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

by Piu Eatwell

  § De River’s version of this was that he had suggested Dillon drop his pants, as they were “among men.” (See page 104.)

  ¶ In 1956, Morris Lavine would take over the local Criminal Bar Association, replacing the previous, equally notorious incumbent, Jerry Giesler.

  # According to Sergeant Finis Brown, Jeff Connors’s real name was Artie Loy.

  ** This correlates with what Leslie Dillon claimed Connors told him in his correspondence with De River. (See page 90.)

  †† For Officer McBride’s account, see page 74.

  ‡‡ Compare also the account of the Frenches and their neighbors, that two men and a woman had visited Elizabeth at their home in San Diego one night in December 1946, and frightened her (page 35).

  §§ It is curious that the fact that the doctor had changed his (originally Jewish) name was highlighted as sinister, when this was common practice among not only Jewish immigrants, but immigrants of many other nationalities to the United States in the early twentieth century. It was also strange that Sara Boynoff chose to highlight this particular issue, as she was herself the first-generation daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants to California.

  ¶¶ Worth over $1 million in today’s currency.

  ## Leslie Dillon eventually dropped his case against the city of Los Angeles when he was threatened with prosecution for robbing a safe during a period working as bellhop for a hotel in Santa Monica.

  13

  THE LODGER

  The ongoing, clandestine investigation into Leslie Dillon throughout 1949 was carried out by some of the toughest members of the Gangster Squad.

  Archie Case was a six-foot 250-pounder. His specialty was the rabbit punch. Case had earned his reputation in the predominantly black neighborhood called Mud Town. He was known on the street as the “Mayor of Watts.” James Ahern was Archie’s longtime partner. He was as squat, stolid, and tough as his teammate. Loren Waggoner—a rookie who had been a cop for less than four years—had proved his mettle in Central Uniform and Felony divisions before joining the Gangster detail. He partnered Ahern when Case was rushed off to the hospital for an appendectomy in January. When Case returned, Waggoner continued on the Dillon investigation. Finally, Con Keller was another six-footer, a redhead from Iowa farm stock who had come out of the war with a brace on his leg. He was good at bugging and picking locks.

  First stop was the A1 Trailer Park on the Pacific Coast Highway, where Dillon had stayed in the summer of 1946. Officers Ahern and Waggoner interviewed Jiggs Moore, the elderly owner of the park. Jiggs told them that Dillon had stayed at the trailer park several times in the course of 1946. He drove different automobiles. “Dillon told Moore that if he wanted a new car, he (Dillon) had an over* in Hollywood, that he could get him a car over there, a new one,” Ahern recalled. “But this man had no income that we could find out about.” Dillon, Moore said, had stayed at the park with his wife, Georgia. But there had been another girl with him there in October. “The way Jiggs remembered her,” said Waggoner, “was through her hair and the way she dressed, and he remembered that she had very large bosoms.”† Jiggs also mentioned that, after the murder in January 1947, the police visited the trailer park and several people made the comment that the girl who had been killed looked “an awful lot like” the girl who had been at the park the previous year. Jiggs had not, however, thought to report this to the police. Jiggs was shown a photograph of Elizabeth Short. “That’s the girl,” he said. He would not be moved to say anything else. Jiggs also confirmed to Waggoner that Leslie Dillon had come to the park in January 1949 and erased certain entries from the registration cards.‡ The records that remained indicated that Dillon had lived at the trailer park from June 8 through August 31, 1946, a period that overlapped with Elizabeth Short’s stay at Long Beach with Gordon Fickling.§ But Ahern believed that Dillon returned to the camp later that year.

  Ahern and Waggoner also interviewed an old man at the trailer park called Mr. Carriere. “Carriere remembered Leslie Dillon being in the trailer court, he lived right across the aisle from him. We asked if he remembered any woman being with him, and he said he did, and he described a dark-headed woman,” said Ahern. Dillon’s wife, Georgia, was a natural blonde. Ahern and Waggoner showed Mr. Carriere a picture of Elizabeth Short. “Well, that looks just exactly like that woman who was here with Dillon,” said Carriere. The old man told Waggoner that Dillon had said to him that he would like to have the girl he was with “come and work for him” up in San Francisco. Waggoner asked what he meant by that. “Well, Dillon was a pimp in San Francisco,” Carriere said. Like Jiggs Moore the old man Carriere was adamant that the girl at the park with Dillon was Elizabeth Short, and that he was not mixing her up with anybody else.

