The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (33 page)

Or, in the words of Sir Charles Russell, “Mrs Maybrick is to suffer imprisonment on the assumption of Mr Matthews the Home Secretary that she has committed an offence, for which she was never tried by the constitutional authority, and of which she has never been adjudged guilty.”

In spite of repeated attempts to free her, the wretched woman was not released until she had served fifteen years’ imprisonment—a punishment roughly equivalent to six penalties for attempted murder.

(Elizabeth Short, 1947)

Russell Miller

In January 1947, the brutal murder of Elizabeth Short shocked America. Her naked body was found on a piece of waste land in Los Angeles. It had been cut completely in half, and was bruised and beaten. Elizabeth Short was an aspiring actress of twenty-two who’d drifted for several years, taking odd jobs and conducting brief affairs with a string of men. She’d also reportedly had liaisons with women, including (so it was said) Marilyn Monroe. The Black Dahlia tag derived from Elizabeth Short’s black hair and clothing. When the story of the murder broke, several men and women confessed to the crime, but the police failed to validate anyone’s story. The case, notoriously, attracted several false confessions. Although one woman has written a book naming her own father as the killer, the Los Angeles Police Department continue to list the case as unsolved. The mystery of the Black Dahlia seems still to weave a sort of magic for modern murder-fanciers, and the case has its own thriving website on the internet. This study of how the killing continues to fascinate was first posted there by American writer Russell Miller (b. 1969). In 1947, Miller’s family owned the ranch where the alleged Roswell Incident UFO crash took place. His published work includes articles on racist cartoons, the JFK assassination and man-made UFOs.

On a typically mild winter evening right before New Year 1996, I stood at the corner of 39th and Norton near the Crenshaw area of Los Angeles. Clean-looking, middle-class houses stood shoulder to shoulder in a nondescript neighbourhood within eyeshot of the famous
HOLLYWOOD
sign to the north. Despite the fact that Watts and Compton weren’t too far away to the south-east, it seemed pleasant enough. Not a bad neighbourhood if you
have
to live in LA.

Standing at the corner of 39th and Norton is not unlike standing next to the ground zero monument at Trinity Site in my home state of New Mexico; the area looks so normal, you’d never guess what kind of insane goings-on went down on the same spot fifty years previously.

On 15 January 1947, in what was then a lot to the south-west of the intersection, the body of a young woman was discovered. Her nude, mutilated body was severed in half at the waist. Both halves of her body had been drained of blood.

By the following morning, the LAPD learned that she was twenty-two year-old Elizabeth Short, who had come to Hollywood from Massachusetts to be a star. As a joking nod to the Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake movie
The
Blue
Dahlia
, and because her hair and clothes were always jet black, she was known to some acquaintances in LA as “The Black Dahlia”.

Despite the fact that the murder rocked the city like an 8.0 earthquake, and despite the fact that for months afterwards the police and Press battled bitterly to solve the crime, not a shred of evidence surfaced which pointed to anyone who might have been involved with the murder. It remains officially unsolved to this day.

I knew all of that. Years before, I read Kenneth Anger’s
Hollywood
Babylon
II
and came away with the same story as everyone else: Elizabeth Short was a floozy prostitute who slept with every guy she met, finally angering one who butchered her in a fit of jealous rage. It was a case of unbelievable overkill, and all the more intriguing that the perpetrator of something so unspeakably horrible escaped so easily.

But then two years ago I picked up, by chance, a book by famed writer John Gilmore called
Severed
—
The
True
Story
of
the
Black
Dahlia
Murder
(the book is being reissued by Amok Books in 1998). In it, Gilmore—who researched the Dahlia case on and off for some thirty years—dropped several bombs, probably the biggest being that the LAPD had, years after the murder, found the man responsible for killing the Black Dahlia.

For weeks after I finished the book, I was, for lack of a better word, haunted. The Black Dahlia wouldn’t leave my head. And after a time it became a quest to figure out why.

