Smudge pots burned for the first night that winter to keep the frost from killing the citrus. The cold had settled in from a cloudless sky that by dawn shone like dull gray metal that revealed no shadows.
Shortly after six o’clock that morning, a boy walked his bicycle through the weeds of a stretch of vacant lots south of Hollywood. His trouser cuffs grew wet from the cold dew as he crossed the empty field. He’d later tell the police that crossing through the lots was his usual shortcut to a paper route along Crenshaw Boulevard. The graded land along Norton Avenue between 39th Street and Coliseum, bordered on the west by Crenshaw, was called the Leimert Park section of Los Angeles. Sidewalks, driveways, and fire hydrants were there, but the war had stopped development and the lots were overgrown with weeds.
The boy slowed down to glance back at the sound of a car, an older black sedan, possibly a Ford. The early morning light reflected on the windshield, and he couldn’t see anyone behind the wheel. But he would remember mud spattered on one front fender and dents along the passenger side. Cars heading north and south along Crenshaw still had their headlights on, but the one creeping onto the driveway of the vacant lot had the lights turned off. It stopped partly against the curb and sat idling, the exhaust smoke rising in the air.
It was not unusual for couples to park on those streets after dark, but rarely did anyone stop there during the daylight. The boy had watched some men from the fire department working on one of the hydrants the week before, but he couldn’t remember having seen anyone else stop there.
Almost late for his paper route, the boy gave no further thought to that lone car on Norton. But soon he would find out that someone—whoever had been in that car—had left something so terrible in the vacant lot that for the rest of his life the boy would remember that windshield. He would try to picture a face behind the glass, but he never could see one.
It wasn’t until after ten o’clock that morning, when the dew was evaporating, that someone noticed what had been placed a few feet from where the boy had seen the car come to a stop.
Betty Bersinger, an attractive young housewife, was walking south on Norton pushing her three-yearold daughter in a baby stroller. She was heading to a shoe repair shop two blocks south of 39th. Suddenly she stopped and looked at something white just ahead, close to the edge of the sidewalk.
It looked like somebody was lying on the ground. She took a few more steps and then stopped again, puzzled by the waxy whiteness of the form—a kind of reflection like white paper or cardboard with the light shining on it. She turned the stroller around, protecting the child from something she instinctively felt was awful. It had to be a dummy, she thought—the undressed bottom half of a store window mannequin. It must have fallen out of a truck and broken apart at the middle, and someone picked it up out of the street and put it near the sidewalk. There were legs and a section of hip that seemed disconnected from the dummy’s waist, like a mannequin in a department store window when displays were changed and the clothing was removed. The top torso was close to the bottom section, both facing up.
The young woman noticed something like dark red lines on the surface of the form, then a sort of red bubble on one side of the chest. It was part of a breast, and there was a breast on the other side. The arms were raised up above the head, with the face turned toward the street. She wouldn’t remember for sure if the eyes were open or closed. She would recall that possibly the eyes had been open, and that the face was a waxy white. Only a moment passed as she stood there with the little girl. The buzzing of flies filled the air, swarming noisily over the form in the weeds.
Quickly she pushed the baby stroller to the nearest house, another long block south. She rapped on the door, told the woman who answered that there was someone lying in the weeds up the street and she had to call the police. “It has to be attended to!” she said. She used the neighbor’s telephone and told the policeman on the complaint board that the person on the ground wasn’t wearing any clothes. She said, “There are flies all around it and someone better do something—” She hung up without giving her name.
Within minutes a radio call was dispatched from University Station as a code 390, “man down” at 39th and Norton. Officers Will Fitzgerald and Frank Perkins, heading west along Exposition Boulevard, responded to the call and turned immediately onto Coliseum. They drove west for eight blocks, then south on Norton.
Halfway down the block they observed a tall, thin boy standing near a fire hydrant, waving his arm at the approaching patrol car. When the policemen pulled to the curb, the boy pointed into the weeds as he walked toward the car.
“He was in his mid-teens,” recalls Frank Perkins, “and was sort of shocked-looking or stunned in appearance.”
The two policemen got out of the car, putting on their uniform caps. Fitzgerald asked the boy if he had made a call about a drunk or someone sleeping in the lot.
