by Piu Eatwell
11
DEADLINE AT DAWN
The brakes of the old Ford creaked in the cold. Along the sidewalks, frost choked the gum trees and cypresses, while the palm trees trembled in a sky that glinted like the tommy gun under the car’s front seat. Los Angeles winters were never like this. Except in January 1949.
The Ford headed down from El Monte to Long Beach, where Leslie Dillon had told the doctor he had stayed at a trailer park on the Pacific Coast Highway, back in 1946. Called the A1 Trailer Park, it was a scattering of white trailers parked along dirt paths lined with young palms. Telegraph poles and slack clotheslines crisscrossed the chicken-wire fencing that separated the lots. When the Ford parked at the entrance to the trailer park, Dillon opened the door and rushed into the small office beneath the park’s signboard. JJ and the doctor waited for a moment, but Dillon failed to reappear. So they got out of the car and went to the office, where they found Dillon engrossed in conversation with the man at the front desk.
“I noticed him pointing down to the ledger,” JJ later recalled. “It turned out to be a book, a record of people in attendance at this trailer court.” Dillon, JJ saw, was busy erasing entries in the ledger. He was nodding his head toward JJ and the doctor as he talked to the man at the front desk. “It was a hurried-up deal,” O’Mara said. “He more or less rushed in there, wanted to get something changed, before we made our way in there.”
The owner of the trailer park was an elderly man called Jiggs Moore. The doctor asked him what he was doing. “Well, I made a little change here, correction in the book for Mr. Dillon here about the time he was in this place, the days he was in here, and the date of his departure.”
The doctor made a mental note to get police officers back to the trailer park to question Jiggs Moore further. For now, they made their way back to the car. Dillon stopped by the camp’s pay phone and jotted down the number.
The Ford sped away from the park and up toward Hollywood, headed for the doctor’s office on Hollywood and Vine. Dillon volunteered to O’Mara that the best way to get there would be via La Brea. JJ ignored Dillon’s suggestion and headed up Western Avenue, turned on Manchester, and proceeded up Crenshaw Boulevard toward Leimert Park. Dillon protested that this route was “erroneous” and “way out of the way.” When they got to Thirty-ninth Street, JJ tried to turn up an alleyway. “You can’t get that way,” Dillon told him. They tried another alleyway. “That alley won’t get you through,” said Dillon. So they proceeded to Coliseum and Norton. “At the time,” said O’Mara, “it struck me as awful funny that he knew what alleyway didn’t go through.” It was clear that Dillon was thoroughly familiar with the area.
They went to Norton and pulled over and parked. Dillon became very agitated.
“Do you recall now,” the doctor said, “this was where the body was found?”
“What body do you mean? You mean the woman who was stomped and kicked?”*
“You know what body I mean.”
To O’Mara’s surprise, Dillon made no reply. He did not—as JJ would have expected—exclaim indignantly, “Are you accusing me of this murder?” or words to that effect. He seemed to be feeling ill. He became “woozy,” and “began to weave.” The doctor asked him what woman he meant.
“Oh some woman. English. English. English.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Well, what is the difference? English. French.”†
They drove back to the motel in El Monte. Dillon wanted to stop en route and get a drink. They stopped at a service station and he got a Coke from the Coke machine, but did not touch it. As the doctor questioned him on the way back, Dillon crouched in the corner of the backseat, sticking his hand out through the wind wing, crowding close to the door, as if he were about to try to clamber out of the automobile.
Back at the motel in El Monte, JJ and the doctor were exhausted by the stress and fatigue of the day. Dillon, however, now seemed “full of vitality” and kept “bouncing back” after all the questions. “I had the impression he was taking narcotics, or something,” recalled O’Mara.
On January 3, the doctor and Dillon drove with O’Mara from Los Angeles to San Francisco, continuing the search for Dillon’s friend Jeff Connors. The doctor, by now, was convinced that “Jeff” was a projection of Dillon’s imagination, a psychic doppelgänger or “double,” upon which Dillon had displaced the responsibility for a murder that he had in fact himself committed.‡
While JJ and the doctor slept from exhaustion in their hotel beds in San Francisco, Dillon was up and buzzing, flitting between the hotel bellboys, with whom he exchanged whispered confidences. When JJ and De River awoke, they tailed Dillon, who led the detective and the doctor on a merry dance down the frozen streets of San Francisco, from hotel lobby to hotel lobby. Dillon seemed to know every Brylcreemed front-desk clerk, every brass-buttoned and pillbox-hatted bellboy in town. But they never found Jeff Connors. Finally, they returned to Los Angeles.
