Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

by Steve Hodel

  SUSPECT IN DAHLIA SLAYING JAILED BY ARMY AT FORT DIX

  February 8, Daily News:

  "BLACKOUT" MURDER OF BETH SHORT CONFESSED SOLDIER ADMITS CRIME BUT HOLDS BACK HORROR DETAILS CORPORAL DUMAIS SIGNS 50 PAGE CONFESSION

  February 8, Herald Express, in four-inch bold headlines:

  CORPORAL DUMAIS IS BLACK DAHLIA KILLER

  Identifies Marks on Girl's Body in Long Confession

  February 9, Examiner:

  MILITARY CAPTAIN CONVINCED THEY HAVE THE DAHLIA KILLER

  February 9, Examiner:

  NEW DAHLIA CONFESSION

  Monday, February 10, 1947

  After all the week's stories about Dumais, whom newspapers now dubbed "the real Dahlia killer," since he had confessed to the crime, readers were jolted on February 10 by a sudden and startling turn of events. Dumais, it was revealed, was not the killer! The story was a complete hoax, a ruse foisted on the Black Dahlia Avenger by the newspapers, in which they "manufactured" a suspect to confess to the crime, a tactic not unlike Steve Fisher's suggestion that the police trick the real murderer by "rigging a phony killer" to bring the real culprit in. Here, however, it wasn't the police putting out a false story, but the media.

  Despite the Dumais "confessions," the public was never told, either by the police or the press, that LAPD detectives were almost certain from the outset that Dumais was not the Black Dahlia Avenger: four of his Army buddies had testified he was at Fort Dix, New Jersey, on January 15. The newspapers knew this too, but played up the story in the hope that, if Fisher was correct in his psychological assessment of the Black Dahlia Avenger, the killer's ego would force him to turn himself in to police, if only to expose Dumais as a false confessor. Unfortunately, the newspapers' hoax did entice the killer to make himself known — not by turning himself in but by striking again.

  *I don't pretend to be an expert on London's notorious nineteenth-century serial killer, "Jack the Ripper." However, on the surface, it would appear that the Dahlia killer had more than a passing knowledge of the famous case, and demonstrated that knowledge after his murder of Elizabeth Short. Like their modern-day counterparts, the newspapers of the 1880s published the handwritten, taunting Ripper letters, which included very similar wording, phrases, and drawings used by the 1947 Avenger. Jack the Ripper wrote, "Catch me when you can." In many of his letters he included the taunting phrase, "Ha ha!" and drew childlike drawings of a knife blade. In addition, the Ripper mailed items connected to his victims, such as a partial kidney, to the police, leading some authorities to suspect the killer might well have been a surgeon.

  14

  The "Red Lipstick" Murder

  A SCANT TWO DAYS AFTER the Herald Express announced that the Black Dahlia killer, Corporal Joseph Dumais, had confessed and the Black Dahlia case was solved, the Herald Express put out a special edition on Monday, February 10, 1947, with the headline:

  WEREWOLF STRIKES AGAIN! KILLS L.A.

  WOMAN, WRITES "B.D." ON BODY

  This time the victim's nude body was found in an isolated vacant lot, on a direct parallel line some seven miles west of where Elizabeth Short's body had been found three weeks earlier. According to crime-scene descriptions, the victim had been "kicked and stomped to death." Like the Black Dahlia, her mouth had also been slashed, and the killer had used lipstick from her purse to write obscenities on the naked body, signing his now infamous initials, "B.D.," to let the police know — or think — he was the same person who had sent the notes in the Dahlia case. The local press quickly dubbed this second crime with two names: "Jeanne French: The Flying Nurse" and "the Red Lipstick murder."

  In the early 1930s, Jeanne French had gained a measure of fame and notoriety in the Los Angeles area as a socialite and starlet. She had worked as a studio-contract actress under the name Jeanne Thomas, had become a registered nurse, and had gotten her license as one of America's first female airplane pilots. The papers loved her and had nicknamed her "the Flying Nurse." Said to be one of the most promising candidates for screen fame in the early days of talking pictures, but dogged by a host of suitors, she finally married and gave up her career.

