by Piu Eatwell
In the meantime, I again looked at the list of suspects in Frank Jemison’s final report. From my exhaustive examination of the available case files, not one of them had the weight of circumstantial evidence against him that had been gathered against the suspects Leslie Dillon and Mark Hansen. The case against the Hollywood physician George Hodel was notably weak. Despite this, I was surprised to find that George Hodel’s son, Steve Hodel, an ex-member of the LAPD, had written many books claiming that his father was the Dahlia killer. Steve’s case for this contention was based on an accumulation of assertions and evidence, set out in his various books. To me, the two potentially most compelling facts were these:
• That two women had said George Hodel knew Elizabeth Short.
• A purported “confession” to the crime by George Hodel in a telephone conversation recorded when the DA’s office bugged the doctor’s house in the early part of 1950.
Ultimately, after careful consideration, I was not convinced that either of these amounted to a case that George Hodel had committed the Dahlia murder.
As to the first contention, it was true that two people did claim that George Hodel knew Elizabeth Short. However, there were many more witnesses who asserted that he did not; and, more tellingly, none of Elizabeth’s own close friends or acquaintances—Ann Toth, Marjorie Graham, Lynn Martin, or the victim’s own relatives—mentioned George Hodel, or indeed any doctor, among her numerous boyfriends. In any event, the mere fact that the doctor might have been acquainted with Short or in her circle did not amount to evidence that he killed her.†††
The second key item of evidence was a statement supposedly made by George Hodel during the secret recordings that DA Frank Jemison made in his home on Franklin Avenue in February/March 1950:
Supposin’ I did kill the Black Dahlia. They couldn’t prove it now. They can’t talk to my secretary any more because she’s dead.
According to George’s son Steve, this statement amounted to a “confession” by his father that he was the Dahlia killer. But there were difficulties with this contention. At the time of the recordings, George Hodel knew that he was being investigated on many fronts by both the DA and the FBI: tax evasion, performing illegal abortions, the possible murder of his secretary, alleged Communist sympathies. He was also in the newspaper headlines as the latest suspect in the Dahlia killing. It would therefore be natural for the doctor to allude to these various allegations in his telephone conversations. It was also obvious, from the transcripts of the recordings, that Hodel was perfectly aware that he was being bugged. The transcripts recorded him banging about the house, digging in the basement for bugs, and exhorting his housekeeper to search for the concealed device that he knew was hidden somewhere. It was highly improbable, therefore, that he would have made a telephone “confession” to a sensational murder which he knew would be relayed straight to the listening ears of Frank Jemison. In any case, if there had been any real likelihood that Dr. George Hodel had been the Dahlia killer, it beggared belief that his own attorney would have brought up that fact in court during the doctor’s trial for molesting his daughter Tamar.‡‡‡ Neeb, it was clear, alluded to Tamar’s accusation as a joke, an illustration of her allegedly hysterical behavior and outlandish accusations. It was a courtroom tactic that seriously backfired, because it turned the doctor into a suspect for a murder for which he had never even been considered until that date.
Most significantly of all, there was no circumstantial evidence that I could see to link George Hodel to the actual crime. The Hollywood physician did not have any connection to the body dump site in the working-class neighborhood of Leimert Park, over thirty minutes’ drive from his Hollywood home; nor to the spot on Crenshaw where Elizabeth’s shoes and purse were found. He had no known connection to the Aster Motel, nor was he referred to by any of the witnesses there. The doctor drove a black Packard car, not a Ford. Moreover, he had returned from China in September 1946 because he had suffered a serious heart attack. He had spent September and October in the hospital. It was highly implausible that he would have had the strength to carry out the Dahlia murder.
Dr. George Hodel was, in fact, never high on the Dahlia suspect list. As he himself said in one of the recorded telephone conversations, he was probably only being investigated because he had angered the DA’s office by bribing his way out of molestation charges. Two members of the DA’s office, the doctor claimed, had been demoted because of him. They wanted revenge. That, and the foolish cross-examination ploy of his attorney, put him on the Dahlia suspect list.
