The Annals of Unsolved Crime

by Edward Jay Epstein

  But what of the letter and postcard, both in the same handwriting, signed “Jack the Ripper”? They created the tabloids’ killer. When the letter was forwarded to Scotland Yard, which had received dozens of other letters claiming credit for the killings, its Criminal Investigation Department handling the case concluded that the letter was a hoax. It further suspected that it was forged by someone inside the Central News Agency. That suspicion was based on the finding that on previous occasions the Central News Agency had fabricated stories to increase their clients’ circulation. In his memoirs, Sir Robert Anderson of Scotland Yard stated bluntly, “the ‘Jack-the-Ripper’s’ letter which is preserved in the Police Museum at Scotland Yard, is the creation of an enterprising London journalist.” Sir Melville Macnaghten also gave his appraisal of the “Jack the Ripper” letter, writing in his autobiography, “I have always thought I could discern the stained forefinger of the journalist—indeed, a year later, I had shrewd suspicions as to the actual author.” (His suspect was Thomas J. Bulling, a deputy editor at the Central News Agency.)

  If the letter was indeed a journalistic invention, it succeeded in creating international interest in the case, as the Central News Agency syndicated the story in two dozen countries, and in burnishing the specter of Jack the Ripper in the popular imagination for generations to come. It also helped spawn a wealth of theories about the case. These theories ran the gamut, enlisting ethnic groups, such as the Jewish butchers who worked in nearby slaughterhouses, and members of the British royal family. One author, Thomas Stowell, published an article in 1970 in The Criminologist theorizing that Prince Albert Victor, second in line to succession to the British throne, may have been the Jack the Ripper because he was driven insane by syphilis.

  My assessment is that the concept of “Jack the Ripper” and much of the speculative finger-pointing surrounding the case is a construct of the media. The only pieces of evidence as to the existence of Jack the Ripper are a letter and postcard sent to news media, and the circumstances surrounding them strongly suggest to me that they were fabrications of one or more journalists interested in increasing circulation.

  The theories that attempt to tie famous names to the case in more recent books proceed from nothing more than speculation based on what may have been possible. And it is possible to speculate that virtually any person in London was the serial killer. Indeed, even when counter-evidence emerged, such as that Prince Albert had an alibi on the night of some of the murders, it has been disregarded. All we really know for certain 124 years later is that four—or possibly five—prostitutes were killed and brutalized in a similar way in London in 1888. Since two of these murders occurred after the massive newspaper publicity began, they might have been the work of a copycat killer. We do not know even how many different murderers are responsible.

  Without forensic tools to process a crime scene—techniques that are now taken for granted in popular television programs such as CSI and Law & Order—it was often impossible for police to factually establish the identities of the perpetrators in crimes to which there were no witnesses. Fingerprint classification, such as the Henry Classification System in Britain and the Bertillon system in the United States, was not used by police until the turn of the twentieth century. Hair, fiber, and ballistics identification, which depended on the availability of the modern comparative microscope, was not employed until the late 1920s. DNA typing was not used as a forensic tool until the late 1980s. In 1888, when London police found the bodies of dead prostitutes, they had no means of identifying who was present at the various crime scenes, and therefore could only use guesswork to determine how many of these crimes were linked to a single killer. As a result, the press was free to merge together a number of unsolved crimes as the work of a serial killer.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE HARRY OAKES MURDER

  Sir Harry Oakes was the richest man in the British colony of the Bahamas in 1943. Born in 1874 in America, he made his fortune buying gold mines in Canada, and he got his title from King George VI for money he gave to the King’s namesake hospital in Britain. In the Bahamas, where he took up residency to avoid taxes, he owned a large share of the British colony’s economy by 1943, including its airport, bus services, commercial real estate, and golf course. He also became a central part of its social life through his close association with the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII of England, who had been sent to the Bahamas as its governor in 1940 after his pro-Nazi sympathies made him a political vulnerability in Britain. On the night of July 7, 1943, in the midst of a tropical storm, Oakes was murdered in his home in Cable Beach and his battered and burned body covered in white feathers. Since his entire family had moved to his summer estate in Bar Harbor, Maine, the only other person staying in the house was his friend Harold Christie, a Bahamian real estate speculator and a business associate of Oakes. Christie reported the crime at 8:00 the next morning. The police found Oakes’ half-charred body in bed in front of a blood-stained lacquered screen. Since the unburnt parts of his body were smeared with inflammable gasoline, they theorized that the perpetrator had set the fire to cover up the murder but that the sudden rainstorm had put it out. With the crime revealed, the Duke of Windsor attempted to stifle any public discussion of it by using his imperial powers in the Crown colony to invoke full press censorship in the Bahamas, but even he could not stop the murder of a man as rich as Oakes from growing into an international scandal.

