The Dahlia Witnesses
Mid-July, 1999, Bellingham, Washington
I HAD ALREADY REVIEWED enough material on the condition of Elizabeth Short’s body to recognize that what her killer did to her was no mere butcher job. The only person who could have performed a bisection so perfectly had to be a doctor, a skilled doctor. I was also impressed by the indications that the killer had performed a postmortem hysterectomy. Not only did he know the female anatomy but he clearly possessed a level of surgical skill far beyond that of the average medical student or, as some had speculated at the time, mortician or nurse. The killer or killers were also brutally sadistic: they had tortured and humiliated Elizabeth before putting her to death.
Assuming for the moment that there was only one killer, the amount of time he had and the rage he felt toward his victim indicated to me that he doubtless knew her intimately. Everything about the crime pointed to an act of rage-driven revenge. What, specifically, was the relationship between victim and killer that would result in an explosion of such violence and brutality that even the police at the crime scene could not remember ever having seen anything so degrading and horrifying?
The answers lie in the dynamic of their relationship, and in their lives before they crossed each other’s path. The records of those lives are still with us, because neither the victim nor the crime could simply disappear. Considering this, I was convinced that, somewhere buried within the official case records, the interviews with witnesses, and the newspaper coverage, or the memories of people associated with Elizabeth Short, there had to be some answers. That’s where I would begin my search: to try and build a composite of Elizabeth Short from scratch—something, I believed, the police had not adequately done back in 1947. I began my search for clues to the real nature of the victim, starting with a complete and thorough review of all known witnesses.
The first group of witnesses would be those people who knew her when she was alive, who could help me reconstruct a chronology of her movements until the day of her murder. They would cover the period from 1943 until January 9, 1947. These people included her family, those who knew her before she came to Los Angeles, and those whom she met during her years in Los Angeles looking for work and a place to live.
Phoebe May Short
Phoebe Short, the victim’s mother, learned that her daughter was found dead and mutilated in a vacant lot when two reporters from the L.A. Examiner called her in Medford, Massachusetts, after the paper had learned, from its Soundex transmission of fingerprints to the FBI, that the victim’s name was Elizabeth Short. It was a gruesome phone call, because the reporters, in their effort to gain as much information as possible, initially told Mrs. Short that her daughter had won a beauty contest and they needed background information on her for a story. Excited and jubilant, Phoebe began to gush about her daughter, talking about her beauty, her hopes, her dreams, until the reporter finally revealed the awful truth. Crushed and distraught, Phoebe nonetheless answered the rest of their questions, and the reporters had their exclusive.
Information from the reporters’ interview of Phoebe Short, and from Mrs. Short’s testimony later at the coroner’s inquest, revealed that on January 2, 1947, Mrs. Short received a letter from her daughter in which Elizabeth told her mother she “was living in San Diego, California, with a girlfriend, Vera French, and was working at the Naval Hospital.” Mrs. Short said that her daughter “was kind of movie struck, and that everyone in Medford had told her how beautiful she was.” Her daughter had left high school in her junior year.
“Elizabeth had asthma,” Mrs. Short told the reporters, “and every winter Betty would go south, to Florida, and work as a waitress, then she would return home in the summers.” While she was living in Los Angeles, Elizabeth told her mother through letters, she had “worked in some films in Hollywood as an extra and had played in some minor roles.” With the exception of Elizabeth’s engagement to Matt Gordon, Phoebe Short was unaware of any serious relationships her daughter had had with men. “Major Gordon,” Phoebe told police, “was engaged to my daughter, but he was killed flying home after the war.”
At the coroner’s inquest, held in Los Angeles on January 22, 1947, seven days after the discovery of her daughter’s body, Mrs. Short identified Elizabeth at the coroner’s office and testified that she “was twenty-two years of age, a waitress by occupation, and to her knowledge had never been married.” Mrs. Short had last seen Elizabeth when she left home in Medford, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1946, for California. She told the inquest that while her daughter was at home with her, she never spoke of having any enemies, and said she was in love with a man named Gordon Fielding. She added that her daughter always wrote her on a weekly basis while she lived away from home.
Inez Keeling
Mrs. Keeling met Elizabeth Short in Santa Barbara during the war when she was manager at the post exchange at the Camp Cooke Army base in Santa Barbara, where Elizabeth, then eighteen, was employed in early 1943. Mrs. Keeling said, “Elizabeth told me that she had come out to California because of her health. She told me that the doctors in the East were concerned she might contract tuberculosis if she remained in a colder climate, and that is why her parents allowed her to come to California alone. I was immediately won over by Elizabeth’s charm and beauty. She was one of the loveliest girls I have ever seen and one of the most shy.” Mrs. Keeling told newspapers that Elizabeth “never visited with the men over the counter at work, and she didn’t date the men. She was a model employee; she didn’t smoke and only occasionally took a drink.” Keeling last saw Elizabeth when she left the base early in 1943.
