Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

by Steve Hodel

  It was clear to the medical examiner that not only had her body been neatly and cleanly bisected, but that a sharp, thin-bladed instrument, consistent with a surgeon's scalpel, had been used to perform the operation. The incision was performed through the abdomen, and then through the intervertebral disk between the second and third lumbar vertebrae. The bisection had been carried out with such precision that it was apparent it was the work of a professional, someone trained in surgical procedures. Police criminologist Ray Pinker confirmed the medical examiner's opinion, and later his findings were confirmed after a study he made with Dr. LeMoyne Snyder of the Michigan State Police.

  Dr. Newbarr's preliminary estimate set the time of death within a twenty-four-hour period prior to the discovery of the body, thus establishing the time of the murder as sometime after 10:00 a.m. on January 14.

  But who was the victim?

  On January 16, 1947, the Los Angeles Examiner offered this questionnaire:

  Description of Dead Girl Given

  Do you know a missing girl who chewed her fingernails?

  If so she may be the victim of yesterday's mutilation slaying.

  The dead girl's description:

  Age — Between 15 and 16 years.

  Weight — 118 pounds.

  Eyes — Gray-blue or gray-green.

  Nose —Small turned up.

  Ears — Small lobes.

  Eyelashes — Virtually colorless.

  Hair — Hennaed, but original dark brown growing out.

  Foot size —6-1/2.

  Toenails — Enameled pink.

  Scars — 3-1/2 inch operational scar on right side of back: 1-1/2 inch scar on right abdomen, possible appendectomy; vaccination scar, left thigh; small scar on left knee and another above the knee.

  Moles — Six small moles on back of neck below collar line; another in small of back.

  General description — Rather well developed, small bones with trim legs.

  Scrambling for any piece of the puzzle that would allow the winner of the who-is-Jane-Doe-Number-1 contest to emblazon the victim's name in a full-page headline, the city editor of the Los Angeles Examiner suddenly had an idea. In a meeting with LAPD detectives, he made an offer that was immediately accepted — to transmit the fingerprints of Jane Doe NumberIvia an early photo facsimile machine called a "Soundex" through their proprietary communications network to their Washington, D.C., bureau. Reporters in the D.C. office had FBI agents standing by to transport the fingerprints immediately to their records section for identification. That the city editor's motive was to be the first one on the street to carry her identity didn't matter, for the detectives were as hungry for information as the press.

  A memo to J. Edgar Hoover, dated June 24, 1947, and now available to the public under the Freedom of Information Act, identifying Jane Doe Number 1, speaks for itself:

  FBI MEMO

  1.1 #590

  June 24, 1947

  SOUND-PHOTO TRANSMISSION OF FINGERPRINTS

  LEADS TO IDENTITY OF ELIZABETH SHORT

  During January, 1947, the police in a Southern California city were not only confronted with the problem of solving mad butcher murders of women, but in the first instance were many times unable to determine the identity of the victims.

  When the body of a young woman, severed at the waist and mutilated in other ways, was found in a vacant lot in Southwestern Los Angeles on the morning of January 15, 1947, they were again confronted with this problem. It appeared she had been dead about ten hours and the body had been placed in full view only a few feet from the sidewalk. The authorities were practically at a standstill in their investigation until the deceased victim could be identified.

  The fingerprints of the body were taken by the police, who then sought the cooperation of the Los

  Angeles Examiner

  newspaper to transmit the fingerprints by wire photo to the FBI Identification Division in Washington, D.C. Eliciting the aid of the International News Service, the newspaper transmitted the prints to its Washington headquarters. At 11 a.m. on January 16 the pictures were received by the Identification Division. Within 56 minutes an identification was established with two fingerprint cards previously on file bearing the name of Elizabeth Short.

  Despite the fact that two of the impressions were missing entirely and three others were badly blurred, FBI fingerprint technicians were able to make an identification by searching all possible fingerprint combinations. At this time there were approximately 104,000,000 fingerprint cards on file.

