by Piu Eatwell
Curiously, while Aggie’s explosive story of the leaked police report was picked up by many other local newspapers, no sign of it appeared in the Herald-Express’s archrival, the Los Angeles Examiner. But the next day, September 15, a brief article did appear buried in the inside pages of Jimmy Richardson’s newspaper:
POLICE DENY DAHLIA “CLEWS”
Police were busy yesterday denying a new rash of rumors that “new clews” in the 32-months old slaying of Elizabeth Short, the “Black Dahlia,” had been found.
“All of these supposed clews are matters checked by police and found to be without substance months ago,” said Chief of Detectives Thad Brown.
The most recent report held that a witness had identified a photo of Miss Short as that of a girl who stayed overnight in a motel on South Flower Street a few days before her body was found in a vacant lot in the 3800 block of South Norton Avenue.
“We found this witness to be entirely unreliable,” Brown commented.
There were several curious facts about the report buried in the Examiner. First, while the newspaper published Detective Chief Thad Brown’s knockdown of the Aster Motel story, it had never actually published an article about the “rumors” surrounding the motel in the first place. Second, not just one, but several witnesses had identified Elizabeth Short as the dark-haired girl who stayed at the motel in January ’47.§ Third, the Examiner article made it clear that in practice, the Aster Motel investigations had not been “transferred” from the Gangster Squad to the Homicide Division when Thad Brown took over. They had, in fact, been terminated.
Despite the very strenuous efforts of the LAPD to keep a lid on the scandals, over the long, hot summer of 1949 they seemed to be interminable. Close on the heels of the Brenda Allen debacle and Chief Horrall’s resignation, it was now the turn of the Brown brothers to find themselves in the headlines. The cause of the unwelcome publicity this time was a plump, blond, heavily rouged taxi dancer from Oakland called Lola Titus. After an argument with her mother over the “kind of life I had been leading,” Lola had left home and taken a bus down to Los Angeles to find the nightclub owner, Mark Hansen. “I made up my mind that he was either going to love me, marry me, or take care of me, or I was going to kill him,” she later told investigating officers. Arriving at Hansen’s bungalow on Carlos Avenue on July 15, Lola invited the nightclub owner to check out her taxi dancing progress. The pair withdrew to the bedroom. Afterward, while Hansen was shaving in the bathroom, Lola shot him through the back with a twenty-five-caliber automatic pistol. Just before she shot him, she accused him of being a “goddam cop lover.” Lola, who was alleged to have been a friend of Elizabeth Short, also accused Hansen of being involved in the Black Dahlia murder. While Mark Hansen staggered to the telephone to call for help, Lola got up, dressed, and left the house. Hansen was taken by ambulance to Hollywood-Leland Hospital, where his first words were, “Get me Brown.” As Finis Brown was off on leave, it was his big brother Thad who rushed to Hansen’s bedside.
Lola was arraigned for assault with intention to commit murder and locked in the prisoners’ detention room on the seventh floor of the Hall of Justice. When a police sergeant came to take her to the courtroom, he found the curvaceous blonde spread-eagled and nude on the floor. The sergeant withdrew and shouted to her to get dressed. Lola emerged briefly in a blue satin dress for the photographers, then promptly withdrew again into the detention room. When the sergeant came to fetch her, she was nude once more. The only explanation that the young blonde could offer the court for her disrobing was, “It’s hot in there.”
In court, Lola’s attorney claimed that Mark Hansen “made a practice of taking young Hollywood girls and promising them careers in the movies, theatres and night clubs. But Miss Titus fell in love with him, he promised to marry her, and didn’t.” According to her attorney, the taxi dancer had spent a year “knocking around Hollywood” trying to get a break. She had met Mark Hansen over Thanksgiving in 1948 and moved into his home for about a week. Hansen’s testimony was that they were merely business acquaintances. “I never touched her,” he claimed. But Lola told the judge that they had been intimate on numerous occasions: “I could recall every one of them if you had the time.” At that point, Judge Byrne’s gavel came down, and he ordered the jury out of the courtroom so he could admonish Lola to answer only the questions that were asked.
