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

by Piu Eatwell

  Lieutenant Harry Hansen’s partner on the Dahlia case, Sergeant Finis Brown, was very different from “the Hat.” Finis was squat and swarthy, with heavy jowls and rumpled suits. Unlike Harry, he had none of the smooth talker about him. People who knew Finis described him as “real strange,” that “you couldn’t believe a word he said.” If Harry “the Hat” was the one to get heavy with criminals, Finis fraternized with them. According to the veteran Fox television crime reporter Tony Valdez, it was common knowledge that Finis Brown was mixed up with Mark Hansen, that he was the “bagman” who collected the dough from police shakedowns of the hoodlums and racketeers of the Los Angeles underworld. That opinion was shared by the intrepid police correspondent of the Long Beach Independent Chuck Cheatham: “ ‘Harry the Hat,’ that’s what we called Lieutenant Harry Hansen. He wasn’t on the take, not the Hat. His partner Finis Brown, that’s another story.” The legendary Los Angeles crime reporter Nieson Himmel was of the same view: “People said that Harry Hansen’s partner, Finis Albania Brown, was a bookie. We called him ‘F.A.’ for ‘Fat Arse.’ ”†††

  Some years earlier, criminologist and crime reporter Ernest Jerome Hopkins had noted that the LAPD of the era had an absolute disregard for the Constitution, or for law of any sort. Hopkins described how LAPD officers would routinely beat suspects with rubber hoses under interrogation, since a hose left no visible marks. Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, the LAPD had a reputation for lawlessness and brutality beyond almost any other police department. The fanatically anti-Labor Los Angeles business establishment, coupled with the city’s puritanical new population from mainly Iowa and Kansas, led to a combination of “Red Squad” and “Moral Squad” that clashed viciously with the laissez-faire values of the movie industry community. At the same time, police were caught up with shyster lawyers, stool pigeons, and bail bondsmen in a cycle of graft that saw the proceeds of crime split profitably between lawyers, cops, and criminals. “It was a lousy, crooked department,” recalled Max Solomon, who had defended many an L.A. gangster and so could be presumed to know what he was talking about. “You know, in Chicago the gangsters paid off the police but the gangsters did the job. In Los Angeles, the police were the gangsters.”

  But Sergeant Finis Brown had an asset that nobody else had. His elder brother, Thaddeus Brown, was the powerful commander of the LAPD Patrol Bureau, handling all divisional vice activities of the department. Thad Brown was a cop’s cop. The historian of the LAPD Joe Domanick wrote of him that “he loved to drink, loved his men, and they loved him.” The elder Brown brother was something of a celebrity. In the early days of the cop radio show Dragnet, Joe Friday’s self-introduction would invariably include the words, “The boss is Thad Brown, chief of detectives.” But like the pudgy, baby-faced police captain Hank Quinlan in Orson Welles’s movie Touch of Evil, Thad’s chummy façade concealed a core of ice. He commanded a network of paid informants in all corners of the city: the management of the Communist Party, a barber in Watts, the head of tongs in Chinatown.‡‡‡ To the average cop in the police department, Thad’s word was law. Nobody would dare knock Finis while his big brother was around to protect him.

  More than a year after the murder of Elizabeth Short, the police investigation was heading nowhere. Los Angeles citizens were terrorized by a succession of recent unsolved murders in the city, of which the Dahlia and French cases were just two examples. Angelenos complained that their women were unsafe on the streets at night as long as the “werewolf killer” remained at large. The public mood was fast turning from unease to anger. Complaints flooded in to the mayor and civic authorities. Something had to be done. But the months dragged on, and nothing happened.

  Then, in late 1948—almost two years after the murder—there was, finally, a breakthrough.

  * Corporal Dumais continued to claim to be Elizabeth’s killer, off and on, for the next ten years.

  † The Jeanne French killing is discussed further on page 109.

  ‡ As transcribed in a confidential police report of the incident. The newspapers reported, in more dignified fashion, that Reynolds had said she had cut off the victim’s hair and “treated it in an obscene fashion.”

  § This must have been Lieutenant Rudy Wellpott, the notorious head of Administrative Vice at the LAPD, who was later to be embroiled in the Mickey Cohen and Brenda Allen phone-tapping scandals of 1949. (Discussed on page 148.)

