by Piu Eatwell
At the Hollenbeck Police Station detectives grilled Manley for most of the night. By the time Aggie Underwood got there early Monday morning, both Red and the interviewing officers were exhausted, and Manley had clammed up.
Aggie sized up the suspect. She was ready to talk sympathetically about hangovers, and this guy “looked like the kind who would strike up a decent conversation in a bar.” Even after a night of being given the third degree by the cops, he was still dapper and dandy, with his slicked-back hair.
“You look as if you’ve been on a drunk.” Aggie said to Red.
“This is worse than any I’ve ever been on.”
Perry Fowler, Aggie’s photographer, took his cue and helpfully handed Manley a cigarette.
“Look, fella,” said Aggie chummily. “You’re in one hell of a spot. You’re in a jam and it’s no secret. If you’re innocent as you say you are, tell the whole story; and if you haven’t anything to hide, people can’t help knowing you’re telling the truth. That way, you’ll get it over with all at once and it won’t be kicking around to cause you more trouble.”
“She’s right,” said homicide detective Harry S. Fremont, who immediately spotted the opportunity. In a mean police department, Harry Fremont was one of the meanest cops in town. Once, he had nearly beaten a prisoner to death at the Seventy-seventh Street substation. The journalist Gene Fowler was convinced that Fremont had killed a number of criminals in back alleys.* But Harry was smart enough to see that a woman’s touch might accomplish more than a beating in this case. “Tell her everything that happened. I’ve known this lady for a long time, on lots of big cases, and I can tell you she won’t do you wrong.”
So Robert “Red” Manley told his story. First to Aggie, and then to the cops—many times over in the ensuing months. What he had to say was straightforward, and barely differed through the many times he was to tell it. The first time he had met Elizabeth Short, Red said, was when he picked up the pale, black-haired girl at a San Diego street corner on a business trip, sometime around December 16, 1946. She was such a “pretty gal,” he said, he had to stop and rake up a conversation with her.
Red and his wife had just had a baby. They were, in his words, going “through an adjustment period.” They had lots to iron out—“nothing important, just little things.” So when he saw the black-haired girl on the street corner, he decided to pick her up and make a test for himself, to see if he still loved Harriette. “I asked her if she wanted to ride. She turned her head and wouldn’t look at me. I talked some more. I told her who I was. And what I did and so forth. Finally, she turned around and asked me if I didn’t think it was wrong to ask a girl on a corner to get into my car. I said ‘Yes, but I’d like to take you home,’ so she got into the car.” She told him she was staying temporarily with a family called French in Pacific Beach and was working at Western Airlines.
Red was adamant that he and the girl “didn’t do anything.” They just rode around and talked, had a dance and dinner, and he dropped her back where she was staying with the French family. “No, I didn’t ask her to stop at my room. We did sit in the car and talk for a short time, and I kissed her a couple of times, but she was kind of cold, I would say.” Red told the girl he was married and she told him she had been, too, to a “Major Matt somebody.” He told her he would wire her if he came back again San Diego way.
When Red had to make another trip to San Diego a few weeks later in January 1947, he sent the girl the telegram. He arrived in San Diego on Wednesday, January 8, and headed to the Western Airlines office, where he waited for her to come out. But she never showed up, and the folks there had never heard of her. He doubted she really worked there. He then went to the French house, where the girl was there to greet him. She asked him to drive her to Los Angeles. Red agreed, but said he could only do so the next day. She left the Frenches’ house with him that night. They checked into a motel at Pacific Beach and went to the Hacienda Club in Mission Valley, where she threw herself into the music. She really loved dancing: at one point, she danced with the singer of the band. “We danced several times and had several drinks. She was gay and happy and seemed to be having a swell time,” Red recalled.
But once they got back to their motel room, it was as though all the light went out of the girl. She became sullen and silent. She took a blanket off the bed and propped her legs up against the wall by the heater, shivering. Red asked her what was the matter. She said she didn’t feel well, to please leave her alone. It was her time of the month. So Red didn’t interfere with her. All that long night she acted very cold. She didn’t want to even talk about sex. He didn’t know what was the matter with her. In fact, he was beginning to think he’d be glad to get rid of her.
