Cold Case Files - The Black Dahlia

Episode Date: January 16, 2018

This week marks the 71st anniversary of one of the most infamous cold cases in America - the gruesome murder of Los Angeles actress Elizabeth Short, more commonly known as The Black Dahlia. We'll go explore what makes this case so complicated, unpack the prevailing theories, and find out why some people say it will never be solved - while other claim it already is.

The following program is brought to you by your friends at Podcast One. We all know the story. A small-town girl leaves home believing she's going to make it big in Hollywood. Sometimes she does. A lot of times, she doesn't. Luckily, rarely does she suffer the same fate as Elizabeth Short. This is Detective Carr. He'll be introduced a little bit later on.

She's discovered nude, imposed, cut in half, mutilated, was pretty gruesome. I just can't imagine someone doing that to another human being. One third of all murder cases in America remain open. Each one is called a cold case, and only 1% are ever solved. In a small change of pace this week, we're presenting one of the most famous and frustrating cold cases of modern times. Yesterday, January 15th, marks the 71st anniversary of the murder of Elizabeth Short, otherwise known as the Black Dahlia. From A&E, this is Cold Case Files, the podcast.

Mary Passio's knew Elizabeth Short when she was 12 or 13, when her only nicknames were simple derivatives of her name, like Betty, Bet, or Beth. Mary and the other neighbors all believed that Elizabeth was going places, that she was someone special. We all had had, all the families had had a hard time during the Depression, and I think we saw Betty as someone who could escape the poverty, who would go somewhere.

She'd been born in Massachusetts in July of 1924. Her father, Cleo, abandoned Elizabeth, her four sisters, and her mother Phoebe during the Great Depression. He's rumored to have faked his own suicide, and so Phoebe Short was left alone to care for her five daughters. Elizabeth was only five years old. Throughout her childhood, Elizabeth had health issues related to asthma. To combat her illness, she spent her summers at home with her family, but then traveled to Florida with family and friends for the winter. Her main source of entertainment was movies, and she was enthralled with them. As Elizabeth grew into her teenage years, she repeatedly expressed her desire to become

an actress. It was also during these same years that she discovered that her father was very much alive and living in California. She wrote him letters, and in this way they reconnected and stayed in touch. Early in 1943, when she was 17, Elizabeth decided to move to California to live with her father and to bring herself one step closer to stardom. It seemed though as if the letters weren't enough to help father and daughter to form the relationship that they might have hoped. Cleo and Elizabeth frequently argued and by mid-1943, Elizabeth's father ordered her to leave his home. Soon after her departure from her father's home, Elizabeth was arrested for underage drinking and forced to return to Massachusetts.

She bounced around for the next couple of years between Florida and her mother's home in Massachusetts, working as a waitress, though she never seemed to have much money. Because she didn't have much money, Elizabeth often relied on a string of admirers to foot the bill. But she knew if she could just get back to California, she could prove that she could make it big. She was going to be an actress, a movie star. And the last time I saw her, she told me when she made it, she'd send for me.

Elizabeth returned to California in 1946, taking a residence in the city of Los Angeles. She was said to have started a search for a husband. Elizabeth met an Air Force pilot that she wanted to marry, but their relationship was cut short when he was stationed in Europe. She then met another serviceman, Major Matt Gordon. He was also stationed abroad, but promised to marry Elizabeth when he returned. Unfortunately, Major Gordon was killed in action.

People who knew Elizabeth said that at this time, she went through what one might consider a phase. She told lies, like she'd already been married to Major Gordon, and that the couple had lost a child. She moved around a lot and was unable to keep a job for any period of time. One evening, a woman named Dorothy French found Elizabeth asleep in one of the seats at the theater where Dorothy worked. Dorothy offered Elizabeth a place to stay for the night, but the night turned into a week and then a week into a month. Elizabeth was said to have gone out many nights with several different men while staying with the Frenches. On January 8th, a man named Robert Manley, a traveling salesman, picked up Elizabeth from Dorothy's home. Manley was married and had an infant son, but was also

infatuated with Elizabeth. They went out together that evening and then stayed in a hotel room paid for by Manley. He told authorities that he had slept on the bed, but Elizabeth had slept on a chair because she didn't feel well. He said that Elizabeth told him she'd be meeting her sister the next day at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. Manley dropped her off at the Biltmore around 6 p.m. On January 9th, Manley and the Biltmore Hotel employees turned out to be the last people to see Elizabeth alive. It was six days later that her body was found, naked and mutilated in a vacant lot. Brian Carr wasn't even born yet when Elizabeth Short was murdered, but until he retired in 2009, he was the detective in charge of her case. It was a major manhunt, and the investigation had all sorts of detectives knocking on doors,

