by Piu Eatwell
After ten days of teasing and frustration, Hansen had had enough. On October 10 he ordered the girls to move on, because, as he later told the police, “this Graham girl, she was inclined to be liquored up and I didn’t like it at all; and this Short girl, she had always got some undesirable looking character waiting for her outside and bringing her home.” The girls fell in with two young men, Bill Robinson and Marvin Margolis. Bill was living at his aunt’s place in the Guardian Arms Apartments on Hollywood Boulevard. Marvin, a premed student at USC, was sharing the apartment with him. Later, the two men claimed that they slept with Marjorie, while Beth slept alone on the sofa. But Ann Toth told police that Bill was in fact dating Marjorie, while Marvin was dating Beth, although Beth always claimed Marvin was her “cousin” when Mark Hansen was around. One chilly morning at dawn, after the girls were supposed to have moved out of Hansen’s apartment, Ann Toth spotted them sitting on the marble steps of the front porch. They claimed they had come to collect their mail, but Ann had already given it to them a couple of days before. She assumed it was because they had no place to stay. Once Elizabeth came over to see Ann crying. Bill Robinson had tried to “make” her in the car. When she gave him the cold shoulder, he had punched her in the face and thrown her out of his automobile.
One evening in late October 1946, Mark Hansen returned home to Carlos Avenue to find Marvin Margolis, Beth’s “cousin,” there. He had a suitcase. Marvin explained that the girls were going back to Boston. Could he leave their baggage at Mark’s place for the night? Hansen agreed. When he came back home that evening, the suitcase was still there. And so was Beth Short. Elizabeth tearfully explained that Marjorie had gone back home to Massachusetts. She had nowhere to go. Could she stay? And so, like the sucker he was when it came to the Short girl, Mark let her back into his home.
Elizabeth’s second stay at Carlos Avenue was dark and stormy. There was, again, the endless stream of boyfriends: soldiers, sailors, fliers, teachers, students, salesmen, advertisers, bank clerks, barmen, bricklayers, mechanics, artists, photographers, estate agents. They came furtively, parking their automobiles and waiting on the street corner a block away from Hansen’s house, out of sight. “Everybody picked her up a block away, and everybody more often dumped her off a block away,” recalled Ann Toth. “She wouldn’t dare bring anyone to the house. Well, Mark wouldn’t like it anyway. He more or less possessed her from the time she came there.” Beth made Mark furious. She made a long-distance call to Texas to her ex-boyfriend, Gordon Fickling, and charged it to his telephone bill. She tried to play the “wife,” clearing out Mark’s bathroom cupboard and throwing out all the old stuff. After the cupboard-clearing episode, Ann said, Hansen was furious for at least a month.
The final straw came when Beth had a fight with another girl who was staying at Carlos Avenue. According to Ann Toth, Mark had been romancing Beth, claiming he was not seeing other girls. But old habits are hard to break, and one night he came home with his latest pick-up. Beth—who was sleeping in Ann Toth’s room—got angry over the girl. She was a tramp, she said: they never did that sort of thing in Boston. “She had a lot of high ideas, that Betty, believe me, with her Boston family and all that stuff,” Ann recalled. “She got up and locked her suitcase, because she thought this girl was going to get into her suitcase, and the girl said, ‘I don’t want to touch your damn suitcase, I don’t want anything in there.’ Anyway, words were flying back and forth and there was a beef and a fist fight, and Mark stepped in between them.” Mark ordered Elizabeth to move out the next day.
This time, there was no change of heart. Ann helped Elizabeth pack her odd scraps of possessions. The Danish actress secretly arranged for Beth to rent a bed at the Chancellor Apartments, a bald white bunker of a rooming house on North Cherokee. In Room 501, on the top floor of the building, eight girls were jammed into bunk beds like sardines in a can. The fee was $1 each a night.
“She came here for a room last November 13. That’s a bad day, isn’t it?” recalled Mrs. Juanita Ringo, the caretaker at the Chancellor. “She wasn’t sociable like the other girls who lived in apartment 501 with her. More the sophisticated type.”
