by Piu Eatwell
“I cut some of her goddam hair off and shoved it up her fucking pussy.”‡
This was not exactly, but very, very close, to one of the “secret” facts that had been deliberately withheld from public disclosure. How could Christine, whose recollection of other details of the crime did not correlate with the facts, know this key piece of information? The answer was a black eye to the LAPD. After a police interrogation, Christine broke down. The “secret clue” had been given to her by a girlfriend who had once worked for the Los Angeles police. The woman had told Christine she learned the clue from “a police lieutenant called Rudy.”§
Christine Reynolds had been exposed as a phony, as were the other handful of women who stepped forward to “confess” to the murder. But the papers were reluctant to give up on what was described as the “queer” angle in the case. Examiner reporter Sid Hughes was especially fired up to catch a killer lesbian. “Sid Hughes wouldn’t give up on the lesbian angle. He checked it out pretty thoroughly,” said Daily News journalist Gerry Ramlow.
The reasons for the postwar reading public’s obsession with the Sapphic angle to the Dahlia case were rooted in Tinseltown’s deeply ambivalent portrayal of homosexuality. 1940s Hollywood was built on the twin bedrocks of Christianity and Judaism: religions innately antagonistic to same-sex love. The restrictive censorship of the Hays Code,¶ supported by bodies such as the National League of Decency, forbade all reference to the love that “dare not speak its name.” Stars with leanings in the “wrong” direction were forced to conceal their true inclinations by “lavender” marriages, often with a homosexual partner of the opposite sex. Homosexuals, like Communists, Jews, Mexicans, and other nonwhite “foreigners,” embodied all that was feared and dreaded in the “Other,” defined as anything “un-American.” They fueled the hysterical fears of a “fifth-column” conspiracy that were to culminate in the witch hunts of the McCarthy years.
But if male homosexuality was condemned, female homosexuality was beyond the pale. Most American women barely knew what a lesbian was. Gay females were, in the public image, loathsome creatures. They were either seen as hard, sophisticated older women who preyed upon younger victims, or sad, misplaced would-be men who dressed in mannish clothing. These images corresponded to the then-current theory that lesbians were men trapped in women’s bodies. In fiction and medical literature, they were portrayed as neurotic, tragic, or absurd, inevitably driven to debility or suicide. It would have been impossible for an actress who openly loved women to become a star. Female stars who played in the “twilight zone”—Greta Garbo, Tallulah Bankhead, Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland—were all forced to make a front of social conformity, many ending up living alone, alcoholic wrecks, or in dead marriages. And yet, in many cases—notably those of Hepburn, Garbo, and Dietrich—it was the very aloofness and sexual ambivalence of the “Gillette blades”# that was the basis of their allure. As with so much else, Hollywood played a double standard with this particular manifestation of the “Other.” While overtly disapproving of the members of its “sewing circle,” the film industry nevertheless exploited them for their ability to titillate the moviegoing masses with voyeuristic glimpses of a deep and complex female sexuality, liberated from the restrictions of convention. So stars such as Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo were permitted to appear in androgynous roles, cross-dress, and even—occasionally—kiss another woman on-screen. It was a hypocritical double standard but it sold pictures and it made the “Gillette blades” megastars.
Not to be outdone by Sid Hughes at the Examiner, the Herald-Express also fully explored the female killer theory. It ran side-by-side photo stories on three infamous homicidal females who had been busted in Los Angeles. Louise Peete, one of only four women executed by the state of California, was a serial killer who had been apprehended when a cop noticed that a flower bed in her blossoming garden looked unnaturally new and bare. It turned out to contain her latest victim. Winnie Ruth Judd had committed two murders in Arizona. She was busted in L.A. when a trunk containing the dismembered remains of her victims began to leak fluids in the baggage claim section of a local train station. Clara Phillips (a.k.a. “Tiger Girl”) had murdered a woman whom she suspected was a rival for her husband’s affections. She had struck her repeatedly with a hammer, then rolled a fifty-pound boulder on top of the corpse.