interviewing people, following every lead. They turned over every leaf. They didn't leave anything untouched. The media widely covered Elizabeth's murder, referring to her as the Black Dahlia. I wondered where this nickname had come from, so I did a few searches. And the way I understand it is that there was a popular movie at the time called The Blue Dahlia. The Blue Dahlia was the story of military men and a murder somewhat similar to Elizabeth's. Because of Elizabeth's dark hair and features, she was referred to as the Black Dahlia, and the name stuck.

The case itself took on a life of its own early on. I think for two months, it was front page news in all the local papers every day. The murderer had drained Elizabeth's body of blood and scrubbed it clean. papers every day. The murderer had drained Elizabeth's body of blood and scrubbed it clean. She'd been bisected mid-spine. In other words, she was cut in half. The condition of the body was at the time they believed that someone, it was someone who had some medical or surgical experience.

From what I've seen, I believe it was probably some type of a surgical instrument that made the cut. Though those details are gruesome, they were basically the only lead that investigators had to go on. They weren't so helpful, though. So investigators started to look into Elizabeth's life, her relationships, and her past for answers. This is LA Times reporter Larry Harnish. He is well-versed in the story of Elizabeth Short. They interviewed literally thousands of people because it was such a tough case. Everybody who had known Elizabeth Short was a suspect. Among those suspects was Robert Manley, sometimes referred to as Red Manley. You remember, the man who claimed to drop Elizabeth

at the Biltmore Hotel on January 9th? Here's reporter Larry Harnish again. She'd met Red Manley, and she was standing on a street corner, and he said, well, you know, he's married. He's going to test his love for his wife by picking up this other woman, you know. Okay. Whatever one might think of Manley's moral choices and character, there was no physical evidence connecting him to the murder. Besides, he was a salesman, not a surgeon. That didn't stop the police from questioning him, though. And the police put him through the ringer. They give him two polygraph tests and they let Aggie Underwood of the Herald Express, a reporter, I mean here's the guy's a hot

murder suspect and they let the reporter in there to talk to him figuring well he won't talk to the tough old detective maybe he'll'll talk to the nice, sweet little reporter, you know, with her feminine wiles. I don't know what might be considered a feminine wile, but I do know that it wasn't helpful. Robert Manley was cleared of the crime, and to this day, no one else has been so closely looked at by detectives. Days and even weeks after the murder, a person claiming to be the killer wrote letters and postcards to the local newspapers promising what they referred to as souvenirs of the crime. The post office intercepted a suspicious looking package that was addressed to the Los Angeles Examiner and other Los Angeles

papers. The letter had been cut from magazines and newspapers and pasted together to form words. Despite being a major cliche in TV shows and movies, this is one of the only real-life examples I can find of someone actually doing the letter made from cut up magazines thing. Inside the intercepted envelope was Elizabeth's birth certificate, business cards, photographs, and a few other things. They had all been cleaned with gasoline in the same way as Elizabeth's body. The police believed that the items in this envelope had come from the real killer, though they were still unable to determine who that was. The news coverage of Elizabeth's murder took a dark turn.

It almost seemed as if she was being blamed for her own murder. This is her friend Mary again. Stories were coming out, and one exact quote was, the black dahlia who prowled Hollywood Boulevard. The Daily News ran a story, tight skirt and sheer blouse. Some of the stories made it almost seem as if it was a justifiable homicide. I can't tell you, it was horrible the way she was portrayed. The detectives continued to actively investigate the case into the 50s,

but with no solid leads, the case went cold. Though no one's been arrested and charged with Elizabeth's murder, that hasn't stopped people from hypothesizing about who it might be. This is Steve Hodel. He's a former LAPD homicide detective, and also a best-selling author on the subject of the Black Dahlia. She was only 22, and she was 22 going on 15. I mean, she was very naive and quite beautiful. And that's a dangerous combination. Hodel, in all of his research, thinks he might have the answer to the question that so many people are asking. Who killed the Black Dahlia?