The next morning, January 9, Red gave the girl a dollar to go get some breakfast and told her that he would collect her around noon. He had some business to attend to in the morning, so he came back after that and they set off. They stopped at the beach city of Encinitas en route because he had business there with a water company. They stayed about an hour and a half there, a time during which she might have made some calls, but as far as he was concerned she was waiting in his car. She mentioned that a couple of fellows on bicycles talked to her while she was waiting. They had a hamburger at Encinitas, which she ate with relish. After Encinitas, he made a couple more stops before they got to Los Angeles—one at Oceanside, then one at Laguna Beach, for gas, at around 5:00 p.m.
All along the road to Los Angeles, the girl seemed anxious. She would strain her head and look at cars that overtook them and cars they overtook, as if she were worried about being tailed. Every time they passed a car, she would turn her head and take a look at the occupants. That seemed funny to Red. She was pretty much silent all the way back. Red remembered remarking to her, “Don’t like my company?” She replied, “It’s not that.”
When they arrived in Los Angeles, the girl told Red that she was going to meet her sister from Berkeley at the lobby of the downtown Biltmore Hotel. Then, she said, she intended to go back to her home in Boston. She suggested checking her baggage into the Greyhound bus depot: her sister might not be at the Biltmore right away, and she didn’t want to have her baggage at the hotel. She seemed happy for Red to leave her there at the bus depot. But Red said no: it was a bad part of town. He insisted on dropping her at the Biltmore. It was, the girl said, her first time in L.A.
When they got to the Biltmore the girl went to the restroom to freshen up. Red went to check at the desk to see if her sister had arrived, but she hadn’t. He left Beth at the Biltmore about 6:30 p.m., as it was late and he was anxious to be getting home. That was the last he saw of her. The doorman at the Biltmore was later to corroborate Red’s story. According to him, Beth spent several hours alone in the lobby of the Biltmore after Manley had left. She made some telephone calls. Finally, she left the hotel via the Olive Street exit about 10:00 p.m. The doorman saw her figure retreating into the fog, southward down Olive. It was the last reported sighting of Elizabeth Short to be confirmed, before her bisected body was found in the vacant lot at Leimert Park.†
Red could recall very little about the girl’s conversation. It seemed there wasn’t much between them in the way of communication. He remembered that she had a little address book in which she noted people’s names and addresses, and that she kept harping on about some fellow named Gordon, or something like that, whom she claimed she had married. She had shown him a picture of the guy. He described the clothes she was wearing when she left Pacific Beach, the last outfit in which she had been seen: a black tailored jacket and skirt, white frilly blouse, white gloves, black suede open-toed high-heeled shoes, and “her last pair of nylons.” She carried a beige camel-hair coat over her arm and gripped a black clutch purse in her hand, but wore no hat or jewelry of any kind. Above all, Red remembered the strange and distinctive perfume that she wore: heavy, musky, and sweet. It enveloped her like a pall.
Robert “Red” Manley’s sensational interview—car
ried in the Herald-Express in boldface quotes under Aggie’s byline—established his innocence. As Aggie said, nobody could doubt that “there was the resonance of truthfulness in what he had to say.” Manley’s Studebaker coupe was thoroughly investigated for bloodstains by LAPD chemist Raymond Pinker. The results were negative. His wife and friends swore to his alibi, that he was playing cards with them on the night of the killing. Harriette was a rock throughout. “The whole idea that Red had anything to do with this case is absurd,” she told the newspapermen. “He’d faint if he merely saw blood.” After undergoing two grueling lie-detector tests and passing with flying colors, Red was released clear of suspicion. According to Aggie, he “eliminated himself by his own straightforwardness, and the police got him out of their hair.” Manley told Aggie, “I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles and tell my minister, too, that [Thursday, January 9] was the last time I ever saw Betty Short. I did not kill her. But, brother, I’ll never cheat on my wife again.”‡
Aggie had barely finished celebrating her victory with the Manley exclusive when she got the biggest shock of her life. She was—suddenly and inexplicably—pulled off the Dahlia case.