  Jeanne French had also been well-known in European social circles as the nurse and traveling companion of Millicent Rogers, the famed oil heiress of the 1920s. French was also the nurse of Marion Wilson, known to the public as "the Woman in Black," who for many years after the death of Rudolph Valentino returned on the anniversary of his death as the mysterious veiled woman seen placing flowers on his grave.

  Just after eight in the morning on Monday, February 10, 1947 — less than four weeks after the murder of Elizabeth Short — construction worker Hugh Shelby discovered Jeanne French's nude, bludgeoned, and lacerated body in a vacant lot in the 3200 block of Grandview Avenue.

  Detectives who examined the victim's body at the crime scene discovered that the killer had written an obscenity on her torso with red lipstick — an obscenity the police never disclosed — and then signed "B.D." The worn-out lipstick stub was found close to the body, as was the victim's empty purse.

  Foot and heel marks were clearly visible on the victim's face, breasts, and hands, indicating that she had been brutally stomped by a maddened assailant. Captain Donahoe told the press that the victim had been savagely beaten with "a heavy weapon, probably a tire iron or a wrench, as she crouched naked on the highway."

  The victim's stockings and underclothing were missing. However, the killer had ceremoniously draped her blue coat trimmed with red fox-fur cuffs and her red dress over the body before leaving the scene. A man's white handkerchief was also found near the body. There was also a wine bottle that search-team detectives found nearby that was taken to the crime lab in the hope of obtaining fingerprints.

  Police obtained photographs of the handwriting on the body and plaster castings of the clearly defined footprints found at the scene. Handwriting experts were called to the crime scene to study the macabre note on her torso before her body was taken to the morgue. Other letters were observed on the nude body below the "B.D." that were difficult to decipher but possibly read "Tex" and "O" or "D" or possibly "Andy D," leading to police speculation that possibly two men might have been involved in the murder.

  The police criminalists recovered important physical evidence in the form of black hair follicles found under the victim's fingernails, which indicated that she had put up a violent struggle before being slain. In their reconstruction of the crime, homicide detectives speculated to the press that the victim "was stripped naked in the parked car and then beaten."

  Detectives also concluded that because a large pool of blood was found in the highway near the crime scene, the killer must have dragged the victim from the highway to the lot, where he wrote the message on her body, then draped the clothing over her. As a last act, he had carefully arranged her shoes on either side of her head at an equal distance of approximately ten feet, then fled.

  The coroner's physician, Dr. Newbarr, conducted the autopsy and found the cause of death to be "ribs shattered by heavy blows, one of the broken ribs having pierced the heart creating hemorrhage and death." Dr. Newbarr stated that the victim had "dined on chop suey within an hour of her death." Newbarr determined that the victim was murdered the same day her body was found, sometime between midnight and 4:00 A.M. Results of a blood alcohol examination by the chemist returned a level of .30, twice what was then considered legally drunk, and more than three times the level by today's standards in California.

  Police described the Lipstick crime scene as a "sort of lovers lane area" — the same phrase that had been used to characterize the vacant lot where Elizabeth Short was found. They also put out an all points bulletin to law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, notifying them that "the killer would have blood on his shoes and pants, and possibly in his vehicle."

  In tracing Jeanne French's movements in the hours before her death, the police and witness statements established that at 7:30 P.M. Sunday, February 9, 1947, she had gon
e into the Plantation Cafe, 10984 Washington Boulevard in Los Angeles, in the company of two men, one of whom was described by waitress Christine Studnicka as having "dark hair and a small mustache." In its coverage, the Los Angeles Examiner also reported that the description matched that of a dark-haired man the victim had had dinner with five hours later. Studnicka also observed that "the two men entered a booth and ordered food, while the victim went to a pay telephone in the restaurant." The victim's phone call to the unknown person lasted approximately ten minutes.

  During the phone call, Studnicka said people nearby could hear French bark into the receiver in a very loud voice, "Don't bring a bottle, the landlady doesn't allow it." While still on the phone, the victim yelled to the two men in her booth, "Don't put any liquor in the car" and "Don't take any liquor." Studnicka observed that the two men appeared "to be arguing between themselves," and it was her impression that they were "arguing over which one was going to accompany the victim."

