by Piu Eatwell
† There were (unconfirmed) reports by the bartender and two other witnesses at the Crown Jewel Cocktail Lounge on Eighth and Olive that Elizabeth had been seen there later on the night of January 9.
‡ Robert “Red” Manley, although cleared of suspicion of Elizabeth Short’s murder, never escaped the shadow of the Dahlia case. He suffered a series of nervous breakdowns and was committed to Patton State Mental Hospital by his wife in 1954. He died in a nursing home in 1986.
§ Equivalent to over $1,200 today.
4
GILDA
The trunk was a gold mine. It contained clothes, photographs, albums, letters from dozens of men. Jimmy also managed to get hold of the Dahlia’s two suitcases and hatbox, which she had checked into the Greyhound bus station before going with Red to the Biltmore. Everything was suffused with the same perfume: sweet, sickly, pervaded by a musty note of decay.
They found Elizabeth’s autograph book. From this it transpired that she had been the Medford high school beauty, referred to as Medford High’s “Deanna Durbin.” Of the five Short girls, it seemed, Elizabeth (known as “Bette” at home) had been the prettiest—and the dreamiest. Phoebe Short’s husband, Cleo Alvin Short, had vanished in Boston in 1930. When Cleo’s car was found abandoned in a vacant parking lot near the Charlestown Bridge, the inference was obvious. Cleo must have taken his life by leaping from the gray bridge railings into the churning depths of the Charles River. It was just another Depression story. The mother brought up her daughters alone.
Phoebe Short often blamed herself for her husband’s suicide. Cleo had been running a thriving car repair business in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. He hadn’t wanted to move to Massachusetts, but Phoebe had insisted. The place was peaceful, with libraries, churches, decent schools, and universities. A good place to raise children. So the family left New Hampshire, first for Hyde Park, Boston, and then for the streetcar suburb of Medford. Cleo started a new enterprise making miniature golf courses. At first business thrived. The golf course that Cleo built at Howard Johnson Circle was considered one of the finest around. The family lived in a spacious residence on Magoun Avenue, an affluent, leafy precinct of Medford lined with large, porch-fronted white clapboard houses. Cleo and Phoebe could afford new oak furniture, a brand-new Ford, and singing and violin lessons for their eldest daughter, Ginnie. Then the Depression struck. The business failed. Cleo killed himself. Phoebe and her girls found themselves on a slow downward spiral through ever-smaller rented homes. Finally, they wound up in a third-floor railroad flat on Salem Street.
Salem Street was crisscrossed by trolley tracks running directly from Medford Square. The intersection was next to the old town burial ground, with its magnificent crumbling tombstones of wealthy New England farmers. On the fringes of the cemetery, slaves rested uneasily in unmarked graves. The Shorts’ building was a three-decker clapboard apartment block. The backyard was littered with tricycles and washing lines. The Shorts lived on the third floor, in a cramped apartment with a small balcony. Sometimes Phoebe Short or one of her girls could be glimpsed on the balcony, hanging out brightly colored braided rugs to dry.
Life on Salem Street was a monotonous round of school, church, and odd jobs waitressing or babysitting for neighbors. Except for the movies. The girls from Medford High would return from the movie theater and gather on a shady porch on summer evenings, reenacting their favorite scenes. Mary Pacios, a childhood friend who was later to write a memoir of growing up with Beth Short, recalled that, while the other girls were only playing games, for Beth the movie star’s life was real. Everybody in Medford remembered Bette’s walk: a slow and sensuous sashay of the hips, which had cars jamming their brakes on Salem Street. Perfectly turned out, with matching hat and gloves even for a trip to the local grocery store, Elizabeth Short always seemed to be destined for a different world, something infinitely bigger and more glamorous than the New England suburb in which she had been born. And yet, there was a sadness and sense of loss about her. “She was the manic depressive type, gay one minute and blue the next,” recalled her mother, Phoebe. A former boyfriend from Bette’s teenage years said, “She wanted to be someone famous. She had stars in her eyes, dreams rather than plans. I think of her as a very beautiful but very private person, with a sadness about her. A void, something missing.”
