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

  But even Aggie was shocked at what she saw on Norton Avenue the morning of January 15, 1947.

  The body—wreathed in smoke from dozens of flashbulbs—was unquestionably female. It lay amid sparse weeds a couple of feet from the sidewalk. The arms were bent in right angles at the elbows and raised above the shoulders: in supplication, it seemed in death, in reality, the consequence of having been strung up by the wrists when alive. The legs were spread apart. There were bruises and cuts on the forehead. The face had been severely beaten. The hair was blood-matted. The eyes, which were closed, seemed strangely peaceful in contrast to the mouth, which had been slashed from ear to ear in a satanic smile. Most shockingly of all, the body had been cut in half through the abdomen, under the ribs. The two sections were ten or twelve inches apart. The liver hung out of the torso. A deep, gaping slit had been cut from the pubic area to just under the navel. It was, as one eyewitness was later to recall, as though “two hunks of human flesh had been laid down like two sides of beef.”

  In the city of Los Angeles in the 1940s, homicide detectives encountered a killing every two or three days. The department listed 131 murders in 1946, and 119 in 1947. Only a few blocks west, in the Baldwin Hills—as those who gazed at the grisly spectacle were all too aware—was the spot where ten years beforehand Albert Dyer, a WPA street-crossing guard, had assaulted, garroted, and tossed aside the bodies of three little girls, the “Babes of Inglewood.”§ But this was the most grotesque murder that those hard-nosed cops and newshounds had witnessed. The scene, Aggie said later, “showed sadism at its most frenzied—the worst butcher murder I was ever assigned.” The male policemen and reporters thought the woman was about thirty-six years old. But Aggie, with her sharp eyes and personal experience, noticed the “youthful condition of the breasts and the smooth thighs.” She knew the girl was much younger—early twenties, probably. Later that morning, the gruesome remains of “Jane Doe #1”—as the corpse had been christened—were sealed in an aluminum coffin with screw-clamps and taken by Black Maria¶ to the Los Angeles city morgue.

  The Hall of Justice in downtown Los Angeles had rats as big as cats. They scampered and squealed down the drafty corridors of the massive fifteen-story building, which towered grim-faced over the city’s civic center. The hall had been built in 1925 from Sierra granite, and its squat Corinthian columns were inspired by the Mausoleum at Helicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. This was all the more fitting in that the building—which housed the district attorney’s and the sheriff’s offices—also happened to house the city morgue, deep within the vaults of the basement floor. The rear basement entry to the morgue was much like that of a wholesale grocery receiving entrance. Here it was that the two pieces of the corpse of Jane Doe #1 were unloaded and weighed on a set of black floor-level scales. “When they were told that the body was cut in half,” recalled news photographer Felix Paegel, “the Coroner said the autopsy would be performed right after lunch.”

  Later on Thursday, January 16, the body was placed on a hard porcelain mortuary table. Above it hovered Dr. Frederick D. Newbarr, M.D., chief autopsy surgeon for Los Angeles County. Dr. Newbarr was dressed in a white autopsy gown, rubber apron, rubber gloves, and white galoshes. The table upon which the corpse lay was one in a row of several in the room. Each table had a corpse laid out on its gleaming surface, the head propped up on a wooden block. The room was infused with the stench of disinfectant, masking the unmistakable odor of decay.

  The saying went that dead men told no tales, but Dr. Newbarr knew this was not true. Of the many dozen corpses that passed under his scalpel each week, every single one told a story, compelling to those who could read it. They spoke of empty lives in glamorous Hollywood villas, violence behind the mock-Tudor façades of the mansions of oil magnates, secrets in the basements of ranches in the forested canyons. There were the torn and broken fingernails of the woman who had clawed her attacker’s face in a last bid for her life; the grip marks on the shoulders of the “accidentally” drowned child; the hesitation scars and cuts on the wrists of the youth who had committed suicide rather than face a court-martial for desertion. For Newbarr, toiling in his basement morgue, every single body presented a new and coded message to crack.

