She was a lazy girl and irresponsible; and, when she chose to work,
she drifted obscurely from one menial job to another, in New England,
south to Florida, westward to the Coast.
No matter how they die, most drifters leave nothing behind, and many
of the 25,000 graves dug yearly in Los Angeles are marked by blank
stones, for their occupants didn’t even leave a name. Yet today, more
than a decade after her strange and awful death, this girl remains
hauntingly, pathetically alive to many persons.
To the sociologist, she is the typical, unfortunate depression child
who matured too suddenly in her teens into the easy money, easy living,
easy loving of wartime America. To the criminologist, though the case
is almost too melodramatic in its twists, her tortured, severed body is
an eerie blend of Poe and Freud. To millions of plain Americans,
fascinated by the combined savagery and cool intellect that went into
her murder, she is “The Black Dahlia.”
The other side of the shield.
Right from the first erroneous report to the police at 10:35 a.m.
that gray mid-January day in 1947, the investigation was askew through
no fault of the police. In the days, months, years of sleuthing that
followed, it never quite got back into balance, again through no fault
of the detectives. More than any other crime, murder is sometimes like
that.
In the University section, along a dreary, weedy block without a
house on either side, a housewife was walking to the store with her
five-year-old daughter, scolding her a little because she wanted to
play in the dew-wet lots.
Halfway up the block, the mother stopped in horror at something she
saw in one of the lots. “What’s that?” the child asked. The mother
didn’t answer. Grabbing her hand, she ran with her to the nearest
neighbor’s house to call the police.
And the first, wrong alarm went out: “Man down, 39th and Norton.”
Within ten minutes, about 10:45 a.m., the first patrol car had
reached the scene. Quickly a team of detectives from Central Division,
a full crew from the Crime Lab, newspaper legmen, and photographers
followed. The street was blocked off to keep back the curious, and the
investigation got underway.
Sergeant Finis Arthur Brown of the Homicide Division, who was going
to live with this ugly thing for months and years, hadn’t yet arrived.
At 9 a.m. that day, he had been in court to testify in another case.
After that, he went to Sixth and Rampart Streets to check out a
dead-body report. An elderly man had died of natural causes, but Brown
followed through with routine questioning of the rooming house
operator.
Then there was a phone call for him. Captain Jack Donahoe told him to
get over quick to the 3900 block on South Norton. “Looks like we got a
bad one, Brownie,” he warned.
At 11:05 a.m., just half an hour after the discovery of the body,
Brown was there. He saw what he was up against, and, in another
twenty-five minutes, additional manpower was at the scene. Nobody could
say later that LAPD hadn’t rolled hard and fast on this one.
Efficiently, detectives fanned out through the neighborhood. They
wanted to find the woman who had made the first call. They hoped to
locate some resident who had perhaps heard or seen something, anything,
though the chances were one-hundred-to-one against them. The lot was a
good hundred yards from the nearest house, and the body had probably
been dumped at three or four o’clock in the morning.
They got nowhere. Neither did the “hard facts” men who sifted
patiently through the weeds, turning up broken glass, rusted cans and
other rubbish; but not a clue. The only bit of physical evidence was a
set of tire marks on the pavement; and, if they came from the killer’s
car, they were never to prove useful.
But there was the body.
Old homicide hand though he was, Sergeant Brown had to make a
conscious effort to study it.
It was nude. It showed evidence of slow, deliberate torture. There
were neat, deep slashes around the breasts and on them. Rope burns on
the wrists and ankles indicated the victim had been spread-eagled to
heighten her agony. Her mouth had been deeply gashed from ear to ear so
that her face was fixed in a grotesque and leering death smile.
Finally, the body had been cleanly, surgically cut in two at the waist.
Brown was glad to turn away and check with Lee Jones of the Crime
Lab. There were two interesting things to note. A sprinkling of
bristles on the body indicated that it had been scrubbed. And, despite
the lavish mutilation, there was only one drop of blood in the field.
Scientists, especially hard-bitten police scientists, usually don’t
give in to emotion. Lee Jones couldn’t restrain himself. “This is the
worst crime upon a woman I’ve ever seen,” he blurted.
Sergeant Brown’s pressing job was identification. But the body had
been stripped, and there was only the long shot that maybe the girl had
got into trouble and maybe her fingerprints were on file. Brown had
copies of them rushed to the FBI in Washington by means of newspaper
telephoto equipment.
Then he used the press another way, asking them to publish an
artist’s recreation of the girl’s face (without the awful death smile).