From my exhaustive examination of the case files available, the only suspect on the DA’s list who appeared to have any credible evidence against him, other than Leslie Dillon and Mark Hansen, was a somewhat mysterious Army sergeant called Carl Balsiger. Balsiger was a known boyfriend of Elizabeth Short and had visited Camarillo with her in December, before her trip to San Diego. He told police that he had stayed overnight with Short at a motel on Yucca Street on December 7 and then had put her on the bus to San Diego, where she was found at the Aztec Theatre the next night by Dorothy French. Balsiger claimed that nothing had happened between Elizabeth and himself during their motel tryst, but the police—not surprisingly—did not believe him. He had been stationed at Camp Cooke at the same time Short was there, although he denied knowing her at this point.§§§ Frank Jemison noted that Balsiger had a propensity for violence. He had attended the University of Kansas City at the same time as a beautiful socialite, Dorothy Welsh, who was brutally murdered in 1941.¶¶¶ In December 1949, Balsiger had married Jane Ellen Moyer, daughter of a prominent family in Lincoln, Nebraska and an assistant attorney general of Nebraska. He therefore had connections in high places. He would have been in a position to cover up a crime.###
But there were other, compelling facts that made it unlikely that Carl Balsiger had killed Elizabeth Short. He had agreed to and passed a lie detector test. More significantly, his name was included in Elizabeth’s address book that had been mailed by the killer to the Examiner newspaper, and from which several pages had been cut. If Balsiger was indeed the killer, why had his name not been removed from the book? Moreover, the extravagantly exhibitionist behavior of the Dahlia killer—the phone call to Jimmy Richardson, the sending in of the package with Elizabeth’s belongings—did not tally with the character or behavior of Carl Balsiger, who was extremely discreet and circumspect.
Elizabeth’s censored address book—which did not include an entry for Leslie Dillon, but did feature Mark Hansen’s name on the cover—was another puzzle. If Mark Hansen was mixed up with the Dahlia murder, as Dr. De River and the Gangster Squad believed, why did the killer incriminate him by sending a book with his name on the cover to the newspapers? The sending in of the address book implied that the killer was deliberately attempting to implicate, threaten, or bribe Mark Hansen. This fit with other events in the story. In particular, it fit with the mysterious calls to Mark Hansen’s home telephone on the Sunday before Short was murdered, and with Dr. De River’s claim that Leslie Dillon used his inside knowledge about Mark Hansen’s underworld activities and police connections as a means to threaten the homicide detectives that he would “tell all,” thus securing his release.
In fact, it was Dr. De River’s account of events—as relayed to Donald Freed in 1953—that finally tied the scattered pieces of the puzzle together. Mark Hansen had the motive to “get rid” of Elizabeth Short. He was obsessive and possessive of her and furiously jealous of her many boyfriends. He was fed up with her pestering him for money. According to Dr. De River, Mark Hansen said, “Someone get rid of that girl.” Like Henry II when he exclaimed, “Who will rid me of this pestilent priest?” he had not expected the response he got. Leslie Dillon, who was part of Hansen’s entourage of pimps, went out and, literally, performed an overkill. Hansen was then obliged to take action. Relying on his contacts with the Brown brothers, he got the matter hushed up. At least three distinguished Los Angeles crime reporters—Tony Valde
z of Fox News, Chuck Cheatham of the Long Beach Independent, and Nieson Himmel of the Los Angeles Times—all stated, on the record, that Finis Brown was a bagman for Mark Hansen.**** Harry Lawson and other members of the grand jury shared that suspicion. The Moormans were convinced Hansen was thick with Finis Brown and told Frank Jemison that Officers Case and Ahern had said to them that “their hands were tied.” Somehow, the cops always seemed to be at Mark Hansen’s beck and call. According to Finis Brown, Hansen was a police informant; when Jeff Connors split from his wife Grace Allen, policemen were there to escort her to Hansen’s home; on being shot by Lola Titus, he called immediately, “Get me Brown.” In what would appear to be yet another stunning conflict of interest, Walter Morgan of the DA’s office—one of the assistant DA investigators on the Dahlia case—was married to Tanya “Sugar” Geise, a featured dancer in the floor show at the Florentine Gardens and a close friend of Mark Hansen’s. Effectively, Morgan was investigating his wife’s friend and employer. Many years later, reporter Nieson Himmel gave an interview in which he summarized what had always been suspected among the newspapermen but never openly acknowledged. It was a story that came startlingly close to Dr. De River’s account as related to Donald Freed. “Mark Hansen was rumored to be Finis’s layoff man. The story goes that Finis was into Mark for $5,000. A lot of money in those days.†††† Mark Hansen had supposedly been after Elizabeth Short for months, wanting to get her into the sack. She wouldn’t come across. Mark became infuriated and killed her. Finis Brown supposedly covered up for Mark Hansen, cajoling his brother Thad Brown, Chief of Detectives, to protect Finis and destroy some evidence. Hansen then, supposedly, forgave Finis Brown’s debt.” Himmel went on to say that Aggie Underwood frequently hinted that she knew what had happened, although she never revealed it.