  Another witness, aspiring Hollywood author and model Ardis Green, also connected Leslie Dillon with Beth Short. Ardis said she had seen Beth at the Ace Cains Nightclub in the company of a tall, blond, slender man about six-one or six-three.¶ She was shown a picture of Dillon in civilian clothes, from the time he worked in Florida. “I can almost positively say that this is the man that was with Beth Short the night that I was introduced to her, but I can’t say positively until I could see him smile or see him in person,” Ardis said. She recalled the date of the encounter with Beth and the man exactly, as it was her birthday: August 27, 1946. It was the day Beth split with Gordon Fickling# and moved into the Hawthorne Hotel with Marjorie Graham.

  Leslie Dillon’s mother, Mamie, had mentioned, in interviews with the police, that Dillon—in addition to staying at his mother-in-law’s house on Normandie Avenue, the A1 Trailer Park, and Nellie Hinshaw’s house on Crenshaw Boulevard—had spent time at a downtown motel in Los Angeles called the Aster Motel, on South Flower Street. The Gangster Squad detectives decided to check it out.

  The Aster Motel consisted of a low-lying strip of ten concrete cabins near the intersection of Flower and Twenty-ninth Streets, in a part of downtown set back from Broadway and Main. It was a closed place, shut to the world: a place of secrets, where men in dark suits paid cash to closet themselves in cabins with nameless associates and women in red lipstick and high-heeled shoes. Officer Ahern, when asked if the Aster Motel had an “unsavory reputation,” replied, “Very much so.” While it was not an actual house of prostitution, Ahern said, “prostitutes stayed there.”**

  The owner of the Aster Motel in 1947 was a man named Henry Hoffman. The Gangster Squad tracked him down. Hoffman was a syphilitic ex-con who had spent time in Leavenworth Penitentiary for mail fraud. He told Waggoner that on a morning that Waggoner calculated was January 15, 1947, he found cabin 3 of the motel covered in blood and fecal matter.†† The blood and feces were spattered over the floor, the bathroom, and up the sides of the bathroom walls. The place was in so bad a state that Hoffman had to clean it up himself. Hoffman’s wife, Clora, had tried to come into the cabin, but there was such a mess that he told her to keep out because he was afraid she might be sick. The sheets on the bed were so saturated with blood that they had to be soaked in a pail of water before being sent to the laundry. The blankets also were soaked with blood and had to be sent out to be cleaned.

  The Gangster Squad officers spoke to Clora, who had by now divorced Hoffman and remarried to become Mrs. Sartain. She was running a restaurant downtown on Grand Avenue. Clora also remembered the “mess” in cabin 3 in January 1947. There were human footprints in the blood and fecal matter smeared over the floor. The footprints and shoe prints looked, by their size, like men’s prints. She also remembered the bloody sheets and blankets on the bed in cabin 3.

  Clora told the Gangster Squad cops that, on the same morning as the discovery of the “mess” in cabin 3 of the motel, a pile of clothes was found neatly tied in a bundle on the bed in cabin 9. The clothes were wrapped in brown paper with a cord around them, as if they were to be mailed in the post.‡‡ The bundle, Clora told Waggoner, contained a small-sized woman’s skirt, blouse, and a pair of men’s shorts. They had blood spattered on them.
She had been planning to wash the blouse and skirt and give them to her daughter, Pamela, but her husband told her to burn all the clothing in the incinerator. Waggoner asked Clora what she thought had gone on in cabin 3. “Well,” she replied, “I thought some sex fiend had been in that room.”

  Clora told the Gangster Squad officers that the regular police had come around to the motel shortly after the “mess” was discovered. They were looking for an Army sergeant who had been associated with the Dahlia.§§ Why, Waggoner asked, had Clora not told them about the “mess” at the time? Well, Clora replied, she and her husband had been having trouble with the police, and she didn’t want to have anything to do with them. (In fact, Henry Hoffman had been arrested on Saturday, January 11, for a domestic disturbance with his wife and had spent the night in jail.) Mr. Hoffman also told Waggoner that he had not reported the matter because he had enough trouble with the cops, he did not want any more.

