by Piu Eatwell
245 Carl Balsiger: See closure report of Frank Jemison dated February 20, 1951, DA grand jury files. The date of Balsiger’s overnight stay at the Yucca Street motel with Short is variously given as December 7 and 8 in the police reports. According to newspaper reports, Dorothy French found Elizabeth crashed out at the Aztec on the night of December 8, 1946.
245 Balsiger had married Jane Ellen Moyer: See Lincoln Journal (Nebraska), October 27, 1949; the Lincoln Star, December 28, 1949.
245 passed a lie detector test: See Jemison’s final report, ibid.
245 name was included in Elizabeth’s address book: See the interview of Robert “Red” Manley carried out by Frank Jemison on February 1, 1950, in which names from the address book are read out to Manley. They include Carl Balsiger. Another police report states that Balsiger’s name was not in the address book but on a piece of paper folded in with the victim’s belongings, which had been sent to the police. If this was the case, it was even less likely that Balsiger was the killer.
247 Tanya “Sugar” Geise: Actress and featured dancer at the Florentine Gardens. Married Walter Morgan of the Los Angeles DA’s Office June 7, 1945 (Billboard, June 23, 1945). Frank Jemison’s DA closure report, dated February 20, 1951, states that Sugar Geise knew Mark Hansen “very well.”
247 Nieson Himmel gave an interview: See Pacios, Mary, Childhood Shadows, p. 103.
251 Pamela . . . recorded a filmed interview: Interview with Pamela Hoffman recorded in July 2012, shortly before she died of pancreatic cancer.
252 tests at the Aster Motel: Taken from document entitled “Evidence Tending to Connect or Disconnect Leslie Dillon to the Murders of Elizabeth Short, Jeanne French and Gladys Kern,” DA grand jury documents.
254 made a discovery: The photograph was originally published in a book about the Black Dahlia case by the late actor and journalist John Gilmore, Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia, first published by Amok Books in 1994.
Chapter 23: Specter of the Rose
255 here was a photograph: Various writers of books and articles on the Black Dahlia case have referred to the transcript of the hearing with Fred Witman and either searched for or claimed to have seen the letter D, but none has actually identified and subjected to expert analysis the markings on an original autopsy photograph as discussed here. (See for example the writer and researcher Stephen Karadjis in an article in Crime magazine, “The Murder of the Black Dahlia: The Ultimate Cold Case” [February 3, 2014].) From the testimony of Fred Witman it is clear that there existed at one point close-up photographs of the pubic region showing the lacerations in detail, which must have been examined by the graphologists subsequently employed by the LAPD to analyze the markings. These close-up photographs seem to have been lost. Interestingly, the writer Steve Hodel refers to some autopsy photographs that were apparently withheld by Detective Harry Hansen. It is possible that these included the close-ups of the pubic region, showing the markings and the letter D with greater clarity.
255 with the initial D: There has been speculation that the letter D referred to the Italian mob boss Jack Dragna, whose home was close to the body dump site at Leimert Park. However, there is no reference to Dragna in any of the case files and no evidence to link him to Elizabeth Short.
255 “impossible to determine”: Undated and unidentified document headed “Evidence and Declarations Tending to Connect or Disconnect Leslie Dillon to the Murders of Elizabeth Short, Jeanne French, and Gladys Kern,” included in DA documents.
257 naming . . . proprietorship: See Graham, Loren, The Power of Names: In Culture and in Mathematics, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 157, no. 2, June 2013.
257 Keppel, the leading expert: See Keppel, Robert, Signature Killers . . .
258 rows of books behind glass doors: Cf. Chandler, Raymond, The Lady in the Lake, Alfred A. Knopf, 1943, Chapter 17.
261 Michael Streed’s report: Report dated May 16, 2017, from Michael Streed/SketchCop Solutions to Piu Eatwell.
262 Black Dahlia Case Internet discussion forum: The Black Dahlia in Hollywood Discussion Forum at http://forum.theblackdahliainhollywood.com/.
Postscript
269 “lost his marbles”: According to Los Angeles Times reporter Nieson Himmel. See Pacios, Mary, Childhood Shadows, p. 104.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY SOURCES
Documents relating to the Black Dahlia case, released to the author by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office in June 2015, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request (not catalogued).
Documents relating to the Black Dahlia case, released by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to the author for the first time in unredacted form in September 2015, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request (not catalogued).
Documents relating to the Black Dahlia case, released to the author by the Los Angeles Police Department in September 2015, in response to a legal demand under the California Public Records Act (not catalogued).
Archives of journalist and Dahlia researcher John Gilmore, UCLA Library, Department of Special Collections. Material relating to the Dahlia case and the book Severed.
Archives of James Hugh Richardson, UCLA Library, Department of Special Collections. Biographical material and material relating to the Dahlia case.
Archives of Agness M. Underwood, Oviatt Library, California State University, Northridge. Biographical material and material relating to the Dahlia case.
Archives of Los Angeles Times journalist Jack Smith, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, box S3, “Black Dahlia.”
Los Angeles Times records, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, MssLat folder 7, “Crime—Los Angeles,” Fowler, Will, From a Reporter’s Notebook.
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A NOTE
ON MONEY
As the contemporary value of money is sometimes relevant to the story, in order to give the reader a rough idea of how much quoted sums were worth at the time, I have used the historic inflation calculator at Dollar Times, http://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/.
INDEX
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
Note: Page numbers followed by n indicate footnotes.
abortion clinics, illegal, 55–56, 207, 208, 243, 248
address book
Carl Balsiger and, 245–46, 332
disappearance of, 264
Harry Hansen and, 189
Mark Hansen’s name on cover, 54, 61, 246, 248
news coverage of, 52–53
physical description, 50
George Price and, 63, 192, 241
Ahern, James, 128, 275
A1 Trailer Park investigation, 128–29
Aster Motel investigation, 131, 133, 134, 137, 151, 202
grand jury testimony, 181–82, 185, 187
and removal of Gangster Squad from BD case, 152