Mark Hansen had known ties with the Los Angeles underworld, in particular the notorious local gangster Jimmy Utley, who had police connections and who ran a secret gambling parlor in Hansen’s nightclub, the Florentine Gardens.‡‡‡‡ According to Ann Toth, Hansen was also linked to the illegal abortion racket. The Gangster Squad had investigated him in relation to a jewelry scam, but got nowhere once the information was passed up the line in the police department. Hansen lied to the DA investigators about receiving a telephone call from Elizabeth on the night of Thursday, January 9, the last night she was seen alive. He lied about the fact that he had told her she could stay at his house if she had no other place to go. In fact, there was evidence that Mark Hansen did see Elizabeth during the “missing week.” The Moormans, in what appeared to be an unshakable identification, said he was at the Aster Motel during the period that Elizabeth Short was seen there, drugged and naked on a bed in a cabin of the motel. But Mark Hansen, fanatically discreet about his private life, was not the type to leave a body sprawled beside a sidewalk in full view. Nor to send packages with his address book in them to the press. Mark Hansen, it seemed, was mixed up in the Dahlia murder, and the reason for the subsequent cover-up. But Mark Hansen did not commit the murder.
Alone of all the suspects in the Dahlia case, the weight of circumstantial evidence against Leslie Dillon as the actual killer was compelling. There was the testimony that Dillon, even when living in San Francisco, visited Los Angeles in January 1947, as stated by his former employer Jimmy Harlow and Mrs. Pearl McCromber; that the body dump site at Leimert Park was close to an address that he used when in Los Angeles, namely his wife’s aunt Nellie Hinshaw’s house on Crenshaw Boulevard; that he demonstrated thorough knowledge of the area when traveling to the scene with Officer JJ O’Mara; that Elizabeth’s shoes and empty purse were dumped in a trash can less than a couple of blocks from Dillon’s Crenshaw Boulevard address; that nobody could establish a firm alibi for Dillon on the night of the murder, not even his own wife; that he drove, according to three witnesses, an older-model dark Ford at the time of the murder, similar to the car seen by eyewitnesses at the murder scene; that he was identified as one of Elizabeth’s boyfriends by her close friend Ann Toth, Mark Hansen, and the actress Ardis Green; that he had been seen in Elizabeth’s company at the A1 Trailer Park by Jiggs Moore and the old man Carriere in autumn 1946, and at the Aster Motel in January 1947. Not to mention Dillon’s admitted interest in sexual sadism and the fact that both Dr. Paul De River and the LAPD asserted that he knew details about the mutilations that had been kept secret, including some that even the police did not know.
