Tasha 0:00

1946 brought an anthem of American exceptionalism. The United States, for our efforts to win the war, would be the biggest, the best, the most beautiful it had ever been. You might say they were making America great again. What? What? With the incoming freeways to Los Angeles, LA government guaranteed the cost of living would go down. In New York, the United Nations General Assembly was meeting for its second session to discuss the Commission on Human Rights. The first commercial TV station west of the Mississippi River was going on air, promising free news and entertainment inside your home.

SPEAKER_02 0:37

Nice.

Tasha 0:38

No more going to the theater right there in your living room.

SPEAKER_02 0:40

Yeah, because that's where they did their news was the theater.

Tasha 0:42

Exactly. In Frankfurt, Germany, General Dwight Eisenhower, I know him, he declared that no nation should ever employ a nuclear weapon again. And in Nuremberg, the trials against war criminals promised that no one, not even leaders, no matter how rich or how powerful they were, could commit crimes against humanity without being held responsible.

SPEAKER_02 1:05

I love that.

Tasha 1:06

No general, no president, and no the king would be above the law. 1947 they promised it was gonna be safer, better, and more prosperous. Meanwhile, as Stephen Colbert likes to say, meanwhile. Meanwhile, millions of hungry Americans were filling the lines of soup kitchens daily. The US, where you know Eisenhower was from, the US and Russia was continuing their focus on developing nuclear weapons, students were dropping out of college left and right, landlords were holding open housing hostage in protest of the new government rent ceilings, to just not letting people move into open houses. The new freeways were bringing in smog and destroying established neighborhoods, and television is killing the film industry. I'm Tasha.

SPEAKER_02 1:56

This is Matt.

Tasha 1:57

Join us today as we investigate how this societal powder keg led to the real twisty story of the Black Dahlia. Welcome to Real Twisty Setting Story Straight. We are deep in the story of Elizabeth Short and the Black Dahlia. And this is the episode where we're going to hear about her death. So if you're someone who would like to avoid the horrible details, which I wish I could have, because I literally was crying while I was reading them. And then I accidentally happened upon a picture that was very graphic.

SPEAKER_02 2:38

Yeah.

Tasha 2:39

And I've seen that made me cry. The one from her autopsy.

SPEAKER_02 2:43

It is so unreal.

Tasha 2:44

Like of just her, it's just like the sheet is up covering her body, and you just see her neck and her face, and that made me cry all over again.

SPEAKER_02 2:53

I emotionally file saw other pictures that showed like the bisection and all that stuff.

Tasha 3:00

I'm so sorry.

SPEAKER_02 3:01

It was crazy.

Tasha 3:02

For the most part, a lot of those pictures are kind of like you've got to dig for them. Yeah. But I mean, so are you saying you dug for them?

SPEAKER_02 3:08

No. Well.

Tasha 3:10

So you don't have to dig for them. You just have to go to the wrong website.

SPEAKER_02 3:13

I went to this one like investigators uh website and he had disclaimers before you clicked into the clicking. So I was like, look real fast.

Tasha 3:23

So you clicked into the clicking, Martin. I did not. I happened upon it rightfully, innocently, without choosing.

SPEAKER_02 3:32

That was it was really rough. I was clickbaited.

Tasha 3:34

Well, we are hoping not to scar the rest of you, like I have been scarred. So if you want to avoid the details of how Beth's body was found, um, what was done to her, I will put an estimated timestamp of where that part begins in the show notes, show notes that you can tap out when you need to tap out. This is part three of Elizabeth Short, whom we call Beth.

SPEAKER_02 4:00

Yeah. This was supposed to just be a two-parter.

Tasha 4:02

But it's probably gonna be a four-parter.

SPEAKER_02 4:04

Yeah.

Tasha 4:04

Okay. Um, Beth also occasionally went by Betty, which we're gonna see some more tank there are no coincidences, Elisa Kelly moments.