  Meanwhile, Bahamian authorities, unable to get assistance from Scotland Yard because of the exigencies of World War II, could not cope with the pressures put on them by the Duke of Windsor to speedily conclude the investigation. They were baffled by the upward flow of blood on Oakes’ corpse, which indicated that it had been moved onto the bed while he was still bleeding, but their only eyewitness, Christie, who was in room next door at the time of the murder, insisted that he had not heard any suspicious noises in the house. This left the police unsure where Oakes met his end. To confuse matters further, there was a serious question of how Oakes had died, indeed so serious that the authorities had to recall in midair the plane carrying Oakes’ body to its burial place in Maine. Whereas a hastily done autopsy concluded that Oakes’ fatal head injuries had been caused by a blow from a blunt instrument, X-rays of Oakes’ right mastoid bones showed four puncture wounds, indicating that he had been killed by a sharp, pointed weapon. Additional photographs taken of the peripatetic corpse did not resolve the discrepancy, nor was any murder weapon found, blunt or sharp. Aside from Christie, the only other possible witnesses at the house, two night watchmen, could not be found.

  Meanwhile, the Duke of Windsor brought in from America a Miami homicide detective, Edward Melchen, who had worked as the Duke’s personal aide when he visited Florida, and his associate, Captain James Barker, with a mandate to quickly bring the investigation to a conclusion. Even though they had no authority in the Bahamas, he reportedly asked them to confirm that it was a suicide (despite the fact that forensic evidence showed Oakes had been hit from behind). Instead, less than thirty-six hours later, the Miami detectives announced that it was a murder, and they then claimed that they had recovered a partial fingerprint from the bloody lacquer screen, missed by the Bahamian police, that identified the murderer. The print matched that of Alfred de Marigny, a yachtsman who had married Oakes’ eighteen-year-old daughter Nancy the year before. On the basis of this fingerprint, he was indicted, a rope was ordered for his execution, and the Duke of Windsor left the country so he could not be called as a witness at the murder trial, which began on October 18, 1943. In the cross-examination, however, the testimony of the American detectives was impeached, and it turned out that the fingerprint could not have come from the bloody screen because it did not match the lines in the screen, and may have been lifted from the water glass that de Marigny had drank from when questioned. De Marigny was acquitted in less than two hours.

  The investigation was never reopened, even after de Marigny claimed to have locat
ed a key witness, one of the watchmen on duty at the Oakes’ home on the night of the murder. According to de Marigny, the watchman said he saw two men arrive in a car around midnight, and enter the house, and, soon afterward, flames in Oakes’ bedroom window. He was then paid 100 pounds sterling to leave the island. De Marigny’s wife also hired a private detective, Raymond Schindler, who reexamined the crime scene and found that it had been so thoroughly scrubbed down that, even before the trial, any fingerprints, hairs, fibers, or other clues had been obliterated. “The authorities told me that was done ‘so as not to confuse the issue,’ ” Schindler wrote to Scotland Yard. He added that Government House, which was the seat of British rule in the Bahamas, had “stopped the reopening of the investigation.”

  The consignment of the murder to limbo left the door open to other speculation. The theory advanced by de Marigny is that Oakes was killed by thugs because of his illegal activities. According to de Marigny, he had been involved with the Duke of Windsor and with Oakes’ houseguest Christie, who was a rum smuggler during Prohibition, in a scheme to illicitly smuggle currency out of the Bahamas. According to this theory, the Duke of Windsor organized the cover-up because his partner in these shady dealings, Christie, could be implicated in the murder. The British government then cooperated in the cover-up by recalling the Duke of Windsor to prevent any further tarnishing of his royal reputation.

  Another theory advanced is that Meyer Lansky, a well-known American organized crime figure, sent the killers that night. In his book King X, Marshall Houts claims that the Duke of Windsor had approved Lansky’s expansion of casino gambling into the Bahamas, but that Oakes was blocking it. According to Houts’ reconstruction, Lansky’s men killed Oakes at another location and had Christie take his body back to his home.

  Finally, there is the theory that Oakes’ lawyer, Walter Foskett, was behind the murder. On June 10, 1959, the FBI forwarded Scotland Yard a report based on information from Fred Maloof, an art dealer from Maryland, who said that Foskett had embezzled money from Oakes in an art sale he had arranged and, just days before his death, Oakes threatened to expose Foskett. If so, Foskett had a motive to silence him.

  My assessment proceeds from the forensic evidence showing that the body had to have been moved onto the bed and then set aflame. The perpetrator clearly had an interest in making the scene appear to be an accident instead of a murder, which suggests that rather than thugs, someone involved with Oakes carried out the crime. The circumstances also indicate that someone inside the house was complicit in allowing access. The only person in the house that night was Christie. His claim that he did not hear the bludgeoning, the moving of Oakes’ body, or the fire is not credible. If he had been involved in illegal businesses with Oakes, as de Marigny alleges, he had a motive to maintain silence about what happened that night.

