", Knowlton also made claims prefiguring those of Black Dahlia Files author Donald Wolfe. In December 1948, Dillon agreed to meet with De River and was given the choice of one of three cities: Los Angeles; Phoenix, Arizona; or Las Vegas, Nevada. She became increasingly frustrated by the all the sloppy analysis, bogus theories, and inaccuracies surrounding Shorts life and death. Marx knew that the epic activities of the modern world involve not lance and sword but dry goods.Stephen Bayley (b. His initial outline for the book was narrowly focused. Eventually, he found the owner of the house on 3959 Norton Avenue, the woman on the deed who paid the property taxesRuth Bayley. In addition to Short, Hodel claimed in the book that his father also killed Jeanne French a month later, which was called by the newspapers the Red Lipstick Murder because of the writing on the body. [5], Among Harnisch's behavioral/psychological evidence: Bayley's neurodegenerative condition was known to produce violent behavior in otherwise passive individuals; his surgical specializations included mastectomies, hysterectomies, and the surgical removal of fat; in conversation with Bayley's former receptionist, Harnisch discovered that he and his mistress would, at dinnertime, watch movies of surgeries and autopsies. Walter Bayley. [15] Hansen's great granddaughter Helen Alexis Yonov was interviewed for Piu Eatwell's upcoming documentary on the Black Dahlia for NBC Peacock Productions. In his office, Harnisch points out a framed photo of Short, who was called Beth at the time, wearing a green beret, a matching top, and a string of pearls. Thats why he was so interested in talking to her. Customers called her the Black Dahlia, a play on the 1946 movie The Blue Dahlia, and because of her swirling black hair and black clothing. Researching the case and portraying it accurately has been so difficult because, Harnisch says, Elizabeth Short was the first to fictionalize her life. The horrific homicide has sparked such enduring fascination that the crime has been transformed into kitsch. My goodnessit was so white.. Bersinger and her husband had recently purchased their home for $11,000 in a middle-class neighborhood of primarily newly married couples with young children. I noticed that dark hair and this white, white form., I glanced to my right and saw this very dead, white body, she told Harnisch, her voice cracking. He made a discovery, however, that altered his perspective. But it wouldnt necessarily affect his sensory or motor skills and he could still do surgeries. Harnisch was devastated. He also identified Short's handbag purse and one of her shoes after they were discovered in a trashcan on January 25, 1947, several miles from the murder scene. Lindgren told Harnisch how scandalized the family was when her father left them for Partyka. Donahoe balked. Scope and Contents Dr. Bayley's USC School of Medicine diploma, California Board of Medical Examiners certificate, and letter and . He talks to a retired LAPD detective whose 3 year investigation led to the stunning conclusion that his own father committed the murder. She agreed to serve as the matron of honor at Shorts sisters wedding, she told Harnisch, because there wasnt anybody else. When he suggested that such a role indicated a close level of friendship, she was very dismissive and refused to elaborate. In the surviving transcripts of microphone recordings, Hodel was heard making highly incriminating statements. When I asked him if he preferred Harnischs or Hodels suspect, he snapped, I wont talk about that anymore. He was always trying to help people. After encountering these early erroneous accounts, he vowed that everything he wrote would be exact, backed by authenticated sources, and he ended up spending an inordinate amount of time, which stalled his own research and writing, challenging the accounts of other writers. Hansen was a Hollywood nightclub owner at whose home Short lived, either as a paying boarder or as a guest, on several occasions between May 1946 and October 1946. He is grateful he began his research decades ago, long before the case generated renewed interest in the Twenty-First Century, because many of those he interviewed are now dead. At the time, the street was undeveloped because the war had stopped construction, and Short was found on an empty lot, but now at the location there is a beige stucco house with Italian cypresses shading the lawn. They deserve to have somebody tell the story accurately. Dillon later filed a $100,000 claim against the City of Los Angeles, but dropped the lawsuit after it emerged he was wanted by Santa Monica police for robbery. Hundreds of people were considered suspects and thousands were interviewed by