body had been arranged in a sexually suggestive position. The same was true of some of the Torso Slayer victims. In fact, there was really only one significant difference between the Dahlia and the Torso Slayer victims. The Dahlia, unlike most of the Torso victims, was not decapitated.
Scherb explained the discrepancy by stating that the Torso Killer murdered victims in other places in the 1940s which he did not decapitate. It wasn't necessarily true that the mere fact of decapitation set all the Torso victims apart. Scherb felt that the killer simply changed his method of operation in a small way. The Black Dahlia not being decapitated did not rule out the possibility that she was killed by the same man.
There are people who believe that Eliot Ness actually knew the Torso Slayer's identity, but never had enough evidence to prove it in court. Eliot Ness retired from public life in 1947. He later told his biographer, Oscar Fraley, that after he had developed a profile of the killer, he was approached by a member of Cleveland's high society. The lady socialite claimed Ness's profile fit a member of an influential family. Ness immediately interviewed the suspect. When the suspect admitted that he had been to medical school, Ness gave him two lie detector tests. Both times the suspect failed. Ness then directly confronted him, saying, "I think you're the killer." The suspect replied, "Think it? Prove it."
Soon after he took the lie detector test, the suspect voluntarily committed himself to a hospital. Lawrence Scherb claims that this act was a complex deal the suspect made to keep his family name out of the newspapers. It was also at that time that the torso slayings in Cleveland abruptly stopped. Scherb felt that Ness believed the suspect was so deranged that he would probably remain in a mental institution the rest of his life, and it would be the end of the case.
But if the Torso Slayer was safely locked away in an Ohio hospital, how could the murders have continued in other parts of the midwest and later in Los Angeles? A crucial point, perhaps overlooked by Eliot Ness, was pointed out by Scherb. If a person is voluntarily in a mental hospital, that person is legally free to walk out at any time. Scherb believes that is exactly what Eliot Ness's suspect did. It would mean that the killer used the mental health system most of his career. When the investigations got tough, he simply checked himself in a hospital and waited until things cooled down. Then he checked himself out and continued killing.
Scherb could be wrong about his conclusions. Captain Jack Donohue, for instance, two weeks after the Dahlia's body was found, formed the opinion that the murderer was not a man, but a woman. Although he could not be sure, Captain Donohue was led to that belief by a number of reasons. Primarily, the nature of the injuries---the vicious spite with which they had been inflicted---were similar to those found in other mutilation murders in which jealous women had hacked their rivals to death. Also, the Dahlia had left San Diego without extra clothing or makeup, indicating she was planning to stay with a woman friend. When the detectives were searching for leads, they found two bartenders who reported serving drinks to her a day or so before her death, and both men swear that she was in the company of another woman at the time. Robert Manley also stated that at one of his meetings with the Dahlia, he saw scratches on her arms, and when he asked about them, she reported that she had a friend who was "intensely jealous." Might not the principle motive for the crime have been jealousy? And who was the mystery woman the bartenders saw? Although the police searched for months, they never found out.
The murder of the Black Dahlia remains unsolved. If she was a later victim of Cleveland's Torso Slayer, there is no way of finding out. Eliot Ness never publicly identified the suspect and took the name with him to the grave. Lawrence Scherb believes that Ness was bothered a great deal that the mad butcher was able to escape punishment. Scherb thinks that Elizabeth Short was simply one of a number of victims who were slain by the same killer, and that the madman was the most prolific mass murderer in the history of the United States.
Was the Dahlia a victim of a jealous rival, butchered by a madman, or the prey of a serial killer who managed to escape the clutches of Eliot Ness? To this day, no one knows. Her killer's true identity remains unknown.