by Piu Eatwell
On October 28, 1948, a letter arrived on Dr. De River’s desk that particularly caught his attention. It had been typed on paper stamped Miami Beach, FLA. The return address was a post office box in Miami. The letter was from a person signing himself under the name of “Jack Sand.” It referred to a magazine report of the Dahlia murder, and stated that the writer had been associating with a person who fitted the “pattern” of the “infamous one.” The letter went on to say that the writer had met the suspected Dahlia killer the previous March in San Francisco, and had associated closely with him for two months. Whether he was capable of such an act, however, the writer could not be sure. The writer of the letter went on to state that he had “never knowling [sic] associated with a murderer,” but that the man he had met in San Francisco had a motive for the killing, and by his own admission was “present at the time,” and “knew the characters involved.” He went on to offer his help in tracking the suspect down, stating that there were many more circumstances that led to his suspicions.
Something about the letter from “Jack Sand” fired a neuron deep in Dr. De River’s brain. The magazine article to which the writer referred was in fact one that had been planted by the doctor, in a deliberate attempt to lure the Dahlia killer. It was the cover story of the October 1948 edition of a pulp crime magazine called True Detective. The story was entitled, in the plural, “The Black Dahlia Murders.” The cover of the edition was blood-red, featuring the white faces and avenging stares of half a dozen female “victims.” The author of the article cited Dr. De River’s published profile of the killer, noting his view that the murderer had manifested “a sadistic component of a sado-masochistic complex.” It also cited the doctor’s opinion that the killer might “be of a studious, scientific bent,” and would, by his very nature, “be impelled to boast of the crime that shocked the nation.”
Three weeks after receiving the letter from “Jack Sand,” the doctor sent a response. He was intrigued, he wrote, to know more about the fellow that Mr. Sand had met in San Francisco in March 1947, who knew so much about the Dahlia murder. The doctor himself was writing a textbook dealing with behavioral problems, and was interested to find out about the backgrounds of such individuals, in particular their childhood, which was often “the basis of complexes. . . . I am interested,” the doctor wrote, “in any person that fits into any pattern that is like the Elizabeth Short case.”
On November 27, the doctor received a response from “Jack Sand.” Jack described his relationship with “Jeff,” the man he had met in San Francisco. Jack and Jeff had spent six weeks together. Jack had once watched Jeff have sexual relations with two women they picked up at a bar. Jeff told Jack that he knew Elizabeth Short, and that he frequented the bars that she did. The police had questioned several people he knew in relation to the case. Jeff had therefore fled from Los Angeles, to escape questioning himself. Jeff had encouraged Jack to try to break into screenwriting for Hollywood. Once, Jeff made a pencil sketch of Jack. Jack enclosed the sketch with his letter. It was signed, “Jeff ’48.” The sketch showed an interesting pattern of shading, or “crosshatching.” It evoked the intricate, crisscross lacerations on the Dahlia’s pubic bone and right hip. The doctor was convinced that “Jack” was not the writer’s real name.
Further letters from Jack Sand to Dr. De River followed. Jack admitted to a strong interest in sexual sadism. On December 11, he wrote that Jeff was a very “loyal lad.” If he had any information that Jack was the real culprit, he doubted that anybody would hear of it. Jack wrote that Jeff had been attracted to him by the “abundance of lovely girls” he had seen with him, and had thought that, by making his “acquittance” [sic], he would be able to meet some of them. Jack wrote that Jeff was very “dissapointed” [sic] when he found out these girls did not in fact visit his hotel room.# The sensitive and tender side of Jeff’s nature, wrote Jack, was very “predomonate” [sic], also a touch of cunning and slyness. Finally, Jack proffered a hypothetical explanation of the genesis and motive for the Dahlia killing. Was it not possible, he wrote, that an associate of Elizabeth, after an affair “not considered proper by the average person,” had been “mocked or threatened exposure by her to his friends?” He therefore might, out of revenge, inflict “pain of some nature on her and experience a new sensation by accident. . . . Thus leading to the complete annihilation of her and other victims.”