  The Gangster Squad then interviewed the maid at the Aster Motel, Lila Durant. Lila recalled the incident with the bloody cabin and clothes in January 1947. She remembered that Clora told her she had burned the clothes in the incinerator, because she was afraid. “Lila Durant,” said Ahern, “described the clothes, to my way of thinking, fairly close to what Elizabeth Short was purported to have been wearing at the time she disappeared. She said it was a white blouse with ruffles on the front of it, and she said it was a black skirt, and the blouse had a sprinkling of blood on it, and there were a pair of men’s shorts—she thought they were size 32—and they had blood all over the crotch, like they had been used to wipe the floor.¶¶ She stated that she thought the skirt was about a size 13 or 14,## if I recall it.” Lila also recalled a spot of blood that had soaked through the saturated sheets and blankets onto the mattress of the bed, “about the size of a large clock.” Lila had not cleaned the cabin herself that day. It had been cleaned out by Mr. Hoffman, although this was not his usual habit. “There was an unusual circumstance there,” Ahern said. “I was suspicious on my part of Hoffman, because of the fact that, although he didn’t have the habit of cleaning the place up, he was very determined that he be the one to clean this place up.” The motel had only opened up for business in December 1946, so until then there had been no laundry bill. But shortly after the murder, Ahern recalled, there had been an excessively large bill charged for laundry.***

  Around this time, Clora Hoffman’s brother, Burt Moorman, and his wife, Betty-Jo, had been staying at the motel. “He’s a very precise witness, this fellow Moorman,” recalled Ahern. “You can’t shake him on anything. He is very determined on what he saw.” It was Burt who first revealed the discovery of the bloody room. He and Betty-Jo had arrived at the motel around January 7, 1947. They had left around January 18. They had stayed in a trailer for most of the time, and for one night in cabin 1. Effectively, this put the Moormans at the motel over the whole of the crucial “missing week,” that is, the period from Elizabeth Short’s disappearance (Thursday, January 9) to the discovery of her body in the vacant lot (Wednesday, January 15).

  Burt Moorman recalled that Mr. and Mrs. Hoffman fought a lot. He remembered the bloody room, and that the two Army blankets on the bed were so saturated with blood that “it looked like somebody had taken a gallon of red paint and poured it over those blankets.” He also remembered Mrs. Hoffman taking some bloody towels out into the backyard, and some bloody clothes, which she showed his wife Betty-Jo and then put in the incinerator. Ahern asked Moorman how much blood there was on the bed. “I worked in a mortuary,” Burt replied. “We used to drain bodies of blood. We used to drain off half of it and then put in the other fluid. I thought that the blood on this mattress would be what a human body would probably contain. It was that much. The smell there at that time was enough to drive you out, even though the cabin had been cleaned up.”

  Burt Moorman’s wife, Betty-Jo, confirmed her husband’s account. She drew a diagram showing where the blood in the bathroom was located, next to the shower door. Betty-Jo could not remember exactly in which cabin the “mess” was discovered. But she did recall seeing “large men’s footprints and shoe tracks” in the feces. She had seen her husband’s sister Clora Hoffman carry bloody items to the incinerator.

  In late April 1947, the Hoffmans sold the Aster Motel to new owners. The motel registers for April showed that Leslie Dillon had stayed there during that month. The Gangster Squad asked Clora Hoffman if they could see the motel registration cards from January 1947, to check if Dillon had stayed there earlier in the year, at the time of the murder. Clora told them to come back the next day and she would give them the cards. But when the cops returned to see her, she told them she was sorry, but she had burned them about a month before. They had been living in a small apartment with the children; the cards were getting in the way; so she had destroyed them. When Waggoner asked Henry Hoffman if Leslie Dillon had been at the motel, he initially said that he had been there in March or April 1947. Waggoner asked him if he could remember Dillon ever being there anytime before that. Hoffman said no, he couldn’t remember exactly, but he might have been there. If he had, he just didn’t remember it.

  Once again, Leslie Dillon seemed to have the benefit of a convenient record erasure. But the officers of the Gangster Squad were not about to give up. They were convinced there was something more in this deal with Leslie Dillon up on Flower Street. They tracked down an old associate of Dillon’s called Tommy Harlow, a longtime petty thief and crooked real estate dealer originally from Dallas. Harlow told Officers Waggoner and Ahern that he first met Leslie Dillon through Dillon’s half-brother Henry, who operated a restaurant on La Cienega Boulevard. Henry, Harlow said, persuaded him to take Dillon on as a real estate salesman, to teach him about real estate. The date of this meeting was early December 1946. On this day Harlow and Dillon went to the A1 Trailer Park on the Pacific Coast Highway, and Dillon introduced Harlow to his friend Jiggs Moore, who owned the trailer park.