At first, Aggie was stunned. Then, so as “not to take the thing lying down,” she defiantly came to the office brandishing an enormous embroidery hoop. She sat down wordlessly and busied herself with her needle. Soon there were snickers around the bullpen. Aggie bent down over her fancy work undeterred. While the entire office rocked with laughter, Aggie kept her needle going until quitting hour.
“What do you think of that?” Aggie’s fellow reporter, Caroline Walker, said with a snigger. “Here’s the best reporter on the Herald, on the biggest day of one of the best stories in years—sitting in the office doing fancy work!”
The city editor kept his head down.
Early the next morning, the assistant city editor called Aggie over. He told her that the city editor had changed his mind overnight. He had reassigned her to the Dahlia case. All resumed as before. Then, once again, Aggie was pulled off the case. This time, however, she was not kicked off, but kicked upstairs. She was appointed the new city editor of the Herald-Express.
Aggie, a woman of the world with a family to provide for, was not of a mind to refuse promotion from the crime beat to the city desk. So she played along. At the time that she took the position, nobody had lasted as city editor of the Herald-Express for more than two years. Aggie would last seventeen. She was to become one of the longest-reigning and most popular city editors in newspaper history. But she never lost her mean streak. She put a baseball bat on her desk to brandish at overzealous Hollywood press agents, and when it became too quiet in the city room, she would fire off a blank pistol and cry out, “Don’t let this paper die on us today!” She was, as the reporter Will Fowler said, in a “class Jim Richardson would never attain.”
Still, everyone agreed that there was something fishy afoot when Aggie was kicked upstairs. Who was trying to get the star reporter off the biggest newspaper story of the decade? Who wanted her off their back? Why?
Jimmy Richardson soon had his revenge on Aggie for the exclusive interview with Red. He got the first interview with the Frenches in San Diego. Dorothy French, the twenty-two-year-old cashier at the Aztec movie theater in downtown San Diego, recalled feeling sorry for the black-haired girl who had crashed there in December. She had taken her home to stay with her and her brother at their mother Elvera’s house in Pacific Beach, as a “friendly act, when the girl was down and out.” “There was something so sorrowful about her—she seemed lost and a stranger to the area, and I felt I wanted to help her. I wasn’t sure how. She apparently had no place to stay. I suggested she come home with me and get a good night’s sleep, if that would help. She said she was thankful for my generosity.”
Dorothy’s mother Elvera said that Elizabeth—who liked to be called “Beth” in Hollywood—told the Frenches that she had come to San Diego looking for work, because of the movie strikes that had paralyzed Los Angeles. But she had barely worked a few days in the month she stayed with the Frenches, although she kept claiming she was looking for a job. Most days, she would simply lounge in the living room writing letters, her lacy black underclothes strewn on the Frenches’ sofa, the room heavy with her overpowering, musky perfume. Beth talked a lot about her “husband,” a Major Matt Gordon, whom she said had been killed in a plane crash over India the previous November. She had given birth to a child by him, she said, but the baby died. She showed the Frenches a newspaper article that she kept in her purse, and which she claimed referred to them as married. But the name of the bride had been scratched out. The newspaper, Elizabeth said, had made a mistake over the bride’s name. In mid-December, Beth’s former boyfriend, Gordon Fickling, wired her $100 to tide her over.§ Such a large amount should have kept her going a few months, but she soon seemed to be broke again. “While she was with us, she apparently needed a great deal of money for something,” said Dorothy French. Up to December 21, Elizabeth had dated Red virtually every night; but then from December 22 to January 1 she was out with other men most nights.