And, though not for publication, he had every inch of the weedy lot
photographed, right down to three-dimensional shots of the severed
corpse.
No one came forward to identify the victim, and though the forlorn
files in Missing Persons were checked and re-checked, not a single
description resembled the butchered remains at 39th and Norton.
But even before they knew whom they were looking for, LAPD launched
the biggest crime hunt in modern Los Angeles history.
Every one of the city’s dozen police divisions was subdivided down to
each radio car beat. House to house, door to door in the apartment
buildings, more than 250 policemen rang bells and asked questions.
Did you hear any unusual noises or screams last night or yesterday or
the night before?
Have you noticed anything unusual around the neighborhood? Anybody
acting peculiarly? Anybody digging in a yard, maybe burying a pile of
woman’s clothing? Or burning anything?
Very possibly, one of the 250 officers talked to the killer that day,
or to someone who had a terrible suspicion about his (or her) identity.
Yet all 250 drew a blank. Where the girl had been murdered was as much
a mystery as the why of it, and the who, for that matter.
Next day the FBI kick-back supplied the who. Her name: Elizabeth
Short, age 22; height, five feet five inches; weight, 120 pounds; race,
Caucasian; sex, female; description, black hair (dyed) and blue eyes.
The FBI had her because just once, four years earlier in Santa
Barbara, Elizabeth had been picked up. She was a minor then, and a
policewoman caught her drinking in a bar with a girl friend and two
soldiers. In a sense, it was ironic. The wrong way of life that was to
lead her to death at least had left behind a clue to her identity, and
she would escape the drifter’s nameless grave.
Now that Brown had something to go on, the pace of the investigation
accelerated. Who was Elizabeth Short? Where did she come from? What did
she do? Boy friends? Associates? Habits? When was she last seen alive?
For seventy-two hours, Brown and many of the original twenty
detectives assigned to the mystery worked day and night without letup.
In fact, during the next thirty days, Brown was to cram in an
additional thirty-three days of overtime. During one three-day period,
he never got around to changing his shirt.
At the end of the first, furious three days of investigation, Brown
knew a great deal about Betty Short or “The Black Dahlia,” as an
imaginative police reporter had re-christened her for all time. Those
seventy-two hours had yielded the secret of The Dahlia’s past right
down to the date of her disappearance. Another seventy-two hours of
such detective work, at most a week, and by all the normal odds LAPD
would be putting the collar on a suspect.
Four years later, Sergeant Brown was down in Texas, chasing still
another lead that led nowhere.
The girl who was to bloom into a night flower was one of four sisters
reared by their mother in Salem, Massachusetts. About the time the war
broke out, when she was in her middle teens, Betty Short went to work.
She ushered in theaters, she slung plates as a waitress. It was the
kind of work where a girl too young and attractive would meet too many
men.
For a time, her father reappeared in Salem, and then left again for
northern California. Maybe there was something romantic about this man
who came and went; maybe he told her stories about sunny California, so
different from cold little Salem. At any rate, at eighteen, Betty went
West and joined him briefly.
Then she struck out on her own for Los Angeles, the city of
opportunity where many another waitress, poor but beautiful, had made
it in the movies. She settled near the campus of the University of
Southern California, and she may even have walked past the lot at 39th
and Norton. It wasn’t far away.
Los Angeles, like every other city, was at war. On a tip from a
soldier, Betty went to Camp Cook, north of Los Angeles, and got a sales
job in the PX.
Then the first ominous thing happened. Betty suddenly threw up the
job. There were barracks room whispers that some soldier had beaten her
up badly. Why? Nobody seemed to know.
Betty drifted on to Santa Barbara; and, after the policewoman caught
her in the bar with the two soldiers, she returned to New England. For
almost two years, she sort of settled down, working as a waitress and
cashier in a Boston restaurant.
Restlessness seized her again, and she took a bus all the way to
Miami, working there for a winter. Then she came back to Boston and got
a job across the Charles River in Cambridge in a cafe near the Harvard
University campus.
There was a brief romance with a Harvard undergrad. All spring they
dated; they even exchanged photographs. But when the school year ended
in June, he went home; and Betty was on the move again. For a time, she
lived in Indianapolis, and then in Chicago in the bright and noisy
hotels that cluster round the Loop.
Something happened there that never has been fully established.
Apparently, she met a handsome young Air Force flier. Maybe she even
married him. No one has been able to check it out definitely, one way
or the other.
At any rate, she loved him enough to go halfway across the country
when he pleaded with her by wire to join him in Long Beach, California.
There he met her at the train and took her to a hotel room he had
arranged. From there, they journeyed on to Hollywood.