  One of the fingerprint cards submitted and identified as that of Elizabeth Short indicated that Miss Short was an applicant for a position as a clerk in the Post Exchange of Camp Cooke, California, on January 30, 1943. The other set was submitted by the Santa Barbara, California, Police Department reflecting her arrest on September 23, 1943, on charges of violating juvenile court laws, after which she was released to the probation department.

  The successful use of scientific communications equipment in this case was referred to by the Director of the FBI as follows: "The action of the Los

  Angeles Examiner

  in transmitting to the FBI the fingerprints of the unidentified murder victim is an excellent illustration of the cooperation of the press with law enforcement, and it is such cooperation that aids law enforcement in curbing the increase in crime."

  As the FBI memo indicates, within hours of the transmission the victim's prints were connected to an arrest in Santa Barbara, a coastal community some ninety miles north of Los Angeles, where three years earlier in September 1943 the victim had been detained as a minor for being present with adults where alcohol was being served. That arrest report provided Los Angeles police with the necessary information about her identity and background.

  Her name was Elizabeth Short. The Santa Barbara police report from 1943 described her as a female, Caucasian, born July 29, 1924. Her mother, Mrs. Phoebe Short, resided in Medford, Massachusetts. As a result of the records the LAPD assembled, detectives were able to establish a background and history on the victim prior to her arrival in California.

  They learned that Elizabeth was born in Hyde Park, a suburb of Boston, and grew up in nearby Medford. Her mother was the sole provider for Elizabeth and her four sisters after their father, Cleo Short, abandoned the family in 1930 and eventually wound up working and living in Southern California. Elizabeth was exceptionally attractive and well liked at Medford High School, but she dropped out in her sophomore year and in 1942 moved to Miami Beach, Florida, where she got a job as a waitress.

  It was in Miami, on her own for probably the first time, that she met a Flying Tigers pilot named Major Matt Gordon Jr., who was stationed there. He was shortly sent overseas, and Elizabeth began to correspond with him, reportedly sending him twenty-seven letters in eleven days.

  In January 1943, Elizabeth traveled to Santa Barbara, California, where she applied for and was hired at the post exchange at the Camp Cooke military base. Her employment there was brief, after which she left to seek her father, who, she discovered, was living close by, in Vallejo, California. She stayed with her father briefly, but both were uncomfortable with the living arrangements, and she returned to Santa Barbara in September 1943.

  Elizabeth liked servicemen and wanted to be around them. Her attraction to men in uniform was clear both from her relationship with Major Gordon and her desire to attend nightspots and clubs frequented by military personnel. It was in such a nightspot that she was arrested on September 23, 1943, because alcohol was being served there and she was only nineteen, in violation of California's liquor law. When she agreed to return home rather than face charges in California, Santa Barbara County probation authorities provided her with a ticket to return home to Medford.

  During the rest of the war years, Elizabeth continued to write Major Matt Gordon, and in April 1945 he reportedly proposed marriage. Elizabeth accepted, but before Gordon could return home he was killed in a plane crash in India. Elizabeth Short's
marriage plans, and hopes for any future she might have had as an officer's wife, went down in flames with Major Gordon's plane.

  During the winter of 1945, Elizabeth remained on the East Coast, and again traveled to Florida, where she took a job as a waitress in Miami Beach. In February 1946, she returned home to Medford and worked as a cashier at a local movie theater, but on April 17, 1946, returned to California, this time to Hollywood. During the nine-month period preceding her death, Elizabeth was known to have lived as a transient at various boardinghouses and with a variety of roommates. She stayed at a hotel in Long Beach for several weeks during the summer months and then returned to Hollywood, where she first shared a room in a private residence, then lived in an apartment with seven other young women. She also shared rooms at several hotels in Hollywood for brief periods. In December she left for San Diego and returned to Los Angeles on January 9, 1947. That was the night she disappeared into the fog after leaving the Olive Street entrance of the Biltmore Hotel.

