Black Dahlia, Red Rose

by Piu Eatwell

  Given the compelling witness testimony of a serious crime committed at the Aster Motel on the night of January 14/15, 1947, the total failure of the LAPD’s forensic tests to trace any blood at all in the motel cabins was bizarre. A further strange fact was that—while earlier forensic evidence had been passed to the FBI for testing####—the tests at the Aster Motel had not been handled by the FBI, but internally by the LAPD. In fact, all forensic testing relating to Leslie Dillon, including tests on the dog leash found in his luggage, had been handled by the LAPD, and not sent to the FBI. The LAPD’s forensic reports on the Aster motel rooms and the dog leash have never been released. I could find only one brief allusion to the tests at the motel, in one of the police reports released to me by the DA’s office:*****

  On March 15, 1949, Lee Jones, Crime Lab, made a benzedine††††† test in unit No. 3, [address redacted] S. Flower St. . . . This check showed a pseudo reaction. Samples were taken to the lab and the second blood test, which was a kastelmeir test made in the crime laboratory, was given with a negative result. Tests were made on all of the cabins at the Aster Motel, S. Flower, on August 2nd, 1949. In making the tests, Officers removed the baseboards and thresholds of all the cabins at this address at which time chemist Ray Pinker found pseudo reactions in all the cabins, by means of the benzedine test. If there had been any blood in these cabins, there would have been a positive true blood reaction. In cabin no. 6 the benzedine test was used on the asphalt tile on a spot in the floor in front of the bed, about a foot away from the wall, where in the crevices between the asphalt tile there was found a blood reaction. The manager of the motel stated at the time that a woman living in there a few days before had menstruated on the sheet and that there was a few drops on the floor. That was the only place where there was any true blood reaction in any of the cabins.

  This extract was the only information available as to the nature of the forensic tests conducted at Flower Street by the LAPD. According to the extract, the tests showed a “pseudo reaction” for blood in cabin 3—the very cabin which, according to the Gangster Squad officers, was discovered smeared with blood, feces, and bloody footprints on the morning of January 15, 1947. But, the LAPD claimed, this was not a “true” blood reaction. The only “true” reaction was, allegedly, a small amount of menstrual blood in cabin 6, dating from after the killing.

  The first question that obviously arose was: How reliable were these tests, carried out two years after the killing and almost seventy years ago, when forensic science was as yet in its infancy? Could it be that, as Fred Witman and Dr. De River had claimed, the results had been voided or rendered unreliable by the presence of chemicals used for cleaning up the scene, which had caused “pseudo-reactions”? The fact that there had been a significant “pseudo-reaction” in cabin 3, indicating a large presence of chemical agents in that particular room, was itself a cause for suspicion. Mr. and Mrs. Hoffman and Lila Durant had testified that the bloody cabin had been thoroughly cleaned on discovery of the carnage.

  In order to attempt to answer these troubling questions, I decided to send all the information I had to a modern forensic scientist. Suzanna Ryan is a leading DNA analyst and forensic serologist based in Carlsbad, California, with extensive experience in crime scene investigation and reporting on cold cases. She kindly agreed to examine what documentary evidence there was, to attempt to establish the reliability of the LAPD’s forensic testing at the motel. I sent what I could find off to her and waited for her response.

  In the meantime, I decided to collect and scrutinize every available copy of the crime scene photographs. Although the original photographs have never been officially released by the authorities, some of them have been reproduced from time to time in books and magazine articles, where an author or journalist has managed to obtain access to them by unofficial means. I was leafing through one such book about the case, originally published in 1994, when I made a discovery. A picture of the victim’s bisected body lying supine on the table of the morgue as though on a butcher’s slab, the hacked out section of the left leg and lacerations on the pubic region clearly visible. The reference of the photograph was exactly as noted by Veitch and Stanley during the secret hearing with Witman: photograph #295-771, 1-15-47 G.L. Across the slashes on the pubic region was—to me, it seemed unmistakably—the letter D, and what might have been an E, or an F.

  The police photograph showed precisely what Veitch and Stanley had seen.

  * Full name withheld.