SPEAKER_02 4:14

So I I want to preface, and you're probably gonna say this, but our first two episodes of this was all about the life of Betty before she died. So it's clarifying like how she lived, yeah, her personality, what other people perceived of her, which is very skewed from what you can find out there. Um, even from the Black Dawya movie that's out there from 2006-7 to 2006. Yeah, yeah.

Tasha 4:38

Um which is what led us down this rabbit hole.

SPEAKER_02 4:41

She is shown in that movie to be very uh scandalous and a little promiscuous, yeah. Promiscuous, even though she showed some hesitation in some of the scenes, like she was not perceived by her friends or family or acquaintances that way. Anyone who knew her, um, except for like one individual that probably had a beef with her because he didn't get what he wanted. Exactly. Which sounds like a lot of men out there. Yeah, so yeah, so we went through if you want to go back through her life before that, those first two episodes cover that. Um, and they're very good and very well done. And Osha's probably gonna talk about the books that she used.

Tasha 5:17

I am that research that what what you should know is that if you want to go back to episodes one and two, part one and two, not episodes one and two, because uh episodes one and two was Veronica Veronica part one and two of the Black Dahlia, then you can do so. And guess what? We will wait for you right here. We won't go any further with it. Right now, now, and we'll wait for you here while you catch up. Very fancy.

SPEAKER_02 5:45

Well, look at my imaginary watch while you look.

Tasha 5:48

Yes. So we've got we we met Elizabeth Beth back home in Medford. We learned about her family, we learned about how she got to California, and we followed her all the way up to six days before she died, which is the last known account of her being alive that anyone can count for.

SPEAKER_02 6:06

Allows a last interaction, yes.

Tasha 6:08

So to remind everybody where we left off, Beth has just been taken from San Diego to the Biltmore Hot Hotel in Los Angeles by a gentleman named Red, where she told him that she was going to meet her sister Jenny.

SPEAKER_02 6:22

This is not the guy from that 70s show, okay?

Tasha 6:25

This is not Red from that 70s show. This is a different Red. Um, but Jenny said she was never supposed to meet Beth. They had no plans to meet at the Billmore at the Biltmore. Red claims that he dropped her there on January 9th, 1947, and that he did not see her again. The Biltmore staff recalled seeing Beth use the telephone in the lobby of the hotel, the Crown Grill Cocktail Lounge, which is like half a mile or less from the hotel. They said that they saw her later that evening in the restaurant, getting some food, getting a drink. Red was cleared by the LAPD by passing numerous polygraph exams. And we will come to that in our story, but that's the last that we've got of Beth. And it's really indicative of kind of how her story goes, that everything about her life, even in her death, was like little tales that people told. Yeah. Um, so the Los Angeles Times, uh, I did some reading from their archives and um even some more recent stories that they've done. And they said that police learned that Short had brief encounters with many men who almost unanimously maintained that the encounters had been non-sexual. The lead detective described her as a tease, however.

SPEAKER_01 7:45

Yeah.

Tasha 7:46

Adding, she probably went too far this time and just set some guy off into a blind berserk rage. So again, yeah, and victim blaming. Ann Redding, who teaches the case of Beth Short at the Santa Barbara City College, she said one of the biggest characters that influences the mythos of this case is post-war Los Angeles because there was such a backlash happening to the whole Rosie the Riveter movement.

SPEAKER_03 8:10

Yeah.

Tasha 8:11

Um, and women were expected to go back to being wives and mothers in the home. She said that she believes that that heavenly, heavily, not heavenly, heavily influenced the misogyny of the time and of Beth's case. So in the 1940s, we're gonna kind of talk about that for a little bit. Okay. I want to talk about where we're at, what we're doing, and again the culture and all of it. The culture of it. Matt mentioned um William Mann, William J. Mann's book, M-A-N-N, is his last name, uh, The Black Dahlia, and it has a much longer title. There's semicolon and like or colon. That came out when came out in January of this year.

SPEAKER_02 8:48

Yeah, 2026.

Tasha 8:50

Yes. He has done the Lord's work, like researching, going through everything he could get his hands on, talking to whomever he could that was related to the families at the time. Um, because what we're gonna find is that uh later on we'll we'll uncover that the last living detective from the original team passed away at the age of like 88. Wow, a few years ago. So he was very young. He was like 24, 25 whenever he entered the case. And so this, you know.

