by Bill James
Whoever killed Elizabeth Short was an advanced sexual sadist. A killer does not leap to that condition; a person develops those traits and habits as he develops any others: in stages, and by degrees. It seems extremely likely, to me, that the murderer of the Black Dahlia had numerous previous kills, which had become progressively more gruesome.
The essential problem with Wolfe’s thesis is this. The people of Los Angeles in 1947—as any other city—could be divided into those who live well-documented lives, and those who live undocumented lives, understanding of course that we don’t mean that they are entirely undocumented. In the one group you have civic leaders, rich and powerful people, sports heroes, media figures, famous mobsters and writers and, this being Los Angeles, movie stars. In the other group you have everybody else, the guys and dolls who get up at 6:30, take their kids to school at 8:00 and go anonymously to work.
For every famous somebody there are several hundred undocumented lives. As a starting point for the discussion, it is overwhelmingly more likely that the murder was committed by a member of the undocumented hordes, rather than the privileged minority. If you have a bag of groceries and you ask “Who bought this bag of groceries,” 99.9% of the time the answer will not be “Clark Gable” or “Mickey Spillane”; it will be somebody you never heard of. Same thing here … it could be a famous person, but most likely it isn’t.
However, if you back away from the murder scene a great distance, sixty years or so, and you then ask “Who in Los Angeles could have committed this murder?” you are inevitably pushed toward those people whose lives you know something about—the famous people. We know what Bugsy Siegel was doing on January 12, 1947; it’s in his FBI file. We know what the movie stars were doing; it’s in the gossip columns. We have no idea what Jack Stanton was doing that day, or Darrell Lum, or Jerry Carpenter, or any of the other phone book full of phony people I could make up by mixing and matching names. They are disappearing quickly into the mists of time, and we have no way to tie them to the crime. If you’re trying to figure it out at that distance you work with the documents.
The way that we perceive the event from across acres of time is very different from the way it really was. We should start with the presumption that the crime was probably created by an anonymous nobody, and, in my view, we should be very skeptical of efforts to link the crime, decades later, to members of the well-documented elite.
Wolfe—and this is a wonderful book that I recommend highly—but Wolfe alleges that Elizabeth Short was pregnant, a claim which is not well-substantiated, and further alleges that a rich and powerful man would be the father, a claim for which there is no evidence at all. He then argues that the pregnancy provides a motive for the crime. Well, Elizabeth Short was tortured, probably over a period of several days, before she was murdered. It seems overwhelmingly likely, then, that she was murdered by some sick bastard who enjoyed hurting women. Asking what his “motive” was is silly. He enjoyed it.
Wolfe argues that Short was murdered by, among others, Bugsy Siegel and Harry Chandler, of the Los Angeles Times Chandlers. Wolfe has extensive documentation about the lives of the people he implicates in the murder, but all he has that ties them to Elizabeth Short is just rumors, gossip, innuendo and coincidences, a bridge held up by toothpicks and spider webs. He ties Harry Chandler to the Biltmore Hotel; he ties Elizabeth Short to the Biltmore Hotel—but how many thousands of people could be tied to the Biltmore Hotel? Elizabeth Short was murdered by a psycho nut case, and Benny Siegel was a psycho nut case—but how many thousands of anonymous psycho nut cases are there in a major metropolitan area?
Wolfe thinks that the murder was never solved because the police covered it up. That’s possible. It is more likely that the crime was never solved because:
a) Stranger-on-stranger murders are extremely difficult to solve, and generally are not solved, even today, and
b) These crimes are especially difficult to solve if you assume that the murderer was someone she knew, which was the universal working assumption of police in that era.
But read the book—The Black Dahlia Files, by Donald Wolfe. In time, Wolfe’s improbable explanation for the murder may become the dominant explanation, simply because Wolfe’s research is much better than the research of the other people who have written about the case. But I’m voting to acquit.
In each generation, due to indigenous journalism, some part of the country becomes the source of a large share of the nation’s crime stories. In our time it is Florida. In the 1970s and 1980s it was Seattle. In the late 1940s it was Los Angeles.
On January 3, 1948, two men and one .45 caliber automatic robbed a haberdashery in Pasadena.
Ten days later, a gray 1946 Ford coupe was stolen from a Pasadena street.
At 4:35 AM on January 18, someone driving a 1947 Ford coupe (the 1946 and 1947 Ford coupes were almost indistinguishable) used a flashing red spotlight to pull over a couple driving near Malibu Beach. Pretending at first to be a policeman, the lone assailant pulled a .45 automatic and relieved them of their valuables.
Later in the day that crime repeated itself near the Rose Bowl: someone using a red spotlight approached a couple in a parked car. Thinking he was being approached by a cop, the man lowered his window and asked the cop what he wanted. This time the woman was struck in the face, for no real reason. The driver believed the car to be a 1946 Ford sedan.
The crime spree took a turn for the worse on the evening of January 19. A couple was parked in West Pasadena, in the hills overlooking the Rose Bowl, when a gray Ford coupe with a red spotlight pulled up behind them. The driver of the coupe approached, his hand on a revolver, and asked for identification. The man produced his license. The cop produced a .45. After robbing the couple, he took the woman back to his car, where he forced her to perform oral sex.
