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

by Piu Eatwell

  * Wally Klein (1904–78) was a Hollywood writer and producer. Writing credits include Oklahoma Kid (1939), They Died with their Boots On (1941), Hard to Get (1938), and Indianapolis Speedway (1939). He was the brother-in-law of legendary film producer Hal B. Wallis (Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon).

  † Donald Freed (b. 1933) is an American playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. He has been writer-in-residence at USCLA, the Old Vic, the York Theatre Royal, and the University of Leeds.

  ‡ Ellery E. Cuff (1896–1988) was the distinguished head of the Los Angeles Public Defender’s Office from 1949 to 1963, the first public defender’s office in the country. He was a long-standing campaigner against the death penalty.

  § For more on Albert Dyer and the Babes of Inglewood case, see page 84.

  ¶ In 1973, Freed was to edit The Glass House Tapes, an account of the inner workings of the LAPD and FBI based on interviews with a former spy and informer, Louis E. Tackwood.

  # Schizothymia is an introverted psychiatric condition resembling a milder form of schizophrenia.

  ** For the two “secret facts” relating to the mutilations that were withheld from the public and which De River and the LAPD initially said that Dillon knew, see page 105.

  †† The “signature” element of a killer’s behavior—i.e., what is done as a result of a deep-seated psychological compulsion, and does not change across his or her crimes—is to be contrasted with the “M.O.” or “modus operandi,” i.e., behavior that evolves and changes as a result of expediency and/or learned experiences. So, for example, if a killer uses a knife to kill a victim in one crime and a hammer in another, depending on what is readily available at the crime scene, this would be a part of the M.O. But if he or she always decapitates the victims after death, this would constitute an element of the “signature.” Distinguishing the M.O. in order to identify the “signature” elements of a crime is one of the major tasks of the forensic profiler.

  PART 4

  OUT OF THE PAST

  “Heavy. What is it?”

  “The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of.”

  —THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), QUOTING WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  22

  THE NAME OF THE ROSE

  “Why did he call me Elizabeth, Mrs. Eatwell?”

  The woman stared at me. She shook her long, dark hair in disbelief.

  For a moment I also was shaken by disbelief. Here I was, in a neat suburban home. The wall clock ticked cozily. The room was spotless. Ranged on the tidy bookshelves were brightly colored children’s books. The woman herself, although not young, had a childlike innocence about her, as if she were trying, subconsciously, to reclaim a childhood that had never been her own.

  I did not reply to her question. After all, what was there to say?

  It was a bright spring morning in 2016. By now I had been researching a book on the Dahlia case for two years. To a writer of historical true crime, the story was compelling. It held the dark allure of L.A. noir: a period synonymous with the golden age of Hollywood, yet riddled with the cynicism and savagery of postwar America. I was fascinated not only by the murder—with its many riddles and paradoxes—but also by the snapshot it revealed of Los Angeles at the time. A city of bright lights and darker shadows, where cops fraternized with mobsters and girls sold themselves for the promise of a bit part in a movie. The twists and turns of researching the case had led me to many surprising places, but none more so than this. Leslie Dillon, after the public furor and frenzy of the Dahlia debacle, had remarried several times. He had had another daughter. He had called her Elizabeth.*

  And here she was. Elizabeth. After a painstaking trawl through the available records, I had finally traced and contacted her. I had written to her, briefly referring to her father’s connection with the Dahlia investigation, and tentatively requesting an interview. Her initial reply was brusque. She had never heard of any connection between her father and the Dahlia murder. She could not believe he had been connected with the case. But then she relented, and agreed to a meeting.

  There was not much that Elizabeth could tell me about her father, Leslie Dillon. The two were not close. She had decided to cut off ties with him when she was young. He and her mother had divorced. (Dillon married four times in all.) He had drifted around from job to job—music teacher, bartender, bookseller. He had spent time in Las Vegas in the 1970s. Finally, he had settled down in San Francisco, where he had died in February 1988. He had gone by the name of “Jack,” not “Leslie.” Elizabeth had not been proud of her father, but she never imagined he was capable of carrying out such an act as the Dahlia murder. He was not, she said, a violent man.

