by Piu Eatwell
Jimmy needed more headlines, and he needed them fast. The case had dwindled to a few paragraphs and was about to fade out.
Then, on the morning of January 23, the phone rang, and Jimmy took the call that he would remember for the rest of his life.
“Is this the city editor?” asked a sly, soft voice.
“Yes.”
“What is your name, please?”
“Richardson.”
“Well, Mr. Richardson, I must congratulate you on what the Examiner has done in the Black Dahlia case.”
“Thank you.” Jimmy was wondering what the hell this was about. There was a slight pause.
“You seem to have run out of material,” the voice continued.
“That’s right.”
There was a soft laugh. “Maybe I can be of some assistance.”
Something in the way this was said sent a shiver down Jimmy’s spine.
“We need it.” Jimmy forced the wisecrack. Again, that sly, soft laugh.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” the voice said. “I’ll send you some of the things she had with her when she, shall we say, disappeared?”
Richardson grabbed a sheet of paper and scrawled on it, Trace this call.
“What kind of things?” He tossed the piece of paper to his assistant, who was hunched over his typewriter punching at the keys with the first finger of each hand. The assistant read the note and immediately started to jiggle the receiver arm on his telephone to get the attention of Mae Northern, the switchboard girl.
“Oh, say her address book and her birth certificate and a few other things she had in her handbag.”
“When will I get them?” Through the cigarette smoke and the chaos of messenger boys passing in and out of the office swing doors, Jimmy could just see Mae in the distance. She had dialed a number and was beginning to talk into her mouthpiece.
“Oh, within the next day or so. See how far you can get with them. And now I must say goodbye. You may be trying to trace this call.”
“Wait a minute—” But the line clicked. The phone went dead.
“What was it?” Jimmy’s assistant was falling out of his chair, wide-eyed.
Jimmy lit a cigarette. “I think I may have been talking to the killer of the Dahlia.”
Two days later, he knew he had.
“I have just had a call from the postal inspector’s office,” Harry Morgan, the night city editor, told Jimmy. “They have intercepted a parcel addressed to ‘The Los Angeles Examiner and other newspapers.’ Whoever sent it used lettering clipped from newspapers and pasted on to form the words. The inspectors have decided to open it in the presence of representatives from all the papers.”
“Goddam him anyway.” Jimmy felt the blood thumping in his head. He needed a stiff whiskey. But he had dried out years ago, so he lit a Lucky from the butt of the one that had preceded it instead.
“What are you talking about?” Harry was nonplussed.
Jimmy sighed smoke. “I’ve been expecting that parcel, Harry. He told me he would send it to me. Why the hell did he let the others in on it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jim.”
So Jimmy told him.
“I’ll join you, goddam him anyway,” Harry said, when he heard the story. “I don’t blame you. I’ve sent a crew to the post office and I’ll let you know as soon as I hear.”
The parcel was opened at the metropolitan downtown post office in the presence of the Los Angeles postal inspectors, Sergeants Brown and Cummings of LAPD Homicide, and Sergeant Wheeler of the LAPD fingerprint unit. There were also representatives of the Examiner, the Herald-Express, the Times, and the Daily News. The parcel had been posted from a downtown mailbox on January 24, the day after the call to Jimmy. It was partially opened. It contained Elizabeth’s birth certificate; her Social Security card; a claim check dated January 9, No. R06-97-79, for the two suitcases and hatbox that the Examiner had located at the Greyhound bus station; a telegram relating to the trunk that had been held by the Railway Express; various business cards; several photos of Elizabeth with men in uniform; and a brown leather notebook filled with names and phone numbers.
The package, as Harry Morgan had said, was addressed to the “Los Angeles Examiner and other Los Angeles papers.” Also on the envelope were the words, “Here is [sic] Dahlia’s belongings—Letter to follow.” The words of the address and message had been cut-and-pasted from newspaper lettering—mainly the Los Angeles Examiner, although the Herald-Express noted with satisfaction that the word “Dahlia’s” had been clipped from the red headline in its sunset edition of the previous Monday. The package was open at one end. The contents gave off a strong odor of gasoline.