Then there was Leslie Dillon’s patently exhibitionist and narcissistic behavior, fitting the identified signature pathology of the Dahlia killer. In particular, he reached out to Dr. De River, offering to help track down the killer; he bizarrely turned himself in to the FBI in Florida; he chose to pack razors, a dog leash, and phenobarbital pills in his suitcase when he clearly suspected he was under surveillance for murder; and he perversely chose “Elizabeth” for his daughter’s name. The actions of the actual killer similarly reflected a deep narcissism and thirst for attention: the package sent to the press; the phone call to Jimmy Richardson (and indeed, the “soft, well-modulated voice” of Dillon would correspond with the “sly, soft voice” that Jimmy Richardson recalled); and the carving of the letter D, and possibly E, into the victim’s body, corresponding to D for “Dillon” and E for “Elizabeth.” There was, in addition, Dillon’s own explanation of the motive for the crime: that of rage at being “mocked” and “threatened exposure.” This tied in both with a personal sexual inferiority complex—explained by De River as the result of a physical abnormality—and details of what had been done to the victim. Not to mention the intimation of other sexual paraphilias evoked by the discovery of the man’s-size female shoes at Briargate Lodge in Banning—a hint of a possible transvestite fetishism that found an echo in the fact that on Elizabeth’s body, according to Aggie Underwood’s early newspaper reports, each large toenail had been painted red.
Then there was the fact of Dillon’s known connections to prostitution and the procurement of women, rackets in which Mark Hansen was involved. Dillon had told investigators that he liked to drug women by sprinkling powdered phenobarbital pills on their ice cream when on dates, to “knock them out”; some seven hundred phenobarbital pills had been found in his luggage when he was arrested. Witnesses had described seeing Elizabeth Short naked and apparently in a drugged state during the “missing week,” although—astonishingly—the LAPD claimed to have “lost” the contents of her stomach, which had supposedly been sent off for chemical analysis.§§§§ Most significant of all, Dillon had stated that the murder was committed in a motel. Not only this, he was proved to have stayed at the very motel in which five people testified that, on the morning of January 15, 1947, the most hideous carnage had been discovered.
The evidence of the bloody room at the Aster Motel was perhaps the most compelling of all. Five witnesses—the motel owners Mr. and Mrs. Hoffman, the guests Mr. and Mrs. Moorman, and the cleaning lady, Lila Durant—all testified to the discovery of a room covered in blood and feces at the Aster on the morning of January 15, 1947. The state of the room was so bad that Mr. Hoffman cleaned it out personally, although this was not his usual habit. The laundry bill at the Aster confirmed an unusually large washing load in the week of January 15. And yet, the LAPD had tested the cabins at the motel for blood two years later, and supposedly turned up negative results.
In the course of my research, I managed to track down a granddaughter of the Hoffmans.¶¶¶¶ Her mother had been Pamela Hoffman, daughter of Henry and Clora Hoffman. As a ten-year-old girl, Pamela had been present at the Aster Motel when the carnage was discovered on the morning of January 15, 1947. Pamela’s daughter told me that her mother had died of pancreatic cancer in 2013. However, before Pamela died, she had recorded a filmed interview for posterity in which she related the events of that morning on January 15, 1947. In the course of the interview, Pamela—then seventy-five years old and close to death—confirmed the discovery by her parents of the bloody room. She also confirmed that—however
much Henry Hoffman and his wife backtracked in Mark Hansen’s office in 1949 on their identification of Elizabeth Short as being the dark-haired girl who stayed at the motel—the Hoffmans were, in fact, in no doubt that Elizabeth had been murdered there. Pale and drawn, Pamela was clearly terminally ill. Yet she retained her mental acuity and vividly recalled the horror of that morning:
We were living at the Aster Motel then. And one night a couple came in, [my father] didn’t pay any attention to them, he didn’t have his glasses on, didn’t require the proper registration. The next day my mother found the room completely destroyed, all the bedding was bloody. They burned the sheets and pillows and bedspread and spent the whole day washing down that room. And when they read about the [Dahlia] murder, my mother was horrified, because she realized that she had destroyed evidence.
So—in addition to the five contemporary witnesses that I already knew about—here was yet another witness, giving a firsthand account before she died, of the carnage that had been discovered at the motel. What motive could Pamela, a dying woman, possibly have, other than to tell the truth?