The Cases That Haunt Us

by Mark Olshaker

  There are others, but my thought is that any good suspect in this case shares the qualities listed above, which is why I have not provided that man’s name. None of them is likely to be brought to trial now. The important consideration here is to move forward in our understanding so that we can be as proactive with this type of offender as he is with us.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AMERICAN DREAMS/

  AMERICAN NIGHTMARES

  There will always be cases that haunt us, the victims’ stories so compelling, the nature of the crimes so heinous, that they will never be forgotten. But we hope that as advances are made in the forensic and behavioral sciences, fewer and fewer cases will have the power to haunt strictly because they have gone unsolved or had questionable outcomes. In the previous chapter, we saw how the traditional, tried-and-true investigative approaches that worked in the “old days” were not enough to solve a series of murders committed by a modern serial criminal. The Zodiac thwarted investigators in large measure because his motive was not recognizable among the classical motives of greed, jealousy, anger, revenge, and the like—something clear or, at least, identifiable that determined victim selection, MO, and ultimately, the course of the investigation.

  Now we’ll explore three cases that are particularly illustrative of how an offender’s motive—or apparent lack thereof—can be instrumental in understanding a crime and directing an investigation. And to further make the point, we’ll begin with a case from well before the days of criminal profiling or behavioral analysis: the murder of “the Black Dahlia.”

  “THE BLACK DAHLIA”

  Elizabeth Short had big dreams, and her story is one of a young woman’s quest to break out of the mold expected universally of her sex at the time, swapping the promise of husband and family for career and fame and the glamour of Hollywood. Ironically, her brutal death won her the fame she longed for, as her tragic and pathetic existence was transformed by the press into the romantic image of a beautiful starlet-to-be.

  And as Stuart Swezey wrote in his publisher’s preface to John Gilmore’s study of the case, Severed, “The Black Dahlia murder—unlike such earlier headline-grabbing cases as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and the Lindbergh kidnapping—was the first case to command the attention of postwar America with its stark carnality.”

  Around 10 A.M. on January 15, 1947, Betty Bersinger was out for a walk with her three-year-old daughter when she saw what she thought was a broken department-store mannequin lying in an overgrown vacant lot on Thirty-ninth Street near Norton Avenue in the Leimert Park section of Los Angeles, south of Hollywood. When she got closer, she realized it was the nude and dismembered body of a woman.

  Although several witnesses had seen various cars in the vicinity, passersby had seen no body as late as 8:30.

  Officers Frank Perkins and Will Fitzgerald responded to the police call. From what they could tell, the dead woman had been sexually posed, lying on her back with her arms raised over her shoulders, elbows bent, legs spread wide apart. The lower torso was angled upward at the hips, leading police to believe she had been in a semirecumbent position at the time of death. After death, she had been cut in half at the waist, and the severed sections had been placed in line, about ten inches apart. The liver was exposed. Her face and breasts had been badly slashed, including deep slashes from both sides of her mouth as though her killer were fashioning a grotesque extension of her smile. Ligature marks were visible on her ankles, wrists, and neck, and police surmised that she had been suspended by her ankles and tortured. A vertical incision that looked like a hysterectomy scar was between her pubic area and navel. Her pubic hair had been shaved or plucked.

  The scene was soon thick with reporters, photographers, and onlookers. The body was taken to the LA County Morgue for fingerprinting. With the help of the Los Angeles Examiner’s facilities, the prints were sent to the FBI. They were identified as belonging to Elizabeth Short, twenty-two years of age, who had been printed when she’d held a government job at a military post exchange. She had also been arrested as a juvenile delinquent while out with men at a bar one night near Camp Cooke in Santa Barbara.

  Autopsy findings suggested that the victim’s body had initially been placed facedown in dew-wet grass, then turned over, and that she had been dead at least ten hours prior to disposal. There was some evidence though that she might have been refrigerated to aid preservation during that time. The cause of death was listed as “hemorrhage and shock due to concussion of the brain and lacerations of the face,” but because of evidence of bleeding out through a severed artery in the abdomen, she might actually have been cut in half before death. No evidence of semen was in or on her body, but examination of her stomach revealed that she had been forced to swallow feces as part of her torture. The body and hair had been carefully washed after death.

  As for victimology, Elizabeth Short had been born in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, on July 29, 1924, the third of five daughters of Cleo and Phoebe Short, moving at an early age to Medford, near Boston. Cleo abandoned the family when Elizabeth was young, faking suicide and leaving Phoebe on her own. When Cleo contacted Phoebe years later from California to seek reconciliation, she refused.

  Young Elizabeth was often ill with asthma and tuberculosis and had to undergo serious lung surgery, so Phoebe sent her to Miami, Florida, in 1940 when she was sixteen. This allowed her to drop out of school and wait on tables. She stayed in Florida until she moved to California.