There was no doubt in anybody’s mind that the sender of the package must have been the killer. The fact that the contents of the parcel had been soaked in gasoline meant that it was impossible to lift any fingerprints from them. One fingerprint was lifted from the exterior of the package, but this was of minimal value, as it was taken from the outside of the envelope, which had already been partially opened. It could have belonged to anybody, including the postal workers. The print quality was poor, with blurs and smudges, but it was still sent to the FBI to seek a possible match with the millions of impressions already filed in the federal agency’s massive fingerprint card index. The result came back negative.
The address book was limp and still damp from the gasoline. It was made of brown leather. Several pages had been cut out. The book contained names, addresses, and telephone numbers in no particular order, mostly in Elizabeth Short’s handwriting. There were three or four pages in a hand that was not Short’s. On the cover, in gold letters, was embossed the year “1937,” and a name. It was a name everybody in the post room knew.
The promised “Letter to follow” came within a day. It was postmarked January 26 at 6:30 p.m. It was a one-cent United States government postcard, addressed to the Los Angeles Examiner alone. The message was handwritten in crude printing.
“Here it is,” read the postcard. “Turning in Wed. Jan. 29. 10 a.m. Had my fun at [sic] police.” It was signed “Black Dahlia Avenger.”
The police noted that the printed postcard had been written with a “new ballpoint pen.” This could be a clue because in 1947 ballpoint pens were still something of a rarity. While they had been provided to officers during the war, commercial distribution to the general public only began at Christmas 1945, at the cost of $12.50 each.† In a public statement, Captain Donahoe of the LAPD said that he believed the postcard was “legitimate.” “The fact that the postcard was printed rather than lettered with words cut from newspapers also supports the theory that the killer intends to turn himself in to the police, and no longer needs to take pains to conceal his identity,” Donahoe said. The signature “Black Dahlia Avenger” implied that the killer “murdered Elizabeth Short for some avenged wrong, either real or imagined.”
All day on Wednesday, January 29, detectives were posted at the doors of the Examiner offices. Swarms of newspapermen from all the rival publications hung about expectantly.
They waited.
Finally, Richardson chased the reporters away and called Big Jack Donahoe.
“Get your boys away from here. Nobody is coming in with them standing there all eagle-eyed. If he comes, I promise I’ll call you.”
“All right, but understand I’m taking him out of there at once,” Jack told him. “No deal this time. You can’t hide out a murderer without getting yourself in real trouble. You know that, don’t you?”
But the murderer never showed.
The next day, January 30, another postcard arrived—this time with a message cut from news clippings like in the package. It read: “Have changed my mind, you would not give me a square deal. Dahlia killing was justified.” Shortly after, the police received an anonymous telephone call.
“Don’t try to find the Short girl’s murderer because you won’t,” the caller said, and hung up.
Th
e following weeks brought a flood of further letters and postcards addressed to the LAPD and various newspapers. The police believed that the first package containing Elizabeth’s belongings was almost certainly sent in by the killer. It was hard to see how anybody else could have gotten their hands on the contents of the girl’s purse. On the other hand, the dozens of letters that followed the package might have included some genuine correspondence, or they might have been hoaxes sprung by screwballs and the less scrupulous newspapermen. Nobody could be sure. The view of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office was that while the first package was genuine, “No subsequent mail or communications contained any material to indicate writers have any knowledge or connection with instant case.” Nevertheless, the police did retrieve and send to the FBI four latent prints that were lifted from a subsequent anonymous letter sent to the LAPD. The five fingerprints—the single, blurred print from the outside of the package and the four from the anonymous letter—were used for a routine cross-check of potential suspects. A positive match would be strong evidence of culpability; but a negative match would not rule out the suspect.
