Black Dahlia, Red Rose: The Crime, Corruption, and Cover-Up of America's Greatest Unsolved Murder Read online

  BLACK DAHLIA,

  RED ROSE

  The Crime, Corruption,

  and Cover-Up of America’s Greatest

  Unsolved Murder

  PIU EATWELL

  This book is dedicated to Donald and Patty Freed

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Key Dramatis Personae

  PART 1 • FALLEN ANGEL

  1 Farewell My Lovely

  2 A Double Life

  3 The Capture

  4 Gilda

  5 Dial M for Murder

  6 House of Strangers

  7 The Big Sleep

  PART 2 • DARK PASSAGE

  8 The Letter

  9 The Suspect

  10 Behind Locked Doors

  11 Deadline at Dawn

  12 Breaking Point

  13 The Lodger

  14 Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye

  15 Panic in the Streets

  PART 3 • RAW DEAL

  16 Key Witness

  17 The Glass Alibi

  18 The Verdict

  19 Detour

  20 Fall Guy

  21 Voice in the Wind

  PART 4 • OUT OF THE PAST

  22 The Name of the Rose

  23 Specter of the Rose

  24 The Woman in the Window

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  Full Dramatis Personae

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  PREFACE

  This is the story of one of the most notorious unsolved murders in California history—probably in American history. The story of the murder of a twenty-two-year-old girl, whose bisected body was found in the grass beside a sidewalk in a Los Angeles suburb in January 1947. Perhaps, if the newspapers had not come up with the name, the case would have languished in obscurity along with the hundreds of others marked “unsolved” in the basement of the Los Angeles Police Department. But the moniker “Black Dahlia”—evocative of an exotic flower, of desire both toxic and intoxicating—has ensured that the case remains forever imprinted in the public consciousness, a potent symbol of the dark side of Hollywood, and, by extension, of the American dream.

  This book is part detective story and part history. Partly, it is also a snapshot of a great American city and its police department as they stood at a specific moment in time. This era is commonly visualized through the movies, as the era of film noir: a time of corrupt cops and gun-toting gangsters, cynical heroes, and bottle blondes doling out deadpan one-liners. But the slick film noir repartee belied the brutal inequalities of reality. In truth, it was a tough time after a tough war in a tough world. The Black Dahlia case tapped into both the imagery and the issues. As such, it became a real-life noir story, acquiring its own mythic dimensions as fact and fiction became hard to disentangle.

  In the following pages I tell the story of this extraordinary case. However, despite its narrative form, this is not a work of fiction. Anything between quotation marks comes from a letter, memoir, or other written document. If I describe the weather on a particular day, it is because I checked the contemporary weather reports. The action takes place almost exclusively in Los Angeles, but I must beg forgiveness for a wide sweep across the decades from postwar to the present. Such a range is necessary to present the story in its entirety. I hope the reader will also allow for a change of narrative voice at the end of the story. This is necessary to broaden the scope of the account, from a historical retelling of the tale to the context of a modern-day investigation. Readers who find the chapter headings evocative of film noir movie titles of the 1940s and ’50s would be absolutely correct.

  An especially challenging aspect of investigating this particular case is that the Los Angeles Police Department has consistently refused to release the crime scene photographs and the full autopsy report. In addition, various key items of evidence—in particular, physical evidence such as the victim’s purse, shoes, and letters—are no longer available or have disappeared. The main source of contemporary evidence remains the important cache of papers related to the case collated for a grand jury investigation in 1949, and recently released by the Los Angeles district attorney. While it is highly probable that some items of contemporary evidence were suppressed by certain members of the police department at the time, it should be emphasized that police practices in general and the conduct of the LAPD as described in this book are limited to the period of the historical events discussed. There is no evidence whatsoever that today’s LAPD was involved in any “cover-up,” or indeed has any idea whether these items of evidence actually exist, or, if they exist, where they are.