  “I read the reports that the killer was a surgeon,” she said to me hopefully. “That doesn’t sound like my father.”

  “He is believed to have worked in a morgue.”

  “A . . . morgue?” Her shock and horror were apparent.

  “Didn’t you know that?”

  “No.”

  But then, Elizabeth knew almost nothing. She had been told almost nothing.

  Why, I asked, had she decided to cut off close contact with her father?

  Oh, he was just not around much, that was all.

  Why had her mother divorced Leslie Dillon?

  A pause. Finally: “Probably because he was still married when he married her. Also, maybe because he just stopped coming home.”

  Was that what happened, I wondered, on the night of January 14, 1947? Leslie Dillon had just “not come home”? Was that why Georgia Dillon, his first wife, was unable to provide an alibi for him that night? And then there was the baffling question that the daughter herself posed, with a dawning realization of shock:

  “Why did he call me Elizabeth?”

  I was now even more perplexed than before. I could think of no explanation for Leslie Dillon’s bizarre choice of the first name “Elizabeth” for his daughter. After all the noise and sensation of the arrest and subsequent court proceedings, it was a provocative and perverse choice. Was it yet another indirect allusion to a woman with whom Dillon felt compelled to connect himself? To me, this seemed potentially yet another manifestation of the “signature” behavior that Dr. De River had identified: another move in the cat-and-mouse game with investigators; a further veiled, teasing allusion to the crime. In my experience as a writer and researcher of historical crime, I had already encountered several killers with a compulsion to draw attention to themselves, without actually admitting culpability, by communicating with the media or somehow getting mixed up in the police investigation. The infamous Zodiac and BTK killers had both sent cryptic communications and clues to the police and the press. The notorious British murderer John Reginald Christie had acted as a star witness in the trial of his tenant for murders that it is now believed he himself committed.† And, of course, Albert Dyer, the Inglewood killer, had come forward to the police investigating the murders of the three little girls, to proffer his assistance.‡

  If the killer had indeed inscribed his initial on the victim’s body, this—like the naming of his daughter after the victim—would have constituted another instance of his both appropriating the victim, and indirectly drawing attention to himself. It would fit in with the pattern of “signature” behavior that had been demonstrated already. In this context, the crime scene photographs purportedly showing the initials D and either E or F were a crucial piece of evidence—if they could be found. The photographs had been exhibited at the secret hearing between Fred Witman and the DA’s Officers Veitch and Stanley. During that hearing, as recorded in the official transcript, the investigators had agreed that the initials appeared to be carved over the postmortem lacerations on the pubic area. And yet, despite my repeated requests, both the LAPD and the DA’s office refused to release any crime scene photographs.§ This blanket refusal was deeply frustrating. After all, the presence of the initial D on the body would be telling evidence against Leslie Dillon. Not one of the other primary suspects in the Dahlia case had t
he initial D.

  While the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office refused to release the crime scene photographs, it did release a large number of documents relating to the case. They included two samples of “creative writing” purportedly written by Leslie Dillon, and discovered by Officer Jones of the Gangster Squad in Dillon’s lodgings in Florida. The fragments were unsigned and typed on the letter paper of the Greystone Hotel on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. They appeared to be submissions of synopses for stories to a newspaper editor called “Mr. Stern.”¶ They made intriguing reading:#

  FIRST FRAGMENT:

  The Greystone Hotel

  Collins Avenue at Twentieth

  Miami Beach—Florida

  Tell you about Tinas big time gambler who took over the gap after you surrendered.

  He was rooming with the doorman from the Blackamoor Room which is now the 5-Oclock Club.