  † Zodiac, BTK, John Reginald Christie: for summary information on these killers and their crimes, see the endnote on page 330.

  ‡ For more on Albert Dyer, the Inglewood killer, see page 85.

  § The LAPD has consistently refused to release the Dahlia case file, despite repeated requests by many researchers. A limited number of documents was released to this author by the LAPD as a result of a legal demand, but these did not include the crime scene photographs. The district attorney’s office disclosed a large number of documents to the author but also refused to disclose the crime scene photographs.

  ¶ Possibly J. David Stern (1886–1971), a well-known newspaper publisher.

  # The fragments are reproduced here exactly as in the originals and include all errors of spelling, grammar, and syntax.

  ** “BTO”: acronym for big-time operator, referring to the “big time gambler” of the first sentence. The inference is that the gambler has so “stretched” the woman’s (Tina’s) vagina that the doorman “would almost drown” when he tried to have sex with her.

  †† “Pump”: possibly derived from the verb “pump,” gambling slang from poker referring to increasing another player’s bet.

  ‡‡ “Bookshop”: bookies, betting parlor.

  §§ “Cabbage”: slang word for roll of (green) banknotes.

  ¶¶ Interestingly, in the 1946 movie Blue Dahlia, a husband comes home from the Navy to find his wife kissing another man. He pulls a gun on her and then changes his mind, with the comment, “You’re not worth it.”

  ## My italics.

  *** See page 104.

  ††† It is perfectly possible that George Hodel might have met Elizabeth at one of his louche sex parties, or through his interest in nude photography. He would certainly have heard of Mark Hansen and NTG.

  ‡‡‡ The incident with Neeb and Tamar at the trial is discussed on page 207.

  §§§ The police reports note that Carl Balsiger denied he was the “Sergeant Chuck” who had allegedly had an affair with Elizabeth at Camp Cooke and subsequently been court-martialed. Balsiger’s Army record contains no reference to a court-martial.

  ¶¶¶ Leila Adele Welsh, known as Dorothy Welsh, was a beautiful twenty-four-year-old heiress who was murdered in Kansas in March 1941. Her mother discovered her dead in her bedroom: she had suffered blows to the head, had her throat slit, and a piece of flesh had been removed from her thigh/buttock. Leila’s brother George was prosecuted for the murder but subsequently acquitted. The killer was never found.

  ### Jane Moyer Balsiger died in a car accident in January 1952. Carl Balsiger was investigated in relation to various insurance frauds, including as vice president of a company underwriting high-risk car insurance, in the late 1960s and early 1970s. (See the Kansas City Times, January 25, 1952; March 22, 1968; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 1, 1970.)

  ****See discussion of Finis Brown on page 78.

  †††† Worth $55,000 today.

  ‡‡‡‡ Mark Hansen admitted knowing Jimmy Utley when questioned by the DA. The Florentine Gardens was to go through successive co-ownerships in the period 1947–49. Co-owners with Mark Hansen in 1949 were Barney Van Der Steen and Eddie Allen, both connected to the Las Vegas gambling casino El Rancho (Billboard, July 23, 1949).

  §§§§ In a memorandum to Leo Stanley of the DA’s office, Frank Jemison stated that officers asked the coroner and the county chemist to analyze the vital organs of Elizabeth Short chemically to find out whether, for one thing, they
contained narcotics. “At a later date when the officers requested the results they were informed that these vital organs had been misplaced and had probably been thrown out at the time they were cleaning up the laboratory and further that they had made no analysis.” For a discussion of the disappearance of contemproary evidence, see the preface to this book.

  ¶¶¶¶ Name withheld.

  #### For example, all fingerprint testing and forensic tests on the brush bristles found on Elizabeth’s body were passed to the FBI’s Forensic Department.

  ***** There was also one brief reference in a police report that the LAPD had tested the dog leash and “found no blood.” Again, the original test report has never been released.

  ††††† Benzidine is an organic compound that in the past was used to test for blood. An enzyme in blood causes the oxidation of benzidine to a distinctively blue-colored derivative.

