The Grand Jury
Even truth itself decays, and lo, from truth’s sad ashes pain and falsehood grow.
—Herman Melville
WHILE MUCH OF THE information that follows is probative and directly supports the fact that George Hodel, the 1949 grand jury’s “wealthy Hollywood man,” was the prime suspect in both the Black Dahlia and Red Lipstick murders, we need no further proof. We have reviewed the evidence, seen the proof, and now know he was without question the killer.
But there remains a further truth that needs be addressed. Like myself, many will find this second truth to be as dark as, or darker than, the stark reality of my father’s madness.
That truth has to do with proving my allegation that the Los Angeles Police Department did commit a Dahliagate. The department’s two highest officers, Thad Brown and William Parker, in a conscious and deliberate obstruction of justice, aided and abetted a cover-up and, along with their subordinates, were directly responsible for knowingly permitting a psychopathic serial killer to remain free until he was finally forced to leave the country in 1950.
I make these allegations with the utmost reluctance and a heavy heart. These two leaders, Parker and Brown, were on the job and in command during my watch. Both were my personal heroes and remain unarguably LAPD’s two most important legends. But the facts are undeniable.
Violence was so prevalent on the streets of Los Angeles by 1949 that the public had finally had enough. Each day’s headlines featured new stories of kidnapping, rape, and murders of women even in the city’s upscale neighborhoods. No one was safe, and the community was outraged over the ineffectiveness of their police department. Worse, the department itself seemed to be no better than the gamblers, hoods, and thugs it was supposed to be getting off the streets.
First, there were the revelations of graft and corruption that came out of the Administrative Vice Division when Sergeant Stoker went public with the story of the Brenda Allen scandal. Hard on the heels of a public airing of LAPD’s dirty laundry came the murder of Louise Springer, whose body was found strangled in her car near downtown. Then came what was to be known as “the Battle of Sunset Boulevard,” when famed gangster Mickey Cohen and his entourage were gunned down on the streets of Hollywood. Then people began disappearing under mysterious circumstances, one after the other. First was Mimi Boomhower on August 18. Then on September 2 came the turn of Barney Weiner, a fifty-year-old newspaperman and district manager for the Daily Racing Form. Frank Niccoli, a close friend and business associate of Mickey Cohen, vanished on the same day. Their respective cars were soon located, but no bodies were found. Actress Jean Spangler disappeared on October 7, and three days later Dave “Little Davey” Ogul, another Cohen henchman, also vanished, and his car, like the others, was found abandoned in West Los Angeles. Cohen was quoted as saying about Niccoli and Ogul, “I’m afraid the guys ain’t living. They was swallowed up.”
By October, Los Angeles had jokingly become known as “the Port of Missing Persons,” but it was no joke and its citizens were not laughing. Not only notorious hoods and gangsters went missing, but ordinary people as well. It was time the district attorney did what he was elected to do and put a stop to it.
In 1949, a grand jury was empaneled. Very quickly, it became proactive and, led by fiery jury foreman Harry Lawson, seemed determined to get some answers. Conducting its own investigations, and using its subpoena powers, it began with the Brenda Allen case and Stoker’s charges of a systemic corruption within the LAPD, reaching all the way to the top.
After the Brenda Allen case and Charles Stoker, the next item on the grand jury’s agenda was the Black Dahlia murder. Why hadn’t the case been solved, and, if a fix had been put in, who was behind it?
Investigators from the district attorney’s office, working through their own operatives, interviews with witnesses, and information developed by unnamed private investigators independent of the LAPD, provided dramatic new information to the grand jury.
The actual testimony itself, as with all grand juries, was secret and, because the case is still technically open, remains secret to this day. However, from articles printed in the dailies, it became clear that DA investigators believed that detectives within the LAPD assigned to the Gangster Squad had orchestrated the cover-up. DA investigators testified before the grand jury with respect to their own investigation and findings, which were the results of having assembled and organized all facts related to the Dahlia investigation during the thirty-four-month period since the murder. They suspected that the Gangster Squad detectives were protecting the identity of “a wealthy Hollywood man” who was a prime suspect. The DA investigators gave the grand jury the name of the suspect and his address, saying they had found witnesses who would testify to having seen bloody clothing of the type and size worn by Elizabeth Short, as well as bloody bedsheets, inside the suspect’s home.