Attention now turned back to the grim relics that had been sent in the package. As with the trunk and suitcase, the newspapermen pawed their way through the contents of the Dahlia’s purse. Photographs of Elizabeth with yet more military personnel occupied as many column inches that week as the Communists taking over Poland. Elizabeth Short’s address book became a national obsession. Headlines screamed that Captain Donahoe, having seen the names listed in the book, had said, “This book is gonna be dynamite!” But the police refused to name the “big names” mentioned, for fear of “embarrassing” them. The newspapers speculated that the contacts listed in the address book might provide clues as to what had happened to Elizabeth during the mysterious “missing week,” a period that still remained unaccounted for. This was the interval between the evening of Thursday, January 9, when Red had dropped her off at the Biltmore Hotel, and the following Wednesday, when her body had been discovered. It was the crucial five days in the course of which things as yet unknown had happened, which were to turn Elizabeth Short, the Hollywood hopeful, into LAPD’s Case #30-1268: a butchered carcass tossed onto the grass beside a sidewalk. But there was one well-known name that the police were not able to withhold from the public. It had been plain to see for everybody when the package was opened. It became the next hot lead in the case. Everyone wanted to talk to the man whose name was embossed in gold on the cover of the Dahlia’s address book.
* According to an early police report filed in February 1947, photographs were taken of the tire tracks. These subsequently disappeared.
† Equivalent to $137 today.
6
HOUSE OF STRANGERS
The minute it was discovered that his name was on the cover of the Dahlia’s address book, Mark Hansen was in a jam. For the well-known but publicity-phobic Hollywood businessman, it was bad news. His name might as well have been up in lights over one of his many movie theaters or nightclubs.
At fifty-five years old, Mark Marinus Hansen had come a long way from Aalborg, Denmark, the town of his birth. The “city of smoking chimneys,” the Danes called it. Hansen was only nineteen years old when he stepped off the steamer from the Old Country and made his way to the town of Scobey, on the great plains of eastern Montana. Long designated the “Great American Desert,” this dauntingly arid land was the last frontier, stretching from the ninety-eighth meridian to the Rocky Mountains. In the first decade of the new century, Hansen had been one of thousands of pioneer homesteaders who flocked to the self-billed “Treasure State.” But the boom was so big that it had to go bust. Ten years later when it crashed and burned, Hansen was one of the thousands who “spit on the fire and whistled for the dog.” First he went to Williston, North Dakota, where he set up in the motion picture theater business. Then he moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and ran theaters there. Finally, he wound up in Tinseltown.
By 1947, Mark Hansen was a wealthy and powerful Hollywood mover and shaker. He owned over a dozen motion picture theaters, from Whittier to Walnut Park. He part-owned the Florentine Gardens, a Hollywood Boulevard nightclub where the famous compere Nils Thor Granlund, or “NTG”—a fellow Norseman—fronted the floor show with a parade of scantily clad females before a partygoing crowd that included the likes of an aging Errol Flynn. At $1.50 for dinner with girlie show included, the Florentine Gardens catered to the “meat ’n’ potatoes” crowd. The “caviar set” hung out at plush places such as the Clover Club, Trocadero, or Mocambo. But the Florentine Gardens was still a booming venue, whose only real competition was the rival Earl Carroll’s theater, west on Sunset Boulevard. It was the place where the budding actress and dancer Yvonne DeCarlo had first sashayed onto the stage with busty, heavily made-up blond striptease artist Lili St. Cyr. It was also the fateful spot where, in 1942, Norma Jean Mortensen and her first husband, Jim Dougherty, had said, “I do”—before Mortensen abandoned spouse and name to become Marilyn Monroe. Playing to a packed audience, the Florentine shows took place every night in a noisy, barnlike space littered with white tables and jammed with servicemen flush on post–Pearl Harbor pay.
Middle-aged and hawk-nosed, with a marked Scandinavian accent, Mark Hansen worked in a shadowy hinterland between legitimate business and the fringes of the Los Angeles underworld. Hidden within the Florentine Gardens was a secret gambling casino, operated by Jimmy “Little Giant” Utley, archrival of the gangster Mickey Cohen. Utley was one of the toughest hoods in Hollywood. A diminutive Irishman who had begun his racketeering career as a carnival hustler, he was involved in prostitution, bookmaking, drugs, a chain of illegal abortion clinics, and the lucrative bingo parlors at Venice Beach. The rumor was that one of Utley’s favorite turn-ons was to dress up as a medical assistant in his abortion clinics and play an active role “assisting” with the “broads” laid out on the table. The word on the street was that Mark Hansen, like Jimmy Utley, was in the abortion racket. Mickey Cohen—kingpin of the Los Angeles underworld—hated Utley for being a snitch and cop-lover who was in league with the LAPD. One day Cohen beat up Utley in the street when he saw him talking to a crooked cop.