  ¶ Hays Code: the Motion Picture Production Code, a set of self-imposed industry rules that set out a restrictive set of “moral guidelines,” and which was applied to motion pictures produced by the Hollywood studios from 1930 to 1968. Among other restrictions, the code forbade the depiction of homosexuality in any form.

  # “Gillette blades”: so called because of the double-edged blade of the Gillette razor, i.e., “cutting both ways.”

  ** The true story of “Madam Chang” was uncovered many years later and is discussed on page 210.

  †† Huntington’s disease is a progressive hereditary neurological disorder, common symptoms of which include uncharacteristic aggression, emotional volatility, and social disinhibition.

  ‡‡ Elizabeth’s fastidiousness was also cited by Robert “Red” Manley, who mentioned that, even when sick at the motel in San Diego, she had asked for her suitcases with her clothes and makeup to be brought in to her from the car.

  §§ The Herald-Express also pointed out the failure to collect her baggage implied the likelihood that Elizabeth was trapped, and possibly drugged, during the “missing week” (Herald-Express, January 23, 1947).

  ¶¶ As opposed to the much more plausible explanation that the girl was trapped.

  ## No relation to the Los Angeles businessman Mark Hansen, although both were of Danish descent.

  *** Harry Watson (1922–2001) was a member of a family of child film stars who later became a leading staff photographer on the Daily News. In the 1950s he switched to television and became a pioneering cameraman for KTTV. All of the six Watson brothers became news or commercial photographers, and Harry’s uncle George went on to manage Acme News Pictures (a forerunner of United Press Photos).

  ††† Nieson Himmel (1922–99) was one of the police reporters who defined postwar Los Angeles. Himmel spent a lifetime prowling the city streets for stories and listening to the nightly mayhem of newsroom murder calls. He worked for the City News and Daily News before joining Aggie Underwood’s Herald-Express, and was once arrested for trafficking narcotics across the U.S.-Mexican border when on assignment for a story under Aggie’s supervision. He ended his career as a police reporter for the Los Angeles Times.

  ‡‡‡ Tong: North American Chinese secret society or clandestine brotherhood.

  PART 2

  DARK PASSAGE

  “Experience has taught me never to trust a policeman.”

  THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950)

  8

  THE LETTER

  In the aftermath of the Dahlia killing, Dr. Joseph Paul De River received hundreds of letters from members of the public, offering theories, clues, and solutions.* He read them all.

  In the 1940s, the doctor was the sole police psychiatrist employed by the LAPD. He was therefore responsible for screening the nuts, crackpots, and other deluded individuals who stepped forward with a confession or claim relating to the killing. The doctor took them all seriously, because it was his view that the pathology of the Dahlia killer included a deep-seated compulsion to publicize and claim recognition for his act. The doctor was convinced that the confessors “would keep on coming” and that the police would have to talk to them, because “the type of mind that conceived the Elizabeth Short murder will some day have to boast about it.”

  Dr. De River had already written an article for Aggie Underwood’s Herald-Express, in which he analyzed the “criminally twisted mind” of the person responsible for the Dahlia murder. According to the doctor, the sadistic killer of Elizabeth Short went about his work with “egotistical satisfaction, elevating his ego and
will to power.” The doctor was of the view that the killer hated womankind. He was a “sadistic fiend” who delighted in beating and then annihilating his victim. The doctor noted that sadists of this type “have a super-abundance of curiosity and are liable to spend much time with their victims after the spark of life has flickered and died.” The killer might even be of the studious type. In the doctor’s view, he “delighted in the humiliation of his victim.” He was the “experimentor and analyst” in the most “brutal forms of torture.”

  Dr. De River himself was a unique figure in the Los Angeles Police Department. He had been born in New Orleans in 1892, apparently of French descent. Certainly the surname “De River” carried with it European connotations. It also, as the doctor himself said, evoked the psychiatrist’s calling, to “derive” hidden truths obscured beneath the smokescreen of the conscious personality. The doctor’s own favorite explanation for his surname came from the fact that he had been born on the Mississippi River, in the course of a boat journey from Cincinnati to New Orleans. His formal training had begun in 1916, in the days when professional psychiatry was in its infancy, with a medical degree from Tulane University.