While it did not release the name and address of the suspected murder residence to the public, an article in the Herald Express dated September 13, 1949, under the headline “Black Dahlia Murder Site Found in L.A.,” reported on part of the grand jury testimony. The article stated, “It was reported that the room where the murder took place was less than a 15-minute drive and in a bee line from the vacant lot where the nude and bisected body of the girl was discovered January 15, 1947 . . . and the home was on one of Los Angeles’ busiest streets.”
In secret testimony, DA investigator Lieutenant Frank Jemison identified this “wealthy Hollywood man” as the same person whom Elizabeth Short had phoned from San Diego on January 8, 1947; the same man, who, four days later, on January 12, using the name “Mr. Barnes,” checked into the East Washington Boulevard Hotel with Elizabeth Short as “husband and wife.” Moreover, the DA investigators testified, the hotel owners had positively identified “Barnes” from a photograph found in the victim’s belongings, and the man, according to the testimony was “connected to a foreign government.”*
Because of this dramatic new testimony from the DA investigators, the grand jury subpoenaed LAPD detectives to testify how they had investigated the case and what they had found. The jury called seven members of the Gangster Squad, including the head of the unit, Lieutenant William Burns (could Bill Burns be Stoker’s “Bill Ball”?), and a Detective J. Jones (“Joe Small”?). The remaining Gangster Squad detectives called were Sergeants James Ahearne, John O’Mara, and Conwell Keller, and Officers Loren K. Waggoner, Archie Case, and Donald Ward.
Next, the grand jury subpoenaed Deputy Chief Thad Brown, as well as interim police chief William Worton, who had replaced former chief Clemence Horrall. Horrall, one recalls, had resigned shortly after his perjury indictment resulting from Charles Stoker’s testimony in the Brenda Allen case. In June 1949, Mayor Bowron had appointed Worton, a retired Marine Corps general, as the LAPD’s interim chief. Worton, restricted to one year of service, would remain only until the police commissioners made their final vote between the two top candidates, Brown and Parker.
The grand jury asked Chief Worton about the overall investigation of the Black Dahlia case and about the possibility that the wealthy Hollywood man was being protected by members of his department’s Gangster Squad. A December 7 article published by the Los Angeles Examiner under the headline “Dahlia Motel Angle Probed by Grand Jury” indicated that Worton had personally investigated both matters related to the Hollywood man’s meeting the victim at the downtown motel and being protected by the Gangster Squad and said that “Chief Worton does not believe there is a case against the man on either score on the basis of information presently available.”
Exhibit 62
Herald Express, January 12, 1950
It was the statement “information presently available” that red-flagged the chief’s statement for me. It meant that Worton had left himself a very convenient back door were the Dahlia case ever to blow up in his face.
After its two-month review of the Dahlia case, the grand jury, whose authority had expired on December 31, 1949, came out with a scathingly critical report of the Los Angeles Police Department and a demand for a complete reinvestigation of the Elizabeth Short murder, as well as of many other unsolved murders of female victims during the previous five-year period. On January 12, 1950, a front-page headline appeared in the Herald Express, “Unsolved L.A. Crimes Ripped By Grand Jury,” with an article featuring photographs of seven of the victims, including Elizabeth Short, Jeanne French, Louise Springer, Gladys Kern, Laura Trelstad, Dorothy Montgomery, and Evelyn Winters.
The article published the grand jury’s final report, and enumerated its specific findings, which included LAPD officers receiving bribery payoffs for protecting gangsters, and bookmakers, gamblers, and abortionists being allowed to run free without fear of prosecution. Addressing the grand jury’s full report, the article noted, “the report was almost reminiscent of Chicago in its heyday of crime, although perhaps on a smaller scale.”
Sharply criticizing the Black Dahlia investigation, the grand jury intimated a “cover-up” by certain police officers. Below are excerpts directly from the grand jury’s report that was summarized in the Express article:
Testimony given by certain investigation officers working this case was clear and well defined, while other officers showed apparent evasiveness. There was not sufficient time left to the jury to complete this investigation, and this Grand Jury recommends that the 1950 Grand Jury continue the probe.
This jury has observed indications of pay-offs in connection with protection of vice and crime, and gross misconduct on the part of some law enforcement officers.
