by Piu Eatwell
Fred Witman’s explosive evidence before the DA investigators made a grand jury inquiry into the Dahlia case inevitable. Within a few weeks, even the acting police chief, William Worton, was supporting the lobby for an inquiry into the case. The retired Marine general, who seemed finally to have gotten wind of something afoot, called a press conference to report on his first three months in office in October. “I frankly believe that the Dahlia investigation was not properly handled,” the chief said. “However, I wish to assure you that this case is now being properly studied and should shortly be ready for investigation by the grand jury.” There had, the chief admitted with masterful understatement, been some “bungling” in the investigation, the result of “petty chiseling within the department.”
It was an unprecedented situation. A police chief was personally handing over, for the grand jury’s independent investigation, one of his department’s own cases. A stronger vote of no-confidence would be hard to imagine. In fact, the new chief was all too ready to admit, “I can’t trust a soul in the whole department.”‡‡
What Chief Worton did not reveal at the press conference was that the decision to refer the Dahlia case to the grand jury had been the result of a secret meeting between himself and the DA’s office, a meeting called after Fred Witman gave his evidence to Veitch and Stanley. At that meeting, it was decided that the DA would effectively re-investigate the case on behalf of the grand jury, concentrating on a short list of prime suspects drawn from an examination of the police files. At the top of the suspect list were Leslie Dillon and Mark Hansen. The stage was therefore finally set for the Dahlia investigation to be taken over by nineteen good men, on behalf of the citizens of the City of Angels.
For as long as anyone could remember, the Los Angeles County grand jury had sat in Room 548 on the fifth floor of the old downtown Hall of Justice. It was here that, back in 1937, indictments had been handed down on Earl Kynette and his LAPD cronies for the bombing of Harry Raymond in the Clifford Clinton affair. And it was also here that, earlier in the summer of ’49, similar indictments had been handed down against Chief Clemence Horrall, his assistant Joe Reed, and Sergeant Elmer V. Jackson, for their roles in the Brenda Allen scandal.
The official purpose of the Los Angeles grand jury, chosen annually from the ranks of the good citizens of the City of Angels, was to investigate the conduct of public authorities. To this end, every year each of sixty-five superior court judges would select two prospective jurors. The original list of one hundred and thirty would then be winnowed down to thirty names. The thirty names would be placed in a wheel. Nineteen names would be withdrawn from the wheel. Each juror received two dollars a day, plus fifteen cents a mile one way from his home. The presiding judge of the Superior Court selected the grand jury foreman.
Most years, the denizens of City Hall and the upper echelons of law enforcement would manage to rig the grand jury with compliant jurors. Jurors who obediently followed the opinions of the investigators appointed by the district attorney’s office, who by their reports, effectively controlled what the jury was allowed to see. But, every once in a while, there would be a jury that refused to toe the line, that rebelled from the control of its prosecutor-appointed investigators. A jury that became a real thorn in the side of the powers that be, probing into what was truly going on behind the revolving doors of City Hall, or in the closed investigation bureaus of the Halls of Justice. Such a grand jury would be termed a “runaway” jury. The 1949 grand jury was such a one.
The tone of the 1949 grand jury was set by a tough and distinguished foreman. Harry A. Lawson had been born in Nova Scotia. Later he had migrated to Idaho, where he had worked himself up from beat reporter on a Boise newspaper, through to city editor, and, finally, newspaper owner and publisher. But like so many others, Lawson soon felt the call of the West Coast. In 1931, he left the snowy peaks of Idaho for the Californian sun, with his wife in tow and $500 in his pocket. He settled northeast of Los Angeles, in the town of Eagle Rock—a cluster of houses at the foot of a red rock slashed by a jagged laceration that would, at certain times of the day, show the silhouette of an eagle in flight. It was only a stone’s throw from where Robert “Red” Manley was arrested by the cops. In this northeastern suburb of the City of Angels, Harry Lawson began a new life as publisher of the local newspaper, the Eagle Rock Sentinel. But politics and campaigning ran in Lawson’s blood: as newspaper owner and president of the Eagle Rock Chamber of Commerce, he was usually involved in some local crusade or another, cleaning up parts of town. Now in his late sixties, Harry was determined in his role as foreman of the 1949 grand jury to clean up the city as a whole. If that meant breaking up police-protected rackets such as those associated with Brenda Allen and Mickey Cohen, or indicting vice cops such as Elmer V. Jackson or even the likes of Thad or Finis Brown, so be it.