Ann Toth did not dare admit to Mark Hansen that she had helped Beth and found a place for her to stay. Mark, for his part, seemed to be annoyed that Elizabeth was apparently able to manage without his help. Toth would collect Beth’s mail when it arrived at Carlos Avenue and bring it over to her at the Chancellor. “I got it before Mark got to it, because he might have wanted to keep it or something,” she told the police. “Elizabeth didn’t want me to let him get ahold of it.” When Ann came over to Carlos Avenue to collect mail, she saw Beth in conversation with Hansen a couple of times. At this point, she thought everything seemed “copacetic” between them. But in truth, Beth hated the Chancellor Apartments. One night, Mark Hansen told the police, he came home to find her having dinner with Ann Toth. She was crying. She had moved in with some bad company, she told him. She was scared. She wanted to move again.
By early December, Beth had run out of money. “When I went up for the rent last December 5, she didn’t have it,” Juanita Ringo recalled. “I don’t think she had a job. That night she got the money somewhere, and left the next morning.” The day Elizabeth left the Chancellor, something was troubling her. “The morning she left she was very anxious,” said her roommate at the Chancellor, twenty-two-year-old Linda Rohr, who worked at the rouge room at Max Factor. “She said, ‘I’ve got to hurry—he’s waiting for me.’ We never found out who ‘he’ was. She was supposed to go to live with her sister in Berkeley.” After disappearing for a couple of days with the mysterious male, Elizabeth resurfaced on December 8, alone at the Aztec Theatre in San Diego. There Dorothy French found her.
On January 16, the day after Elizabeth’s body was found, Ann Toth called the police. The newspapers had reported that detectives were searching for a friend of the victim called “Ann Todd.” They were also, it was reported, looking for a blond nightclub singer who had shacked up with the Dahlia at the Hawthorne Hotel, and who apparently disliked her intensely. Mark Hansen was reluctant to go to the cops, but Ann insisted. When they arrived at the police station, Hansen shied away from the swarm of reporters and flashbulbs, lurking in the background. He was, he claimed, “nobody.” He was “Ann’s chauffeur.” Toth gave an account to homicide detectives of the two occasions when Elizabeth Short had stayed at Carlos Avenue. Hansen verified the statements, but refused to say anything with reporters present. The last he saw of Elizabeth Short, he said, was when she was staying at the Chancellor Apartments, before she left for San Diego.
Now, just over a week later, the discovery of Mark Hansen’s name on the cover of the Dahlia’s address book put the businessman in the unwelcome spotlight again. Hansen’s explanation for the address book was that it was a gift sent to him from Denmark. It had disappeared from the desk at his Carlos Avenue home some time ago. The Short girl must have stolen it. But the press, in particular Aggie Underwood, were now beginning to ask questions about Mark Hansen. About the harem of girls at the house on Carlos Avenue. About Hansen’s relationship with the Dahlia.
Then—the day after the surfacing of the address book—Mark Hansen had his greatest stroke of luck. Other things belonging to the dead girl surfaced, which turned the story on its head and caught the attention of every paper in town. There were signs that the killer might have made his first—and to date only—mistake.
* In 1944, the Florentine Gardens was charged with hiring two underage girls, the fifteen-year-old Stull sisters, Jean and Dean (Billboard, July 22, 1944, p. 26).
7
THE BIG SLEEP
The shoe was made of black patent leather, high-heeled and open-toed. It was found, along with a shiny black patent-leather purse, in a trash depot on East Twenty-fifth Street.
The purse had been previously spotted in a trash can by Robert Hyman, the manager of a café on South Crenshaw Boulevard. When Hyman saw the purse in the trash can, it c
ontained a pair of high-heeled shoes, but by the time the café manager reported the discovery, the contents of the can had been collected and dumped at the depot. It was only after an extensive police search of the depot that the purse and a single shoe were finally recovered.
As the last person known to have been with the Dahlia, it fell to Robert “Red” Manley to identify the shoe and purse. They were displayed among a selection of similar shoes and bags, dusted with a light coating of ash. Red straightaway picked out the items from the trash can. He knew this was one of Elizabeth’s shoes, he said, because he had gotten new shoe-taps fitted for her at her request, when they stayed at the motel in San Diego. This shoe had a double tap, exactly as had been fitted to the Dahlia’s shoes. Red also recognized the purse. Not only did it match the one Elizabeth had been carrying, it also still emanated a faint waft of her distinctive perfume.
The purse and shoe were different from the package sent to the Los Angeles Examiner in one important respect: the killer had not intended that they be found. He had likely tossed them into a convenient trash can shortly after the crime. Did the location of the trash can—at the café on Crenshaw—suggest the location of the murder or the murderer’s identity?
