Marcus Parks
Appearances
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, and America is the pussy. Yeah.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
So in 1947, when the Black Dahlia murder occurred, there were still plenty of LAPD officers on the take at every level. Unfortunately for Elizabeth Short, it just so happened that the two homicide detectives in charge of her case, Fennis Brown and Harry the Hat Hansen, were just about as corrupt as they come.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Around the offices of the Los Angeles Held Express, Finnis and Hanson were called the Ego Stoops, which was a portmanteau, meaning they were a combination of egotistical, arrogant, and stupid.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Lieutenant Harry Hanson was described by author Pew Eatwell as a tall, balding redhead with a basset hound face, Mickey Mouse ears, and sleepy eyes.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Along with his pinstripe suit and loud ties, Hanson also never took off his fedora for anything, which is why they called him the Hat.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, medicinal hat.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
It's my medicinal hat.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
It's like when some people get half a face, you know, we give it after they get blown off in the war. He got a hat. I got a scalp that I have to screw up.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
A nearly 20-year veteran of the LAPD by the time of the Black Dahlia murder, Hansen was known as a brute who beat suspects mercilessly and would pressure newspaper photographers to edit photos of suspects' faces to remove the blood produced by his enhanced interrogation techniques.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Hansen was particularly proud of what he called his Third Street Bridge Confessions, where he'd dangle suspects over the Third Street Bridge if they didn't cooperate. Hansen was also known to call a suspect's bluff, often dropping them to the concrete below if they didn't tell him what he wanted to hear.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
I had dish soap on my hands from earlier today. So he's like a serial killer. Ha ha!
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
More mass murderer kind of. We don't know how many people Harry the Hat killed or if he killed anybody in particular.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
He just said he dropped people off the fucking bridge all the time.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
It wasn't that tall of a bridge.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
They never do that. Harry Hansen's partner, though, Finnis Brown, was Hansen's polar opposite in both looks and demeanor. While Hansen was a smooth talker, Finnis Brown was clumsy and strange. A squat and swarthy cop with heavy jowls and rumpled suits.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
While Harry Hansen got the relatively flattering nickname of The Hat, Finnis Brown, the other guy in charge of investigating Elizabeth Short's murder, was called F.A. or Fat Ass.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, in addition to being corrupt, Finnis Brown also moonlit as a bookie and a bag man for the mob, collecting money from shakedowns and protection rackets throughout Los Angeles. Finnis's brother, Thaddeus, however, was known as a cop's cop.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Thaddeus was a beloved figure in the department who didn't have much regard for the Constitution either due to his obsessive hatred of communists and his obsessive love for cops.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
I mean, he's like, he's like lawful evil.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
He's the one that is- He's a quieter, murdering cowboy.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
corrupt and then double teaming and everybody's on two separate teams they're on their own team and somebody else's team it doesn't begin to muddy the waters very significantly you get paid twice yeah and that's what makes uh black dahlia so interesting and so confusing is because every person in this story is running a game within a game within a game because it is so corrupt and there is so much crime going on here from the top to the bottom
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, who did their mother love more, though? That's what I want to know. Thaddeus.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
No, the mother always loves the fuck up more. Always. I guess they're forced to. They're forced to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thaddeus Brown, he was such a looming figure in Los Angeles that on the radio version of Dragnet, Joe Friday referenced Tad Brown as his boss. And Orson Welles based the character of Hank Quinlan in the film noir classic Touch of Evil off Tad Brown as well.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
No, it's not. And so with Finnis Brown working directly with organized crime and Tad Brown working solely for the interests of the cops, they made an extremely powerful pair that were difficult to stand against if you thought they might not be doing their job correctly.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Or at least Finnis was tossed on it. Thaddeus was doing his own thing.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
They were the cops that show up.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
They were told to go take care of this body we put there. Don't know.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
We don't know. It might have just been their turn in the rotation and it just so happened. That's the thing. The room for coincidence in this case is astronomical. There really is so much room for coincidence.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, it was much smaller. LA at this point was half the size that it is now. It's half the population that it is now.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, and it's just a bunch of vacant lots.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
At least in places like Leimert Park.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, to the press, it seemed like the cops really weren't trying all that hard when it came to investigating the Black Dahlia murder. Because as we established last episode, all the most important aspects of the case have been uncovered by journalists like Jimmy Richardson and Aggie Underwood.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Jimmy's people had discovered all the weird shit that had gone down in San Diego just before Elizabeth's death, for example. and Aggie Underwood, who put together a clear timeline of Elizabeth's last days during her interview with Red Manly. The cops hadn't done any of this shit.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Therefore, rumors that the Black Dahlia investigation was being shut down and covered up were being spread as early as late January 1947, about a week or two after the murders.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
The play, you know, the musical. Yes.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, it does. Welcome to the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with the in-too-deep Henry Zebrowski.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Also, when a murder is this elaborate, it's probably easier to solve. And so I imagine that when you go two weeks without no fucking clues or no answers, people are definitely asking questions.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Which is most murder, right?
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
In one way or another, like you're associated with them or a lot of times it is someone you know personally that kills you.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Jimmy Richardson in particular began to believe that the investigation was being purposefully stalled. And it was his theory that the LAPD wanted it gone because of its possible connections to organized crime, and the Los Angeles political elite.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Furthermore, the LAPD were trying their best to distance themselves from even putting work into the investigation, going so far as to say that the murder had probably taken place outside the LA city limits and was therefore none of their business.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
The chief homicide detective in the city, Captain Jack Donahoe, was likewise drawing criticism because of his ridiculous public statements, like his assertion that Elizabeth Short was cut in half solely so the body could be carried more easily, despite the fact that Elizabeth Short only weighed 123 pounds.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Gonna cut her tits off.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Oh, my God. That's a pulley system. That's a...
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But the problem with that, though, is the clean surgical nature of the cut. Is that if they're just cutting her in half solely to transport her body, why did they take so much care in cutting the body? Because of the guy they brought her to. But that doesn't make sense because why are they bringing her to a guy to cut her in half so they can transport her somewhere else?
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
They're transporting her to transport her? Guy went to her.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
And the newly traumatized Ed Larson, who just saw the Elizabeth Short crime scene photos for the first time just before walking in here.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now I'm here. This is just one of the days of this. So you think it's an evil doctor? No, I think he's... Dr. Giggles. It wouldn't be so straight if it was Dr. Giggles. Dr. Serious.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Was the spine cut cleanly? Yes, it was.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Like the spine was cut very cleanly and very deliberately. Specifically cut very nicely. But yeah, and that's the thing is that we're going to really try really hard in this episode. There's so many different lines of questioning. We really have to stay like fucking laser focused. All right. And the investigative lines that Donahoe pushed were even more ludicrous. The Hawaiian guy, Donahoe?
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, you just sent them to me. I asked you to. Yes, you asked me.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Well, as Donna Ho, he had become a big proponent of the homicidal lesbian angle. This was a line of investigation that was sure to go nowhere except to the harassment of LA's LGBT community, which was at the time a target of the LAPD anyway.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, you may ask why the head of homicide would be so invested in derailing the murder investigation of one young woman, especially when leaving the case unsolved made his department look that much more incompetent. Because people were getting killed every fucking day in Los Angeles. It was a bloodbath out here.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
I never send them to people without permission or direct request.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Fucking innocent citizens were getting caught in the crossfire of all these fucking gang wars. Women were getting killed. Hell, we talked about two murders last week that occurred just after Elizabeth Short that also went unsolved. Oh, yeah, because we all say, what, the werewolf murders, which we haven't even really factored into any of this.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
The answer is that Captain Jack Donahoe was one of the men who arranged bribes for the organized crime syndicate that had Los Angeles in a stranglehold in the late 1940s. And the more that investigators looked into Elizabeth Short's death, the more it led them to organized crime figures.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
I was like, while we're doing the show, I might as well see it. And I did not finish my lunch. It was very upsetting. Hey, no, Eddie, you got through most of it. I definitely had a couple more bites. But I officially, I think I have a good theory before we get started on who it was. World's worst magician. Yeah. He cut the box in half and then he's just like, oh no.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, organized crime was such a fact of life in Los Angeles during the time of the Black Dahlia murder that mobsters were hired as consultants on noir movies for accuracy. And in some cases, they even got producer credits.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
That's kind of amazing. I mean, it still happens, especially with military movies. Yeah.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah. Mobster Johnny Rosselli, for example, produced a prison break movie called Cannon City. And this was in addition to Johnny being responsible for getting Marilyn Monroe some of her first roles, as well as Johnny being involved in CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. And he was also quite possibly the man in the sewer at Dilley Plaza when JFK was killed.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Hey, hey, hey, hey, that's just where I was.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Well, that is true. Johnny Rosselli, he was responsible for getting Marilyn Monroe some of her first roles. He was in the business. And he was... heavily involved in a CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. In other words, people like Johnny Rosselli, the ones involved in both organized crime and the movies, they had connections to the government on both a local and national level.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
And they had the power to pull strings if they wanted something covered up.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, but she's out-of-pocket because they were filling her full of drugs.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, it really is. And the things about these conspiracies is that I think it really does start with one guy telling another guy, take care of it. And then another guy tells another guy, why don't you take care of it?
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, bombings, shootings, and murder of all stripes were committed by the mob with near impunity during this time period, giving Los Angeles the reputation as the gang capital of the nation, in addition to being the center of the world's entertainment industry.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Such was the prominence of mob violence in Los Angeles that coverage of the Black Dahlia murder shared headlines with a gang war that ultimately culminated in the assassination of infamous gangster Bugsy Siegel just five months after Elizabeth Short's body was found. Have you ever heard about how Bugsy Siegel was fucking assassinated?
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
God, he was sitting in his house and some guy from outside shot him in the head with such accuracy that the bullet ricocheted off his nose and blew Bugsy Siegel's eye across the room.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Out West, yeah. Well, Los Angeles was one of America's newest cities, and a lot of mafiosi came to California to escape either the law or previous associations with crime families, mainly on the East Coast. Now, the other big crime cities, New York and Chicago, thought of the L.A. mob as a bunch of country bumpkins. And that's if they thought of them at all. And you're not wrong.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Or because they'd gotten into trouble. A lot of them came out because they were too hot-headed to be out there. And they'd beaten the shit out of the wrong guy. And it's like, okay, you've got to go to fucking California now.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Mickey Cohen was a guy they sent. I was like, okay, yeah, now you got to deal with Mickey Cohen. And then he ended up becoming one of the biggest gangsters in the city's history.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah. Yeah. But what Los Angeles had that no one else did was Hollywood, with all the new opportunities that the movie business brought. See, the motion picture industry was essentially contained within a 20 square mile grid with supply chains that could be manipulated and squeezed at any point. And its workforce was almost fully controlled by unions.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
At one point, gangster Bugsy Siegel had complete control of the Screen Extras Union, of all things.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Also, it's a good way to go make sure people are on set taking a look at the director and having informants getting back to you and what's going on on set. And it's also a good way to get hot, new, desperate ladies. Also, you think about this because when you said... It's actually served a lot of great... It really is a very good podcast. L.A. had Hollywood. New York had Broadway.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
And that's why L.A. and New York are better than Chicago because Chicago just got the Cubs. It just got Cubs and heart disease.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
You also out here had a lot of rich and famous people with, shall we say, predilections. And we talked about predilections. And those predilections could be exploited and used for extortion should a movie star or producer or director need some help getting rid of a dirty little secret.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
And I've had them all over the world!
