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

by Piu Eatwell

  † Again, this appears to be a reference to the Jeanne French murder, with a feigned confusion between the names “English” and “French.”

  ‡ There was some justification for this belief to the extent that Dillon did frequently use his friends’ names as aliases, and had in fact used the alias of “Jeff Connors.” (See page 117.) Note also O’Mara’s recollection that Dillon sometimes addressed him as “Jeff.”

  § It is important to note that at the January 10 press conference the LAPD asserted categorically that it had been established that Dillon was definitely in Los Angeles on January 15, 1947, the date of the murder. This assertion was subsequently reneged by the police department.

  ¶ For the discovery of the purse and shoes, see page 62.

  # Georgia Dillon’s official statement to the police, including, crucially, any evidence she may have given as to Leslie Dillon’s whereabouts on the night of January 14/15, 1947, has never been released.

  ** The identities of these “two witnesses” were never revealed. The evidence of the various people who connected Leslie Dillon with Elizabeth Short is discussed further on pages 131–135.

  †† For a discussion of the five latent fingerprints relating to the case that were sent to the FBI, see page 52.

  ‡‡ Leslie Dillon did in fact use the names of other friends and acquaintances among the many aliases by which he passed (page 96).

  12

  BREAKING POINT

  Leslie Dillon was to be released.

  The official explanation for the stunning about-turn was simple: Jeff Connors had been located. He was not a psychological projection of Dillon’s subconscious, as Dr. De River had thought. He was a real human being of flesh and bone, residing in the old gold rush town of Gilroy, nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Jeff’s alias, it transpired, was Arthur (or “Artie”) Lane. He was a forty-something cafeteria busboy, cosmetics peddler, pulp magazine writer, and failed actor turned utilities man for the movies.

  On the night of Thursday, January 13, Jeff Connors was booked and held for questioning. In the meantime, Leslie Dillon walked out of the old red-brick building of the Highland Park Jail a free man. It was left to Deputy Chief William Bradley to explain to the press the LAPD’s extraordinary volte-face.

  “We have insufficient evidence to warrant holding Leslie Dillon. Until this morning, we thought his story was phony and that the ‘Jeff Connors’ he told us about was a figment of his imagination. But then Jeff Connors was arrested in Gilroy—and now what can we do but believe Dillon.”* Bradley paused, then added: “And I guess that now, we’ll have to sugar Dillon up a bit.”

  While Chief Horrall had previously stated that the LAPD had incontrovertible evidence of Dillon’s presence in Los Angeles at the time of Short’s murder, the story now changed. Dillon, the deputy chief said, had been in San Francisco at the time of the murder. Nothing was now said about the “secret facts” relating to the crime, which Horrall had previously stated Dillon knew.

  Aggie, Jimmy, and just about everybody else in the press corps were stunned. Only two days after the Los Angeles Police Department had declared “the best ever suspect” in the Dahlia case, the police were sheepishly releasing the twenty-seven-year-old bellhop from jail. Not only that, they were apologizing to him. Now it was Detectives Harry “the Hat” Hansen and Finis “Fat Arse” Brown who played the bellhops, carrying Dillon’s suitcases to a waiting automobile. It was Dr. De River who played the chauffeur, driving Dillon back to his wife’s aunt’s house on Crenshaw Boulevard.

  But Leslie Duane Dillon was showing no sign of willingness to be “sugared up.”

  “I have been in custody for a week. I was handcuffed as early as January 3—a week before my arrest was announced. I have been guarded in hotel rooms by detectives ever since,” Dillon told the newspapermen. “I’m going to have to talk to my attorney before I decide whether or not I’m going to sue anybody for what’s been done to me.”