Cleo Short
The police discovered that Cleo Short, Elizabeth’s fifty-three-year-old father, was living in Los Angeles, working as a refrigerator repairman. LAPD characterized him in its reports to the press as “uncooperative.” Short explained that he wanted no contact with his daughter, who had traveled to California to live with him, and said he had paid for her bus fare back to her mother in Massachusetts. In 1930, according to Mrs. Short, Cleo had abandoned her and his five young daughters in Massachusetts, and simply “disappeared.” Mrs. Short had raised the children on her own and had no desire to see or speak with Cleo at the time of the inquest.
Both police investigators and reporters interviewed Cleo Short at his Los Angeles apartment at 1020 South Kingsley Drive, only three miles from the vacant lot where his daughter’s body had been discovered. Short told them that he couldn’t provide any current information about his daughter or her activities. “I last saw my daughter Elizabeth three years ago, in Vallejo, California. I gave her two hundred dollars and she came out from Massachusetts. She came to live with me in Vallejo, but she spent all her time running around when she was supposed to be keeping house for me, so I made her leave. I didn’t want anything to do with her or any of the rest of the family then. I was through with all of them.” Cleo made it clear to the police that since he had no information about his daughter, he wanted nothing to do with the investigation of her death.
The interviews with Phoebe Short and her ex-husband, Cleo, revealed to police a mother who could not control her daughter’s wanderlust, as innocent as that may have been, and a father who had abandoned his family and had no desire to be further involved with it. The interviews also revealed that Elizabeth was probably looking for a father figure, someone in authority, probably someone in uniform, who would stabilize her life. She thought she had found it in Matt Gordon, but his death had dashed her hopes and set her on a path to find a replacement. Whether she still lived in the fantasy of her engagement to Major Gordon during her stays in Hollywood and San Diego or was simply in denial about her own reality, she would drift from relationship to relationship until she met her killer.
When she met Arthur Curtis James in 1944, three years before her death, and agreed to model for him, she was already dancing very close to the edge.
Arthur Curtis James Jr. (aka Charles Smith)
Arthur James was a fifty-six-year-old artist and ex-convict, awaiting sentencing in a pending forgery charge, who first met Elizabeth in a Hollywood cocktail lounge in August 1944. “She showed an interest in my drawings,” he told police, who interviewed him in 1947 after they discovered that James had known Elizabeth Short. James told police that he was in a bar drawing sketches and she was seated nearby. After she said she liked what James had sketched, he revealed to police, the two of them became friends. “She modeled for me, and I made several pictures of her,” he explained. He corroborated his statements by giving police the names of the current owners of his artwork. “One, a large oil painting, I later turned over to a man named Frank Armand, who lived in Artesia.” The second one he identified as “a sketch of Elizabeth, which I turned over to a Mrs. Hazel Milman, Star Route 1, Box 24, Rodeo Grounds, in the Santa Monica, Palisades district.” James then told police that his contact with Elizabeth ended abruptly three months later in November 1944 after he was arrested in Tucson, Arizona, for violation of the Mann Act, while he was using the alias of Charles Smith. The press later established that the federal charges against him, involving the “transporting of girls across a state line for immoral purposes,” did not involve and were totally unrelated to the Elizabeth Short homicide.
As a result of those charges James was convicted and served two years in Leavenworth prison. After his release in 1946, he ran into Elizabeth in Hollywood that November, when he bought her several pieces of luggage. James quickly ran afoul of the law again, because the check he wrote for the luggage bounced and he was arrested. At the time of his interview with reporters in January 1947 he was awaiting sentencing on those charges.
Mrs. Matt Gordon Sr.
The press interviewed Mrs. Gordon, fiancé Matt Gordon Jr.’s mother, over the phone at her home in Pueblo, Colorado, after a telegram she’d sent to Elizabeth was found in Elizabeth’s luggage stored in the downtown Los Angeles bus depot. Mrs. Gordon denied rumors that Elizabeth and her son were ever actually married, but confirmed that her son had first met Elizabeth in Miami, Florida, in 1944, where he was stationed after his return from China. She also confirmed that the two did correspond after he left the United States for India, adding that she was proud that “my son had been awarded the Air Medal with fifteen oak clusters, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the silver and bronze stars.”
Upon being notified by the War Department that Matt had been killed in an airplane crash in India in August of 1945, Mrs. Gordon sent a telegram to Elizabeth: “Received word War Department Matt killed in crash. Our deepest sympathy is with you. Letter follows. Pray it isn’t true. Love.” In her telephone interview with reporters four days after Elizabeth’s body was discovered, she said, “My heart goes out in sympathy to that girl and to her mother.”
Elizabeth Short’s former roommate Anne Toth was a twenty-four-year-old film actress and extra who had had bit parts in several movies. She’d briefly shared lodging with Elizabeth at the private residence of Mark Hansen, part owner of the Florentine Gardens, a popular nightclub in Hollywood, which featured what newspapers called a “Girlie Revue.” It was common practice for Hansen to rent rooms at his Hollywood residence at 6024 Carlos Avenue, Toth said, to “girls trying to break into the business.”