Aggie Underwood even hauled out Alice La Vere, a “noted consulting psychologist” and expert-for-hire, to compile a profile of the lesbian Dahlia killer. La Vere opined that the killer was “a sinister Lucrezia Borgia—a butcher woman whose crime dwarfs any in the modern crime annals.” According to La Vere, murders left behind them “a trail of fingerprints, bits of skin and hair.” The Black Dahlia killer left the most telltale clue of all—the murder pattern of a “degenerate, vicious feminine mind.” There were three types of killer, La Vere continued, who might have perpetrated such a crime: a jealous, rejected female; an abnormal, “Well of Loneliness” type whose “twisted mind” combined “the most terrifying criminal tendencies of the warped male and female minds”; and a “psychopathic male” caught between impotency and confused sex tendencies. La Vere urged the police in particular to look for a woman older than the Dahlia. This woman, who either inspired the crime or actually committed it, need not be a female of great strength. Extreme emotion or high mental tension, La Vere noted, can give superhuman strength.
The Hollywood director and screenwriter Ben Hecht also wrote an article for the Herald-Express positing a lesbian killer. According to Hecht, the female psychopath in question was a “hyperthyroidic type,” with an “over-developed thymus gland.” The faulty grammar of the killer’s letters, such as the statement “Had my fun at the police,” also (according to Hecht) suggested a female killer. It was a “female malapropism, and an infantile one. . . . Little girls often say, ‘Give it at me!’ ” Hecht proceeded to give a description of the female killer straight out of the phantasmagoria of the postwar horror movie, describing her as gaunt, with a “rudimentary bosom.” Her face was long and narrow; she had a receding chin; her fingers were long; she had a “European” accent. But then, mysteriously, Hecht finished his article with a cryptic about-turn. The killer, he said, was not a woman, but a man. He knew the killer’s name and the reasons for the crime, but was unable to offer “another version.” Whether Hecht really knew anything about the killer, or was simply playing some obscure prank, remained a mystery.
The LAPD scoped out the lesbian angle, too. Sergeant Peter Vetcher, an Army officer based in Washington who had had a one-night stand with Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles in the fall of 1946, had told the police that Elizabeth had told him she was “going with a man whom she did not like very much,” but that “she did not want to hurt his feelings by stopping going with him.” Vetcher also told the cops that, while the pair had made love several times that night, “at no time was she in a passionate mood.” The natural conclusion he came to from her sexual indifference to him was that she was likely a lesbian. As further evidence of Sapphic leanings, Vetcher told police that Elizabeth had told him she had at one time frequently visited a wealthy woman who resided in Hollywood or Los Angeles, and that this woman had made “improper advances to her,” which she had resisted.
Police reports hinted darkly at the involvement in the murder of a “queer woman surgeon in the Valley.” Even more suspect, this queer woman surgeon was Chinese. “Madam Chang,” wrote one report, “was a prominent queer” of San Francisco who “spent considerable time partying in Hollywood.” She entertained pilots and fliers in the U.S. Air Force en route to the Pacific field of operations during the war. Elizabeth, the reports noted, had been engaged to a Flying Tiger (Matt Gordon), and therefore could have known Madam Chang. The police reports did not disclose further details or information about the sinister “queer female surgeon.” Her true story was to be uncovered many years later. It was more incredible than anything a Hearst reporter could dream up, but
it had nothing to do with the Black Dahlia.**
Aggie Underwood probably knew full well that the speculations on lesbian involvement in the Dahlia murder were a red herring, but she was happy to let them run. Officially, Aggie had been booted off the Dahlia case. But secretly, she continued to investigate it. Her investigations took several years to come to fruition, but they were to lead finally to the truth.
