Black Dahlia, Red Rose: The Crime, Corruption, and Cover-Up of America's Greatest Unsolved Murder

by Piu Eatwell

  There was much that was highly unusual about Burns’s “special assignment.” It was, to begin with, the first and only time that a key aspect of a homicide investigation had been assigned to members of the Gangster Squad. More unusual still, while the secret assignment was known to the head of the Homicide detail, Captain Kearney, it was not revealed to the two homicide officers in charge of the Dahlia case: Lieutenant Harry “the Hat” Hansen and Sergeant Finis Brown. They were completely unaware of the secret operation. Finis, in particular, was kept out of the way. All through December 1948, the sergeant was assigned to the detail of guarding the Berlin picture exhibition# held in the county museum of Exposition Park.

  What prompted the Homicide and Gangster details, in planning the Leslie Dillon mission, to go over the heads of the lead police officers assigned to the Dahlia case? The official explanation was that to involve Harry “the Hat” Hansen and Finis Brown would have immediately alerted the press to the clandestine operation. And it was true that Jimmy Richardson’s men were watching Finis’s and Harry’s every move. But Harry and Finis were not only kept out of the Leslie Dillon assignment. They were not even told about it. Why? The answer lay, possibly, in the allegations of incompetence that had dogged the Dahlia case from the beginning. But there might well have been another reason. The calling in of the Gangster detail at this juncture implied the possible involvement of organized crime and the presence of police corruption. And the fact that the assigned officers were not told about the mission hinted that the department’s top brass did not fully trust them. Specifically, that they did not trust one officer in particular: Finis Brown, commonly known as “Fat Arse,” the cop who was rumored to have links with organized vice through his connection with Mark Hansen and the Florentine Gardens.

  While Finis Brown was admiring masterpieces of the Dutch and Flemish schools at Exposition Park, Willie Burns quietly assembled his team to accompany and support Dr. De River in his clandestine mission to connect with Leslie Dillon. Burns himself would deal with the bugging of conversations, with the help of Homicide’s Captain Kearney. But Willie still needed an undercover cop to act as chauffeur for Dr. De River. Such a man would need to have the muscle to protect the doctor in an emergency. But he would also need to have a brain, to lie low and play the dumb chauffeur and not blow their cover. It took some time and thought before Willie came up with a name. Why had he not thought of it before? He had just the man.

  * Clifford E. Clinton (1900–1969), founder of the Los Angeles restaurant chain Clifton’s Cafeterias, was a leading philanthropist and campaigner against corruption who, among other charitable acts, founded “penny restaurants” to feed the needy before the government introduced relief agencies.

  † Officer Jones’s mission was kept highly secret and his first name was never revealed.

  ‡ This incident makes it clear that Leslie Dillon, contrary to his later assertions, was well aware from an early stage that he was being watched as a potential suspect in the Dahlia murder.

  § “Shoots Out Girl’s tooth”: this clipping is discussed further on page 104.

  ¶ The unsigned writing samples are discussed later on page 237.

  # Berlin picture exhibition: an exhibition of paintings, mainly from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, captured by the American Third Army during World War II and exhibited in the U.S. in 1948.

  10

  BEHIND LOCKED DOORS

  Sergeant John J. O’Mara (or “JJ”) had been assigned to the Seventy-seventh Street Station when Willie Burns picked him to join the Gangster Squad. A big, blue-eyed Irishman, O’Mara was one of the squad’s musclemen. At his local Catholic church of St. Anselm, the priest had selected him especially to pass around the collection basket. The Irishman’s ice-blue stare ensured that even the most reluctant members of the congregation coughed up their widow’s mite. Like the other members of the Gangster Squad, O’Mara kept a tommy gun concealed in a violin case under the bed. When he was selected by Willie Burns to serve on the squad, he had already been causing ripples at the Seventy-seventh Street Station for busting a burglary ring that included the teenage son of a police commander. Some of his colleagues were of the view that he should have let the case “disappear.” He hadn’t. O’Mara’s specialty was to escort local hoodlums up to a secluded spot in the Hollywood Hills. He would, as he put it, “have a little heart-to-heart talk with ’em, emphasize the fact that this wasn’t New York, this wasn’t Chicago, this wasn’t Cleveland. And we leaned on ’em a little, you know what I mean? Up in the Hollywood Hills, off Coldwater Canyon, anywhere up there. And it’s dark at night.” In the darkness, O’Mara would put a gun to the hoodlum’s ear and utter his dreaded catchphrase: “You want to sneeze?”