SPEAKER_02 9:20

Oh, he's probably newly a detective or something like that.

Tasha 9:23

Yep. So there, you know, of people who were around, the list is few. Yeah. So a lot of people that he talked to were family members, and he just did so much legwork. It's a beautiful book, so well done. And I have set up a bookshop.org page that kind of has all of the books that that we use as references for all of our cases there. And what I've done with this one, because we are going to talk about a lot of the theories that come up with Beth and the who-done it of it all. And a lot of those come from books that get written later. So I did, I was I went back and forth on this because I was like, but these are not well, in some cases, they're not well researched stories. So I don't want to lead people down the wrong path. So, but we do reference them. I do want people to be able to, you know, read them and read them, determine them, and figure out for themselves what they believe. Do the the LeVar Burton of it all, you know, don't take our word for it. Yeah. So I have linked as many of those books that are still in publication in that list. And that is in our show notes, the the link to that. So you can kind of go through and find all of those. There is one book, and we'll talk about it very briefly today by Agnes Underwood. She was a reporter, and it is no longer in print. So if you want it, it's not linked in our bookshop.org site because you can't get it from a normal you gotta go to eBay and pay, you know, $100 or so to be able to get a copy of that book, which is why I have to do it.

SPEAKER_02 10:52

Or see if you can find it in a library somewhere.

Tasha 10:54

Yeah, good luck with that. Uh, I believe that it only had one publication. Wow. Yeah, so it's a little hard to get your hands on, but William J. Mann did, and he read it, and we've got a quote from it from him because again, he did the Lord's work. So are you ready?

SPEAKER_02 11:09

I'm ready.

Tasha 11:10

I'm gonna dive in.

SPEAKER_02 11:11

I'm gonna take another drink.

Tasha 11:12

And I know I'm gonna wet my whistle, as they would have said in the 1940s. I think I think that's where it came from. Uh, in the 1940s, women in America were gaining more agency and authority over their own lives. They were traveling further alone, like Beth. They were getting jobs and they were supporting their families in a lot of instances. But as their independence raised, so did this like collective rage about the upset of societal norms and women just not staying in their place. And as a result, brutality against women increased as well. On top of that, we saw a definite downturn in the economy. So between 1945 and 46, unemployment was up 2%. The gross domestic product crashed 10 points into negative territory, and inflation rose from 2.2 to 11.6% in one year. So what we see in economic, you know, downturns and times of economic despair is an increase in homicide rates.

SPEAKER_03 12:17

Yeah.

Tasha 12:17

That's just a national US fact over time, but always been linked. There it is. So that was definitely happening here. National homicide rate was at its lowest point in the decades before 1944. It had had an 11-year decrease leading up to 1944. So that was the lowest it had been in decades. And then the war ended, and the FBI marked that there was a surge in crime. So bank robberies went up 40% after the war. Oh, homicides were up 10% from 1944 to 1945, and they were still rising in 1946, resulting in a 31% increase over three years' time. The lynchings of black men were at pre-war levels in 1946. In 1947, homicide rates started to lower in the United States, but it took until 1955 to get back down below the rate at 1944. So it literally took, what is that, 47 to 55? You're looking at eight years, took eight years to get back down.

SPEAKER_02 13:19

Not that the we can delve into this, but I wonder if some of that was also like PTSD of soldiers that came back. Okay.

Tasha 13:27

Because in LA there was a noticeable decrease, but it did not occur until 1948. So in the United States, they started to see that decrease in homicide rates in 1947, but they did not see the same effect happen in LA until a year after that in 48. William J. Mann said that the FBI's response was to blame young people because they'd never been taught morality or empathy or civic responsibility, but it was unfounded by evidence. In fact, while other crimes were more popular among younger demographics, like public indecency, getting drunk in public, even robberies, things like that. Statistics showed that murders were being committed by older adults. So the statistics then led to the violent veteran idea. Basically, they all returned with PTSD, and that was the cause for the homicide rates, is what the FBI started leaning into. And in fact, they started to publicly blame the Western U.S. crime rate on an influx of military personnel and camp followers. So they were just like, California, your problem is that the soldiers came to you. In LA County, the murder rate jumped 23.6% between 1945 and 46. So that's just Los Angeles County.