The letters from Jack Sand contained errors of spelling, grammar, and syntax (“aquittance,” “dissapointed,” “predomonate”). There were also errors on the envelopes in which the letters were sent: one, for example, was addressed “Especial delivar.” There had, as the doctor was aware, been a number of grammatical errors in the purported Dahlia killer letters: “Here is Dahlia’s possessions”; and “Had my fun at the police.” Elizabeth had also, in her final letter to Gordon Fickling, referred to going to work as a model for someone called “Jack.”** A further curious point was that Jack, in his letters, referred to the murder victim always as “Elizabeth”—never “Elizabeth Short” or “the Dahlia case.” It was a term of intimacy that the doctor found striking. Most significantly, Jack’s act of coming forward to the police manifested, in the doctor’s opinion, the very desire for publicity, the need “to boast of the crime that shocked the nation,” which he was convinced that the Dahlia killer harbored.
Dr. De River and Aggie Underwood were sure they were on to something. The doctor in particular wanted to find out more about “Jack Sand,” to establish exactly who he and his friend “Jeff” were, and the nature of their relationship to the Dahlia. To do this, he would need to obtain the clearance of the LAPD top brass. So the doctor went to see the LAPD chief, Clemence Horrall.
* Pronounced De-RYE-ver.
† The London physicians George Phillips and Thomas Bond used autopsy results and crime scene evidence in the fall of 1888 to create a rudimentary but groundbreaking analysis of the personality, behavioral characteristics, and lifestyle of the notorious serial killer known as “Jack the Ripper.” This is generally considered the first case of criminal profiling.
‡ The question of juvenile criminal responsibility is a vexed one, to which there has arguably never been found a complete solution. Issues include knowledge of wrongfulness, understanding of criminality and its consequences, the child’s psychological development, and lived experience. See, for example, the overview in McDiarmid, Claire, “An Age of Complexity: Children and Criminal Responsibility in Law,” Youth Justice, August 2013, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 145–60.
§ Sodomy laws, or laws proscribing certain types of sexual activity as “unnatural”—notably homosexuality—were not declared illegal on a federal basis in the U.S. until the 2003 Supreme Court ruling of Lawrence v. Texas. Even today, fourteen U.S. states have not as yet revised their sodomy laws in line with the federal court’s ruling.
¶ Judge Thomas P. White (1888–1968) was a distinguished member of the Los Angeles appellate court. Among his rulings as an appeals court judge was the successful appeal of the Latino defendants in the notorious “Sleepy Lagoon” case.
# The girls did not visit Jack’s hotel room because, as was later discovered, he was a pimp.
** See the letter from Gordon Fickling referred to on page 44.
9
THE SUSPECT
Police Chief Clemence B. Horrall was a rarity in the Los Angeles Police Department in that he held a college degree. He was also probably the only officer who kept a farm of pigs, chickens, horses, and cows at his home in the Valley. His wife milked the cows every morning.
Horrall had been appointed the forty-first police chief of the LAPD in 1941 by Los Angeles Mayor Fletcher Bowron, as a weapon in the mayor’s war against corruption. For the police department had, by Mayor Bowron’s election, been rocked by scandal after scandal. The police chief before Horrall, Arthur C. Hohmann, had been forced to resign after a corruption bust involving the head of the LAPD Robbery Squad. And only three years before that, there had been an even wo
rse public relations disaster.
On January 14, 1938, private investigator Harry Raymond got into his car and turned on the ignition. The car was blasted to smithereens by a black powder bomb hidden under the hood. Miraculously, Raymond survived. At the time of the bombing, Harry Raymond was employed by the crusading Los Angeles restaurant owner Clifford Clinton.* His beat was to investigate police-protected brothels and gambling parlors in the city. But when Raymond was rushed to the hospital filled with shrapnel, he dropped a bombshell bigger than the original bomb that had blasted him. The individual responsible for the car bomb attack, he claimed, was none other than the then-head of the LAPD Police Intelligence Squad, Captain Earle Kynette. Captain Kynette and other LAPD officers were involved in the police-protected rackets of the city. Harry Raymond and Clifford Clinton, by their poking around, were getting too close to exposing what was going on. The threat they posed had to be, in police parlance, “neutralized.” Kynette, naturally, denied the allegations. He was, he claimed, at home nursing an eye complaint with boric acid the night of the attack. Unfortunately for Kynette, the fact that he and other members of the LAPD had rented a $50-a-month house opposite Harry Raymond’s home in order to spy on him, together with the detonating wire found in Kynette’s garage, told another story.