The chance discovery of Elizabeth’s purse and one of her shoes was a major find, but for every breakthrough in the Dahlia investigation there were a dozen brick walls. After much searching, the cops tracked down the missing blond nightclub singer who had lodged with the Dahlia at the Hawthorne Hotel and vanished the day of the murder. It was said she had expressed a “bitter dislike” of Elizabeth. She was Norma Lee Meyer, a sixteen-year-old runaway from a broken home in Long Beach, who was passing herself off as twenty-one. Norma went by the name of “Lynn Martin.” She had frizzy blond hair that haloed her face like a sulky Shirley Temple. She posed for photographers in a trench coat and bobby socks.
Lynn had fled on the day Elizabeth’s body was discovered next to the sidewalk and had gone into hiding in a motel on Ventura Boulevard. The cops found her in the company of a forty-two-year-old “salesman” with a rap sheet, known as Edward P. (“The Duke”) Wellington. When questioned, Lynn talked about a photographer on Jewett Drive called George Price. Price had brought her to his apartment and taken nude photographs of her. George Price’s name was in the Dahlia’s address book. Witnesses reported seeing Elizabeth in Price’s automobile on Hollywood Boulevard sometime before she left Los Angeles for San Diego. But when the cops questioned Price, he denied knowing Elizabeth. He had no clue, he said, how his name had turned up in the girl’s address book.
George Price was not the only peddler in smut whose name was linked to the Dahlia. Arthur Curtis James, Jr., also known as Charles B. Smith, was a middle-aged, self-proclaimed “artist” who told the papers he had painted Beth in the nude. Arthur said he met the Dahlia in a cocktail lounge in Hollywood in August 1944. “I was sitting alone at the bar, making pencil sketches on a bit of paper, when a girl who turned out to be ‘Beth,’ sitting beside me, showed an interest in my sketches,” he told Aggie Underwood’s reporter. Arthur’s friendship with the Dahlia bloomed over the next three months. He painted several pictures of her—a large oil painting that he turned over to a man in Arcadia, and a sketch he sold to a woman who lived in the Pacific Palisades. But the friendship ended abruptly when Arthur was arrested in Tucson, Arizona. He was with a girl alleged to have been transported there for “immoral purposes.” He never, he said, saw the Dahlia again.
The revelations of George Price, Arthur James, and Lynn Martin led to speculation that a clandestine pornography ring was in operation in Hollywood. But how such a ring might connect to the Dahlia killing, if at all, was far from clear. Many years later, some startling evidence was to surface to suggest that Beth Short had indeed been involved in nude photography. But for now, the picture was clouded. And then, to further muddy the waters, there were the “confessing Sams.”
The twenty-nine-year-old Army corporal had bloodstained pockets. He carried a clipping of the Dahlia murder.
“I dated that gal on January 9. The next thing, I blacked out. When I came to, I was standing in the Pennsylvania Station in New York.” Corporal Joseph Dumais was adamant he had killed the Dahlia. “I get drunk and forget, and I get rough with women.”
The Army investigators believed Corporal Dumais at first. But then, nine soldiers came forward to state that they had seen him at Fort Dix between January 10 and 15. It transpired that Dumais had in fact been in New Jersey—more than two thousand miles from the murder scene—over the week of Elizabeth’s disappearance and death. Nor did the corporal know the two secret facts about the mutilations that the police had been keeping for questioning.*
Over the weeks, months, and years following the Dahlia murder, the crackpots kept coming. Over five hundred in all. Edward Augele was a forty-one-year-old unemployed warehouseman who confessed to the murder to get a free meal and a place to stay for the night. Melvin Robert Bailey was a twenty-two-year-old St. Louis boy who claimed he “cut up” the girl because she refused to move back out East with him. A thirty-three-year-old restaurant porter called Daniel Voorhees, with a rap sheet that included rape, telephoned the cops and confessed because “he couldn’t stand it any longer.” The problem was that, at the time he claimed to have been having a torrid affair with Beth, she was a teenager living on the East Coast. Voorhees was judged a mental case and booked for insanity.