SPEAKER_03 14:49

Yeah.

Tasha 14:49

Previous increases had been between 7 and 10% a year. So you're looking at 7 to 10% during the war, and then all of a sudden the war ends and it jumps up to 23.6% increase in one year.

SPEAKER_03 15:03

Yeah.

Tasha 15:03

And while the homicide rate grew about 26.8% for men in that year, for women, it grew 52.9%. So more women.

SPEAKER_02 15:14

You're talking about victims. Yes. Okay.

Tasha 15:16

More women, violence against women was much more um 50%, over 50%.

SPEAKER_02 15:22

That's crazy.

Tasha 15:23

Yes. That's how much it raised.

SPEAKER_02 15:25

Yeah.

Tasha 15:26

And that, and it's not just not that any murder is big.

SPEAKER_02 15:30

Or too small.

Tasha 15:31

Or too small. But these murders were becoming more and more gruesome. It was violent murders, very violent murders, people getting cut up and shipped off in suitcases. Like there's one story. It's craziness. Wow. So man makes a correlation that when homicide rates are low, those homicides are usually tied to family and acquaintance murders. That's the most common is you were killed by someone you know.

SPEAKER_02 16:00

Someone intimate or something.

Tasha 16:02

But when there's a high surge like they were experiencing in 1946, those murders or more stranger, stranger, danger. Yeah. Stranger led, stranger, uh, what am I trying to say? Murders by strangers predominate the number. So the messaging, let me try that sentence again. So the messaging shifted now towards the stranger. Okay. So at this time, Los Angeles is still racially segregated. That's important to note. There was a campaign that was called Keep the White Spot White. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:36

Yeah. I was like America.

Tasha 16:37

Yeah. So the white spot had kind of a twofold meaning. It started because there was a map that rated national crime. And when this map had been made, white was the indicator for the least amount of crime. And Los Angeles County was like the only part of the country that was white. Everything else had color grids indicating percentages of white or percentages of crime. So they started this keep the white spot white to indicate, you know, let's keep crime rates down. But they were also saying that they needed to keep people of color out of the area in order to do so. And as part of the campaign, they actually put a large white dot underneath the Hollywood land sign. So when you would look at Holly at the Like physically put a white dot? Yeah, there was a white dot below it to like remind people this is what we're striving for.

SPEAKER_02 17:33

Wow. So did you see any pictures of that? I did. Wow.

Tasha 17:36

Yep. When I first started reading about it, I was like, so and they like spotlighted it. Spotlight spot. Mm-hmm. That's like highlighted, but shouldn't it be highlight? I don't know. They spotlighted the white dot. And so when when I first read about it, I was like, so does that mean that like they just had a spotlight that was the white dot? No, they physically created a white dot that would have been like if you had put a period at the end of the sign, like it was that size, but it was centered underneath it, underneath it. And then they put a spotlight on it to like really get that message across. Um, so it began with the messaging of let's keep the hoodlums out. And sometimes they did say the gross part out loud, but a lot of times it was just implied that their aim was to keep out anyone who was not a middle to upper class white American of European descent. That was that was the line. The message, yeah. That was the message. So while this is all happening, the Cold War is ramping up. The message there is that outsiders threaten the American way of life, the white capitalist way of life, right? So in 1945, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was made a permanent congressional committee. And within a year, they were focused on the film industry with the Red Scare and creating the Hollywood blacklist, purging communist, Jewish, African Americans, and LGBTQ members from the community. That was their focus. In LA, the city council campaigned to close bars that quote unquote catered to unbridled and strange passions so that they could maintain a good standard of morals. So essentially they were saying if there is a bar that caters to people of color, if there is a bar that caters to the LGBTQ community, um, we're going to target them and close them down. So that was under attack by the LA City Council. And then housing covenants started to really ramp up. And the housing covenants prevented people of color from moving into the new housing projects. And that included the one in Lymark Park, which is where Beth's body was found.