In some cases jurisdictional disputes and jealousies among law enforcement agencies were indicated. In other cases, especially where one or more departments were involved, there seems to have been manifested a lack of co-operation in presenting evidence to the Grand Jury, and a reluctance to investigate or prosecute.
In addition to its findings and critical report, the 1949 grand jury, in its boldest move, recommended that the Black Dahlia investigation be taken over by the district attorney’s office investigators and taken out of the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department. They also requested that those same investigators contact and interview the “wealthy Hollywood man” cited by DA investigator Jemison as a possible prime suspect, regarding his links to the crime.
On April 1, 1950, a few months after the grand jury closed its investigation, the Los Angeles Times printed a story under the headline “Murder Cases Reopened by District Attorney; Investigators Start Again on Slaying of Nurse and ‘Black Dahlia’ Brutality,” which revealed that the DA investigators were actively “searching for a man they believed to be a ‘hot suspect’ in the three-year-old murder cases. Investigators Frank Jemison and Walter Morgan told reporters that their office was co-investigating both the Black Dahlia and Jeanne French murders.” Further, the article said, “H. Leo Stanley, chief investigator for District Attorney Simpson, said that his investigators remain unconvinced that a bloody shirt and trousers found in the home of an acquaintance of Mrs. French have been fully eliminated as a clue to the murder.” Investigators had refused to name the man they were seeking as a prime suspect but said, “He is the owner of the mysterious bloody clothing that has disappeared from LAPD police evidence lockers.” The DA investigators planned to “take lengthy statements from two close women friends of the slain nurse” and had been assigned to investigate the two unsolved murder cases at the request of the 1949 grand jury.
The actual police reports themselves were never released. However, from public disclosures and statements provided by the district attorney’s investigators and from my own research, it seems that LAPD had recovered some bloody clothing from the residence of the “wealthy Hollywood man,” including pants and a shirt belonging to him, which was booked into evidence and then either “lost” or deliberately disposed of, probably by members of the Gangster Squad. Indications were that investigators believed the clothing possibly related to the Jeanne French murder investigation, since several of French’s women friends had identified the wealthy Hollywood man as being acquainted with her.
Next, and separate from the man’s bloody clothing evidence, the independent private investigators located a different set of witnesses, who when interviewed by Lieutenant Jemison told of seeing women’s bloody clothing of a size and description similar to those worn by Elizabeth Short as well as bloody bedsheets inside the wealthy Hollywood man’s residence.
There can be no doubt, therefore, that Lieutenant Jemison’s “wealthy Hollywood man” was known and identified by both the Los Angeles district attorney and LAPD as the prime suspect in both those murders.
As noted, the DA’s office testified that “the murder site was located on a busy street, 15 minutes from the crime scene.” I submit that the murder site was in fact the Franklin House, located on the busy streets of Franklin and Normandie Avenues in what is called the Los Feliz section of Hollywood.
In October 1999 I conducted a time-and-mileage check by driving from 39th and Norton to the Franklin House. In normal Hollywood traffic, the 7.7-mile drive took me seventeen minutes. And the Franklin House garage opens onto a tiny alley. Once inside the closed garage one has direct access to the interior of the residence, where one could easily remove a body from the house in the dead of night and be undetected.
None of the publicly released documents reveal at what time the LAPD detectives found and recovered the bloody clothing believed to be owned by my father. On what date, and in what year, did they remove this clothing from the Franklin House? The two strongest possibilities are (1) either in February or in the weeks or months immediately following the 1947 murder of Jeanne French, or (2) in the days following George Hodel’s arrest for incest on October 6, 1949.
For the moment, the questions relating to the two separate sets of bloody clothing that connected George Hodel to both Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French must remain unanswered. What is certain, and has been answered, is that in secret testimony the 1949 grand jury received from district attorney’s investigator Lieutenant Frank Jemison two startling facts: (1) LAPD detectives were covering up the Dahlia and Red Lipstick murders, and (2) Dr. George Hodel was the prime suspect in both crimes.
* This public comment made by the Johnsons strongly suggests that the photograph originally shown to them in 1947 by LAPD, then again by DA investigators in 1949, was our exhibit 9 or 10, George Hodel’s China photos that “connect him to a foreign government.” It is believed he mailed these photographs to Elizabeth Short from his overseas assignment in 1946.