I'm a cop. I'm trained and programmed to solve crimes. Who does Steve think killed Elizabeth Short? A doctor named George Hodel. None other than Steve's own father. Steve talks about his childhood home, a place called the Franklin House that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright's son. He points out that there's a secret room just behind a trick panel. This was off limits to the children, and basically it's been restructured, new walls and stuff. Despite being off limits, Steve managed to get a glimpse of some unusual things

that his father kept inside the room. Well, a lot of pornography, a lot of nude photos of young women. Steve shares that his father used that same home to entertain Hollywood's elite. He claims his father was rich and powerful and out of control. He outlines it all in his book and also walks us through his theory of what happened. It all started with a family photo album that he discovered after his father's death in 1999. And here are pictures of my father, and that's me sitting on his lap. So that's about 1943. Then I came to these two photographs. He sees pictures of a woman with black hair

and dark features. To my mind, clearly the photographs were of Elizabeth Short. I've seen the pictures. I'll post them on Twitter so you can see them as well. I have to admit, I didn't see a resemblance right away. However, after listening to Steve Hodel's analysis, I could see why he came to the conclusion that he did. Steve tells us about the photo of a woman he believes is Elizabeth. What I saw here was there appears to be a small freckle on the tip of the nose. Steve examined Elizabeth Short's autopsy photos along with other photos of her before the crime. He mapped the different areas of her face in order to make comparisons between Elizabeth and the woman in his father's pictures. Because the question of is this or

isn't this Elizabeth Short, this photograph, is very important. Now we look at father's photograph. There's a freckle. Steve finds what he considers three points of identification between Elizabeth and the woman in his father's picture. He declares this his first piece of evidence in his case against his own father for murder. Steve moves on to what he believes is the next piece of evidence against his father, the letters and postcards written to the police. These are from the killer and the note says, here it is, turning in Wednesday, January 29th, 10 a.m., had my fun at the police, signed the Black Dahlia Avenger. I looked at this, and this is my father's handwriting.

Steve Hodel believes his father's handwriting is a match to that of the letters that were sent to the police. An expert from the National Association of Document Examiners, Hannah McFarlane, finds a close similarity between George Hodel's writing and some of the mailings. The next clue that Steve Hodel shares with us has to do with the Franklin house itself. It would have been easy to bisect the body in the tub. Steve believes that his father murdered Elizabeth Short inside a bathroom. The blood would simply run down the drain and any evidence left behind could be washed away and cleaned easily. He also points out that the bathroom's location

gave George Hodel direct access to the garage without anyone seeing him. At that time, this place was a fortress. There was nothing, no houses behind it. It was totally isolated. Steve even has an explanation for why Elizabeth's body was cut and mutilated so severely. Well, this all relates to Dad's love for surrealism. This isn't thrown there. This isn't a dump. This is a sculpture. This is a creation of art.

There are a number of photographs that his close friend Man Ray had made. One was called the Minotaur, which was a woman's body cut in half, posed with her hands over her head in a certain position like this. And the Minotaur, of course, was the beast, the monster from the labyrinth who devoured maidens. Was George Hodel's love of art and competitive nature enough to compel him to murder a young woman? Steve seems to think so. I think in some respects this was George Hodel's way of kind of out, you know, kind of in competition with Man Ray. Look at this. This was

his masterpiece. There's another person who believes that Steve Hodel might be on to something. Former prosecutor Steve Kaye. If I can see it, I can get the jury to see it too. Let me put it this way. I have no doubt in my mind that his father murdered Elizabeth Short. A second investigation and what brought Steve K to that conclusion after the break. Hey, this is Jim Litke, host of AP Sports Weekly, where we harness the shoe leather insight and experience of some of the smartest reporters in the business to bring you the news. I've been an AP sports columnist since 1989 and covered every major championship around the globe multiple times and crossed paths with some of the greatest athletes of our time. And now I'm excited to bring you a weekly recap of the most interesting happenings in sports.