The newspapers had begun to follow the crimes, dubbing the unknown assailant the “Red Light Bandit,” and anxiety about his attacks sharpened after the rape. The next day, January 20, a couple parked on Mulholland Drive was robbed in a similar manner, although the woman was not assaulted.
Two days later, the Red Light Bandit established a new standard in his violence. Approaching a couple driving slowly down Mulholland Drive (they were returning from a church dance), the Red Light Bandit pulled them over, robbed them both, then took the woman, an innocent seventeen-year-old girl, back to his car. The boyfriend drove off, trying to get the police; the bandit followed, attempting to force the other car off the road into a canyon. He told the girl he would kill her boyfriend if she didn’t do what he wanted. When she acquiesced, he pulled off into a secluded area by the side of the road, where he forced her to submit to oral and anal rape.
Pulling together reports from all over the area, two detectives from the Hollywood Bureau compiled an APB, released shortly after five o’clock on January 23, alerting police to be on the lookout for a tan or gray Ford coupe. An hour after the APB was issued two men with a handgun robbed a clothing store in Redondo Beach. An hour and a half after that, two patrolmen spotted a suspect car in North Hollywood. They pulled up behind it. The car fled, initiating a high-speed chase, which ended as they generally do. Caryl Chessman and David Knowles were in custody by nine o’clock. It had been less than three weeks since the crime spree began.
There is no murder here; the Red Light Bandit had committed no murder. The two most famous crime stories of the twentieth century which do not involve a murder both occurred at the same time: the Caryl Chessman case, and the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg matter.
The case of David Knowles would be adjudicated and resolved, making a little bit of legal history along the way. Caryl Chessman would become perhaps the most famous criminal of the 1950s, and one of the pivotal crime figures of the twentieth century. His case would go to the Supreme Court sixteen times. Chessman would write at least four books while in prison, spending many, many weeks on the best-seller lists, and would become the subject of numerous other books and films. His execution by
the state of California on May 2, 1960, was protested by Eleanor Roosevelt, Pablo Casals, Aldous Huxley, Albert Schweitzer and the Queen of Belgium, among millions of others.
But back to 1948 … Showing his resourcefulness quickly, Chessman elected to act as his own attorney—and then immediately filed a motion challenging his competence to act in that capacity, on the grounds that he might be insane. The judge ruled that he wasn’t insane and could act as his own attorney if he wanted to.
After a trial lasting about the same length of time as the crime spree, Chessman was convicted on 17 of 18 counts. Under the provisions of California’s so-called Little Lindbergh Law, Chessman faced the possibility of a death sentence. The Little Lindbergh Law held that:
1) Whenever an individual was taken from one place to another against his will, that was kidnapping, and
2) If the kidnapping victim was harmed, it was a capital crime.
Since two women were taken back to the Red Light Bandit’s car and physically harmed, it was a capital case.
The Little Lindbergh Law broke down during the prosecution of David Knowles. Knowles, apparently Chessman’s partner in the clothing-store robberies, had not participated in the sex crimes. Still, using the spurious argument that clerks were “kidnapped” when they were forced into a back room, Knowles was also charged and convicted under the law. In 1950 the California Supreme Court threw out the conviction, ruling that this was an impermissible abuse of the law. Prosecutors were using the law to get a life sentence or even a death sentence for armed robbery. This was never the intention of the legislature, but once it became a standard practice that shifted the ground of the argument, forcing legislators to go against the law-and-order sentiment in order to correct the law. The California Supreme Court finally told them they had to. The law was amended during the 1951 legislative session.
Chessman’s description of this, in The Face of Justice (p. 58), was that “the anomalous result was that Chessman had been tried, convicted and sentenced to death for technical ‘kidnapping’ for the purpose of robbery, an act that apparently would no longer be punishable at all under the clarified law.” This is a preposterous description of the matter. The acts committed by the Red Light Bandit have been serious crimes everywhere in the civilized world since the time of Hammurabi, and always will be.
A few weeks after Chessman’s trial the court reporter suddenly died. He had transcribed only one-third of the record of Chessman’s trial; the rest was in shorthand notes, which, when referred to an association of court reporters, were initially described as “completely indecipherable.” When the judge sentenced Chessman to death, the absence of a complete trial transcript became a stumbling block, which would trouble the case until its resolution twelve years later.
At this time, people sentenced to death were normally executed in a matter of weeks. Into the 1940s, the law in many states required that a person filing an appeal must pay for the preparation of a trial transcript. Preparation of the trial transcript was expensive, and this made it impossible for most convicted criminals, even those facing death sentences, to appeal their crimes. “If you’re broke and can’t afford to have a transcript prepared,” the law said to the convicted, “that’s tough luck, but we’re going to execute you anyway.”
Many death sentences were never appealed, because of this barrier and others, but even when they were appealed, the appeals were normally resolved within a matter of some months. California, a little ahead of the nation, had reformed the law to this extent: that when a man facing a death sentence filed an appeal, the state was required to produce a transcript of the trial. The court reporter’s death made it extremely difficult for the state of California to meet this obligation.