Toth first met Elizabeth in July or August of 1946, when Elizabeth moved in. “She lived at the house for several months, then went away for about three weeks, then came back.” Toth did not know where Elizabeth had gone during that three-week period, but indicated that “Elizabeth’s girlfriend, Marjorie Graham, had left for Boston, but that Elizabeth said she hadn’t gone with her and she would rather die than bear the cold of the East.”
“About three weeks before Christmas,” Toth said to the press, “Elizabeth told me she was going to go to Berkeley, to visit her sister, but instead went to San Diego. I don’t know why she went there.” Toth received a telegram from Elizabeth during the Christmas holidays saying that she was low on funds. “She was asking me for twenty dollars,” Toth said. “Three weeks later I got a second telegram saying she was coming back and a letter would follow.” That was Elizabeth’s last communication; Toth never received the promised letter.
“She was friendly with several men while she stayed at the house on Carlos Avenue with me,” Toth said. “I remember three of the men. One was an Air Force officer from Texas, another a radio announcer named Maurice, and the third was a language teacher. He was about thirty-five years old, 5’ 6”, medium build, and he drove a black Ford or Chevrolet. I remember he had promised to set Betty up in an apartment in Beverly Hills if she left our place on Carlos.” Toth added, “We used to think the world of that kid. She was always well behaved and sweet.”
“Sergeant John Doe” (unidentified U.S. Army man)
Elizabeth Short’s FBI file, obtained under a FOIA request, contains a memo dated March 27, 1947, of a lengthy interview by special agents of the FBI’s Pittsburgh office with a soldier in the U.S. Army whose name, rank, and home base were blacked out, as were the names of other identified individuals. The interview, which provides important information about Elizabeth’s background and movements, and insights into her overall character, describes a twenty-four-hour relationship between the soldier and Elizabeth in downtown Los Angeles on September 20–21, 1946.
The interviewee told the FBI agents that after being granted special leave for four days in Los Angeles he went downtown to 6th Street and Olive, arriving at that corner at approximately 2:00 P.M. wearing his full Army uniform with campaign ribbons and shoulder patches identifying his “outfit.” He told agents that two women approached him, one of whom he identified from photographs as Elizabeth Short.
Noticing his shoulder patch, Elizabeth asked him whether he knew a certain soldier, whose name was stricken from the transcript. The interviewee replied that the two of them had served overseas together in the same outfit. Elizabeth told him that she and ________ had been “childhood sweethearts” in her hometown of Medford, Massachusetts. She added that she had heard he had reenlisted, but didn’t know where he was stationed.
The interviewee told the agents he’d asked Elizabeth for a date that night and she’d agreed, introducing herself as “Betty Short.” She had also introduced her girlfriend, but the interviewee could not recall her name. The interviewee and the two women walked the short distance to the Figueroa Hotel, where Elizabeth was registered, and the three of them stayed in the hotel lobby and talked for a while until Elizabeth excused herself and went upstairs. According to their memo, the sergeant told the FBI agents, “He is positive that the name that Betty was registered under at the hotel was [blacked out].”
The second woman remained in the lobby with the sergeant while Elizabeth was upstairs and informed him that she “had been married, was separated, then divorced,” adding that she had been employed in Hollywood, though her employer’s identity was stricken from the transcript. Elizabeth was currently unemployed, she said, and she had to loan her money from time to time. The sergeant then asked Elizabeth’s friend if she knew where he could get a hotel room for the night. She told him she thought it would be extremely difficult but that “Elizabeth had twin beds in her room and might allow me to sleep there.” The sergeant wanted her to “ask Betty if it would be agreeable with her if I stayed in her room.” The girlfriend then left him in the lobby and went upstairs.
Both women rejoined the FBI’s unidentified witness in the lobby of the hotel a little later in the afternoon and walked a short distance from the hotel, then caught a bus to Hollywood. Sergeant John Doe was seated next to Elizabeth’s girlfriend, and Elizabeth sat in a vacant seat next to a Marine, with whom she immediately struck up a conversation. Noting this, the sergeant told the FBI agents that Elizabeth was “the type of girl who was very friendly and would talk to anyone.” During the bus ride to Hollywood, he said, Elizabeth’s girlfriend said she had asked her about his staying in her room, and Elizabeth had agreed he could. When the bus stopped in Hollywood, Elizabeth’s girlfriend said goodnight to Elizabeth and the soldier and went off on her own.
Elizabeth and Sergeant Doe went to a live Tony Martin broadcast at the CBS radio studio and from there to Tom Breneman’s restaurant at the corner of Hollywood and Vine. The interviewee told the FBI agents that when he and Elizabeth got there they saw a long line of people waiting for tables, but upon seeing Elizabeth the headwaiter immediately whisked the two of them inside and got them a table. The soldier could see, he told the FBI, that “Elizabeth was a regular customer, as all the waiters were on friendly terms with her and all recognized her.’