So make sure to download new episodes of AP Sports Weekly every Tuesday on PodcastOneSports.com, the new Podcast One app, and Apple Podcasts. Steve Hodel takes us one more place on the journey to prove that his father murdered Elizabeth Short. We're going to the criminal courthouse downtown Los Angeles. We're going to go up to the 18th floor and take a look at the DA records and files. This is where they've had the DA Black Dahlia files locked away along with the Hodel files. The records and files that Steve Hodel is referring to are actually the district attorney's 1949 independent investigation into the Black Dahlia murder. A DA's independent investigation is basically when a person outside of any other branch of law enforcement investigates a case or crime. Now remember the DA is doing the investigation at the request of the 1949

grand jury. So it's, you know, LAPD has nothing to do with it. They are basically ordered to investigate on their own. Immediately, something almost literally jumps out at Steve Hodel. A photo of Dr. George Hill Hodel. It turns out that Steve Hodel is not the only one who suspected his father of murdering Elizabeth Short. He was at least a person of interest to the Los Angeles DA over 70 years ago. He became the prime suspect in the Dahlia case at the end of, in October of 49. What was it about Dr. George Hodel that had caught the attention of the DA? Well, Dr. Hodel was charged with molesting his 14-year-old daughter. Though he was acquitted of that charge,

several witnesses appeared to link the doctor to Elizabeth Short. What they did was bring George Hodel down to the DA's office for questioning. While he was here, they went out to the house and basically put the bugs in place. The investigators wiretapped the Hodel home and spent the next month monitoring and recording conversations inside the house. It seemed that the investigators were doing a thorough job. They are. And of course, really, the icing on the cake, if you will, is the transcript. Here they are here. This is the original. It's labeled the Hodel file. There's a long transcript of the wiretap recording spanning more than 100 pages.

The most incriminating conversation goes like this. Here's one of our producers, Scott Brody, with an excerpt from the transcript. FBI, police had pictures of me, and I thought I had destroyed all of them. I'm in trouble. Do you think we could hire some girls to find out what they're doing? Suppose I did kill the Black Dahlia. They couldn't prove it now. They can't talk to my secretary anymore because she's dead. Do those sound like the words of an innocent man to you? Or a killer bragging about his crimes?

Steve Hodel gives us his take on what seems like a huge lead. Steve Hodel could talk all he wants about the investigation and the probable cause that points to George Hodel as the probable suspect. But you still need solid corroboration. This is a tremendous confirmation. I mean, I had no idea this stuff existed. Nobody else did either. How was Dr. Hodel cleared for the Black Dahlia murder if there's so much evidence? Why was he never brought to justice? This is what Steve Hodel has to say. But what we know is that Hodel was never cleared because he was never talked to. He was talked to, the only time he was talked to was when he was brought in when they installed the wire.

After that, he was never talked to again. Brian Carr, the detective assigned to the Black Dahlia cold case, has a differing opinion to that of Steve Hodel. There's no way that the DA's office would file that case on that kind of evidence. If you read the book, it's full of conjecture. Steve Hodel makes some loose connections. He admits at the beginning of the book that there are loose connections, that it could be this and it could be that.

But when you read towards the end of the book, he adapts those connections as fact to try to put his case together. And it just doesn't work that way. It's not that Detective Carr doesn't have access to the materials that Steve Hodel claims are evidence against his father. It's more that he doubts his interpretations of those items. For example, the isolated phrases from the transcripts. First of all, that's what they are. They're isolated. It's tough to make meaning out of

them, especially they're handwritten from an audio tape that I don't know where it exists. Detective Carr has an opinion as to the picture in the family album in which Steve Hodel has so carefully mapped each section of the woman's face to compare with Elizabeth Short in her various pictures. I personally don't believe it's Elizabeth Short. Plenty of other people don't. Some people do. Elizabeth Short's own sister says it's not her. Detective Carr also cast suspicions on the comparison of Dr. Hodel's handwriting

with the letters and postcards mailed to the newspapers from the alleged killer. First of all, on handwriting, I'm very skeptical. It's not an exact science in my mind. And if you're going to base your evidence on handwriting, you've got a weak case. It seems that someone else also didn't quite believe Steve's assumption about the letters. And in an albeit politically incorrect brash manner, here's Larry Harnish. That stuff was from crackpots. The detectives at the time must just be howling up there

in the Heaven Squad room laughing over anybody taking this stuff seriously because it was crackpot stuff. Larry Harnish has also done an extreme amount of research on the Black Dahlia murder. Like the others, he believes the killer was a doctor, but not George Hodel. He began digging into the others, he believes the killer was a doctor, but not George Hodel. He began digging into the case and the mystery that surrounds it as part of the 50th anniversary assignment for the paper. Well, it was interesting to go through the clips because you could see it happen.

