Rather than providing answers, the information seemed to raise further questions. On the surface, it would appear that LAPD detectives had either dropped the ball or deliberately kept important witness information from the public. Why?
Perhaps the answer to these and other troubling procedural questions, I told myself, could be found through a day-by-day reconstruction of the joint police and press investigations, beginning with the discovery of the body on January 15, 1947.
12
The LAPD and the Press: The Joint Investigation
LOS ANGELES WAS USED TO BIZARRE CRIMES, and, although this crime went beyond brutality, into the world of pure evil, the LAPD command tried to take it as much in stride as possible. But even in 1947, Los Angeles, like New York, was a media capital, with a corps of crime reporters who knew well how the scent of blood sold extra editions of papers and could make a crime reporter's career. Therefore, even in the earliest hours of the investigation into the death of Elizabeth Short, as the sensational nature of the case began to overtake the gumshoe routine of LAPD Robbery-Homicide, the crime reporters themselves quickly got involved. Over the next few weeks it would be the reporters who were calling the shots as they tracked down leads, witnesses, and suspects for the police in exchange for exclusives. The police knew that once they arrested the "Black Dahlia Avenger," as he had called himself in a taunting note to investigators, their case would have to stand up to the scrutiny of a clever defense attorney. Thus they began to worry about disclosing too much sensitive information. Sloppy police work, either at the investigation or arrest stage, could result in an acquittal, no matter how compelling the evidence. The police brass had seen it before and did not want to walk around with mud on their faces as some clever defense attorney like Jerry Giesler took his client by the arm and walked him out of court a free man. This time it would have to be different, because this person was more than a killer: he was a "fiend," a "sex-crazed torture killer," as the papers were calling him.
The LAPD needed to rely on the newspapers if they wanted to keep up with fast-moving crime reporters, but they also knew they had to keep some cards face down on the table.
To see what aspects of the investigation actually made it into the light of day, it was necessary for me to document how the case actually unfolded, which witnesses were brought in, what they said. I needed to discover what was consistent and what was not.
I have therefore laid out a chronology of the early months of the investigation, not only to see how the police proceeded in the Dahlia case during its first stages, but to establish a timeline enabling me to set the Dahlia murder in the context of the disconcertingly high number of other murders of lone women taking place in L.A. during the same period.
Wednesday, January 15, 1947:
LAPD's 1947 Investigation Begins
The detectives who responded to the crime scene in Leimert Park, some five miles south of Hollywood, probably knew that the location where the body was found was a vacant lot that had been characterized by police as a "lovers' lane." They therefore knew that whoever had placed the body must have been familiar enough with the location to have felt secure that he, or they, would not be seen. Investigators were also quick to note that the victim's body had been deliberately and carefully placed just inches from the sidewalk, as if posed for maximum effect.
While the surrounding grass near the body was dry, the grass under the two sections was wet, leading them to conclude that the body had been placed there after dark, once dew had formed on the ground.* Police canvassed the neighborhood for any potential witnesses. Within days, people started to come forward.
Betty Bersinger
Housewife Betty Bersinger, a resident of the Leimert Park area, discovered the body of "Jane Doe Number 1" while walking along Norton Avenue with her three-year-old daughter, Anne. Mrs. Bersinger, who did not give her name when she called the police on the morning of January 15, finally contacted police on January 24 after learning through the press that they were trying to locate her and thought "she might be a suspect."
Mrs. Bersinger said that when she saw the body she grabbed her daughter and ran to the nearest house, which she described as "being the second house on Norton Avenue from 39th Street, and that it belonged to a doctor." She phoned the police but "the police didn't ask me for my name and I was too upset myself to think of giving it to them. I do recall that the policeman asked me for the telephone number I was calling from, and I looked at the number on the dial and gave that to him."
Embarrassed LAPD detectives later admitted to the press that the original officer receiving the call from Mrs. Bersinger not only neglected to take her name but lost the number she had given him. In an audit of their own records, the University Division station officers, ten days after the call-in, on January 25, located the ticket on Betty Bersinger's call, which documented that she had originally notified the police of her discovery of the victim's body at 10:54 a.m. on January 15, 1947.
Robert Meyer
Leimert Park resident Bob Meyer, interviewed on the morning of January 15 by both police and press, said that between 6:30 and 7:00 A.M. that morning he saw a "1936 or 1937 Ford, sedan, black in color" pull up to the curbside near where the body was found. The car was there for "an estimated four minutes, and then left the location." Mr. Meyer was unable to get a clear view of the driver because weeds were blocking his view.
Sherryl Maylond
Sherryl Maylond, one of the seven girls sharing room 501 with Elizabeth Short in Hollywood, also worked in Hollywood as "a bar girl" at an unidentified bar. She told the police and press that on Wednesday, January 15, 1947, a man, who gave his name as "Clement," came into the bar and asked the night bartender if he could "speak with Sherryl." The bartender told him it was Sherryl's night off, whereupon the man left. He returned the following evening, and again asked for Sherryl Maylond, who was working that night and agreed to talk to him. Clement, "a slight, dapper, olive-skinned man, with hair graying at the temples," told Sherryl he wanted to talk to her about Betty Short. Despite his repeated requests, she refused, until he finally left.
Thursday, January 16, 1947
Once the identity of the victim had been established, the investigation intensified. For a city with more than its share of bloody homicides, including the violent sexual murders of women, the characterization of the Elizabeth Short murder by LAPD as the city's "most brutal killing ever" made the local press corps even more frantic, desperate for every scrap of news, even if they had to create it themselves.
Gradually, as the LAPD crime laboratory developed more information, the police, under increasing pressure to feed a crime-hungry public, released information that the victim "was killed elsewhere." She was murdered by a sadistic killer and then driven to the crime scene, where the suspect's vehicle "hurriedly stopped as evidenced by tire tracks in the gutter."
The same day the police released information about the tire tracks, detectives brought in policewoman Myrl McBride to question her about the woman she had reported seeing near the downtown bus depot. Officer McBride positively identified the victim in the photograph as the same woman who had come to her "sobbing in terror" on January 14 and whom she later saw leaving a downtown bar in the company of two men and a woman. At that point, the police had, via a reliable witness, Officer McBride, a description of the three people who were with the victim only hours before she was murdered.