The Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

by Steve Hodel

  On April 1, 1950, a few months after the grand jury closed its investigation, the Los Angeles Times printed a story under the headline "Murder Cases Reopened by District Attorney; Investigators Start Again on Slaying of Nurse and 'Black Dahlia' Brutality," which revealed that the DA investigators were actively "searching for a man they believed to be a 'hot suspect' in the three-year-old murder cases. Investigators Frank Jemison and Walter Morgan told reporters that their office was co-investigating both the Black Dahlia and Jeanne French murders." Further, the article said, "H. Leo Stanley, chief investigator for District Attorney Simpson, said that his investigators remain unconvinced that a bloody shirt and trousers found in the home of an acquaintance of Mrs. French have been fully eliminated as a clue to the murder." Investigators had refused to name the man they were seeking as a prime suspect but said, "He is the owner of the mysterious bloody clothing that has disappeared from LAPD police evidence lockers." The DA investigators planned to "take lengthy statements from two close women friends of the slain nurse" and had been assigned to investigate the two unsolved murder cases at the request of the 1949 grand jury.

  The actual police reports themselves were never released. However, from public disclosures and statements provided by the district attorney's investigators and from my own research, it seems that LAPD had recovered some bloody clothing from the residence of the "wealthy Hollywood man," including pants and a shirt belonging to him, which was booked into evidence and then either "lost" or deliberately disposed of, probably by members of the Gangster Squad. Indications were that investigators believed the clothing possibly related to the Jeanne French murder investigation, since several of French's women friends had identified the wealthy Hollywood man as being acquainted with her.

  Next, and separate from the man's bloody clothing evidence, the independent private investigators located a different set of witnesses, who when interviewed by Lieutenant Jemison told of seeing women's bloody clothing of a size and description similar to those worn by Elizabeth Short as well as bloody bedsheets inside the wealthy Hollywood man's residence.

  There can be no doubt, therefore, that Lieutenant Jemison's "wealthy Hollywood man" was known and identified by both the Los Angeles district attorney and LAPD as the prime suspect in both those murders.

  As noted, the DA's office testified that "the murder site was located on a busy street, 15 minutes from the crime scene." I submit that the murder site was in fact the Franklin House, located on the busy streets of Franklin and Normandie Avenues in what is called the Los Feliz section of Hollywood.

  In October 1999 I conducted a time-and-mileage check by driving from 39th and Norton to the Franklin House. In normal Hollywood traffic, the 7.7-mile drive took me seventeen minutes. And the Franklin House garage opens onto a tiny alley. Once inside the closed garage one has direct access to the interior of the residence, where one could easily remove a body from the house in the dead of night and be undetected.

  None of the publicly released documents reveal at what time the LAPD detectives found and recovered the bloody clothing believed to be owned by my father. On what date, and in what year, did they remove this clothing from the Franklin House? The two strongest possibilities are (1) either in February or in the weeks or months immediately following the 1947 murder of Jeanne French, or (2) in the days following George Hodel's arrest for incest on October 6, 1949.

  For the moment, the questions relating to the two separate sets of bloody clothing that connected George Hodel to both Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French must remain unanswered. What is certain, and has been answered, is that in secret testimony the 1949 grand jury received from district attorney's investigator Lieutenant Frank Jemison two startling facts: (1) LAPD detectives were covering up the Dahlia and Red Lipstick murders, and (2) Dr. George Hodel was the prime suspect in both crimes.

  * * *

  *This public comment made by the Johnsons strongly suggests that the photograph originally shown to them in 1947 by LAPD, then again by DA investigators in 1949, was our exhibit 9 or 10, George Hodel's China photos that "connect him to a foreign government." It is believed he mailed these photographs to Elizabeth Short from his overseas assignment in 1946.

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  The Dahlia Myths

  AMONG THE MORE FASCINATING AND DISTURBING aspects of the Black Dahlia murder was the amount of myth that gathered around both victim and assailant as the case aged over the years. Because the case was so much in the headlines in 1947 and in the years since, it has become the subject of a number of books, films, and television movies. Writers and commentators have come up with their own notions of the truth, and all too often their opinions unfortunately become considered fact. Commentators have theorized endlessly about the nature of Elizabeth Short and that of her assailant. In every case, however, the theories about both have been woefully off base. First, there is what I call "the Dahlia myth."

  The brief, tragic life of Elizabeth Short stands apart from the other victims in our investigation for two primary reasons. The first is the way she was murdered and her body disposed of. Second is the name "Black Dahlia," which both horrified and fascinated the public and immediately identified her with this beautiful flower, turning the crime into a piece of lore. Although some of the other victims were more beautiful and more exotic than Elizabeth, it was the name that made her crime stand out.

  As the beloved Los Angeles Tunes columnist Jack Smith said about her in his book Jack Smith's L.A.:

  I have always supposed that I was the first one to get "the Black Dahlia" into print, though I didn't make it up. As I remember, one of our reporters picked up a tip that Miss Short had frequented a certain Long Beach drugstore for a time. I looked the number up in the phone book and got the drugstore and talked to the pharmacist.