Despite establishment attempts to dampen the flames, the evidence against Earle Kynette was just too damning. After indictment by the 1938 Los Angeles grand jury, Kynette was tried, convicted of attempted murder, and sent to San Quentin. The then–LAPD chief, James “Two Gun” Davis, was forced to resign. The incumbent mayor, Frank Shaw—who managed Los Angeles like his private piggy bank—was ousted. In Shaw’s place as mayor came the sober ex-judge and staunch ally of Clifford Clinton, the self-avowed white knight against corruption Fletcher Bowron. At the time of Mayor Shaw’s recall, police corruption was so widespread that it was said that, when the mayor stepped down, dozens of Los Angeles police officers “retired” to Mexico.
The new mayor vowed to change all that. Fletcher Bowron eschewed the dapper panama hats, shiny suits, and Oliver Hardy–esque mustache favored by his predecessor, Frank Shaw. Flashiness—all too reminiscent of the gangster—was replaced by gray suits and spectacles. The new mayor was nostalgic for the dusty old Los Angeles of his childhood, when wagons trundled along dirt tracks and the word “freeway” had yet to invade the American dictionary or way of life. In Bowron’s shake-up, over two hundred police officers were demoted or fired. Two new chiefs tried and failed to manage the unruly police department before Clemence Horrall was finally appointed to the post.
On Mayor Bowron’s orders, Chief Horrall and his assistant, Joe Reed, devised a strategy for controlling the gangsters in town: a new, elite special detail. The detail—known as the Gangster Squad—was charged specifically with the task of clearing the hoods out of the city. It was headed by a tough little officer from the Seventy-seventh Street Station, on the edge of Watts: Lieutenant William Burns. The prime targets of the Gangster Squad were the local gangsters—Mickey Cohen, Bugsy Siegel, the Mafia’s local capo Jack Dragna, Jimmy “Little Giant” Utley, and the like. But they also spied on corrupt cops. That, and any other “special assignment” given to them by the chief.
It was just such a “special assignment” that Chief Horrall had in mind when he called Willie Burns into his office late in December 1948. Present at the secret meeting were Dr. De River, Assistant Chief Joe Reed, and Captain Francis Kearney of Homicide. Captain Kearney had replaced Big Jack Donahoe —who had been transferred back to Robbery—as head of the Homicide detail a year back.
By the time Chief Horrall called the meeting with Willie Burns, a lot had happened since Jack Sand’s original letter to Dr. De River. Throughout the winter of ’48, the doctor had continued his correspondence with Jack, discussing psychological profiles of the Dahlia killer. In the meantime, Chief Horrall and Assistant Chief Reed had sent an undercover officer of the LAPD—Officer Jones†—to Miami, to tail Jack.
Officer Jones was, at first, unaware of the purpose of his mission. He reported that Jack spent hours staking out a restaurant called Wolfie’s on Collins Avenue, where his wife worked as a waitress. As Dr. De River had suspected, “Jack Sand” was a pseudonym. Jack’s real name was, in fact, Leslie Duane Dillon. He was twenty-seven years old, tall and lanky, sloop-shouldered, with glasses, and he was given to dyeing his hair in different colors.
Leslie Dillon had grown up in Cushing, Oklahoma, a small town riddled with pipelines and infused with the odor of gasoline from the massive refineries of the Creek County oil fields. His father, Ray, was a metal worker. By the time he was eight years old, Dillon’s parents had separated. His mother, Mamie, was living as a single parent in his grandmother’s home in Cushing, working as a cook in a local restaurant. During the war, Dillon served barely a year in the Navy before he was dishonorably discharged for stealing watches. In January ’46 he was arrested and charged with pimping in San Francisco. Shortly thereafter he married, had a baby daughter, and firmly settled into what would become a lifetime of drifting. Throughout the late ’40s he meandered from state to state with his wife and daughter, crisscrossing the country from coast to coast with stays in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Florida, and Oklahoma City. His aliases were many: “Jack Sand,” “Jack Diamond,” “Jack Dillon Maxim.” His changes of occupation reflected the chameleon-like changes of his name and hair color: bellhop, rumrunner, bootlegger, beer bottler, pimp, gambler, taxi driver, dance instructor. He never stayed at any one place, or did any one thing, for long.