On October 18, 1949, at a closed session of the grand jury committee, Dr. Paul De River gave evidence on the Dahlia case, in secret, at Harry Lawson’s invitation. Lawson did not consult the DA’s office before inviting De River to attend the committee session, and the contents of the discussion were never divulged. It was an omission that would not be forgiven or forgotten by the DA’s office. Lawson’s secret session with the doctor gave a strong signal that this grand jury was prepared to take matters into its own hands. But even “runaway” grand juries determined to get to the truth, like this one, faced one big problem. They were dependent on the reports of the DA’s investigators. And the DA’s investigators, in their turn, were dependent on the primary police officers who were assigned to assist them on the case. The DA investigator allocated in this instance to assist the grand jury in its Dahlia investigation was a stolid, droopy-eyed prosecutor, Lieutenant Frank Jemison. Assigned to assist Jemison were an officer of the Homicide Division, Ed Barrett; an intelligence officer by the name of Sergeant Jack Smyre (apparently appointed “to investigate particularly the activities of psychiatrist Dr. Paul De River”); and Sergeant Finis Brown.
While the grand jury prepared to begin its investigation into the Dahlia case, Chief of Detectives Thad Brown sent one of his officers, Inspector Hugh Farnham of the Detective Bureau, on a secret mission.§§ This was to meet with Leslie Dillon and his ex-wife, Georgia, who were now back in Oklahoma. The purpose of the meeting was finally to eliminate Dillon as a suspect by establishing incontrovertibly that he was in San Francisco, as he claimed, on the night of the murder of Elizabeth Short.
When Hugh Farnham reported on his Oklahoma meeting with Dillon to Thad Brown, he wrote that he had trouble, at first, with Dillon’s attorney. “But I finally convinced him,” he continued, “that I was just as interested in clearing Dillon, if he was innocent, as he was.” But the October meeting in Oklahoma failed to provide the corroboration of Dillon’s alibi that Thad Brown was looking for. “Almost three years have passed, and their memory is pretty dim,” wrote Farnham of the Dillons. Leslie Dillon could not, Farnham said, remember working anywhere after he left his job as bellhop at the Devonshire Hotel in San Francisco, on January 8, 1947.¶¶ Farnham also attached, to his letter to Thad, a statement of what Mrs. Dillon had to say about her ex-husband’s whereabouts on the day.## “Nothing very concrete as you will notice, but has some possibilities,” he wrote. The secret meeting with Dillon in Oklahoma was not revealed to the grand jury.
On the same day that Thad Brown received Farnham’s letter confirming that Dillon could not establish his alibi in San Francisco at the time of the murder, Lieutenant Frank Jemison made a preliminary report to his bosses at the DA’s office. The report was based on the information given to him by Officers Finis Brown and Ed Barrett of Homicide. It was later read to the grand jury. The purpose of the report was manifestly obvious: to stave off any further inquiry into Leslie Dillon.
The report began by acknowledging that there were aspects of the Dahlia case that were problematic. There was controversy and uncertainty over the exact whereabouts of Leslie Dillon on the night of January 14/15, 1947
. Witnesses claimed to have seen Elizabeth Short in a drugged state at the Aster Motel on South Flower Street in January, and yet, although Elizabeth’s vital organs had been sent to the county chemist for analysis, they had apparently been thrown away in a laboratory cleanup, with no analysis having been done. Under Sergeant Brown’s helpful supervision, Lieutenant Jemison had listened to selected extracts of the tape-recorded conversations between Leslie Dillon and Dr. De River.*** Approximately half of what he heard was unintelligible. However, from what Jemison could make out from the little he could understand, there was no evidence that Dillon knew any “secret facts” relating to the murder. In particular, Jemison cited the following extract from the transcript of the recordings:
Dr. De River: What do you think the killer did with the hair he shaved off the private parts of the body of Elizabeth Short?
Dillon: I think the killer would probably have thrown that into a toilet and flushed it.
