I called a lawyer and filed for divorce that same week. It became final a year later. Kiyo and I never spoke again, and I heard from Rumor Central that she had remarried, or was living with a man even younger than me. She continued to teach astrology classes and found her fifteen minutes of fame, which included her picture and a small article in Time magazine as a recognized "astrologer to the Hollywood stars." She died from cancer while she was still in her mid-fifties, about ten years after our divorce.
My only explanation for Kiyo's interest in me was her private moment of truth in those brief minutes in the lobby at the Biltmore Hotel when I introduced her to my father as my wife. To her, it was all worth it for the "Hello, George."
In that single moment, Kiyo had exacted her revenge for the grudge she held against him. Twenty years earlier, in her youth and innocence, she had loved him and succumbed to his seduction. His conquest complete, Father had cast her aside and quickly moved on to other women and other loves. It was a slow road for her to travel, but she would be avenged. Her moment came in the lobby of the Biltmore, as she was introduced as Kiyo Hodel, his son's wife. Standing there, ignorant of the drama, I was hoping and praying that Dad would be impressed with my choice of a wife. He wasn't the only Hodel who knew how to pick beautiful and sophisticated women!
In the following days, after the discovery of Kiyo's infidelity, her lies about her age, and Mother's explanations about her true relationship with Father during the war years, I was shaken to my core, tilled with the rage and hatred that only youth can know. However, it would not be for another thirty-four years, until I saw Kiyo's picture in my father's album after his death, that the full impact of Dad and Kiyo would begin to dawn on me. Then only gradually did I come to know the truth. His love for her was no weekend romance. Her picture was there, hidden with the rest. Carried for fifty years in his sanctum sanctorum. He had loved her!
11
The Dahlia Witnesses
Mid-July, 1999. Bellingham, Washington
I HAD ALREADY REVIEWED ENOUGH MATERIAL on the Condition of Elizabeth Short's body to recognize that what her killer did to her was no mere butcher job. The only person who could have performed a bisection so perfectly had to be a doctor, a skilled doctor. I was also impressed by the indications that the killer had performed a postmortem hysterectomy. Not only did he know the female anatomy, but he clearly possessed a level of surgical skill far beyond that of the average medical student or, as some had speculated at the time, mortician or nurse. The killer or killers were also brutally sadistic: they had tortured and humiliated Elizabeth before putting her to death.
Assuming for the moment that there was only one killer, the amount of time he had and the rage he felt toward his victim indicated to me that he doubtless knew her intimately. Everything about the crime pointed to an act of rage-driven revenge. What, specifically, was the relationship between victim and killer that would result in an explosion of such violence and brutality that even the police at the crime scene could not remember ever having seen anything so degrading and horrifying?
The answers lie in the dynamic of their relationship, and in their lives before they crossed each other's path. The records of those lives are still with us, because neither the victim nor the crime could simply disappear. Considering this, I was convinced that, somewhere buried within the official case records, the interviews with witnesses, and the newspaper coverage, or the memories of people associated with Elizabeth Short, there had to be some answers. That's where I would begin my search: to try and build a composite of Elizabeth Short from scratch — something, I believed, the police had not adequately done back in 1947. I began my search for clues to the real nature of the victim, starting with a complete and thorough review of all known witnesses.
The first group of witnesses would be those people who knew her when she was alive, who could help me reconstruct a chronology of her movements until the day of her murder. They would cover the period from 1943 until January 9, 1947. These people included her family, those who knew her before she came to Los Angeles, and those whom she met during her years in Los Angeles looking for work and a place to live.
Phoebe May Short
Phoebe Short, the victim's mother, learned that her daughter was found dead and mutilated in a vacant lot when two reporters from the L.A. Examiner called her in Medford, Massachusetts, after the paper had learned, from its Soundex transmission of fingerprints to the FBI, that the victim's name was Elizabeth Short. It was a gruesome phone call, because the reporters, in their effort to gain as much information as possible, initially told Mrs. Short that her daughter had won a beauty contest and they needed background information on her for a story. Excited and jubilant, Phoebe began to gush about her daughter, talking about her beauty, her hopes, her dreams, until the reporter finally revealed the awful truth. Crushed and distraught, Phoebe nonetheless answered the rest of their questions, and the reporters had their exclusive.
Information from the reporters' interview of Phoebe Short, and from Mrs. Short's testimony later at the coroner's inquest, revealed that on January 2, 1947, Mrs. Short received a letter from her daughter in which Elizabeth told her mother she "was living in San Diego, California, with a girlfriend, Vera French, and was working at the Naval Hospital." Mrs. Short said that her daughter "was kind of movie struck, and that everyone in Medford had told her how beautiful she was." Her daughter had left high school in her junior year.
"Elizabeth had asthma," Mrs. Short told the reporters, "and every winter Betty would go south, to Florida, and work as a waitress, then she would return home in the summers." While she was living in Los Angeles, Elizabeth told her mother through letters, she had "worked in some films in Hollywood as an extra and had played in some minor roles." With the exception of Elizabeth's engagement to Matt Gordon, Phoebe Short was unaware of any serious relationships her daughter had had with men. "Major Gordon," Phoebe told police, "was engaged to my daughter, but he was killed flying home after the war."
At the coroner's inquest, held in Los Angeles on January 22, 1947, seven days after the discovery of her daughter's body, Mrs. Short identified Elizabeth at the coroner's office and testified that she "was twenty-two years of age, a waitress by occupation, and to her knowledge had never been married." Mrs. Short had last seen Elizabeth when she left home in Medford, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1946, for California. She told the inquest that while her daughter was at home with her, she never spoke of having any enemies, and said she was in love with a man named Gordon Fielding. She added that her daughter always wrote her on a weekly basis while she lived away from home.
Inez Keeling
Mrs. Keeling met Elizabeth Short in Santa Barbara during the war when she was manager at the post exchange at the Camp Cooke Army base in Santa Barbara, where Elizabeth, then eighteen, was employed in early 1943. Mrs. Keeling said, "Elizabeth told me that she had come out to California because of her health. She told me that the doctors in the East were concerned she might contract tuberculosis if she remained in a colder climate, and that is why her parents allowed her to come to California alone. I was immediately won over by Elizabeth's charm and beauty. She was one of the loveliest girls I have ever seen and one of the most shy." Mrs. Keeling told newspapers that Elizabeth "never visited with the men over the counter at work, and she didn't date the men. She was a model employee; she didn't smoke and only occasionally took a drink." Keeling last saw Elizabeth when she left the base early in 1943.