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
And when it comes to dirty little secrets, Elizabeth Short may have gotten herself involved with a shady, publicity-phobic Hollywood businessman heavily involved with both organized crime and the LAPD, a man named Mark Hansen. And she just may have gotten killed as a result.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
The man from Batavia. Hansen's great-grandfather. Yeah.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Everyone was always talking about the Olsen twins when we were growing up. I was thinking about the Hanson sisters.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, if you'll remember, when the LAPD received the package from the man who had claimed to have murdered Elizabeth Short, included with that package was an address book with the name Mark Hanson printed on the front. I believe whoever sent the package is the only person who knows who killed Elizabeth Short.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Hansen claimed that he barely knew Elizabeth and that she'd stolen this book from him to use herself.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
And that was the extent of their relationship. It is, however, almost positive that Elizabeth Short and Mark Hansen were involved in an affair shortly before the Black Dahlia murder.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yes. When I say affair, I use that term loosely. Like, there was definitely some sort of relationship between the two of them, although it's very murky as to what that relationship really was.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, in many ways, Los Angeles is the promise of the American West. It's a place of reinvention. The farthest you can run before you hit ocean. A place where there's ample opportunity to become somebody else entirely if that's what you so choose. But within that rebirth lies great vulnerability. And L.A.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
I'm sure it was completely innocent.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Hanson, his story is quite interesting. Yeah. Mark Hanson was involved in motion pictures, but his business was on the distribution side. He owned movie theaters, and he'd gotten his start in Minneapolis, where he opened a chain of theaters that were successful enough to necessitate a move to Hollywood.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Once in Los Angeles, Hanson opened a nightclub called the Florentine Gardens, where you could find an aging Errol Flynn or a young Marilyn Monroe hanging out if you went on the right night. But the big secret at Florentine Gardens was that it was also a mob casino.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
And a big part of the reason why Hansen and his mob associates were able to operate Florentine Gardens so successfully was because they worked hand-in-hand with the LAPD.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yep. And there was also actual mobsters involved. Oh, very much so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jimmy the Little Giant Utley was his mob contact. The Little Giant. But remember, you know, these guys, like, no matter how, like, there are these huge syndicates that are operating out of Los Angeles that involve Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen. But then there are also these small ones that work together.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
directly with the police. Because Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel fucking hated the cops. They hated anyone who worked with the cops.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
They came from New York.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, they were New York guys. But these guys, guys like Mark Hansen and the mob associates he had, they worked directly with the police. Because if you'll remember, I mentioned earlier that one of the homicide detectives in charge of the Black Dahlia murder, Finnis Brown, was a bag man for an organized crime figure. What the organized crime figure Finnis Brown worked for was Mark Hansen.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
And one has to ask how much of a coincidence it is that while Finnis Brown was investigating Elizabeth Short's murder, a package should arrive from the killer that has an address book with his boss's name on it and the investigation stalls soon after. I think that's quite possible. Yeah. But also, why would he be incriminating himself? He's not incriminating.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
has always been host to parasites constantly on the search for a cocoon to suck dry and throw away without a second thought.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
He's saying by receiving the package that he's eliminating himself as a suspect.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But it's Mark Hansen. Mark Hansen didn't send the package. No. Mark Hansen had no idea that the package was being sent. All of this was happening outside of Mark Hansen's purview. And that's the problem here. Now, as far as how Mark Hansen came to be involved with Elizabeth Short, we really are looking at a very Laura Palmer-esque plot straight out of David Lynch's creative universe.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But it's like filled with serial rapists. Yeah. And all the songs are about trains.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
See, in the 1940s, Mark Hansen had a sort of casting couch situation going on in which he would recruit young girls for his nightclubs. And these girls were found and recruited by a man named Nils Thor Granlund. And they called him Granny for short, NTG. Nils Thor had actually pioneered the New York City nightclub scene of the 1920s. Hearing about the Charleston, I invented the Louisville.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Tell us how you really feel. Yeah.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
So his name is Thor and they called him Granny? Yeah.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Because his last name is Granland.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah. Well, he was the one who kind of pioneered the concept of the girl in the G-string wearing high heels. Thank you.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Thank you, Granny. Well, he was a very particular flavor of piece of shit. He would travel to rodeo shows across the country where he would find jailbait that he could lure to L.A. for Mark Hansen. But from the girls that worked for him, Mark Hansen would choose a sort of harem for his own home, which was located just behind the Florentine Gardens Club.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
That's right, though. It's pretty close, but that's kind of why I like it. One might even say that much of the entertainment industry has been built on this very principle since day one.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Not all the girls who stayed at his home, however, worked for Mark Hansen. According to well-placed sources, one of the girls that came in and out of Hansen's home who fit that bill, didn't work for him, was Elizabeth Short. So he was married.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yep. Now, Elizabeth had been introduced to Mark Hansen's world through a friend named Marjorie Graham. Graham, a heavyset girl who was also from Massachusetts, like Elizabeth, she had a weakness for the sauce and often found herself... Nara Nara? Yeah.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Elizabeth and Marjorie had been staying together at the Hawthorne Hotel in Los Angeles during the summer of 1946. This was shortly after Elizabeth's relationship with Major Matt Gordon had ended. Remember him? He was the guy that supposedly had died over India and that she had supposedly married him and she supposedly had a kid with him that supposedly died and all that.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
No matter what happened, this is around the time that that whole thing ended. And Elizabeth and Marjorie were running out of money. But they could, according to Marjorie, stay for free at the home of a club owner named Mark Hansen. Although it's unclear if Marjorie told Elizabeth what was expected of her if she did choose to stay at Hansen's home.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Come on, baby, do this for me.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah. But since Los Angeles is known to attract desperate people... Or at least people who are apt to become more desperate the longer they're here. It's also attracted criminals of every kind, from gangsters to rapists to murderers. And that was never more true of Los Angeles than it was during the time of the Black Dahlia murder.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, while Mark Hansen did have sex with the young woman who stayed at his home, Elizabeth was said to be different from all the other girls. According to a friend of Elizabeth's who lived there, Mark tried having sex with Elizabeth on many occasions, but she was always able to get out of it, which only made him want her more.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yes. Well, this yearning was only made stronger by the steady stream of dates Elizabeth would go on while staying at Mark's house. Now, Elizabeth was well aware of Hansen's jealousy, so she would always make sure her dates picked her up and dropped her off on a corner a block away so Hansen would never see her with another man.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But in early December 1946, about a month and a half before Elizabeth was found dead, Elizabeth and Mark Hansen had some sort of disagreement and he kicked her out of the house. Briefly, Elizabeth lived in an apartment where each room had eight young women crammed together in bunk beds, costing just a dollar a night.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But since Elizabeth didn't even have a dollar, she skipped out on paying the landlady and disappeared. A few days later, she reappeared in the Aztec theater in San Diego, where she was found by the aforementioned Dorothy French. Soon after, you had the mysterious couple knocking on the French's door looking for Elizabeth. You had the ride back to L.A.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
with Red Manley, the disappearance that night, and her body being found six days later.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
There are so many fucking characters. Yes.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
You'd be on, like, a three- or five-picture deal, and you'd live there, and as soon as your deal was up or they fired you, you would lose your home and your clothes. Just very Three Amigos. It was real. Yeah.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, Mark Hansen was able to evade investigation for a long time after his former address book showed up at the Los Angeles examiner offices, along with Elizabeth Short's other belongings. But that was because he was in cahoots with one of the homicide detectives. Hansen, however, almost got a dose of street justice in July of 1949. a year and a half after Elizabeth's murder.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
That month, a dancer at his club named Lola Titus shot him in the back after an argument, accusing him of being, quote, a goddamn cop lover.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Hansen, however, survived the gunshot to the back. And when he arrived at the hospital, the first thing he said was, Get me Brown! Get me Brown! He did not, however, mean Finnis Brown. He wanted Finnis's brother, Thaddeus Brown, the cop's cop. And Thaddeus Brown quickly rushed to Hansen's side, I suppose to make sure that Lola Titus got what was coming to her.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
No one really knows what went on between Thaddeus Brown and... Mark Hanson during that conversation. All they know is he said, get me Brown and Thaddeus Brown fucking jumped.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
So was Hanson dying and he just wanted to get Thaddeus some information?
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
I don't know. I think he wants, I think what he wanted to do is bring Thaddeus and say, Get the bitch who did this to me. Get her. It was Lola Titus. Get her. Make sure she goes down.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yes, you're making things purposefully confusing for people.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But Mark Hansen's close relationship with the police wasn't the only reason why she shot him. Allegedly, Lola Titus and Elizabeth Short were friends, and Lola had accused Hansen of being involved in Elizabeth Short's murder.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
What did the guy say who killed Elizabeth Short after he killed her? What? Abracadabra. Marcus liked it.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Did you think it was crocus pocus?
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
There we go. Unfortunately, though, Lola was not the most stable witness. After she was arrested and taken to the Hall of Justice, the officer in charge of taking her to the courtroom opened the door to the room where she was being held to find her nude and spread-eagled lying on the floor. Want to check me for a gun?
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
The officer ordered her to get dressed, which she did.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
The whole, everything.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Quite fragrant. It's quite fragrant. You're welcome. I wasn't sure what it was, but once you said pussy, I knew exactly what it was.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But after her picture was taken by court photographers, she got nude again, remarking, my God, it's hot in here.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Hey, son, your new name is air conditioner.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But when it came time to finally make arguments, Lola's attorney said that according to Lola, Mark Hansen's game was to scoop up young girls and make a lot of promises about opening doors in Hollywood. If only they did a little something for him first.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
I like my suspect a lot. I really do.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Bingo the okay.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
And off that statement, amongst many others, Lola Titus was convicted of attempted murder and sent to the Patton State Hospital for the insane.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Nope. She died there 10 years later at the age of 30.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
I don't just fucking shock their brains and give them crazy experimental drugs. I don't have any checks and balances on these.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
She was probably lobotomized.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, specifically a state hospital where she could be shut the fuck up and never listened to ever again. Because she's legally crazy. Yep. And with Lola put away, even considering her unstable nature, a possible window into Mark Hansen and Elizabeth Short's relationship was closed. Although Lola's perspective was far from the last vantage point, as we'll soon see.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, there have been many people who have made connections between Elizabeth Short's death and organized crime, chief among them, author Donald Wolf. In his theory, Elizabeth Short was a high-end call girl who worked at a mob-owned brothel and had become pregnant by the owner of the Los Angeles Times, a man who also happened to be from one of the most powerful families in Los Angeles.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
This, some people say, is why the Los Angeles Times had relatively scant coverage of on the Black Dahlia murder, and had begrudgingly covered it only after seeing how well the story was doing in the other city papers. This story feels too much like the perfect arc to me.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
It's a very pulp fiction novel type way to tie all the story up.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
She was like, what I'm catching here is she was like the hottest chick in town, and she was being sold to the most powerful men in town, and she probably slept with a lot of the most powerful men in town. And so a lot of people could have been connected to her when she turned up dead. Everyone was like, let's sweep this under the rug, whether it had something to do with it or not.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, she liked guys and nice things.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
I think it's how Jimmy Richardson put it. Lost. Like, just not really know. She's in her early 20s. She doesn't know what the fuck she wants. All she knows is that she doesn't want the life that has been laid out for her, you know, as society demanded it. She's trying to find something, and she just keeps coming up with goose eggs every time.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But as far as why Elizabeth was killed, it's theorized that she may have refused to get an abortion after being impregnated by such a high-powered client, which is why she was hiding out in San Diego and became disturbed any time someone came looking for her.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
And why she had her body hollowed out.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yes. She was killed. According to the theory, she was finally captured when she returned to Los Angeles and was killed brutally and publicly so as to send a message to any other girls who may have been thinking of stepping out of line. But while this theory has the right idea, I think it comes to the wrong conclusions.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
I do believe that Elizabeth Short's death was directly related to organized crime. Yes. But... I think it had a lot more to do with her associating with dangerous people than it did with her participating in risky activities like sex work in a mob-owned brothel. I think that the organized crime figure responsible for Elizabeth Short's death was Mark Hansen.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
And he had a lot of help from the LAPD to make sure the Black Dahlia murder was never solved. But notice I said responsible for her death. I do not believe that Mark Hansen was the one who actually killed Elizabeth Short.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah. Well, as one mob lawyer put it, in places like Chicago, the gangsters paid off the police, but the gangsters committed the crimes. In Los Angeles, the police were the gangsters. And since the police were so corrupt, Los Angeles was an attractive place for organized crime figures who were either on the run for the law or looking for new opportunities.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah. And I think that all of this happened within a span of months. I think Elizabeth Short's life fell apart very, very quickly. And I think she found herself involved in some really bad shit very fast, like faster than she even knew what was happening.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, it's important to note that for almost two years, there was very little to no movement on the Black Dahlia murder investigation. A lot of people have been questioned and a lot of theories have been put forth and more clues had even been found. Elizabeth Short's purse and shoes, for example, had been found in a trash can outside of a cafe four miles from Leimert Park.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But none of these clues had led anywhere meaningful because Finnis and Hansen had made sure, especially after Mark Hansen's name came into play, that the investigation had stalled.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
See, now, if they found the purse and stuff four miles away in a trash can outside of a diner, someone had to have been tipped off. Like, because that shit's just getting picked up and thrown in the dump. No one's searching every trash can within four miles of her body.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, it just happened. They just happened upon it. I mean, that's another just happened upon it. Fucking story here. Reporters later uncovered that Finnis was in debt to Hansen for $5,000, 70 grand in today's money. And it's speculated that Mark Hansen used Finnis Brown to shut down any lines of investigation that led towards him in exchange for forgiveness on his debt.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, that by itself is not proof that he killed Elizabeth Short or that he was responsible for the death of Elizabeth Short. But... A person was just about to be discovered that was going to lead towards Mark Hansen.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
The one man in the LAPD who just couldn't let it go, the man who tried to fight the tide of corruption and cover-ups, was the aforementioned Dr. Joseph Paul DeRiver, which I mispronounced in the last episode as DeRiver. DeRiver!