“That’s a dead woman,” the boy said. “Looks like it to me. . . .”
“Jeezus!” Perkins said, and Fitzgerald turned to his partner at the edge of the sidewalk. “Someone’s cut this girl right in half!” Fitzgerald stooped down, staring at the body. “Get on the radio,” Perkins told him, “and put straight through to the watch commander. Get them over here fast.”
For a moment Fitzgerald seemed to sway a little, then he quickly climbed back into the car and grabbed the microphone wand from the dash cradle. He reported “a dead body at the 390 location.” It appeared to be a homicide, he said, and requested a direct line to Lieutenant Paul Freestone, the watch commander.
Perkins asked the teenager how long he’d been there. The boy replied he had just crossed the street and saw the dead woman, then noticed the police car heading toward him. It had all taken no more than a few minutes. Perkins wanted to know if he’d seen anyone else—any cars or pedestrians—anyone in the vacant lots or in the area. The boy said he hadn’t seen anyone. He’d been alone out there.
“The kid looked like he was going into shock,” Perkins recalls. He took the boy’s name and address and told him to wait across the street until the detectives arrived. The boy said some friends were waiting for him, but Perkins told him not to worry about that. The boy nodded, relieved to get away from the corpse. But even as he walked away, he kept staring back.
It was difficult not to look at it, Perkins thought, the way it lay right on the edge of the sidewalk in plain view from anywhere on the street. Anyone could see it, even from across the street where the boy had sat down on the curb.
Without disturbing the weeds or the immediate area, Perkins observed the dead girl’s slashed face and breasts, and made notes on the knife marks to the lower torso. Because there was very little pubic hair, he believed she couldn’t have been much older than the teenage boy who had been standing there. He thought, too, that what hair she had in the crotch area might have been cut off because a lot of the lines appeared to be marks made by a knife. The foot of her left leg was inches from the sidewalk, while the upper part of the body angled into the lot. Both sections had been more or less aligned, though she’d been severed at the waist. The cut went straight through the narrowest part between the bottom of her ribs and navel. The two parts had been placed on the ground with a space of approximately ten inches between them. Her legs were spread wide apart, and her arms were bent at right angles and raised above the shoulders. Perkins observed that both cheeks had been cut from the corners of her lips almost to the earlobes.
He noted the victim’s age somewhere between fifteen and seventeen. She was completely naked and “her skin was as white as a lily.” The only discoloration seemed to be from the knife wounds and in the exposed internal areas of the body. The liver was hanging out, and a large wedge-shaped piece of skin in the left thigh had apparently been gouged out almost to the leg bone. Apart from the telltale bruises of a severe beating, there were rope marks on the wrists, her neck, and around the ankles.
She had jet black hair, wet and reddish in places. It wasn’t blood. There wasn’t any blood on the body —no signs of coagulated blood around the wounds, and no blood surrounding the body. There was no internal fluid or blood on the ground between the two body sections. There was no way of observing what was underneath the body until the detectives arrived and the body was removed by the coroner.
Perkins could make out the grayish white of the girl’s spine where it was severed through the vertebrae and past the organs. There was an apparent cavity where it appeared that organs had been removed from the body. The way she’d been bisected reminded him of the belly of a shark he’d seen cut open recently at the Santa Monica Pier—the white, thick outer layer of skin and the exposed inside parts.
Watch Commander Paul Freestone had requested Fitzgerald and Perkins to stand by for Detective Lieutenant Jess Haskins, en route to the scene. Shortly after Fitzgerald finished the report to University, another radio unit arrived, then backed up almost to Fitzgerald’s bumper. A police sergeant out of Inglewood joined the two officers on the sidewalk staring at the body. The sergeant, who knew Perkins from the police academy, said he’d been cruising Slauson when the 390 went on the air and had picked up Fitzgerald’s call about the dead body. The sergeant’s mouth hung open for a moment and he shook his head saying, “Man, oh, man . . .” A third car, a coupe with a press sticker on the windshield, parked in the middle of the street alongside the Inglewood unit. The policemen turned around and watched a short redheaded woman in a raincoat get out of the car, followed from the driver’s side by a photographer loading a Speed Graphix camera.