  The body found in Leimert Park was a challenge for even the most experienced of forensic pathologists. Yet, by meticulous examination and assessment, Dr. Newbarr succeeded in itemizing the many horrific mutilations inflicted on the victim. His final report, with its staccato-like scientific terminology, made chilling reading. The body, Newbarr noted, was that of a female, about fifteen to twenty years of age, measuring five feet five inches in height and weighing 115 pounds. There were multiple lacerations to the face, inflicted by a sharp knife: in particular, a deep laceration over three inches long, which extended from the corners of the mouth. The teeth were in an advanced state of decay: the two upper central incisors were loose, and one lower incisor. The rest of the teeth showed cavities. The head showed evidence of severe blows, although the skull had not been fractured. Depressed ridges in the wrists suggested the girl had been strung up by the wrists and tortured. The blows to the head and lacerations to the mouth had been delivered while the victim was alive. It was these, Newbarr decided, that had probably killed her. The rest of the lacerations had been inflicted upon her when dead, including a distinctive network of crisscrossed slashes to parts of the body and across the pubic region, where the hair had been cut off and removed. There was no evidence of strangulation or suffocation. The grass upon which the body was laid had been wet with dew, suggesting that it had been placed there before dawn. Newbarr was of the view that death had occurred twenty-four hours previously, probably less.

  A square of tissue had been removed from the right breast; and there were multiple scratches on the surface of the left. Healed scars on the chest suggested an old operation on the lungs. This was corroborated by the fact that, while the left lung was healthy, the right had pleural adhesions. Both arms were covered in cuts and scratches. Her nails were very short, and bitten to the quick. The palms of her hands were roughened, but not with calluses. The hair was dark brown but had been hennaed, with the original dark strands beginning to grow out. On each foot, the big toenail was painted bright red.#

  The trunk was completely severed, by an incision that cut through the intestine and the soft disc between the vertebrae. It appeared that a very sharp, long-bladed butcher’s or carving knife had been used to sever the body, and that the killer might have used a straight razor to inflict torture before death. The organs of the abdomen were entirely exposed, with lacerations of the intestines and both kidneys. There was no evidence of pregnancy, and the uterus was small. There was, however, evidence of what Newbarr delicately described as “female trouble.” This was later explained as a cyst on the Bartholin gland.** There was also a gaping laceration four and a quarter inches long, extending down from the navel to just above the pubis. A latticework of cuts had been made on both sides of this laceration, above the pubic bone. There was also a square pattern of lacerations in the skin of the right hip, and an irregular shape of flesh that had been removed from the front of the left thigh.†† While the vaginal canal remained intact, the anal opening was markedly dilated with multiple abrasions, indicating insertion of a foreign object. The soles of the feet were stained brown, and the stomach was filled with feces and unidentifiable particles. All smears for spermatozoa were negative. The corpse was completely clean and drained of blood, indicating that the killing had been accomplished at a different location from which the body was found. Fibers from what appeared to be a stiff brush revealed that the body had been thoroughly scrubbed, particularly in the pubic region and points of mutilation. The fibers were sent to the FBI for analysis. They were found to be of coconut hair, probably from a cheap scrubbing brush. They were of no assistance to a possible identification.

  Dr. Newbarr’s report made it clear that the majority of gruesome mutilations had been performed o
n the dead woman’s body after her death. They suggested necrophilia and a fetishism with knives. The blows to the head and lacerations to the face, on the other hand, had been performed when the victim was still alive. They were the hallmarks of a sadistic lust murderer. There was much discussion about the “clean” nature of the bisection of the body, and the fact that the corpse had been professionally drained of blood. It was speculated that the killer either had medical training or experience with handling corpses in a mortuary. While the possibility that the killer was a doctor was entertained, this was not a requisite. The famous LAPD detective “Jigsaw John” St. John, who was to inherit the case many years later, stated that while “the perpetrator may have had some knowledge of anatomy . . . he wasn’t necessarily in the medical profession.” Of greater significance was the manifest fascination of the killer with death.

  Two key items of information relating to the mutilations were withheld from public disclosure. These were to be kept secret, as an aid in interviewing potential suspects. They were facts that only the killer would know.