  She was called Betty by her family and friends but changed that to Beth as a young adult. At five feet five and 115 pounds, with blue eyes and dark hair, she was described as a sweet, romantic, vulnerable girl who wanted to marry a handsome serviceman, preferably a pilot. Some people thought she resembled the actress Deanna Durbin, who was a role model for teenaged girls and often appeared dressed in black. Beth began to dress that way to create an image for herself.

  In early 1943, while working at Camp Cooke, she had become involved with “a jealous marine,” of whom she continued to be afraid. She repeated this story often and it became part of her personal myth. That summer, she found her father living in Vallejo, working at the Mare Island Naval Base. He allowed her to move in, but the relationship was strained. Cleo disapproved of what he considered Beth’s obsession with men and her lazy and untidy ways. After her arrest at the bar near Camp Cooke, she was sent home to Medford. Her goal remained, however, to end up in Hollywood and become an actress.

  She visited relatives in Miami Beach and on New Year’s Eve, 1945, fell in love with a pilot named Matt Gordon, who was then sent overseas. One story has it that they became engaged, another that Gordon was already married and their engagement was only Beth’s fantasy. At any rate, she confided to a friend that she was still a virgin when, back in Medford, she received a telegram from Gordon’s mother saying he had been killed. The newspaper article announcing his death was in her belongings when she died less than two years later.

  She went to Long Beach, California, to visit an old boyfriend, Gordon Fickling, also a serviceman. He put her up in a hotel miles from his base, but the relationship didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

  Just about that time, the Raymond Chandler movie The Blue Dahlia, came out, starring Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd. Some of her servicemen friends started calling Beth the Black Dahlia because of her shiny black hair and propensity for dressing in black, down to her sheer black underwear and black ring on her finger. Her red lipstick and nail polish and her constant talk about becoming an actress and movie star lent her a glamorous persona.

  Beth liked the Hollywood nightlife and tried to be seen at the right places to be recognized and “discovered.” Most of her hangouts were near the mythic intersection of Hollywood and Vine. But despite her glamorous dream, her life seemed aimless and somewhat tawdry, living on the edge, doing or saying whatever she needed to get people to take her in or do what she wanted. When she couldn’t pay her share of the rent on an apartment she occupied with seven other young wo
men, she went down to San Diego, where she was taken in by sympathetic Dorothy French, who found her sleeping in the movie theater where she worked. Beth lived with the Frenches without working or contributing to her upkeep until she was offered a ride back to Los Angeles by a pipe-clamp salesman named Robert Manley, nicknamed Red. They stayed together the night of January 8, 1947, then he dropped her off the next day at the Biltmore Hotel, where she said she was meeting her sister.

  Red Manley became the chief suspect in her murder. LAPD put him through a grueling interrogation, twice administering polygraphs. Two days later he was released, but he collapsed in exhaustion and, sometime later, was given shock treatments for depression. When he was a psychiatric patient at Patton State Hospital in 1954, he rambled on about having committed a murder. But an administration of sodium pentothal revealed he knew nothing of the crime. He died in 1986, exactly thirty-nine years to the day from the date he had dropped off Beth at the Biltmore.

  Police found luggage that Short had checked at the bus terminal. Inside were photos, clothing, and stacks of letters to and from men for whom she felt romantic attachment. The authorities were inundated with calls from people who had known her, but her own father refused to get involved, saying he had not seen her since 1943. Her mother—who first learned of her daughter’s death from a reporter who’d managed to track her down faster than the police—made the trip to Los Angeles to claim her body. Then, after the inquest, Beth was buried in Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery. Police had hoped strange people might attend the memorial service and give them some leads, but none showed.

  Not long afterward, a package was sent to the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. An accompanying note created from newspaper letters stated, “Here is Dahlia’s Belongings” and “Letter to Follow.” Enclosed were Short’s social security card, birth certificate, a telegram, photographs with various servicemen, business cards, the newspaper clipping about Matt Gordon’s death, and claim checks for the suitcases left at the bus station. There was also an address book with several pages torn out. A note to police near the end of January indicated the killer was going to turn himself in, but then another note arrived saying he had changed his mind and that the killing had been justified.

  On January 26, a purse and black suede shoes were found at a garbage dump on East Twenty-fifth Street. Manley identified them as Short’s. This suggested the killer was traveling north and may have been returning to the murder site. But nothing came of the discovery.

  Some of the police and press theories about the Black Dahlia’s killer mirrored the Jack the Ripper speculation. One faction believed that this was a first killing for the offender and that the dismemberment indicated medical knowledge and training.

  Others thought they were dealing with a serial offender. In this vein, one suggested suspect was the “Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run,” who had killed, mutilated, and dismembered a dozen people in Cleveland between 1935 and 1938. He was believed to be a woman-hating homosexual sadist. The killings there had stopped after three years with no solution.

  LAPD homicide captain John Donahoe and some of his detectives theorized from the viciousness of the injuries and that Short used to hang out with women that the killer was female, reminiscent of the “Jill the Ripper” theory. Short bore scratches on her arms said to be inflicted by a jealous woman friend.