  Dillon told the Los Angeles Examiner a “strange story of unorthodox police behavior,” including being held for several days in secret police custody. He said he could hardly believe that, as a result of a “helpful letter” to the LAPD police psychiatrist, “these things happened to me.” He had been whisked by airplane across the United States. He had been promised a job as the doctor’s secretary. He had been flattered as “the most intelligent man” the doctor “had met in a long time,” and as someone who knew “more about sex psychopathia than most psychiatrists.” And then he was suddenly handcuffed, kept in custody for over a week, and flatly told that he had killed the Black Dahlia, Elizabeth Short.†

  “They had me just about convinced,” claimed Dillon, “that I was crazy or something. That maybe I DID kill the Dahlia—and then just forgot about it.” He had never, Dillon said, intimated that he knew who the Black Dahlia killer was, or implicated his friend Jeff Connors as the murderer.‡ “They slapped handcuffs on me. Dr. De River wanted to know whether I’d have truth serum or a lie detector, which? I said either, but first for God’s sake let me call my wife and a lawyer. They wouldn’t.” (Dillon, in fact, initially agreed to take lie detector and scopolamine tests, but subsequently refused both.)

  Dillon told the press that he had been stripped nude and photographed.§

  “They handcuffed me to a radiator. Then they questioned me. They really turned on the heat. They said they had traced me two years, could blast all my stories. I was only telling them the truth. Dr. De River sent the detectives outside, then worked on me alone. He said, ‘What you tell me is in confidence. We’ll treat you like a sick boy, not a criminal.’ He wanted me to confess I killed the Dahlia. I couldn’t.” In Los Angeles, Dillon continued, three two-man detective teams had joined them. They had held him incommunicado at the hotel on Seventh and Olive. In desperation, he had managed to scribble the postcard to Jerry Giesler and drop it into the street. It was found. Inquiries were made. And then, for the first time since Dillon had been transported cross-country and elsewhere under police guard, the police had announced he was being held. They had booked him on suspicion of murder, and called him “the best suspect they ever had.” They had continued their incommunicado tactics. Newsmen were not allowed to question him. No lawyer could get to him. Then, when Jeff Connors was finally discovered to be a real person—blowing the doctor’s doppelgänger theory out of the water—they had dropped the case and run for cover.

  Dillon went on to state that he had retained the Los Angeles attorney Morris Lavine to examine all aspects concerning his arrest. A former newspaperman, Lavine had won notoriety defending local gangsters such as Mickey Cohen and the Mafioso Johnny Roselli. In 1930 he had been jailed for hatching a scheme to extort $75,000 from a trio of organized crime figures in exchange for keeping their names out of a newspaper story. Ten months later, he was out of the can after fighting his own appeal. A question that was obvious but which nobody asked was how Leslie Dillon—an unemployed bellhop—was able to engage the services of such an expensive attorney as Morris Lavine.¶

  While Leslie Dillon regaled the press with his histrionic account of his alleged mistreatment at the hands of the Gangster Squad and the doctor, his former “friend” Jeff Connors—a.k.a. Arthur or “Artie” Lane#—was being questioned at City Hall by Deputy Chief Bill Bradley and Captain Kearney of Homicide. Harry “the Hat” Hansen and Finis Brown were also there. Connors admitted that he had known Leslie Dillon casually in San Francisco. But he denied that he ever discussed the Dahlia case with him. At first Connors told the press that he knew Elizabeth Short by sight. He had been with her and his wife in a bar the night before the murder. He had, he said, reported the matter to the Hollywood police division the day the body was discovered. No action had been taken by the LAPD. Connors told the press that he had cleared out of Los Angeles after the murder, because a lot of his friends were being questioned about the killing and he wanted to get away.**

  Later, however, Jeff’s story changed. Now he claimed he ne
ver knew the Dahlia. Jeff’s ex-wife, a platinum blonde sometime model going by the name of Grace Allen, posed for the newspapers with a winning smile. “Jeff was a screwball,” Grace said. “Always imagining things. He never acted in pictures as far as I know, but he told people he did. He was on a studio labor gang, I think.” She said she had not seen her ex-husband for a year and a half. They had gotten a divorce in Tijuana. Jeff, Grace said, was given to “Walter Mitty–style” dreaming. “So far as I know, he never knew the Black Dahlia. I think when he said he saw her in a bar he was just dreaming up the whole thing.”

  Allen told the newspapermen that, to the best of her recollection, Jeff Connors was with her the night before the Dahlia’s body was discovered. He was working as a laborer at Columbia Studios from 2:00 to 11:00 p.m.

  Grace Allen’s statements appeared to give Jeff a watertight alibi. But the pretty blonde omitted certain details. She did not reveal that she was friendly with Mark Hansen, or that she had stayed in his home on Carlos Avenue when she separated from Jeff. Nor that, on that occasion, some helpful police officers had collected her belongings from the couple’s home on Camerford Avenue. Nor did Grace mention the fact that, after Leslie Dillon was released from custody, he had called on her at her home. He had tried to threaten her into not speaking to the press or police. She had not let him in.

  Jeff Connors’s original admission that he knew Elizabeth Short, his assertion that he and his wife had been with her in a bar the night before the murder, his connection to Leslie Dillon, and his wife’s connection to Mark Hansen, tightened the nexus of associations linking the Dahlia, Leslie Dillon, and the shady Danish nightclub owner. Way back in 1947, in the immediate aftermath of the murder, Officer Myrl McBride had reported that, the night before Elizabeth’s body was found in the vacant lot, a girl had come up to her on Main Street and begged desperately for help.†† Her boyfriend, an ex-Marine, had been threatening to kill her. Later, the same girl had exited a bar with two men and a woman. Dillon was an ex-Marine. Connors, Dillon’s friend, had claimed he and his wife were in a bar with the Dahlia the night before the murder. Dillon had threatened Connors’s wife and told her to keep silent. Connors had told the press that he ran away from Los Angeles after the killing, to escape police questioning.‡‡

  In the tangled web of accusation and counter-accusation, confusion and confabulation, it was difficult to see how a clear picture of the relationship between Jack, Jeff, Grace Allen, and Mark Hansen could be obtained without a confrontation between Dillon and Connors. Such a confrontation was proposed. It never took place. On January 14, 1949—the two-year anniversary of the Dahlia’s murder—Jeff Connors walked out into the winter sunlight and across the vaulted courtyard of City Hall, disappearing forever into the crowds milling on Spring Street.

  Now came the first signs that Dr. De River’s star was in a steep decline.

  INVESTIGATE BLACK DAHLIA FIASCO

  So ran the headline in the Los Angeles Daily News of January 20. The article, written by a journalist named Sara Boynoff, contained an interview with Dr. De River. In the interview, the doctor pointed out that it was Leslie Dillon who had initially contacted him, claiming that he could “put the finger on the A-No. 1 suspect” in the murder of Elizabeth Short. “I have only acted in good faith—doing my duty,” said the doctor. He added, hinting darkly, “In good time, I’ll give you a very good story. Right now I can’t make any statement. I would be more than pleased if police authorities urged me to tell everything I know.” When Boynoff asked the doctor about his medical training, De River said, “I’ve had exceptional training, if I do say so myself.” He spoke of his medical degree from Tulane University, and his past employment with the Veterans Administration as a specialist in brain and reconstructive surgery.

  But Sara Boynoff did her own digging. Soon, she had unearthed the previously unpublicized judicial order that arose from the Chloe Davis case, banning the doctor from questioning juvenile suspects. She approached Judge Scott and Judge Fox, who had issued the order. However, Judge Scott would only state that “in my opinion, Dr. De River is the best qualified sex psychiatrist in the country.”

  The next day’s issue of the Daily News went full steam ahead.

  DR. DE RIVER BACKGROUND REVEALED

  Sara Boynoff’s new headline, splashed across the cover, made what was described as a “shocking” and “sinister” revelation. The doctor’s birth name, apparently, was not “Joseph Paul De River” but “Joseph Israel.” He had changed it in the San Francisco Superior Court in 1923.§§ Boynoff also said that City Councilman Ernest E. Debs had made a resolution calling for a public hearing into De River’s background and professional qualifications. “I want to know about this man whom we have hired,” Debs was quoted as saying, “and what his skills and qualifications are. This is not the first time he has been under fire. I wonder if we passed blindly in hiring this man.”

  Dr. De River’s hearing before the City Council, investigating his professional qualifications and fitness to act as a police psychiatrist, took place on March 8, 1949, in the marble-pillared vault of the council chamber at Room 340 of City Hall. Councilman Don Allen presided over the proceedings. Councilman Debs asked most of the questions.

  First on the witness stand was Assistant Chief Joe Reed. He was forthright in his support of the doctor. “Speaking for the Chief of Police, as he has already authorized me to, and speaking for myself, as the Assistant Chief of Police, I would say that the work that Doctor De River is rendering to the Los Angeles Police Department is exceptional. We feel that his work is a very beneficial part and without his services the Los Angeles Police Department would be handicapped in the prosecution of sex cases.”

