by Piu Eatwell
If there was one single, overall impression that came from the evidence of Harry “the Hat,” it was how little he knew about the Dillon and Mark Hansen angles in the Dahlia case. Apart from the early questioning of Mark Hansen in 1947, and of Leslie Dillon in January 1949, Harry had never, as he himself admitted, been involved in those aspects of the investigation. He knew nothing about the Aster Motel; nothing about Dillon’s movements in or around Los Angeles. Everything relating to Leslie Dillon and Mark Hansen had, it appeared, been the preserve of Sergeant Finis Brown. Nor was Harry involved in advising the DA’s office, or any aspect of the grand jury investigation. That, also, was the preserve of Sergeant Brown. Many years later, Harry was to give in a newspaper interview what was, perhaps, his true opinion of Elizabeth Short. “She didn’t have any standards. She had an obviously low IQ. She was a man-crazy tramp. There were all kinds of men in her life, but only three had any sexual experience with her.*** She was a tease. She asked for trouble. There wasn’t much to like about her.”
The time had come for Sergeant Finis Brown to take the stand. Squat and scruffy in his usual rumpled suit, with his belligerent bulldog expression, Finis made a marked contrast to his dapper colleague.
Brown began by running through the early history of the case, as Hansen had done. The receipt of the package containing the Dahlia’s purse contents, which he agreed must have come from the killer, who clearly had a “mania for publicity”; the surprise arrest of Leslie Dillon, about whom he was told for the first time while patrolling artworks at the Berlin exhibition; the subsequent release of Leslie Dillon and his friend Jeff Connors without charge, after interviewing by others including himself. The investigation of Dillon, Finis claimed, was not yet complete: he was still considered a suspect, along with some fifty other individuals. The crucial issue was where Dillon was on the night of the murder—if it could be established whether he was in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Dillon’s alibi that he was in San Francisco at the time was established by witnesses, not by “actual work record or anything that you can bring in as facts.” And being Dillon, a known pimp and bootlegger, Brown conceded that his associates were not necessarily to be considered reliable alibi witnesses.
“What was your acquaintance—if you had any prior to the time he appeared in the police station—with Mark Hansen?” Harry Lawson asked.
“That is the first time I knew who he was at all.”
“You had no prior contact with the man before that time?”
“No.”†††
But the intrepid Harry Lawson remained undaunted. How was it, he asked, that, when Mark Hansen was shot by Lola Titus on July 15, he uttered the now notorious words, “Get me Brown”? Finis’s explanation for the incident was convoluted and obscure. According to Brown, Mark Hansen had offered to act as a “stool pigeon” or police informant, reporting to the LAPD the various criminal activities going on in the Los Angeles underworld.‡‡‡ Finis had pretended to agree to this, but what he really wanted to do was to check out Hansen himself. Therefore, the police had bugged Hansen’s house at Carlos Avenue—with Hansen’s knowledge. Hansen thought the bug was to pick up evidence of criminal activity at his home. In fact, it was to spy on him. (How the cops proposed to pick up any incriminating admissions from Mark Hansen when he knew his home was bugged remained a mystery: a discrepancy not lost on the jurors.)
It was in pursuance of this informer’s agreement with Mark Hansen, Brown said, that Lola Titus’s name had cropped up. Brown had obtained a photograph of Lola in the nude. He had evidence that she was involved in a lewd photography ring§§§ as a model, and also in narcotics. The police, through Mark Hansen’s help, were about to jump on Lola. Hence her accusation of Hansen, that he was a “damned cop lover.” While Hansen was in the hospital, the LAPD crime lab checked the Carlos Avenue house for blood, with negative results. Not surprisingly, the bug also turned up no incriminating admissions relating to Elizabeth Short. When Hansen’s house was searched, however, two photographs of Elizabeth Short were found. One was the Santa Barbara police mug shot, the other a photograph taken by a young man called Glenn Sterns. Mark Hansen explained that he had obtained the photographs from the police to help him check out a girl who claimed to have known the Dahlia.¶¶¶
One of the jurors pointed out that this was a highly peculiar situation. There was evidence that Mark Hansen had been seen at a motel on Flower Street in January. Numerous police officers had testified that they had gotten to a certain point in the case and then been transferred. Wasn’t it unusual, in Brown’s opinion, that there had not been more effort to tie in the “man from Batavia” with Mark Hansen? Finis’s response was evasive. The investigation at the Aster Motel was not complete.### The statements of the Moormans and the Hoffmans, which had identified Hansen at the motel, were confusing and contradictory. If “a man like that was placed in the witness box—I think it would blow up.” The jury remained unconvinced.
“On the other hand, these people up in San Francisco who you think in court might develop an alibi for this man, most of them have questionable reputations, have they not?”
The jury then went on to question Finis Brown about the claims by members of the Gangster Squad that Mark Hansen had initially identified a picture of Leslie Dillon as resembling a man who visited Elizabeth Short, and that Hansen had then changed his mind after talking to Finis. Brown confirmed that both Mark Hansen and Ann Toth had talked about a man who had picked up Beth Short on several occasions, when she lived at Mark Hansen’s home on Carlos Avenue. The man, they said, was about six feet tall, with light hair, and drove a light-colored Chevrolet coupe. Both Ann Toth and Mark Hansen identified a photograph of Leslie Dillon as the man they had seen with Short. Hansen called attention to Dillon’s prominent Adam’s apple, which he recalled the man he saw with Short as having, too. Later, Finis said, Hansen was shown a picture of one of Elizabeth’s boyfriends, Lieutenant Stephen Wolak.**** He thought this also looked like the man with the light-colored coupe who had visited her. Hansen wanted to see Leslie Dillon in person, to be sure of the identification. The meeting, as far as was known, never happened.
What, the jurors asked, could in Sergeant Brown’s mind, finally resolve the question of Leslie Dillon’s culpability for this crime? If the crucial issue was Dillon’s whereabouts on January 14–15, DA Investigator Frank Jemison had already been up to San Francisco to re-interview the alibi witnesses. Was there anything else that could be done to clear up this point?
“I can’t think of anything. It is Dillon that might be talked to. If the officers—the police officers of the city or some officer could get his cooperation and maybe establish beyond a doubt that he had anything to do with it—”
“Determine as to whether or not he was telling the truth as to his whereabouts in this period of the eight days? In other words, could Dillon bring to bear upon the proposition any corroboration, any corroboration of his declaration that he wasn’t in Los Angeles at the time; that is what you come down with, isn’t it?”
“That is what I mean.”
Effectively, Sergeant Brown was saying that only a personal interview with Leslie Dillon himself could establish the issue of his whereabouts on the night of the murder. But what Finis omitted saying was that there had, in fact, already been such a meeting with Dillon: the secret meeting with Inspector Hugh Farnham in Oklahoma in October. The truth was that, by the time Finis Brown testified to the grand jury, the LAPD had already tracked Dillon down. They had carried out just such a personal interview with him and his wife that Brown, in his testimony, said would be necessary to obtain corroboration of his alibi. The Dillons had failed to establish that alibi. There was, in fact, no solid evidence to confirm that Leslie Dillon had been in San Francisco at the time of Elizabeth’s murder. And yet Sergeant Brown said nothing of this to the grand jury.
It was a bald-faced lie.
The testimony of the police officers at the grand jury hearing was now complete. From what they had said
, it was abundantly clear that there was a serious internal rift in the LAPD over the Dahlia case. The officers of the Gangster Squad were adamant that there was a strong prima facie case against Leslie Dillon and Mark Hansen; that great suspicion surrounded the events at the Aster Motel; and that they had been mysteriously pulled off the case. The officers of the Homicide detail, on the other hand, dismissed Hansen and Dillon as suspects. They glossed over the events at the Aster Motel. One glaring omission was the fact that Captain Francis Kearney—the head of the Homicide detail who actually went on the Dillon mission in January 1949—was not called to give testimony. This was especially strange because it was Captain Kearney who would have been in the best position to explain why he did not reveal the details of the secret mission to his own men. Captain Kearney was to continue in Homicide for two years, transferring back to the Narcotics detail in 1951. Neither he nor anybody else in the LAPD ever publicly explained why the chief of the Homicide Division was not called to give testimony to the grand jury on the Dahlia investigation.
Meanwhile, the evidence having been heard, the grand jury, headed by Harry Lawson, retreated to deliberate. Aggie Underwood, Dr. Paul De River, and the public of Los Angeles waited expectantly for its judgment to be pronounced. Aggie, for one, fully expected indictments to come out of the jury’s investigation of the Dahlia case. She was convinced that the full story was, after all her diligent digging, finally going to explode—and dynamite the rotten police department with it. But the grand jury’s pronouncement, when it came—as with so much else in this case—was totally unexpected.
* Dillon’s claim that he did not work anywhere after January 8 was contradicted by the evidence of Tommy Harlow and Mrs. Pearl McCromber, who stated that he came up to Tommy Harlow’s office by bus from San Francisco in January. (See page 135.)
† Dillon was invariably fired by the hotels he worked for as a bellhop. He was fired from the Lankershim Hotel in San Francisco for pandering in February 1946, and in 1949 from a Santa Monica hotel for robbing the safe. In Oklahoma, it appeared he indulged in bootlegging.
‡ Compare the eyewitness description of a 1936 or 1937 dark Ford sedan seen at the body dump site of Norton and Coliseum in the early hours of the morning of January 15, 1947 (page 47); the landlady of the Normandie Avenue address where Dillon’s mother-in-law lived saying that Dillon had owned a black Ford coupe during the two months he had resided there, from January to February 1947 (page 115); and Tommy Harlow stating that Dillon drove an old 1936 two-door black sedan during this period (page 135). The 1936/7 Ford coupe and the two-door sedan models were virtually indistinguishable.
§ Compare the “sly, soft voice” of the person believed to be the killer who called the Examiner offices on January 23, 1947, as recounted by Jimmy Richardson (page 48).
¶ Mrs. Ashford, who resided at the trailer park in 1946, was a married woman in her forties. It seems highly unlikely that Jiggs Moore or Mr. Carriere would have confused her with the twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short.
# Mark Hansen was never taken to see Dillon in person, in order to make a conclusive identification.
** $15,000: over $150,000 in today’s money.
†† Los Angeles’ historic Jewelry District is located downtown, a stone’s throw from the Aster Motel.
‡‡ Waggoner’s allegations were published by the intrepid Long Beach Independent crime reporter Chuck Cheatham. Chuck later said that he believed Finis Brown was a “bagman” for Mark Hansen. (See page 77.)
§§ Con Keller also said that he had checked for the presence of Leslie Dillon in San Diego and that, although not confirmed, he “looked familiar” to several people there.
¶¶ The grand jury record of Jones’s evidence is not included with the transcripts of the other witness evidence and seems to have disappeared.
## With the possible exception of Officer Jones, whose witness evidence, as mentioned above, has disappeared.
*** Three men who had sexual experience with her: presumably Robert “Red” Manley, Peter Vetcher, and Carl Balsiger. (See pages 26, 71, and 244.)
††† Given that Finis’s big brother Thad was in charge of Patrol Division, monitoring Divisional Vice, it is inconceivable that Finis Brown would not even have heard of Mark Hansen, a major player in Los Angeles vice activities, prior to January 1947.
‡‡‡ It seems highly unlikely that Hansen, a successful businessman with known connections to organized crime, would have proffered his services for this dangerous activity.
§§§ Yet another reference to a friend of Elizabeth Short being involved in a lewd photography ring. Short’s other friend and apartment share partner, Lynn Martin, mentioned being photographed in the nude by photographer George Price, whose name was in Elizabeth’s address book. (See page 63.) The papers of the late John Gilmore, journalist and Dahlia researcher, stored at UCLA, include an uncredited nude photograph of a woman described on the back of the photo as Lola Titus.
¶¶¶ Again, strange that a suspect in a murder inquiry appeared to be taking on aspects of the investigation himself.
### And yet, as we know, Thad Brown had already terminated the Aster investigations in June, and had announced in September that the rumors of the murder taking place there were unfounded.