  Various suspects were investigated, picked up, and questioned, but none of them panned out. Others, both men and women, confessed to the crime; many, if not most, of them displayed psychiatric problems.

  The press quickly seized on the image of the beautiful young starlet so tragically and viciously murdered, and their coverage captured the public imagination. Like many other high-profile cases before and after it, Short’s killing sparked several copycat sex crimes in the area. Three days after Short’s body was found, Mary Tate was savagely attacked and then strangled with a silk stocking. A month later, Jeanne French was found mutilated, with obscenities written on her corpse in lipstick. Another woman was mutilated, then throughout the summer three more suffered gruesome deaths through beating and/or strangulation. All bore some features that seemed to link them to Short’s death—killed in one place then transported to another, several were barflies, some bodies were nude—and detectives worked hard to figure out if there were any direct connections.

  As they investigated Short’s death, police discovered a sharp contrast between the image and the reality. The Black Dahlia lived mostly at or below poverty level in California, essentially homeless. Police uncovered many rumors about Beth Short, one of the most prominent being that she had an underdeveloped vagina. There were stories that though she didn’t have vaginal sex with her boyfriends, she performed oral sex in exchange for whatever she needed—shoes, clothing, a room for the night. Who she really was and what she really did or did not do is largely lost in myth.

  The Black Dahlia case haunted the public because of its aura of seedy glamour and the easy irony of how quickly the American dream can turn into the American nightmare, but what I see here is so much more pathetic than that. Elizabeth Short longed for something that always eluded her. She had two goals: to become a movie star and to marry a serviceman; fame and fortune on the one hand and domestic stability and normalcy on the other. At that time, the movie stars had the image of being at the top, but the reality was that the servicemen were the true heroes; they had just saved the world. Either of those lives could have made her happy, but because of her background and personality, she was able to achieve neither. Like Hollywood itself, the image was hollow. In her early twenties, her beauty was already fading and her teeth were rotting because she had no access to dental care. She was never a movie star, never even a starlet. She was just a poor, sad girl who wanted something for herself.

  Beth Short was young and emotionally vulnerable and needy, with a highly dependent personality. Because of the lifestyle she led (I hesitate to say “chose,” but I suppose we have to acknowledge this), she was a high-risk victim. Like Tennessee Williams’s Blanche DuBois, she relied on the kindness of strangers. She could easily be targeted by anyone who wanted to dominate or hurt women. And her killer would be the type who’s always on the hunt. He could have spotted her a mile away.

  The homicide falls under the heading of lust murder, as is clearly indicated by the torture to which the victim was subjected antemortem, but I would be hesitant to categorize this UNSUB as being in the same sort of crazed frenzy as we saw in Jack the Ripper’s mutilations. The combination of the sawing in half—as opposed to frantic disembowelment—and the washing of the body indicates to me someone who knows he’s got to get rid of his evidence. The washing is to eliminate forensic clues, and the severing of the body is for easier and less apparent transport. These are the actions of an organized offender, which combine with the more disorganized elements of the case for a mixed presentation.

  Since the body was found in a vacant lot, we know it had to be physically carried at least some distance. We know people were in the area with some frequency before the body was found and that it was found shortly after it was dumped. From this we can conclude that the killer might have been seen by a witness, but did not arouse much suspicion. That speaks to the possibility that he carried the body in a bag, or even two bags. Transportation would have been a lot easier in two pieces.

  Of course, if it could be shown forensically that the sawing of the body had taken place before death, I would have to reevaluate its meaning. I would still say that this was a lust murder, but then the offender becomes more of the disorganized type, more obviously mentally aberrational.

  We can still conclude that the offender had an automobile because, frankly, there isn’t any other way of getting the body to the dump site, and this is not the kind of thing you’d risk borrowing a friend’s car for. Generally, the lust murderers we see don’t drive vehicles. More times than not, they’re disorganized types of personalities, often bordering on the psychotic. And in 1947, when fewer people had cars
, it would be even more unusual for a disorganized personality to have one. This can tell us something about the killer. He’s functional; he’s not disorganized twentyfour hours a day. It may be that he’s a chronic alcoholic, for example, who is able to hide or handle his problem well enough that he can still hold down a job. He has to have money to maintain his vehicle, keep it gassed up, etc. He probably worked with his hands, possibly in a job involving blood, such as at a slaughterhouse. Or, he could be a seasoned hunter.

  To do what he did to the victim, both antemortem and postmortem, he also had to have a house or apartment of his own. It could be small and run-down as long as it was someplace private, with access to running water, where he knew he would not be interrupted. So now we know the UNSUB can’t have been poor—at least, not compared to his victim. He had to have money for rent as well as car expenses. Even if he stole the car, he’d still need a private place to go.

  The fact that the body was placed where people would quickly see it rather than where it would not be found for days or weeks tells us the killer wanted to shock and offend the community by what he’d done. And he communicated with the police, which was unusual for this type, again giving us a mixed presentation. This UNSUB wanted credibility, much like the Zodiac, although he was not nearly as organized, bright, nor detached.