by Piu Eatwell
The historic property records of the Aster Motel at the Los Angeles County Assessor’s Office showed that the original strip of ten cabins remained intact, virtually unchanged since 1947. Many years later, in the 1980s, a new strip of cabins had been constructed facing the old, on the far side of the courtyard. The motel’s checkered history weaved through the fabric of the city’s past. It had been a mid-century gangster hangout, but also, for two decades, a place of refuge for African-American travelers during the segregation years.‡ A place of historical shoot-ups but also a haven; a mottled hybrid of the city’s black and white story. And what a strange coincidence, I thought, that the dahlia happened to be a member of the aster family of flowers. According to America’s Garden Book, a subgroup of Astereraceae, cultivated as an “ornamental plant for the cut flower industry.”
I was waiting for my forensic scientist Suzanna Ryan, with whom I had arranged to meet at the motel. I held in my hand her report on the tests that had been conducted at the motel by the LAPD. The key section of the report read as follows:
First, some background on chemical tests for blood. Both tests mentioned in the LAPD police report, the Benzidine test and the Kastle-Meyer (KM), or Phenolphthalein test, are presumptive blood tests. This means that substances other than blood can yield positive results. Therefore, in order to confirm the presence of blood a second, confirmatory test (which would be specific to blood) must be conducted.
In regards to the testing performed by the police in 1949 in cabin 3 of the Aster Motel, it is possible that a dilute bloodstain was detected with the Benzidine test, but when a second swab or cutting was collected for laboratory testing, the stain was simply too dilute for the KM test to detect. Alternatively, what was termed in the police report as a “pseudo-reaction” could have been a reaction to a cleaning product, like bleach. It is not completely clear to me what the term “pseudo-reaction” means in this instance. It may mean a false positive reaction or it may mean a weak reaction.
In the circumstances, Suzanna Ryan’s view was that reliance could not safely be placed on the results of the blood tests carried out by the LAPD in cabin 3. The negative readings could have been due either to the lack of sensitivity of the tests, or to interference by cleaning agents. The question now was, could those forensic tests be re-performed in cabin 3?
In a few minutes, the forensic scientist’s car swung into the parking lot. Suzanna herself emerged shortly afterward, a neat figure with a blond bob and deep California tan. We shook hands and I led her to the cabin. She pulled on white gloves and a lab coat. Within minutes she was on her knees, spraying luminol on the doorframes and scraping pieces of unidentifiable matter from obscure nooks and crannies in a business-like fashion. She spread the samples of dust and paint on a sheet of paper and subjected them to various tests. I held my breath. She shook her head. I breathed out. There was not enough to go on. It would be impossible, seventy years after the events, to come up with meaningful results without taking up the floorboards and shower tray. While I had known, deep down, that this must be the outcome all along, I also knew that to take the motel bathroom apart would not be feasible. Not, at least, without a court order, pursuant to a wholesale re-investigation of the case. And the LAPD had given every indication that it had no intention of reopening this particular can of worms.
In the meantime, while waiting for the motel test results, I had also received Michael Streed’s report on his comparison between the photograph of the semi-nude woman posted on Flickr with the known photographs of Elizabeth Short. Streed’s view was that the comparison between the profile of the woman in the semi-nude photo and the Santa Barbara police profile shot showed that both images shared “similar morphological traits,” in particular:
1.Forehead Height/Slope
2.Eyebrow Shape/Height
3.Nose Bridge Projection
4.Angle/Shape of Upper Lip
5.Chin Shape/Crease below Upper Lip
6.Cheek/Nasolabial Fold
In the circumstances, Streed’s conclusion was that, while an identification could not be made with 100 percent certainty through photographic comparison alone, it was his expert opinion that the female in the semi-nude photograph was “highly likely” to be Elizabeth Short.
Susanna and I were in the process of clearing away the test materials when the woman from the front desk of the motel came running up to us. She had with her one of the men who worked night shifts at the motel reception desk.