The Inglewood policeman said, “Just wait a minute—” but the woman pushed past him and Fitzgerald and looked up at Perkins.
“I know you,” she said, “and you know me. I’m Underwood of the Herald Express. My photographer’s shot you half a dozen times—twice on fires and a couple of fatalities when you worked traffic. What’ve you got here?” She stepped forward, looked down and then stopped in her tracks, one foot on the sidewalk and the other almost stepping on the left leg of the body.
Perkins would recall her standing there for just a couple of seconds. “You could see the color drain right out of her like you’d opened a spigot on her bottom side.”
“God almighty!” she said. “This kid’s been cut in two! Where the hell did somebody do something like this?”
Hotshot crime reporter Aggie Underwood had the reputation of being tough as nails. Perkins had never heard of Underwood getting queasy over a corpse. “It sort of tickled us standing there,” he says, “and watching her back up—walking backwards almost right off the edge of the curb—almost down on her keester.”
For the moment, Perkins told Underwood, he could tell her nothing more than what she could see for herself.
“I’d like to get some shots,” she said. “Is it okay?”
“Go ahead,” Perkins said. “You’re going to do it anyway, but thanks for asking, Aggie.”
The photographer’s flashbulbs popped in quick succession until Lieutenant Jess Haskins arrived and asked the uniformed officers to keep everyone temporarily off the sidewalk. He told Fitzgerald and Perkins the lab crew was on the way and that he’d called in two other detectives. “Nobody in town is going to print any pictures of this one,” Underwood said to Haskins. “This is the worst one I’ve ever seen, Jess. They didn’t leave much to anyone’s imagination this time.”
The detective said, “I don’t know if it’s a they or a he or a she, but I’ll let you know as soon as I do.” Haskins looked at her as she leaned against the right door of the coupe with the squad car blocking her view of the lot. She then stood very stiffly with her back against the car, clutching her purse and notebook pad against her stomach, and gave Haskins a sad kind of smile as if to say, “What the hell kind of business are we in anyway?”
Haskins had been unable to trace the original complaint made to the station. He only knew that an unidentified female had placed the call. He observed the dead body and the immediate surroundings and told Fitzgerald and Perkins to begin a search without disturbing the area around the corpse. He asked the Inglewood sergeant where the nearest land line was and warned the officers to stay off the radio. “Any personnel going back and forth on the radio are going to have us jammed up with bystanders,” he said, adding, “and more cops than we need.”
The only possible evidence that was quickly apparent to Haskins was a cement sack bearing spots of watery blood; another blood spot on the sidewalk, found by Fitzgerald; and a heel print in the driveway. The print was apparently made by a heel having stepped in a small spot of blood, but the print was partly obscured by the track of the automobile tire.
The body was cold, and from the marks on her neck the immediate cause of death seemed to be strangulation—not manually, but by rope. It seemed to him that the body may have been soaked in water and washed off so that latent prints or other evidence would have been removed. The body had probably been drained of blood.
Apart from the blood spots, the heel print and cement sack, nothing else was found. It was the kind of homicide that could get the department and the press in a wrangle, Haskins believed. The naked body told him that a sex crime had been committed, not just a dismemberment or ax murder—those were rough enough—but there was something here that went beyond unnatural and peculiar.
He felt that the law was facing a “defiance killing”—a sex crime, but with other dimensions. The killer had set his handiwork on their doorstep in a manner that not only challenged them, but was an act of defiance against everything that was human. If they weren’t on their toes and didn’t nab this guy pronto, they’d be in one hell of a tussle with the papers and the radio—“a mess like a pressure cooker that’s going to blow up.”
The body had a cleanliness or a “fresh” look that Haskins noted, but it was arranged and spread out in what he described as “someone’s idea of a dirty post card that suddenly materializes into real life.”
It was not unusual—the “display idea” as part of a sex crime—but Aggie Underwood’s comment that they hadn’t tried to hide very much kept coming back to Haskins. Hiding it had been the least of the perpetrator’s concerns. Something didn’t gel—something was cockeyed. It was only surprising to Haskins that the body hadn’t been discovered sooner. Anyone passing the location should have noticed it like a billboard. He felt it would take the police psychiatrist to figure out this murder.