  For the moment also, only the killer knew a third fact. Who was Jane Doe #1?

  * The Hollywood Freeway—the primary shortcut spanning the Cahuenga Pass to link the San Fernando Valley with the Los Angeles Basin—was completed in three stages in 1940, 1954, and 1968.

  † Walter H. Leimert (1877–1970) was born in Oakland, California. The son of German emigrants, he was to become a significant Los Angeles property developer.

  ‡ Aggie added the distinctive double s to her name on her second marriage in 1920, to the same man. Her husband, Harry, persuaded her to marry him again, because a dance hall was running a promotion that was paying couples $100 to tie the knot. Aggie was reluctant to do so, but Harry assured her there was no illegality in marrying the same person twice.

  § Albert Dyer and the Babes of Inglewood case are discussed in detail on pages 84–86.

  ¶ Black Maria: Contemporary term for the coroner’s truck.

  # While the hair had been hennaed, it had the overall appearance of the original dark brown, as the hair was growing out: as evidenced by the dead body report and morgue photographs.

  ** Bartholin’s cyst: a small, fluid-filled sac inside the opening of a woman’s vagina, which if inflamed can cause an abscess and resultant discomfort during sexual intercourse.

  †† The removal of the flesh from the left thigh was particularly significant and is discussed in later chapters.

  2

  A DOUBLE LIFE

  The news flash came through to the offices of the Los Angeles Examiner on the morning of January 15 from its police reporter, Bill Zelinsky. When it did, the city editor, Jimmy Richardson, shot every newspaperman and photographer in the office out on it. The staff of the Los Angeles Examiner called Jimmy the “last of the terrible men.” He had been born in Windsor, Ontario, in 1894. His father was a Detroit horse-drawn carriage retailer put out of business by Henry Ford. Jimmy had started his career as a reporter in Winnipeg in 1912, after being expelled from school. The following year he moved to Los Angeles, to work at the Los Angeles Evening Herald, the Post Record, the Daily News, and finally the Los Angeles Examiner.

  By 1947, Jimmy—a recovered alcoholic now hitting his fifties, scrawny, balding, and bespectacled—had worked virtually every big story that had come out of L.A. in the last thirty-five years. In the 1930s, he had single-handedly waged war against the gangster Bugsy Siegel. Jimmy was tough as boots, but there was just the tiniest chink in his hard-boiled armory: a predilection for quoting the poetry of G. K. Chesterton.*

  Jimmy knew, from years in the newspaper game, that the way for a city editor to jump on a story was to “shoot the works at it.” Then you waited, with your “blood pounding and your insides churning.”

  The Examiner reporter Sid Hughes was the first to call in on the story.

  “It’s a pip,” he told Jimmy.

  “Who is she?”

  “Don’t know. Can’t find a thing to identify her. Nothing on the body. Good looking gal.”

  “Pictures?”

  “Plenty but you can’t print them. She’s all cut up. Face and everything. I can give you detailed description, hair, eyes, height, weight and all that stuff. That’s all there is to go on.”

  When Sid called the story in, the huge city room in the Examiner offices at Eleventh and Broadway was just waking up. The photo editor hurried up to Jimmy with a dripping eight-by-ten blowup of the bisected body. The reporters gathered around and stared. Richardson dispatched a man from the art department to make a sketch of the girl as she probably looked in life. He set the photographers working on printable crime scene photos that showed the nude corpse decorously covered by an airbrushed blanket. The Examiner’s January 15 Extra edition came out with the headline “Fiend Tortures, Kills Girl.” It sold more copies than the edition that had covered the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The only edition to beat it was the one that came out on V-J Day. The writer Arthur James Pegler had said that “a Hearst newspaper is like a screaming woman running down the street with her throat cut.” For once, nobody accused the newspaper of exaggeration.