  Doorboy had a very beautiful Jewish girl who was a clerk at Saks. Youve seen her around may know her. He was nuts about her, but her living right in the next room, for a whole year or more. and him working so late at night. She decided she liked his roomates nuts better. So she started to unravel the doorman slowly. The roomate would move in with her one shoe at a time. It began to get on the dorman’s nerves. When he would come home so late after work, and get ready for the doorman’s double deep dive. He would almost drown. The BTO** had stretched that little old thing so. So the next morning at 10 AM The bastard who parks the cars went in to alter the situation but he failed to look at the calender. It was no less Friday August the 13th.

  Resenting his ungentlemanly acquasitions the pump†† went to the front office to call up the high roller. Who was at the local bookshop.‡‡

  Realizing this as the climax, Little boy park your car went back to his room and retrieved a role of cabbage§§ big enough to stuff her. and gashed right back to the front office to offer the stuffing which was one kind peter boy did not have. She refused the bribe so he made another digging and came back with some thing she couldnt refuse.

  He pulled his trigger finger all over the place. Passed the light so fast behind her eyes the balls shot out of the sockets. Resenting either the sight or his poor workmanship, He gunned himself twice in the same place and fell dead over her unconscious body.

  She is still alive the last I heard, But doesn’t feel so good. She will probably be blind or [nuts]. Which goes to show he should have been satisfied with Tina. What good is a wife with her eyeballs hanging out.

  You wouldn’t have shot Tina, Would you?

  The fragment gave an illuminating insight into the writer’s psychological complexes. In the story, the protagonist, the “doorman,” was shown to be impotent, his inferior member “drowned” by that of his rival, the “high roller” gambler. The doorman’s revenge was to find a roll of “cabbage” (cash) big enough to “stuff” the victim. While the overt scenario was one of bribery/paying for sex, the imagery—“stuff her,” “gashed”—also evoked the forcible use of an object to penetrate the victim, where the protagonist’s own member was inadequate to the task.

  The second fragment was also revealing:

  SECOND FRAGMENT:

  The Greystone Hotel

  Collins Avenue at Twentieth

  Miami Beach—Florida

  Have you ever killed a man? Do you know what it is to hide from fear? Fear of your own fear. Surely you have considered such a venture. Not even the landlord? Well now that we understand each other. If the rascal in question is laid away without any serious planning. In just maybe a fit of anger. With a brick or something. then no body gets really mad at you. They will probably just put you up with some of Uncle Sam’s chosen guests until all is forgotten.

  But on the other hand. If you are a very thoughtful sort of a person, and really give the matter serious thought. Does this guy really deserve to go, so young? And if you decide he does. and if you make elaborate plans to that end. For his end. Then you did it in the first degree, no less. You have done it up so cleverly (except for the knife in the back) that the boys in blue get real upset. That is no rose they are trying to pin on you. They are trying to gas or electrocute you. Depending on who has the most votes the gas or the electric company. On the other hand if you are just a poor Chinaman and live in China. Where the basket weavers union is affiliated. They will chop off your hair just below the adams-apple and let the unsmiling remnants drop into one of their little hand-woven baskets,

  That they so smilingly weave.

  Don’t do it.

  She isn’t worth it.

  In this fragment, the “hypothetical” scenario of a hotheaded killing was contrasted with that of a thoughtful, cold-blooded, and calculated murder. The protagonist was shown considering the consequences of one versus the other: the gas chamber or electric chair, as opposed to a mere spell in one of “Uncle Sam’s” jails. The substitution of the word “he” for “she” in the final sentence—“She isn’t worth it”—was especially significant. It implied that the use of the masculine gender in the opening sentence of the fragment—“Have you ever killed a man?”—was a cover or displacement for the real scenario underlying the piece: that of killing a woman.¶¶ This slip obviously struck Dr. De River as it was pointed out by his representative, Fred Witman, to Veitch and Stanley at the secret hearing. Witman also told the DA investigators that multiple drafts of the fragments had been discovered, suggesting intensive and careful reworking and rewriting.