One day Phoebe Short was walking down the street in Medford when she bumped straight into her former husband. Cleo, it transpired, had not committed suicide; the abandoned car was a ruse. Cleo wanted a reconciliation. Phoebe refused. The family was doing perfectly fine without him. Bette, however, dreamed of a life with the father she never knew. In her sophomore year she quit school and wrote Cleo that she would like to come down to live with him in Vallejo, California. She could cook and keep house for him, take care of him. They would be a real family. Cleo agreed. He had served in the merchant navy during the war and was now working in the naval yards doing odd jobs as a handyman. Most of the time, he was drunk. The live-in arrangement with his daughter lasted three weeks. At the end of that time Cleo threw Elizabeth out, “because of her habit of running around and keeping late hours.” So she took up the job at the post exchange at Camp Cooke. It was from here that she was dispatched back to Medford after her arrest for underage drinking.
When she alighted from the bus in the fall of 1943, Elizabeth never revealed to Phoebe that she had been sent home to Medford by the Santa Barbara cops. It was just one of many, many things that she did not tell her mother. Life resumed as before. Summers were spent at home in Medford with Phoebe. Winters were spent in Miami Beach, Florida, where Bette would retreat to escape the New England frosts that triggered the bronchial and asthmatic complaints with which she was constantly plagued. But something had happened to Bette since her brief and ill-fated trip to California. She had “gone Hollywood.” Medford would, from now on, be too dull and small-town for her.
From December 1943 through March 1945, Elizabeth would stay in Medford just long enough to earn the carfare to head down to Miami Beach. There she boarded at the El Mar Hotel and worked as a waitress, first at the Rosedale Delicatessen, the oldest Jewish sandwich shop in Miami, and then at Mammy’s Restaurant on Collins Avenue. It was in December 1944, in one of the swinging nightclubs on a palm-tree-lined boulevard of wartime Miami, that Elizabeth met Major Matthew Michael Gordon, Jr., a decorated United States Army Air Force officer and “Flying Tiger.” Gordon was assigned to the Second Air Commando Group, which was then in training for deployment to the Pacific theater of operations. Elizabeth was always attracted to men in uniform. Matt looked the true part of a flying ace, with wholesome, rugged features and a flashing smile. Whether the couple was truly engaged or not is unknown. Unsent letters found in Elizabeth’s trunk from April and May 1945, when Gordon was overseas for the end of the war, implied that she thought they were. “Please take good care of yourself for me, darling, because you are private property,” she wrote. “Today is VE Day. People are throwing paper from the windows and are ready to run wild. You want to slip away and be married. We’ll do whatever you wish, darling. Whatever you want, I want.”
Despite President Truman’s call for a subdued celebration in light of the “terrible price” the country had paid to rid the world of Hitler, VE Day was characterized by unrestrained jubilation throughout the United States, with crowds flooding the streets from New York to New Orleans. Along with so many thousands of other girls, Beth must have eagerly anticipated the return of her fiancé, the Flying Tiger. But a telegram from Matt’s mother three months later dashed her hopes:
Received word War Department Matt killed in crash. Our deepest sympathy is with you. Pray it isn’t true. Love.
Major Gordon’s plane had crashed over India.
Later, after the brutal murder and the newspapers’ transformation of Bette from innocent victim into femme fatale, Mrs. Gordon was to play down the relationship between her deceased son and the vampish Black Dahlia. She expressed disbelief that Matt had ever ma
rried, or even intended to marry, Elizabeth Short. The telegram, she said, was a courtesy she had sent to all of Matt’s friends.
Was Matt Gordon engaged to Elizabeth Short? The truth will probably never be known. The love letters in Beth’s trunk had never been posted. Elvera French had noted that Elizabeth spent much of her time lounging around the house writing letters, spinning tales of her past marriage, her flier husband, her lost child. For Elizabeth Short, the borderline between fantasy and reality was dangerously blurred. The world of her imagination, like the world of the movies, was more real to her than the drab life of suburban poverty she had led on Salem Street. And the many and varied life stories she wove enabled her, with each retelling, to escape the bondage of her reality, to reenact her own life as a movie in which she was cast as the central character, the tragic heroine. But Elizabeth’s stories also made it much more difficult for investigators to separate fact from fiction when attempting to solve the riddle of the real-life, brutal drama in which she did, in the end, play her final role.