Like the Hollywood studio moguls, Hansen and his floor show host NTG operated their own B-version of the casting couch. In addition to his many theaters, Hansen owned two “rooming houses,” where would-be Hollywood hopefuls were groomed for semi-nude careers both on and off the dance floor. NTG, Hansen’s chief recruiter, searched rodeo shows across the country for jailbait whom he would cajole into coming to L.A. to “dance” for the club.* NTG was a middle-aged Swede with a pale flabby face, bulbous nose, and penchant for shiny suits. Back in the 1920s and ’30s, he had defined the New York nightclub scene with big floor shows featuring girls in high heels and G-strings. He financed his New York nightclubs with Irish-American gangster money, specifically from Owen “Owney” Madden, the tough enforcer who was once described as the “preeminent mobster of the Prohibition era.” In Hollywood, NTG “discovered” stars such as Yvonne de Carlo, Betty Hutton, Jean Wallace, Marie “the Body” McDonald, and Lili St. Cyr. But more often than not, would-be movie stars “discovered” by NTG would end up as taxi dancers in one of Mark Hansen’s dime-a-time joints.
Mark Hansen kept a harem of his favorite girls in his house on Carlos Avenue, just behind the Florentine Gardens. It was an impressive building clad in ornamental stone veneer with a marble porch, shady veranda, and secret corners nestled in the shadow of palms and pepper trees. Hansen had separated from his wife, Ida, who occupied a mansion in the canyon with their daughters. NTG kept a long-suffering spouse, Rose Wenzel, up in New York. The pair lived bachelors’ lives. There were parties, hard liquor, hard drugs, and above all, an endless parade of girls. It was on October 1, 1946, when Elizabeth Short first pitched up at Carlos Avenue. Hansen noticed her immediately. She had a girlfriend with her: a big, heavyset Massachusetts girl with a weakness for liquor, called Marjorie Graham. Elizabeth, M
arjorie, and a blond nightclub singer had shacked up together in a seedy rooming house, the Hawthorne Hotel on North Orange Drive, after Gordon Fickling split from Elizabeth. Fellow hotel residents Harold Costa and Donald Leyes, who had dated Elizabeth’s girlfriends, recalled that “the kid was broke and hungry.” Others said that she was “a fun-loving, always in trouble beauty.” At the Hawthorne, according to a hotel clerk, Elizabeth was forever behind on her rent. When she was, a “short, dark man” of about thirty-five or forty years old paid it. The girls had spent a few days downtown at the Figueroa Hotel with Sid Zaid, a shady musician, before turning up on Mark’s doorstep on Carlos Avenue.
Several people noticed that to Mark Hansen, Elizabeth Short was different from the other girls who passed through the house on Carlos Avenue. Twenty-five-year-old Ann Toth also lived in a room at Mark’s home. Toth was Danish like Hansen, another Hollywood hopeful, and a bit player in the movies. She had a beautiful, pale, pointed face, arched eyebrows, and hair that she wore in curls pinned back with an Alice band. In 1947, although she didn’t know it at the time, Ann would reach the pinnacle of her career: an uncredited role playing a woman in the ladies’ toilet in Stuart Heisler’s movie Smash-Up.
“Mark really liked Beth, he had a yen for her,” Ann said. Mark, according to Ann, had tried to “make” Elizabeth a couple of times. To fend him off, she had claimed she was a virgin. But being forbidden fruit made Elizabeth all the more tantalizing. The middle-aged businessman seemed to desire her all the more: the fey, aloof Boston ingénue with pale skin, translucent eyes that seemed to change color in the light, and red mouth that slashed her face like a wound. Mrs. Ardis, a Hollywood seamstress who rented one of Mark’s apartments, recalled that Hansen invited her around for drinks, to “see the most beautiful creature in Hollywood.” The next day Mark came over to Ardis’s apartment with Elizabeth and ordered two dresses for the girl, which Ardis fitted and made. They were never delivered. Mark would not tolerate Beth’s endless stream of boyfriends. He banned them from the apartment.