Compiling the reports from Perkins and Fitzgerald with his own appraisal of the scene, Haskins drove to the nearest pay phone on Crenshaw and called Captain Jack Donahoe at Central Homicide. The detective had no way of anticipating the police rivalries and problems that would soon arise, but he’d confess at first a reluctance to hand the case over to Central. Stressing the need for a maximum canvassing of the surrounding neighborhood, he told Donahoe it was unlikely that the bisection had occurred far from where the body was found.
“There’s some kind of deliberate arrangement of all this,” Haskins told Donahoe, “and with all these peculiar cuts, carefully done—she hasn’t been hacked up—and even the cut straight through the middle had been done with some sort of skill. The guy could be a doctor or someone with medical knowledge. . . . Hard to tell how much of this was done to her while she was still alive because the body’s been so cleaned off, and from what I can tell until the coroner gets here, there’s no blood in her to give us any lividity.
“Looks like strangulation, but seems she was trussed up by ropes or maybe wire from some of the marks, maybe spread-eagle or bound upside down the way you’d hang a carcass—that would’ve drained the blood out. . . . It’s almost the worst I’ve seen, Jack, and I think this nut’s probably lining up another one right now.”
Jack Donahoe put through a call to Detective Sergeant Harry Hansen, the senior officer supervising most murder investigations in metropolitan Los Angeles. Hansen had been with the police force since 1926, and after assignment to the homicide division, wrote a police handbook on the preservation of evidence and protection of crime scenes.
He was closing another case, with his partner, Finis Brown, in southwest L.A. where the coroner was also needed. Over the radio Donahoe told Hansen, “University’s got a bad one, Harry. A girl cut in half around the middle, in a vacant lot. Stark naked and there’s already photographs on it. It looks like there might be problems. Get a uniformed officer to stand by where you are, and you and Brown get over to 39th and Norton.” Again Donahoe said, “It looks like a bad one, Harry.”
By the time Hansen and Brown reached the new location, reporters from L.A.’s newspapers had converged upon the area, littering the street and sidewalk with cigarette butts and the blackened flashbulbs from cameras. Several more police and onlookers had found their way to the site—some were driving around the block while others parked and stood on the roofs of their cars for a better view.
Hansen was bothered from the start.
A murder scene had its own special kind of life for the detective, its own signature. Even though the girl had been murdered elsewhere and the body brought to the lot, the spot where she was found was a “sacred setting,” as Hansen called it. Time and circumstances could be read from even the most seemingly insignificant piece of evidence—elements that could shed light not only on the victim but on the murderer. The success of closing a case could be jeopardized from the start by a bunch of curiosity seekers hungry for the gory details.
“Homicide is a union that never dies,” Hansen would say. “A bond is formed that finds the two subjects in a set of circumstances that’re tighter than a marriage wedding—tied together into infinity. Nobody needs it being busted up from the outside.
“That’s why I say it’s ‘sacred,’ because it’s ground that’s been walked on only once and it’s never crossed again. You can get married three times to the same individual, but you can only kill them once, and it’s an irreversible act. It can never be changed, or the circumstances altered. And where it’s taken place or where you find the body is damn near the same thing because they both were there—the one that’s dead and the one that’s alive. Even when we catch the living one and hopefully put them to death, there is still that union that tied them together. And it’s still as irreversible as the very second it happened. . . .”
None of the clues could be separated from the scene as a whole without disrupting the total picture, Hansen said. Every shred of evidence bore a signature, especially in the placement of the corpse. In facsimile, the scene would unfold for a true detective as a kind of work of art, a reflection of a mind and personality, the traits of the killer as well as those of the victim—lives peculiar to certain circumstances that could be mirrored in even the most remote clue. The evidence had to be protected as a whole, or the signature would become diffused, then fade and be gone.
Several plainclothes and uniformed officers were stepping carefully through the weeds farther into the field. “We’re going over the ground now,” Haskins told Hansen. “If anything turns up, we’ll have it for the lab crew—they’re on the way.”