  When the doctor himself took the stand, councilman Debs accused him of lacking the requisite professional psychiatric qualifications. De River’s response was that, while there was no dispute that he had the requisite medical training, his lack of formal psychiatric qualifications was simply due to the fact that such training was “established long after I went into psychiatry. The young men are taking it, but the older men, a great many of them, are not taking it. It is not necessary for us to take it.”

  The doctor’s case was seconded by letters of support from friends and colleagues, including a letter from a William A. Miller, addressed to Councilman Allen. Miller wrote that he had no doubt whatsoever that the “vicious, personal attack” on the doctor had implications that went far beyond his part in the current investigation of the Dahlia case. He would like, he wrote, to known just who was behind the “smear campaign.” He had a hunch that, if the facts were brought to light, it would “amaze a lot of people.” Why the Daily News had gone to so much trouble to point out that the doctor’s real name was Israel, could only be guessed at; but, wrote Miller, “I don’t believe it would take a genius to figure out the angle there.”

  Strangely, the City Council proceedings were deafeningly silent about the Dahlia case. The hearing focused exclusively on the professional qualifications of the doctor to hold his position. The so-called “Dahlia Fiasco”—the handling of which had supposedly triggered the Daily News investigation of the doctor in the first place—was never referred to at any point. Nor was the name of Leslie Dillon.

  By a seeming miracle, Dr. De River escaped the City Council hearing with his job. The respite was not to last long. Nor had Leslie Dillon gone away. A month previously, he had filed a $100,000 claim¶¶ for false arrest against the city of Los Angeles. According to the writ, Dr. De River and members of the LAPD “unjustifiably arrested Leslie Dillon, transported him from place to place, handcuffed him, and held him incommunicado without justification or charges having been lodged against him.” Dillon, the writ continued, was “nationally degraded by said incompetent agents of the city in that without any basis or legal excuse, he was represented in the press as a ‘hot’ suspect in the Black Dahlia murder case.”## This time, Dillon’s claim was filed by L.A. attorney Arthur Brigham Rose: a lawyer even more hard-
boiled than Morris Lavine. “Arthur Brigham Rose,” wrote Aggie Underwood, “is one of L.A.’s most spectacular trial lawyers, often throwing courtrooms into an uproar. Judges have become weary of holding him in contempt, a proceeding which he argues with authority.” On one occasion, Aggie recalled, a policeman, tired of Rose’s bullying questions, told him he was too much of a coward to act up in such a way out of court. Rose reached over to the cop, pulled him out of the witness box, and “slugged him.” Once again, Dillon—the unemployed bellhop—had somehow found himself elite and expensive legal representation.

  In the meantime, while “Jeff” and “Jack” walked free and Dr. De River battled to save his career, the Gangster Squad did not stop its investigation into Leslie Dillon. Officially, the case against Dillon had been dropped with his sudden and unexpected release in January 1949; but in secret, the Gangster Squad persevered.

  They had more to learn.

  * It is unclear how the mere fact of Jeff Connors’s separate existence was sufficient to demolish the case against Leslie Dillon, particularly given the evidence that Dillon had in fact gone by Connors’s name in the past.

  † While the questioning of Leslie Dillon was certainly “unorthodox,” it should be remembered that, prior to the Supreme Court decision in Miranda v Arizona in 1966, there was no codified procedure in the United States for detaining suspects or informing them of their rights. As recorded by the criminologist and news reporter Ernest Jerome Hopkins in his 1931 book Our Lawless Police, much routine police procedure of the time was unconstitutional and would today be considered illegal. Harry “the Hat” had himself boasted to the Daily News photographer Harry Watson about his favored technique of dangling suspects from a bridge over concrete to extract a confession (see page 77).

  ‡ This was contradicted by Leslie Dillon’s initial letter to De River as “Jack Sand” (see page 89), where he wrote that his friend Jeff had a motive for the crime and hinted that there were other things which led to his suspicions. The “motive” that Dillon later proffered was rage at the girl “mocking” the killer. (See page 104.) See also Dillon’s interview with the Examiner on January 12: “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.”