  Willie Burns knew that JJ—cool, tough, and dependable—was just the man to chauffeur Dr. De River on his mission to connect with Leslie Dillon. On December 28, 1949, O’Mara therefore received his instructions from the chief of the Gangster Squad. He was to drive the doctor wherever he wanted to go, and protect him in all situations that might arise during the assignment.

  Now that the operation had been set up, Dr. De River contacted Leslie Dillon and told him he would like to meet him to discuss the Dahlia case further. He would also like to see if Dillon’s friend “Jeff,” whom Dillon had hinted had committed the murder, might be persuaded to come to Los Angeles and receive psychiatric treatment. Dillon agreed to meet, but indicated that he did not want to come to Los Angeles. De River told him he was making a trip to New Orleans and then on to New York, and that he was going to be in Phoenix and Las Vegas. The doctor gave Dillon a number of options to meet. He hoped for Las Vegas, as it would likely be easier to get police cooperation to extradite Dillon from there if necessary. Dillon agreed to a meeting in Vegas. Police department funds were spent to buy Dillon a plane ticket. JJ O’Mara, Willie Burns, and the doctor checked into a Vegas hotel to await Dillon’s arrival. A couple of days later, unknown to Dillon, Captain Kearney of Homicide joined Burns in Las Vegas. When Dillon arrived in the hotel lobby, he seemed excessively nervous. He had changed his hair color from the peroxide blond he sported in Florida to red-brown.**

  It proved impossible to obtain suitable rooms for the party in Vegas. O’Mara was therefore instructed to drive the doctor and his suspect to a health resort and hotel in Banning, near Palm Springs. On the cold December desert trip from Vegas to Palm Springs, O’Mara drove while the doctor conversed with Dillon in the backseat of the rusty old Ford jalopy. JJ was too busy focusing on the road to pay much attention, but he recalled later that there was a conversation about embalming and the proper way to bleed a corpse. Dillon told De River that he had once worked for three weeks in a mortuary, Hahn’s Funeral Home in Oklahoma City. He and the doctor discussed the procedure of making a cut in the leg of a corpse in order to bleed it, and the method of inserting a tube to drain the blood. Dillon also talked endlessly about “women, women, women.” He spoke in a “very soft, well-modulated voice.”

  The wind was keen as a knife and snow glinted on the peaks of the San Jacinto Mountains when the old Ford arrived at Palm Springs. Briargate Lodge was a long, low, rambling white 1930s building buried in the forest north of Banning. The lodge was perched on the edge of the San Gorgonio Pass, one of the many rifts in the California desert created by the shifting of the great tectonic plates of the San Andreas Fault. It had been built originally as a sanatorium, but by the end of the war had become a hotel. The main building featured along its length a shady porticoed veranda, where creaking basket-weave easy chairs hailed back to its early days as a place of rest, recuperation, and quiet death. Around the principal building clustered individual guest cottages. Dillon, O’Mara, and the doctor were housed in one cottage. Captain Kearney and Willie Burns arrived a day later and were housed in another. They installed the bugging equipment to record the conversations between the doctor and Dillon. Dillon was not supposed to know that Burns and Kearney were anything other than hotel guests.

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bsp; O’Mara had a room adjoining Dr. De River’s, and Leslie Dillon was placed in a room on the other side of the doctor. Later, JJ recalled that Dillon spent a great deal of time prowling around the lodge buildings at nightfall and in the early morning, before everybody else was up. Dillon called O’Mara “JJ,” as did the doctor, but a couple of times he called him “Jeff.” Much of the talk that O’Mara remembered centered on Dillon’s friend “Jeff,” who turned out to be an individual called Jeff Connors, and how he was a likely suspect for the Dahlia murder. During the long conversations between the doctor and Dillon in the doctor’s room, O’Mara would listen in through the wall from his adjoining room. He remembered that Dillon and the doctor discussed Jeff’s portrait of Dillon. Dillon made a sketch of Jeff, in profile.