“We want to show you this,” she said. She held out a cell phone. On it was a video taken from the phone of footage running on the motel security camera. The video had been taken earlier that year. The woman explained that her colleague had been sitting, as usual, at the front desk in the early hours of the morning. The screen at the front desk relayed footage taken from a security camera placed to overlook the motel parking lot. Suddenly what appeared to be a female figure could be seen on the security footage. The figure exited cabin 3 and hurried away, finally disappearing out in the street. As the security footage was showing the image of the figure crossing the parking lot, the cell phone video panned across the actual lot. It was empty. The security footage therefore appeared to be showing a figure hurrying from cabin 3 when in reality there was nobody there.
“He has seen this happening before, always about the same time, early in the morning,” the woman explained to me, translating from her colleague’s Spanish. “But this time he took a film of it.”
I replayed the video, nonplussed. It was indeed difficult to explain.
“This place,” the woman said, “has too much history.”
* The circumstances of the French case are discussed on page 65.
† The Aster Motel has changed ownership several times since the 1940s. The current management has no connection with the historical events described in this book.
‡ The Aster Motel was one of a few motels in Los Angeles that accepted African-American travelers during segregation, and was listed in the Negro Motorist Green Book.
24
THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW
The old videotape jumped and flickered. As I peered in the semidarkness, a woman’s face appeared on the library computer screen. She was old and wizened, with frizzy hair and steel spectacles. She had a cracked, frail voice, but her eyes gleamed like a hawk’s. When she spoke, it was in the language of the old City of Angels. She pronounced “Los Angeles” with a hard g.
I was in the library of the journalism archives at California State University, Northridge. The film was of Aggie Underwood. It had been shot in 1974, when Aggie was seventy-two years old. She was giving an interview in the living room of her home to a journalism major at the university.* The room overflowed with the clutter of old age: china, knickknacks, framed family photographs. Memories from the past jostled for space. The student asked Aggie many questions: about life as a female journalist in the 1940s; working on the Herald-Express; her memories of being a city editor. Aggie told many stories. She recalled when Stanley Bruce, the police reporter, got married in the Herald-Express offices. Police Chief Bill Parker was the best man. “They didn’t stay married very long, but it was a blast. In the city room. We had the damnedest wedding you ever saw. Judge White performed the ceremony. The police band played the wedding march.”† The student asked Aggie about her many cases as a crime reporter. She recalled them in detail. There was the mysterious death, ostensibly from carbon monoxide poisoning, of the beautiful actress Thelma Todd; the Overell yacht murder case, when a daughter was accused of murdering her millionaire parents; the unsolved killing of Mickey Cohen’s smooth-talking henchman, Johnny Stompanato. The student asked Aggie about the Black Dahlia murder. Her face changed. For a moment, she faltered. For the first and only time, she looked afraid. “The Dahlia case . . . well . . . there was no solving there,” she said. Then the interview cut out. Whatever Aggie had to say about the Dahlia case had been removed. Only one fragment was preserved: a short section in which she stated, for t
he record, that she had been the first journalist to discover the body at Leimert Park. Clearly, this was all Aggie wanted history to know about her role in the Dahlia investigation.