After Matt’s death, Beth went through a string of flings and whirlwind romances. There was Tim Mehringer, a handsome married flier based at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station; Lieutenant Stephen Wolak, an Air Force officer based out in El Paso; another military acquaintance, Paul Rosie. Most significantly, there was Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Gordon Fickling, a former boyfriend with whom Elizabeth took up again after Matt’s death. Gordon Fickling was thirty-one years old and came from Charlottesville, North Carolina. He had served as a B-24 pilot in the U.S. Air Corps during the war. After hostilities ended, he became a pilot on a commercial line flying between North Carolina and Chicago. Elizabeth followed Fickling to Indianapolis in June 1946, and on to Long Beach after a brief stay in Chicago in July. At Long Beach, she signed into the Washington Hotel on Linden Avenue, and afterward at a furnished apartment provided by Fickling. It was at Long Beach that Elizabeth acquired her racy reputation for frequenting a drugstore soda fountain in lacy black clothes. The druggist later told police that she was seen with an Army lieutenant who would get “very jealous” when she turned her attention to a variety of sailors. Likewise, the manager of the Washington Hotel recalled Elizabeth being visited there several times by an Army man, and once by a sailor. The Army man, he said, “seemed jealous of the sailor.” Perhaps it was the presence of so many rivals that caused Fickling to break off the relationship. He was later to state that he knew Elizabeth had other dates while she was seeing him, and the thought of her kissing other men made him “crazy.”
Whatever the reason, by the end of August 1946, the affair with Fickling was over. “Honey,” he wrote in a telegram, “I’m sorry about that wire you sent. Couldn’t raise the money on that short notice. Glad you managed OK. I want that picture of you very much.” Again, presumably in response to another request for funds, he wrote: “Darling, your request is impossible at this time, other obligations have me against a wall. Try to make other arrangements. I’m concerned and sorry, believe me.” Elizabeth and Gordon Fickling continued to correspond. He still cared about her and sent money when he could, wiring her the $100 that she asked for in December, when she was staying with the Frenches in San Diego. But now he was keeping her at bay, concentrating on establishing a new life for himself, in what would prove to be a successful career as a commercial flier. Elizabeth realized that the relationship was over. At first she protested: if everyone waited to have everything all smooth before they decided to marry, none of them would ever be together. Then she seemed to accept the position. “I’ll never regret coming west to see you,” she wrote. “You didn’t take me in your arms and keep me there. However, it was nice as long as it lasted. You had a great deal on your mind, and I was just an extra burden.” The final letter Fickling received from Elizabeth was sent from San Diego on January 8, 1947, the day before she left for Los Angeles with Red. In it, she told him not to write her anymore in San Diego, as she was going to Chicago to work as a model for someone called “Jack.” It was the last Fickling heard from her.
Before the discovery of Elizabeth’s trunk, Jimmy Richardson had lamented the lack of printable pictures in the Dahlia case. Afterward, it became one of the best-illustrated in Los Angeles newspaper history. But the newspapermen soon exhausted the ephemera to be extracted from a brief life lived out of suitcases, borrowed carfare, and cheap motels. In any event, the case was moving on. Phoebe Short had just alighted from a plane in Los Angeles. The inquest into her daughter’s death was about to begin.
5
DIAL M FOR MURDER
At 10:30 on the morning of Wednesday, January 22, 1947, the coroners’ court in the old Los Angeles Hall of Justice was packed to overflowing. Coroner Ben H. Brown cast a displeased look at the crowd. At fifty-five years old, Brown had reigned over the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office for just two years. In that brief space of time he had come into contact with more movie stars than the average person would in his entire life. Unfortunately, if a movie star was in the presence of Coroner Brown, that star was most likely dead. But no dead movie star in Brown’s tenure to date had attracted one sliver of the attention that was being accorded to his latest object of inquiry: Elizabeth Short, the unknown dead girl from Massachusetts.