I did my homework before I went back to LA in July of 1996 to do a Black Dahlia tour. From a Black Dahlia Website I found a bunch of articles, and discovered that there were thousands of others out there like me. More obsessed individuals making pilgrimages to 39th and Norton. Strange stuff—here we are, fifty years later, and the Black Dahlia refuses to fade away. In the summer of 1991 a crackpot, fifty-four-year-old woman in Southern California went to the police claiming it was her father who killed Elizabeth Short in 1947, and buried the evidence at her former home. A few years ago, James Ellroy’s “Novel based upon Hollywood’s most notorious murder case”,
The
Black
Dahlia
, was published, even though it had barely anything to do with the case. Freaks with Black Dahlia tattoos walk the streets of America. Goatee-sporting, cappucino-sipping, wanna-be-arty gothic-types sit in coffee houses rambling on about Elizabeth Short, practically deifying the girl; in 1947, Elizabeth Short was just a confused chick who ran with a bad crowd. By 1997, she was a legend, an archetype of sorts—the most spectacular unsolved murder America has to offer.

My tour began where all Black Dahlia tours
must
begin—39th and Norton. Even though the intersection is ground zero for Black Dahlia buffs, there’s nothing there in 1997 that recalls the Los Angeles of 1947. LA is the Rome of the western US; its layers deep in history. The excitement and glamour of Golden-Age Hollywood is now buried under tons of garbage and endless miles of clogged freeways. Likewise, the infamous lot where Elizabeth Short achieved worldwide fame is buried under dozens of houses.

I tried to picture the intersection on 15 January 1947. Vacant lot overgrown with weeds, punctuated by the nude body of a girl cut in half. The crime scene itself is impossible to ignore; for a single image which starkly and brutally sums up the state of affairs between men and women on this planet, look no further than any picture of Elizabeth Short at 39th and Norton. Her murder is a sobering reminder that no matter how far feminists think they’ve come, you can’t fight tens of thousands of years of evolution. The brutal men of the world have always dominated the Elizabeth Shorts of the world.

I aimed my rental east down Martin Luther King and headed towards 31st and Trinity, where the house in which Elizabeth Short was murdered
used
to be.

Why do people who have even an accidental brush with the Black Dahlia’s story wind up as fanatics? Different people offer different reasons. For some, the story is a link to an older, seedier,
noir
-like Los Angeles. To others, Elizabeth Short is the prime symbol for any number of social ills, ranging from the irresponsible Press to the irresponsible police.

Part of my homework was talking to John Gilmore, who, as it happened, also lived in New Mexico.

For Gilmore, who has written books about Manson (
The
Garbage
People
), Tucson’s Charles Schmid (
Cold Blooded
), and James Dean (the newly released
Live Fast
,
Die Young
—
Remembering the Short Life of James Dean
), it’s the body itself which laid the groundwork for endless generations of Black Dahlia zealots. “It’s like this tremendous, bizarre magnet,” he told me. “It gets to our unconsciousness, and it gets to us on a real subliminal level . . . So much hidden agenda went into that murder that it was inherent at the
scene
of the murder.”

I wasn’t going to argue with that—Gilmore is, after all, the world’s number one Black Dahlia expert. As a child, he actually met Elizabeth Short—albeit briefly—at his grandmother’s boarding house. In the early sixties, he hooked up with actor Tom Neal, who wanted to make a movie about the Black Dahlia. Neal assigned Gilmore the task of speaking with potential financiers, one of whom was a “weird, weird guy” in Barstow who wanted to touch Gilmore’s hands, because they had touched the field where the body had lain. (A great bit on all of that appears in Gilmore’s latest book,
Laid
Bare
, which chronicles his relationships with, among many others, James Dean, Lenny Bruce, Janis Joplin, and Ed Wood, Jr).