During dinner Elizabeth talked more about her childhood sweetheart back in Medford, remarking that he “had been quite jealous when they were young, and had told me not to have any other boyfriends,” which she found “quite amusing.” The soldier mentioned to Elizabeth that he had known her friend only under combat conditions and “really did not know him very well.”
Throughout their dinner, the soldier noticed that many of the patrons kept eyeing Elizabeth, noticing how well dressed she was, and constantly making whispered comments, as if “they recognized her as an actress from RKO or some other film studio.” The two of them finished dinner and left the restaurant in the early-morning hours of September 21, 1946.
They caught a trolley back to downtown Los Angeles and got off about five blocks from the Figueroa. As they were walking, a black car drove up beside them. Inside, the soldier said, he could see five men, “all appearing dark complexioned, possibly all Mexicans.” Three of these men jumped out of the car and yelled, “There she is!” The soldier said he turned to Elizabeth and suggested he “beat the men up.” “No,” Elizabeth told him, “it would be better to run”—which they did.
As they reached the hotel, Elizabeth asked the soldier “to wait outside for about 20 minutes” while she went to her room first, because, she said, “the hotel has strict regulations.” The soldier waited about half an hour, then went up and knocked on the door. “She opened it wearing a flimsy negligee.” He made love to Elizabeth that night. In fact, he stated he “had relations with her numerous times during the night,” adding that “at no time during the night was Elizabeth in a passionate mood.”
On the morning of September 21, Elizabeth’s girlfriend returned to the hotel and the three of them agreed to double-date, the soldier promising to fix Elizabeth’s girlfriend up with an Army buddy. They agreed to meet at the drugstore across the street from the Figueroa between 2:00 and 3:00 P.M., which they did. As they were leaving the drugstore, however, Elizabeth suggested that they play a little joke on ________: she and the soldier would write a postcard to ______ saying they were “happily married and living in Hollywood.” The soldier bought several postcards and stamps at the drugstore, wrote the messages, and addressed them to ______ at his home address in Medford, Massachusetts.
The foursome went to what the soldier described as a “nearby beer garden.” Then the soldier and his Army buddy, whose name was stricken from the record, suggested to Elizabeth and her friend that they head back to the hotel. But Elizabeth and her girlfriend turned them down, saying they “had dates with other men later that night.” Elizabeth said that her date that evening was “with a man with a car” who was taking her to some specific place that he could not recall. After the soldier realized he would not have another date with Elizabeth, he asked if he could correspond with her, and see her again. He gave her his address, which, he told the FBI, “was noted down by her girlfriend in a small notebook.”
After walking the girls back to the Figueroa, the two soldiers left them there at about 7:00 P.M. As Elizabeth started to enter the hotel the soldier noticed that she ran into someone she apparently knew and was having a heated argument with him: “a short, chunky, well-dressed man who appeared to be 40–45 years of age.”
Sergeant Doe told the FBI agents that he never saw, heard from, or corresponded with Elizabeth after that day, returning to the East Coast the following day, September 22. When four months later he read about her murder in the newspaper he immediately wrote the LAPD about his date with Elizabeth. He said he “was fearful that my name would be discovered in the victim’s girlfriend’s address book, and that was the reason I contacted LAPD as soon as I heard about her murder.” He never heard back from the police. But since he wasn’t in California from January 9 through 15, he could not have been a suspect.
In closing the interview, the agents asked Sergeant Doe if he could recall any additional conversations he had had with Elizabeth during their thirty hours together. The soldier made these additional observations, which the agents included in their casefile memo:
Elizabeth had told him “she was afraid to be alone on the streets of Los Angeles at night.” In the hotel lobby, he said, “Elizabeth had shown me a newspaper that recounted the number of murders and rapes that had occurred in Los Angeles over a short period.” Elizabeth also told him she was going out with a man “she did not like very much, but she did not want to hurt his feelings by stopping relations.” The soldier could not recall this man’s name.
Sergeant Doe assured both agents that he had never really been married to Elizabeth Short and “the postcards were only a joke to her former boyfriend.”
Marjorie Graham
A friend of Elizabeth’s from Massachusetts, Marjorie Graham had originally met Elizabeth in Cambridge, where they had both worked together as waitresses in a restaurant near the Harvard campus. The Los Angeles press contacted Marjorie Graham back in Massachusetts on January 17, and in the telephone interview she provided the following information:
Marjorie had come out to Hollywood to visit Elizabeth in October 1946 and shared a room with her. She told reporters that “Elizabeth had told me her boyfriend was an Army Air Force lieutenant, currently in the hospital in Los Angeles,” adding that “she was worried about him and she hoped that he would get well and out of the hospital in time for a wedding they planned for November 1.”
Marjorie said that she (Graham) had “returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 23, 1946,” adding, “I received one letter from Elizabeth since my return to Massachusetts, but in it Betty did not tell me whether the wedding had taken place or not.” Nor, said Marjorie, had Betty “included the name of her prospective husband in the letter.”
