Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

by Steve Hodel

  After my conversation with Mellecker, I realized that what I had suspected — that the LAPD was involved in an ongoing concealment — was inaccurate. The body of the truth was never buried within the case files; it had, in all likelihood, been ordered destroyed, so that no linkage could be made. But inasmuch as nothing — absolutely nothing — disappears without a trace, the truth was actually out there, if you knew where to look for it.

  The only possible way for any of these detectives to have discovered the truth behind the cover-up would have been to do as I had done — go back in time to 1947-1950 Los Angeles and reconstruct day-by-day the scattered facts from the four separate newspapers and the thousands of separate articles. The truth is buried in what would have to be a three-year, week-by-week, reinvestigative search for the coverage of the events as the bits and pieces of the truth appeared in the press. This is what I did, and my steps are completely retraceable.

  As of this writing, the currently assigned LAPD detective on the Elizabeth Short-Black Dahlia investigation is Brian Carr. Presumably, Carr received the baton from John St. John some six or seven years ago. I located two published interviews with Detective Carr, the first dated June 1999, the second in October of that year. Both interviews were brief. The first was conducted by Pamela Hazelton, who had established a Black Dahlia website, www.bethshort.com, as a research center for Dahlia case devotees. For that interview, Hazelton reported on her website, she met personally with Detective Brian Carr at LAPD's Homicide Division at the police administration building, Parker Center.

  Ms. Hazelton said that Detective Carr told her that "due to the lack of his emotional involvement in the Black Dahlia murder investigation, and because he was not able to get to know the victim's parents and family, it is difficult for him to slot unlimited time to the case." She quoted Carr as saying, "When I get emotionally involved in a case, that's a really huge motivating factor."

  According to Hazelton, Carr also said that he was "doubtful that the case will ever be solved." He revealed, "It's [the Dahlia murder] got signs of serial murder all over it, but again, they never found another murder linked to it." Carr correctly refused to answer any specific questions related to the suspect's modus operandi, but did confirm that "the suspect appeared to have some medical knowledge," and most surprising of all, he told her, "The killer probably knew the victim," but he did not elaorate on how or why he arrived at this conclusion. Carr said that "any possibility of releasing any portion of the case files while he's assigned to the case is non-existent."

  The second interview with Carr appeared in an article on the APBnews.com website, under Celebrity News, written by staff writer Valerie Kalfrin, and entided "Writer Reopens Black Dahlia Murder Case." In the article, Ms. Kalfrin revealed L.A. Times writer Larry Harnisch's "new theory" related to his favorite suspect, Dr. Walter Bayley. She also personally contacted Detective Carr, noting that he had been assigned to the Dahlia case since 1994. When she asked if Carr planned to follow up Harnisch's new theory, he said, "I'd be more than happy to check it out if I had the time and resources to do it," adding, "I will probably hand this over to somebody when I retire."

  Detective Carr has made it clear that as lead investigator with sole access to the Elizabeth Short files, neither he nor his department has the time or resources to investigate even a single suspect, in this case Dr. Walter Bayley. Though not connected to the murder of Elizabeth Short, Bayley was, as Sergeant Stoker had revealed, a member of the Gangster Squad's abortion ring and possibly one of my father's associates.

  In addition to Kirk Mellecker, I discovered a second LAPD officer who had been intimately connected with the Dahlia investigation, retired policewoman Myrl McBride, a critical original witness who, one will recall, had an encounter with Elizabeth Short just hours before she was murdered. McBride, I learned, was living only an hour or so from Los Angeles. I called, introduced myself, and met her for an interview.

  While Myrl McBride has little present memory of the facts as she originally reported them to detectives two days after the murder occurred, nevertheless, the facts themselves are not in dispute. My interview with Myrl confirmed two very important points. First, she was never unsure of her original identification of Elizabeth Short as the woman who came up to her and with whom she returned to the Main Street bar. Second, she was never shown any pictures of a potential suspect by detectives in the weeks, months, or years that followed.