A bit of a monkeywrench was thrown into the plan when Neal went to jail after murdering his wife in Palm Springs. Although it was no longer his intention to make it into a movie, Gilmore continued to research the Black Dahlia case for years after that (“I suppose over the years I’ve had all the major Black Dahlia crackpots . . .”), eventually hooking up with retired LAPD detective Finis Brown, who, having personally worked on the Dahlia case, was a treasure trove of information.

And Gilmore was right; that body does hit you—and
hard
—on an unconscious level. But it wasn’t the main reason I was having difficulty ridding my brain of the Black Dahlia. There was more to it than that.

Take the second biggest bomb dropped in his book. Gilmore had access to the previously sealed Elizabeth Short autopsy report, which revealed that because her genitals were not fully developed, Elizabeth Short was incapable of having sex. (A startling release generated for the
Severed
book focused exclusively on this point: “
STRANGE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER VICTIM WAS NOT A BEAUTIFUL FEMME FATALE
,
BUT WAS A MAN
”. Well no, she wasn’t
really
a man, but she wasn’t a whore either.)

Discovering that Elizabeth Short not only wasn’t a prostitute, but
couldn’t
have been a prostitute, throws the story under an entirely different light. So much for the countless Call-Girl-of-the-Night stories. So much for James Ellroy’s fantasy view to the facts.

If a beautiful girl who apparently bounced from guy to guy
wasn’t
sleeping with any of them, then what was going on? “. . . She knew that she couldn’t ever possibly become a full-blown woman in any size, shape, or form,” Gilmore told me between sips of coffee. “And she decided she was going to do the role anyway. Because she did. It was just a series of games, a series of encounters with people that would lead to the romance-type situation, and then she would disappear. I think she overlapped relationships, so she always had a place to go, and a place to be transported to.”

So the Black Dahlia herself had a secret so dark that she had to keep it from the male acquaintances in her life. Probably the female ones, too. Actually, plenty of folks think it’s Short’s past—not her murder—which is at the heart of the case. The autopsy certainly brought an insane new twist to a story already replete with insane twists, but there was still something else that I couldn’t put my finger on.

I turned left onto San Pedro and then left again a couple of blocks later onto 31st. It’s amazing how quickly the landscape changes in LA. Only minutes away from the more-or-less cozy atmosphere at 39th and Norton, the scenery becomes aesthetically destitute at 31st and Trinity. A few badasses in tanktops glared at me from a garage.

Unlike the Angelinos at 39th and Norton who are tired of countless morbid tourists snapping pictures of their houses, the blokes at 31st and Trinity are oblivious to their area’s role in the Black Dahlia case. Although the house in question was torn down over thirty-five years ago, it was here, as Gilmore discovered through his research, that Elizabeth Short was actually murdered.

And so it’s here that Jack Anderson Wilson, aka Arnold Smith, enters the picture.

The biggest question mark in the Black Dahlia murder has always been, obviously, the identity of the murderer himself. Many, like Sherry Mazingo (USC’s associate professor of journalism), would argue that the case’s endless momentum and
noir
mood was built around the fact that Elizabeth Short’s murderer was never found. As Mazingo once wrongfully observed: “. . . Should the (Black Dahlia) murder have been solved, it would take some of the dramatic sheen off this beautifully dramatic story.”

I couldn’t disagree more. You do have to understand. Elizabeth Short’s story to understand the Black Dahlia phenomenon, but it is Smith’s place in the action which I find most engrossing. And, if anything, the drama only intensifies with Smith’s arrival. Uncovering him gives the Black Dahlia story a beginning, a middle, and for the first time, an ending. It’s a stunning ending, too. The kind that would be criticized by a Lit. professor as an easy way out.

Elizabeth Short is
Severed
’s dark woman of the night, but Smith—a thin alcoholic who stood around six foot four, walked with a limp, and had a five-page rap sheet and a dozen different aliases—is the mysterious shadow who lurks throughout the book, whom police could never quite pinpoint.