Moving on from the “queer woman surgeon in the Valley” theory, the LAPD checked out another likely subject. This one was an Oklahoma cowboy with sinister Communist connections. Woody Guthrie, the Okie hillbilly, was at this point a well-known albeit controversial musician living on Mermaid Avenue in Brooklyn with his second wife, Marjorie, and their children. Unknown at the time was that he was suffering from undiagnosed and untreated Huntington’s disease.†† During a separation from Marjorie in 1948, Guthrie wrote a number of rambling letters to Mary Ruth Crissman, the twenty-eight-year-old sister of a friend of his, who lived in Northern California. There were as many as twelve letters, typed on foolscap legal pad, with handwritten notes in the margins. Woody wrote in forensically technical detail about how he would make passionate love to Mary Ruth. He stuffed into the envelopes pages from New York tabloids with lurid red circles around stories of grisly murders. The packets frightened Mary Ruth. She showed them to her sister, who telephoned the police. A deputy district attorney visited the Crissman sisters to warn them about Guthrie. They were not to be alone with him under any circumstances. A family friend who worked for the Los Angeles police dropped by with grisly pictures of the disemboweled Elizabeth Short. They wanted to question Guthrie about the murder. “That was the kind of thing this man would be capable of,” the officer told Mary Ruth.
In the end, the LAPD eliminated Woody Guthrie as a candidate for Elizabeth’s murder. The Dust Bowl troubadour with sinister pro-labor ties was the perfect suspect, save for one problem; he was not in Los Angeles at the time of the murder. Guthrie was indicted by the New York City authorities for sending obscene items in the mail. Through the efforts of his attorney, he got off with a minor sentence.
In addition to chasing unlikely suspects, the LAPD also investigated a number of alleged “sightings” of Elizabeth during the missing week. None of them could be confirmed.
Mrs. Christina Salisbury was a self-proclaimed princess of the Cherokee Indian tribe, who had played several seasons at the Ziegfeld Follies as “Princess Whitewing.” She claimed to have seen Beth on the night of January 10 at the Tabu Club on the Sunset Strip. Beth was, according to Princess Whitewing, in the company of two women, a blonde and a brunette.
Mr. and Mrs. Johnson owned the Hirsch Apartments on East Washington Boulevard. They claimed that a girl matching Elizabeth’s description checked into the apartments on Sunday, January 12, in the company of a man. They identified him as a man in a photograph found in Beth’s trunk. He was of medium height and complexion and refused to sign the register. He told Mr. Johnson to just put down “Barnes and wife.” He said the couple were moving out of Hollywood. They did not see the girl again. The man came back Wednesday. Mr. Johnson said, “We thought you might be dead.” He got very excited and left. But the clothes Mrs. Johnson described the woman as wearing—beige and pink slacks, a full-length black coat, white blouse, and white bandanna over her head—did not match the outfit Elizabeth was wearing when she left Red. She had been wearing a black collarless suit, fluffy white blouse, and beige coat. A fingerprint check in the room subsequently satisfied the police that it was a case of mistaken identity.
Buddy LaGore, a bartender at the Four Star Grill on Hollywood Boulevard, claimed to have known Elizabeth and to have seen her in the company of two women on the night of January 10. “When she came in that last time she looked as if she’d slept in her clothes for days. The sheer black dress was stained and crumpled. I’d seen her many times before and always she wore the best nylons. But this time she had no stockings on.” He added that her hair was “straggly” and some lipstick had been smeared on “hit-or-miss. . . . The powder was caked on her face.” The other thing that Buddy noticed was that she “was cowed instead of being gay and excited, the way I’d seen her before.”
A policewoman named Myrl McBride stated that on the night of Tuesday, January 14—the night before Elizabeth’s body was found in Leimert Park—a girl came up to her on Main Street. The girl was crying. She said to the policewoman, “Someone wants to kill me.” She then told of her ex-Marine boyfriend meeting her in a bar and “threatening to kill me if he found me with another man.” McBride said she later saw the girl reenter the bar and emerge with two men and another woman. She had told the policewoman she was to meet her parents at the bus station later. But once she was shown the murdered girl’s photograph, McBride was said to be less certain about the identification.
None of the “sightings” of Elizabeth in the week between January 9 and 15 were confirmed. The fact that her baggage—which had been checked in at the downtown Greyhound bus station—had never been reclaimed was significant. The cops asked Elizabeth’s girlfriend, Ann Toth, if she was the type to borrow someone else’s clothes, or spend four or five days in the same white blouse.