  Though she cannot today recall the original descriptions of the "two men and a woman" who were with Elizabeth Short as she exited the bar at 5th and Main streets, those descriptions, like McBride's original reporting of the victim's actions, would have been recorded, and unless they, like the George Hodel connections, have been destroyed, they would still be in the case file as an accurate record of her description of the suspects who were known to be with Elizabeth just hours before her murder.

  Officer McBride, unlike her civilian counterparts, the downtown motel owners Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, could not be as easily dismissed by the Gangster Squad detectives as "being mistaken" in her identification of Elizabeth Short. The cat was out of the bag and into print on the front pages of the Los Angeles newspapers too quickly.

  McBride's original identification of the victim did not stand alone. It was also strongly corroborated by what Elizabeth had told McBride and was later found to be entirely consistent with personal facts of the victim's life. McBride's positive identification of the victim on January 17 was supported by McBride's reporting to police that Elizabeth Short had told her she was terrorized by a jealous suitor who "had threatened to kill her if he saw her with another man." These were the same threats that had caused her to flee to San Diego in fear for her life and the same story she told Robert Manley and the Frenches while she was in hiding at their home.

  LAPD detectives could not discredit or refute one of their own. Too much information had already been released to the press. The likely scenario back in January 1947 would have been for the detectives to approach McBride and "suggest" she take a moment to rethink her statement and positive identification of Elizabeth Short, and while she was rethinking it, consider what kind of light she was placing LAPD in with regards to the public! In all likelihood, the detectives asked, "Are you absolutely sure the person you released was a terrified Elizabeth Short, who told you she was going to be killed? Might the woman you saw possibly have been someone else? Think about it before you answer us." Then, by way of damage control, they told the press in reviewing the case with McBride, "she was no longer absolutely certain that the girl that came running up to her 'in terror' the day before the murder was Elizabeth Short."

  After she had become a witness who could place Elizabeth Short with a possible suspect or suspects during her "missing week," Myrl McBride was ultimately transferred to the Harbor Division, where she quietly and inconspicuously finished her career in a "Sleepy Hollow." Fifty-four years later, Myrl McBride reestablished unequivocally that the woman she saw exit the Main Street bar was Elizabeth Short.

  This interview with Myrl was the strangest of my career. On the surface, we were sitting together in her home, sharing a cup of coffee, linked as we were, "fellow retired LAPD" discussing the facts of an ice-cold murder case. Below the surface, the link was surreal. The last known witness to see and speak with Elizabeth Short — and that in the presence of her killers — was, five decades later, seated next to that killer's son, now an ex-homicide detective, who was putting the final pieces in place to solve the murder.

  Fifty-plus years after the Black Dahlia case was put into cold storage, at least three basic points remain clear.

  First, the victim herself has been obscured and vilified over time so that to the uninitiated she has been made to appear complicit in her own death.

  Second, profilers, detectives, and writers have relied on the myth of the Black Dahlia, instead of the facts, to come up with their own theories behind the murder. Simply stated: the facts about the case still speak for themselves. Eliza
beth consistently reported to anyone who would listen that she was deathly afraid of a certain person. She told that chilling story to the Frenches, to Manley, and to police officer Myrl McBride.

  Finally, it's clear that the Black Dahlia file, which was handed down from case manager to case manager, had been sanitized or destroyed, probably by Thad Brown's brother Finis. None of the officers, from Galindo to Carr, probably ever saw the real file or even knew that the DA's investigators had considered my father to be the prime murder suspect.

  We know that, after discovering my father's connection to the Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French murders as the "wealthy Hollywood man," the DA's office had launched a separate investigation into LAPD corruption that they presented to the 1949 grand jury, based on their own "codified files" from their own two-year investigation. This meant that a DA case file existed on the case, separate and apart from LAPD's.

  Lieutenant Frank Jemison of the L.A. DA's Bureau of Investigation and his detectives knew that George Hodel was a prime suspect for the Black Dahlia and Red Lipstick murders. They had multiple witnesses who had independently connected him to both victims. They probably also suspected him of the brutal stabbing murder of Gladys Kern in 1948.