  Yes, he remembered Elizabeth Short. "She used to hang around with the kids at the soda fountain. They called her the Black Dahlia — on account of the way she wore her hair." The Black Dahlia! It was a rewrite man's dream. The fates were sparing of such gifts. I couldn't wait to get it into type.

  From day one, with the birth of that name, her real identity disappeared. Few today can tell you the actual name of the Black Dahlia, but most know her story. Not only was her name forgotten, but also her true character. Truth gave way to fiction almost immediately. Initially, the press was to blame, through insinuation and innuendo.

  Her character assassination started out slowly in the dailies, with one-liners scattered here and there: "Elizabeth was seen at a Hollywood bar with a mannish-looking female." "Elizabeth was seen in a vehicle with a large muscular blonde woman." "Unidentified sources indicated Elizabeth preferred the company of women."

  To LAPD's credit, no confirmations discrediting her reputation came from any detectives assigned to the investigation, at least in those early years. Unfortunately, that would change in later decades.

  But what the cops didn't do, the authors and self-proclaimed "true-crime experts" did quite well. Hank Sterling, in his 1954 book Ten Perfect Murders, comments:

  It's fair to say that her death was the result of her deplorable way of life. Did she go there [Biltmore Hotel] because she hoped to find a pickup, found one and was lured to her death? If so, we can say that the same thing could have happened to a blameless virgin intrigued by a deceptive personality. In that case her death would have nothing to do with her lurid past. In fact, it can be said that a girl with Beth's experience would have been too wise to be trapped that way.

  A few years later Elizabeth Short was mentioned in another book, The Badge, by Jack Webb, who portrayed Detective Sergeant Joe Friday on the television show Dragnet.

  She was a lazy girl and irresponsible; and, when she chose to work, she drifted obscurely from one menial job to another ... To the sociologist, she is the typical, unfortunate depression child who matured too suddenly in her teens into the easy money, easy living, easy loving of wartime America.

  Closing his chapter on the Dahlia, Webb wrote:

&nbs
p; All LAPD can say is that its detectives exonerated every man and woman whom they have talked to. Beyond that you are free to speculate. But do him a favor; don't press your deductions on Finis Brown.

  By the 1980s, Elizabeth's character had reached rock bottom. In Fallen Angels: Chronicles of L.A. Crime and Mystery, by Marvin Wolf and Katherine Mader, we find this description:

  She hung around radio stations, went on casting calls — and soon descended into the netherworld of the street hustler where scoring a meal, a drink, a new dress, or a little folding money was as easy as finding a willing guy on Sixth Street. For a few months in 1946, she was a fixture of the Hollywood street scene, a pretty girl not too mindful about where or with whom she slept, a girl pretty and desperate enough to pose nude for sleazy pornographers, a pretty girl descending into a private hell.

  She spent a drunken night in a Hollywood hotel with a traveling salesman in return for a bus ticket to San Diego and pocket change.

  Three years later, Steven Nickel, in Torso: The Story of Eliot Ness and the Search for a Psychopathic Killer, made even more startling claims:

  The odyssey of Elizabeth Short was a tragic and progressively sordid story. At age seventeen, she had left her home in Massachusetts and headed west in an attempt to break into motion pictures in Hollywood. But her break never came, and she had drifted among the hustlers and flesh peddlers of Santa Barbara, Long Beach, San Diego, and Los Angeles during the next five years. Her romance with a young pilot ended tragically when he was killed in the war; her lover's death marked a turning point in Elizabeth Short's brief life. For a time, she operated as an expensive call girl with a flashy lifestyle. Some of her clients were Hollywood producers who promised her movie roles, but before long she degenerated into a common street prostitute hooked on alcohol and drugs, posing for nude photos to earn extra cash and occasionally living with a lesbian lover.

  . . . Her blouses, her dresses, her hosiery, her shoes, and her undergarments, as the detectives who searched her apartment found, were exclusively black. It was easy to see how Elizabeth Short had come by her nickname. She apparently realized it; there had been a tattoo of the exotic black dahlia on her left thigh that her killer viciously gouged out.

  In 1993, the editors of Time-Life Books, in their True Crime — Unsolved Crimes, characterized the Black Dahlia as follows:

  Short gravitated to Hollywood, hoping to break into the movies, but the closest she got was a job as a movie-house usherette. Her main line of work was prostitution.

  Years after his 1971 retirement, LAPD detective Harry Hansen dealt the final blow: "She was a bum and a tease."

  From one of the case's lead homicide detectives to the star of television's Dragnet, comments about Elizabeth Short proliferated, resulting in a composite of the victim that, in the end, had nothing whatsoever to do with who she really was. These "profilers," as if scripting a Hollywood B-movie, writing more from their own fantasies or prejudice than from the facts in the case, recreated Elizabeth Short as a gutter whore, an unclean and unkempt woman, turning tricks in dark downtown alleyways to support her alcohol and drug addictions. They described her as a user and manipulator of men who, because of her low intelligence and loose morals, was destined to fall prey to the dark forces that fed on wannabe starlets.

