by Piu Eatwell
Wain gave Jimmy a look. “What a sweet guy you are,” he said, with deep sarcasm. But he proceeded to dial the number. Soon he had Phoebe Mae Short on the line. The mother was blissfully unaware of her daughter’s recent fate.
“Well Mrs. Short,” said Wain, “your daughter has won a beauty contest and we want to know all about her.”
Richardson was whooping inwardly. “Wain might have been sad-eyed,” he wrote later, “but he sure had come up with a daisy.”
After scribbling furiously for some time, Wain looked imploringly at his boss.
“Do I have to tell her? She’s so damn happy about the beauty contest.”
“Tell her.”§
And that was how Mrs. Phoebe Mae Short heard the news that her twenty-two-year-old daughter Elizabeth had been murdered and left on a sidewalk three thousand miles from the family home.
When Jimmy Richardson got back to his desk, Sid Hughes came up and told him that the girl had won the Camp Cooke “Cutie of the Week” contest during her brief spell at the Lompoc Army Base in 1943.
“Tell all this to Wain,” Richardson said dryly. “He’ll be glad to hear about her winning that contest.”
Wain, in the meantime, had extracted more facts from the mother. It transpired that Elizabeth was the third of five girls, born into a single-parent family in a working-class Boston suburb. She had no fixed address or job. She had lived at various times in Florida, Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Chicago, and had been staying, only ten days previously, at an address in Pacific Beach, San Diego. Jimmy called Tommy Devlin, his top crime reporter, to his desk. Tommy had been working on the Mocambo heist,¶ in which arrests were being made. Jimmy ordered Tommy to drop everything and hightail it to San Diego to dig up what he could.
Up until now, the newspaper reports had focused on the victim as a pathetic ingénue, a New England beauty who had been drawn to the dark lights of Hollywood like a moth to a flame. Elizabeth’s former boss at Camp Cooke, a Mrs. Inez Keeling, said that she first met Elizabeth in the spring of 1943. “I was won over all at once by her almost childlike charm and beauty. She was one of the loveliest girls I had ever seen—and the most shy.” Mrs. Keeling said that Elizabeth suffered from an acute bronchial condition: the doctors back home were afraid that she might have tuberculosis. “That is why her parents allowed her to room in California alone. She was just 18 then.” Most of the girls at the PXs used to date the servicemen. “But not Elizabeth,” said Mrs. Keeling. “She never visited over the counter with any of the boys, and always refused to date them. She was one of the few girls in my employ who didn’t smoke or occasionally take a drink. She lived in the camp and never went out nights.” In 1943 Elizabeth left her job, but she came to see Mrs. Keeling for the next few weeks. Then the girl suddenly dropped out of her life, and she never saw her again. The rumor was that Elizabeth had been assaulted by a sergeant at the Army base, known as “Sergeant Chuck,” whom she had been dating. The sergeant had been court-martialed and left the base. Elizabeth left shortly afterward.
But as the weeks passed, the image of the victim began, subtly, to change. There were incoming reports of many and various boyfriends; a rootless and drifting existence; and there had been the arrest for underage drinking in Santa Barbara. While it was clear that Elizabeth Short was no prostitute, equally she could no longer be characterized as an innocent. “This victim knew at least fifty men at the time of her death and at least twenty-five men had been seen with her in the sixty days preceding her death,” noted a police report. “She was not a prostitute. She was known as a teaser of men. She would ride with them, chisel a place to sleep, clothes and money, but she would then refuse to have sexual intercourse by telling them she was a virgin or that she was engaged or married. She has been known to see as many as four men in one day chiseling a ride, dinner money or a place to stay, and would then brush them off with a fabricated line of conversation.”
And so, slowly but surely, the public image of the murder victim began to change from that of a violated beauty into a “man crazy delinquent,” a temptress prowling the rain-soaked streets of an urban film noir. The society columnist on the Herald-Express, Caroline Walker, saw in Elizabeth’s fate a warning to the young women of postwar America:
“Two girls,” wrote Walker, “with the innocent curve of babyhood still rounding their young cheeks, walk down this or that boulevard. There is no innocence in the knowing eyes of these girls.” For such young women, wrote Walker, an evening of bar-hopping would end in a cheap hotel. Or the girls might go home: “home” being an apartment meant for two, crowded with bunk beds for eight. What, opined Walker, did these girls think of at night? Did they remember Sunday mornings, and a white steepled church in a little town? Perhaps, until the rush of excitement when the night returned, and they felt the same urge to prowl the streets like “animals in the jungle.” Such women, concluded Walker, were accusations against society, against parents, and against the American home, “as stark as the handwriting on the walls in Biblical days.”