  23

  SPECTER OF THE ROSE

  In an outlandish case, this was the most outlandish discovery yet. I had spent so much effort, so many hours, attempting to locate a photograph that would show what Veitch and Stanley had seen at the secret DA hearing. I had subjected the LAPD and DA’s office to a barrage of disclosure requests. And yet here was a photograph that revealed what they had been shown, for all to see. The second letter—the E or the F—was, as observed by Veitch, Stanley, and Witman at the hearing, difficult to discern. It might have been a letter carved over the crisscross lacerations. Or it might simply have been a part of the lacerations themselves. The D, on the other hand, was remarkably distinct. The two strokes of which it was composed—the vertical stem and the curved bowl—were in marked contrast to the diagonal slashing that underlay it, crisscrossing the pubic region. And there was only one suspect that I knew of in the case with the initial D.

  One of the police reports I had seen referred to the fact that “experts in handwriting have stated that it would be impossible to determine any type of handwriting from the so-called ‘D’ cut into the pubic region of Elizabeth Short’s body.” It was, therefore, clear that the LAPD had subjected the crime scene photographs to analysis by more than one graphologist, and that they had been of the opinion that it was impossible to identify the handwriting characteristics of whoever had carved the “so-called ‘D.’ ” But the report was silent as to whether the graphologists who studied the crime scene photographs were of the opinion that there was a D carved into the body in the first place.

  What would a modern graphologist think about the issue? To find out, I sent the photograph to a modern handwriting expert. Caroline Murray is a British graphologist and director of the British Academy of Graphology. After a close examination of the photograph, her opinion was that, while the quality of the print was too poor to be certain, there did appear to be a D inscribed on the pubic region. “It is difficult to make a fluid curved movement like that,” she wrote. “Therefore it looks deliberately curved, as opposed to the straight slashes surrounding it.”

  Looking at the photograph, it was also not surprising that the initials had not, apparently, been picked up in Professor Newbarr’s autopsy report. Their significance as letters as opposed to random scrawlings could easily have been overlooked, unless pointed out by somebody, as Fred Witman had pointed out to Veitch and Stanley. Witman, I mused, must have received his intelligence from Dr. De River. And where had Dr. De River obtained the information? There could only be one answer: Leslie Dillon himself. Suddenly the cryptic statements made by Clemence Horrall and Dr. De River when Dillon was apprehended in early 1949—that Leslie Dillon knew “more about the Dahlia murder than the police did,” and gave information explaining the mutilations on the body that they did not know—seemed, finally, to make sense. Surely, it was Leslie Dillon who had told Dr. De River and the LAPD about the initials that were carved on the body.

  The inscribing on the victim’s body of the initial D—and the possible E—were an egotistical appropriation that fit with everything I had seen in the behavior of both the Dahlia killer and of Leslie Dillon. Like the naming of Dillon’s daughter “Elizabeth,” these were acts that asserted ownership and control. From time immemorial, the act of naming has been equated with proprietorship, starting from Jehovah giving man the prerogative to name all the animals, and thus implicitly the right to dominion over them. Yet, like Leslie Dillon’s own first approach to the police, these acts fell short of a full “confession.” They manifested a supremely egotistical need to be identified with, control, and boast about the murder and the victim, but a simultaneous counter-impulse to conceal, hide, and run away from it. It was a game, above all, of power: power over the victim, the press, the cops. The power game of a supreme egotist who knew he had gotten away. Robert Keppel, the leading expert on “signature” killers, has said that “inasmuch as most of these killers exert little or no control over their own existences or perceive themselves deep down inside as being life’s losers and the victims of society, they gratify their sexual urges by demonstrating control over their murder victims. Whether that control manifests itself as necrophilia, bondage, humiliation, the torture of victims, or the posing of dead victims, it is the control itself that supplies the killer with his gratification.”