  Leslie Dillon and the doctor also discussed in detail how Jeff had accomplished the Dahlia murder. According to the doctor, Dillon proffered an explanation as to why the Dahlia’s body was cut in half. The killer, Dillon said, would have wanted to see how far his penis went into the body of the woman. The doctor asked Dillon about how the body would be cut.

  “Well,” said Dillon, “if Jeff cut the body one way he would cut it up high, if, for another purpose, he wanted, he would cut it low.”

  “Well, why would he want to cut the body low?”

  “Well, Jeff is a funny fellow. He would like to see the effect of his sexual organs, the far end of an act after the body had been cut.”

  Dr. De River asked Dillon where the cutting of the body was effected. Dillon said maybe a bed, the floor, or a bath. The doctor asked him how Jeff had drained the blood from the body.

  “Oh, he probably hung that up on something in a shower, or something like that.”

  “Where would Jeff have committed this crime?”

  “Oh, in a hotel.”

  “Well, I don’t know of any hotel where he could get the body out without having to lug it downstairs.”

  “Oh, there are ground-floor hotels.”

  “You mean motels?”

  “Yes,” replied Dillon, “motels, something like that.”

  The conversation went back and forth until eventually De River said, “Do you mind taking off your shirt, Mr. Dillon?”

  “No.” Dillon stripped off his shirt and showed a very powerful build.

  The doctor was surprised. “You are not the type I thought you were at all—or maybe you are.” Then, after a pause, “We are just among men here. Have you any objection to dropping your trousers?”

  Dillon hesitated. Then he dropped his trousers. According to the doctor, this revealed that he had a “juvenile penis,” about “typical of an eight-year-old boy.” For the doctor, this was the “first explanation” for the vertical incision that had been made in the Dahlia’s body above the pubic region to the navel. For, from the “psychological point of view,” it intimated to him that while “Jeff”—the man with the string of female conquests—could be a rapist, it was the “under-developed chap, however powerful he may be”—and Dillon had revealed himself, when stripped, to be a powerful man—who was typical of the “sadist type, the frustrated fellow.” The juvenile penis also potentially explained the hypothetical motive for the murder that Dillon had proffered previously, in his written correspondence with the doctor: that Elizabeth’s killer, after an affair “not considered proper by the average person,” had been “mocked or threatened exposure by her to his friends.” He had therefore, out of revenge, inflicted “pain of some nature on her,” to the point of experiencing “a new sensation by accident. . . . Thus leading to the complete annihilation of her and other victims.”

  Could Elizabeth have “mocked” Dillon, or “threatened exposure” of him to his “friends,” thus enraging him and provoking the “complete annihilation of her”? Most chilling, if this were the case, who were the “other victims”? In this context, one of the newspaper clippings that had been discovered by Officer Jones of the Gangster Squad at Leslie Dillon’s lodgings in Florida was revealing. It was headlined “Shoots Out Girl’s Tooth.”†† It related how John B. Elias, age eighteen, had shot out a tooth of Amalia Chipley, age fifteen, with a spring BB pistol, as she ate her lunch in the schoolyard of Everett Junior High School in San Francisco. Elias shot Chipley because the group of girl students had, apparently, been “insulting” him.

  One circumstance above all convinced the doctor that Leslie Dillon was either guilty of the Dahlia murder or at the very least heavily implicated in it. From the very beginning of the investigation, two key facts relating to the mutilations that had been inflicted on Elizabeth Short’s body had been deliberately withheld by the police from public disclosure. Only a handful of officers, and the doctor himself, were aware of them. They were facts that only the killer would know. The facts were these: What did the killer do with the pubic hair and the rose tattoo that he cut from the victim’s body? According to Dr. De River, Leslie Dillon knew the answers to these two questions. The pubic hair had been inserted into the rectum. The rose tattoo had been inserted in the vagina. In addition, according to both the doctor and the LAPD, Dillon knew further details about the crime that even the police did not know. Those details were to come to light much, much later.

  Throughout the stay at Banning, Dillon was deeply suspicious of O’Mara. “He was pretty sharp,” JJ recalled. “He was a pretty wise man, and hard to fool around. You had to change the subject around. At one point he asked me, if I ever thought of taking a police examination. I told him I did, but I was too short. He looked me over pretty carefully.” Dillon talked about his interest in law enforcement, including a past application for the post of deputy sheriff in Los Angeles. While he became quite cocksure when the doctor, his “friend,” was around, he always seemed to become very nervous when De River went away. On several occasions, he returned to his room as if to check whether somebody was going through his belongings.