Walker’s diatribe tapped directly into a wider social anxiety about Los Angeles’ “girl problem.” Southern California had always been sold as a destination for white American males seeking to escape the influx of “ignorant, hopelessly un-American” foreigners flooding into the eastern cities. But lately—largely due to the movie industry—the region had become a target for a new type of female immigrant. The movies portrayed heroines with thrilling life experiences, liberated from the restraints of work and family. The golden life they promised stimulated a wave of women in the massive wash of emigrants that deluged Southern California in the early twentieth century. By 1900, female migrants outpaced male, effecting a stunning reversal in western migration patterns. “There are more women in Los Angeles than any other city in the world and it’s the movies that bring them,” said a shopkeeper in 1918. The figures supported the claim. In 1920, Los Angeles became the only western city in which women outnumbered men. The “extra girls” were everywhere: “girls—tall girls and short girls, curly-haired girls and girls with their hair drawn sleekly back over their brows, girls who suggest mignonettes and girls who suggest tuberoses; girls in aprons and girls in evening gowns—girls by the score, their faces all grease paint, waiting in little chattering groups for their big moment of the day.”
The uncontrollable tide of youthful female flesh let loose on the West Coast created a moral panic. As the journalist Walter Lippmann put it, “external control of the chastity of women is becoming impossible.” The dangers facing girls who left the white clapboard houses of home to venture into Sin City were starkly highlighted in books such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Girl from Hollywood (1922). Written at his Tarzana ranch in the San Fernando Valley (where Burroughs penned his more famous Tarzan of the Apes), The Girl from Hollywood features two heroines, neither of whom, with telling irony, actually comes from Hollywood. Seeking fame and fortune, the girls wind up drug-addicted, pregnant, and—in the case of one—dead; a telling parable of the dangers of a city whose sinister temptations were all the more insidious in that they took place under a blazing azure sky. Those girls with the “Bohemian bacillus” in their system, warned the film producer Benjamin Hampton, were in danger of reaching the “end of their journey” in a store, a restaurant, or the morgue.
Elizabeth Short—the dead extra girl from Massachusetts—made even better preaching material than any heroine of Edgar Rice Burroughs. She was real. But the murdered girl now required a new, headline-grabbing moniker to fit her new image. The newspapers found one. It came from a pharmacist in Long Beach, where, in the summer of 1946, the girl had drifted for a few months. The druggist, Arnold Landers, Sr., recalled her hanging around the soda fountain. “She’d come to our drug store frequently. She’d usually wear a two-piece beach costume which left her midriff bare. She’d wear the black lacey things. Her hair was jet black, and she liked to wear it high. She was popular with the men who came in here, and they got to calling her The Black Dah
lia.”
The Black Dahlia. It was the moniker of the decade. Jimmy Richardson said it was the brainchild of one of his reporters. Aggie Underwood claimed it as her own. Whoever first printed the name, it must have been inspired by the 1946 film The Blue Dahlia, a hard-boiled noir movie scripted by Raymond Chandler, featuring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Floral names were fashionable for murders in those days. There had already been the “Red Hibiscus” and the “White Gardenia” killings.# The “Black Dahlia” fit right in the box, although—as Aggie Underwood speculated—a “red rose” murder might be even better, as it would sound like “class as well as homicide.” Aggie herself was a pro when it came to floral murder tags. Once she had dropped a white carnation on the body of a waitress who had been stabbed to death, dubbing the killing the “white carnation murder.” When a cop objected to her taking a picture of her creation, Aggie smacked him with her purse.