  A further strange “coincidence” that now became apparent to me was the fact that, barely three weeks after the Dahlia murder, there had been another killing in which initials had been found on the body of the victim—that of aviatrix Jeanne French, who was found stomped to death on the street with the words “FUCK YOU, BD” written on her body in lipstick. Initially, the LAPD had treated the two cases as linked. Then it had unaccountably separated them. Leslie Dillon had referred to the French killing when he was brought to the Dahlia body dump site by JJ O’Mara and Dr. De River. There was no doubt he was in Los Angeles at the time of the French murder. The fact of two violent lone female killings occurring in the same city, so close in time, linked by the highly unusual characteristic of inscribing initials on the body, and with the second even referencing the first with the initials BD, cried out for further investigation. The LAPD, it seems, was determined to ignore the parallels.* And then there was the fact that Aggie Underwood—who had insisted on linking the murders—had been mysteriously “kicked upstairs” at the point when she attempted to make the connection, way back in 1947. Had she been getting too close to a truth that the police department didn’t want people to know?

  Reluctantly, I snapped shut my laptop computer. I had an appointment to go to. At this point, I was staying in downtown Los Angeles, at the old Los Angeles Athletic Club, on the intersection of Seventh and Olive and a stone’s throw from the Biltmore Hotel. The club overlooked Raymond Chandler’s old offices at the Dabney Oil Syndicate, just visible through the tall windows of the wood-paneled bar. Like much of downtown Los Angeles, the club seemed trapped in a time warp from the days of Philip Marlowe. The library, as in Marlowe’s day, shelved rows of books behind glass doors, magazines on the tables, and lighted portraits of club dignitaries of the past, below which club dignitaries of the present snoozed peacefully in high-backed leather armchairs. The ancient bellhops spoke in whispers, respectfully wheeling trolley-loads of antique-looking baggage down corridors dimly lit by Art Deco lamps.

  Leaving the club, I drove down Spring Street and past City Hall. In the time of Mayor Bowron, City Hall was the tallest building in Los Angeles. Now it was dwarfed by the jagged silhouette of skyscrapers on Bunker Hill. On the southwest corner of Broadway and Eleventh was the Spanish Colonial extravaganza of the old Los Angeles Examiner building. In Jimmy Richardson’s heyday, the cast-iron presses had rolled into the small hours and the lights had blazed around the clock. Today the windows were dark and vacant. Pieces of chipboard were tacked onto the missing panes. On Pershing Square, steel skyscrapers glinted behind the red brick Spanish-Italian façade of the Biltmore Hotel. Perhaps ironically, the Biltmore—the last place Elizabeth Short was seen alive—was itself built on the site of the old Salvation Army hostel where Aggie U
nderwood had washed up as a teenager alone in the world, back in the 1910s. Aggie and Elizabeth: two statistics in the vortex of Los Angeles’ early twentieth century “female migrant problem.” One had risen to dazzling success; the other had been propelled to equally spectacular destruction.

  Some minutes later I reached my destination: two narrow strips of concrete cabins framing a parking lot, rattled day and night by the thunderous traffic that pelted down the adjoining Harbor Freeway. At the entrance a large sign read “Vacancies,” and below it, “Cash Only.” Small architectural details mapped accretions of time for those who could read them: the rounded Art Moderne corner of one strip of cabins; a fragment of old terra-cotta tile screen; a vintage neon sign. I had arrived at the Aster Motel.†

  The Aster Motel had no website. When I tried to call the number given for it in the directory, the line was disconnected. The motel does not normally take advance bookings. It charges by the hour, in cash. Cars pass in and out of the parking lot silently, day and night. After each visit, rooms are cleaned and bed linens changed. The washing machines hum permanently in the laundry room.

  At the front office I was met by a woman who worked the reception. The motel workers had heard vague rumors of the Aster’s connections with a long-ago murder, but nothing in detail. The woman took me to the cabin that I had asked to visit—cabin 3. It was very sparse. A double bed, cupboard, TV enclosed in a wood-veneered cabinet. Adjoining it, a shower room with toilet and washbasin. The room smelled of cigarette smoke and Aqua Velva. It probably always had. So this, I thought, was it. The room that was discovered soaked in blood and feces on the morning of January 15, 1947, with bloody footprints tracked across the floor. A door slammed shut in the wind. In the background, the traffic hummed on the Harbor Freeway.