Lynn Martin (real name: Norma Lee Myer)
Lynn Martin was a fifteen-year-old runaway from Long Beach, California, who, according to most accounts, looked as if she were a woman in her early twenties. By the time she met Elizabeth, Martin had already spent a year at the El Retiro School for Girls, a correctional institution. Describing herself as “an orphan,” the already street-smart Martin admitted to a juvenile record of eight prior arrests in Los Angeles and Long Beach when she was arrested by police and told them she was one of the seven women who had shared room 501 at the Chancellor Hotel on North Cherokee Avenue in Hollywood with Elizabeth. Martin also briefly shared a room with Elizabeth and Marjorie Graham at the Hawthorne Hotel at 1611 North Orange Drive, also in Hollywood.
Because her guardians in Long Beach had filed a missing persons report on her, Martin was afraid of being arrested as a runaway and attempted to elude the police for the first several days after the murder. Almost a week after the murder, she was located by the police in a motel at 10822 Ventura Boulevard in North Hollywood and was arrested and detained at Juvenile Hall, where she was interviewed by LAPD Juvenile detectives.
Martin told the police that she knew Elizabeth “only casually.” Martin said that Elizabeth’s friend Marjorie Graham had come out from Massachusetts, and Elizabeth persuaded Graham to share a room with her and Martin at the Hawthorne Hotel. The three women lived together for a short time until, “after a brief argument” with Martin, “Short and Graham moved out of that room and took another room in the same hotel.” Martin told police that she “learned of the murder on January 17, when a friend stopped me on the street in Hollywood and showed me my picture in the newspaper.”
Joseph Gordon Fickling
Pilot Joseph Gordon Fickling was an Army Air Force lieutenant, honorably discharged at the end of the war, who flew for a commercial airline in Charlotte, North Carolina. Because of letters LAPD detectives found in Elizabeth Short’s luggage on January 17 between the two, they contacted Fickling in January 1947 and had detectives from the Charlotte Police Department interview him.
The letters reveal a long-distance romance, more in Elizabeth’s mind than in Fickling’s. According to their notes, he said he had first met Elizabeth in Southern California in 1944, before he had gone overseas, and while he had corresponded with her he “denied ever being engaged or contemplating marriage to Elizabeth Short.”
In a letter found in Elizabeth’s trunk, Fickling wrote to Elizabeth on April 24, 1946:
You say in your letter you want to be good friends, but from your wire you seem to want more than that. Are you really sure just what you want? Why not pause and consider just what your coming out here to me would amount to? In your letter you mentioned a ring from Matt. You gave no further explanation. I really don’t understand. I wouldn’t want to interfere.
In a second letter, also found in her trunk, Fickling wrote:
I get awfully lonesome sometimes and wonder if we really haven’t been very childish and foolish about the whole affair. Have we?
He wrote that an engagement or marriage to her was out of the question:
My plans are very indefinite and uncertain. There’s nothing for me in the army and there doesn’t seem to be much outside. Don’t think I think any less of you by acting this way, because it won’t be true.
Fickling told the Charlotte detectives he had received a final letter from Elizabeth dated January 8, 1947, in which she told him not to write her anymore at her address in San Diego because her plan was to relocate to Chicago.
Five unidentified youths
Immediately after LAPD detectives identified their “Jane Doe Number 1” as Elizabeth Short, they located three young men and two women who knew her and had been in Hollywood in December 1946. Detectives interviewed them but refused to divulge their names to the press. The interview notes and witness statements that would have been entered into the LAPD murder book case file have never been made public and may no longer exist. Similarly, the whereabouts of the investigators’ summaries of their interviews are unknown. All that exists is a brief but very important collective statement, made by the five to the police and released to the newspapers the day after the discovery of Elizabeth Short’s body. In that statement, published in the L.A. Times, the LAPD is quoted as saying, “These five witnesses recognized the victim as Betty Short. They had seen her in Hollywood in December of 1946, and the five had visited a nightclub in Hollywood with her earlier in the fall. These acquaintances of Elizabeth Short described her as ‘very classy,’ and they said that Elizabeth Short told them that ‘she planned to marry George, an army pilot from Texas.’”
Juanita Ringo
Juanita Ringo was the apartment manager at the Chancellor Hotel in Hollywood, at 1842 North Cherokee Avenue, where Elizabeth shared room number 501 with seven other girls, each of them paying a dollar a day for rent. In interviews with reporters following the identification of Elizabeth Short’s body, Juanita Ringo stated, “Elizabeth came to the apartment building on November 13, 1946,” adding, “she wasn’t sociable like the other girls who lived there with her. She was more the sophisticated type.”
On December 5, 1946, Mrs. Ringo said she attempted to collect the rent from Elizabeth, who told her she did not have the money. So, Ringo said, she “held her luggage as collateral.” Elizabeth then asked one of her roommates to accompany her to a Crescent Drive apartment in Beverly Hills, where, she told them, “a man would pay the rent.” Elizabeth went there, obtained the money that evening, paid her landlady the following day and moved out. Mrs. Ringo told the papers, “I felt sorry for her even when she got behind on the rent. She looked tired and worried.”