“No, she wasn’t. She was the type that didn’t want anybody to touch their clothes and she didn’t want to touch theirs. She washed everything. She was a very meticulous person,” said Toth.‡‡
Elizabeth’s friends all agreed that she was particularly fastidious about her makeup and dress. She was certainly not the type of girl to have voluntarily spent a week without changing even her underwear. The overwhelming probability was that she had been trapped and tortured in the week before her death, the week in which she had gone missing.§§ If any of the so-called “sightings” of her during the missing week was accurate, she must have somehow escaped her captor or captors, albeit for a short time. But who had trapped Elizabeth during that week? And where?
Somehow, the police in the Dahlia investigation always seemed to be one step behind the newspapers. The Hearst reporters had big expense accounts. They could pay to shut witnesses up until the papers had finished with them. All the major advances in the early stages of the case—the artist’s sketch of Elizabeth, the identification of the victim from Soundphoto copies of her fingerprints, finding Red, the first contact with the girl’s mother, locating the Frenches—were down to Jimmy’s or Aggie’s men, and not Captain Donahoe’s. The police were beginning to look like a joke. To the public they were the cliché of Keystone Cops, stumbling around a succession of off-the-wall angles to the case. “Dahlia Case ‘Idiot’s Delight’: More ‘Confessions’ and ‘Letters,’ ” scoffed a banner headline in Aggie’s Herald-Express. Captain Donahoe did not do the police department any favors when, in support of the “lesbian angle,” he reasoned that Elizabeth must have stayed at a woman’s house in order to borrow “a make-up kit.”¶¶ He drew even greater derision when he theorized that a woman might more likely have cut the body in half, for the reason that she would not be able to carry the entire 123-pound corpse. In a phone call to the FBI in February, Jimmy Richardson warned that there were rumbles of police incompetence in the Dahlia case. The Police Commission had asked the LAPD chief, Clemence Horrall, for a full report. There were questions about whether the local police department was up to handling the case, or whether the FBI should step in to clean up the mess.
Everybody was putting pressure on the LAPD. In particular, the homicide detectives leading the Dahlia investigation—Lieutenant Harry Hansen## and Sergeant Finis Brown—were in the hot seat. Aggie’s boys called the homicide cops the “egostupes,” a portmanteau term intended to convey a combination of stupidity, arrogance, and ego. But Lieutenant Harry Hansen was not stupid. Admittedly, he had a penchant for pin-striped suits, loud ties, and snazzy watchbands. Tall, red-haired, and balding, his basset-hound face was long and morose, with Mickey Mouse ears and sleepy eyes. His fedora was glued to his head, earning him the moniker Harry “the Hat.” But Harry had served more than twen
ty years with the Los Angeles Police Department. Originally from Salt Lake City, his parents were Mormons who later moved to Los Angeles. Harry graduated from Manual Arts High School and joined the LAPD in 1926. There, he graduated from patrolman through the Records Bureau, Robbery, Burglary, and, finally, Homicide. With his regular partner Jack McCreadie, he had been responsible for bringing to justice—and the gas chamber—a host of vicious killers. They included such lowlifes as Mrs. Peete of the infamously denuded flower bed, and William Edward Hickman, a child murderer whom Harry had identified from a single fingerprint on the rearview mirror of his Chrysler roadster. Everybody respected Harry “the Hat.”
But there was another side to “the Hat,” which fewer people saw. It was recalled by Harry Watson,*** a well-known photographer for the Daily News. Watson had been summoned one night to the Hall of Justice, to cover a story in which a suspected child molester would be available for photographs. As he entered the conference room in which the prisoner was being held, he saw a man sitting at the table, head in his hands, repeating over and over, “I know my rights, I know my rights.” According to Watson, Leutenant Hansen reached out to the man and punched him, knocking him to the floor. He then pushed him back into his seat, where the prisoner sat while the photographers busily snapped pictures of him, the blood dribbling from his chin. Back at the newsroom, the photographers retouched the pictures to erase the blood. On another occasion, Hansen bragged to Watson about how he obtained what he called “Third Street Bridge confessions.” If a suspect refused to cooperate with the cops, he would be taken to Third Street Bridge and dangled over the side. If no confession was forthcoming, he would be dropped onto the concrete below.