police. Dr. George Hodel Transcripts", "How the Black Dahlia Murder Became a Twin Obsession for Two L.A. He asked if her mother ever discussed the murder of Elizabeth Short and Lindgren said she had never mentioned it. As you can see, Harnisch says, its an easy walk from the crime scene to Walter Bayleys houseonly one block. A self-published book by a former LAPD Vice detective wrote in 1950 that an abortion doctors office was located in a building on West 6th. About a dozen patrol officers, sergeants, command officers, and detectives descended upon the scene, in addition to numerous reporters and photographers. The last person seen with Elizabeth Short before her disappearance, Manley was the LAPD's top suspect in the first few days after the killing. The two photos Hodel was convinced was Short, the photos that launched his investigation, were soon called into question. Dillon was living in Florida at the time of his correspondence with De River, but had formerly lived in Los Angeles. Halfway up the block, the mother stopped in horror at something she saw in one of the lots. After fingering his father for the two murders, Hodel later claimed he was one of the Twentieth Centurys most prolific serial killers. Los Angeles iconic homicide is not known by the moniker of the perpetrator, but the victimThe Black Dahlia. As a result, this is a story that fades to conjecture. Prior to Wilson's death, however, Gilmore made an entirely different claim to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in a story appearing January 17, 1982. Nelson, Mark; Sarah Hudson Bayliss (2006). At the time of the murder, Bayley's estranged wife still lived in the home. She is found cut in half in a vacant lot. She was so abusive in her Usenet posts[28] that Pacific Bell canceled her account in 1999. This was a state-of-the-art investigation at the time. Instead, he left the body in a busy residential area. The truth is, Harnisch says, she was just a young woman traumatized by the death of her fiance, a lost soul homeless, grieving, and adrift. She told Harnisch that she was stunned that Bayley and Partikya used to pick up dinner to go, listen to classical music at their medical office, and eat dinner while watching surgery films. Keller believed Mark Hansen was the killer and said Hansen was Swedish and had spent some time at Sweden's Medical Surgical School (Hansen was actually born in Denmark) which would explain the precise dissection of Short's body. It was so partisan, he says, picking at his chicken pot pie. I glanced to my right and saw this very dead, white body, she told Harnisch, her voice cracking. He never imagined that he would unearth a murder scenario and a suspect who would intrigue LAPD detectives. Bayley's daughter was a friend of Elizabeth Short's sister Virginia and brother . Nobody can tell this story straight. Harnisch scowls and grips his knees. In his correspondence, he mentioned an intense interest in sadism and sexual violence in hopes of authoring a book on the subject. He passed along the tip to a Times assistant city editor, expecting him to assign the story to a reporter. [6] Wolfe's claim that Short was a prostitute is at odds with the Los Angeles County district attorney's files, which plainly state that she was not, as Wolfe asserts, pregnant.[7]. Short might have called Barbara Lindgren, but she had recently moved to the Midwest. Someone is going to look out a window and see you, Douglas told Harnisch. Yet another theory was that the murder may have been an attempt to frame Siegel by Jack Dragna, who wanted revenge for Siegel's attacks on Dragna's business interests since his arrival in the 1930s. In the early 1990s, George Knowlton's daughter Janice began claiming that she had witnessed her father murdering Elizabeth Short, a claim she based largely on "recovered memories" that surfaced during therapy for depression after a hysterectomy. People dismissed as suspects early in the investigation include Daniel S. Voorhees. Author James Ellroy endorsed Harnisch's theory in the 2001 film James Ellroy's Feast of Death. Hodel recently talked to me about the book during lunch at a restaurant perfectly in tune with the citys infamous noir-era homicideHollywoods Musso & Frank Grills, opened in 1919, which still serves dishes that were on the menu when Short was murdered: grilled calves liver, Welsh rarebit, liver and onions, lamb kidneys, and oyster stew. His daughter was a friend of Short's sister Virginia, and had been the matron of honor at her wedding. The Black Dahlia Murder Case Lecture 3April 26, 2022 Frank Wood. The first was that Walter was 67 years old at the time of the murder (Wikipedia). I happened to be working on the rewrite desk of the, Once Short was