Heading back to Los Angeles from the vast suburban expanse of Northridge, I mused on the Dahlia case. All the key protagonists—Aggie Underwood, Paul De River, Leslie Dillon, JJ O’Mara, Willie Burns, the Brown brothers, and the rest—had now passed away. The physical evidence relating to the case—the Dahlia’s address book, the shoes, the purse, the coconut brush hairs on the body, the dog leash, the stomach contents of the victim—all had, apparently, disappeared.‡ Most of the documents had been destroyed or locked away in the vaults of the LAPD. All that was left were fragments: a precious cache of documents left by the grand jury at the L.A. District Attorney’s Office; faded newspaper clippings on reels of microfilm; the personal archives of Aggie Underwood and Jimmy Richardson; echoes of long-dead voices reaching from the void on the other side of the din on the freeway. And yet, by painstakingly piecing together these hundreds of scattered fragments, I had managed to reconstruct a picture of what had happened. A picture that, while lacking in some details, was on the whole remarkably clear. How could that picture have remained buried for so long? Partly this was no doubt due to the difficulty in accessing the source materials. There was also the fact that, in the immediate aftermath of the 1949 grand jury investigation, there had clearly been a willful campaign to suppress the facts of the case, and to discredit and harass key witnesses such as Dr. De River. But also there seemed to be an unwillingness, on the part of some recent writers and researchers, simply to let the facts—as they appeared—speak for themselves. People seemed all too eager to shoehorn the case into some exotic, preconceived theory of who the culprit was, too often persons with little or no credible connection to the crime: Bugsy Siegel, Jack Dragna, Orson Welles, the glamorous and sinister Dr. George Hodel. They ignored the evidence, plain on the face of the contemporary documents, which pointed an unequivocal finger at an insignificant, sloop-shouldered man in glasses. A man who had, by conventional wisdom, been treated as a bizarre footnote in the case.
That Leslie Dillon was—according to my research—not a sideshow in the Dahlia drama but, in reality, its centerpiece was perhaps, in a case full of paradoxes, the ultimate irony. An irony that Dillon, complex and contradictory a character as he was, might well have appreciated. Dillon’s appearance and personality resonates with the modern image of the psychopath—the bland, bespectacled, deceptively innocuous exterior—far more than it resonates with the gory monsters of movies from the war era, the blood-slobbering vampires played by the likes of Bela Lugosi. Here we have evil not with a European accent, but personified in a native boy from the Southern plains. An evil begotten in the maelstrom of postwar America. For once, the American public had no “Other” to blame: no homosexuals, Chinese, Communists, or Mexicans. The darkness came from within.
Today, the Dahlia case has entered the annals of Los Angeles lore and legend as one of the most infamous “unsolved” mysteries in California history. There is a room devoted to the Dahlia in the macabre collection of memorabilia at the Los Angeles Museum of Death; a heavy metal band with the name “the Black Dahlia Murder”; a cocktail called the Black Dahlia martini at the Biltmore Hotel. (One of the signature drinks at the hotel’s Millennium Bar, the cocktail calls for Absolut Citron, not Blavod; it gets its dark color from a combination of Chambord and Kahlúa.) Fletcher Bowron and Thaddeus Brown have become immortalized as characters in the detective video game L.A. Noire, in which Bowron, as mayor, discusses a vice scandal over a woman called “Brenda,” with “Chief William Worrell.” One of the most famous books about the Dahlia case is James Ellroy’s novel The Black Dahlia—a fantastic fictional account of the story, in which a crazed gardener commits the murder and keeps jars of preserved organs, including Betty’s tattoo, in a Silver Lake bungalow.
And yet, the true facts of the Dahlia case—the facts buried in the contemporary newspaper reports, court documents, the memories of the few witnesses left to tell the tale—are so much more extraordinary and compelling than any of the “alternate facts.” And perhaps more compelling still is the woman at the center of it all. The woman about whom there is so much speculation, but whom nobody really knows. We know that she was young, beautiful, complex, elusive, contradictory. That in her real life she occupied a territory as uncharted and controversial as the film noir heroines whom, in some ways, she resembled, and with whom she became equated. That for her contemporaries, her story became a morality tale, a fable illustrating the dangers posed to women by early twentieth century “Hollywood”: a space of adventure and freedom, glamour, ruthless commercialism, and dangerously uncircumscribed female sexuality. Perhaps, in the end, all that matters for the purposes of her legend living on is that she was young, and beautiful. It means that she will always be a cipher, a blank board upon which we can write our own story. Elizabeth, Betty, Bette, Beth, Gilda, the martyr, the angel, the whore, the icon. Elizabeth Short. Every so often, we catch a glimpse of her—a hazy figure crossing a motel parking lot. But when we look again, there is nothing there.
* Interview by Natalie Holtzman, 1974, housed in the Agness Underwood collection at California State University, Northridge.