Linda Rohr
Twenty-two-year-old Linda Rohr, who worked in “The Rouge Room” at Max Factor’s in Hollywood, was one of Elizabeth’s seven roommates at the Chancellor Apartments. During interviews three days after Elizabeth’s body was discovered, she told the newspapers, “Elizabeth was odd. She had pretty blue eyes, but sometimes I think she overdid it with makeup an inch thick. Elizabeth dyed her brown hair black, then red again.” Rohr said that Elizabeth dated men frequently. “She went out almost every night and received numerous telephone calls at the apartment from different men.”
Specifically recalling December 6, 1946, the day Elizabeth moved out, Linda Rohr said, “Elizabeth was very anxious the morning she left. She told me, ‘I’ve got to hurry. He’s waiting for me.’ None of us ever found out who ‘he’ was.” It was Rohr’s impression, she told reporters, that “Elizabeth was going to leave and go visit her sister in Berkeley.”
Vera and Dorothy French
Elizabeth Short’s last known address before she was driven back to Los Angeles on January 9, 1947, and into the arms of her killer, was in San Diego at the home of Elvera (Vera) French, whose daughter, Dorothy, had befriended Elizabeth after she met her at a local movie theater. When she learned that Elizabeth had no money or a place to stay, Dorothy invited her to stay temporarily with her and her mother, because she felt sorry for her. Reporters learned about Vera and Dorothy from the victim’s mother, Phoebe Short, and quickly drove the three hours south from L.A. to interview them.
Vera French described Elizabeth as “a shy and somewhat mysterious” person “my daughter, Dorothy, brought home one night as a friendly act because she was down and out.” Elizabeth told the Frenches that she “had been married to a major in the Army who had been killed in action,” adding that she had “borne him a child, but the child had died.”
Elizabeth also mentioned to the Frenches “her friendship with a Hollywood celebrity, who helped her out,” but never revealed a name. Mrs. French told reporters, and also later the LAPD, that during the month Elizabeth had stayed at her home in December 1946 she had “dated a different man each night after December 21 through the New Year.” During her stay, both Frenches noted, “Elizabeth colored her black hair with henna-blond streaks.”
Mrs. French also recalled that “Elizabeth had received a one-hundred-dollar money order from a friend, a Lieutenant Fickling from North Carolina,” which Fickling mailed to her at the French residence in December of 1946. Mrs. French also gave detectives a black hat that Elizabeth had left behind at the house, which, she had told Vera, she’d received because “she had modeled for a Los Angeles milliner and he gave her the hat as payment.”
The last time Vera French saw Elizabeth was on January 8, 1947, when she left her home in the company of a man named “Red,” who, Elizabeth had told her, was an “airline employee.” Elizabeth had received a telegram from Red on January 7, the day before he arrived to pick her up. She packed her two suitcases and they left together in his car. The next time they heard about Elizabeth was over a week later when she was identified as the mutilated murder victim who’d made headlines in all the California papers.
Both French women recalled having met Red, or “Bob,” as he sometimes referred to himself, at their house in December, shortly after Dorothy had brought Elizabeth home. They described him as a handsome, well-dressed man about twenty-five years old, who had taken Elizabeth out on a date in December after she had introduced him when he came to pick her up at the house. He seemed well-spoken and had been kind enough to drive Elizabeth back to Los Angeles on January 8, 1947.
During her stay, Elizabeth “frequently spoke of an ex-boyfriend from whom she was hiding out of fear,” but gave no reason why she was so afraid.
After police identified “Red” as Robert Manley, whose identity had been corroborated by the Frenches, they were interviewed again by LAPD detectives at University Division police station, after which Lieutenant Jess Haskins told reporters that the women verified what Manley had told the police. Both he and the Frenches repeatedly said that Elizabeth “was living in fear of a jealous boyfriend.” Mrs. French described to the police an “alarming” incident that had taken place the night before Elizabeth’s departure. It had been witnessed by Mrs. French’s neighbor, who remains to this day unidentified.
The neighbor told Mrs. French that at a very late hour on the night of January 7, 1946, she observed “three individuals, two men and a woman, drive up, park a car, then walk to the front door of the French residence and knock.” Possibly because it was so late, the neighbor kept watching. “The three waited for a few minutes, then all three of them ran to the parked car and drove off.” The following morning, after her neighbor told her what she had seen, Mrs. French asked Elizabeth what she thought. Elizabeth said she too had seen the nighttime visitors: she had peeped through the window when the three had come to the door, but she had made no move to answer the door or acknowledge their presence.
Mrs. French described Elizabeth’s alarm over the incident to detectives, telling Lieutenant Haskins that “Elizabeth was constantly in fear of someone, and was very frightened when anyone came to the door.” Mrs. French tried to find out what or who Elizabeth was afraid of, but was unable to, simply saying, “Elizabeth was very evasive and would not talk to me about the people, so finally I just gave up asking.”
Glen Chanslor
Even though Elizabeth Short had lived at Vera French’s house in San Diego from December 12, 1946, to January 8, 1947, she had, according to the statements of other witnesses, gone back to L.A. for a few nights around Christmas. One witness was Glen Chanslor, who identified the woman he drove to a hotel in downtown Los Angeles on December 29 as Elizabeth Short. Chanslor, a taxi-stand manager with an office at 115 North Garfield Avenue in East Los Angeles, described an incident that occurred on December 29 at approximately 7:30 P.M., when Elizabeth Short came running up to his taxi stand seeking help from a man who had just assaulted her.
The woman, whom Chanslor positively identified as Elizabeth, ran to his stand “wild eyed and hysterical, bleeding from her knees.” He said her “clothing was torn and her shoes were missing.” He remembered her saying that she had just gotten a ride from some strangers who dropped her off at his cab stand. She said that “a well-dressed man she knew and worked with had offered to take her to Long Beach so she could cash her weekly paycheck.” But instead “the man drove her to a lonely road south of Garvey Boulevard, near Garfield Avenue, parked his car, and tried to attack her.”
Chanslor calmed Elizabeth down, then drove her to a hotel where she was staying in downtown Los Angeles, at 512 South Wall Street. He waited at the hotel while she went to her room and then she returned “all dolled up, but didn’t have the cab fare.” Chanslor figured he “wouldn’t get the money from her, and just wrote it off.” Chanslor was positive that the individual was Elizabeth Short, who told him “she was a waitress.”
Chanslor said he could not remember whether “she was cut or bruised or scratched elsewhere on her body,” as he just saw her bleeding from her knees.
Robert “Red” Manley
One of the most important witnesses police were able to identify and question was Robert Manley, who had met Elizabeth in San Diego and spent an evening with her in a hotel, had driven her back to Los Angeles the day she disappeared, and, police thought at first, might have been the last person to see her alive. The twenty-five-year-old salesman from Huntington Park, California, initially became the LAPD’s prime suspect, but after days of intense questioning and repeated polygraph examinations administered by LAPD criminalist Ray Pinker, he was cleared of any involvement in the case.
Police at the Hollenbeck Station allowed Herald Express chief crime reporter and veteran newswoman Agness Underwood a chance to soften up Manley in an initial interview in the hope he might open up to a woman. Initiating her conversation with a smile, a cigarette, and a warm handshake, Underwood got the full story complete with photograph, within the hour, just in time for the evening edition, published as a four-page Herald Express exclusive feature under the headline “Red Tells Own Story of Romance with Dahlia.” The other dailies were quick to follow, summarizing Manley’s statements to police and press.
Manley began his statement with a complete denial of any involvement in the murder of Elizabeth Short and provided a chronological account of his contact with the victim from the day he first met her in mid-December until he left her in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel on the late afternoon of January 9, 1947. Manley said he “drove to San Diego about ten days before Christmas in December of 1946” because his employer had sent him to San Diego to make business sales calls. “After hitting all of my sales spots,” he said, “I saw Elizabeth Short standing on a corner, across the street from Western Airlines in San Diego.”
Manley admitted he was interested in the strikingly beautiful woman, saying that, although he was married, “my wife had just had a baby and she and I were going through an adjustment period.” He explained that there was a method to his madness. “I decided to see if I could pick her up, make a test for myself, see if I loved my wife or not.” So he approached Elizabeth at the street corner and asked her whether she wanted a ride.
Elizabeth ignored him, turned away, and “refused to look at me,” but Manley persisted and, he said to the police, he told her “who he was and continued attempting to talk with her.” Elizabeth turned around to him and responded, “Don’t you think it’s wrong to ask a girl on a corner to get in your car?” He agreed that he thought it might be wrong, but he “just wanted to give her a ride to her home.” Manley said she finally climbed into his car and directed him to Pacific Beach, where “she was living with some friends.”
Manley invited her out to dinner that evening and she accepted, but, he explained to the detectives, “she was worried what she would tell the two women at the residence where she was temporarily staying.” She decided to introduce Manley to the two women as “a friend who worked at Western Airlines.” Elizabeth had told him that she worked at Western Airlines. Then, as agreed, Manley dropped Elizabeth off at the Frenches’ and found a motel room nearby. He acknowledged that he “was nervous about stepping out on my wife, that this was the first time, and that I and my wife had only been married since November of 1945.”
Manley returned to the French residence at 7:00 P.M., was introduced to Elvera and Dorothy, and left with Elizabeth on their date. They had drinks and dinner, then returned to the French residence, where they sat in front of the house in his car and talked for some time. Manley admitted kissing Elizabeth, but “found her non-responsive, and kind of cold.” He told her he was married, and Elizabeth said that “she had been married to a major, but he had been killed.” Manley walked her to the front door and then asked whether he could wire her if he was returning to San Diego in the near future. She replied, “Yes, but I might not be here. I don’t like San Diego very much.” He returned to Los Angeles after that one date.
When he learned that he would be returning to San Diego on business on January 8, 1947, he wired Elizabeth at the French residence and asked if he could see her again.