  The DA knew that LAPD had a dozen more kidnappings and lust-murders, most of which had occurred after the Dahlia murder, up until Dr. Hodel's departure to the territory of Hawaii in the spring of 1950, when they suddenly stopped. Many of the bodies were found within sight of the DA's downtown office. From the grand jury revelations, we now know why LAPD was not solving these obviously serial, connected rape-murders, and the DA's investigators also knew why. That is why they took the drastic measure of going around LAPD and submitting their own investigation to the grand jury in secret, in an effort to reveal the cover-up and try to stop the killing.

  Desperate to survive, LAPD's top brass orchestrated a cover-up that they hoped would prevent these victims' brutal murders from ever being solved, with the expectation that their own crimes would be buried with them.

  31

  Forgotten Victims, 1940s:

  The Probables

  I HAVE PREVIOUSLY PRESENTED A SERIES of seven killings and one Dahlia-related assault-robbery. Based on all the evidence from my investigations, it is my confident belief that George Hodel and Fred Sexton committed those crimes. Those eight victims are: Ora Murray, Georgette Bauerdorf, Armand Robles, Elizabeth Short, Jeanne French, Gladys Kern, Mimi Boomhower, and Jean Spangler.

  The more I reviewed and researched the period 1943 to 1950, the more I became convinced that these two men were serial killers. I suspect history will ultimately prove them to have far outdone their counterparts of the late 1970s, Los Angeles's Hillside Stranglers Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, who were charged with twelve murders of Los Angeles-area women. I am not alone in my suspicion; many of the crimes that follow were identified as "suspect" by the press as possibly being "Dahlia related."

  As we have seen, some law enforcement officers of other Southern California localities, including the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, the Long Beach police, and the San Diego police, also believed there might well be a connection between Elizabeth Short, Jeanne French, and their own unsolved murders. In the early months of the serial killings, even some "renegade" LAPD detectives believed that the Dahlia and Red Lipstick murders, as well as that of a third victim, Evelyn Winters, were connected, and went so far as to release their " 11 Points of Similarity" to the press, which printed the speculations in March 1947. The more I looked at the crimes and the patterns, the more I found.

  As preface to this next grouping of murders I will provide some personal and professional observations as relates to serial killers. First the personal.

  I have no desire to add to my father's and Fred Sexton's already horrendous body counts. Nor have I arbitrarily sought out unsolved L.A. murders to throw in "just in case."I'm an old-school homicide detective, trained by much older schoolers. As a rookie detective they told me, "Kid, you're standing in the shoes of the victim. It's your case. If you don't find the killer it's likely nobody ever will. Go get 'em!" I am proud that I was indoctrinated and "programmed" to believe that a detective's highest responsibility is to the victim and his family. That responsibility never stops. It remains as true fifty years after a killing as it did on the first day of the investigation. It is a sacred trust, handed down to the next generation of officers. They too stand in the shoes of the victims. Knowing this, even at the risk of overloading the reader with so many additional crimes, I believe it is my responsibility to make known what I see, what I believe, and what my professional instincts tell me is so.

  From a professional standpoint, I would point out that there exist many misconceptions about serial killers and their M.O.s. Often these misconceptions come from in house, from experienced homicide detectives, who are simply wrong! Fixed attitudes, quick judgments, mixed with egos — a dangerous combination. Here are a few examples: "Can't be the same killer, all his victims were white girls." "Nope, he only liked dark-haired girls in their twenties. "Definitely not, he only used a white sash cord to strangle, not a stocking." "He stabbed them in the back, not the front." "He never struck on Saturdays." " That crime is too far away, our guy never went south of 5th Street." Endless reasons for detectives to say, "Not our guy." However, as we have seen so dramatically in the previous cases, one should not disregard or eliminate a suspect based on differences. Look at our proven cases and their obvious inconsistencies, yet the suspects were the same! Some completed rapes, some not. Ages varied from twenties to fifties. Inside residences and street abductions. Strangulation, bludgeoning, and stabbing. Acquaintances and complete strangers. Sending notes and not. Posing bodies and not. George Hodel and Fred Sexton were all over the radar screen. They were consistently inconsistent! The point being, a murder investigation must remain objective and inclusionary and consider all the facts, all the possibilities.