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, as we said last week, DeRiver was in charge of screening all the confessing Sams who either arrived at the police station claiming they'd killed Elizabeth Short or were sending weird shit through the mail. After a year and a half of sifting through the muck, however, DeRiver finally decided to get proactive. I got a copy of his out-of-print book, The Sexual Criminal. It is very... It's dated.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
This moral ambivalence trickled down into the very fabric of this city and gave all sorts of people tacit permission to be horrible. Because when you mix a virtually untouchable group of powerful individuals with a never-ending stream of desperate, naive people, shit's going to get real ugly and real weird real fast.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah. But it is very, very interesting. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Dr. Deriver is a fucking hero.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
He behaved like a monster much of the time.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yes. See, Deriver had a theory that the killer both craved attention and was most likely a true crime fan. So he planted an article about the Black Dahlia murder in True Detective magazine to try and lure the killer out from hiding.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
The registration, yeah.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Well, the article described the Black Dahlia killer as a sadomasochistic type with at least half a dozen victims already. A cunning, studious, scientific type. who would be compelled to boast about the details of the crime. And sure enough, soon after the article was published, Deriver received a letter from Miami Beach, signed with the obviously fake name of Jack Sand.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Jack Sand wrote that he'd read the article about the Black Dahlia murder, and he believed that a friend of his was the killer. Intrigued, Deriver and the mysterious Jack Sand began exchanging letters. And Jack eventually said that his friend was a guy named Jeff. Jeff!
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
That's like three feet deep.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Well, allegedly, this guy said that he'd spent six weeks in San Francisco with Jeff just after the Black Dahlia murder. Jeff, Jackson wrote, had bragged that he'd gone to the same bars as Elizabeth Short, but had fled Los Angeles before the cops could question him.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Jeff also liked to draw. Yes, he did.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Well, in one letter, Jack included a sketch that he claimed had been drawn by Jeff.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, while the contents of the letters themselves were interesting, the sketch really was the sort of wow moment for Dr. Dereva. Wow! It featured a fair amount of crosshatching that was very similar to some of the extensive mutilation inflicted on Elizabeth Short's body, namely the crisscross lacerations that have been found on her pubic bone and right hip.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Jack Sand also wrote a letter that speculated on the motive behind the killing, saying that Elizabeth may have threatened exposure of something, an affair not considered proper, as he put it.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Where are you from?
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Jack Sand also said that the killer may have experienced a new sensation by accident during the murder, thus leading to the Black Dahlia's complete annihilation. The letter also showed many of the same spelling, grammar, and syntax peculiarities as the letter sent to Jimmy Richardson at the examiner.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
And Jack Sand also referred to the victim as simply Elizabeth, rather than Elizabeth Short or the Black Dahlia, inferring that this person may have known or felt Not like he had known Elizabeth Short intimately.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Right in those moments before. That's where L.A. was fun. I think like days before it was fun. It was fun.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
No, I can hear him saying the game is afoot over and over again.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
He had that perfect little mustache. He had that perfect mustache for it. Now, when he was calling her Elizabeth, was she known as Elizabeth? Because you called her Beth earlier. She was Beth to her friends. Okay.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah. Now, since Finnis Brown and Harry the Hat Hansen had all but given up on the case, the aforementioned gangster squad was tapped to pick up where they left off. Because not everyone at the LAPD, nor everyone in the mayor's office, was on the take. There were some people who wanted this fucking thing solved.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
No, it's a razor's edge. That's the thing about Los Angeles. It's a town where you can walk this razor's edge of danger and you never know when you're going to fucking fall off.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
So Deriver told the gangster squad all about this Jack Sands character in Miami Beach, which prompted the squad to send one of their officers to Florida undercover to track Sands down.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Before long, they discovered that Jack Sands was a pseudonym for a career criminal named Leslie Dwayne Dillon. 27 at the time, Dillon was described as tall, lanky, and sloop-shouldered, with a habit of dyeing his hair different colors. Originally from Oklahoma, Dillon had served less than a year in the Navy during World War II before he was dishonorably discharged for stealing watches.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Remember that. A few years later, Dylan was arrested for pimping in San Francisco. Then, after marrying and fathering a child, he became, much like Elizabeth Short, just another drifter in post-World War II America. He was free. Using the aliases of Jack Diamond, Jack Maxim, and Jack San, Dylan wandered between California, Florida, and Oklahoma...
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
with his family in tow, working alternately as a bellhop, a rum runner, a bootlegger, a pimp, a professional gambler, a taxi driver, and, for a short period of time, a dance instructor.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Out of all the professions that he had, the one that he returned to again and again was bellhop. He just liked it. And pimp.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Lots of cash. Both jobs.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
I tell you what I like. It's the little hat. I mean, bellhop and pimp, that goes hand in hand. You're dropping off a guy, you say like, hey, looking for some fun tonight? Exactly.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
And then you think the bellhop's getting the lady? No, the bellhop's the one who's telling you, like, hey, I got some girls. You looking for some fun tonight here in San Francisco?
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Well, in this case, it was. Yes. Wow.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, the head bellhop is the pimp. Now, Leslie Dillon... You wanna fuck, Greg?
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
And so, on today's episode, we're going to be talking about the disreputable, disgusting men who thrived in the underbelly of Los Angeles during the time of the Black Dahlia murder. Along the way, we'll also explain how these men gained enough power to possibly cover up their involvement in one of the most high-profile murders in America's history.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Well, it's clear. Yeah, it was part of the turndown service.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Well, concerning 1940s sex parties. There is a whole other line of investigation here involving the real Los Angeles sex parties. I think Mark Hansen was just having fun. He was just taking a girl here and taking a girl there. There's a whole other line of questioning that involves a man named Hodel, who was actually having horrific orgies at his house all the time.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But George Hodel doesn't really fit into this world.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, Leslie Dillon soon caught on that someone was following him. So he turned himself over to the FBI, suspiciously telling the authorities that the cops were after him for, quote, some offense in Los Angeles.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But since the gangster squad operated totally in secret to protect themselves and to honestly take a shit on the Constitution whenever they wanted. Dental dam. Yeah. The FBI had no idea who Dylan was or what he was talking about, so they told him to get lost. Now later, one of the gangster squad members said that they would have been indicted many times over for the shit they did back then.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, which meant that the guy who had traveled to Miami Beach to investigate Leslie Dylan had no problem breaking into his house without a warrant to search for clues. Amongst violently torn clothes and piles of books, magazines, and newspapers, the officers found numerous true crime articles cut out and saved. Stories about prison guards being killed in riots.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
A lot of stories about girls getting shot in the face.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But he's just into the occult.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
He's not into the occult. He's into true crime.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
He's into true crime. But back then, there weren't many books on it.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
If you wanted to read it again... The magazines were everywhere.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah. Back then, there were so many detectives. Like, they called them detective magazines.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah. They'd read anything about these people. The officers also found a treasure trove of short stories that Dylan had written involving situations that usually ended with a woman being raped and murdered. Finally, though, the cop came across the copy of True Detective magazine that featured the article that Dr. Joseph DeRiver had planted.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, while organized crime was certainly a problem, it operated hand-in-hand with the LAPD. And in the time period we're talking about here, the 1930s to the 1950s, it's been said that the LAPD had absolute disregard for both the Constitution and the law itself.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
On a picture of a telegram Red Manley had sent to Elizabeth Short, Dylan had signed the page with the name Jack Sand using a ballpoint pen, which appeared to be similar to the pen used to write the printed postcard in which the so-called Black Dahlia Avenger had said he's going to turn himself in.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, this may not seem like a big sticking point here, but in 1947, ballpoint pens were relatively new, rare, and expensive. They cost about $175 in today's money.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, none of this is, of course, concrete proof of murder, but it was enough for the undercover officer to call his superiors in L.A. to say, quote...
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Everything the cops do is illegal except they try to get this guy legally back. Why don't you just hit him over the head and fucking throw him in a train car?
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Well, that's kind of what Deriver said they did. But this is the other side of that story. Deriver contacted Dylan and asked him to meet so he could give him more information about this Jeff character.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Jeff. Jeff. That had supposedly killed Elizabeth Short. But while Dylan had been all too ready to help before, he was reluctant to return to California. I get sunburned. So, Deriver and Dylan agreed to meet in Las Vegas.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Where the gangster squad planned to set up wiretaps to record everything Dylan said. When they got there, though, Dylan was too nervous to talk and suggested they go to Palm Springs instead. Much nicer. It is. But during that drive, Dylan began to talk more about himself.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
He told the driver and the gangster squad member driving them that one of his many jobs had been as a mortuary assistant, where he'd learned the proper way to bleed a corpse.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
It's so crazy. Mum's the word from Florida to Vegas, but from Vegas to Palm Springs is an open book. I actually spent many years.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Dylan also spoke in the same soft, modulated voice that had been used when the alleged Black Dahlia killer had called Jimmy Richardson at the Los Angeles examiner offices. Now, once they got to a lodge in Palm Springs, the gangster squad wired up a cabin and listened in as Dylan and Deriver talked about his mysterious friend Jeff, the one who had supposedly killed Elizabeth Short.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Dylan told them that the perpetrator's full name was Jeff Connors. Yes, Connors. And soon after began to pontificate about Elizabeth Short's murder, starting with speculation on why her body had been cut in half. Just sort of thinking out loud.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Well, Dylan said that the killer might have wanted to physically see how far his penis went into the body of a woman when it was inserted into her vagina. Fascinating. Cutting. Yes.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
So curious. All right. So I'm going to have sex with her. You peek in the top.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Cutting her in half, Dylan opined, would enable the murderer to stick his penis inside the severed bottom half of Elizabeth Short's body and see it poke out the other end.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
No. This is a very long time ago.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
More details you'd like to know?
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Oh, your penis could poke her that long. You know what's interesting is when you can do this, you can also shake her hand.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
There it is. Well, as far as where the bisection took place, Dylan said she was probably cut in half in a bed, a bath, or on a floor. And the blood was probably drained by hanging the two halves in a shower. Jeff Connors, Dylan said, would have done all of this on the ground floor of a motel so we wouldn't have to lug the body down any stairs.