  But none of this is true. Worse, what people had to say about Elizabeth, from Hansen right through to today's commentators, is actually a blame-the-victim rationale for why the case was never solved. In reality it was solved, but then covered up. Elizabeth Short does not deserve to be so maligned. She was, after all, a crime victim, not a perpetrator. If she yearned for the attentions of men or lived in a world of fantasy, that did not make her complicit in her own death. For commentators to make such claims with little or no real knowledge of who Elizabeth Short was and what events drove her to her fateful meeting is, to my mind, the height of unprofessionalism. Writers can say what they want, but for law enforcement people to strike out against a victim is, at the very least, a violation of their ethical responsibility. Whatever she might have been in life, Elizabeth simply did not fit the profile created for her by Hansen, Webb, scores of reporters, and the editors of true-crime anthologies. Those who knew her provide the best evidence about her personality, and it's from them and from Elizabeth's own letters that people should draw their conclusions. We have heard in detail the descriptions of her by those who knew her in life. In their personal composites we find the following: "immaculately dressed," "shy, and sweet," "always well behaved model employee, who didn't smoke or drink," and "good kid."

  Elizabeth herself is her own best spokesperson. Her letters abound in naiveté, which I read as a belief in the essential honesty of others. For example, in her letters to her self-described fiance Major Matt Gordon, written in April and May of 1945 and published in newspapers after Elizabeth's murder, she shares her heart's secrets. In anticipation of Matt's return from overseas and her pending marriage, she wrote:

  My Sweetheart:

  I love you, I love you, I love you. Sweetheart of all my dreams . . .

  Oh, Matt, honestly, I suppose when two people are in love as we are our letters sound out of this world to a censor .. .

  Just dreaming and hoping for a letter and now you are going to be mine . ..

  It is going to be wonderful darling, when this is all over. You want to slip away and be married. We'll do whatever you wish, darling. Whatever you want, I want. I love you and all I want is you . ..

  Beth

  Or this later letter to Matt:

  My Darling Matt:

  I have just received your most recent letter and clippings. And, darling, I can't begin to tell you how happy and proud I am . . .

  I'm so much in love with you, Matt, that I live for your return and your beautiful letters so please write when you can and be careful, Matt for me. I'm so afraid! I love you with all my heart.

  Beth

  After Matt Gordon's death, Elizabeth dated another officer, Lieutenant Joseph Gordon Fickling, in the hope of finding a new love. Fickling discouraged her; in a letter from him to her found in her luggage he wrote:

  Time and again I've suggested that you forget me as I've believed it's the only thing for you to do to be happy.

  Discharged from the service in 1946, Fickling returned to Charlotte, North Carolina. Letters addressed to him but not mailed were found in Elizabeth's luggage. On December 13, 1946, Elizabeth, her hopes for marriage with Fickling all but extinguished, wrote, but never mailed, the following:

  . . . Frankly, darling, if everyone waited to have everything all smooth before they decided to marry, none of them ever would be together.

  I'll never love any man as I do you. And, I should think that you would stop and wonder whether or not another woman will love you as much.

  Another letter found in her luggage, written by a Lieutenant Stephen Wolak, speaks directly to the issue of Elizabeth's obsessive desire to marry a military man. Wolak wrote:

  When you mentioned marriage in your letter, Beth, I got to wondering about myself. Seems like you have to be in love with a person before it's a safe bet. Infatuation is sometimes mistakenly accepted for true love, which can never be.

  A letter from a fourth serviceman, identified only as Paul Rosie, was found bound with ribbons with the rest of the letters. He wrote, as a response to what we must assume to be another love letter from Elizabeth:

  Your letter took me completely by surprise. Yes, I've always had the feeling that we had a lot in common and that we could have meant a lot to each other had we only been together more often. It's nice to receive a warm friendly letter such as yours.

  These letters, addressed to four separate servicemen and published on the front pages of L.A.'s major newspapers, are all windows into her heart. They were never expected to be read by anyone except the men to whom they were addressed, but they reveal a young woman's desperate need to find love and to marry, her overwhelming joy at finding love, and her ecstatic anticipation of h
er fiance's triumphant return. After the tragic news of his sudden death, she goes into a tailspin at having lost the man of her dreams and returns to California in the hope of finding another man to heal her broken heart.

  The Dahlia letters themselves have never been previously discussed by the press, the police, or in any of the books written about the investigation, yet to my mind they raise a serious question about Elizabeth's emotional or psychological health. We know from the conflicting stories Elizabeth told friends that she was not only extremely secretive, but prone to distort the truth. On a number of occasions she clearly fantasized or lied. For example:

  She told both Dorothy and Elvera French that she had been married to Matt, had borne him a child, and the child had died.

  In early letters she told her mother she had had some minor roles in films as an "extra." In her last letter to her mother in early January 1947, she told her she was working in San Diego at the hospital at Balboa Park.

  She told Robert "Red" Manley that she had been married to a major and was working at the Western Airlines office in San Diego.