After a few weeks of being tailed by Officer Jones in Miami, Leslie Dillon got wind of something afoot. This was not surprising, as he was called in and raked over the coals by the Miami postal inspector about his P.O. box. Suspicious that he was being watched, Dillon even turned himself over to the local office of the FBI. He told them he believed he might be wanted for some offense—possibly murder—in Los Angeles. Did they want him?‡ The Feds told him they did not know what he was talking about and let him go. The FBI also picked up Officer Jones. They let him go, too, when he explained he was on assignment from the Los Angeles Police Department. Aware that he was being watched, Dillon went into hiding in his room for two days. An Italian taxi driver friend, Larry Fanucci, brought him food.
Finally, Dillon left his room in Miami. Officer Jones took the opportunity to search his lodgings. The place was a mess. Violently torn clothes were strewn around. It appeared that Dillon was a voracious reader, not just of detective stories, but of everything. Jones found two newspaper clippings in the room. One showed a picture of a man lying dead, killed by a prison guard at the Cook County jail. The guard was being congratulated by the warden for having killed the man. The other newspaper clipping showed the headline “Shoots Out Girl’s Tooth.”§ There were also unsigned samples of “creative writing.” They included an account of what appeared to be the rape and shooting of a woman.¶ In addition, Jones found the copy of True Detective magazine that Dillon had referred to in his original letter to Dr. De River, under the alias of “Jack Sand.” The article featured a picture of the telegram that Red Manley had sent to Elizabeth in San Diego. Next to Red’s signature, Dillon had inscribed the curious squiggle that he added under the a of “Sand” when signing his name as “Jack Sand.” The annotations to the magazine article had been made with a ballpoint pen—the kind of pen with which the printed postcard sent to the Examiner about “turning in” had been written. Finally, the penny dropped, and Officer Jones realized the purpose of his assignment: to track a suspect in the Dahlia murder. He immediately sent a report back to Chief Horrall stating, “This is the man.”
Leslie Dillon’s strange behavior and the material collected by Officer Jones in Miami convinced Dr. De River that he needed to at least meet with and talk to him. However, Dillon—who had initially offered to help in the investigation and advise on the psychology of the Dahlia killer—now seemed to show a remarkable reluctance to head out to the West Coast to meet th
e doctor in person. So, the doctor reasoned, an alternative meeting location would need to be found. The mechanics of how such a meeting with Leslie Dillon could be arranged was the subject of the secret meeting between Chief Horrall, Assistant Chief Reed, Homicide Chief Francis Kearney, Dr. De River, and Gangster Squad Chief Willie Burns. Chief Horrall’s brief for Burns was as demanding as it was unusual. As head of the Gangster Squad, he was to team up with Francis Kearney, head of the Homicide detail. The chiefs of the two details were to give all requisite support to Dr. De River in his efforts to secure a clandestine meeting with Leslie Dillon, wherever that would eventually take place. In practice, this meant chauffeuring De River and Dillon around, once the meeting place had been agreed. It also meant setting up telephone taps to record future conversations between the doctor and Dillon.
There was much that was highly unusual about Burns’s “special assignment.” It was, to begin with, the first and only time that a key aspect of a homicide investigation had been assigned to members of the Gangster Squad. More unusual still, while the secret assignment was known to the head of the Homicide detail, Captain Kearney, it was not revealed to the two homicide officers in charge of the Dahlia case: Lieutenant Harry “the Hat” Hansen and Sergeant Finis Brown. They were completely unaware of the secret operation. Finis, in particular, was kept out of the way. All through December 1948, the sergeant was assigned to the detail of guarding the Berlin picture exhibition# held in the county museum of Exposition Park.