  After they had eaten, the two men left the restaurant, followed shortly by Jeanne French. Studnicka did not know whether the three met up outside the restaurant, nor could she provide a further description of the second man who accompanied the "dark-haired man."

  Later that Sunday evening, at 9:30 P.M., witnesses saw Jeanne French driving away from her home at the wheel of her 1928 Ford Roadster. Half an hour later, restaurant owner Ray Fecher saw her inside his Turkey Bowl restaurant at 11925 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, where, he told police, "She was intoxicated, making loud remarks, while drinking a cup of coffee."

  At 10:30 P.M., French was identified as the person inside a bar at 10421 Venice Boulevard on the west side of Los Angeles, where she told bartender Earl Holmes she was going to "commit her husband to a psycho ward at the Sawtelle Veteran's Hospital the following morning." Police later verified the accuracy of this statement, because Jeanne French's husband, whom she was planning to divorce, had slapped her a week before, and as a result she had forced him to move out.

  At 10:45 P.M., Santa Monica PD officers Chapman and Aikens received a radio call in their patrol car reporting "a drunk driver, driving an automobile described as a 1928 Ford Roadster." They searched the vicinity and located an empty car of that description parked curb-side at Stanford and Colorado Boulevards. But because they were unable to locate the driver, they left.

  What the officers did not know was that French was in an upstairs apartment at 1547 Stanford Avenue visiting her estranged husband, Frank. She told him to "meet her at her attorney's office the next day at 11:00 A.M., as she was filing for divorce and wanted to commit him to the hospital as a psycho." The drunken woman argued with her husband for approximately the next thirty minutes, then drove away, arriving at the Piccadilly drive-in restaurant, at 3932 Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles, shortly after midnight.

  Between 12:10 and 1:00 A.M. Monday, February 10, Toni Manalatos, a carhop at the Piccadilly, served the victim what would turn out to be her last meal. She told police she saw Jeanne French in the company of a "dark-haired man with a small mustache."

  French's Ford Roadster was later found, still parked in the Piccadilly's parking lot, at 2:00 A.M. by Mr. Anzione, a cleanup man coming to work at the restaurant. Doubtless she had left her car at the Picadilly and driven away with the dark-haired man. Her body was found only fifteen blocks away, and, given the medical examiner's estimated time of her death, that man was probably the last person to have seen her alive. Based on time of death and the murder's proximity to the restaurant, he was also probably the killer.

  After detectives identified the victim and learned that she had filed for divorce, the initial thrust of their investigation focused on Jeanne's husband, Frank, as the likeliest suspect. Within several days of the murder, Captain Donahoe ruled him out: Frank French could not and did not drive a car, his shoe size was different from those found at the crime scene, and handwriting samples compared to those found on the body did not match. The police didn't report it, but it is assumed that the other physical evidence — hair samples and possible fingerprints found at the scene — also helped to eliminate Frank as the suspect.

  After they had initially linked the Lipstick murder to the Dahlia murder, police detectives theorized that whoever killed Elizabeth Short may have been infuriated by Corporal Joseph Dumais's "confession" and murdered Jeanne French to disprove his claim. This, police told the press, would also account for the "taunting obscene phrase written on her chest." One police official was quoted as saying, "For two days before Mrs. French was kicked to death, the newspapers had been full of Dumais' confessions that it was he who had killed Beth Short. We know that the killer is egotistical, and it's possible that the real killer resented the claims of Dumais and wanted to show that the real killer was still here." Thus, in a tragic and unintended way, Steve Fisher's strategy of smoking out the Black Dahlia Avenger with a false confession had proved to be chillingly effective.

  On February 12, 1947, the Herald Express ran a story under the headline, "Quiz Mystery Man Sharing P.O. Box of 'Lipstick' Victim," in which the reporter said that an unidentified male had shared a secret post office box with Jeanne French and was being questioned by detectives. No further details about his identity or his relationship to Jeanne French were ever released, nor have I found any information that would indicate that LAPD said anything more to the press about him in the weeks or months that followed.

