After spending more than two decades investigating the case and Los Angeles history, and researching the victim and a suspect, Harnisch anticipates finally finishing his book next year. Instead, he left the body in a busy residential area. Harnisch decided to start from the beginning, when the area was part of a Spanish RanchoRancho La Cienega o Paso de la Tiejera. [5] Douglas also advised that the facial lacerations indicated personal anger towards the victim: Short would often falsely tell men that she had a son who had died tragically; Bayley did, in fact, have a son who was struck by a car and killed at age 11. Bayley was never a suspect in the case, but many medical doctors and others with medical training were. Hodel draws sweeping conclusions, but when I began to investigate all I found were shadows, Hodel contends that Harnischs suspect, Walter Bayley, had a secret, but it wasnt murder. Federal documents, he tells Fallon, are much more difficult to obtain, the V.A. Bayley was 67 years old at the time of the murder, had no known history of violence or criminal activity of any kind, and is not known to have met Short, even though his daughter was a friend of Short's oldest sister. He called Harnischs theory the most plausible explanation of the murder that Ive heardthe theory is great. Her anonymity was soon transformed into notoriety and her case evolved into the nations most infamous unsolved murder. The FBI, who had been called into the case to provide forensic assistance, noted in their files the problematic behavior of the reporters. [16] Popular accounts of the Black Dahlia case often portray Hansen as having connections to organized crime, but there is no evidence of this. In his correspondence, he mentioned an intense interest in sadism and sexual violence in hopes of authoring a book on the subject. They didnt. Dillon offered up one of his friends, Jeff Connors, as a likely suspect. This interview and the Examiner article galvanized Harnisch. Another theory was that the assailant bisected Short's body because he or she was not strong enough to move it in one piece. He graduated M.B. I opened a dusty old box, and it was like exhuming a body, Lopez wrote. Virginia, had married soldier Adrian West in 1945 at the home of Dr. Walter Alonzo Bayley at 3959 S. Norton one block from where the bride's sister's corpse would be found years later. Wilson figures in Donald Wolfe's book The Mob, The Mogul, And The Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles. While he was overseas and flying P-51s in the Burmese theater he wrote and proposed marriage. He was given his fathers photo album shortly after his death, which was filled with pictures of family and friends, including several unidentified women. [36] The reason why he was a suspect is unclear, especially since Siegel was more concerned with the Flamingo Hotel and Casino at the time and he was known to be a "lady's man" not a "lady's killer." Knowlton's sister has since stated on Amazon.com's listing for Daddy Was The Black Dahlia Killer that after the publication of Knowlton's book, Tamar Hodel, daughter of George Hodel and sister of Steve Hodel, contacted Knowlton and the two women remained "email pals for several years. It later comes out that she was promiscuous, perhaps even a lady of the night. She wasnt. When the woman learned that Short was homeless, she invited her to stay at the apartment she shared with her mother and younger brother. New England has the Boston Strangler. However, contrary to popular belief, Dillon could not be conclusively placed in San Francisco at the time of the murder. Harnisch, who was in touch with the Short family, received an email from one of her sisters who saw the pictures in a magazine article about, Hodel believes his reputation was salvaged by a surprising revelation by a newspaper columnist and the support of Stephen Kay, an assistant Los Angeles County district attorney. A photograph of the suspect in the nude with a nude identified colored model was secured from his personal effects. Intimidation by a young woman colleague caused Dr. Walter A. Bayley, physician, to disinherit his wife, the widow Mrs. Ruth A. Bayley, she claimed yesterday in a will contest suit, filed in Superior Court. Former tenant of Elizabeth Short, Walter Bayley was questioned by police in relation to the slaying. The real killer, he believed, only killed once. Harnisch figures she was just trying to get rid of him. She believes that the bisection of the body was part of the killer's signature and an acting out of the perpetrator's obsession. Bayley was never a suspect in the case, but many medical doctors and others with medical training were. Writers have portrayed Short as a promiscuous loser sleeping her way across Hollywood. Only the Robbery-Homicide Division captain and Detective Mitzi Roberts, who is in charge of the case, have the keys to the storage room and the cabinet, which is stuffed to the gills, she says. No charges were ever brought against him. And when you run into coincidences in a homicide investigation, you want to go, Wait a minute. And thats what it made me say, Wait a minute., Rick Jackson, who spent a decade in LAPDs elite Robbery-Homicide Division and was the assistant officer in charge of the departments Cold Case Unit before he retired, is familiar with Harnischs theory. Life. The LAPDs investigative files for the Short murder are stored in a four-drawer metal cabinet located in a locked storage room on the fifth floor of the Police Administration Building. She wasnt. Short spent about a month at the apartment, briefly dating a number of men before she met a pipe clamp salesman by the name of Robert Red Manley. Douglas asked Harnisch what he knew about the neighborhood. It was so white and separated in the middle. We can win experience, but never achieve innocence. Jack Anderson Wilson (a.k.a. 