Dr. De River: What do you think a killer such as he was would do with the piece of flesh with the tattoo on it after he cut it off her thigh?
Dillon: Well, I think he would probably have thrown that down the toilet and flushed it.†††
Jemison continued to state that, in the opinion of the “present administrators of the police department,” there “was an error made on the part of the preceding administrators when they assigned the gangster squad and Dr. Paul De River as psychiatrist to investigate the Short murder. They appear to be of the opinion that the homicide division officers should have had control over it at all times.” There was, Jemison continued, evidence of “some stupidity and carelessness on the part of the more inexperienced officers who were working on the case,” but no indication of “payoff, misconduct, or concealment of facts on the part of any officers.” Jemison would, he continued, be available to present all material evidence from the files to the grand jury in November. However, Sergeant Finis Brown was “thoroughly familiar with their contents and could no doubt convey any desired information.” Finally, Jemison concluded, he and Officers Jack Smyre, Ed Barrett, and Finis Brown were of the opinion that there was “insufficient evidence” to date upon which “any suspect could now be brought to trial for the murder of Elizabeth Short.”
The obvious problem with Jemison’s report was that it was reliant on information provided by the very police officers—those of the Homicide Division—whose conduct in the case was being investigated by the grand jury. Would the 1949 grand jury be discouraged from taking the case further, as was clearly the intention? The LAPD had not reckoned on Harry Lawson and his colleagues. The jurors ignored Frank Jemison’s advice. They determined that they would carry on with the probe into Leslie Dillon, Mark Hansen, and the Aster Motel. They ordered Frank Jemison to go up to San Francisco in order to establish incontrovertibly where Leslie Dillon was on the night of January 14/15, 1947. And they determined to call up members of the police department to testify as to what had really happened in the Dahlia case.
* This was most likely the distinguished Judge Thomas P. White, presiding judge on the Albert Dyer case, appellate judge on the “Sleepy Lagoon” case, and a lifelong friend of Dr. De River and Aggie Underwood. (See page 86.)
† The transcript of the sworn evidence given by Witman to Veitch and Stanley of the Los Angeles DA’s office remained secret, and was not released until the 2000s.
‡ Leslie Dillon had allegedly worked for some weeks in a mortuary. (See page 113.)
§ See page 112.
¶ A copy of the sketch was admitted into evidence by Fred Witman and examined by Veitch and Stanley at the secret hearing. It appears to have subsequently disappeared.
# The findings of the LAPD’s forensic testing of the rooms at the Aster Motel are discussed in more detail on page 261 onwards.
** See page 113.
†† This was a generic serial number on all the Dahlia crime scene photographs: it gave number of photograph, date, and the initials of the photographer.
‡‡ The chief’s referral of the Dahlia case to independent investigation by the grand jury could only mean that he did not have confidence in his own officers to investigate it. It is possible that Worton saw evidence of an implacable standoff between the Gangster and Homicide details on the case, and was reluctant to enter the fray.
§§ Inspector Hugh Farnham was not infrequently entrusted by Thad Brown on sensitive missions. When the actress Jean Spangler “disappeared” in late 1949 in a possible mob-connected murder, Farnham was tasked with searching an area of Ferndell Park where the actress might have gone missing. Farnham was also called as a character witness by a police officer accused of mob connections in the convoluted “Seven Dwarves” affair, involving Mickey Cohen. When Detective Lieutenant William Harper was accused of accepting bribes by Worton’s new Intelligence Division in 1950, he chose Hugh Farnham, along with two other LAPD officers, to hear his disciplinary case. Farnham took the exams for LAPD police chief to replace Clemence Horrall in 1950, coming out among the top five candidates.
¶¶ Contrast with the evidence of Tommy Harlow and Mrs. Pearl McCromber, that Leslie Dillon came to Los Angeles sporadically by bus to work for Harlow in January 1947 (page 135).
##Georgia Dillon’s account as to Leslie Dillon’s whereabouts on the night of January 14, 1947—surely one of the most pertinent, since she was his wife at the time—has never been released.
*** The originals of these recordings have, apparently, disappeared. For further discussion of the disappearance of physical evidence, see the preface of this book.