Within weeks, the “Black Dahlia” sobriquet had established itself as an integral part of what was swiftly becoming a Hollywood legend. For many—including Lieutenant Harry Hansen, one of the lead LAPD detectives on the case—it was the reason for the legend. Hansen recalled that there had been many other crimes that year, at least as horrific and with victims at least as attractive. But not one got the same attention. It was the name “Black Dahlia” that sparked a national obsession.
Beneath the smoldering gaze and the lacy black chiffon outfits of the Black Dahlia legend, however, the reality of the victim’s life was more prosaic. Jimmy Richardson summed it up best of all. “She was a pitiful wanderer, ricocheting from one cheap job to another and from one cheap man to another in a sad search for a good husband and a home and happiness. Not bad. Not good. Just lost and trying to find a way out. Every big city has hundreds just like her.”
“We’re hotter than a firecracker,” Tommy Devlin told Jimmy Richardson upon his return from San Diego. “Just listen to this.” The letter that Elizabeth had sent to her mother from San Diego had been written while she was staying at the home of a Mrs. Elvera French on Camino Padera Drive in Pacific Beach. Mrs. French’s daughter, Dorothy, was a cashier at the Aztec Theatre downtown. The Aztec was an all-night movie theater where the homeless would crash. Dorothy had found Elizabeth asleep in the theater on the night of December 8, 1946, and had offered to take her to her home. Elizabeth had only been meant to stay a night with the French family. In the end, she lived there for a month.
“She left the French place about six o’clock on the evening of January 8 with a man known as Red,” Tommy reported. “This Red sent her a telegram from Huntington Park saying that he would pick her up the next day. She told Mrs. French and Dorothy he was taking her to Los Angeles.” Red was apparently a tall, red-haired, freckled man in his twenties.
“Good going, Tommy,” said Jimmy. “Call me in an hour. Have we got this all alone? Have you told the Frenches not to talk? If it takes dough to shut them up give it to them.”
“They’re shut up,” said Tommy, “I’ve seen to that.”
The urgent task now was to track down “Red,” the mysterious man who had collected Elizabeth on January 8. He must have been one of the last people to see Elizabeth alive. Jimmy sent a crew tearing down to Huntington Park to trace the telegram to which Tommy had referred. They found it. It read: BE THERE TOMORROW AFTERNOON LATE WOULD LIKE TO SEE YOU, RED. But there was no address.
Jimmy told Tommy to keep searching the records of motels at Pacific Beach for any trace of Elizabeth and Red. It was, he well knew, the time when a city editor sweats it out: the moment when he needs those little white pills. These were tough times for city editors. The City of Angels had, at this point, more than its fair share of newspapers in a cutthroat fight for a piece of the market. They included the staid and sober Los Angeles Times, the bastion of the conservative establishment, steered by the latest scion of the Chandler dynasty, real estate billionaire Harry Chandler; the shoot-’em-up and go-get-’em papers owned by Chandler’s rival press magnate, William Randolph Hearst, the Herald-Express and the Los Angeles Examiner; and the ever-struggling Daily News, run on a shoestring by the Democrat-supporting Manchester Boddy. Everybody knew it was the Chandler and Hearst interests that ran the show. While very different men, Harry Chandler and William Randolph Hearst were united in their implacable animosity to the unions, organized labor, nonwhite “foreigners,” and the “hot bed of Communism” which Hollywood was alleged to have become. But their approach to the threat differed. While the Times remained aloof and overtly allied to WASP establishment and business interests, the Hearst newspapers entered the fray with hysterical forays into yellow journalism to keep working-class readers entertained and well distracted from the issues that most affected them. The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, blacklisted by the Hearst establishment for his alcoholism, was one of many to mock the typical Hearst headlines of the day. “Mickey Mouse Murdered! Randolph Hearst Declares War on China!” shouts a newsboy in Fitzgerald’s 1941 novel The Last Tycoon. The difference in editorial approach between the media moguls at Los Feliz and San Simeon partly explained the difference in the attitude toward the Dahlia case taken by their respective newspapers. Chandler’s Times, on the whole, did its best to ignore the sordid story as beneath its dignity. Hearst’s Examiner and Herald-Express, on the other hand, flogged it within inches of death.