  Perhaps the most important lesson of the Oakes case is that frame-ups do not only occur in fiction. If the political stakes are high enough, as they were in the Harry Oakes case, an innocent person can be framed for murder.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE BLACK DAHLIA

  The mutilated body of a nude woman, severed at the waist, was found on January 15, 1947, in Los Angeles. Taking a page from the playbook of Jack the Ripper, a reporter from William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Herald Express tagged the unknown female “The Black Dahlia,” a name that conjured up in the press images of a slinky adventurer. The hunt for the Black Dahlia’s killer so intoxicated the public imagination over the next five years that no fewer than thirty men falsely confessed or falsely identified relatives as the sadistic murderer. Six decades later, the fictive sex life of the victim became the subject of Brian De Palma’s 2006 movie The Black Dahlia.

  The facts are more prosaic. Initially, after body parts were found in a vacant lot near Norton Avenue, the police did not even know the identity of the corpse. Only when the body was reassembled could police learn that the victim was a young, diminutive woman—five feet, five inches tall and weighing 115 pounds—with blue eyes and brown hair. There was no blood surrounding the body, and the crime scene had been so badly trampled by journalists, police, and bystanders that it yielded no usable footprints, fingerprints, hair, fibers, or other clues.

  According to the autopsy, the cause of death was blood loss combined with a concussion of the brain. The bleeding proceeded from ear-to-ear facial lacerations. She also had deep rope burns on both her wrists and ankles, indicating that she had been tied spread-eagle and then tortured. The lack of blood suggested that the killer had murdered her elsewhere, drained away her blood, cleaned the body parts, transported them to the vacant lot, and then posed them with her arms at right angles above her head.

  Her fingerprints were sent to the FBI in Washington, which matched them to the prints of twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short, whose fingerprints were on file because she had worked as a clerk at an army base and had been arrested for underage drinking in Florida. Police then established that she had worked on and off as a waitress in Los Angeles. According to witnesses at the boarding house where she had resided, Short had been missing for about six days before her body was discovered. Soon after the Black Dahlia was identified, the editor of the Los Angeles Examiner, another Hearst newspaper, reported that he had received a phone call from the “Black Dahlia Avenger,” who claimed to be the killer and demanded that the Examiner provide more publicity for the crime. As proof of his bona fides, he mailed the Examiner a number of Short’s putative possessions, including an address book, a birth certificate, business cards, and photographs. Since an empty handbag had been found in a garbage bin a short distance from the body, either the “Black Avenger” was the killer or a publicity-seeker who had found Short’s handbag and, after removing the contents, discarded it. In any case, inscribed on the address book was the name “Mark Hansen.” When questioned, Hansen, a Hollywood nightclub owner, told police that Short had lived in his home for about six months from May to October 1946. She had shared a room with his girlfriend, Ann Toth, who was a friend of Short. Toth provided a number of suspects, including Hansen. The prime suspect was Robert Manley, who was with Short in a motel on January 9, making him the last person known to have seen her alive. Manley was briefly arrested, but after he passed a polygraph test, he was released. Despite one of the largest and longest investigations in the history of Los Angeles, the police were unable to connect any of the suspects to the murder or, for that matter, even locate the place in which Short was mutilated. As a result, no one was ever indicted for the murder of Elizabeth Short.

  The theories of who did it fall into two basic categories: acquaintances and strangers. As for the former, Manley remained a prime candidate among theorists for a decade. Since he had been with Short a week before she was murdered, he had the opportunity. He also had serious psychiatric problems, as it later developed, including hearing imaginary voices. In 1954, his wife committed him to a psychiatric hospital and agreed to have him questioned under sodium pentothal—a drug that the CIA experimented with as a truth serum. On the drug Manley maintained that he was innocent of Short’s murder, and he was released. He died in 1986. Other theories focus on various other men she knew or might have known in Hollywood, but they have no grounding in evidence. The stranger theories suggest that she was picked up by a sadistic drifter or a Jack-the-Ripper-style serial killer. Captain Jack Donahoe of the Los Angeles police, for example, developed the theory that Short’s murder was “likely connected” to a series of sadistic murders in Chicago (for which William Heirens was convicted). He based this on his own analysis of the “Black Dahlia Avenger’s” handwriting and the fact that one victim in Chicago was named Suzanne Degnan and Short’s body was found only three blocks from Degnan Boulevard. Another such theory is that Short was killed by the so-called Cleveland Torso Killer, who killed and dismembered women in Cleveland between 1934 and 1938, although the Los Angeles police could not find any similarity in the modus operandi of the killers.

  My assessment
is that Captain Donahoe, though wrong about the Chicago linkage, was right that a serial predator was at work. Media attention, even when it is as unrelenting as in the Black Dahlia case, can confuse rather than clarify a crime investigation. All the evidence points to a killer who had prepared a discreet place to imprison, torture, and mutilate his victim and was able to carry out this gruesome deed without leaving a trace. The long police investigation shows that none of the men she dated, including Manley and Hansen, had such a facility. I believe Short was the victim of a random predator.