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Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, as Deriver listened to Dylan, he began to get a hunch. So he asked Dylan to strip naked. Now, listen, this might sound like a total non sequitur.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
It's just us. It's Popspring.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
I'll do too. Well, hesitatingly, Dylan did as he was asked, or so DeRiver says. I think it's more likely that a gangster squad member forced Dylan's pants down.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But either way, Deriver's hunch was correct. He had suspected that Dylan had a micropenis. And sure enough... Don't tell me why. I don't know how it was.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
And sure enough, when Dylan's dingle was exposed, Deriver, with disturbing accuracy, compared the size of Dylan's penis to one belonging to a boy of exactly eight years of age.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
His penis was larger than a seven-year-old's, boy.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
The small penis, Deriver hypothesized, was why there was a vertical cut in Elizabeth's pubic region just above her vagina. Yeah? The micropenis would not be long enough to reach the bisection. But if the killer did want to see how far his penis went in, he would have to mutilate the body further if his penis was particularly small. For the next time you do this app, what I recommend to you,
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
to use an orange. Well, just guessing. Deriver thought that it was possible that Elizabeth Short may have mocked or threatened to expose Dylan's micropenis to his friends. And he had reacted in the most brutal way possible.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Well, that's why I think his pants were probably pulled down because it didn't seem like Dylan was super pleased with his micropenis.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
There absolutely weren't.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
There really weren't. Now, that's not to say that law enforcement during this time period was a paragon of virtue across America, but the LAPD were especially renowned for their lawlessness and brutality.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
What do you think of that? Not pretty small, huh?
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah. Well, to bolster this theory, Deriver noticed that out of the many true crime articles Dylan kept at his home, many were stories in which the perpetrator had taken revenge on the victim for some slight, meaning that the Black Dahlia Avenger moniker may have held some element of truth. Additionally, Dylan knew far more about the exact details of the mutilation than what was made public.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
And here's where we're going to get into some of the really fucking horrible shit.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yes. Dylan knew that Elizabeth Short's pubic hair had been cut off and shoved in her rectum, while the skin on her left thigh featuring her rose tattoo had been carved out and shoved in her vagina. There was also the little matter of one of the final indignations bestowed upon Elizabeth's corpse, the carving of a single letter on her skin.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
The letter was D. And it was quite possible that the D was a sort of signature carved by who else but Leslie D. Dylan. Not Jeff. Actually, no, not Jeff.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, as we know from the last episode, some of the details had already been leaked to certain individuals connected to the LAPD. So it's not impossible to think that Leslie Dillon could have heard about them from someone. It is, however, extremely unlikely.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
They struck deals with anyone who could line their pockets, from lawyers to snitches to bail bondsmen, and they created a grift in which the criminals, the cops, and the lawyers were all on the same side trying to squeeze as much money as they could out of the city of Los Angeles.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Leslie Dillon changed many of his answers after the fact. Yes. Now, after five days of conversation that only made Dylan look more guilty, conversations where he said he liked girls with big mouths. You get it? Jesus. He was trying to get caught. Yeah. He also just straight up said, like, yeah, I drug and rape girls all the time. It's my thing. It's my hobby. Yeah.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
We should have just killed him for fun then.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
He was finally driven to San Francisco to track down the mysterious Jeff Connors. Jeff could be behind any corner. But after driving around San Francisco for a full week to no avail. No Jeff, nothing. No Jeff, no Jeff nowhere. Visiting dozens of hotels and haunts where this Jeff Connors might have been.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
No, not you. Not you.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
I'm Jeff. Let me see your license. Not with a G. Idiot. Well, Dylan was taken back to Los Angeles. There, he began to realize he had basically been kidnapped by Dr. Deriver and the gangster squad. Oh, yeah. And he had no way to free himself.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
So Dylan threw a postcard out of his hotel window in L.A. that said he was being Jeff.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
The postcard said that he was being held in room 219 by Dr. J. Paul DeRiver in connection with the Black Dahlia murder. And he was requesting legal counsel.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Interestingly, especially for a man of such little means as Leslie Dillon, the postcard was addressed to a high-powered attorney, a man who had represented Errol Flynn on statutory rape charges, a man who had represented Robert Mitchum for marijuana possession, and most importantly, had represented mobsters Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen on a number of criminal charges.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
And how long do you think this lasted? Like 15 years? No. About 2024. I mean, there's always going to be police corruption, but obviously.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
The incredible coincidence here, though, was that the person who found the postcard was none other than one of Aggie Underwood's reporters for the Herald Express. You can't write this in a movie.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But it literally happens. Yeah. They called their contact at the gangster squad and asked them what was going on here with this Leslie Dillon guy. That forced the LAPD to either arrest Leslie or set him free. And they chose arrest.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now when Dylan was taken downtown and his belongings were searched for the first time, cops found that Dylan had packed a number of harrowing yet ridiculous items for his trip out west to speak with the police.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Well, along with 700 phenobarbital pills. I just like to be awake.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Oh, nice.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, it's what you use to roofie women.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Oh, really?
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah. Oh, I thought it was to roofie yourself.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
That's why Tootsie sleeps so much.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, phenobarbital is bad. If you're found with a lot of phenobarbital pills, it's a bad person.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Really? Yeah. I'm blown away right now.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But they also could have epilepsy.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
At its worst, it was a decades long thing that lasted from the 20s up until around the 50s. Okay. Where there was no law. Yeah. None.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
He does not have epilepsy.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
All right, get the nap.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Dylan had also brought seven razor blades and a dog leash with a massive leather strap that had appeared as if it had been thoroughly scrubbed and scraped.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
It's for the dog. I mean, I'm going with the dog theory now. You got a dog leash, phenobarbital, like...
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
The scrap also showed signs of strain, as if a heavy weight had been suspended from it. If you'll remember, the way Elizabeth Short's arms had been placed made it look as if she'd been hung from something for a very long period of time.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
And he also said that's the best way to drain the blood out of the body is hanging it in the shower.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
You can use a belt for lots of stuff.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
It's my choking belt. Yeah. All right, this is just so I can relax. Now, when it was announced that a suspect had been arrested in conjunction with the Black Dahlia murder almost two years after it had occurred, the press started looking into Leslie Dillon, and they found that his aunt lived on Crenshaw Boulevard. This location was less than four miles from Le Merritt Park.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Not super close, but not super far away. But... It was only two blocks away from the cafe where Elizabeth Short's purse and shoes had been found in the trash can.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
At another one of Dylan's Los Angeles addresses, his landlady said that he'd driven a black Ford sedan when he'd lived there, which was the same type of car seen by eyewitnesses on the night that Elizabeth Short's body was dumped in the vacant lot. But when police began interrogating Leslie Dillon directly, he denied ever knowing or even meeting Elizabeth Short.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Lots of, you know, lots of good movies and lots of bad movies made about it.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But what the LAPD and the press did discover was that Leslie Dillon had been involved in organized crime when he lived in Los Angeles.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yes. Well, all this only got worse in 1933 when a man with an actual Hitler mustache named Frank Shaw was elected mayor.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
I forgot my pants once. I didn't know. It's so hard. You're just rushing because of the deadlines.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, Dylan was decidedly small time. He worked as a pimp and a bootlegger. But the kicker was that he had done so in the same territory covered by associates of Elizabeth Short. Namely, he worked in the same territory as Mark Hansen, whose address book was still a big question mark for a lot of people when it came to the murder.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Now, Dylan had been arrested but not charged, and time was running out before they had to let him go. Deriver was convinced that Dylan was the killer, but not just because of what Dylan had told him. See, Dylan was still saying that his friend Jeff Connors was the killer. Jeff did it. And Jeff was the one who had told him all the mutilation details. He loves details.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But at one of the hotels where Dylan had worked in San Francisco, the driver had showed the manager a picture of Leslie Dylan. The manager said, sure, that guy worked here. I know him. But the manager did not call him Leslie Dylan. Rather, the manager identified the man in the picture as Jeff Connors.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Fuck! Oh my God, Jeff did do it! It's been me!
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Obviously, Leslie was using Jeff as his alter ego.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
I cannot believe how good I am. Leslie is just one of the man's name. Yeah, for once. Jeff, the most masculine of names.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But since there was no hard evidence linking Dylan to the murder just yet, and since there was little evidence linking him directly to Elizabeth Short, the LAPD was forced to let him go free.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But concerning the LAPD... There's so much evidence.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
all circumstantial and it's all just shit he said and like they did take the strap and they sent it off to the lab and they're like nothing here it's been scrubbed clean you know like it's all circumstantial it's all just like weird shit there are no pictures of Leslie Dillon with Elizabeth Short
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, but concerning the LAPD, there was a confluence of events around this time that left a bad taste in a lot of mouths. See, as it turned out, Jeff Connors did actually exist. He was found in the town of Gilroy at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. As it turned out, Jeff Connors was a 40-year-old busboy, pulp fiction writer, and failed actor turned cosmetic salesman.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
I'm Jeff. But he was questioned at length while Dillon walked free. The LAPD police chief had also made a total reversal on Dylan. Where he's just days prior to Dylan's release, it had been publicly said that they had incontrovertible evidence that Dylan was in LA at the time of the murder. The chief now said that Dylan had actually been in San Francisco at the time.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
No, because there's no brim. The lip. It's a chaplain mustache at this point. But in 1933, though, Hitler was a world-renowned figure. So you do know that you have the same mustache as a... It's kind of like now having the same haircut as Elon Musk. Okay.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
He's been talking about that for years. I was hoping he didn't do it.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
But I'm Jeff, so... But cops also stopped making the point that Dylan knew secret facts about the murder, the mutilation details. So the media was left once again with suspicions that something in the Black Dahlia case was being covered up by the cops.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Dylan, however, began talking himself to the press, and he had a very different story to tell about the treatment he'd received at the hands of Dr. Joseph Paul DeRiver and the LAPD, much of which could very well be true. Dylan claimed that DeRiver lured him in with the promise of a job as a doctor's secretary.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, no, Deriver did all kinds of horrible, weird, illegal shit.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, but then Dylan said that Deriver handcuffed him and kept him in custody for weeks. Dylan said he'd never claimed that his friend Jeff Connors was the murderer, nor that he'd ever even known who the killer actually was. But that also doesn't explain why the cops went and talked to Jeff Connors. Yeah, especially if he's all the way in fucking Gilroy. Yeah.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Dylan also said, and this part I believe, that the LAPD handcuffed him to a radiator with the heat turned all the way up during their interrogation. Driver, meanwhile, played good cop, saying that if Dylan confessed, they'd treat him well, like a sick boy instead of a common criminal.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
It was also uncovered that Dr. Deriver may or may not have been completely upfront about his background.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
The Los Angeles Daily News discovered that Deriver's real name was Joseph Israel. So a city councilman called for a public hearing to investigate Deriver's credentials. Now, this is often pointed to as something that discredits everything Deriver ever said or did, notwithstanding all the unconstitutional and illegal shit that he did. But the hearing did not discuss the Black Dahlia case at all.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
And Deriver was allowed to keep his job at the end of the hearing. That sucks.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Thank you. But even though the arrest of Leslie Dillon had been a fiasco that resulted in a $100,000 false arrest lawsuit that was later dropped, some interesting information did come to light as a result. Through Leslie Dillon, the cops did find and question Jeff Connors. And while it was obvious that Leslie Dillon was using the name Jeff Connors as an alter ego, Connors was not a dead end.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
See, Connors himself was full of shit. He told police that he'd hung out with Elizabeth Short the night before she'd been murdered. Oh, yeah. He was kind of... He's also a busboy.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
They never tell the truth.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, man. What are you talking about? You worked in the restaurant industry for a while. You know busboys.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Well, Connors was known, he was a Walter Mitty type of character. You know, he would tell people that he'd acted in movies when he never did. And he was just known to make up stories to make himself more interesting.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah. But Jeff Connors was like sort of the fun part of that. He was like, he was the fun guy that, you know, made up like fun stories. And Leslie Dillon was the guy, the very dark side of that, who says horrible things like, supposing you did cut a woman in half that you could maybe stick your penis inside of her and see it stick out of the bottom.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Well, Frank Shaw was essentially bought and paid for by organized crime. And his first action in office was to appoint his brother, Sailor Joe Shaw, as a secretary whose sole purpose was to organize and collect bribes. By making an under-the-table payment to Sailor Joe, a police officer or even a firefighter could easily— Yari, give me how you want to be up there.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
I really enjoy your lies.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Your lies are fun. Your lies are gross. But in checking out Connors' alibi, they came across his ex-wife who had some very interesting actual connections to the case. Jeff's ex-wife knew nightclub owner Mark Hansen, and she had lived with Mark Hansen after her divorce from Jeff.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Leslie Dillon had also showed up to Jeff's ex-wife's house after he was arrested and set free, shouting through a closed door that she better not say shit to the police about anything she knew or else.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