  From December ’46 through January ’47, Harlow said, Dillon worked on and off for him. He would show up at Harlow’s office on West Olympic. Sometimes Harlow would take him out with him, and sometimes not. Dillon was occasionally away from Los Angeles for three or four days; when he was away, he was in San Francisco. In March, Harlow put Dillon to work refurbishing an old house. Dillon worked for Harlow for about three weeks, and during that time Harlow would pick him up at the home of his wife’s aunt, Nellie Hinshaw, on South Crenshaw. Dillon had his pale blue trailer parked outside the house. It was a two-room affair, with a stove and refrigerator for cooking. One day Harlow looked into the trailer and saw Dillon’s wife and little girl. Dillon drove his brother Henry’s old black Buick, and also an old 1936 two-door black sedan during this period.††† Harlow did not know to whom the black sedan belonged, but he thought it was Dillon’s. A woman at Harlow’s real estate office, Mrs. Pearl McCromber, recognized a picture of Leslie Dillon and told the officers that, to the best of her knowledge, he had worked for Tommy Harlow on Olympic Boulevard during the month of December 1946 and the early part of January 1947. He would come, she said, on a bus from San Francisco, although she could not be specific about dates.‡‡‡

  According to Tommy Harlow, Leslie Dillon asked him to buy a house that he, Dillon, would run as a house of prostitution. Dillon said, “My buddy and I will operate the house and get the girls. All you have to do is get the house.” The “buddy” referred to was an unidentified Italian man.§§§ Harlow didn’t go for it. According to Tommy, Dillon was “all the time running around with different women.” As long as Harlow knew him, “he was always talking about women, operating houses of prostitution, hot jewelry,¶¶¶ and other talk of similar topics.”

  In further interviews with the Gangster Squad cops, Harlow told them that the Aster Motel had been built in late 1946 for a “friend of his called Hansen.”### The motel was completed and put on the market that December. He, Harlow, was appointed as agent to sell it. He visited the motel two or three times in
December 1946, and once or twice in January 1947. Leslie Dillon was with him. Dillon, Harlow said, complained of not having a place to stay. Harlow therefore told him to go ahead and sleep at one of the units at the motel: it was not completely finished, and no one would bother him if he stayed there.**** Henry Hoffman also, having initially denied that Leslie Dillon ever lived at the motel before March or April 1947, came up to Officer Ahern one night at his ex-wife’s café on Grand Avenue and confirmed Harlow’s account that Leslie Dillon was the man who had visited the motel with him during the period it was on the market in December and January.

  Tommy Harlow also remembered that, at one point, there was a dark-haired girl staying at the motel.†††† Henry Hoffman was fooling around with the girl, and his wife, Clora, had a big argument with him about it. When Harlow saw the girl, she was lying in bed with just a sheet covering her up. She looked to Harlow like she had been sick, or was “just coming off of a drunk.”‡‡‡‡ Waggoner asked Harlow if the girl could have been Elizabeth Short. “Well, you go talk to Mr. Hoffman first,” Harlow said. “And after you talk to Mr. Hoffman and have him describe that girl, you come back to me and talk.”

  The trouble was, Henry Hoffman did not want to talk about the dark-haired girl at the motel. Every time anyone from the Gangster Squad tried to broach the subject, he veered away. Loren Waggoner fared best with him. Somehow, the old con and the young cop seemed to hit it off. In July 1949, after months of effort, the rookie detective managed, finally, to win the confidence of the cagey old man. “I had two pictures of Elizabeth Short in my pocket, and we were sitting in the car talking,” Waggoner recalled. “I pulled these pictures out, and he was sitting in the back seat. I had them in my hand, I was hitting them on the seat, and he said, ‘Let me see that picture.’ I showed him the picture. He asked me, ‘Why didn’t you ever show me this picture before? This is the girl that was there at that motel.’ ” Suddenly, during that meeting in the car with Waggoner and his partner, Garth Ward, Hoffman began to “remember things that he would not tell investigating officers before.” He told the officers that, on a night in January—he believed it was around January 9, 1947—a dark-haired girl came to the Aster Motel. He believed she stayed in cabin 9. After two days, the girl had no more money to pay for her room. His wife said she had to go. He thought she did go, but it was possible she stayed there longer, without his knowledge. Altogether, he had seen the dark-haired girl about six times in the cabin. She had told him she was a waitress somewhere up on Broadway. When he saw the girl, she was lying on the bed with no clothes on, just covered by a sheet. He had sat on the bed with her and run his fingers through her hair. He had tried to talk her into having sex with him, but she had refused.