  In the end, this is a story about truth: the search for truth and its suppression. The sixteenth-century English philosopher Francis Bacon has said that truth is the child of time. If this is the case, then I offer this book as the offspring of the years, which, like Moses in the cradle, has finally come to rest in the bulrushes of the Nile (or, in this case, the Mississippi).

  Piu Eatwell, 2017

  KEY DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  (A full list of dramatis personae begins on pp 275.)

  THE COPS

  Chief of the LAPD

  Clemence B. Horrall (until summer 1949)

  William A. Worton (after summer 1949)

  Assistant Chief of the LAPD

  Joe Reed (until summer 1949)

  LAPD Chief of Detectives

  Thaddeus Franklin “Thad” Brown (from summer 1949); elder brother of Finis Brown

  LAPD Homicide Division

  Head of Homicide:

  Captain Jack Donahoe (until September 1947)

  Captain Francis Kearney (after September 1947)

  Homicide Detectives Assigned to the Dahlia Case:

  Lieutenant Harry “the Hat” Hansen

  Sergeant Finis Albania Brown; younger brother of Thad Brown

  LAPD Gangster Squad

  Head of Gangster Squad:

  William “Willie” Burns (until late 1949)

  Gangster Squad Detectives Assigned to the Dahlia Case:

  John J. “JJ” O’Mara

  Archie Case

  James Ahern

  Loren K. Waggoner

  Con Keller

  LAPD psychiatrist

  Dr. Paul De River—police psychiatrist to LAPD from 1937 to 1950

  Fred Witman—private investigator and close friend of Dr. De River

  THE JOURNALISTS

  James Hugh “Jimmy” Richardson—city editor for the Los Angeles Examiner, Hearst newspaper

  Agness “Aggie” Underwood—city editor for the Los Angeles Evening Herald & Express, another Hearst newspaper and rival of the Examiner

  THE VICTIM

  Elizabeth Short—the “Black Dahlia,” victim of a gruesome murder in January 1947

  Phoebe Mae Short—mother of the victim

  Mark Hansen—Danish nightclub owner and Hollywood businessman, close friend of Short; no relation to Harry “the Hat” Hansen of the LAPD

  Ann Toth—Hollywood bit player, close friend of Short

  Marjorie Graham—girlfriend of Short

  Lynn Martin—nightclub singer, girlfriend of Short

  Dorothy and Elvera French—cinema assistant and her mother who housed Short briefly in San Diego in December/January 1947–48

  THE SUSPECTS

  George Hodel—celebrity Hollywood doctor

  Leslie Duane Dillon—twenty-seven-year-old drifter and hotel bellhop

  Corporal Joseph Dumais—
one of over five hundred “confessing Sams” who claimed to have committed the murder

  PART 1

  FALLEN ANGEL

  “This is a rotten town with a lot of rotten people in it.”

  —A MAN ALONE (1955)

  1

  FAREWELL MY LOVELY

  Sunrise was at 6:58 a.m. in Los Angeles on the morning of Wednesday, January 15, 1947. The month had been an unusually bleak one for Southern California. Dense fog had descended on the coastal towns of Long Beach and Redondo. The sea fog was accompanied by a razor-edged wind that whipped up the Pacific rollers and sent raw blasts through the boulevards of a city more accustomed to the hot, dry, dusty winter gusts of the Santa Ana winds.

  The previous night had been a rare one in Los Angeles because there had been a hard frost on the ground. Black smoke trailed across the sky from the smudge pots lit to protect the orange groves that, in those days, still carpeted the slopes of the San Fernando Valley. A slice of waning moon hung over the orange trees, their pale blossoms and fragile perfume already in the process of being obliterated by rows of white concrete grid housing. Farther south from San Fernando, in Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles, trolley cars shuttled their late-night cargo of drunks, streetwalkers, and transients around the city, seemingly oblivious to their impending annihilation even as they rattled along in the shadow of the construction work on the latest phase of the Hollywood Freeway. In just a few years, the freeway would become the major road linking northern suburbia with Tinseltown. The old central tramway would be demolished as part of a lofty plan to transform the City of Angels into, in actor Bob Hope’s words, “the biggest parking lot in the world.”*