  The doctor himself cut an imposing figure. His nose was impressively hooked. His black eyes stared imperiously at the object of his gaze, above his jet-black mustache. He was seldom to be seen without his pipe in his left hand. He would take a deep puff on it and pause, clearing his throat for dramatic emphasis. As Life magazine observed, he very much looked the part of a celebrity Hollywood physician.

  The high point in the doctor’s career with the Los Angeles Police Department came a decade before the Dahlia, with the case of the three little “Babes of Inglewood.” Seven-year-old Madeline and nine-year-old Melba Everett were sisters. They went missing on June 26, 1937, with their eight-year-old-friend Jeannette Stephens. The three little girls were last seen talking to a man at Centinela Park. Two days later, volunteer Boy Scouts found their bodies in a weedy gully in the Baldwin Hills. They had been strangled and sexually assaulted.

  Dr. De River visited the crime scene and viewed the bodies in the morgue. He observed that the little girls had been laid facedown, their dresses pulled up, their shoes placed side by side in a row. After considering all the evidence, the doctor described the type of person the police should be seeking: a sadistic pedophile in his twenties who was meticulous in appearance, religious, and remorseful. He might have a past record of annoying children, or loitering where they played. The crime had been planned and the killer had known how to approach the girls without frightening them. They had trusted him.

  The doctor’s description of the killer fit a school crossing guard by the name of Albert Dyer. Dyer aroused suspicion when, after questioning by the police, he walked back into the interrogation room, took the officer’s hand, and thanked him for all the efforts that were being made to solve the crimes. Dyer was therefore brought in for requestioning. This time, he confessed to the murders. He told police that he had lured the little girls into the secluded gully in the Baldwin Hills with a story about rabbits. He had then separated them. He had strangled them one by one and prayed over their dead bodies. Later, when photographs of angry crowds storming Inglewood City Hall and demanding justice for the murdered girls were reexamined, Albert Dyer could be seen in the crowd, yelling with the other irate citizens, “Lynch the S.O.B.!” He was even photographed among the men helping to carry the small bodies of the victims to the morgue. Dyer’s wife later admitted that, after the killings, her husband had kept a scrapbook of clippings relating to the case.

  Dr. De River’s profile of the killer in the Inglewood case was only the second case in history of a criminal profile being used to catch a killer: the first being the landmark profile of the British serial killer Jack the Ripper, which was drawn up by two physicians in the 1880s.† Moreover, the doctor’s description of the Inglewood killer had been broadly accurate, although Albert Dyer was thirty-two (not in his twenties), and had not previously been arrested for bothering children. Dyer was tried by Judge Thomas P. White, convicted, and sent to the gas chamber.

  After the conviction of Albert Dyer, Dr. De River became the new star expert for the Los Angeles Police Department. He was brought onto the payroll of the LAPD as the department’s first consultant psychiatrist, charged with interviewing suspects and criminal profiling. He established a one-man Sexual Offense Bureau, and it was through his personal campaigning and the public outcry and indignation over the Dahlia murder that California introduced the first state sexual offender register, in 1947.

  Three years after the Inglewood case, the doctor met his first serious challenge. It came in the form of an eleven-year-old girl. On the afternoon of April 4, 1940, Chloe Davis called her father, who managed a Los Angeles grocery store, and told him to come straight home. When Frank Barton Davis arrived at the two-bedroom bungalow on West Fifty-eighth Place, he saw a crowd of neighbors clustered around the house. Chloe stood on the porch, her forehead bleeding. In the kitchen were Barton’s three-year-old son Marquis and seven-year-old-daughter Deborah Ann, lying faceup on the blood-soaked linoleum. They had been bludgeoned. In the hallway lay Barton’s wife, Lolita. She had been bludgeoned and burned. In the bathroom was his ten-year-old daughter, Daphne. Barton glanced at the blood and pieces of brain spattered on the walls and ceiling. He registered that he had lost his entire family. He ran screaming down the street. His daughter, Chloe, went after him and told him to “brace up.”