  Here then, in this chapter and the next, are summaries of an additional nine murders and one attempted murder that I believe need to be examined by law enforcement as attributable to the same two men.

  For various reasons, these ten are a rung or two down the evidentiary ladder from the victims cited earlier. Therefore, lacking additional information and documentation, I am classifying them as "probables."

  These crimes span the years 1947 to 1959. The victims include: Evelyn Winters, Laura Trelstad, Rosenda Mondragon, Marian Newton, Viola Norton, Louise Springer, Geneva Ellroy, Bobbie Long, Helene Jerome, and a "Jane Doe."

  With very few exceptions, these crimes followed similar patterns: abduction; savage, sadistic beatings; occasional mutilation and laceration of the victim's bodies; generally followed by ligature strangulation and dumping of the nude or partially clad bodies in public places, with no attempt at concealment. In many of the crimes, the suspect(s) ceremoniously wrapped or draped the victim's dress, coat, or cape over her body, and in at least one inserted a large tree branch inside the victim's vagina. I interpret all of these actions as a variation of posing, as Father and or Sexton had done in the White Gardenia, Dahlia, and Red Lipstick murders.

  Evelyn Winters (March 12, 1947)

  On the morning of March 12, 1947, just fifty-eight days after Elizabeth Short's murder, and thirty-two days after that of Mrs. Jeanne French, another woman's body was found in downtown Los Angeles.

  She was quickly identified as Evelyn Winters. Her crime bore strong similarities to both the Jeanne French and Elizabeth Short killings.

  Evelyn Winter's nude and severely bludgeoned body was found dumped on a vacant lot at 830 Ducommun Street, near some railroad tracks, just two miles from downtown Los Angeles. The victim's shoes and undergarments were found at Commercial and Center Streets, one block from where the body lay. The victim, who was forty-two, had been struck repeatedly with a club or pipe about the head and face.

  Before he — or they — left the scene, the killer wrapped the victims dress around her neck. Police believed she ha
d been slain elsewhere, then the body dragged from an automobile to the dirt lot. Footprints and tire tracks were visible nearby. The cause of death was due to "blunt force trauma causing a concussion and hemorrhage to the brain."

  A check of the victim's background revealed that Evelyn's life had taken a downward spiral, most likely because of alcoholism. From 1929 to 1942 she had been a secretary at Paramount Studios. In 1932 she met and married the head of Paramount's legal department, attorney Sidney Justin. Divorced five years later, Evelyn married a soldier during the war, but they too were divorced within a few years.

  The victim's arrest record in recent years showed that she had been booked by police for a number of alcohol-related offenses, all in downtown Los Angeles.

  The victim was known to frequent the downtown bars on Hill Street and was last seen on Monday night, March 10, by James Tiernen, a friend, when she left his apartment at 912 West 6th Street.* Tiernen, a thirty-three-year-old bowling-pin setter, was detained and arrested by police but considered "not a good suspect" and promptly released. Tiernen told police he had known Winters for two years and "had run into her in the public library" on Sunday, March 9, where Winters had told him "she had no place to sleep."

  He offered to share his hotel room with her and she accepted, staying Sunday night. Tiernen told police, "She was gone all day Monday, then came back about 8:00 p.m. very drunk," imploring him, "Talk to me. I want to talk to someone." Tiernen told her she was "too drunk to talk," at which point she left. That was the last time he had seen her. Her body was found the following morning.

  An article in the Los Angeles Examiner of March 14, 1947, headlined "Dahlia Case Similarities Checked in Fourth Brutal Death Mystery," offered an eleven-point list of similarities provided by LAPD that detectives believed strongly supported the theory that the murders of Elizabeth Short, Jeanne French, and Evelyn Winters were all related. This was published in the early months of the Dahlia investigation, before the need was fully recognized by LAPD to disconnect and isolate the murders. The article notes: