The “Red Lipstick” Murder
A SCANT TWO DAYS after the Herald Express announced that the Black Dahlia killer, Corporal Joseph Dumais, had confessed and the Black Dahlia case was solved, the Herald Express put out a special edition on Monday, February 10, 1947, with the headline:
WEREWOLF STRIKES AGAIN! KILLS L.A. WOMAN, WRITES “B.D.” ON BODY
This time the victim’s nude body was found in an isolated vacant lot, on a direct parallel line some seven miles west of where Elizabeth Short’s body had been found three weeks earlier. According to crime-scene descriptions, the victim had been “kicked and stomped to death.” Like the Black Dahlia, her mouth had also been slashed, and the killer had used lipstick from her purse to write obscenities on the naked body, signing his now infamous initials, “B.D.,” to let the police know—or think—he was the same person who had sent the notes in the Dahlia case. The local press quickly dubbed this second crime with two names: “Jeanne French: The Flying Nurse” and “the Red Lipstick murder.”
In the early 1930s, Jeanne French had gained a measure of fame and notoriety in the Los Angeles area as a socialite and starlet. She had worked as a studio-contract actress under the name Jeanne Thomas, had become a registered nurse, and had gotten her license as one of America’s first female airplane pilots. The papers loved her and had nicknamed her “the Flying Nurse.” Said to be one of the most promising candidates for screen fame in the early days of talking pictures, but dogged by a host of suitors, she finally married and gave up her career.
Jeanne French had also been well-known in European social circles as the nurse and traveling companion of Millicent Rogers, the famed oil heiress of the 1920s. French was also the nurse of Marion Wilson, known to the public as “the Woman in Black,” who for many years after the death of Rudolph Valentino returned on the anniversary of his death as the mysterious veiled woman seen placing flowers on his grave.
Just after eight in the morning on Monday, February 10, 1947—less than four weeks after the murder of Elizabeth Short—construction worker Hugh Shelby discovered Jeanne French’s nude, bludgeoned, and lacerated body in a vacant lot in the 3200 block of Grandview Avenue.
Detectives who examined the victim’s body at the crime scene discovered that the killer had written an obscenity on her torso with red lipstick—an obscenity the police never disclosed—and then signed “B.D.” The worn-out lipstick stub was found close to the body, as was the victim’s empty purse.
Foot and heel marks were clearly visible on the victim’s face, breasts, and hands, indicating that she had been brutally stomped by a maddened assailant. Captain Donahoe told the press that the victim had been savagely beaten with “a heavy weapon, probably a tire iron or a wrench, as she crouched naked on the highway.”
The victim’s stockings and underclothing were missing. However, the killer had ceremoniously draped her blue coat trimmed with red fox-fur cuffs and her red dress over the body before leaving the scene. A man’s white handkerchief was also found near the body. There was also a wine bottle that search-team detectives found nearby that was taken to the crime lab in the hope of obtaining fingerprints.
Police obtained photographs of the handwriting on the body and plaster castings of the clearly defined footprints found at the scene. Handwriting experts were called to the crime scene to study the macabre note on her torso before her body was taken to the morgue. Other letters were observed on the nude body below the “B.D.” that were difficult to decipher but possibly read “Tex” and “O” or “D” or possibly “Andy D,” leading to police speculation that possibly two men might have been involved in the murder.
The police criminalists recovered important physical evidence in the form of black hair follicles found under the victim’s fingernails, which indicated that she had put up a violent struggle before being slain. In their reconstruction of the crime, homicide detectives speculated to the press that the victim “was stripped naked in the parked car and then beaten.”
Detectives also concluded that because a large pool of blood was found in the highway near the crime scene, the killer must have dragged the victim from the highway to the lot, where he wrote the message on her body, then draped the clothing over her. As a last act, he had carefully arranged her shoes on either side of her head at an equal distance of approximately ten feet, then fled.
The coroner’s physician, Dr. Newbarr, conducted the autopsy and found the cause of death to be “ribs shattered by heavy blows, one of the broken ribs having pierced the heart creating hemorrhage and death.” Dr. Newbarr stated that the victim had “dined on chop suey within an hour of her death.” Newbarr determined that the victim was murdered the same day her body was found, sometime between midnight and 4:00 A.M. Results of a blood alcohol examination by the chemist returned a level of .30, twice what was then considered legally drunk, and more than three times the level by today’s standards in California.
Police described the Lipstick crime scene as a “sort of lovers lane area”—the same phrase that had been used to characterize the vacant lot where Elizabeth Short was found. They also put out an all points bulletin to law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, notifying them that “the killer would have blood on his shoes and pants, and possibly in his vehicle.”
In tracing Jeanne French’s movements in the hours before her death, the police and witness statements established that at 7:30 P.M. Sunday, February 9, 1947, she had gone into the Plantation Café, 10984 Washington Boulevard in Los Angeles, in the company of two men, one of whom was described by waitress Christine Studnicka as having “dark hair and a small mustache.” In its coverage, the Los Angeles Examiner also reported that the description matched that of a dark-haired man the victim had had dinner with five hours later.
Studnicka also observed that “the two men entered a booth and ordered food, while the victim went to a pay telephone in the restaurant.” The victim’s phone call to the unknown person lasted approximately ten minutes.
During the phone call, Studnicka said people nearby could hear French bark into the receiver in a very loud voice, “Don’t bring a bottle, the landlady doesn’t allow it.” While still on the phone, the victim yelled to the two men in her booth, “Don’t put any liquor in the car” and “Don’t take any liquor.” Studnicka observed that the two men appeared “to be arguing between themselves,” and it was her impression that they were “arguing over which one was going to accompany the victim.”
After they had eaten, the two men left the restaurant, followed shortly by Jeanne French. Studnicka did not know whether the three met up outside the restaurant, nor could she provide a further description of the second man who accompanied the “dark-haired man.”
Later that Sunday evening, at 9:30 P.M., witnesses saw Jeanne French driving away from her home at the wheel of her 1928 Ford Roadster. Half an hour later, restaurant owner Ray Fecher saw her inside his Turkey Bowl restaurant at 11925 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, where, he told police, “She was intoxicated, making loud remarks, while drinking a cup of coffee.”
At 10:30 P.M., French was identified as the person inside a bar at 10421 Venice Boulevard on the west side of Los Angeles, where she told bartender Earl Holmes she was going to “commit her husband to a psycho ward at the Sawtelle Veteran’s Hospital the following morning.” Police later verified the accuracy of this statement, because Jeanne French’s husband, whom she was planning to divorce, had slapped her a week before, and as a result she had forced him to move out.
At 10:45 P.M., Santa Monica PD officers Chapman and Aikens received a radio call in their patrol car reporting “a drunk driver, driving an automobile described as a 1928 Ford Roadster.” They searched the vicinity and located an empty car of that description parked curbside at Stanford and Colorado Boulevards. But because they were unable to locate the driver, they left.
What the officers did not know was that French was in an upstairs apartment at 1547 Stanford Avenue visiting her estranged husband, Frank. She told him to “meet her at her attorney’s office the next day at 11:00 A.M., as she was filing for divorce and wanted to commit him to the hospital as a psycho.” The drunken woman argued with her husband for approximately the next thirty minutes, then drove away, arriving at the Piccadilly drive-in restaurant, at 3932 Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles, shortly after midnight.
Between 12:10 and 1:00 A.M. Monday, February 10, Toni Manalatos, a carhop at the Piccadilly, served the victim what would turn out to be her last meal. She told police she saw Jeanne French in the company of a “dark-haired man with a small mustache.”
French’s Ford Roadster was later found, still parked in the Piccadilly’s parking lot, at 2:00 A.M. by Mr. Anzione, a cleanup man coming to work at the restaurant. Doubtless she had left her car at the Picadilly and driven away with the dark-haired man. Her body was found only fifteen blocks away, and, given the medical examiner’s estimated time of her death, that man was probably the last person to have seen her alive. Based on time of death and the murder’s proximity to the restaurant, he was also probably the killer.
After detectives identified the victim and learned that she had filed for divorce, the initial thrust of their investigation focused on Jeanne’s husband, Frank, as the likeliest suspect. Within several days of the murder, Captain Donahoe ruled him out: Frank French could not and did not drive a car, his shoe size was different from those found at the crime scene, and handwriting samples compared to those found on the body did not match. The police didn’t report it, but it is assumed that the other physical evidence—hair samples and possible fingerprints found at the scene—also helped to eliminate Frank as the suspect.
After they had initially linked the Lipstick murder to the Dahlia murder, police detectives theorized that whoever killed Elizabeth Short may have been infuriated by Corporal Joseph Dumais’s “confession” and murdered Jeanne French to disprove his claim. This, police told the press, would also account for the “taunting obscene phrase written on her chest.” One police official was quoted as saying, “For two days before Mrs. French was kicked to death, the newspapers had been full of Dumais’ confessions that it was he who had killed Beth Short. We know that the killer is egotistical, and it’s possible that the real killer resented the claims of Dumais and wanted to show that the real killer was still here.” Thus, in a tragic and unintended way, Steve Fisher’s strategy of smoking out the Black Dahlia Avenger with a false confession had proved to be chillingly effective.
On February 12, 1947, the Herald Express ran a story under the headline, “Quiz Mystery Man Sharing P.O. Box of ‘Lipstick’ Victim,” in which the reporter said that an unidentified male had shared a secret post office box with Jeanne French and was being questioned by detectives. No further details about his identity or his relationship to Jeanne French were ever released, nor have I found any information that would indicate that LAPD said anything more to the press about him in the weeks or months that followed.
In the course of my investigation, I came across a reference to a book, Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook, edited by Sean Tejaratchi, containing over a hundred photographs of unsolved crimes in the L.A. area during the years of LAPD homicide detective Jack Huddleston’s service, from 1921 to 1950.
The scrapbook was a compilation of Detective Huddleston’s own photo collection of suicides, murders, and accidental deaths, clearly his own personal macabre fetish. Its pages contained pictures of tattooed men, nude drag queens, child homicides, murdered prostitutes, and even a decapitation caused by a train wreck, all packaged into an album of horrors. Next to many of the photographs the detective had written his personal observations and locker-room dark humor.
In her introduction to the book, Katherine Dunn says that the collection of photographs, found at an estate sale after Huddleston’s death, was eventually made into a video called Death Scenes. Although essentially a revelation of one person’s fascination with the brutality of homicide, Death Scenes contains three photographs next to which Huddleston had typed the following information:
“THE RED LIPSTICK MURDER.”
Mrs. Jeanne Axford French Age 40. (Nurse) of 3535 Military Ave, Sawtelle L.A. Killed by ???? Her body was found in a field near Grand View Ave, & National Blvd. L.A.
She was stomped to death by a friend who crudely printed an obscene phrase (FUCK YOU) on her chest.
The three photographs were obviously from the 1947 LAPD investigation. One of them, a close-up, showed the victim lying supine in the vacant lot, completely nude, with the lettering clearly visible on her body. In large block printed lettering, the killer had written in red lipstick the following words across the midsection of her body: “FUCK YOU, B.D.” What the LAPD had not revealed to the press, Detective Huddleston unintentionally revealed to the public through the bits and pieces of his own obsession years after his death.
Exhibit 32
Jeanne French, “Red Lipstick” murder, February 10, 1947
Simultaneous and parallel to the “Red Lipstick” murder, the Dahlia investigation remained ongoing, as Captain Donahoe told the public that in his opinion the Dahlia and Lipstick murders were likely connected. In the month of February 1947, leads and additional evidence continued to pour in.
Tuesday, February 11, 1947
Imagine the surprise of downtown Los Angeles cab driver Charles Schneider when he discovered a mysterious note in his cab, possibly written by the Black Dahlia Avenger. Schneider told police and reporters that he had gone to a restaurant in the 500 block of Columbia Street—ten blocks from the Biltmore—and when he returned to his parked cab he found a note in the glove compartment. Addressed to the Examiner, but not released to the public, the note, with a crude illustration of a knife and a pistol on it, read:
Take it to Examiner at once. I’ve got the number of your cab. $20,000 and I’ll give B.D. up. Is it a go?
B.D.
Police quickly lifted fingerprints from the glove compartment of Schneider’s cab, which did not belong to him. They also checked similarities between the letter and the original envelope sent to the Examiner with Elizabeth Short’s belongings and immediately eliminated Schneider’s fingerprints from both the prints on the glove box and the original note. Those fingerprints remain unidentified to this date.
Wednesday, February 12, 1947
Ica Mabel M’Grew, a twenty-seven-year-old resident of Los Angeles, reported a kidnapping and forcible rape that occurred in the early-morning hours of February 12 as she was leaving a South Main Street café in downtown Los Angeles. She reported that two men had forced her into their car and driven her to an isolated spot on East Road in Los Angeles, where both had raped her. After the attack one of the assailants had warned, “Don’t tell the police, or I’ll do to you the same as I did to the Black Dahlia.” They then drove her close to her home in Culver City, only three miles away from where Jeanne French had been murdered. The only descriptions of the assailants released in the news article were “two swarthy men.”
By the middle of February, the LAPD said that it had “hit a stone wall” in its investigation of the murders of both Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French, announcing that the one remaining lead, a key to the two mysterious homicides, was their search for a dark-haired man with a small mustache, who was known to have had dinner with Jeanne French just two hours before she was murdered.
Police indicated they had a close watch on their important witness, Mrs. Antonia Manalatos, the waitress who had seen the dark-haired suspect dining with the victim.
That same day, Otto Parzyjegla, a thirty-six-year-old linotype operator at a Los Angeles printing shop, was arrested for the bludgeoning murder of his seventy-year-old employer, Swedish newspaper publisher Alfred Haij. After confessing to police that he had “hacked the torso into six pieces and then crammed them into three boxes at the rear of the print shop,” Parzyjegla told authorities that “the whole thing was like a dream,” insisting to his interrogators that “he must be dreaming and was waiting to wake up.”
Captain Donahoe quickly entered the case, believing that Parzyjegla might possibly be the suspect in the Black Dahlia and Lipstick cases. Donahoe theorized that the violence that Parzyjegla had displayed in killing and mutilating his employer could well link all three murders. Donahoe informed reporters that Parzyjegla worked in a print shop, adding, “one of the letters received by the Black Dahlia suspect bore evidence of having been mailed by someone working in a printing establishment.” After his preliminary investigation, Donahoe said, “Parzyjegla is the hottest suspect yet in the ‘Black Dahlia’ killing.”
Tuesday, February 18, 1947
Captain Donahoe organized a live “show-up” of suspect Parzyjegla for 2:00 P.M. for Toni Manalatos. He wanted her to “attend the show-up of Parzyjegla,” along with those witnesses “claiming to have seen Elizabeth Short with various men during the last six days of her life.” Donahoe wanted to give Parzyjegla the largest exposure possible in front of the broadest array of witnesses, in the hope that someone who had seen either Elizabeth or Jeanne French in the company of a man would identify Parzyjegla as the person who had been with one or both of the victims. The description given for Parzyjegla was “a tall 36-year-old male, of light complexion, with darkish blonde hair and powerful hands.” Parzyjegla, however, while he readily admitted to slaying his employer, “vehemently denied any connection with the slayings of the two women,” according to press reports.
At the same time Donahoe was organizing his witnesses to see Parzyjegla, the LAPD crime lab began conducting an examination of possible physical evidence that could potentially connect him to the other murders. LAPD police chemist Ray Pinker conducted an examination of “proof-sheet” paper taken from Haij’s printing office, because, according to Captain Donahoe, “at least one of the notes sent in by the Dahlia killer in that case used proof-sheet paper, of a type commonly found in printing shops.” Donahoe was hoping the print shop would be the key that could link the three murders to the suspect, someone who would have had access to the blank proof sheets.
Thursday, February 20, 1947
Suspect Otto Parzyjegla was formally charged with his self-described “dream murder” of his employer, and the case was closed. At a police show-up conducted at the Wilshire Division station on February 19, the six women victims of attempted attacks, as well as other witnesses from the French and Dahlia investigations, eliminated Parzyjegla as a suspect.
With Parzyjegla out of the picture, the search for the person(s) responsible for the Black Dahlia and the Red Lipstick murders turned back to San Diego, where apparently a new clue was discovered. Four detectives were assigned to San Diego, but LAPD and San Diego detectives kept secret, even from reporters, what that new clue might be.
As indicated, initially Captain Donahoe publicly confirmed LAPD’s belief that the Dahlia and the French cases were connected. Within days of that announcement a strange and never-explained series of events occurred, all related to the investigation.
First, Captain Donahoe was personally removed, by Chief of Detectives Thad Brown, as officer-in-charge of both investigations, and was summarily transferred from his position as commander of the Homicide Division and placed in charge of Robbery Division, then a separate entity. This effectively terminated his personal involvement in both murder cases. What was it about this case that made the LAPD brass nervous enough to remove the one commander who could have solved it? Was Donahoe getting too close to the truth?
Next, as I saw it, there appeared to be a simultaneous lockdown of information in two separate and critical fronts of the investigation. First, the “San Diego connection” sounded as if LAPD had successfully traced Elizabeth Short’s January 8 phone call to a man in Los Angeles. Second, relative to the recent newspaper reports of the “mystery man” who was sharing Jeanne French’s P.O. box, again LAPD acknowledged they had identified, interviewed, and “eliminated” him. However, his identity, unlike other “non-involved” witnesses, was kept secret, and to this day remains a mystery.
In addition, the police high command made another startling revelation. Immediately after Donahoe’s removal from the case, LAPD revised their assessment of the Jeanne French murder. They no longer saw it as a second homicide by the same suspect, but rather as a “copycat murder.” Within less than a year, the Lipstick murder became totally disassociated from the Dahlia case and quickly fell into obscurity. Now the official LAPD line was that the murder of Elizabeth Short was a standalone, unconnected to any other crimes of murdered, sexually assaulted, and bludgeoned women. That remains the official LAPD position to this day: Elizabeth Short’s murderer never killed anyone before or after that brutal murder. Why did LAPD take such a hard line on this? Why was it that, immediately after Donahoe’s transfer out of Homicide, the link between the two murders was officially severed? All of this was not a coincidence but, as will ultimately become clear, part of an organized conspiracy within the LAPD to protect the identity of the self-described Black Dahlia Avenger. In doing so, the conspirators were covering up one of the biggest corruption scandals in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department. These overt and deliberate actions by LAPD’s highest-ranking officers would ultimately transform them from respected law enforcers to criminal co-conspirators, accomplices to murder after the fact.