Hansen said it looked as though “everyone” had gone over the ground, and perhaps there wouldn’t be much left for the lab. “Call Ray Pinker,” Hansen said. “Get him over here.” Squatting down at the edge of the sidewalk, he stared at the dead girl’s face for just a moment. His usual stone-solid objectivity from twenty years of police work seemed to slip a little, according to Brown.
One had to know Hansen well to have observed that. Brown believed few people knew Hansen at all, and understood him even less. He lived in his own world, did things the way he saw fit for them to be done. He left little room for contradiction.
“Someone spent some time on this one,” Hansen said. “I can’t remember seeing a face cut up like this. It looks cut clean through to the inside of the cheeks.”
Haskins, Brown, and Hansen speculated on the cause of death while waiting for the coroner. Had the body been severed by a knife with a serrated edge? “There appear to be no serrated edges to the wounds,” Brown said. “What you’d use is something like a bread knife, cutting straight through like you cut through a loaf of bread. She’s been so washed off there’s no coagulation or evidence to show just what the hell went on.” The large wound to the front of the head suggested concussion, and Brown pointed to the ligature marks around her neck, but Hansen didn’t think they proved strangulation.
“We’ll have to have an immediate postmortem just to see what we’re dealing with,” Hansen said.
Each of the men, detectives, reporters, and crime lab crews, sensed a strangeness they would carry away with them. It formed an uncomfortable bond between the men. No one seemed to look the other in the eye and the talk became strained or evasive. Without really voicing it, each policeman on the scene knew that this was the worst murder in the city’s history. Something was hanging in the air that wanted them to understand the crime as a spectacular act.
The sun was breaking from behind the overcast sky and Hansen wanted the body covered until the coroner arrived. He was concerned with a discoloration of the skin that could be caused by the sun. Several newspapers were taken apart and laid over the body, forming a series of overlapping peaks like roofing, shielding whatever evidence remained with the victim. Only the bare feet with the red-painted toenails protruded from beneath the newspaper pages.
Ray Pinker, head of the crime lab, said she had been placed in the lot sometime before early dawn, after the dew had settled. He determined that the upper torso had been placed face down first, then turned over, face up. Then the lower torso was carried from a vehicle on the cement sack, and positioned where it was found. The sack had been left in the weeds. Pinker couldn’t immediately guess at the exact weapon used, but suggested—as Harry had guessed—that contusions to the head, possibly from blows with some blunt object, and lacerations to the face had caused her death.
“Without rectal temperatures,” Pinker said, “I can’t be sure, Harry, but I’d estimate ten hours dead.” He took some small bits of bristle-like fragments from the skin, which appeared to be broken pieces of broom straw or brush bristles, not necessarily pig hairs—maybe car matting. From what he observed, he told Hansen and Brown it appeared that Haskins was right—the girl’s hair had been washed or shampooed after she was dead. “Most of what we’re dealing with in the way of wounds,” Pinker said, “were done following death.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Harry said.
Looking Hansen straight in the face, Pinker said, “This is the worst crime I’ve ever seen committed upon a woman.”
Hansen figured whoever left the body in the lot had stopped in the driveway, then backed up for some reason. The girl’s body hadn’t been dragged there, and she hadn’t been carried in that position, with her legs wide apart. The lower part had been set down and then arranged that way. Whoever left her like that then climbed back into the car and drove away.
When the California Hearse Service panel truck arrived, two attendants placed the sections of the body into a single conveyance casket. Dark grass, damp and bent over, formed two depressions where the body had lain. The surrounding grass was dry and a lighter green. Hansen knew she had been placed there before dawn, when the grass was still wet with dew.
While detectives continued to comb through the vacant lots for evidence, newspaper reporters knocked on doors in the neighborhood, badgering anyone they met for a clue to the victim’s identity and possibly for a lead on where the murder had been committed. Several reporters had been ordered to follow the hearse to the morgue, which was located in the downtown Hall of Justice basement. There the body was received by the coroner’s deputies, unloaded, and tagged “Jane Doe Number 1” on the PERSONAL DESCRIPTION OF UNKNOWN DEAD line. The call memorandum was completed at the Los Angeles County morgue at 2:45 p.m. by Deputy Coroner Sears. The victim’s weight, as read off the morgue scale, was listed as 115 pounds, her complexion light, nose small, chin round, eyebrows brown, build small, teeth poor, eyes green-gray, and age estimated between fifteen and thirty. Her height of five feet, five inches was determined by measuring from the top of her forehead to the edge of the bisected torso, then from the heel of one foot to the severed edge between the second and third vertebrae.