Building upon that small strand of good fortune, Chessman began to pursue appeals with great vigor. As his own attorney, Chessman was what might be called “constructively incompetent.” Having no training in the law, Chessman of course made many procedural mistakes. Whenever one of these was found, Chessman would seize upon it to try to block the process: See, I should never have been allowed to act as my own attorney (he would argue). Look what I did here—this might have changed everything that happened from that point on. At the same time, he was a brilliant and resourceful advocate, constantly pursuing different lines of appeal in different courts. When one appeals court would turn him down, he would appeal the issue to a higher court. When one avenue of appeal was closed to him, he would open another one, entangling them if possible, so that it became impossible to actually execute him, since the state could never reach the point where all of the legal issues in his case had been resolved.
Later, of course, this became standard operating procedure for a death-row inmate, and later still the higher courts clarified the law to limit appeals. But it hadn’t happened before. Chessman largely invented it. Although condemned prisoners in his time were guaranteed access to legal representation, this representation was often perfunctory. Chessman, fighting for his life, declined the help of court-appointed attorneys. He faced an almost-impossible task. He had to figure out, as the process was happening, how to stop the state from executing him—a task roughly equivalent to taking the court against the Los Angeles Lakers with an untrained team, figuring out the rules of a basketball game as the clock is running. He did this job so well that he invented a small industry, the death-row attorney’s game.
In 1954 Chessman published his first book, Cell 2455 Death Row (Prentice-Hall). He was an amazing writer. The book vaulted to the top of the best-seller list, and stayed there. By the time the book was published Chessman claimed that he had already established an American record for the length of time spent on death row, six-plus years.
The publication of Cell 2455 gave him two important weapons in his fight with the state: money, and attention. There had been an active movement to abolish the death penalty for a hundred years before 1950. Several states had abolished the death penalty before or about the turn of the century, but most had gradually reinstated it. Caryl Chessman became the poster boy for the anti–death penalty movement. After he hit the best-seller list with his first book, everything he did was news. If he disobeyed a prison directive and was confined to quarters, that was in the papers.
Now Chessman could command the attention of good lawyers, committed to keeping him alive, and he began to accept their assistance. They helped him to invent more ways to frustrate the government in its efforts to carry out the sentence.
Chessman wrote four books from death row. The later books were not as well written as the first, and his popularity as a writer gradually waned.
Chessman spit out arguments about his innocence at a machine-gun pace. He succeeded in convincing hundreds of thousands of readers that he was indeed innocent, and this is still apparent today. In Frederick Drimmer’s book Until You Are Dead, Drimmer writes that “To the very end, Chessman insisted he was not guilty—and to this day the evidence he presented seems so persuasive it is hard to understand why he was ever convicted and executed. But that is reckoning without the power of the circulation-hungry California press, which whipped up a campaign against him that would not be stilled until his life was.”
Drimmer follows this with a seven-page account of the Chessman case, during which he gives hardly a clue as to what the “evidence” was that he found so persuasive. Descriptions of the Red Light Bandit “were conflicting,” writes Drimmer. “A few of the people who’d been robbed identified Chessman; others, however, couldn’t.”
Well, the crimes for which Chessman was executed were committed at night, in dark and isolated places. The bandit parked behind the victims and walked toward them through his headlights. He covered his face with a handkerchief and stood behind their door(s), as a cop would in writing a ticket. He shined a flashlight in their faces. Of course not all of his victims could identify Chessman as the assailant. That’s not evidence that he was innocent.
On the other hand, both rape victims gave strong, positive that-is-the-ma
n type of identifications. A man who was with one of the rape victims, and who also got a good look at the assailant, was equally certain that Chessman was the perpetrator. This pair of victims happened to drop by the police station at the time Chessman was being interviewed. Without being told that their assailant was anywhere around, they spotted Chessman and rushed up to him, accusing him of the crime.
As to the “conflicting descriptions” of the criminal, when were there ever not conflicting descriptions of a criminal, if there were multiple witnesses? I’ve certainly never heard of such a thing. In fact, though, the APB issued for the Red Light Bandit on the evening of January 23, 1948, put together a composite description of the criminal, based on all of the witnesses. Even leaving out the 1946 Ford sedan in which he was captured, it seems an obvious description of Caryl Chessman: “Male, Caucasian, possibly Italian, swarthy complexion, 23–35 years, 5'6'' to 5'10'', 150 to 170 pounds, thin to medium build, dark brown wavy hair, close cut, dark brown eyes, crooked teeth, narrow nose with slight hump on bridge of nose, sharp chin, possible scar over right eyebrow.” Chessman was Jewish, not Italian, but looked Italian. The suspect is described as 5'6'' to 5'10''; Chessman claimed to be six foot, but was probably 5'10'' or 5'11''.
Also, the APB describes a subject with a “narrow nose”; Chessman had a huge nose. However, why the APB says this is something of a mystery, since several witnesses had specified that the attacker had a large, broken nose.