Back in Los Angeles, the party checked into the downtown Strand Hotel on South Union Avenue, a red-brick building slashed by jagged iron fire escapes. They booked into a suite under the name “O’Shea.” Here, Dillon finally began to tire of the cat-and-mouse game with the doctor. On January 10, he sailed a postcard out of the hotel window. It read, on one side, “If found, please mail,” and on the other:
I am being held in Room 219–21, Strand Hotel, phone FE 3101 in connection with the Black Dahlia murder by Dr. J Paul De River as far as I can tell. I would like legal counsel.
[signed] Mr. Leslie Dillon.
The postcard was addressed to the Los Angeles attorney Jerry Giesler, at his downtown office in the ornate Chester Williams building at 215 West Fifth Street on Broadway. Giesler was lawyer to the stars and the highest paid attorney of the age. His celebrity clients included the actor Errol Flynn, whom he had represented on charges of statutory rape; Robert Mitchum, whom he defended for marijuana possession; gangsters Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen; and, in later years, the actresses Lana Turner and Marilyn Monroe. Also on the postcard was written the name of Dillon’s wife, Georgia Stevenson, c/o the Golf Park Hotel or Wolfie’s Restaurant, Miami Beach, Florida; and a telephone number for Dillon’s wife’s aunt in Los Angeles.
It was snowing in Los Angeles for the first time in seventeen years when Leslie Dillon’s postcard was found trodden in the leaf- and mud-choked gutter at the intersection of Seventh and Union. By an incredible coincidence—perhaps too incredible—the postcard was “discovered” by one of Aggie’s men, the Herald-Express reporter William Chance. Aggie, from her close friendship with De River, knew what was going on at the Strand Hotel. And, of course, one of her men just happened to be on the spot when the great news event occurred.
When the Herald-Express telephoned Willie Burns and revealed that a postcard written by one Leslie Dillon had been found floating in a gutter downtown, the cat was finally out of the bag. Burns had little choice but to order the arrest of the LAPD’s new prime suspect. Dillon was taken into custody in the downtown drugstore that nestled in the shadow of the Angel’s Flight Railway at Third and Hill. At 2:45 p.m., he was booked at the Highland Park Police Station. This was the moment when Harry Hansen and Finis Brown were first told about what had been going on.
Harry “the Hat” was having a day off when Captain Kearney called him at home on the afternoon of Monday, January 10.
“How soon can you get downtown?”
“Why, what’s up?”
“Well, something pretty hot, how soon can you get down?”
“Well, just as soon as I can get cleaned up, change clothes and drive down.”
“Come on then.”
Harry hightailed it downtown to Highland Park. The captain told him that there was a man in custody by the name of Leslie Dillon, and that he was a pretty good suspect in the case. Finis Brown was called, too. Now he also found out for the first time what his fellow officers had been up to, while he had been inspecting the masterpieces at Exposit
ion Park. Dillon was taken to Chief Horrall’s office for questioning, then on to the police academy for further interrogation into the night. In the meantime, his suitcases were searched. In them were found some seven hundred phenobarbital pills; seven safety razor blades; and a dog leash with a heavy, massive strap. The lock end of the dog leash was new and unscratched, but the last third of it showed evidence of being very thoroughly scrubbed and scraped. The strap appeared to have been run through the noose, and a heavy weight suspended from it so that there was an angle to the end of the noose. The leash was sent to the LAPD crime lab for testing.