identified, reporters scurried to find out as much about her as possibleon deadline. The scenes containing the set were deleted from the film by Harry Cohn. In a half hour, the killer could have transported the body to the beach or the mountains; add another half hour and he could have reached the vast expanses of the Southern California desert. On January 24, 1947, a suspicious manila envelope addressed to "The Los Angeles Examiner and other Los Angeles papers" was discovered. On January 15, 1947 a woman walking on the sidewalk in the 3800 block of Norton St., in Liemert Park, Los Angeles caught a glimpse of what appeared to be a department store mannequin lying in the weeds on the side of the street; the top half separated from the lower half. Her anonymity was soon transformed into notoriety and her case evolved into the nations most infamous unsolved murder. On March 5, 2004, Janice Knowlton died of an overdose of prescription drugs in what was deemed a suicide by the Orange County, California, coroner's office.[29]. Det. On the day Shorts body was discovered, the paper reported two murders, thirteen robberies, and forty-seven burglaries. However, Newton also admitted that Janice's allegations against her father were entirely circumstantial and lacked substantial corroboration. He described her as a pathological liar. The jury acquitted the doctor. The profiler, John Douglas, speculated that the killer was probably angry at some residents on Norton Avenue and intended to put the fear of God into that neighborhood. Harnisch recalled this when he learned that Bayley had adopted two girls and then had one biological son whom he doted on and whod been killed. Flipping through filesmuttering, Hansen, Hansen, where is Hansen?he locates a folder, fishes out testimony, and points to the relevant passage. Hodels investigation began when he was retired and living in the Pacific Northwest. Bayley, called in Latin Bailus and in English books also Baley and Baily, was born at Portesham, Dorset, in which county his father was a squire. There was zero corruption in this unit. With neither the energy nor motivation to finish his book, he put it aside. On January 15th, the date the body was discovered, he jammed a broomstick into the dirt on his front yard, spread out a large sheet of paper, and with a felt tip pen traced the progression of the shadowsa primitive sun dialand compared them to the shadows in the photos to garner a rough idea of who was at the scene and when. The late Pulitzer Prize-winning sports columnist Jim Murray was a rewrite man for the Examiner at the time and sat next to Sutton. [11], In 2004, De River's daughter, Jacque Daniel, published a book called The Curse of the Black Dahlia, in which she expressed her belief that her father had been unfairly maligned for the Dillon affair.[12]. The editor, however, asked, Do you want to do it? Harnisch, who had always wanted to be a writer, responded, Hell, yeah., At the Times morgue, he obtained all the clips on the case, photocopied them, and placed them in chronological order. Still, according to Don Wolfe's book The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles,[37] Siegel was the actual murderer. So, the pathology lines up., The probate records revealed, Harnisch says, even more significant clues. Harnisch pulls a dusty cardboard box out of his office, fishes out a Manila folder, removes a copy of the marriage certificate, and points to address3959 Norton Avenue. The killer, Douglas surmised, had some connection to the neighborhood. I sat there and listened to the poor, dear mother telling him about her school-day triumphs. While most decades-old murders slip into obscurity, the Black Dahlia case attracts so much attention that the LAPD has continued to assign the homicide to a specific detective since the lead investigator retired in 1960. Short was face up, her gray-blue eyes were open, and she had been posed with elbows bent at right angles, her hands over her head, and her legs were spread with her knees straight. After creating a roster of everyone named in the storiesdetectives, patrol officers, suspects, family members, witnesses, and reportershe created a list of people to interview. Wolfe hypothesizes that Wilson was present at Short's murder and claims a connection between Wilson and gangster Bugsy Siegel through some small-time gangsters Wilson supposedly associated with. Steve Cooley about the case, he said that Kay had presented Hodels theory in a closed-door presentation, but he wasnt close to being convinced. Still, he allowed Lopez to peruse the previously unreleased 1949 grand jury files, which chronicled an investigation headed up by D.A. There are people with this lesion without any psychological pathology, and