So, another connection between Leslie Dillon and Mark Hansen, however faint, was made, and the gangster squad was slowly connecting the dots as far as what may have really happened to Elizabeth Short.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
The entire scenario, however, began to come into sharp focus when the gangster squad discovered reports of a motel room in Los Angeles that had been found covered in blood and feces just after Elizabeth Short's murder. And it's with that disgusting little room that we'll return next week for Black Dahlia Part 3.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
You need helping hands. I just put together a bench. I need another pair of hands.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Well, there's three parts for a reason. Yes.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
It is very murky.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah. It's a massive story and there are a million different theories.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
I also feel like, you know, as someone who likes like older movies, I feel like there's like things taken from this story that's in like several different movies. Oh, yeah, dude. Just like little pieces here and there and stuff. It's very interesting.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, very much so. And also, I really want to thank our team on this one who's done a fantastic job. I want to thank Shaw. I want to thank Joel. I want to thank Carolina for her help in editing the script on these last couple episodes. It's really been like a nice team LPN effort here for the Black Dahlia series.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, indeed. And also, don't forget to go to LastPodcastOnTheLeft.com to check out where we're going to be playing a show near you. We're going to be coming to all kinds of fucking places this coming year.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
The show's hot right now, by the way, guys. That New York show was fucking nuts. It was incredible.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
No, no, no. We're fucking, we're rolling on, we're firing on all fucking cylinders with this one. We've got Atlanta, Georgia on January 11th. Dallas, Texas, February 22nd. Nashville, Tennessee, March 14th. Detroit, Michigan, April 18th. Cannot fucking wait to go to the record stores in Detroit and Toronto, Ontario on May 3rd. Also can't wait to check out the record stores there.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Just fantastic record store towns, both of them.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
I can't swim. Through him, a police officer or even a firefighter could easily buy a promotion. And Joe is even known to sell the answers to local civil service exams to anyone who wanted them. As one person put it, everything in City Hall from the furniture to the toilet paper was up for sale just so long as you paid cash.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Hail, um, who's cool today? Count Basie. Yeah! Yeah, that's good.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
What Shaw was in office, he was able to flip the tables on organized crime by forcing them to pay him protection. And as long as you stayed up to date on your payments, you never had to worry about a raid on your brothels or your casinos by the biggest gang in town. That was the LAPD.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
A little something to make him... Hitler.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Shaw's entire operation, however, came crashing down when he got involved with the attempted murder of a private investigator in 1938. The investigator was working with a concerned private citizen to expose the LAPD as essentially a legalized mafia.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
The entire operation had been orchestrated by the head of the LAPD intelligence squad. And interestingly, that officer was convicted for his crime partly due to testimony from Jack Parsons. That's, wow, holy fucking shit, another connection. Yeah, that's actually, this case is actually how Jack Parsons made his name. That's how Jack Parsons got famous was by being an expert witness in this case.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah, because when I was reading about it, I was like, I know this case from somewhere. Yeah, it was Jack Parsons. And after the intelligence officer was convicted, Mayor Frank Shaw resigned along with the LAPD chief, James Tugun Davis. Woo! And dozens of LAPD officers, quote-unquote, retired to Mexico soon after to escape further scrutiny.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Soon after, another 200 cops were demoted or fired, and the administration that followed Mayor Shaw's corrupt regime appointed an elite group of cops dedicated to removing mobsters and the corrupt officials from within. That group was called the Gangster Squad.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Oh yeah, but these guys weren't the runners. They weren't first responders. They were like third and fourth responders.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
They were call me when you get them responses.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
These are the new good guys. These are handpicked recruits. This is like Gotham City. This is Commissioner Gordon combing the ranks of the fucking police department to find the few guys who aren't paying the Oswald Cobblepot.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
They had that horrible movie that came out like 10 years ago called Gangster Squad. Oh, is there like Jeremy Renner in it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He plays like the flute in it or something? Yeah, and I think Sean Penn plays Mickey Cohen or something like that. Yeah. But then they had to...
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
halt the release of it because they had this scene where it was in the preview where they came out and they just shot everyone in a movie theater and then the batman thing happened yeah and so they're like okay i guess this movie's coming out in winter instead of summer and they had to go like reshoot a bunch of shit jesus no it's just them handing out gum to a bunch of people in the theater being like don't say we didn't give him anything you see enjoy some sugar-free gum i won't hurt your teeth see
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
No, Mickey Cohen hated the gangster squad. He called them more like the stupidity squad. The mobsters aren't super clever when it comes to names.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Especially not them.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
Yeah. Working deep undercover, the seven-man gangster squad operated solely out of two unmarked sedans. They had no offices, and they began making a name for themselves as crack investigators who were just as unconcerned with the Constitution as the men they were hunting.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad
As such, the gangster squad was sometimes given special assignments outside of their purview, which is how they came to be involved in the investigation into the Black Dahlia murder.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Exactly half. Well, that exclamation drew dozens of people from cops to reporters to simple bystanders, all of whom got a good long look at the sort of gore that a lot of these men had hoped they'd left behind in Europe and the South Pacific just a few years prior. Now we'll get into more details as our story progresses, but what those people saw that morning is as follows.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
And we've got the tightly packed Ed Larson with us today.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
A smorgasbord of such horror that it's hard to decide where to start. But for the sake of the story, let's start with the first thing the police noticed. The bisection of the body. The naked corpse belonging to a young white woman with reddish light brown hair had been neatly cut in half about midway up her belly. What you'd call the true waist just under her ribs.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
It's a science. It takes a village, a whole team. The torso had been laid out on the ground about a foot above the legs, but it had been deliberately placed to the left of the corpse's bottom half with a line on the outside of the right leg ran up to the line on the left side of her torso. In other words, the two sections were deliberately placed, crime scene, as a work of art.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
The less artistically-minded of eyewitnesses, however, described the placement as though two hunks of human flesh had been laid down like two sides of beef. As for the victim's arms, they were extended, imposed above her head like a discarded marionette, as one of the first reporters to write about the corpse put it, and her wrists, ankles, and neck were marked with deep rope burns.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Her right breast was also missing, but just the right— as were many of her organs. The liver, however, was intact and hung slack from the bottom of the bisected torso. But perhaps most gruesome of all, her face had been beaten and mutilated, her lips and cheeks carved out to give her the appearance of a wide, gaping grin.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, it was immediately obvious that this person had been killed elsewhere, not just because of the time it would take to mutilate someone like this out in the open without someone seeing, but because there was very little blood on the grass. In fact, the body had been completely drained of blood in addition to being washed or soaked in water.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Well, let's fucking jump right into this shit because I cannot wait. I love this story so much. And it's going to be a fucking journey, ladies and gentlemen.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
The grass was still damp under the body, meaning someone had placed it between midnight and dawn. The dew was still there, and the deliberate posing meant that the killer had done all of this for maximum effect. This was not a crime of passion. This was deliberate.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But when you say empty field, I want to make sure you know it's like two feet from the sidewalk. Yeah. Like it's just there's a road, a sidewalk and two feet off of that sidewalk is the body.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Near the body was a sack used for cement containing watery bloodstains. This was almost certainly the sack used to carry the body. It appeared, however, as if it had been carried by more than one person. Police also found a spot of watery blood on the nearby sidewalk, and a bloody footprint from a man's shoe was near the victim's head. These, however, were the only instances of blood at the scene.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, the only witnesses to any part of the body disposal were a neighbor and who else but the local paper boy.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But both the paperboy and the neighbor saw a 1936 or 1937 black Ford sedan stop at the side of the body. The neighbor said he saw it at 6.30 a.m., but the paperboy said he saw it two hours earlier at 4 a.m., meaning whoever dropped the body may have returned after the initial dump for some reason.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
The only other hard clue at the scene, which turned out to be nothing at all, was a men's wristwatch found in the weeds near the body. It was considered to be a military-style watch, which, along with the victim's choice in men, would inform certain lines of investigation later on. But within an hour, Jane Doe No.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
1, as she was still known at that time, was placed in an aluminum coffin and taken via hearse to the L.A. City morgue. Reportedly, when the coroner was told that the body had been cut in half, he requested that he be allowed to have lunch before he began the autopsy.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
The photos of the Black Dahlia crime scene are pretty hard to find on the internet these days. But as Henry said, I have a book called Exquisite Corpse, Surrealism, and the Black Dahlia Murder that shows the whole thing in great detail. And my God, is it horrific.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
That might be our fault, though.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just a butthole. Yeah. But nevertheless, in the next day's edition of the Los Angeles Examiner Herald, photos of the corpse were published on the front page before the victim was even identified. While they did edit the photos, cleaning up the blood, bruises, and knife cuts to the face, they did show a fair amount of mutilation.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
And even though someone airbrushed a blanket over the body, it was still a hell of a front page for 1947. But the news in Los Angeles in 1947 was one hell of a business.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
No, Ouija's photographs, that's what I was going to bring up. Ouija was a crime scene photographer in New York City, and his... Pictures are fucking graphic, extraordinarily graphic, and they were printed in the newspaper, like, every day. You had the worst gore you could possibly fucking imagine just printed in the newspaper.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Almost. See, before the cops even showed up at the crime scene that day, two reporters and a photographer had arrived on the scene first. And this was a regular occurrence with crime scenes in Los Angeles. And one of those reporters was journalistic legend Agnes Aggie Underwood, who plays a big part in the story of the Black Dahlia.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah, she's the prototypical tough broad. Born in San Francisco in 1902, but she'd spent her youth in the foster care system. A relative in Los Angeles finally took her in when she was a teenager, but only so Aggie could be exploited as a possible child movie star.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah, this is an extraordinarily Lynchian tale.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, Aggie settled down for a bit as a housewife with her husband, Harry, but decided one day to get a job at the Los Angeles Record working the switchboard just so she could buy a pair of silk stockings after her husband said they couldn't afford them.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
getting a job before long aggie underwood had worked her way from switchboard operator to reporter and by january of 1947 aggie underwood was the best crime reporter on the herald express staff at the age of 44 she was short and sturdy with a square jaw and a big grin prompting her editor to say quote she should have been a man And in fact, Aggie did do her best to fit into the boys club.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
She refused to cover gossip or pop culture and dressed, quote, shabby and slapdash like her male coworkers, wearing no makeup and the lowest heels she could get away with.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
I want you to know I'm one of the guys.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Well, Underwood was actually quite proud of being a true crime reporter, later saying that she was no sissy in her reaction to blood and guts. When a corpse was discovered, Aggie would usually be the first on the scene, pushing her way past beat cops trying to control their gag reflex so she could grab an ID off the body.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Eventually, this moxie would land her in the city editor's chair, making her one of the first women in the U.S. to have the job. During her 17-year reign, she kept a sawed-off bat on her desk to swing at overzealous Hollywood press agents.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Well, if Aggie's newsroom was too quiet, she'd walk out of her office with a starting pistol, fire it into the air and yell, quote, Don't let this paper die on us today. Moxie. But back when Aggie was the best crime reporter at the Herald Express, she was the paper's best bulldog when it came to getting the story.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
And the Black Dahlia would be the biggest story of her life and the biggest story her paper ever covered.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Well, we're going to get into that in just a second. So on January 15th, 1947, the viciously mutilated corpse of a beautiful young woman named Elizabeth Short was found in a vacant lot in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Within weeks, she would become known as the Black Dahlia, and her murder would remain one of the most infamous unsolved cases in American history.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Aggie wanted the story no matter where the story led, and then once the story was over, it's time for the next fucking story. Hell yeah.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, while Aggie Underwood and the rest of the reporters who'd been on the scene that morning tried to figure out what this story was all about, the body of Jane Doe No. 1 was lying on a slab in the L.A. City Morgue, about to be examined by the chief autopsy surgeon for Los Angeles County, Dr. Frederick Newbar.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Well, he was discovering even more disturbing details about the body. Although, again, we're not going to go into every single detail just yet. So no fucking emails about how we didn't talk about how fucking dilated her anus was or whatever your favorite gruesome tidbit might be. And it was super dilated.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, after determining the age, 15 to 20, he thought, he put the cause of death as most likely coming from one of the many blows to the head she'd suffered. They were hard enough to kill, but not hard enough to break the skull. Next, the coroner moved on to the bisection.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
A very sharp, long-bladed butcher's knife had been used to sever the body in half, cutting through the intestine, kidneys, and the soft disc between her vertebrae. Flesh had also been cut from her left thigh to remove a tattoo of a rose.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
The tattoo detail was held back from the press at the time, but the Herald Express did allude to the wound in their coverage by saying a piece of flesh had been gouged out of the leg. This was most likely done after the victim was already dead.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But when the coroner moved on to the face, he concluded that the victim had been given her satanic smile, as Aggie Underwood put it, while she was still alive. Then, as a final indignation, the killer had filled the victim's stomach with feces.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah, I know what you're talking about. Yeah. No, I thought you're not talking like logs.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
That gum you like is coming back in style. Now, this is a little out of character for us because we don't often cover unsolved cases. But what if I told you that Elizabeth Short's murder was, in fact, all but solved and has been for almost 75 years now?