The “confessing Sams” distracted the police and fed the press, but they also proved to be dangerous. On February 8, 1947, Aggie’s newspaper ran the headline “Corporal Dumais Is Black Dahlia Killer.” The case, the paper announced, had been solved. Two days later, the newspaper ran another headline: “Werewolf Killer Strikes Again! Kills L.A. Woman, Writes B.D. on Body.” In the space of barely three weeks after the killing of Elizabeth Short, another brutal murder had taken place in Los Angeles. This time, the victim was forty-five-year-old Jeanne French, a former aviatrix, bit movie player, and Army nurse. Jeanne’s nude body was discovered at about 8:00 a.m. on February 10, 1947, at the intersection of Grand View Avenue and Indianapolis Street in West L.A. She had been stomped, battered, and left to literally bleed to death. Before abandoning the body, the killer had taken a dark red lipstick from her purse. With it he had scrawled on her torso: “FUCK YOU, B.D.”
The obvious inference was that the initials B.D. stood for “Black Dahlia.” Aggie’s newspaper was clear in making a link between the two killings with the headline “Werewolf Killer Strikes Again!”
At first, the LAPD agreed with the view that the same man who killed Elizabeth Short also killed Jeanne French. Captain Donahoe theorized that whoever killed Short was infuriated by Corporal Dumais’s “confession” and the subsequent press attention. He murdered Jeanne French to disprove the claim that the Dahlia killer had been caught. He wrote the initials B.D. on Jeanne’s body to stamp his signature on the two murders.
But later, the LAPD changed its opinion. The “Dahlia” and the “Lipstick” killings were not connected, the police department stated. The initials on the body were P.D. and not B.D. It was a rather strange about-turn. Many years later, evidence would surface to question that assertion and suggest that there was indeed a possible connection between the Dahlia and French killings. For now, the Jeanne French murder remained unsolved.† While at least two other nude female bodies were found in Los Angeles soon after the Short and French killings, none of them attracted the attention that the Dahlia case inspired. The lack of press interest prompted UPI news agency executive Bill Payette to complain, “Somebody has to tell these guys you can use these women more than once.”
Beyond stimulating copycat murders, the “confessing Sams” were a waste of police time. But the cops had to interview them all because, as the LAPD police psychiatrist Dr. Paul De River said, the Dahlia killer craved publicity. He had publicly displayed Elizabeth Short’s body beside the sidewalk like a carcass on a butcher’s slab. He had taunted the city editor of a major Los Ang
eles newspaper. He had sent in a package containing the victim’s belongings to the press. Any one of the confessing Sams might be him. So the cops had to check them all.
One confessor, however, was different from the others.
“I knew her as Libby Short in Hollywood. I met her in the bar at the Greyhound depot about 3½ years ago. We visited back and forth in hotels and motels. About four days before Libby died, she was giving me a bad time. She was chasing around with other girlfriends. One was a blonde named Louise, about 20 years old. She was queer too. I flew into a rage and stabbed her. I held her and stabbed her and stabbed her and stabbed her!” The woman had initially telephoned the Oakland Tribune. She was later described by the newspapers as “mannish and crop-haired.”
“This baby’s dangerous,” said Lieutenant Walter E. Hawkinson, head of the Oakland Homicide Squad, when the report was radioed over to him.
The “dangerous broad” was thirty-five-year-old Christine Reynolds. She had been shacking up with a female cousin, a Detroit bus inspector, in a motel in Glendale. The pair had argued. Christine hit the cousin with an iron pot and broke her finger, the cousin told Aggie’s reporter.
Press and public were fascinated. For some time, there had been rumors flying around that the Dahlia was a “female pervert,” and that she had indulged in “unnatural intimacies” with women. One purported sighting of Elizabeth during the missing week was with a woman of “Amazonian proportions” at a gas station. Another was of the Dahlia in the company of a “bossy blonde.” There were unsubstantiated sightings of Elizabeth at the Crown Jewel cocktail bar on Eighth and Olive, after she left the Biltmore on the night of Thursday, January 9. The Crown Jewel was a well-known gay bar downtown, and only a couple of blocks from the Biltmore. There were believed to have been some gay women staying at the Chancellor Apartments, Beth’s last known address in Los Angeles. The nature of the injuries inflicted on the Dahlia also aroused speculation as to a female killer. The deep vertical gash, inflicted from the pubic bone to the navel, could have been a grotesque reference to female genitalia. But something else Christine Reynolds said grabbed the attention of the cops.