  Chloe, who had superficial injuries, was interviewed by police officers and Dr. De River. Under questioning, she appeared remarkably cold and calm. Chloe claimed that her mother, Lolita, had ordered her to kill her brothers and sisters, and then Lolita herself. She had told Chloe to set her nightdress on fire, and then kill her and the other children. This Chloe had obediently done, pausing for a drink between blows. The evidence in the case was far from clear-cut. On the one hand, Lolita was found with slit wrists, tending to corroborate Chloe’s story that the mother intended to commit suicide. Lolita had also been suffering from mental problems at the time of her death, and had apparently asked for chloroform to kill the children when the “demons” came after them. On the other hand, one of the dying children, Daphne, was alleged to have told doctors before she expired that Chloe had attacked her. Neighbors gave witness to the girl’s violent temperament, including an incident when she grabbed her mother’s hair over a petty quarrel, and banged her head against the wall. Chloe was just a head shorter than her mother, and muscular. She could, it was admitted, easily have committed such an attack.

  Chloe’s father, Barton, who by now wanted his remaining daughter back, hired top attorneys and a rival psychiatrist to counter Dr. De River’s contention, for the LAPD, that Chloe was a “cold” character who lacked “remorse,” who had intentionally killed her mother and siblings. There were, the father’s expert alleged, “important elements of physical and mental shock to be considered before an adequate appraisal of the girl’s reactions can be evaluated.” There was also the fact that, under California law at the time, the threshold for criminal responsibility was fourteen years old.

  In the event, the coroner’s jury ruled that Lolita Davis had murdered her three children and then killed herself. In a blow to De River’s career, Superior Judge W. Turney Fox of the juvenile court ruled that the police psychiatrist was not to question suspects under the age of eighteen. Judge Fox’s successor in the juvenile court, Superior Judge A. A. Scott, confirmed the ruling, although Judge Scott later defended De River with the statement that “in my opinion, Dr. De River is the best qualified sex psychiatrist in the country.”‡

  By 1947, however, the Chloe Davis fiasco was in the past and Dr. De River was firmly entrenched in the offices of the LAPD as its resident police psychiatrist. His reputation was that of a somewhat unorthodox and controversial practitioner, but all agreed that he did seem to have an uncanny ability to read the mind of the sexual criminal. Set against the Chloe Davis failure w
ere successful prosecutions in over twenty cases where the doctor had acted as expert witness. He had, he was proud to say, never lost a case for the city of Los Angeles in court. Certainly the doctor was conservative in his views on criminal responsibility and the registration of sexual offenders. But he was by no means extreme for the time. In the 1940s, the terms “degeneracy” and “perversion” included homosexuality and oral and anal sex.§ When the sexual offender register was introduced in California, punishments proposed for “sex psychopaths” included castration, tattooing on the forehead, and trimming the ears of sexual offenders to a sharp peak so that even children could identify them. America, in the late 1940s, was in the midst of a “sex crime panic.” The sexual license of the war years had been shut down, and the political discourse of civil liberties and procedural justice was, as yet, two decades away.

  One of the most ardent supporters of Dr. De River was Aggie Underwood. Their friendship had started back in 1937, when Aggie was a police reporter on the beat, covering the Inglewood case. At one point during the trial of Albert Dyer, Judge White remained in his chambers to allow Aggie to grab a snack in the coffee shop around the corner from the courtroom. When Aggie returned, the judge mounted his bench to receive the jury’s guilty verdict. Judge White, Aggie Underwood, Dr. De River, and district attorney investigator Eugene Williams—who brought De River into the process of interviewing the Inglewood suspects—remained lifelong friends after the case.¶ De River wrote columns for Aggie’s newspaper. During the investigation of the Dahlia murder, the police psychiatrist met the city editor secretly at her home. Publicly, the Herald-Express continued to keep Randolph Hearst and the reading public happy with stories of confessing Sams and Sapphic sadism. Privately, Aggie and Dr. De River pored over the serious evidence in the case. They discussed the theories. They evaluated the suspects. They drew psychological profiles of the killer. “Aggie met surreptitiously with Dr. Paul De River,” recalled Aggie’s daughter-in-law, Rilla. “They’d meet at Aggie’s house late at night and pore over the books De River had written, discussing theories and drawing psychological profiles of people. Some were quite prominent, and others were low-level hoods and hangers-on.”