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

by Piu Eatwell

  One of the people who witnessed the “Bloody Christmas” beatings was the distinguished crime journalist Nieson Himmel, then a junior reporter working for the Herald-Express.** When Himmel was subpoenaed to give evidence to a grand jury about the beatings, he asked for Aggie’s advice as city editor. She told him to keep out of it. It was a stunning reversal in approach from her go-get-’em exposure of the police cover-ups relating to the Brenda Allen scandal and the Dahlia case just two years beforehand. Himmel, the junior reporter, was fearful of the wrath of the LAPD. He had no support from his city editor. So he lied to the grand jury and testified that he saw nothing.††

  The doctor therefore now stood alone in his defiance of the police department. In a final irony, even as he was being humiliated by the LAPD, De River was featured with a drumroll as a great scientific detective in 12 Against Crime, a book by the journalist Edward D. Radin. The acid-yellow dust jacket promised that the book would reveal the “smashing, inside story of the Deadly Dozen, the experts the police call in to solve America’s toughest and most notorious cases in the fight against crime.” Radin had this to say about the doctor:

  In Los Angeles, where glamour is largely manufactured, Dr. De River’s genuine glamour is conspicuous. Claiming to be a descendant of Jean La Fitte, the pirate of the bayous of Louisiana who is credited with saving New Orleans, he has a swashbuckling air about him, accented by his lengthy dashing side-burns, his thin sweeping mustache, and a wing worn in the lapel of his jacket, a reminder of the days when he was a flying doctor for the Navy. Tall, immaculately dressed, with a pair of shoulders developed by working as a lumberjack during his youth, his appearance outdoes even a movie director’s conception of a man about town. But behind the smooth-appearing façade there is an inquiring mind always seeking the cause behind the effect, and it has led him into a pioneering study of the modern sex criminal.

  Radin went on to describe the psychiatrist’s uncanny ability to spot a culprit, an ability that had left many police officers unable to “fathom how he reaches certain conclusions.” He concluded with some remarks on the doctor’s most notorious case to date, that of the Black Dahlia:

  Without realizing it, the Black Dahlia killer, like other sex criminals, left a message that Dr. De River has read. From it he has furnished police with enough information about the type of man they should look for. Enough officers have committed the description to memory to recognize the murderer if he is picked up. Even if he manages to elude all the traps set for him, Dr. De River still predicts that he will be caught because he says that the Black Dahlia killer is a man who some day will have to talk about it, and once he confides to somebody, he is on the road to capture.

  What Radin did not say was that the doctor had, in fact, already identified to the police the man whom he believed to be the Dahlia killer. They had let that man go. They were now bent on destroying the doctor. They were determined to shut him up. But the doctor would not shut up. He continued to tell his story, to anybody who would listen. A few years later, somebody did.

  * For the Babes of Inglewood case, Albert Dyer, and the roles of Aggie Underwood, De River, Judge White, and Eugene Williams in the investigation, see page 84.

  † For more on Ellery E. Cuff, see page 223.

  ‡ Judge Joseph Call was a distinguished municipal court judge who, among other things, called for a grand jury inquiry into the “Bloody Christmas” beatings of Christmas Eve 1951, when members of the LAPD seriously assaulted a group of Latinos in the city jail on an erroneous pretext (see page 218).

  § Inspector Roy E. Blick was notorious for his crackdowns on lascivious displays in the burlesque clubs of the Washington area.

  ¶ Lieutenant James Hamilton was an officer of the LAPD Intelligence Division and Chief Parker’s right-hand man, charged with spying on members of the police department and others whom the chief wished to place under surveillance. He was later to become a close confidant of Robert Kennedy and was seen at the Brentwood home of Marilyn Monroe, on the day of her death by ostensible suicide in August 1962. Hamilton later left the LAPD to work as a private security advisor to the National Football League, to assist the league in dealing with interference by the mob. He was appointed to the position because of his inside knowledge of organized crime.

  # For Harry Fremont’s role in the early Dahlia investigation, see page 28.

  ** For more on Nieson Himmel and his suspicions about Finis Brown and the Dahlia murder, see page 246.

  †† The “Bloody Christmas” beatings—which were immortalized by the writer James Ellroy in his L.A. Quartet novels and featured in the movie Hollywood Confidential—ended with a public inquiry and grand jury investigation in which eight LAPD officers were indicted for assault. The inquiry was precipitated by the pioneering judge Joseph Call, a friend of Dr. De River who contributed a chapter to his textbook The Sexual Criminal. (See page 212.) The beatings marked a turning point in the previously cozy relationship between the police and press, with the latter subsequently becoming more hostile and critical of the LAPD.

  21

  VOICE IN THE WIND

  It was late 1953, the climax of a long, hot summer that ended in October with the hottest day of the year. Up the winding path to the doctor’s Beachwood Canyon home toiled the figures of two men. One was middle-aged, but a good six feet five inches tall, with the powerful physique of a heavyweight boxer. The other was much younger—barely twenty-one years old, with piercing eyes and a tight thatch of curly black hair.

  The pair arrived at the doctor’s front door and knocked. Through the frosted pane, a shadow could be seen, peering out suspiciously. Finally, the door opened a crack. Then there was the heavy sound of bolts being unshot and chains released. When the door opened fully, the doctor was revealed, standing in the doorway. He wore a thick velvet dressing gown over his shirt and tie. From the folds of the dressing gown could be seen the dark glint of a gun. Dr. Paul De River had been expecting the visitors. He ushered them in immediately.

  The middle-aged, powerfully built man was Wally Klein, a well-known Hollywood screenwriter with a number of credits to his name,* mainly historical westerns like They Died with Their Boots On, an early pairing of Errol Flynn with Olivia de Havilland, and The Oklahoma Kid, a movie that pitted a gunslinging James Cagney against his villainous nemesis in the form of Humphrey Bogart. Klein was a friend of John Huston and a fully paid-up member of the hard-drinking, hard-living, fast Hollywood set.

  The younger man was Wally Klein’s nephew, Donald Freed. Freed was then an aspiring actor/director/writer who had been studying in New York. The young Donald was staying at the Kleins’ home on Fountain Avenue while he tried to break into the movie business. Many years later, he was himself to become a distinguished playwright in the tradition of Arthur Miller and a close associate of Harold Pinter.† But for the moment the young man followed his uncle around, picking up what he could of the tools of the screenwriter’s trade and rubbing shoulders with Klein’s extensive network of Hollywood contacts.

  Wally Klein was interested in making a movie about the Dahlia case. The LAPD had been extremely helpful when he approached them. Perhaps they were too helpful. Klein was not convinced by what the LAPD told him. He wanted to find out more. He had heard that there was a doctor who had worked for the police department who knew the true story. So Klein had arranged to interview De River. His young nephew Donald Freed came along for the ride, mainly from curiosity.

  The interior of the doctor’s house was stifling in the late summer heat. The doctor himself sat hunched in a stuffed armchair, drawing long puffs from his black pipe. With the doctor was an eaglelike, bespectacled man. To the best of Donald’s recollection, this was Ellery E. Cuff, public defender of Los Angeles. A Northern California farm boy, Cuff had grown up to become a passionate defense lawyer. He was to lead the Los Angeles Public Defender’s Office for fifteen years, the first and biggest such office in the country, famously defending more than four thousand accused criminals i
n a thirty-five-year career.‡ Ellery Cuff and Dr. De River went back a long way, to the trial of Albert Dyer, whom Cuff had defended.§ The pair remained close friends throughout their lives. Cuff had contributed a chapter to De River’s textbook The Sexual Criminal. It was entitled “The Criminal Attorney Views Mental Disease as a Factor in Crime.” He attended the meetings with Klein and Freed to lend his quiet support. Occasionally De River’s eldest daughter, Jacqueline, would come into the room. The pair were clearly close: when they talked to each other, De River would speak softly to her in the old dialect of the South.

  Donald Freed would never forget the half dozen or so interviews he and Wally Klein had with De River during the long, dark nights of that California fall. Many years later, he recalled the physical presence of the doctor with clarity: the sleek sartorial image of the well-dressed man from 1940s New Orleans; mustache, pipe, tie, velvet dressing gown. Having been fired from the LAPD, De River was now working for the Veterans Administration. “He had to live secretly. He withdrew, he was suspicious, his wife was very sick,” recalled Freed. “It was a besieged household. It was dark, and it was sad.” But the doctor himself spoke “in a resonant voice, with a natural sense of drama.” Clearly, he had powerful friends to help him, as he had managed to get a job with the federal government and had avoided the blacklist. Donald Freed at that time had no knowledge of the Los Angeles Police Department. Many years later, he was to become an expert in its secret workings, in particular its Intelligence Division, the “Glass House.”¶ But then, as a young man in the fall of 1953, he was hearing the names of Aggie Underwood, Mark Hansen, and Thaddeus Brown for the first time.

  “Gradually, over the course of the interviews, I became familiar with the patois, the lingua franca that develops between people versed in a case, and so little by little I began to make out what was being said. I could see the doctor was beleaguered, and that this was his narrative, the story he had to tell. He was a natural dramatist, able to tell that story in a way that I never forgot. I carried it with me for the rest of my life.”

  The doctor told Klein and Freed that his analysis of the Black Dahlia murder had led him to a conviction about the type of “schizothymic”# personality that, he believed, had committed the crime. He had drawn up a detailed psychological profile of the killer. He would be, in the doctor’s view, someone extremely sharp, an amateur deeply interested in crime and psychology. He would likely be an aficionado of true crime and detective stories, and had clearly followed the case in the newspapers. He would be likely to boast about his crime. He was exactly the type of personality who, like Albert Dyer before him, was likely to put himself onto center stage in the police investigation. Therefore, the doctor had deliberately made speculations as to the psychology of the Dahlia killer in true crime magazines such as True Detective. Eventually, he got the response for which he was looking—from one Leslie Dillon in Florida. And so the doctor started an epistolary exchange, finally culminating in the meeting between Dillon and himself in Banning. Dillon and the doctor met and talked and he—De River—could see at once that Dillon was the man. Dillon, the doctor explained, knew intimate details of the crime—including key facts such as what had happened to the rose tattoo.** He gave detailed explanations of the mutilations. He told the doctor the killing had taken place in a motel, before police had even interviewed the witnesses at the Aster.

  It was on the basis of what Dillon had revealed in Banning that the then-chief of the LAPD, Clemence Horrall, had stated to the press that “this is the man”: the best suspect by far in the entire case. Aggie Underwood at the Herald-Express had been mercilessly listing the number of days that there had been no breakthrough in the case. Now the police finally had the break. The LAPD was categorical, in the press conference, that they had a suspect who had made statements that only the perpetrator of the crime could have made. That Dillon knew facts about the killing that the police did not even know themselves. That he had been in Los Angeles at the time of the murder. And yet, within a day of Leslie Dillon being re-interviewed by the Homicide detectives, he was let go. Why?

  The doctor’s explanation of the sudden and mystifying release of Leslie Dillon was powerful and succinct. Here, finally, was the last piece of the puzzle that connected Mark Hansen, Leslie Dillon, and the Brown brothers. “The doctor told us that Leslie Dillon, with his connections to the prostitution network, was a pimp and errand boy for Mark Hansen,” said Freed. “Elizabeth Short was part of the Hansen entourage. But Hansen was getting tired of the Short girl. He was jealous of her many boyfriends, had enough of her pestering him for money. So one day, Hansen said words to the effect of, ‘Get rid of her.’ Hansen, not knowing or caring that his functionary was a dangerous and murderous psychopath, was stunned when she turned up as she did, all cut up. Although he didn’t care what happened to her, he hadn’t imagined that happening, particularly. Dillon was simply a runner, a messenger, a small-time hood running errands for Hansen and his friend, NTG. But he knew where the bodies were buried, and who at the LAPD was on the cuff for betting, bookmaking, prostitution, et cetera. . . .”

  Leslie Dillon, De River told Freed and Klein, had played a dangerous game with the cops. A game that only a narcissistic, psychopathic egoist would dare to play. He had revealed, during the confidential interviews in the desert, that he was the killer. And then, when under arrest, he had threatened to blow the cover off the whole den of vice and corruption at the heart of the LAPD. “We were absolutely certain that Paul De River had solved the case,” Freed said. “He had brought in the murderer, Leslie Dillon. But in order to cover up small-time vice on the part of Thaddeus Brown and his brother Finis—NTG, Mark Hansen, the organized vice of the day, which had the LAPD on the pad—to cover that up, they let a dangerous psychopath on the loose. In that interview with homicide, Leslie Dillon took them on. He told them that he wouldn’t say a word, if they let him go. But if they arrested him, he knew plenty: and he mentioned Hansen and NTG, and he mentioned the Brown brothers, and he said he knew where the bodies were buried in terms of organized vice. And then, he was gone.”

  The doctor’s voice droned on as he puffed on his black pipe. Occasionally, he would play extracts from the wax cylinder recordings of the interviews with Leslie Dillon, and Dillon’s soft, mellifluous voice would float out of the phonograph. “I met the doctor at a time of deep depression in his life,” Freed remembered. “He had lost a battle of savage infighting which only a police department can have, and after the collapse of his career and his job, and the police department itself, he had retreated—to his home, daughters, son, and very ill wife. He had been through a traumatic event, and he just had a few people who weren’t afraid to be seen with him. One of them was the public defender, a very well-known and respected man. He was present at the interviews, and seemed very familiar with the case. It was clear that he fully supported the doctor. There were others, like Aggie Underwood, to whom the doctor referred all the time. She was his great friend and ally. De River had been wrecked by the Dahlia case. Aggie had not been wrecked, but she had played a dangerous game. She was the doctor’s last hope—not that she herself had any overriding power—but she had a circle, she was highly respected, she was an influential figure, and as long as she believed in him and had gone to the lengths she went to, despite the fact she had been ordered off the case, the doctor clung to her. So he made Aggie an unforgettable character, the way he talked about her, and pinned his hopes on her. And I don’t believe she ever abandoned him. She kept it alive, she was the keeper of the flame, and as long as she believed in him he could believe in himself and have some hope.” The doctor’s interviews with Klein and Freed were an extension of that hope. “He thought, in talking to someone like Wally Klein—a screenwriter of some prestige—that, while it could no longer be adjudicated legally, the full story might emerge. He, Paul De River, would then be seen to be a conscientious and creative officer of the justice system, the Los Angeles Police Department, who had been on the way t
o solving the case. At least, that is what might have been. We now know, of course, that it never happened.”

  Donald Freed himself has never been in any doubt as to what did happen in the Dahlia case. “There was a tremendous cover up. And it went far beyond this case. It was symbolic of the situation in Los Angeles: the nexus of political power, the newspapers, and the police.” In the end, Wally Klein never did make his Black Dahlia movie. It was a story that, in the 1950s, was too dangerous to tell.

  In his chapter about Dr. De River in 12 Against Crime, the journalist Edward Radin said about the Dahlia killer: “Even if he manages to elude all the traps set for him, Dr. De River still predicts that he will be caught because he says that the Black Dahlia killer is a man who someday will have to talk about it, and once he confides to somebody, he is on the road to capture.”

  Time and again, the Dahlia killer had demonstrated a compulsion for glory through grotesque theatricality. There had been the public display of Elizabeth’s body next to the sidewalk; the sending in of the package to the newspapers; the phone call to Jimmy Richardson; the purported carving of initials in the victim’s body. These were acts that this particular killer was psychologically compelled to do. They constituted a unique element of his pathology.†† It was this key exhibitionist trait, a component of the Dahlia killer’s distinctive “signature,” that Dr. De River identified as potentially leading to his downfall. It was what he had in mind when he stated that whoever committed this crime would effectively come to the police himself, because he would be “compelled to boast about it.” It was the reason why the doctor decreed that all the “confessing Sams” must be interviewed. But the Dahlia killer was more cunning and insidious than the “confessing Sams.” For—in contrast to them—his self-identification with the crime was never direct. It was taunting and elusive. Time and again, he would thrust himself into the picture with a hint—a phone call, a letter—but never in such a way as to definitively be pinned down. It was a teasing game of cat-and-mouse with the authorities. A game that had something to do with self-publicity, but more to do with power. Leslie Dillon’s initial approach to Dr. De River claiming knowledge of a third-party culprit, the offer to help in tracking the killer down, the revelation of secret facts, and then his ultimate escape from charges—all these facts fitted in with this signature behavior. It was a signature that would recur in Dillon’s subsequent actions, years after he disappeared from public view upon his surprise release in January 1949. But these were not to be revealed until more than sixty years later, to a different writer, in a new century.