  JJ also recalled a particular conversation between Dillon and the doctor that took place in the doctor’s room on New Year’s Eve of 1948. O’Mara was watching and listening through a crack in the door. The pair had been discussing a sketch of the Madonna, whom Dillon likened to Elizabeth Short. Dillon liked the hair of the figure in the sketch, and also mentioned that he liked girls with “big mouths.” At this point, Dillon was looking at the doctor intently. He had such an expression of “rage and hate” contorting his face that JJ immediately went on alert as to the doctor’s safety. According to O’Mara, Dillon was “an individual that I have never seen the likes of before, and will probably never see again. His facial expression would change, and his temperaments would change, very quickly.” He was not a stupid person. In fact, he was “super cunning. . . . He would shoot a few statements and watch your reactions,” recalled O’Mara. “He was very, very clever, in my opinion. You had to more or less spar with him, box with him.”

  One night when there was a shortage of rooms, the question came up whether Dillon might share a room with O’Mara. Dillon said, “I’ll sleep with JJ.” “He got quite a laugh out of that,” JJ remembered. “I wouldn’t sleep with that fellow, not even in the same room, unless I was wide awake. He’s not stupid, in any sense of the word.” For JJ, there was “something about the man that raises a man’s animal instincts, makes the hair on the back of your neck bristle up.”

  While he did not drink much, Dillon did do drugs. He told O’Mara he would take bennies, or benzedrine,‡‡ “for pep,” and “cut the paper and drink whiskey with the fellows.” He referred to them getting a “great kick and bang out of it.” He also told JJ about how he would get phenobarbital,§§ grind it up into powder, “put it on ice-cream or food,” and give it to women, as “it knocks them out.” Dillon told JJ about a large quantity of phenobarbital that he had obtained from some nurses staying at a hotel in which he had been working.

  After four or five days in Palm Springs, O’Mara was ordered to drive Leslie Dillon and the doctor west to Los Angeles, in a bid to track down Dillon’s friend Jeff Connors. Afte
r the party checked out of Briargate Lodge, the police searched Dillon’s room. They found a pair of women’s loafer-style black suede shoes, with platform heels. The hotel manager swore that they had not been in the room before the party arrived. The shoes—nine and a half inches in length—were much bigger than the petite size 6 worn by Elizabeth Short. Although women’s shoes, they were equivalent to a man’s shoe size of the time.¶¶

  Leslie Dillon appeared to be very reluctant to travel to Los Angeles. JJ noticed that, as they approached the outskirts of the city, he began “fidgeting and watching the street markers.” They stopped at the La Bonita Motel on Garvey Avenue in El Monte. It was a red-roofed, dirty white Spanish-Colonial-style bungalow building, flanked by amputated date palms and twisted jacaranda trees petrified in the cold. Once again, Willie Burns and Captain Kearney, this time with the help of Gangster Squad Officer Con Keller, bugged the rooms. O’Mara and the doctor, meanwhile, had another task. They had a little surprise for Leslie Dillon.

  * Clemence Horrall, in a letter to the FBI dated January 10, 1949, was to state that Dillon’s hair was “red-brown, which appears to be dyed.” Dillon’s hair had been previously dyed blond.

  † For the discovery of the news clipping by Officer Jones in Florida, see page 97.

  ‡ Bennies/benzedrine: an amphetamine-based drug originally marketed in the form of inhalers by Smith, Kline & French and quickly adopted for recreational use in the mid-twentieth century.

  § Phenobarbital: a drug used for the treatment of epilepsy and seizures with the side effects of inducing sedation and hypnosis.

  ¶ One of the shoes Elizabeth had worn—open-toed and high-heeled—had in any event been found dumped in a trash can on Crenshaw Boulevard and identified by Robert “Red” Manley in January 1947. (See page 62.) The possibility of the Dahlia killer having some form of transvestite fetishism was hinted at by the fact that, according to Aggie Underwood’s early reports in the Herald-Express, the big toenail on each of Elizabeth’s feet had been painted red. (See page 11.)