  Subsequent to the discovery of the victim's body, and after many of the descriptive details from the autopsy findings were leaked to the press, not only Los Angeles but the entire country became obsessed with Elizabeth Short's murder. Before the age of the Internet, twenty-four-hour-cable news networks, or television, much of the interest in a mysterious, beautiful murder victim was driven by page-one newspaper headlines and radio announcers. Feeding the public's intoxication with the victim was her sobriquet "the Black Dahlia," which reporters claimed was given her by the men and sailors who saw the attractive black-haired young woman frequent their favorite pharmacy soda fountain in Long Beach.* Along with this name the newspapers printed blown-up high-school photos of the exotic young woman. This, combined with the horrific details of sadistic torture, bisection, and mutilation, fed the macabre imaginations of newspaper readers from coast to coast.

  The ongoing murder investigation remained on page one of the Los Angeles newspapers for a record thirty-one successive days. The January 16 first-day edition sold more newspapers than any other edition in the history of the Los Angeles Examiner, with the sole exception of VE Day. This Los Angeles frenzy was also driven by the fierce competition among the six newspapers in the city, as the Hearst syndicate, which owned the Examiner and the Los Angeles Evening Herald and Express, vied with the Chandler empire, publisher of the Los Angeles Times and its tabloid the Los Angeles Mirror. Most rounds went to the Los Angeles Examiner, whose night city editor had sent the victim's fingerprints to the FBI for quick identification, thus gaining initial favor with LAPD and the investigating detectives.

  In truth, the crime reporters were usually way ahead of the detectives, especially when it came to locating and interviewing witnesses. They didn't punch the time clock at five o'clock, but kept on working until they had the story. Reporters also worked for newspaper owners who had deep pockets and paid whatever it took to get a big story on the streets first. If it meant paying cash to help out a witness who was going through a rough patch, a reporter could always get the money. Then, after he'd called in the story, he'd turn over what he had learned to his friendly detective on the force. Thus both the police and the press had the power to get things done for each other. For the most part they tried to share their findings, but ultimately it was an uneasy partnership.

  All of these factors were at work in the Black Dahlia case, to such an extent that the reporting of and publicity about her murder were unparalleled in Los Angeles history. Even the Lindbergh kidnapping or the Leopold and Loeb murder trials had not taken up as much local media space. The public was so voracious for any news that reporters spread out across the nation for background on Elizabeth Short. They located and interviewed her family, close friends and acquaintances, roommates and classmates, ex-lovers, and military men. With few exceptions, almost every detail these crime reporters discovered through their independent investigations, no matter how irrelevant, turned up in print the next day and helped keep the public's seemingly insatiable appetite fed.

  After a full month of daily headlines, the Dahlia homicide had found its place as the most notorious unsolved murder of the century.

  * It was later speculated that the original source for this name was The Blue Dahlia, a Raymond Chandler-penned murder mystery, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, released and screened in L.A. in the summer of 1946.

  A Death in the Family

  May 17, 1999, Bellingham, Washington

  WHEN THE PHONE RINGS at one in the morning, you hope it's a wrong number. If it's not, it's usually bad news. And that's what it was for me on Monday, May 17, 1999: a hard ring, an insistent ring that wouldn't go away because my answering machine was off, and it woke me from a deep sleep. June, my father's wife, was hysterical on the other end, screaming into her receiver at their penthouse suite in San Francisco. "Steve," she said, trying to regain some composure, "your father. He's dead!" Between her sobs I could pick up snippets of what had happened. "Heart attack. Paramedics still here. Your brother Duncan and his wife are here with me. Come down. Please come down now. I could have saved him, Steven. I should have done something more. I am all alone now."