There were the original news stories, and then after the first month or two, the facts started to erode almost immediately. And so that's one of the reasons I started doing something more thorough. I started with the clips, which are right here. Like any good reporter, Larry Harnish went to the official file and read the original reports as they were written. That didn't feel like enough information, though. So Larry took his investigation

a step further. I made a wish list of, ideally, if I could talk to certain people, who would I talk to? And then I tracked him down, dead or alive. He interviewed as many witnesses as he could, using the information that he uncovered and his own unique insights. He then moved on to the mail that had been sent to the newspapers. And though he believed most of it to be fake, he zeroed in on one particular item. This is the envelope used to send her belongings. I mean, that certainly is from the killer.

If you remember, this was the envelope that had been addressed and written using clippings from magazines or newspapers. It contained her birth certificate, social security card, and other items, making it likely that it had been sent by the real killer. It's obviously all cut out, and I got to wondering, well, where did it come from? And you can see, like, here is, you can see this was originally over here. So I kept looking and kept looking. And sure enough, I found the page. It's a page of movie ads. He matches the cutout letters to a movie theater ad page in the newspaper, like a puzzle. In a cruel coincidence, or a sickening calculation,

the movie titles included The Most Sinister Address in History and The Razor's Edge. Larry Harness then took all the information he had gathered and consulted with an FBI profiler. His first question was, what do you know about the neighborhood? Whoever did it, your subject had a reason for picking that neighborhood. Larry looked into the neighborhood over and over again, but he just couldn't seem to find anything that stood out. He decided to check the property records for the area where Elizabeth's body was found. What he came out with was the name of a woman who had bought the plot exactly one block away from the scene. The woman's name was Ruth Bailey. Yeah, and I said,

there's Ruth A. Bailey. Who's that? Harness went on a search through the LA Times archives to see if there was any information on Ruth Bailey. Here's the story. Ruth Bailey, okay. 3959 South Norton, a block from where the Black Dahlia was found. And we have Dr. Walter Bailey. Holy smokes, here's the address, and we've got a doctor. And not just a doctor, but a surgeon. Ruth Bailey's husband was a surgeon,

the occupation that was assumed of the killer. Harnish also found the details of a dispute between the doctor's wife, Ruth, and his girlfriend, Dr. Alexandra von Partica. This girlfriend, Dr. Partica, had learned some secret about him, and supposedly he lived in fear of being exposed, because this secret, if she exposed it, would ruin him personally and professionally. Could that secret have been murder? We don't know.

We'll never know. Dr. Partica cannot tell us. She's long gone. Could it be that reporter Larry Harnish has solved the case? Does the Black Dahlia mystery finally have an answer? No.

But unlike all the other people who've been put forward, we do have here, there's a link between the two of them and there's a link to that neighborhood. And nobody else has that. Stephen Hodel and Larry Harnish have investigated the crime. And each man thinks that it's likely that their suspect is the culprit. What will it take to prove either suspect's innocence or guilt?

Could DNA be the key to solving this 70-year-old case? It's not as likely as we might think. The actual original documents, I don't know where it's at. The last known where this particular evidence was, was in the possession of Ray Pinker, who worked our forensic, the police forensic lab at the time. Was it thrown out accidentally when they moved and were shuffling things around? I don't know. We might never know who killed Elizabeth Short, but that hasn't stopped Steve Hodel from investigating the crime and writing multiple books on the subject.

You know, I've wondered what dad might think. Part of me has to say that he would probably be very proud of his son. I mean, there's a kind of a twisted part of him that would say, you know, I really wanted all of this publicity. I wanted the infamy, and thank you for bringing it to me. Why has the interest and intrigue with this crime continued throughout the years? I think ultimately, it's the mystery, the not knowing, and the human brain's need to make sense of the world. Sometimes we want to make sense of the loose connections in a circumstantial theory, like Steve Hodel. And other times we stick with the facts, like Larry Harnish. In this case, there seems to be no telling who is actually right, or if the answer is something else entirely. We like to believe in Los Angeles that Chinatown really happened and there's wheels within wheels of conspiracy and high-powered people in lofty positions are trying to clamp down on things. Believe me, if anybody knew who killed the Black Dahlia, it would have come out.

Cold Case Files, the podcast, is hosted by Brooke Giddings. Thank you. by Podcast One. Cold Case Files Classic was produced by Curtis Productions and hosted by the one and only Bill Curtis. Check out more Cold Case Files at aetv.com and by downloading the A&E app.