  In the course of my investigation, I came across a reference to a book, Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective's Scrapbook, edited by Sean Tejaratchi, containing over a hundred photographs of unsolved crimes in the L.A. area during the years of LAPD homicide detective Jack Huddleston's service, from 1921 to 1950.

  The scrapbook was a compilation of Detective Huddleston's own photo collection of suicides, murders, and accidental deaths, clearly his own personal macabre fetish. Its pages contained pictures of tattooed men, nude drag queens, child homicides, murdered prostitutes, and even a decapitation caused by a train wreck, all packaged into an album of horrors. Next to many of the photographs the detective had written his personal observations and locker-room dark humor.

  In her introduction to the book, Katherine Dunn says that the collection of photographs, found at an estate sale after Huddleston's death, was eventually made into a video called Death Scenes. Although essentially a revelation of one person's fascination with the brutality of homicide, Death Scenes contains three photographs next to which Huddleston had typed the following information:

  "THE RED LIPSTICK MURDER."

  Mrs. Jeanne Axford French Age 40. (Nurse) of 3535 Military Ave, Sawtelle L.A. Killed by ???? Her body was found in a field near Grand View Ave, & National Blvd. L.A.

  She was stomped to death by a fiend who crudely printed an obscene phrase (FUCK YOU) on her chest.

  The three photographs were obviously from the 1947 LAPD investigation. One of them, a close-up, showed the victim lying supine in the vacant lot, completely nude, with the lettering clearly visible on her body. In large block printed lettering, the killer had written in red lipstick the following words across the midsection of her body: "FUCK YOU, B.D." What the LAPD had not revealed to the press, Detective Huddleston unintentionally revealed to the public through the bits and pieces of his own obsession years after his death.

  Exhibit 32

  Jeanne French, "Red Lipstick" murder, February 10, 1947

  Simultaneous and parallel to the "Red Lipstick" murder, the Dahlia investigation remained ongoing, as Captain Donahoe told the public that in his opinion the Dahlia and Lipstick murders were likely connected. In the month of February 1947, leads and additional evidence continued to pour in.

  Tuesday, February 11, 1947

  Imagine the surprise of downtown Los Angeles cab driver Charles Schneider when he discovered a mysterious note in his cab, possibly written by the Black Dahlia Avenger. Schneider told police and reporters that he had gone to a restaurant in the 500 block of Columbia Street — ten blocks from the Biltmore —
and when he returned to his parked cab he found a note in the glove compartment. Addressed to the Examiner; but not released to the public, the note, with a crude illustration of a knife and a pistol on it, read:

  Take it to Examiner at once. I've got the number of your cab.

  $20,000 and I'll give B.D. up. Is it a go?

  B.D.

  Police quickly lifted fingerprints from the glove compartment of Schneider's cab, which did not belong to him. They also checked similarities between the letter and the original envelope sent to the Examiner with Elizabeth Short's belongings and immediately eliminated Schneider's fingerprints from both the prints on the glove box and the original note. Those fingerprints remain unidentified to this date.

  Wednesday, February 12, 1947

  lca Mabel M'Grew, a twenty-seven-year-old resident of Los Angeles, reported a kidnapping and forcible rape that occurred in the early-morning hours of February 12 as she was leaving a South Main Street cafe in downtown Los Angeles. She reported that two men had forced her into their car and driven her to an isolated spot on East Road in Los Angeles, where both had raped her. After the attack one of the assailants had warned, "Don't tell the police, or I'll do to you the same as I did to the Black Dahlia." They then drove her close to her home in Culver City, only three miles away from where Jeanne French had been murdered. The only descriptions of the assailants released in the news article were "two swarthy men."

  Sunday, February 16, 1947

  By the middle of February, the LAPD said that it had "hit a stone wall" in its investigation of the murders of both Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French, announcing that the one remaining lead, a key to the two mysterious homicides, was their search for a dark haired man with a small mustache, who was known to have had dinner with Jeanne French just two hours before she was murdered.

  Police indicated they had a close watch on their important witness, Mrs. Antonia Manalatos, the waitress who had seen the dark-haired suspect dining with the victim.