First on the witness stand was Phoebe Mae Short. Soberly dressed in gray with a black velvet pillbox hat, the mother related how her daughter had left her house in April of the previous year. That, as far as she knew, Elizabeth had worked as a waitress and at the San Diego naval hospital. And of how she came to hear about her daughter’s death.
The mother’s testimony was deadpan, but the scene at the county morgue the previous day had been anything but deadpan. Mrs. Short, overcome with emotion, had for a long while refused to look at the body that lay draped in a white sheet on the mortuary slab, behind a pane of glass. “I want to remember Elizabeth as she was,” she said. With Phoebe was Elizabeth’s eldest sister Virginia, now married to a professor at Berkeley. Finally, the mother had forced herself to ask the morgue attendants to remove the sheet from the body. She stared for a moment, then closed her eyes. “It looks like my daughter. But I can’t be sure.” Ginnie, too, wasn’t sure. Finally, Phoebe ventured the fact that her daughter had a large mole on her left shoulder. Did this corpse have such a mole? The answer was the affirmative. “Then that,” said Phoebe, “is my daughter.”
By the time of the inquest the next day, Phoebe seemed calm. The quiet monotone in which her evidence was given was broken only when the coroner asked if she knew where her daughter had died. “She was murdered here in Los Angeles!” the mother cried, jumping from her seat.
Phoebe Short was followed on the witness stand by Detective Lieutenant Jesse W. Haskins of the LAPD. He had been one of the first police officers at the crime scene on Thirty-ninth and Norton. Haskins said that the body was found on the west side of Norton, in a vacant lot covered with weeds, grass, and rose clippings. There was a fireplug in the center of the block, about equidistant from the intersections with Thirty-ninth and Coliseum. The body was about fifty-four feet north of the plug, toward Coliseum. It had been lying to the north faceup, severed in two, the legs spread. There was a tire track up against the curbing, and what appeared to be the imprint of a bloody heel in the tire mark.* There was one bloodstain on the sidewalk. There was also an empty cement sack lying nearby. It had what looked like a spot of blood on it. The body was clean, and appeared to have been washed. Evidently it had been transported to the scene from another location.
Haskins’s evidence was followed by that of Robert Manley, LAPD Homicide Detective Lieutenant Harry Hansen, and the autopsy surgeon Frederick Newbarr. Manley repeated the story he had already told the police and Aggie Underwood. Detective Hansen was tight-lipped. Giving nothing away, he stated only that the LAPD was currently following all leads in the case and as yet had nothing to report. Dr. Newbarr ascended the stand to read his autopsy report. However, as he reached the most crucial point—the details of the mutilations—he
was cut short by Coroner Brown.
“Doctor, I don’t believe it will be necessary for you to read all of this,” the coroner said hastily. “It is rather long, and I don’t think we need to read all of it here. The essential findings with regard to cause of death have already been expressed; and that is the concussion of the brain and the laceration of the face.”
The verdict of the coroner’s jury, after the forty-five-minute hearing, was curt and inevitable. Elizabeth Short had died from hemorrhage and shock due to concussion of the brain and lacerations of the face. The injuries had been inflicted on the deceased by some person or persons unknown, at an unknown location. The finding was homicide, with a recommendation that every effort be made to apprehend the person or persons responsible.
Back at the Examiner offices, Jimmy Richardson was blowing a fuse. His story was in danger of fizzling out. Immediately after the discovery of the body, detectives had cast a dragnet over the Leimert Park area in search of clues. The house-to-house hunt had turned up three people who reported that they had seen a Chevrolet coupe in the early morning hours, near the spot where the body was found. Another witness, Bob Meyer, who lived a block over, told police he saw what he believed to be an older model, 1936 or 1937, dark Ford sedan stop for about four minutes close by the spot where the body was found, sometime between 6:30 and 7:00 on the morning of January 15. Meyer had not been able to see the driver’s face, as it was blocked by tall weeds. None of these sightings had led to any concrete leads.