† For more on Bill Parker, see page 214. For more on Judge White and his friendship with Aggie Underwood and Paul De River, see page 88.
‡ For a discussion on the lack of evidence, see the preface of this book.
POSTSCRIPT
Aggie Underwood, after being “kicked upstairs” off the Dahlia story to the post of city editor of the Herald-Express in 1947, remained in that position for seventeen years. She was one of the most popular, distinguished, and longest-serving city editors of a Los Angeles newspaper. She died in 1984, at eighty-one years old. In 2015, the Los Angeles Public Library ran an exhibition about her life and work.
Dr. Paul De River was fired from his position as police psychiatrist for the LAPD in 1950. He continued to work for the Veterans Administration. He died in 1977 at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Anaheim, California. There was no obituary or death notice in any newspaper.
Mark Hansen remained on the suspect list for the murder of Elizabeth Short for the rest of his life, although he was never charged. He died at his home on Carlos Avenue in 1964, at the age of seventy-four. At his death, he left an estate with an officially declared value of some $2 million ($15 million today). The Carlos Avenue house was razed to the ground in the 1970s to form a parking lot.
Leslie Dillon disappeared from the public eye after his release from police custody in 1949. He passed the rest of his life under the alias of “Jack.” He died in obscurity in San Francisco in 1988, at the age of sixty-seven.
Jimmy Richardson continued as city editor of the Los Angeles Examiner until his retirement in 1957. He never touched a drop of alcohol for the rest of his life, although he continued to chain Luckies and pop his little white pills. He died in Boulder City, Nevada, in 1963.
Jimmy “Little Giant” Utley, Mark Hansen’s gambling associate at the Florentine Gardens, was finally taken out of circulation in August 1955. Authorities arrested him when they raided a storefront in Long Beach that turned out to be one of his abortion clinics, turning over $500,000 a year ($4 million today). Utley waived a jury trial and received ten-year sentences for conspiracy and illegal surgery. He finally gave up the ghost while incarcerated at Folsom in 1962.
Clemence Horrall retired from the LAPD after the Brenda Allen scandal and went home to milk his cows in the Valley. He died in 1960 from a heart attack and is buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park, by the Hollywood Hills.
Thaddeus Brown continued to serve as chief of detectives under Bill Parker. After Parker’s death in 1966, he was briefly appointed interim chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, before the appointment of Thomas Reddin in 1967. He died in 1970.
Finis Brown continued to serve in the Los Angeles Police Department. He died in Te
xas in 1990, at eighty-four years old. Rumor has it that he “lost his marbles” and died insane.
Harry “the Hat” Hansen also continued with the Los Angeles Police Department. He became a familiar face on television newsreels and documentaries as the LAPD spokesman on the Dahlia case. He retired to Palm Desert with his wife and pet spaniel, Cookie, and died in 1983.
John J. O’Mara, or “JJ,” continued to serve in the LAPD’s Intelligence Division. He died in 2003, at the age of eighty-six. O’Mara and his Gangster Squad colleagues, and their battles with Mickey Cohen and others in the L.A. underworld, were immortalized in the 2012 Hollywood movie Gangster Squad.
Frank Jemison continued to serve in the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office until his retirement. He died in Beverley Hills in 1967. At the time of his death he was an extremely wealthy man, bequeathing money to various organizations, including the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office.
Bill Parker continued, after his appointment as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department in 1950, to rule the department with a rod of iron. He presided over the department in some of its most turbulent times, including the Watts race riots of 1965. He died of a heart attack in 1966, the same year as his chief aide, Captain James Hamilton.
In 1962, the Los Angeles Examiner and the Herald-Express were merged to form the Herald-Examiner. This in turn folded in 1989, leaving the Los Angeles Times as the sole citywide daily newspaper. The old offices of the Los Angeles Examiner are now derelict, scheduled for redevelopment as a commercial complex. The Los Angeles Police Department moved from City Hall to new quarters in 1955. The Hall of Justice remained abandoned for many years, but has recently been restored.