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
I'm a people pleaser. No matter what, Ed, you're always going to be a simple man.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, once it was all said and done, and again, more details later, the coroner concluded that whoever had mutilated this corpse had some knowledge in surgery because the body was so cleanly bisected. This, however, ran contrary to how haphazard the facial mutilation had been, leading many to speculate for years on end that there had to be at least two people involved in this murder.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But it was very... Well, that's the thing. What people didn't know for decades was that the coroner had ruled that the facial mutilation, an act of sadism, had been done before death, while the bisection, a cold act of disposal and display, had taken place after. Definitely.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Well, actually, no, it wasn't. It was cut off and shoved inside her...
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
They were like ragged.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
She was definitely alive. Yeah. When that was happening. Well, the reason why people didn't know the fact about, you know, before and after was because the full autopsy report has never been made public. We only have excerpts. And the LAPD's official line is that the full report on possibly the one of the most, I'd say, top three most famous murders in Los Angeles history is forever lost.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But there are some who say that the report was lost on purpose because there may have been information contained therein that the LAPD didn't want the public to know.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Secondhand.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
No, there's only, as far as we know, there are only four people in this world who ever read the full report. You know, the guy who wrote it, the head of homicide, the chief homicide detective at the time, and the two homicide detectives who were assigned to the Elizabeth Short case.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, the public's hunger for information about this case was partially fueled by the fact that in 1947, there were five major newspapers in Los Angeles. And that's just major newspapers. That doesn't even count the small ones. This is in a city of almost two million, half the population of Los Angeles today.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
And every single one of these papers were competing with each other for the latest scope concerning the murder. Incredibly, the sheer number of reporters on the streets every day scouring the city for any bit of information about any given case, they actually outnumbered the investigative force of the LAPD. And some reporters were actually far better at homicide investigations than the cops were.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, you might say that's just because the reporters didn't have to follow the rules that the cops did. But let's just say that the LAPD wasn't too fond of rules in 1947 either. This was decades before the Miranda ruling. You know Miranda rights? That was 1966.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Well, because there were no Miranda rights, that meant that cops routinely held people for questioning without informing them of their rights for days on end. But because there were so many reporters, there was a constant tradeoff of information between the police and the press. But that came with a price.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
What if I told you?
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
A reporter often had to weigh the cost of reporting a story that might make the LAPD look bad because negative press for the LAPD could cut off the information spigot from the cops.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
that for very good reason the most likely suspect was swept under the rug and has stayed there despite a mountain of evidence pointing towards his guilt i would say uh like and subscribe please well over the course of this series we're definitely going to be getting deep into the who amongst the garden of who's but who really isn't the big question here i mean for some people it is for me i mean that's the whole reason we're doing it but
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But if you have a big story about the LAPD being a bunch of bastards, that can sell a lot of newspapers as well. It can.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But such was their collaboration that some reporters were even given badges by the L.A. County Sheriff to gain restricted access to crime scenes. They could also use these badges to help themselves out when they ran afoul of the law. Like, say, if a rummy reporter had a few too many one night and got stopped on Sunset Boulevard, you just flash the badge and you're good to go.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
The first reports from Aggie Underwood at the Herald Express described the killing as the act of a werewolf fiend. Those are the words she used. And for many days afterward, the Black Dahlia murder was referred to as a werewolf attack. I mean, of all of the murders to call a werewolf attack. Yeah, I mean, not literally, of course.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
They weren't saying there was a werewolf at Luce in Los Angeles, but the mutilation certainly played a number on the imaginations of the local Angeleno. Seems more vampire to me because there was no blood. You know what? It could be more. It could be sort of a vampire werewolf combination.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But the story also absolutely fascinated Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Examiner edition that featured the airbrushed photos of the crime scene with the headline, Fiend Tortures Kills Girl. That sold more editions than the one announcing Pearl Harbor.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But before long, police would identify the young woman found in the vacant lot from her fingerprints, which had been wired to the FBI using an early version of the fax machine called a sound photo.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Within hours, the FBI linked the fingerprints to an arrest made on a girl who'd been busted for underage drinking four years earlier with a bunch of military officers at a restaurant in Santa Barbara. The LAPD was sent a mugshot of a beautiful young girl with raven black hair. A stunner, as the papers put it, who had originally hailed from the Boston suburb of Medford, Massachusetts.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Which is where Jingle Bells was written, was in Medford, Massachusetts.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah, they were of age.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
They might have also been arrested for, what do you call it, contributing to the delinquency? That's what the crime is?
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah. Well, her name was Elizabeth Short. Now, reporters began finding out details about Elizabeth Shore little by little as they fanned their way out from the information they could glean from her arrest in Santa Barbara. Back in 1943, she'd been working as a clerk at Camp Cook in Lompoc, California, and had once won the base's Cutie of the Week contest.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Well, Elizabeth Short's boss at Camp Cook said that she had a childlike charm and beauty, but she was shy. But as far as she'd known, Elizabeth never smoked and rarely drank. All she knew is that Elizabeth had disappeared in 1943 to parts unknown after a rumored sexual assault.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, Elizabeth's father, Cleo Short, was also from Medford, Massachusetts, but lived just two miles from where Elizabeth's body was discovered in 1947. Reportedly, he reacted coldly to the news of his daughter's death and was mostly uncooperative.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah, her father was a piece of shit. Well, he'd actually moved to Los Angeles on his own in 1945, but hadn't seen nor spoken to Elizabeth since she'd started working at Camp Cook four years prior to her death. He'd been an absent father in her childhood, and while they had tried to reconnect in California, he'd cut ties with her because he didn't approve of her lifestyle.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Back in Boston, we'd call her a whore! Yeah.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
The big question is why Elizabeth Short was murdered. And more importantly, how many people were involved before, during, and after? To try and answer that question, we're going to spend the next three episodes taking a tour through 1940s Los Angeles.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Most cruelly, though, was what a reporter from the Los Angeles Examiner did to secure details about Elizabeth Short's life. See, while the Herald Express had Aggie Underwood, the Examiner's city editor was a man named Jimmy Richardson, a recovering alcoholic in his 50s who was said to be, quote, the last of the terrible men.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Well, Richardson was a newsman without fear. He once waged a one-man war against gangster Bugsy Siegel in the 30s. But Jimmy Richardson was also a man without conscience who would do anything to get a story.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
He had one of his crime reporters call up Phoebe Mae Short, Elizabeth's mother, and tell her that he was a reporter covering a beauty contest that her daughter had won, and he just needed a little more background on the bathing beauties.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Got this phone call. Got this phone call from a reporter like, hi, this is Jim Phelps from the Los Angeles Examiner. Guess what? Your daughter's won a beauty contest. It's a beauty contest.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
After the reporter gobbled up details about Elizabeth Short, happily relayed by her mother, he was ordered by Jimmy Richardson, listening on another line, to pull out the rug and tell Phoebe May that actually her daughter had been murdered and left next to the sidewalk in a vacant lot. Comment? Let's see what happens when we take the puppy away.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, what the examiner reporters had learned was that Elizabeth was a free spirit of sorts, the third daughter of five born to a single mother. Elizabeth was also a high school dropout, dropped out her sophomore year. Friends from Medford later described Elizabeth as a fashionable girl who was destined for a more glamorous world than the Boston suburb could offer.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
In other words, she was the type of girl who moved to California. But they also described her as a bit manic depressive. Using the parlance of the times, they said she'd be gay one minute and blue the next.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
You should have been a man. The people, the papers, the movie industry, the mob, and of course, the biggest gang of them all, the LAPD.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah, and everyone knew that I needed to get out of Texas. To the point where they were almost rude about it.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
He did.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, Elizabeth certainly wasn't going to stay in Medford, but she also didn't have a good idea of where else to go. In her short 22 years, Elizabeth had lived in Miami, Chicago, Long Beach, Los Angeles, and a handful of other cities, with her most recent address being in San Diego.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
And so after discovering where she'd most recently lived, Richardson told his crime reporter to drop everything and head to San Diego to dig up whatever he could find. But with what little information the press already had, they were painting a very negative picture of Elizabeth Short. Her's was the fate of yet another pretty girl drawn to the promise of fame and fortune in Hollywood.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
In essence, the press called her a morally bankrupt floozy who'd slept her way across Southern California. Endless reports about her supposed sexual escapades soaked the papers. And before long, the desecrated innocent became, in the words of author Pew Eatwell, a temptress prowling the rain-soaked streets of an urban film noir.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Well, that's the thing is that she had, I mean, we talk about, you know, like modern people being born earlier. Like Elizabeth Short's really no different from like your average woman in 2024. Not at all. But for 1947, she was very unique. Like she was living an unconventional lifestyle that made people very uncomfortable. Yeah.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Love military men.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah. Now, this change from virgin to whore spoke to a social anxiety that was bothering Southern California in particular at this point in American history. Inspired by portrayals of strong women in film, girls were moving to L.A. to live a life of freedom. I mean, they wanted to live like men. They didn't want to resign themselves to the roles of domestic servants or mothers.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
We're also going to cover a myriad of theories concerning who killed Elizabeth Short. All of them have a degree of plausibility. But in the end, there really is, in my own personal opinion, only one suspect worthy of serious consideration.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
This, however, wasn't just a 1947 issue. The influx of young women began in the early 20th century. And by 1920, there were more women in Los Angeles than in any other city in the country. And a lot of those women had dreams of being movie stars.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yes. Author Edgar Rice Burroughs made the moral panic even worse with his 1922 novel The Girl from Hollywood, which was about two young women who moved to Hollywood but soon fell into drug addiction, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and death for one of them. Elizabeth Short was in short order painted as the real-life girl from Hollywood.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, by some accounts, Elizabeth Short was being referred to as the Black Dahlia as early as January 17th, two days after her murder. But it actually took several weeks before that little detail came to define her entire existence. Jimmy Richardson, the last of the terrible men, if you'll remember, said that he invented the name. I invented the name.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
While Aggie Underwood claims that she invented the name. I discovered the Black Dahlia. But in reality, the name Black Dahlia had been given to Elizabeth while she was still alive. Elizabeth had jet black hair and liked to wear it high. And when she lived in Long Beach, she was known to frequent a drugstore wearing a black two-piece lacy bathing suit.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
She naturally caught the attention of the local men who began calling her the Black Dahlia after, appropriately, a Raymond Chandler film noir that had been released the year before called The Blue Dahlia. She liked playing into it. Very much. She very much enjoyed attention from men.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But and I'm not judging on that or anything.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
That, however, begs the question as to why this man's name isn't right up there with some of the most famous murderers in history. Why his name hasn't become a byword for overkill. Because if you're not familiar with the Black Dahlia murder at all, it really is one of the absolute worst America has to offer. And that's saying something. I mean, we love killing people who come out West. Yeah.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But part of the reason why the name caught on in Los Angeles was that there had actually been several local murders that had been labeled with a flower. Murders that had been covered by Aggie Underwood herself. Which is probably the reason why she did probably cement the name. Yeah, she definitely, I think she almost certainly cemented the name. One of those was the White Carnation murder.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
So named because a white carnation had been found on the top of the body of a dead waitress. Along with that, you had the Red Hibiscus murder and the White Gardenia murder. Oh. But. Put flowers on.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But all those have faded into history because no name had the poetry of the Black Dahlia murder.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, under Jimmy Richardson's direction as city editor, the Los Angeles Examiner was one of the first papers to put together a more 3D portrait of Elizabeth Short. In San Diego, at her last known address, she'd stayed with two women named Elvera and Dorothy French.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Elvera had found Elizabeth sleeping in the Aztec theater a little over a month before the murder and had invited her to stay at her home out of pity. Why Elizabeth was sleeping in the Aztec, seemingly hiding out... No one knows for sure. That's one of those details we will get to.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
In San Diego or here in Los Angeles?
