Manley admitted he was interested in the strikingly beautiful woman, saying that, although he was married, "my wife had just had a baby and she and I were going through an adjustment period." He explained that there was a method to his madness. "I decided to see if I could pick her up, make a test for myself, see if I loved my wife or not." So he approached Elizabeth at the street corner and asked her whether she wanted a ride.
Elizabeth ignored him, turned away, and "refused to look at me," but Manley persisted and, he said to the police, he told her "who he was and continued attempting to talk with her." Elizabeth turned around to him and responded, "Don't you think it's wrong to ask a girl on a corner to get in your car?" He agreed that he thought it might be wrong, but he "just wanted to give her a ride to her home." Manley said she finally climbed into his car and directed him to Pacific Beach, where "she was living with some friends."
Manley invited her out to dinner that evening and she accepted, but, he explained to the detectives, "she was worried what she would tell the two women at the residence where she was temporarily staying." She decided to introduce Manley to the two women as "a friend who worked at Western Airlines." Elizabeth had told him that she worked at Western Airlines. Then, as agreed, Manley dropped Elizabeth off at the Frenches' and found a motel room nearby. He acknowledged that he "was nervous about stepping out on my wife, that this was the first time, and that I and my wife had only been married since November of 1945."
Manley returned to the French residence at 7:00 p.m., was introduced to Elvera and Dorothy, and left with Elizabeth on their date. They had drinks and dinner, then returned to the French residence, where they sat in front of the house in his car and talked for some time. Manley admitted kissing Elizabeth, but "found her non-responsive, and kind of cold." He told her he was married, and Elizabeth said that "she had been married to a major, but he had been killed." Manley walked her to the front door and then asked whether he could wire her if he was returning to San Diego in the near future. She replied, "Yes, but I might not be here. I don't like San Diego very much." He returned to Los Angeles after that one date.
When he learned that he would be returning to San Diego on business on January 8, 1947, he wired Elizabeth at the French residence and asked if he could see her again.
Believing she worked at the Western Airlines office, Manley drove there at about 5:00 P.M. and waited for her to leave the building. Since she didn't really work there, she never appeared, so he drove over to the Frenches'. Elizabeth greeted him at the front door and asked, he later told police, if he could take her to make a telephone call. As they were driving to make the call, she changed her mind and asked him if he could drive her up to Los Angeles. He agreed, but not until the following day, because he had business to attend to in San Diego. They returned together to the French residence, where Elizabeth said her goodbyes to Vera and Dorothy, packed her suitcases, and left with Manley.
Manley found a motel room, checked in, and the two of them went downtown for drinks and dancing. Elizabeth raised the possibility of taking a bus back to Los Angeles that night, but they decided instead "to get some hamburgers and return to the motel." She told him that "she was cold," and he lit a fire in the motel fireplace. She complained of "chills and not feeling well," and the two of them went to sleep without any attempt at lovemaking.
The following morning Manley made his business calls, returned to the motel at 12:30, picked up Elizabeth, and drove her back to Los Angeles, stopping along the way at a restaurant for sandwiches, and again for gasoline in Redondo Beach. As they drove, Elizabeth asked if she could write to him. "Of course," he said, and gave her his address, which she noted in her address book. She told him she was "going to Los Angeles to meet her sister, Adrian West." Manley asked, "Where's the meeting, the Biltmore?" "Yes," she said, "the Biltmore."
When they arrived in downtown Los Angeles, Elizabeth asked Manley to drive her first to the Greyhound bus depot, so she could check her luggage. Manley carried her bags inside, she checked them, and he drove her to the Biltmore just four blocks away. They both entered the lobby of the hotel and Elizabeth asked Manley to "check the front desk to see if her sister had checked in, while she went to the restroom." Manley did as she had bid, was told no Mrs. West had checked in, so he "asked a couple of women who were standing in the lobby if either one might be Mrs. West." They both said no. After waiting with her for a few more minutes, Manley left Elizabeth in the lobby of the Biltmore. It was the last time he saw her, he told the detectives.
Red Manley swore he was telling the truth, repeating the same story over and over to his interrogators, who grilled him hard to try to find any weak spots. The more intense the questioning, the more firm Manley became, finally offering to take a lie detector test, even truth serum, to prove his innocence.
When the police asked him if there was anything else he could remember from any of his conversations with Elizabeth, he said that on the evening of January 8 at the motel, he remembered seeing "bad scratches on both of Elizabeth's arms on the outside, above the elbows." He also reported that Elizabeth had told him that "she had a boyfriend who was intensely jealous," describing him as "an Italian, with dark hair, who lived in San Diego."
He also recalled that "Elizabeth made a long distance telephone call to a man in Los Angeles on January 8 from a payphone in a cafe at Pacific Highway and Balboa Drive, just outside San Diego." Man-ley overhead just enough of the call to know that she was arranging to meet her caller — a man — in downtown Los Angeles the following evening, January 9. Manley did not hear her mention the man's name, but suspected it was actually this man, not her sister, whom Elizabeth was planning to meet. Finally, Manley said he learned of the murder and the discovery of her body from the newspapers during a business trip he made to San Francisco in mid-January.
On January 25, 1947, detectives recontacted Manley and took him to the University Division station to see if he could identify a purse and high-heeled shoes possibly belonging to Elizabeth Short. He was shown a pile of some two dozen shoes and ten different purses, and positively identified both the shoes and purse as hers: she had been wearing the shoes and carrying the purse when he had left her in the lobby of the Biltmore. Asked by police how he could be sure about the shoes, since there were several similar pairs, Manley stated, "These shoes have double heel taps on them, and I remember that she asked me to take her to a San Diego shoe repair shop to have the extra taps put on her shoes." Manley also identified the "faint traces of perfume inside the purse as the same as the perfume she wore."
In my review of these initial twenty-one witnesses originally interviewed by the press and police, I found that only a very few of them had played a public role in the investigation. Apparently the police had ignored most of the other witnesses, which obviously concerned me. Especially disconcerting were references to the Army, or Army Air Force, lieutenant from Texas named "George," who had been hospitalized in Los Angeles and whom she said she hoped to marry in November.
The police had also seemed to have ignored the independent — and crucial — information provided by the taxi-stand owner, Glen Chanslor, about the incident the night of December 29, 1946: the vicious assault on her by a well-dressed man, the friend who had offered her a ride. Chanslor's statements were consistent in all respects with what Manley would later tell the police when he described the deep scratches he saw on her arms just eleven days later, which Elizabeth said had come from an earlier assault by her jealous boyfriend.