††† The difficulty with this quoted “extract” is that the date of the recording is not given. If it was made when Dillon was wised up to the fact he was a suspect, he would obviously not be giving out knowledge of key facts at this stage. Contrast this innocuous “explanation” with the detailed explanation of the mutilations that Dr. De River recorded Dillon giving at the interviews in Banning, with JJ O’Mara listening in. (See page 102.)
17
THE GLASS ALIBI
On November 1, 1949, DA Investigator Frank Jemison went up to San Francisco on the grand jury’s instructions. His brief was to interview the witnesses who, according to the LAPD, provided alibis for Leslie Dillon. They were not a confidence-inspiring bunch.
Dillon himself had said, in the secret meeting in Oklahoma with Hugh Farnham, that he could not remember working anywhere after January 8, 1947, when he left his job as a bellhop at the Devonshire Hotel in San Francisco.* He had been fired from the Devonshire on this date, possibly on a theft or pandering charge.† At that point, Dillon said, he was planning to move to Los Angeles. He had sold the furniture in his San Francisco apartment to a couple by the name of Anderson. Mrs. Shirley Anderson, when questioned, thought—but was not certain—that she met Dillon in San Francisco on January 16. She came to view the furniture with her mother and stepfather the next day. A receipt for payment for the furniture in Dillon’s handwriting was dated January 21. The registration cards of the El Cortez Hotel in San Francisco showed that Dillon had registered there, with wife and child, on January 20. He had then moved his family to Los Angeles, where they stayed at his mother-in-law’s house on Normandie Avenue. He spent a brief spell in Santa Monica in March, where he burgled the safe of the Carmel Hotel. From then on he had done various jobs for Tommy Harlow, moving his family to the Aster Motel in March. In June he headed off to Oklahoma, where he was arrested for bootlegging. Finally, by the end of the year, he wound up in Florida.
The burning question, therefore, was: Where was Leslie Dillon between the dates of January 8, when he was sacked from the Devonshire Hotel, and January 16, when Shirley Anderson had seen him back at his apartment in San Francisco? The first alibi witness was Woodrow J. Wood, a bellhop described by the police as “hot.” Dillon, just as he had “borrowed” Jeff Connors’s name on occasion, had also been known to adopt the alias of “Woodrow,” presumably in honor of this friend. Wood originally told the police that after Dillon was s
acked from the Devonshire, he had gone to Los Angeles for about a week before he went to the El Cortez Hotel on January 20. This would have put Dillon squarely in Los Angeles during the period of the “missing week.” But when re-interviewed, Wood changed his story. Now he said that in fact Dillon had been in San Francisco after he left the Devonshire, and that he had seen him every day during this time. Phil Compoli, a jobber subsalesman and hotel manager, said that he had seen Dillon on the afternoon of January 15, 1947. Grant Robertson, a Mill Valley taxicab driver, and his wife recalled having dinner with the Dillons at Clifton’s Cafeteria on January 16 and stated that they had seen Leslie Dillon four or five times in the preceding week, on different days, Grant could not remember which. Dillon, Robertson recalled, drove a black Ford with purple-painted taillights.‡
In truth, there was no clear-cut evidence of Dillon’s whereabouts between January 8 (the day he was sacked from the Devonshire in San Francisco) and January 15 (the morning Elizabeth’s body was found in Leimert Park). The Andersons did not see him in his San Francisco apartment to view his furniture until January 16, and his friend Phil Compoli could only testify as to his presence there on the afternoon of January 15. It would have been perfectly possible, if Dillon had been in Los Angeles on the night of January 14, to complete the six-and-a-half-hour drive up to San Francisco the following morning, in time to meet Compoli. All the Robertsons could say was that they had seen Dillon in San Francisco, on four or five unspecified occasions, in the week prior to January 16. In fact, the only evidence that Dillon had been consistently in San Francisco from January 8 to 15 was that of the “hot” bellhop Woody, who had changed his story. Most perturbingly, the person who would have been expected to have given the soundest alibi—Dillon’s own wife, Georgia—could, according to Hugh Farnham’s letter to Thad Brown, give no clear account of his whereabouts. There was no doubt, on the other hand, that Dillon was in Los Angeles at the time of the anonymous telephone call to Jimmy Richardson (January 23) and the posting of the package containing the Dahlia’s belongings from a Los Angeles downtown mailbox (January 24).