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Oh, really?
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah, it's the one downtown. Yeah, it's looking real rough. Really just came to a halt here. I'll go masturbate there later.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, Elizabeth had told Elvera and Dorothy that she'd gone to L.A. to be an actress, but was looking for work in San Diego in the meantime. She also claimed that she was a recent widow. Her husband, she said, a one-major Matt Gordon, had just been killed flying over India. And she further claimed that she'd given birth to his child, but the child had also died.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah, that's... She did not have a kid. Well, that's the thing. I mean, Major Matt Gordon did exist. He did die over India in September of 1945. Elizabeth Short did receive a telegram from the Major's mother informing her of his death. But the mother said that she sent telegrams to all of her son's friends as a courtesy.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
And there's no evidence of a marriage between Matt Gordon and Elizabeth Short. Nor is there any record of her giving birth to a child. Sure.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yes. Quite possibly. Now, these half-truths that Elizabeth told about herself make it a hell of a lot harder to figure out what was really happening in her life during this time period. But she did tell Dorothy and Elvira that she had an inside track to Hollywood through some celebrity and was doing some work as a movie extra. That's also, we don't think, there's no record of her as a movie extra.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
There is some, like, very short, piece of video footage that is thought to be her, but it's just her on the street.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But to answer that question, it all has to do with the hypothesis I have. I think that people actually like the Black Dahlia murder better as a mystery that will remain unsolved for all eternity, although the reasons why people want it to remain mysterious differ from person to person. From one perspective, if the case remains unsolved...
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But what's known for a fact is that on some nights, a knock would come at the door of Elvera and Dorothy's home while Elizabeth was staying there. She would refuse to answer and would become terribly frightened, but would also refuse to say anything about who might be on the other side of that door. And those for you to remember, this is up to a month before her death.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
To make things even more mysterious, about a week before Elizabeth's body was found, a man and a woman arrived at the house where Elizabeth was staying in a car driven by a second man. Three people had shown up in San Diego looking for Elizabeth. But when they knocked on the door, Elizabeth got panicky and refused to answer again.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
That's one of the big theories. All Alvera and Dorothy knew was that Elizabeth suddenly wanted to leave San Diego as quickly as possible after that encounter with those three people. And two days later, she left with a tall, red-haired, freckled man in his 20s named Red.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
The Jimmy Richardson's crime reporter miles ahead of the police got a license plate number from Red's car from a nearby motel where Red and Elizabeth had stayed the night before she returned to Los Angeles. The car belonged to a 25 year old pipe clamp salesman named Robert Manley, known to his friends. As Red.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
And so, Jimmy Richardson ordered his reporters to get an interview with Red Manley, the first prime suspect of the Black Dahlia murder.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah. Now, Manley was in San Francisco on a work trip when Jimmy Richardson's reporter showed up at his home in Huntington Park. Unfortunately for Red, the person who was home that night was his wife, who was none too pleased to be questioned about the Black Dahlia murder.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
That's Red Manly for you.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
You know, what's funny is that now that you say that and I think back to all the, yeah.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Elizabeth Short, with her almost movie star face and complicated erratic backstory, she becomes an almost romantic, even angelic figure, the Beat Generation's wandering sacrificial lamb laid out like an art installation in the middle of the City of Dreams.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Well, as soon as Red returned from San Francisco, he was ambushed and arrested by cops and reporters. Immediately, he said, quote, I know why you're here. But I didn't do it. Yep. Immediately. First thing he said. Now, Manley wouldn't talk to the cops or the reporters who would help find him. But where Jimmy Richardson left off, Aggie Underwood stepped in.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
In the most 1940 speech you could imagine, she, according to her recollection, told him, quote, Look, fella, you're in one hell of a spot.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Taking Aggie's advice, Manley told his story to her first, then repeated it over and over again to the police.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Well, he said that he had met Elizabeth Short in San Diego the previous December, just after he and his wife had a baby. According to Manley, his marriage was going through an adjustment period.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
So he decided to test himself with a pretty young girl to quote, I just wanted to see if I could still love my wife.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, he claimed that he never slept with Elizabeth Short, but they did ride around, dance, and have dinner. They did kiss, but he said that when they did, she was, quote, kind of cold. I think it was because she was cut in half at the time. Now, Manley left Elizabeth in San Diego after their first fling, but returned the next month on January 8th when he offered to give her a ride back to L.A.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
at her request. That night, though, before they left, they danced and had some drinks, and Manley said that Short was happy until they got to the motel room.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
He said that she became sullen and silent, and when he tried making a move, she said that it was her time of the month.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
And she refused to even discuss sex. Manley said fair enough. But the suspicious part of the story began the next day on their way back to Los Angeles. Well, have it your way. I'll go ahead and fuck myself.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But by the time they made their way to Laguna Beach at around 5 p.m., Elizabeth got anxious, staring intently at every car that passed, straining her neck to see who the passengers were while saying almost nothing.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But when they finally got to Los Angeles proper at around 6.30 p.m., Elizabeth said that she needed to go to the Biltmore Hotel to meet her sister because she was planning on returning home to Medford, Massachusetts. Elizabeth Short's getting the fuck out of town. Or at least trying to. She says she's trying to. To him. Yes.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
And so, Manley dropped Elizabeth off at the Biltmore, and the doorman later said that Elizabeth waited in the lobby for three hours. Finally, she left alone at around 10 p.m. But she did make several calls. Yeah. And that was the last reported sighting of Elizabeth Short until her body was found in Le Merit Park six days later.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah. Now, Manley's alibi checked out easily enough. He was playing cards with his wife and friends the night of the murder, and his wife further said that it was absurd to think her husband would kill anyone because he fainted at the sight of blood.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
And he didn't, mostly because she divorced him.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah, about a year after the investigation, she divorced him, and he never fully recovered from being the first suspect in the Black Dahlia case. Suffered numerous nervous breakdowns as a result.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
He had to be put away for a little while, yeah.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Well, to the point of her beauty, the very name the press gave to the crime that killed her, the Black Dahlia murder, makes it sound almost ethereal, like a song or a poem. But... If you introduce a suspect into this story, the beauty fades along with the romance. It's no longer the Black Dahlia murder.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
It did.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But what was strange about Red Manly was what happened to Aggie Underwood just after her interview was published. Aggie, the best true crime reporter the Herald Examiner had, was pulled off the case without explanation. Well, in response to getting taken off, Aggie sat in her editor's office and did an embroidery for hours until she was put back on the story. You see what I'm making?
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Just set a ball.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Says home is where the nuts are. And she soon after uncovered an interesting link between Elizabeth Short and another murder that had occurred about two and a half years prior. On October 12th, 1944, a woman named Georgette Bauerdorf was found murdered in the bathtub of her West Hollywood apartment, raped, beaten, and asphyxiated. A military badge was stuffed in her mouth, which led the L.A.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Sheriff's Department to believe she was killed by a military man.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Of course it is!