And then one day he told her he had to fly East to be separated from
the service. He was like her college student; she never saw him again.
The war was over, the men were going home. At twenty-one, when she
should have been starting married life or maybe a modest career, she
was already obsolescent.
For three months, The Dahlia moved in with a girl friend; then went
to a small home for would-be actresses; moved again to a private home;
then to a hotel for girls in Hollywood.
She had no job. She killed time hanging around the radio studios and
attending the radio shows. She sponged off friends and even got money
from her mother back home. She lost her clothes to the landlady in lieu
of rent. She mooched at the night spots and the bars where a pretty
girl could easily cadge a drink. She was careless about the company she
kept.
Two or three times, friends later remembered, Betty had hitched rides
to the Sixth Street area when she was out of funds. After a day or so,
she would reappear, mysteriously replenished. Where she got the money
never was known.
Some six weeks before the end, The Dahlia met a salesman in
Hollywood. The salesman rented a room for her in a hotel, but he signed
the register “Mr. and Mrs.” Later, he took her to a bus depot, bought
her a ticket for San Diego and said good-bye.
In San Diego, aimless, drifting, The Dahlia happened into an
all-night theater. She got into a conversation with the cashier. Little
by little, The Dahlia let drop her affecting story of misfortune and
unhappiness.
Generously, the cashier brought her home with her that night and then
let her stay for the next month. But something seemed to be driving The
Dahlia toward her fate. She met another young salesman and begged him
to drive her to Los Angeles the following day.
Perhaps with romantic hopes in mind, he did so, but as soon as they
arrived, The Dahlia skillfully avoided a dinner date with him. She had
some other plan in mind. Her sister, she explained, was down from
Berkeley and stopping at the Hotel Biltmore. Regretfully, the salesman
waited while she checked her bag at the bus depot and then dropped her
off at the hotel.
It was 7 p.m., January 10.
For three more hours, The Dahlia moved freely. Three hours in which
chance, a friend happening by, or an attractive well-dressed stranger
might have diverted her from her plan, whatever it was.
Dozens of men must have observed her, for she spent the time waiting
near the phone booths and she was, in her black cardigan jacket and
skirt, white blouse, red shoes, red purse, and beige sport coat, the
kind of girl that men observe. Yet none offered a merciful, life-saving
flirtation.
Once The Dahlia changed a dollar bill at the hotel cigar stand and
made a phone call, maybe two. Then she waited, as though expecting a
call back. When none came, she walked out the front door, smiling to
the doorman as he tipped his cap. He observed her trim form swinging
south on Olive Street toward Sixth, the slim legs striding easily, the
red heels tapping purposefully on the sidewalk.
It was 10 p.m.
And thus Sergeant Brown traced The Dahlia back to childhood, forward
to the brink of eternity. And there the investigation stood still. Five
days, from the doorman’s last salute to the living, up to the discovery
of the mutilated thing, remained a blank.
Medical evidence could say what must have happened during part of
that time, but not why or by whom, nor could it locate the abattoir.
The Dahlia had been roped and spread-eagled and then hour after hour,
for possibly two or three days, slowly tortured with the little knife
thrusts that hurt terribly but wouldn’t kill. She had made the rope
burns on her wrists and ankles as she writhed in agony.
Finally, in hot rage or coup de grace, there had come the slash
across the face from ear to ear, and The Dahlia choked to death on her
own blood.
But the killer had not done with her body.
Afterwards, he (or she) drained the system of blood, scrubbed the
body clean and even shampooed the hair. Then it was neatly cut in two
and deposited at 39th and Norton.
Five days after the first report of “man down,” the twenty original
investigators were increased to fifty. Now the newspapers were playing
the case as no crime had ever been played in Los Angeles, and the
publicity was both a blessing and a burden to LAPD.
Every hour seemed to turn up a new “lead” that had to be checked out;
and suddenly dozens of persons who had not recognized The Black
Dahlia’s sketch in the papers four days earlier volunteered bits and
pieces of information about her life. Nothing, however trivial, could
be ignored. Everything was run down, saved or discarded.
Some fifteen times, the Crime Lab and men from the Detective Bureau
went over houses, from cellar to attic, where the slow torture killing
might have been played out. They found nothing. Having been lost en
route, The Dahlia’s trunk at last arrived from Chicago. Again, nothing.
There had to be a touch of lunacy in a killing like that, and madness
communicates with madness. Now the “confessions” began pouring in to
irritate and distract Finis Brown. One man telephoned that he was
coming in to surrender, and he did—three or four times when the
detectives wouldn’t believe him the first time. “Confessin’ Tom,” they
finally called the nuisance.