As the arteries of the city clogged and ground to a halt in snowdrifts, a bevy of reporters sped to the offices of Chief Horrall at City Hall for a press conference. Horrall’s announcement was a sensation. The LAPD had, the chief said, apprehended the “best suspect yet” in the Dahlia investigation. The man was Leslie Dillon, alias Jack Sand, twenty-seven, a former hotel clerk and bellhop with an admitted interest in sadism and psychopathy. Dillon, Horrall said, had voluntarily told the LAPD police psychiatrist Dr. Paul De River about “secret details” relating to the crime. The police had kept back a series of “key questions” that only the killer could answer. “Dillon had all the answers,” said the chief. “More, he knew things even we didn’t know about the murder.” Under interrogation at a downtown hotel, Horrall went on, Dillon “without prompting revealed details of the crime which police have never been able to explain. These details include significant explanations of the mutilation of Miss Short’s body, and her movements before she died.” Horrall added that “Dillon’s presence in Los Angeles at the time of the slaying has been definitely established.”§
This was a pip indeed. The chief’s revelations were a bombshell in a case that had become mired in a tide of fantastical Sapphic conspiracies and other confabulations. The newspapermen rushed to track down all the information they could find on the “hottest suspect yet.” Jimmy Richardson’s men reported that, when Dillon was not living sporadically in Los Angeles in the late forties, he had worked as a pimp and bellhop in San Francisco. There he had lived on Sacramento Street with his wife, Georgia, and his baby girl. Dillon had met Georgia in Oklahoma, his own home state, and married her there. He had, it was reported, worked as a mortician’s assistant in Oklahoma, and had personal knowledge of embalming methods. When in Los Angeles in the summer of ’46, Dillon had lived in a trailer at the A1 Trailer Park on the Pacific Coast Highway. Later, he stayed with his wife’s aunt, Nellie Mae Hinshaw, on South Crenshaw Boulevard, where he parked his trailer in the forecourt. Mrs. Hinshaw told Jimmy’s men that she could not remember whether he was staying with her at the time of the murder. “But the police,” the Examiner went on to state, “can prove Dillon was here.” In Los Angeles, the newspaper reported, Dillon and his wife had also stayed with his mother-in-law, Mrs. Laura Stevenson, on South Normandie. The Examiner quoted Mrs. Stevenson as saying, “They came down from San Francisco just a few days after Christmas 1946 and moved in with me at my place on South Normandie Avenue. They stayed for two months, later moving to Oklahoma and then Florida.”
It transpired that Leslie Dillon had three regular addresses in or around Los Angeles, even when he was officially based in San Francisco: the A1 Trailer Park near Long Beach; his mother-in-law’s house on South Normandie; and the house belonging to his wife’s aunt on Crenshaw Boulevard. The Crenshaw Boulevard address was less than four miles—or eleven minutes’ drive—from Leimert Park. An astonishing coincidence that was overlooked by all was the fact that the aunt’s house was also only two blocks away from the café on Crenshaw where Elizabeth Short’s purse and shoes had been discovered dumped in a trash can by the café manager Robert Hyman, back in January 1947.¶
Leslie Dillon’s mother-in-law, Laura Stevenson, told the newspapers that Dillon and her daughter had separated more than a year ago. Wife and child were living in Miami. When confronted with the news of her husband’s arrest, Dillon’s estranged wife Georgia was reported by the Los Angeles Examiner as being “half hysterical” yet “strangely reticent.” “I have no comment to make—now,” she repeated, over and over. “She accented the now,” reported the newspaper, “as if to hint that when she felt the time ripe, she might have plenty to tell.”# The landlady of the Normandie Avenue address where Dillon’s mother-in-law lived was quoted by the Examiner as saying that Dillon had owned a black Ford coupe during the two months he had resided there, from January to February 1947. In the summer of 1947, after the murder, he had headed out to Oklahoma City, where he was arrested for bootlegging. The Examiner’s report continued:
Six feet tall, slender, dressed in what would be called “natty” clothes—a camel’s hair top coat, neat small-checked slacks and sports shirt, the man smiled at cameramen whilst he posed. For the few minutes of picture taking the police unlocked the manacles that bound his wrists. Then they clicked them shut again, and under a five man guard, took him away and wouldn’t tell where.
“We’re going to let nobody talk to him—except ourselves—until we’ve got a closed case,” a police spokesman said.
So “hot” a suspect did the police consider Dillon that he was under guard by five men.
Dr. De River was quoted in the press as saying that Dillon knew “more about the Dahlia murder than the police did, and more about abnormal sex psycopathia than most psychiatrists do.” The doctor added: “From what he told me, I gathered that in the past two years Dillon has lost 40 pounds. These are the two years since the Dahlia was murdered. Dillon also told me that because of a ‘certain event’ in his life two years ago, he had been trying to achieve a complete change of personality. But he wouldn’t say what the certain event was.” While Dillon denied that he ever knew Elizabeth Short, Deputy Police Chief William Bradley told the newspapers, “We have two witnesses who say Dillon knew the Dahlia, went out with her.”** The shadowy world of hotel bellhops, pimping, and bootlegging in which Leslie Dillon operated was the same territory covered by the underworld operations of girls and gambling run by associates of Elizabeth Short such as Mark Hansen and his pals Jimmy Utley and NTG. Was there a nexus between them? If so, where?
Dillon was questioned at the police academy into the early hours of the morning on Tuesday, January 11, and then into the night again. Drafted in to help with the interrogation were veteran Deputy District Attorney John Barnes, along with Deputies Fred Henderson and Adolph Alexander. John Barnes was quoted in the press on Tuesday as fully supporting the LAPD. “From what the police have learned,” he told the Examiner, “I am convinced that Dillon must be held and guarded carefully whilst the whole story he tells is checked out to the ultimate.” In the meantime, Dillon’s mother, Mamie, had, through an attorney, obtained a writ of habeas corpus on Dillon that was returnable at 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, the next day. In effect, the police had to charge Dillon by the time the writ expired or release him. In the meantime, Dillon’s fingerprints were sent off to the FBI to be compared with the five latent prints collected from the various items of anonymous correspondence sent to the police. The FBI failed to produce a match, but that wasn’t a surprise. The only print to come from the package purportedly sent by the killer was from the outside of the envelope, and blurred; the other four came from a later letter that, as the FBI had noted, gave no indication of knowledge of or a connection with the killer.††
De River’s case up to now had been that “only the killer himself, or a man directly connected with the crime, could know the things that Dillon knew.” Leslie Dillon’s response was to refer back to his “friend” Jeff. It was Jeff, he repeated, who had given him the “secret details” of the Dahlia killing. “A friend of mine, named Jeff Connors, is the man I suspect of having killed Beth Short. He told me the inside facts of the murder which I told you.” The doctor’s settled belief that “Jeff” was an alter ego who existed only in Dillon’s imagination received support when a photograph of Leslie Dillon was shown to the manager of a San Francisco hotel at which
Dillon had worked. The manager identified the photograph of Dillon as “Jeff Connors.” This implied that Dillon had, in fact, used the name “Jeff Connors” as an alias.‡‡ “The existence of Jeff Connors is seriously doubted by the investigators,” reported the Examiner. “The belief is that he is a mythical alter ego of the blonde, blue-eyed man in custody.”
By the morning of Wednesday, January 12, only a few hours remained before the writ of habeas corpus expired and Leslie Dillon would have to be charged or released. And yet there was still no sound from the LAPD. The minutes crawled past on the great clock at Los Angeles’ Union Station. In the monolithic Examiner headquarters on Eleventh and Broadway, the cast-iron printing presses were ready to roll into action. The lead plates were cast, the giant paper rolls mounted, the ink tanks filled. Jimmy Richardson reached for his white pills. Aggie Underwood had her rewrite men on standby at their telephones. Everybody waited for the call from City Hall. The call that would pull the trigger on the biggest news story of the decade. Hypothetical headlines ricocheted off the office walls of every city editor’s office in town: “Dahlia Killer Apprehended—Sadistic Sex Fiend Reveals Hidden Details of Butcher Murder.”
Finally, at 11:30 a.m.—just two hours before the deadline for expiration of the writ of habeas corpus—the call came through from the reporters at City Hall. When it did, nobody could believe it. There must, Aggie thought, have been some mistake.
* Apparently a reference to the murder of Jeanne French, or the “Red Lipstick Murder,” which occurred in Los Angeles in February 1947. (See page 66 and footnote.)