The Frenches described Beth as reluctant to talk about her past. She was “polite and secretive.” Often she seemed depressed and moody, which Elvera attributed to her failure to find employment. Beth told Elvera she had plans to break into the movies, and that a Hollywood celebrity had promised to help her. Much of the time she appeared on edge and afraid. The Frenches recalled, for example, a strange incident when two men and a woman came knocking on the door. Beth wouldn’t answer, but peeked through the curtain. She seemed relieved when the trio finally left. “She was terribly frightened and refused to talk about them,” said Dorothy French. “She was evasive when I asked other questions, so I gave up.” Beth told the Frenches that a woman had chased her and a friend up Hollywood Boulevard in December. “She seemed constantly in fear of something,” said Elvera. “Whenever anybody came to the door she would act frightened.” It was during her stay in San Diego that Elizabeth dyed her hair with henna —perhaps in an attempt to disguise her appearance. The reddish henna, as had been reported in the newspapers, was fading when her body was discovered, the hair growing back to its original dark color.
In the end, Beth overstayed her welcome. Elvera got fed up with tiptoeing around her own house to avoid waking her guest up when she slept late after her nighttime dates. Mrs. French was also worried about the effect of such a plethora of lacy black underwear on her teenage son. She asked Beth to leave. “Our place is very crowded with my son Cory and daughter Dorothy, and I’m a widow,” explained Elvera. She showed Tommy Devlin an expensive black hat with a veil. “Beth worked as a hat model. When she left, she gave me this hat that I admired. I think it was her way of thanking me for letting her stay.”
Elvera said that Elizabeth left their house alone and on foot on January 8, carrying two suitcases and a hatbox. Around the corner, Red was waiting in his car. He had driven to the Frenches’ house in it once before. “He was a big, good-looking fellow with wavy red hair,” Dorothy recalled. “He had a wonderful smile. His teeth sparkle, they’re so white. When my mother and I saw him, he was immaculately dressed and seemed to be the kind of person who’d always dress like that. He was wonderfully well mannered.” A neighbor, Forest Faith, saw Elizabeth as she drove away with Red in his coupe. “Both of them were in good humor, laughing and joking, as they put suitcases in the trunk of the car,” she said. Elvera was not much surprised to hear that Beth had suffered mishap on arriving in Los Angeles. “I had a premonition Miss Short was in trouble.”
In addition to the Frenches, Tommy Devlin turned up another cracker for Jimmy Richardson in San Diego. He told him that Mrs. French had said the girl had a trunk stored at the American Railway Express office. The company told Tommy that the trunk had been sent to their Los Angeles warehouse for nonpayment of storage, but they would not turn it over to the Examiner without permission from the police. So Jimmy Richardson called the LAPD. He got Jack Donahoe,
chief of the Homicide Squad, on the phone.
“If I tell you where you can find the Dahlia’s trunk will you agree to bring it to the Examiner and open it here?”
Jack Donahoe was a big, beefy Irishman who didn’t take no shit. But he was new to Homicide, having just transferred from Robbery, where he had been buried in administration.
“Look, Jim. If I do that every other paper in town will be after my scalp. Don’t put me on the spot like that. You’ve caused me enough goddam trouble the way it is with all those stories you’ve been breaking.”
“You want the trunk, don’t you? No deal, no trunk.”
Jack groaned. “All right. It’s a deal. I’ll send a couple of the boys to you. But if you were a friend of mine you’d give me a break.”
“If you were a friend of mine you’d give me a break. Let’s be friends somehow, Jack.”
“All right, but I’m sure gonna catch hell.”
The next day, the Dahlia’s trunk arrived at the Examiner offices.
* Gene Fowler also claimed to have been eyewitness to an incident when Harry Fremont interrogated a man who had just shot and killed Fremont’s partner. The man was lying on a bed in a hospital. Fremont, according to Fowler, told the man to get off the bed and run for it, and as he did so, he put six shots into the man’s back. There was no investigation. Harry Fremont was one of the police officers later indicted for the “Bloody Christmas” beatings of Chicano prison inmates in 1951. (See page 218.)