  Like much of Los Angeles, Leimert Park in the south of the city was the planned master community of an ambitious property developer. When Walter H. Leimert† began his dream project in 1927, he envisaged a model community of homes in the newly fashionable Spanish Colonial Revival style, which would give white middle-income families their piece of the American dream. Sandwiched between Jefferson Park to the north, Hyde Park to the south, and Baldwin Hills to the west, the residential district boasted its own town square, movie theater, and shopping malls. Even more impressive, it was designed by the firm Olmsted and Olmsted, sons of Frederick Law Olmsted, the man who landscaped New York’s Central Park.

  In the 1940s, Leimert Park was the perfect place for young, white married couples to start a family. So it was for John and Betty Bersinger, who in 1945 had purchased a bungalow with a neat garden and wrought-iron grilles in the 3700 block of Norton Avenue—one of a series of narrow ribbon-roads to the north of Leimert. As elsewhere, the war had stopped housing development on their block, and the lots one block south were covered with weeds: stiff horseweed, yellow mustard, and stinging nettles in the spring and summer; clumps of wiry grass, ranging Mexican oleander, and hard, black earth in the winter. Nothing stood on the vacant scrub other than a row of electricity pylons, a line of black masts linked with skimming wires that leaped and ducked to the horizon.

  Despite the unfinished housing developments, sidewalks had been put in along the vacant lots, and this part of the park was a popular recreation area for mothers and children. It was also where Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey sometimes had their circus. So it was that, at 10:00 a.m. on the clear, cold morning of Wednesday, January 15, 1947, Betty Bersinger packed her three-year-old daughter, Anne, into her stroller and headed out south across the vacant lots, making for a repair shop to pick up her husband’s shoes. The crunch of broken glass underfoot at the 3800 block of Norton caught the young housewife’s attention as she tried to steer the stroller clear of the shards scattered on the sidewalk.

  Then, glancing up, Betty saw the flies. There was a big black cloud of them buzzing low over something. Squinting, the young mother could just about make out what appeared to be a white shop mannequin sprawled on the rough grass by the sidewalk. Bizarrely, it appeared to have been cut in half. “My goodness, it was so white,” said Betty, many years later. “It didn’t look like anything more than perhaps an artificial model. It was so white, and separated in the middle. I noticed the dark hair and this white, white form.” The presence of the palely glinting object, in a place where children played, was troubling. “It just didn’t seem right to me,” said Betty. “I could see these kids on their bicycles, and I thought, maybe it will scare those kids if they ride to school and see this, so I’d better call somebody to come along at least and have a look, and see what it is.” The thought that what she had seen was anything other than a broken store dummy barely entered Betty’s head.

  Hurrying past the vacant lots, Betty tried the doorbell of the first house on the next block. There was nobody home. At the second house, however, a woman opened the door. Betty explained that she had seen something strange a block back. She asked to use the telephone. When the call was answered at the police station, she briefly outlined what she had seen and told them someone should come check it out. Then—having triggered what was to become one of the biggest manhunts in the history of modern America—Mrs. Bersinger trundled on her way with her buggy and her child to the shopping mall.

  The call came through to the police complaint board at 10:55 a.m. A shrill-voiced female—who hung up abruptly without identifying herself—complained that there was an unsightly object off the sidewalk in the vacant lot on Norton Avenue between Thirty-ninth Street and Coliseum, in the middle of the block on the west side, and could someone please take care of it. At 11:07 a.m. a radio car was dispatched to the scene, with uniformed patrolmen Frank Perkins and Will Fitzgerald of the University Division. Accustomed, as regular flatfeet, to booking the streetwalkers, dope peddlers, and drunks who were the usual detritus of Skid Row, Perkins and Fitzgerald were ill-prepared for the sight that awaited them. They immediately radioed in to the Homicide Division.

