In the course of my investigation, I came across a reference to a book, Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective's Scrapbook, edited by Sean Tejaratchi, containing over a hundred photographs of unsolved crimes in the L.A. area during the years of LAPD homicide detective Jack Huddleston's service, from 1921 to 1950.
The scrapbook was a compilation of Detective Huddleston's own photo collection of suicides, murders, and accidental deaths, clearly his own personal macabre fetish. Its pages contained pictures of tattooed men, nude drag queens, child homicides, murdered prostitutes, and even a decapitation caused by a train wreck, all packaged into an album of horrors. Next to many of the photographs the detective had written his personal observations and locker-room dark humor.
In her introduction to the book, Katherine Dunn says that the collection of photographs, found at an estate sale after Huddleston's death, was eventually made into a video called Death Scenes. Although essentially a revelation of one person's fascination with the brutality of homicide, Death Scenes contains three photographs next to which Huddleston had typed the following information:
"THE RED LIPSTICK MURDER."
Mrs. Jeanne Axford French Age 40. (Nurse) of 3535 Military Ave, Sawtelle L.A. Killed by ???? Her body was found in a field near Grand View Ave, & National Blvd. L.A.
She was stomped to death by a fiend who crudely printed an obscene phrase (FUCK YOU) on her chest.
The three photographs were obviously from the 1947 LAPD investigation. One of them, a close-up, showed the victim lying supine in the vacant lot, completely nude, with the lettering clearly visible on her body. In large block printed lettering, the killer had written in red lipstick the following words across the midsection of her body: "FUCK YOU, B.D." What the LAPD had not revealed to the press, Detective Huddleston unintentionally revealed to the public through the bits and pieces of his own obsession years after his death.
Exhibit 32
Jeanne French, "Red Lipstick" murder, February 10, 1947
Simultaneous and parallel to the "Red Lipstick" murder, the Dahlia investigation remained ongoing, as Captain Donahoe told the public that in his opinion the Dahlia and Lipstick murders were likely connected. In the month of February 1947, leads and additional evidence continued to pour in.
Tuesday, February 11, 1947
Imagine the surprise of downtown Los Angeles cab driver Charles Schneider when he discovered a mysterious note in his cab, possibly written by the Black Dahlia Avenger. Schneider told police and reporters that he had gone to a restaurant in the 500 block of Columbia Street — ten blocks from the Biltmore — and when he returned to his parked cab he found a note in the glove compartment. Addressed to the Examiner; but not released to the public, the note, with a crude illustration of a knife and a pistol on it, read:
Take it to Examiner at once. I've got the number of your cab.
$20,000 and I'll give B.D. up. Is it a go?
B.D.
Police quickly lifted fingerprints from the glove compartment of Schneider's cab, which did not belong to him. They also checked similarities between the letter and the original envelope sent to the Examiner with Elizabeth Short's belongings and immediately eliminated Schneider's fingerprints from both the prints on the glove box and the original note. Those fingerprints remain unidentified to this date.
Wednesday, February 12, 1947
lca Mabel M'Grew, a twenty-seven-year-old resident of Los Angeles, reported a kidnapping and forcible rape that occurred in the early-morning hours of February 12 as she was leaving a South Main Street cafe in downtown Los Angeles. She reported that two men had forced her into their car and driven her to an isolated spot on East Road in Los Angeles, where both had raped her. After the attack one of the assailants had warned, "Don't tell the police, or I'll do to you the same as I did to the Black Dahlia." They then drove her close to her home in Culver City, only three miles away from where Jeanne French had been murdered. The only descriptions of the assailants released in the news article were "two swarthy men."
Sunday, February 16, 1947
By the middle of February, the LAPD said that it had "hit a stone wall" in its investigation of the murders of both Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French, announcing that the one remaining lead, a key to the two mysterious homicides, was their search for a dark haired man with a small mustache, who was known to have had dinner with Jeanne French just two hours before she was murdered.
Police indicated they had a close watch on their important witness, Mrs. Antonia Manalatos, the waitress who had seen the dark-haired suspect dining with the victim.
That same day, Otto Parzyjegla, a thirty-six-year-old linotype operator at a Los Angeles printing shop, was arrested for the bludgeoning murder of his seventy-year-old employer, Swedish newspaper publisher Alfred Haij. After confessing to police that he had "hacked the torso into six pieces and then crammed them into three boxes at the rear of the print shop," Parzyjegla told authorities that "the whole thing was like a dream," insisting to his interrogators that "he must be dreaming and was waiting to wake up."
Captain Donahoe quickly entered the case, believing that Parzyjegla might possibly be the suspect in the Black Dahlia and Lipstick cases. Donahoe theorized that the violence that Parzyjegla had displayed in killing and mutilating his employer could well link all three murders. Donahoe informed reporters that Parzyjegla worked in a print shop, adding, "one of the letters received by the Black Dahlia suspect bore evidence of having been mailed by someone working in a printing establishment." After his preliminary investigation, Donahoe said, "Parzyjegla is the hottest suspect yet in the 'Black Dahlia' killing."
Tuesday, February 18, 1947
Captain Donahoe organized a live "show-up" of suspect Parzyjegla for 2:00 P.M. for Toni Manalatos. He wanted her to "attend the show-up of Parzyjegla," along with those witnesses "claiming to have seen Elizabeth Short with various men during the last six days of her life." Donahoe wanted to give Parzyjegla the largest exposure possible in front of the broadest array of witnesses, in the hope that someone who had seen either Elizabeth or Jeanne French in the company of a man would identify Parzyjegla as the person who had been with one or both of the victims. The description given for Parzyjegla was "a tall 36-year-old male, of light complexion, with darkish blonde hair and powerful hands." Parzyjegla, however, while he readily admitted to slaying his employer, "vehemently denied any connection with the slayings of the two women," according to press reports.
At the same time Donahoe was organizing his witnesses to see Parzyjegla, the LAPD crime lab began conducting an examination of possible physical evidence that could potentially connect him to the other murders. LAPD police chemist Ray Pinker conducted an examination of "proof-sheet" paper taken from Haij's printing office, because, according to Captain Donahoe, "at least one of the notes sent in by the Dahlia killer in that case, used proof-sheet paper, of a type commonly found in printing shops." Donahoe was hoping the print shop would be the key that could link the three murders to the suspect, someone who would have had access to the blank proof sheets.
Thursday, February 20, 1947
Suspect Otto Parzyjegla was formally charged with his self-described "dream murder" of his employer, and the case was closed. At a police show-up conducted at the Wilshire Division station on February 19, the six women victims of attempted attacks, as well as other witnesses from the French and Dahlia investigations, eliminated Parzyjegla as a suspect.