Believing she worked at the Western Airlines office, Manley drove there at about 5:00 P.M. and waited for her to leave the building. Since she didn’t really work there, she never appeared, so he drove over to the Frenches’. Elizabeth greeted him at the front door and asked, he later told police, if he could take her to make a telephone call. As they were driving to make the call, she changed her mind and asked him if he could drive her up to Los Angeles. He agreed, but not until the following day, because he had business to attend to in San Diego. They returned together to the French residence, where Elizabeth said her goodbyes to Vera and Dorothy, packed her suitcases, and left with Manley.
Manley found a motel room, checked in, and the two of them went downtown for drinks and dancing. Elizabeth raised the possibility of taking a bus back to Los Angeles that night, but they decided instead “to get some hamburgers and return to the motel.” She told him that “she was cold,” and he lit a fire in the motel fireplace. She complained of “chills and not feeling well,” and the two of them went to sleep without any attempt at lovemaking.
The following morning Manley made his business calls, returned to the motel at 12:30, picked up Elizabeth, and drove her back to Los Angeles, stopping along the way at a restaurant for sandwiches, and again for gasoline in Redondo Beach. As they drove, Elizabeth asked if she could write to him. “Of course,” he said, and gave her his address, which she noted in her address book. She told him she was “going to Los Angeles to meet her sister, Adrian West.” Manley asked, “Where’s the meeting, the Biltmore?” “Yes,” she said, “the Biltmore.”
When they arrived in downtown Los Angeles, Elizabeth asked Manley to drive her first to the Greyhound bus depot, so she could check her luggage. Manley carried her bags inside, she checked them, and he drove her to the Biltmore just four blocks away. They both entered the lobby of the hotel and Elizabeth asked Manley to “check the front desk to see if her sister had checked in, while she went to the restroom.” Manley did as she had bid, was told no Mrs. West had checked in, so he “asked a couple of women who were standing in the lobby if either one might be Mrs. West.” They both said no. After waiting with her for a few more minutes, Manley left Elizabeth in the lobby of the Biltmore. It was the last time he saw her, he told the detectives.
Red Manley swore he was telling the truth, repeating the same story over and over to his interrogators, who grilled him hard to try to find any weak spots. The more intense the questioning, the more firm Manley became, finally offering to take a lie detector test, even truth serum, to prove his innocence.
When the police asked him if there was anything else he could remember from any of his conversations with Elizabeth, he said that on the evening of January 8 at the motel, he remembered seeing “bad scratches on both of Elizabeth’s arms on the outside, above the elbows.” He also reported that Elizabeth had told him that “she had a boyfriend who was intensely jealous,” describing him as “an Italian, with dark hair, who lived in San Diego.”
He also recalled that “Elizabeth made a long distance telephone call to a man in Los Angeles on January 8 from a payphone in a café at Pacific Highway and Balboa Drive, just outside San Diego.” Manley overheard just enough of the call to know that she was arranging to meet her caller—a man—in downtown Los Angeles the following evening, January 9. Manley did not hear her mention the man’s name, but suspected it was actually this man, not her sister, whom Elizabeth was planning to meet. Finally, Manley said he learned of the murder and the discovery of her body from the newspapers during a business trip he made to San Francisco in mid-January.
On January 25, 1947, detectives recontacted Manley and took him to the University Division station to see if he could identify a purse and high-heeled shoes possibly belonging to Elizabeth Short. He was shown a pile of some two dozen shoes and ten different purses, and positively identified both the shoes and purse as hers: she had been wearing the shoes and carrying the purse when he had left her in the lobby of the Biltmore. Asked by police how he could be sure about the shoes, since there were several similar pairs, Manley stated, “These shoes have double heel taps on them, and I remember that she asked me to take her to a San Diego shoe repair shop to have the extra taps put on her shoes.” Manley also identified the “faint traces of perfume inside the purse as the same as the perfume she wore.”
In my review of these initial twenty-one witnesses originally interviewed by the press and police, I found that only a very few of them had played a public role in the investigation. Apparently the police had ignored most of the other witnesses, which obviously concerned me. Especially disconcerting were references to the Army, or Army Air Force, lieutenant from Texas named “George,” who had been hospitalized in Los Angeles and whom she said she hoped to marry in November.
The police had also seemed to have ignored the independent—and crucial—information provided by the taxi-stand owner, Glen Chanslor, about the incident the night of December 29, 1946: the vicious assault on her by a well-dressed man, the friend who had offered her a ride. Chanslor’s statements were consistent in all respects with what Manley would later tell the police when he described the deep scratches he saw on her arms just eleven days later, which Elizabeth said had come from an earlier assault by her jealous boyfriend.
Rather than providing answers, the information seemed to raise further questions. On the surface, it would appear that LAPD detectives had either dropped the ball or deliberately kept important witness information from the public. Why?
Perhaps the answer to these and other troubling procedural questions, I told myself, could be found through a day-by-day reconstruction of the joint police and press investigations, beginning with the discovery of the body on January 15, 1947.