At the end of her trial, Lola was convicted and sent to the Patton State Hospital for the insane. Her short, sad life was to end in that red-brick, neo-Gothic pile only a decade later, at the age of thirty. But Lola’s brief, meteoric, satin-bedecked track through the headlines of Tinseltown was more than just pathetic. It served—yet again—to buttress the rumors of a link between Mark Hansen and the Dahlia murder. Even more significantly, the fact that Hansen had called out, “Get me Brown,” on being shot, imprinted on the public consciousness the idea of a close connection between the businessman from Aalborg and the Brown brothers. Months later, the episode was to come back to haunt Sergeant Finis Brown.
By the fall of 1949, Aggie Underwood and Paul De River were buoyed by the promise of a full re-investigation of the Dahlia case. The newspapers and public were baying for it. “A grand jury investigation of the police handling of the ‘Black Dahlia’ murder, with a Hollywood millionaire as the central figure in the probe, is shaping up,” reported the Long Beach Independent in September. “The jury intends to look into sinister reports that a racket tie-up involving the police has stalled the investigation of the slaying, unsolved for more than 2½ years.” Aggie’s Herald-Express was more explicit. Under the banner headline “Link Rich Hollywood Figure to Stalling of Dahlia Probe—Racket Tie-Up Is Charged,” the paper reported:
Sinister reports that a racket tie-up involving Los Angeles police has stalled the lagging investigation of the “Black Dahlia” murder mystery, unsolved for more than two and one-half years, will be probed by the county Grand Jury, the Herald-Express learned today.
The jury will examine reports that powerful interests affecting the embattled and faction-fighting police department have sought to suppress or minimize crucial evidence in the butcher slaying, a jury spokesman admitted.
Besides one or more suspects in the actual slaying of the “Black Dahlia”—Elizabeth Short, 22, whose mutilated body was found January 15, 1947 in a weed-covered lot on Norton avenue near Coliseum drive—the evidence involves a wealthy Hollywood figure, according to the report.
For several months the Herald-Express, which brought the current police vice investigation to Grand Jury attention, has been checking the reports of irregularities in the “Black Dahlia” case.
Results of this checking were presented to members of the Grand Jury, whose official interest was disclosed in a story printed exclusively by the Herald-Express Tuesday.
“The reasons for the on-again, off-again investigation have become as big a mystery as the ‘Black Dahlia’ murder mystery itself,” a Grand Jury spokesman said today.
“In the face of the reports, we want to give interested parties opportunities to explain or justify their actions—or lack of actions.”
Efforts of duty-devoted policemen to determine what part, if any, the wealthy Hollywood figure played in the life and ghastly death of Miss Short have been thwarted, they charge, by high-ranking police personnel.
In the mystery within the mystery, these policemen, convinced that they were on the brink of solving the case, were suddenly called off the investigation and assigned to other duties.
These officers met a mysterious stone wall of opposition among some of their superiors when diligent cross-checking disclosed the name of the wealthy figure who is known to be on close personal terms with one of the more powerful members of the police department.
“I don’t know why anybody should be excited by what happened to the ‘Black Dahlia,’ ” one high-ranking police executive is quoted as having declared. “She’s just another butchered ____ .¶”
Another high ra
nking executive fell asleep during questioning of a prime suspect, later released, in the case.
The article—printed in the Herald-Express on September 8—revealed the full extent of Aggie’s pioneering investigative journalism. It made clear that under her stewardship the newspaper had, “for several months,” been “checking the reports of irregularities in the ‘Black Dahlia’ case.” Moreover, that the paper had itself presented the “results of this checking” to the grand jury. As an aside, the report revealed an astonishing indifference to the case on the part of “higher executives” at the LAPD. Elizabeth Short was “just another butchered ____ .” Nobody should be excited by her murder. One top police officer had even fallen asleep during the questioning of a prime suspect who was later released (presumably Leslie Dillon).
With public anger at an all-time high, the time was ripe for a showdown, a confrontation in which the citizens of Los Angeles would at last call to account their police department, through investigation by their chosen representatives on the grand jury. After two and a half years of smoke and mirrors, the press and public would finally get to the bottom of what was going on in the Dahlia case. Or so they thought.
* An unsigned, undated, typed draft of this newspaper article is carefully preserved in the papers of Aggie Underwood, now held by the California State University of Northridge. This suggests that, while the article does not have a byline, Aggie either wrote it herself or was closely involved in its writing.
† The “undisclosed police report” referred to the final report of Officers Waggoner and Ward, filed at the end of July 1949, and referred to on page 145.
‡ Henry Hoffman said that the black-haired girl stayed in cabin 9 (where the parcel of bloody clothes was found), and that the “man from Batavia,” whom he identified as Mark Hansen, stayed next door in cabin 8. (See page 141.)
§ Motel owner Henry Hoffman and neighbor Mr. Hurst both positively identified a photograph of Elizabeth Short as the dark-haired girl who had stayed at the motel. Clora Hoffman, Burt Moorman, Lila Durant, and Tommy Harlow all referred to a dark-haired girl staying at the motel in early January 1947, although because their statements have never been released it is not clear if they identified her as Elizabeth Short.
¶ Presumably an expletive, redacted in the original article.
PART 3
RAW DEAL
“It’s like any other business, only here the blood shows.”
—CHAMPION (1949)
16
KEY WITNESS
While Aggie Underwood carried out her newspaper exposé of the irregularities in the Dahlia investigation, Dr. Paul De River drew attention to them in a different way. He alerted the Los Angeles grand jury privately to what was going on. As his mouthpiece, he used an old friend.
Fred Witman was a seasoned private investigator who had been in the detective business for ten years. In 1949, he ran a licensed PI business downtown, near the intersection of Spring and Fourth Streets. It was a ten-minute walk from the Biltmore Hotel, in a part of town where the trolley cars clanged as they transported women in cheap shoes and brash makeup to the incandescent streetlights and taxi-dancing halls of Main Street. As a gumshoe, Witman specialized in defense cases. He had also handled technical investigations for the mechanical pencil corporation Eversharp. He had known De River for thirteen years.
At the beginning of July 1949—around the time that Thad Brown took over as chief of detectives—the doctor made an urgent telephone call to Fred. He showed Witman the file on the Dahlia case. He told the private investigator he had also shown the file to an appellate court judge.* The doctor knew that, with Thad Brown in a position of unprecedented power, the Dahlia file would be suppressed. It had to be sent to the grand jury without delay, even though such an action would—as the doctor well knew—kill his career in the Los Angeles Police Department. On September 9, 1949, Fred Witman sent the doctor’s file to the grand jury criminal complaints committee. “The cause of the obstruction to this inquiry is far more mysterious than the crimes themselves,” wrote Witman in his covering letter to the committee. He was, he stated, “appalled at the splendid leads that had been neglected” in the case. Leslie Dillon, he believed, ought to be judged by a “jury of his peers,” and “not by a police department torn by internal embarrassments.”
On the morning of September 23, 1949, Fred Witman arrived at the Hall of Justice for a secret meeting with Deputy DA Arthur Veitch and Leo Stanley, chief of the DA’s Bureau of Investigation.† He was sworn in and his testimony to the prosecutors was given under oath.
“My interest in the Dahlia case,” Witman told Veitch and Stanley, “began rather casually, I should guess about three months after the killing, at which time I phoned my friend Dr. De River and made two suggestions: one, that there was considerable reason in my mind to suspect the killer was an embalmer or had experience in an undertaking establishment.‡ The other suggestion was this: that there was no need to try to find the killer because of the nature of the crime and my knowledge of such persons. I felt that there was a strong probability that the killer would reveal himself. Dr. De River concurred.”
Witman told Veitch and Stanley about the early correspondence between Leslie Dillon and Dr. De River, and the shadowing of Dillon in Miami by Officer Jones from the Gangster Squad. He recounted the strange history of the relationship between “Jack,” alias Jack Sand/Leslie Dillon and “Jeff,” alias Jeff Connors, and Connors’s subsequent arrest and sudden release, without any promised “confrontation” occurring. He repeated De River’s conviction that Dillon’s behavior manifested the need to be identified with his crime by getting somehow mixed up with the investigation, by putting himself on center stage. “He has to check in. He’s very much like a pyromaniac. He sets a fire and helps the Fire Department put out the fire. You have the case, too, of Albert Dyer, who led the authorities in the search for the body of the child he had killed. Dillon has to put himself forward in this in my judgment.”
Witman went on to tell the prosecutors that a bellhop friend of Dillon’s called Woody had informed the police that, a few days before the murder, Dillon had left his employment at a San Francisco hotel. Shortly after January 15, he had returned to San Francisco, cleared his apartment, and returned to Los Angeles. Just after this statement was taken, however, a member of the Los Angeles Police Department visited Woody in San Francisco. He convinced the bellhop that his recollections were faulty: Dillon had not been in Los Angeles, but San Francisco at the time of the murder. The first policeman was “young and inexperienced,” and his statement was therefore “discounted.” Witman also told Veitch and Stanley about the leaking of Officer Waggoner’s report by Aggie Underwood in the Herald-Express earlier that month, only to be blown down by Thad Brown in the Examiner shortly afterward.
Next, Witman showed the prosecutors a photograph of the dog leash that had been found in Dillon’s suitcase, along with the razors and phenobarbital pills.§ The leash, Witman said, had been examined by the police department, who claimed that there was no blood on it. However, Witman asserted, the leash had subsequently been subjected to fluoroscopic examination, and definitely revealed a blood spot.
Witman also showed Veitch and Stanley a sketch that Dillon had made, apparently showing the layout of a building. “I have studied this sketch at some length before I ever went to the motel on South Flower Street,” he told the prosecutors. “When I went down there and saw the place, I said, ‘My God, that explains the whole thing!’ ” Witman pointed to a part of the sketch. “He came in here. There are the sounds of the screams and whatnot. He walks out and goes over here, dumps the body and going back to his word, ‘completely annihilates it, blots it out.’ This drawing here has undoubtedly great phallic significance. These dots all around, the character of the dots are Dillon through and through, and appear in other communications.” When Dr. De River confronted Dillon with the sketch, Dillon “acknowledged it as his own, and was unable to explain it.” Thus, according to Fred
Witman, Leslie Dillon had actually drawn a detailed sketch of a building plan that, in Witman’s and De River’s view, exactly corresponded to the layout of the Aster Motel.¶
Witman went on to tell Veitch and Stanley that the LAPD had sent its chemists out to the Aster Motel, to test the cabins for blood. The chemists had reported positive samples of human blood. And yet, “Four days after the report came in, I am advised that the Police Department refused to put reliance on it because certain substances were found also to be there, and the substance that the police department claimed to have been mixed in with the blood to make the findings unreliable, were the substances that Dillon said that Jeff Connors would have used to clean the blood off the body.”# Witman also proffered an explanation for the lacerations to the sides of the victim’s mouth, extending it to “hideous proportions.” Dillon, he said, had told Dr. De River in correspondence that Jeff Connors preferred girls with “big mouths.” Furthermore, Dillon—as both the doctor and the LAPD had previously stated—knew the secret facts about the mutilations that had been deliberately held from the public, facts that only the killer would know.**
But Witman’s biggest revelation to the prosecutors was to come. From his file, the PI produced a previously unpublicized close-up of a photograph from the crime scene.
“I told you that Dillon initials nearly everything that he touches. You will see the letter ‘D’ carved in this pubic [region] after the pubic hair had been shaved off and slashing been done on the body.”
Prosecutor Veitch took a close look at the photograph. “There is also apparently an ‘E’ or an ‘F’ there.”
Stanley examined the photograph. “Definite ‘E.’ ”
“Looks like ‘E D,’ ” said Veitch.