  By 11:30 a.m., word of there being a “man down” on Norton between Thirty-ninth Street and Coliseum had spread through town. A throng of newspapermen with heavy camera equipment and phosphorescent flashbulbs gathered to join Sergeant Finis A. Brown and Lieutenant Harry L. Hansen, the Homicide Division detectives who had been dispatched to the scene. “ ‘A 390W–415 down’ meant a female drunk passed out sans clothes,” recalled Los Angeles journalist Will Fowler, twenty-four years old at the time. Fowler had never had his picture taken with a dead body before, so he cut a deal with news photographer Felix Paegel to split a bottle of bourbon if Paegel took a photograph of him kneeling beside the corpse. A circle of fedoras, jabbing fingers, and smoking flashbulbs soon surrounded the form with its cluster of buzzing flies.

  One of the first to arrive on the scene was Agness Underwood, veteran crime reporter of the Los Angeles Evening Herald-Express. Agness, known to all as “Aggie,” had been born in San Francisco in 1902. Her mother had died when she was six years old. She had subsequently been dumped by her itinerant, glass-blower father into a series of charity homes and foster families around the country. Finally, abandoned as a teenager in Los Angeles by a relative who had tried unsuccessfully to get her into the movies as a child actress, Aggie had managed to find her way to a Salvation Army hostel downtown. She had worked as a waitress and married a young soda jerk, Harry Underwood, for fear of being turned over to the authorities for living on her own underage. The pair had settled in Ocean Park in 1920, running a soda fountain lunch counter. Aggie was a housewife in Los Angeles when she applied for her first newspaper job, working vacation relief on a metropolitan switchboard. She later claimed she only wanted the job to buy new silk stockings, which her husband told her they couldn’t afford.‡

  By January 1947, Aggie had worked her way up from switchboard operator to the Herald-Express’s premier crime beat reporter. She was forty-four years old, a short, sturdy woman with a square jaw, pugnacious appearance, and a ready grin. “She should have been a man,” said the Herald-Express managing editor, J. B. T. Campbell. She was “a rip-snorting, gogettum reporter that goes through fire lines, trails killers, w
eeps with divorcees and rides anything from airplanes to mules to reach the spot that in newspapers is usually marked with an arrow or an x.” Aggie took great pains to distance herself from the sob-sister line of reporting that was the traditional beat for female journalists. “To hell with that. I’d rather have a fistful—an armload—of good, solid facts,” she said. Underwood wrote like a man, cussed like a man, and joined in her male colleagues’ pranks. Once, she slapped the city editor in the face with a fish that had been brought to the office in a tank. She dressed in the shabby, slapdash fashion of the male journalists: rumpled and unremarkable dresses, no makeup, low-heeled shoes. Colleagues recalled that her hair often looked as if it had been combed by an electric mixer. “She was a raggedy-looking woman,” said Jack Smith, a high-profile columnist who worked with Aggie. But Aggie could also work her gender to advantage, when it suited her. She sewed back the wayward buttons of her male colleagues’ shirts, invited them home for spaghetti dinners, and brought her kids into the office to hand out gifts at Christmas. From the very beginning, she saw the big picture: skillfully mapping out a strategy where she would be seen as an exceptional journalist who just happened to be a woman. Within two years, she was to become the city editor of the Herald-Express, one of the first women to be appointed to the position on a U.S. national newspaper.

  It was a matter of great pride to Aggie that she was tougher than any man when it came to covering gruesome crime stories. “I was no sissy in my control of my reaction to blood and guts,” she said. Once, when police discovered two rotting corpses on a living room sofa, male officers and newspapermen waited outside for the room to air. Aggie marched straight in, climbed over the corpses, retrieved their IDs, and phoned in her story. Afterward, she sent her brown dress to the cleaners, but complained that “the odor persisted.”