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yes. Furthermore, Bowerdorf was a junior hostess at a club called the Hollywood Canteen, known to be frequented by men in the military. And who else should be working the same job at the same club at the same time as Bowerdorf but Elizabeth Short? Dude, just like all the girls in Twin Peaks worked at Two-Eyed Jacks. Yeah.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Believing it to be too much of a coincidence, Aggie published an article linking the two murders with the incredible headline, Werewolves Leave Trail of Women Murder Victims in Los Angeles.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, Georgette's diary had been confiscated by the LAPD after she'd been murdered, and it was discovered upon second look that there were quite a few entries about Elizabeth Short and the time the two girls had spent working at the Hollywood canteen. Laura Palmer's fucking diary. Yes. Of most interest was their relationship to a then well-known actor named Arthur Lake.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Arthur Lake had played Dagwood in a series of 28 movies based on the comic strip Blondie between 1938 and 1950. Lake was known for playing light romantic roles, but was always a bit of a mama's boy. Yeah.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
1947, yeah. And it just so happened that Aggie Underwood's newspaper was one of the many newspapers that William Randolph Hearst owned. So with one quick phone call from Hearst's mistress, any investigation into Arthur Lake, Georgette Bauerdorf, and Elizabeth Short was quickly nipped in the bud. Although there are no serious theories that say that fucking Dagwood murdered the Black Dahlia.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
It's now the story of the Black Dahlia killer, which places Elizabeth Short's death firmly in the grubby world of true crime with no escape. Yeah, then she's just some murdered lady. There is, however, an opposing perspective here that has nothing to do with romantic notions.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah. But just because Arthur Lake wasn't involved, that didn't mean there wasn't a connection between the murders of Georgette Bauerdorf and Elizabeth Short, even considering that Georgette's murder was nowhere near as violent or performative as Elizabeth's.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah, I mean, you'd think it would be definitely, you'd think it'd be a huge ramp up, but... But Aggie never got to find out anything about these connections because the moment she started looking into this link, she was taken off the story a second time. Except on this occasion, it was because she was promoted to city editor of the Herald Express.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Oh, yeah. But everyone thought it was strange that the only reporter making real progress at their paper on the biggest news story of the decade was reassigned twice without explanation.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Don't know, Eddie. Don't know. But Aggie took the job, and the story, more or less, went back to Jimmy Richardson. Now, besides the black sedan that had been spotted at the murder scene in the wee hours before Elizabeth Short's body was found, there really weren't any concrete leads as to who was responsible for Elizabeth Short's murder.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But on January 23rd, the phone rang at the office of the Los Angeles Examiner, and it was Jimmy Richardson who answered.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
On the other end of the phone was a man with a voice that has been described again and again as soft and sly. He was asking for the city editor. Jimmy said, speaking.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Instead, the Black Dahlia murder, often considered one of the most gruesome crime scenes in history, can also be seen as a cautionary tale of a girl who, in the words of many people at the time, reaped what she sowed.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
And so, after Jimmy very matter-of-factly said, we need it, the soft voice said, I'll tell you what I'll do.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Immediately, Jimmy wrote the words, trace this call, on a piece of paper and handed it to his assistant, who jiggled the receiver arm on Jimmy's telephone to get the attention of the switchboard girl. The soft voice went on to say that he had Elizabeth's address book, her birth certificate, and a few other items that she had in her handbag.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
When Jimmy asked when they could expect these items, the soft voice said, Oh, within the next day or so.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Flabbergasted, Jimmy sat back in his chair, lit a cigarette, and said, I think I might have been talking to the killer of the Dahlia. And sure enough, two days later, a package arrived at the examiner's office postmarked January 24th, the day after Jimmy Richardson had gotten the call. Written on the front of the package in words clipped from newspapers and magazines was this.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
And inside, among other things, was Elizabeth Short's birth certificate, social security card, and a baggage claim check for two suitcases and a hat box at a local Greyhound station. But most important was a brown leather notebook filled with names and numbers, what appeared to be Elizabeth Short's address book. Strangely, the name Mark Hansen was printed on the front.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
And believe you me, we'll be getting into Mr. Hansen on the next episode. But even more strange was the fact that several pages had been cut out of the book, meaning that it was possible that whoever sent it didn't want the reporters or the police to have certain bits of information.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yes. Oh, yeah. But lest the police get too excited, the entire package had been soaked in gasoline, which meant that there were no usable fingerprints on anything that was inside or outside of the envelope.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Four days later, though, the promised letter to follow arrived at the examiner. This time it was a handwritten message and very short. It said, quote, Here it is.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, the cops awaited January 29th like it was Christmas Day, and they couldn't wait to find out what the fuck Black Dahlia Avenger meant.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
They figured it was probably in reference to some sort of wrong that Elizabeth Short had committed, either real or imagined, that the person who had killed her had avenged something. But once January 29th came, they thought that they were going to find out for sure. But January 29th came and went.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
The next day, another postcard arrived at the examiner, this time returning to the cut-and-paste method. It said, quote, Have changed my mind.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yes. See, Elizabeth Short, just 22 when she died, lived an unconventional life for 1947. She was a drifter of sorts from Massachusetts, who just sort of ended up in and out of Southern California. A kid who didn't or couldn't buy into the conventions of post-World War II America.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
And after that missive, the newspapers in Los Angeles and the offices of the LAPD were flooded with letters and postcards supposedly from this Black Dahlia Avenger, making it impossible to tell what was real and what was a hoax.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
This guy, the Zodiac, BTK.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
The false leads overwhelmed the investigation on both sides. And while there were four viable fingerprints taken from the second postcard, it was believed by the FBI that only the first package and the first postcard were from the actual killer. Although they may also have their reasons for holding that opinion.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
From there, though, the police had to contend with a mountain of what they called confessing Sams. These were men and women who didn't do the crime but wanted to take credit for the murder anyway.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
It was interesting, though, that at least one confessing Sam got attached to another brutal murder. Just a few weeks after Elizabeth Short was killed, another woman, a 45-year-old pilot, army nurse, and bit player named Jean French, was found beaten and stomped to death on the corner of Grandview and Indianapolis Avenue. On her torso, someone had written a message in lipstick. Fuck you, BD.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Presumably, fuck you, Black Dahlia.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
They said it could also be fuck you BP, but it could, you know, who knows? It could be anything, but it was either BP or.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah. Also, the crime, the killing of Jean French, also unsolved to this day. The cops believed at the time that Jeanne French had been murdered in a rage by the Black Dahlia killer because two days earlier, the Herald Express had declared that a man named Joseph Dumais, who would spend years confessing and recanting about Black Dahlia, was the man who murdered her.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
500. Such a ridiculous number.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
No idea. Now, some of these confessing Sams were led by the press and public opinion to create fantastical stories that were nowhere near the truth. See, for a time, it was speculated that Elizabeth Short was gay because she was sometimes known to be in the company of, quote, bossy blondes and women with Amazonian proportions.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, the gay angle was, of course, salacious, but it also served to further smear Elizabeth short. Because while male homosexuality in Hollywood in the 1940s was condemned, lesbianism was actually seen as the far greater sin and the bigger perversion.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
You know what I mean? Lesbians. There's a dick going into a hole. I can grasp that.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Well, it was said that gay women dressed in men's clothing to trick innocent young girls into horrifying sadistic situations, just like the Black Dahlia murder. And a reporter at the Examiner was particularly sure that the murderer was a disgruntled lesbian.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
These were men trapped in women's bodies, they said. Neurotic, tragic, absurd, and dangerous. And it seemed like this story was actually going to play out when a woman named Christine Reynolds confessed to Elizabeth's murder.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Reynolds said that she'd met Elizabeth at a gay bar called the Crown Jewel on January 9th, and it killed her soon after, using some of the worst details about the mutilation that had been held back from the public as proof. Namely, Christine had said after the murder of Elizabeth Short, she had, quote, cut some of her goddamn hair off and shoved it up her fucking pussy. And the thing was...
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
This did happen. The killer did cut off a piece of skin from Elizabeth Short's pubic area before forcing it into her vagina after her death. But when Christine Reynolds was further interrogated, it was found that she had a girlfriend who worked for the LAPD who had told her all the gory details about the mutilation that had been withheld from the public.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Nevertheless, the lesbian angle continued to be pushed for years.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Who knows? All of this came and went in the course of a couple hours. She gets put in the box and starts confessing. One of the big... tricks that they used with these confessing Sams was the hair color. Yes. Because everyone sort of assumed that when Elizabeth Short was killed that she still had her like famous raven black hair.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But no, she'd actually dyed it using henna really like pretty recently before. So her hair when she was killed was actually kind of a reddish light brown. Okay. Yeah. So if they didn't know that detail, then it was like, okay, you definitely aren't the person who killed her.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, the man who was responsible for sifting through all the Confessing Sam stories to maybe find the real killer was also the only guy in Los Angeles who seemed to have a real hook on who the Black Dahlia killer might be. That man was Dr. Joseph Paul DeRiver.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
He was a psychiatrist who worked for the Los Angeles Police Department. He's an interesting guy. He is interesting. And of course, some people say that he's completely discredited because he made up his job. But, you know, it's the 1930s. Somebody's got to make up the job.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah, I made this up. I made up this job. This is the job we created. Now, because of the public display of the body and the Black Dahlia Avenger communications, DeRiver was convinced that the murderer would continue to interact with the public. Yes. So, if someone wanted to talk, DeRiver would listen. Because DeRiver had already danced to this song once before.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Well, as a consequence, Elizabeth Short became an example of what could happen if you stepped outside the boundaries that society had drawn for the average American woman in 1947. Put another way, people could make a stark comparison with no middle ground using Elizabeth Short's murder.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
See, in 1937, he'd worked a case called the Babes of Inglewood. It's now lost time. But before the Black Dahlia, it was the most disturbing set of homicides the city had yet seen. In this case, three little girls, ages 7, 8, and 9, were found raped and strangled to death in a gully in Baldwin Hills.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Going just off the way the bodies were positioned and the fact that their shoes had been removed and placed next to them, DeRiver deduced that the killer was a sadistic pedophile in his 20s who was meticulous in his appearance, he was religious, and he was remorseful.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
It's hardly a bigger story. Yeah, it's a huge story, yeah. And now, like, actually, I found some information about it, but, you know, there's no fucking Wikipedia page about the Babes of Inglewood. Well, police soon found something very close to that in a 32-year-old crossing guard named Albert Dyer, who said he lured the girls to the park with a story about rabbits.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
He then separated, raped, and strangled them one by one before preying over each corpse. DeRiver's mostly accurate profile was among the first to ever lead to the capture of a killer in Los Angeles, so DeRiver became a sort of star expert thereafter.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
He also established the LAPD's Sexual Offense Bureau, which led to the California Sexual Offender Registry that was created partly because of the Black Dahlia murder.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yes, it was used to criminalize LGBT people. It was basically used as like a gay list. And that was used mostly during the sex crime panic of the 40s and 50s. But DeRiver's actual target with this registry was sexual psychopaths like the man who had killed Elizabeth Short.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
DeRiver believed that particularly nasty sex offenders should be castrated, tattooed on the forehead, and get their ears clipped to a sharp peak so children could easily identify.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
You're either the girl that was found bisected in a vacant lot, or you're the happy housewife who lives in the home built on top of the crime scene.
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Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But even though some of his ideas were fucking insane, DeRiver was the one who found the man who might be the key to the entire Elizabeth Short mystery. See, as was demonstrated by Elizabeth's paranoid behavior in the time just before her disappearance, it just might be that she got herself mixed up with some unsavory characters during her time in Los Angeles.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
These unsavory characters were the men who ran the city's underground, Men who had the power to not only cover up one of the most famous murders in history, but to eventually derail an indictment that would have almost certainly resulted in a trial that could have introduced a lot of uncomfortable questions.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
And it's with these men, those questions, and the world where all this happened that we'll return to the Black Dahlia murder next week.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Whoa. And it wasn't photographed until about 11 a.m.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah, there's a there's a lot. I mean, there's a million theories about who may have done it, why the motivations like you can for every argument you could make. There are six arguments you can make against it. Like, yeah, I mean, there I guarantee you there are people that just because I said the name Dr. Joseph DeRiver have discredited every single thing that I've said before or after.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Just because you even mentioned Joseph DeRiver because in their theory, in their world, they must remove Joseph DeRiver from the picture completely for their theory to be true.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yeah, we're going to go through a fair amount of them. Next week, we're really going to be getting into some of the other theories, some of the really interesting things, some of the stuff it does have to do that relates to the art world, some of the stuff that relates to the cops. And then on episode three, we're really going to get into the theory...
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
as to who personally I think is the best suspect and why.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Yes, those very sweet men. Unsavory.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
I think it's actually more. I think we're pretty getting pretty close to 650 at this point. Yeah.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Of course, Toronto is also this next year. That's on May 3rd. Don't forget to buy your tickets to that. It's at the Elgin Theatre.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Try. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
In reality, though, Elizabeth Short was neither of these extremes. As reporter Jimmy Richardson put it, Elizabeth Short wasn't bad, but she wasn't necessarily good either. She was just lost, a person trying to find a way out, a wanderer who bounced around the country in search of happiness and purpose. In other words... Elizabeth Short was as human as they come.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Or so we assume. That's the thing. We actually don't know a lot about Elizabeth Short's actual motivations. A lot about what she really wanted out of life. We're not really sure. We can just piece together things from what people who knew her said.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But in this tale, there is also a bevy of inhumanity. That savagery lies in the method of her murder and the likely motivations behind it. A story that's filled with a thousand questions about who did what, when, where, and why.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Oh, no. This entire episode is scored by Angelo Badalamente. Like at certain points, just like in your mind, just think...
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
it's so this this i don't know what it is this time this story fucking creeped me out but to help answer all of our questions we used three sources the black dahlia files by donald wolf black dahlia red rose by pew marie eat well and black dahlia avenger colon a genius for murder colon the true story colon part one by steve hodell there's a
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with Henry Zebrowski.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
It might not be the theory that we subscribe to, but you know what? That's okay. That's called opinion. So on the morning of January 15th, 1947, a woman named Betty Bersinger and her three-year-old child were walking through the half-finished neighborhood of Leimert Park, a small neighborhood in Los Angeles that was still dotted with grassy vacant lots waiting for a home to be built on top.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
But as Betty and her daughter strolled down the 3800 block of South Norton Avenue, she noticed broken glass on the sidewalk and a large black cloud of flies buzzing over what seemed to be two separate objects lying just off the footpath.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Why is that?
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, when Betty got closer, she thought, perhaps unable to fully process the sight before her, that someone had cut a mannequin in half and thrown it on the grass. She thought it was a mannequin because the objects were porcelain white. Her first concern, however, was this unsettling sight might frighten some of the kids playing in the nearby park.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
So she decided to call the city to see if someone could come do something about this mess in the vacant lot. She knocked on the door of a nearby house, reported what she saw, and went about her day, shopping at the mall while one of the most enduring mysteries in true crime history unfolded in that lonely, vacant lot.
Last Podcast On The Left
Episode 600: The Black Dahlia Murder Part I - The Girl from Hollywood
Now, around 11.07 a.m., after a second bystander who processed the crime scene a little more thoroughly called the police, saying something horrible was laying in a vacant lot in Le Merit Park, the first policemen showed up on the scene. Their first reaction was to shout, Holy hell, someone's cut this girl right in half.