there are others who have significant pathology which may include bizarre violence, On a recent evening, Harnisch visits Dr. James Fallon, a professor emeritus of neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, tells him about Bayleys shift of personality and presents the psychiatrists assessment. In October 1946, Walter walked out on his family and filed for a divorce. Tamars mother, however, testified that a psychiatrist had told her that her daughter was addicted to telling fantastic stories. The horrific homicide has sparked such enduring fascination that the crime has been transformed into kitsch. His father was devastated. Later, Harnisch tracked down retired LAPD patrol officer Wayne Fitzgerald who, along with his partner, were the first cops on the scene. Dr. Walter Alonzo Bayley. Homicide was the elite LAPD unit and Harry Hansen and his partner were experienced professionals. During World War II, crime surged in L.A. and generated such interest that the Examiner ran a daily tally on the front page. Multiply getting details like that with a thousand other details and youll see why its taking me so long to finish the book.. [20], Author James Ellroy endorsed Steve Hodel's theory in 2004,[21] but has since refused to discuss the case publicly. She began following Harnischs blog about the case, which he launched after writing the anniversary story, and was immediately impressed. Mrs. Bayley, who lives at 3959 South Norton Ave., asserts that while associated with Dr. Bayley in practicing medicine, Dr. Partyka threatened to expose and ruin him if he returned to his wife.. No suspects were detained, and no further evidence has been uncovered as of yet. In addition, one of the Los Angeles homicides Hodel attributes to his father was extensively investigated by the Unit, Lambkin says; the case was solved, the killer was identified, and he was not George Hodel. Finally, he spent afternoons in the dim subbasement of the Los Angeles County Hall of Records, leafing through plat books where property deeds were recorded. Dr. Walter Alonzo Bayley was a Los Angeles surgeon who lived in a house one block south of the vacant lot in which Elizabeth Short's body was found, until he left his wife in October 1946. At about 10 a.m., she was pushing her three-year-old daughter in a strollernot just any stroller, but a Taylor-Tot stroller, she was proud to point outto a repair shop to pick up her husbands shoes. There are two things I refuse to discuss: Donald Trump and The Black Dahlia.. My stomach turned when I came to photos of the corpses of Elizabeth Shortand Jeanne FrenchFlipping past those photos, a number of smaller mug shots slipped out of the stack, and looking up at me, his eyes dark and narrow, was Dr. George Hodel. [5], In devising his theory, Harnisch consulted retired FBI profiler John E. Douglas, who advised that the very public location of the dump site was significant, since the killer had the ability to transport the body to a more remote site, where it may not have been discovered; the site was one block away from property owned by Bayley's estranged wife Ruth. He simply wanted to tell a good crime story and to create an accurate biography of Short, tracing her life from small town Massachusetts, to California, to her death. Then another book, Black Dahlia Avenger, was released that blew everything out of the water, Harnisch says. Arnold Smith). Tamar Hodel, fifteen-year-old daughter, stated that her mother, Dorothy Hodel, has told her that her father had been out all night on a party the night of the murder and said, "They'll never be able to prove I did that murder." On October 26, 1946, the doctor left his wife for his mistress . Harnisch spent three decades as a newspaper copy editor, ensuring stories contained no inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and were grammatically correct, and he brings this punctilious approach to his Dahlia research. It is theorized that Dr Bayley's degenerative brain disorder which symptoms include homicidal ideation/behaviour in even pacifists. Harnisch had spent most of his career editing other writers, but after all the blogging he had done, he realized his writing had improved dramatically, so he embarked on another draft, which he is attempting to finish as he continues to delve deeper into Walter Bayleys background. Along a dreary, weedy block without a house on either side, a housewife was walking to the store with her five-year-old daughter, scolding her a little because she wanted to play in the dew-wet lots. Her body was found in a weed-webbed lot in South Los Angeles, surgically severed in two, washed and scrubbed, posed, and completely drained of blood. 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