  When I was an LAPD homicide detective, I taught myself how to wake up instantly in the middle of the night when we had to roll out to a call. It was a skill I'd lost over the years since I retired, but it came back to me as June kept talking. I tried to reassure her that we would take care of things, offering her whatever comfort I could over the phone. "I'll be there on the first flight I can get, June." It was the best I could do. I made coffee and got on the phone to find a seat on the first flight to San Francisco from Seattle, some ninety miles south of my home in Bellingham, where I had been living for the past twelve years.

  Eight hours later I was boarding the plane at SeaTac airport, looking forward to two hours of time alone to ruminate upon the passing of "the Great Man." The grief and the loss that I felt, that all sons feel at the death of their father, was mixed with the satisfaction. I had from knowing that his life had been long and remarkable. His life, as much as I knew of it, had been unique, much larger than that of most people I knew. George Hill Hodel, M.D., who seemed to have lived four lifetimes, had been held in awe by all of his children from all four of his families. And now he was gone.

  As the plane lifted through the cloud cover and carried me toward the passage that almost all sons must inevitably make (the burial of their fathers), I felt oddly grateful that I had been granted the opportunity to repair a relationship with a father I had never really known. There were only snatches and pieces of memory from my childhood in our mysterious Hollywood house, and then, after he had left, nothing.

  Now I was fifty-seven. But my relationship with my father had really begun only eight years earlier. Before that the two of us had been strangers, sharing a hello once in a while over the phone or a handshake now and then when I visited him in Asia or when he was passing through L.A. on business. For thirty-five years there had been brief encounters in hotel lobbies, but ours had never been a real father-son relationship.

  What we had had were business meetings, where his stiff and formal demeanor was as offputting to me as it was to all his children. To us, he was the "doctor" — clinical, cold, and remote. It struck me as passing strange that my father, with his brilliant mind and extensive training as a psychiatrist, was so obviously uncomfortable among his children. In lectures, using his vocabulary and wit, he was able to charm and hypnotize whole audiences with his charismatic personality and as a leader in his field. Yet in the role of father he was painfully awkward and inept. This paradoxical disconnect, however, actually gave life and body to the eccentricities that made him a distant legend to all of his children. And I was no exception, having lived in the same house with my father in Hollywood in the late 1940s and then twenty-five years later spending time with him in the Philippines when he wanted to woo me away from LAPD Homicide and groom me to take over his business. But that was more than twenty years ago.

  Over th
e ensuing decades, after my retirement and a subsequent career as a P.I. specializing in criminal cases, I had begun to make a breakthrough into the mystery of my father. Slowly, gradually, since his return to the United States in 1991 after a forty-year absence, I had established the beginnings of a relationship with him. I was almost fifty and he was eighty-four.

  I believe my change of career had helped us in some ways. I knew that he had on occasion worried about my personal safety. But now I was no longer the metropolitan homicide detective waiting for the midnight callout to a Hollywood murder. No more six o'clock news interviews with the L.A. press reporters who wanted to be assured that "an arrest is imminent." Those glory days were behind me now. I liked retirement. I liked my new work as a P.I. I liked the fairness of it all. It had been twenty-four years for the prosecution and almost fourteen years for the defense. A recent major victory for an innocent client was still reverberating through my psyche. My life was moving toward a natural homeostatic balance. And now, seeing my face reflected in the airplane window at 35,000 feet against a cloudscape so thick you were sure you could walk on it, that balance was upset and all I could feel was a hole where the past had been. I kept picturing my father over the years: the young 1920s crime reporter, the bohemian artist, the silky-voiced radio announcer, the meticulous surgeon, the austere but dominating psychiatrist, and finally the entrepreneurial marketing genius who had moved to Asia in 1950, abandoning all of us.

  My father and I couldn't have been more different. My job as a street detective in the Hollywood Homicide Division had taught me how to size up and read a person's character. I was good at it, and most of the time I was right about people. I made lots of mistakes about other things in life, but rarely was I wrong about people. My judgment was intuitive and accurate, partly developed, partly inherent.