At Fort Dix, New Jersey, a soldier sobbed out the story of the murder
he hadn’t committed. Four times at his own expense, a man traveled west
from Utah and sat, drenched with sweat in the interrogation room, while
he begged detectives to believe his preposterous admission of the
killing.
At times it seemed the case needed a division psychiatrist more than
a Homicide man, but with remarkable restraint, LAPD booked only one of
the confessers for insanity.
In all, thirty-eight confessions had to be double-checked, and the
waste of time was deplorable. Scores more had to be at least listened
to before detectives knew they weren’t worth even a rundown. Now and
then, fighting to unclutter his few hard facts from all the fancies
being pressed on him, Finis Brown wondered if he wouldn’t tip over
himself.
But if a madman had killed The Dahlia, he might be among those
psychos, and the loony bin had to be emptied, one poor deluded mind at
a time, just to make sure.
Then there were the stacks of mail that came in daily, mostly
abusive, obscene or plain crazy but now and then intelligently written
notes that were even more annoying. These contained pompous advice from
amateur detectives telling the police how to go about their business.
Everything had to be read because The Dahlia’s butcher might just be
the egocentric who would delight in needling the police. At first,
Sergeant Brown kept a ledger to catalogue the mail, but the volume
overwhelmed him. So names and addresses of the writers were filed on
cards to be checked out gradually when there was time for it.
In ten days, the hysteria seemed to have run its course. For the
first time, the newspapers took The Dahlia off page one, and LAPD
enjoyed a moment of quiet. The quiet before the storm, as it turned
out.
That very same evening, a mail truck emptied a box near the Hotel
Biltmore, and among other pieces picked up a simple carton, wrapped in
brown paper and addressed to the police. Next morning, when they
unwrapped the package, Finis Brown and his detectives relieved
themselves with words that would have made an old Army sergeant shake
his head in envy.
Inside were The Black Dahlia’s purse, her Social Security card, her
birth certificate, a batch of miscellaneous cards and papers, scraps
with numbers and names on them, even an address book. The killer was
laughing at Homicide, telling the detectives contemptuously to go ahead
and make something of it.
But he (or she) had been careful to leave no traces. Postmark and
printing, carton and brown paper, yielded no clues. There was a faint
odor to the contents, and scientific tests confirmed the suspicions of
the detectives. Everything had been carefully washed in gasoline to
remove any trace of where it had been or who had touched it.
Tantalizingly, about a hundred pages had been ripped out of the address
book. Some two hundred names remained, and Finis Brown had each one
checked out, in vain.
With this mocking gesture, the killer bowed out; and, though the
papers hastily brought The Dahlia back to page one, though the
humiliated detectives bird-dogged even harder, this was really the end
of the line.
There is no statute of limitations on murder, and LAPD will not admit
defeat.
Two years later, Finis Brown thought he had a lead on the mysterious
soldier who had given Betty the bad beating at Camp Cook. The lead ran
dry.
Three years later, he was able to make a complete check on the
salesman who had signed the register “Mr. and Mrs.” in Hollywood and
then put her on the bus to San Diego.
Four years later, he was down in Austin and Dallas, Texas, and after
that up in Boston interviewing the Harvard man who had dated her one
spring.
Nothing, nothing, except to close out false scents and then try to
get back to the right one.
Sometimes police know their man and yet cannot pin the evidence on
him. Sometimes they sense with the hunter’s intuition that they are
close, very close, and lose him only because he has suddenly died or
managed to flee into obscurity. Usually, almost always, they can
reconstruct the motive and sex of the killer. Murder is their business,
and these things are not surprising.
But with the monster who slowly, delectably tortured The Black Dahlia
to death, they have never felt that they were anywhere near close. They
have never known the motive, nor whether the slayer was man or woman,
nor where the agony was perpetrated.
Was the killer The Dahlia’s lover or husband who felt he had been
betrayed? But what betrayal, even unfaithfulness or a mocking laugh,
merited revenge like this?
Was it perhaps a woman who had taken The Dahlia as wife in Lesbian
marriage? Was that why the body had to be bisected, so that she could
carry out the parts to her car?
Was the killer, man or woman, a sadist with a blood fetish who
slashed for no comprehensible reason at all?
All LAPD can say is that its detectives have exonerated every man and
woman whom they’ve talked to, including the scores who insist to this
day that they are guilty.
Beyond that, you are free to speculate. But do him a favor—don’t
press your deductions on Finis Brown.