**** An Air Force officer based out in El Paso.
18
THE VERDICT
GRAND JURORS SHIFT DAHLIA PROBE TO 1950!
The morning’s headlines rolled off the giant printing presses in the neo-Gothic downtown Examiner offices, steamrolling the hopes of Dr. De River, Aggie Underwood, and all who had set so much store by the grand jury investigation into the Dahlia case. So much for Harry Lawson’s much-trumpeted crusade against corruption. Now he and his fellow jurors seemed to have capitulated to the very forces with which they had battled.
For Aggie Underwood and Dr. De River, the announcement that the Dahlia investigation was to be transferred to the 1950 grand jury beggared belief. How could the 1949 jury, the “runaway jury” that had virtually brought down the police department over the Brenda Allen affair, have handed off the task of giving indictments to its successor? Aggie and the doctor did not know about the battle then being played out in the corridors of the Hall of Justice. Harry Lawson hinted at the deadlock. On the morning of December 7, he gave a statement to the press. “We feel the evidence is strong enough,” he told the newspapermen. “But there is not enough time left in our term to complete the inquiry.” The grand jury, Lawson went on, was due to discuss the next steps with the ex-head of the Gangster Squad, Willie Burns, and Chief of Detectives Thad Brown, the next day.
On the same day that Harry Lawson made his statement to the press, Frank Jemison presented another report to the grand jury. It repeated the substance of his first report, in what was swiftly becoming the LAPD mantra on the Dahlia case. Based on his own investigations and the information provided to him by Barrett and Brown of LAPD Homicide, Jemison told the jury—just as he had done back in October—that there was “insufficient evidence to place Leslie Dillon in Los Angeles at the time of murder, and none whatsoever to connect him with it.” Nothing was said to the grand jury of the secret meeting in Oklahoma, when Dillon had failed to establish his alibi. Nothing was said about key items of evidence that had been produced by Fred Witman to the DA, including the initials D and E that were purportedly carved into Elizabeth’s body. Yet again, the jury was delivered the one clear message from the DA’s office, channeled via Jemison’s advisors in the Homicide Division: “drop Leslie Dillon.”
Also on December 7, a curious article appeared in the Los Angeles Examiner. Reporting on Lawson’s statement that the evidence was “strong enough” for an indictment, the paper quoted another, unnamed juryman as stating that the jurors were interested in reports that a “wealthy Hollywood nightclub and theater owner should be investigated in the case.” The juror explained that the panel had been told that this “wealthy Hollywood nightclub owner” had stayed with the Dahlia at a motel o
n South Flower Street in January 1947. The article continued:
Jury questioning of police officers, concluded yesterday, is understood to have concerned reports that the Hollywood man was “protected” by members of the police gangster squad during investigation of the Dahlia slaying.
Early in the hunt for the slayer of Miss Short, whose bisected body was found January 15, 1947, on a vacant lot in the 3800 block of South Norton avenue, it was established that the Hollywood man had known her.
Since then it has been persistently reported that because of his friendship for members of the gangster squad, investigation of the man’s connection with Miss Short was shifted to that squad from homicide, with the result that he was dropped as a suspect.
From the evidence presented in secret to the grand jury, it was clear that the “wealthy Hollywood nightclub owner” suspected of being mixed up with the murder of Elizabeth Short was Mark Hansen. But it was also clear, from the transcript of the grand jury proceedings, that the police “cover-up” that the jury strongly suspected had taken place to protect Mark Hansen was not by the Gangster Squad. Rather, it was a cover-up by the Homicide Division, through the Brown brothers’ links to Hansen. Once again, as with the earlier Examiner report about the Flower Street motel, Thad Brown’s men seemed to have been twisting the story told to the newspapers. As to the events at Flower Street, the Examiner article went on to say that “witnesses familiar with the motel at that time are supposed to have identified the Hollywood man as one registered there and, at the time, supposed to have been connected with a foreign government.”* The grand jury, the Examiner continued, was not satisfied that the witnesses at the motel had been given an opportunity to tell their full stories. Those stories, in the jury’s opinion, should be heard.