  Both fragments exhibited errors of grammar and syntax similar to those in the letters Leslie Dillon wrote to De River, and similar also to those in some of the communications sent to the police in 1947 purportedly by the Dahlia killer. The note in the original Dahlia package, for example, read, “Here is Dahlia’s possessions . . . ,” and the subsequent postcard that might have been the promised “letter to follow” stated, “Had my fun at the police.”## Most significantly, the first fragment in particular manifested an extreme insecurity about the writer’s masculinity and ability to satisfy a woman, a pathology that boiled over into a climax of violence in which an orgasm appeared to have been achieved, not by normal sexual intercourse, but by an orgy of brutality in which the protagonist shot his “trigger finger all over the place” and shot out his girlfriend’s eyeballs. Similar themes of sexual insecurity and violence against women were reflected in the news clipping Leslie Dillon had preserved, about the man who shot out a schoolgirl’s tooth because she had mocked him. It was also the motive Dillon had hypothesized to Dr. De River for the Dahlia murder. Was it not possible, he had written, that an associate of Elizabeth, after an affair “not considered proper by the average person,” had been “mocked or threatened exposure by her to his friends?” He therefore might, out of revenge, inflict “pain of some nature on her and experience a new sensation by accident. . . . Thus leading to the complete annihilation of her and other victims.”***

  If Dr. De River’s observation that Dillon had a “juvenile penis” was true, this fact would proffer an explanation for such a deep-rooted insecurity. It would validate Dillon’s explanation of the motive for the killing. It would explain some of the details of the actual crime: for example, why the victim was not raped, but sodomized with a foreign object; and the killer’s many postmortem acts of “piquerism,” or cutting with a knife. The criminal psychologist and signature killer expert Robert Keppel has written: “Acts of piquerism—jabbing, stabbing, cutting, and gouging through the use of a knife or other sharp-pointed instrument for the purposes of sexual gratification—strike terror in living victims. Knives are fearsome and unyielding and their phallic nature as weapons supersedes any harm the predator can inflict with his penis. Knives are therefore sexual weapons psychologically as well as weapons of combat.”

  In addition to the fragments of Dillon’s writing, in the course of my research, I also came across an intriguing photograph. The picture had been posted on one of the major Black Dahlia case Internet discussion forums. It depicted a young woman in prof
ile, with a mass of dark, curly hair. She was sitting bent over in a chair, semi-nude in her panties, brushing her hair. The background of the photograph showed a sparse bedroom with a single bed draped in a candlewick coverlet. A polka-dot blouse that might have been made of silk lay tossed aside, crumpled carelessly on the floor. Beside the blouse was a pair of black, open-toed, high-heeled shoes. A small snapshot of a serviceman in a peaked cap was pinned to the wall. The woman was the very double of Elizabeth Short.

  According to the person who placed the photograph on the Black Dahlia site, the picture had originally been posted on the popular image hosting site Flickr, credited to “George Price.” However, upon inquiry as to the provenance of the photograph, the picture was mysteriously taken off Flickr. The resemblance of the semi-nude woman in the picture to Elizabeth Short was striking. Could this be a photograph of Elizabeth taken by George Price, the photographer listed in her address book? If it were, this would establish without a doubt that she had been caught up in the porno ring described by her friend Lynn Martin and in which Lola Titus had also been involved. In order to try to establish whether the photograph was indeed of Short, I decided to consult an expert. I therefore sent the semi-nude picture—along with a selection of known photographs of Elizabeth Short, including the only known profile shot of her (which was taken by the Santa Barbara police)—to retired police sergeant Michael Streed, a leading forensic facial recognition expert based in Corona, California. Michael’s long and distinguished career has included stints working as a forensic artist/consultant to the Los Angeles and Baltimore City police departments. Was it possible, I asked him, that the semi-nude woman in the photograph was the same woman depicted in the known pictures of Elizabeth Short?