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. Harnisch was devastated. [20], Author James Ellroy endorsed Steve Hodel's theory in 2004,[21] but has since refused to discuss the case publicly. On January 15, 1947, the "Black Dahlia" was discovered murdered in Los Angeles. With neither the energy nor motivation to finish his book, he put it aside. Its just about watertight in most ways., LAPD Detective Brian Carr, who was in charge of the Dahlia case at the time, was more equivocal at the dinner, but still found all the coincidences relating to Bayley and the murder intriguing. The murder of Elizabeth Short has never been solved, despite the work of many detectives and law enforcement officers. The office in his small South Pasadena home is crammed with five metal file cabinets, twenty boxes of file folders, and four bookcases lined with hundreds of books, all focused on the Short homicide or Los Angeles history. With this condition you could see a radical change in personality, says Fallon, who has written extensively about the neural circuitry of criminal behavior. Dumais was cleared of any involvement in the crime, although he continued to claim he killed Short each time he was arrested for various offenses, well into the 1950s. Short called Hansen from San Diego on January 8, making him one of the last people known to have spoken to her. He described her as a pathological liar. The jury acquitted the doctor. At the time of the murder, Bayley's estranged wife still lived in the home. I base that conclusion on the way the body was bisected.It is unusual in the sense that the point at which the body was bisected is, according the eminent medical men, the easiest point in the spinal column to severhe hit it exactly.. I shadowed him on his last day on the job when I was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and during lunch at a dim, smoky steakhouse near downtown, I asked him about the Dahlia case. He also spends the evening wandering around the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel, where Short was last seen, paying homage to her and ruminating about the case. Lindgren told Harnisch how scandalized the family was when her father left them for Partyka. It turns out that T.J.s wife wouldnt write to him, so Charlie got Short to write him and send him the photo., After her body was found in the South Los Angeles lot, a savannah of-ankle high weeds and yard clippings, the afternoon, Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window), Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window), a co-publication with The Delacorte Review, The Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2020: Fall Preview, Five Crime and Mystery Novels Featuring Deaf Characters, The Invention of the Polygraph, and Law Enforcement's Long Search for a 'Lie Detector', Graphic Content: Talking Comics, Crime, and Craft with Benjamin Percy, The Expatriates: Spy Fictions Hapless Unfortunates, The Many Levels of Mystery: Whodunnit? to Whydunnit? and Beyond, But Wheres Its Anus? On How We Imagine Alien Lifeforms, How Lower-Class Innovation, Like, Changes the Langwage, A Shed of Ones Own (in Upstate New York), Katy Simpson Smith on Writing a Southern Woman Louder Than Herself, Girls to the Front: A Reading List of Provocative Feminist History. She wasnt. While some of the original 24 suspects were discounted, new ones have arisen. 's office wrote: Doctor George Hodel, M.D. Manley was the leading suspect at one time, and Harnisch interviewed a detective who investigated him. And his medical office, where he specialized in performing hysterectomies and mastectomies, was only a few blocks from the Biltmore Hotel. The author, Steve Hodel, who fingered his father as the killer, wasnt the first writer to make this claim. Stephen Kay proclaimed the case solved, but others have noted that he had formed this conclusion by treating Steve's many disputed assertions as established fact. This launched Hodels investigation. Text is available under the Creative . His first draft, he realized, had been overstuffed, encyclopedic rather than dramatic. His research takes us to a deceased surgeon named Walter Bayley. Some writers contended the original detective team was inept. The nickname alone, he says, was not enough. The horrific homicide has sparked such enduring fascination that the crime has been transformed into kitsch. 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 Streetthe same building as Bayleys office. 