  Bill Zelinsky called in that the girl’s fingerprints didn’t match any on file at the police department or sheriff’s office. “They’re airmailing them to the FBI in Washington,” he said. Warden Woolard, the assistant managing editor, then came up with the idea that was to give the Examiner its first big lead on the story: the jump that, in Jimmy’s words, “made it our story from then on.” That night, a couple of Homicide Division detectives came to the Examiner offices and asked if they could have their artist’s drawing of the girl. Warden lambasted them for airmailing the prints to the FBI in Washington. There was going to be a big storm in the Midwest and the East, and all planes were to be grounded.

  “That’s tough,” said one of the detectives.

  “Not as tough as you think,” said Warden. “We can send those fingerprints by Soundphoto.† We can send them tonight right now, and have the answer within a few hours.”

  Warden called Ray Richards, head of the Washington Bureau of the Hearst newspapers. Richards called the FBI and arranged for the prints, once wired to the Examiner’s Washington office by Soundphoto, to be delivered personally to Quinn Tann, the inspector in charge of fingerprint identification at the FBI. The first transmission over the telephone wires failed. The prints were indistinct. Russ Lapp, a photographer at the Examiner’s news bureau, then had the idea of blowing each fingerprint up and sending them one by one, as eight-by-tens. The prints reached the FBI at 11:00 a.m. But the images wired by Soundphoto, even when enlarged, were defective: two of the eight fingerprints were missing entirely, and three others badly blurred. Quinn Tann doubted that they could be used for identification. Nevertheless, dozens of assistants searched the fingerprint records by hand, leafing through card indexes under the glare of electric arc lights in the vast FBI vault. By 2:50 p.m., the prints had been identified.

  She was Elizabeth Short, twenty-two years old, from Medford, Massachusetts. The fingerprints used for the identification had been filed with the FBI some years back by the Santa Barbara police. They had been taken on September 23, 1943, when the girl had been arrested for underage drinking with soldiers in a restaurant in the Mission Valley. At that point, she had been living with another girl in a bungalow court at West Cabrillo Beach. Soon a second matching print was traced with the help of the first: a national defense print submitted by the Services of Supply at the U.S. Army’s Camp Cooke, Lompoc, California. It transpired that the girl had been working as a clerk at the Camp Cooke post exchange when she was arrested.

  The Santa Barbara police mug shot showed a sallow, sulky-faced girl with an upturned nose, a shock of raven-black hair, and eyes with strangely pale, glassy irises. She had a look that went straight through you. The pressmen, habituated to writing up all “tomatoes as stunners,” were for once not lying. Nobody had expected her to be so sullenly beautiful.

  It transp
ired that after her arrest for underage drinking and while awaiting trial in Santa Barbara, the girl had been looked after by a local policewoman, Mary H. Unkefer. Officer Unkefer had befriended her and taken her into her home.

  “She had the blackest hair I ever saw,” Unkefer told the swarm of reporters who descended on the Santa Barbara Police Station. “I noticed that she was a very nice girl and was most neat about her person and clothes.” Unkefer also mentioned that the girl had a rose tattooed on her upper left leg. “She loved to sit so that it would show,” she said. The killer had cut out the rose tattoo.‡ Eventually, Unkefer said, the juvenile court at Santa Barbara had released the girl on probation. Officer Unkefer had accompanied her to the bus station and put her on a bus home to Medford. The Santa Barbara Neighborhood House gave the girl $10 in expense money for food and Cokes on the six-day return trip.

  It was the first time in history that fingerprints in a criminal case had been identified by Soundphoto. Jimmy Richardson took some time to crow about it before he sent Sid Hughes racing out to Lompoc to check out records at Camp Cooke. Sid prowled about the Army camp for a day or two. Soon he resurfaced with the information that the girl’s mother was Mrs. Phoebe Mae Short of Medford, Massachusetts.

  Jimmy called in his reporter Wain Sutton, who was writing up the story. He told Wain to get on the telephone to the murdered girl’s mother.

  “Now I want you to be careful,” Jimmy told Wain. “She probably doesn’t know her daughter has been murdered. So, find out everything you can about the girl without saying anything about her being dead. If you tell her at the start she’ll probably throw a wing ding and you won’t get anything.”

  “What if she asks what it’s all about?” Wain asked.

  “Stall her. Just keep asking questions. When you’ve got all you can then break the news to her.”