Of all the newspapermen on the street, Jimmy Richardson’s were the most aggressive. They had huge expense accounts, bankrolled by the old man, who still barked out orders from his monolithic castle at San Simeon. Other newspapers, Jimmy knew, did not stand a chance in competition. Not that they didn’t try. The Daily News had two reporters assigned to the Dahlia case to the Examiner’s twenty. In a desperate attempt to get more copy, the News sent a rookie reporter, Roy Ringer, into the Examiner offices in the early days of the story, posing as a copyboy. Ringer went to the spike where the proofs were ready for the next day, grabbed a bunch of them, and returned to the Daily News office. The next day, the Daily News ran the same “exclusives” as the Examiner. On Ringer’s third visit, he felt a tap on his shoulder from behind. It was Jimmy Richardson. “Nice try, but don’t try it again.”
All through the night and day, Jimmy waited for word from Tommy. When it arrived, he could have kissed him.
“I’ve got it,” said Tommy. “I’ve found the motel where Red stayed when he was down there and where he stayed with the Dahlia the night they left the Frenches.”
Tommy had gotten the license-plate number of the car from the owner of the motel at Pacific Beach where Red had stayed with Elizabeth Short the night of January 8. Red and Elizabeth had checked out of the motel at 12:30 p.m. on January 9. That meant they would have arrived in Los Angeles later that afternoon.
It took no time to run down the license. The owner of the car—a 1939 Studebaker coupe—was a twenty-five-year-old pipe clamp salesman called Robert M. Manley. He had been a musician in the Army and had a psychiatric discharge from the service. He resided on Mountain View Avenue in Huntington Park.
Jimmy ordered two crews of reporters and photographers to hightail it over to Huntington Park. He’d be damned if he wasn’t the first newspaperman to get an interview with “Red,” the prime suspect in the Dahlia case.
* Jimmy Richardson’s hard-drinking and hard-living newspaperman’s life story was retold in fictional form in the novel Come, Fill the Cup (1952) by Harlan Ware, later to be dramatized in a film starring James Cagney.
† Soundphoto: an early form of fax machine.
‡ Among the many mutilations of the body of Elizabeth Short, Dr. Newbarr noted in his autopsy report: “There is an irregular opening in the skin on the anterior surface of the left thigh with tissue loss. The opening measures 3½" transversely at the base and 4" from the base longitudinally to the upper back. The laceration extends into the subcutaneous soft tissue and muscle.” This was in fact a reference to the incision that was made by the killer in order to remove the rose tattoo. The cutting out of the tattoo
was never revealed in the press, but it was hinted at in a Herald-Express report on the discovery of the body: “A piece of flesh was gouged out of the left thigh, leading to the belief her murderer may have removed it to conceal an identifying mark” (Herald-Express, January 16, 1947).
§ Richardson recalls this episode with some pride in his 1954 memoir For the Life of Me (New York: Putnam, pp. 299–300).
¶ Mocambo heist: a holdup of the Mocambo Nightclub on the Sunset Strip, for which several local gangsters were rounded up and arrested in January 1947.
# The Red Hibiscus murder: name given by the press to the killing of Naomi Tullis Cook, who was found beaten to death with a bolt and left in a clump of bushes in Lincoln Park in 1946. The White Gardenia murder: moniker for the murder of forty-two-year-old Ora Murray, whose partially nude body was found on the Fox Hill Golf Course in West Los Angeles in 1943. The killer had carefully placed a white gardenia under her right shoulder.
3
THE CAPTURE
In the end it wasn’t one of Jimmy’s boys who got the first interview with Red. It was Aggie Underwood.
Red wasn’t home when Jimmy Richardson’s team arrived at the house in Huntington Park. He was on a trip to San Francisco with his boss. Jimmy’s men had to make do with Red’s wife, Harriette, a pretty young woman who came to the door with the couple’s four-month-old baby in her arms. Mrs. Manley was adamant that her husband had come straight home on the evening of January 9. He had been at work all day and home every night since, until he left for San Francisco. She wouldn’t believe he’d been with another girl unless she heard it from his own lips. He was faithful and good to her and the baby and his home. She loved him no matter what happened to him and would stand by him. Harriette posed for pictures with the baby and gave the reporters pictures of Red. “Gad, what a woman!” sighed an Examiner newspaperman. “Beautiful and forgiving. Why can’t I find somebody like that?”