The two body sections were aligned on a steel table, with the head elevated onto a metal brace for a number of black and white photographs. These were followed by several experimental color shots. The lacerations to her face were stitched to align her jaw, and as her fingerprints were rolled, Brown waited in a glass-partitioned area next to the examination room. He was told that the postmortem would be performed the following day by the chief surgeon, but an assistant said she had possibly been kept on ice because her fingerprint ridges appeared shrunken, and the skin of the fingers puckered into grooves. But the deputy coroner rolling the prints believed that a set could be processed to enable a classification—and if she had any sort of record at all, they’d have the identification.
A touched-up rendering of how the girl might have appeared in life was prepared from a head-shot photograph, and on the phone with Captain Donahoe, Brown said, “You can’t tell much from the original —her face is bruised and puffed out of shape. We’re figuring she was killed quite a while before she wound up in the lot, and maybe she’s been in water, so identification is difficult without the artist working up her likeness hopefully into a shape recognizable by someone.”
Two hundred photographs were hastily printed and the detectives planned to work around the clock until they came up with her identity—and maybe a lead to her killer.
When the first extra edition hit the street with the rendering of Jane Doe, the police lines jammed with calls about runaways and missing daughters and wives. Missing persons reports were checked and rechecked, and Georgia Street Juvenile had reporters in every doorway and window waiting for a break to Jane Doe’s identity.
In the Examiner’s city room at 11th and Broadway, Assistant Managing Editor Warden Woolard was pushing for a second extra when he thought of the Soundphoto machine. The rewrite men were putting together stories as fast as the phones were answered, the regular crews were being summoned, and reporters were calling in tips every thirty minutes.
The victim’s prints had been airmailed special delivery to the FBI in Washington, but the night editor had complained that the prints might not even get to the FBI because of storms and airplanes being grounded. “It could take a week before there’s any word,” he said.
Woolard said, “We could send the prints over the wire, on the Soundphoto. It’s never been done, but I can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work.”
The wires were closed for the night, but International News Photowire would open at four o’clock in the morning. “It’s not going to take any longer to send one print sheet than any other photograph,” Woolard said. He suggested calling Donahoe for a copy of the prints. “They can be wired first thing in the morning,” Woolard said. “We can have an FBI agent standing by at the Hearst Bureau to hand carry it straight to their files. If the feds have got a name to match those prints, then the Examiner’s got a jump on every paper in the country.”
Donahoe agreed to wiring the prints to Washington, for a possible acceleration of the process, though Hansen felt it wasn’t the right protocol. He knew Donahoe was in “cahoots” with the Examiner’s editor. Hansen wanted no part of that—he only wanted to know who the dead girl was.
At 4:02 the following morning, the sheet of prints went over the wire. With the time difference it was a little after seven o’clock in Washington, D.C. The bureau chief and an FBI agent standing by received the wirephoto, but the agent immediately detected problems to do with the prints. “They’re too blurred to yield a classification,” he said. “There’s defects and blanks in the swirls.” He suggested the Examiner enlarge and build up the prints in a way that would magnify the defects into a readable presentation.
The Examiner’s photo department immediately made separate 8 x 10-inch enlargements of each print, a tedious, time-consuming process. They then leased a special Soundphoto wire to Washington, and each of the separate prints was transmitted over the wire.
Within minutes the FBI was able to identify Jane Doe Number 1. Her fingerprints were on file from a civilian job application taken at an army base located north of Santa Barbara, California. Though it had been four years earlier, the girl was described as five feet five inches in height, with her weight at 115 pounds, brunette, blue eyes, light complexion. Her place of birth was Hyde Park, Massachusetts—July 29, 1924. She was only twenty-two at the time of her death. Her name was Elizabeth Short. She did not have a middle name.
Within days, though, the detectives would learn that in Hollywood she was called the “Black Dahlia.”