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. Harnisch interviewed Shorts youngest sister, Muriel, who told him she has avoided reading anything about the murder, although her daughters had read a few books because after all she was their auntbut my poor mother. Dr. Walter Bayley considered the most likely suspect in Black. And he wasnt just a cop with the Long Beach P.D. On January 15th. But it wouldnt necessarily affect his sensory or motor skills and he could still do surgeries. Thats the kind of thing Adrian West would have done. When asked about an element of the investigation, he is often reluctant to answer, and instead says, Let me check my files. He then lunges out of his chair, disappears into his office, roots through the photocopied newspapers clippings, inquest reports, and investigative files, and returns with a precise answer. There was nothing then in the way of support groupsThe family has put so much time into trying to get away from ittrying to put it behind us.. For decades, the gruesome death of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short remained a mystery. About a dozen patrol officers, sergeants, command officers, and detectives descended upon the scene, in addition to numerous reporters and photographers. Now I feel Im on the right track.. At the time of the Black Dahlia murder, George Hodel lived in the famous Sowden House which he had bought. The Walter Bayley Theory The theory of Walter Bayley was devised by Larry Harnisch, an LA Times copy editor. Harnisch found the books for the 3900 block of South Norton Avenue and he worked his way through them until he reached the 1940s. It didnt look quitelike anything more than perhaps an artificial model. 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. She was the matron of honor at the wedding of Elizabeth Shorts oldest sister in Inglewood. 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. No suspects were detained, and no further evidence has been uncovered as of yet. He was raised in Illinois and Arizona and moved to Southern California when he was hired by the, To know who to interview, he needed to conduct more research. Author James Ellroy endorsed Harnisch's theory in the 2001 film James Ellroy's Feast of Death. His father was devastated. 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. Then he had to determine who was still alive. She claimed the same source told her that future LAPD chief and California politician Ed Davis and Los Angeles County District Attorney Buron Fitts were suspects in the murder as well. [9][10] The publication of the Long Beach Police The Rap Sheet said that a former member of LA's Gangster Squad investigating the case believed that Leslie Dillon was the killer and when Dillon returned to his home state of Oklahoma was able to avoid extradition to California because Dillon's relative was the governor of Oklahoma. Among authors, the case has resonated for decades. I havent seen anyone come close to what hes done. He was also a member of the military. But covering up a murder corruptiondefinitely not.. Harnisch points out that this was a hulking eight-story medical building devoted entirely to doctors, so just having an office there proves nothing. When Bayley died in January 1948, his autopsy showed that he was suffering from degenerative brain disease. At some point, he was approached by long retired LAT copy editor Larry Harnisch who pitched him his "No no. The murder of Elizabeth Short, nicknamed the Black Dahlia, is one of the oldest and most compelling unsolved cases in the history of Los Angeles. Yes, there was some corruption in the department, but that was mostly in Vice. Or that, at the very least, she was promiscuous. The killer, Douglas surmised, had some connection to the neighborhood. Walter Alonzo Bayley (1880-1948) graduated from USC's School of Medicine in 1905. He has been unable, however, to interest law enforcement authorities in following up on his claims. [deleted] 8 yr. ago Thanks for the video link! The Murder of Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia; Los Angeles' Most Famous Unsolved Killing", "Heaven Is Here! The cop/son is a little questionable, though. It was very difficult to be subjected to all that negative exposure.. Hes a journalist, he lets the facts guide him, and he doesnt have any agenda other than the truth. He had almost completed his second draft, Ellroy was interested in writing the introduction and was going to set up him up with his agent. "The things that she is saying are not consistent with the facts of the case. While other Los Angeles murder victims had been brutalized and their bodies mutilated, Harnisch acknowledges there was something sui generis about what the killer had done to Elizabeth Short. 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. The truth is she came out to Southern California for a man. He had the strange habit of watching surgery films at night. After Wilson's death, Gilmore named Wilson as a suspect owing to his alleged acquaintance with Short. Doing another story like that didnt interest me. This page is not available in other languages. Harnisch is writing a book about the case, but the homicide and the investigation are only part of his focus. Nevertheless, Westminster, California police took her claims seriously enough to dig up the grounds around her childhood home there, looking for evidence. Lane had lived in Los Angeles at the time of the murder and was employed by Columbia Studios, a favorite hangout of Short's, as a maintenance man. At the time of the murder, Bayley's estranged wife still lived in the home. 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