SPEAKER_03 19:47

Okay.

Tasha 19:48

President Truman issued executive order number 9086, which established a committee on employee loyalty, and it allowed the removal of anyone who was suspected to be a member of the LGBTQ community. Um, and anyone who was suspected of being a communist or a communist sympathizer, they could be removed from their government jobs.

SPEAKER_02 20:09

Just under suspend just being suspected of it.

Tasha 20:13

Implied is really just implied, not even like implication, no proof, they could be removed. My brain kept wanting to say uh suspense, you know, but that was not the word. Suspected is the word. So during the Red Scare, more than 12,000 people lost their jobs, their homes, their social stand social standings, and their families from being accused of being communist or communist loyalist or sympathizer.

SPEAKER_02 20:38

The lavender scale or they live a lifestyle that they don't agree with.

Tasha 20:42

This is where it is the lavender scare, which targeted specifically the LGBTQ community, that cost another 5,000 plus people. So, in all, the red lavender scare affected more than 17,000 people.

SPEAKER_02 20:57

I've never heard of the lavender scare. That's crazy.

Tasha 21:00

Yes. And those numbers, the more than 17,000, do not include people who became so desperate during the investigations or after the investigations that they took their own lives. So it's just these are the people who lost their jobs, lost their families, lost their standing. It does not include people who became so desperate that they could not see another way out. Oh, yeah. So though crime was up in LA, the representation of it in our movie, The Black Dahlia, is really misleading. And we need to circle back to that. The movie starts with a depiction of the Zoot Suit riots, which I need to like just come right out right now and say that in the 90s, when that song came out, I legit did not know it was an actual thing. I had never heard of the Zoot Suit riots, but I grew up in Kansas City. I didn't know that it was a real thing. Did you had you heard of it before?

SPEAKER_02 21:52

No, I don't even know what song you're talking about.

Tasha 21:54

You don't know the zoot suit riots?

SPEAKER_02 21:56

I don't.

Tasha 21:56

Oh, I'm gonna have to play it for you.

SPEAKER_02 21:58

Okay, but no, I have never heard of it. Of it.

Tasha 22:00

It's wit in the past.

SPEAKER_02 22:01

I also never heard of the Falsa massacre. I've never heard of it.

Tasha 22:03

Right? There are so many things.

SPEAKER_02 22:04

There's so many things that they didn't teach us at all.

Tasha 22:07

Um, so the Zoot Suit riots actually took place in June of 1943. So we're talking three and a half years before Beth moved to California. Well, no, I mean it's three and a half years before her body is found.

SPEAKER_02 22:19

Okay, yeah.

Tasha 22:20

In 1942, the American government just wanted to let you all know, the government created a deal with Mexico called the Braciero Program. And what this did was it invited Mexican citizens into the U.S. for jobs. In LA alone, this program brought 17,000 Mexican citizens to LA to work. This increased the already growing number of Latino Americans that were in LA. And LA newspapers started blaming the increase in crime on the increase of Latinos in the city. But there was no proof that they were tied together. But it was selling papers, you know? And if that wasn't enough, their clothes, their zoot suits were pissing people off. So the zoot suit look evolved out of Harlem and had been made famous by musicians like Duke Ellington. It is the big oversized jackets with the baggy pants, the chain, the hats, the big, um, like heavy-soled shoes. It's very like everything that everybody was wearing whenever it was the 90s and they were trying to bring back big band swing music, and then they were like the big that's that's what we're talking, okay? Um, shouldn't have been that big of a deal. But the youth culture of the Latino community in LA really like took to that look. They were really impressed by it, and they it it became like a part of their culture while they were in LA. Shouldn't have been a big deal, except that during the war, the use of wool had been banned in clothing manufacturing because it was being saved to make um uniforms for soldiers. And these zoot suits that were oversized, they used more wool than your standard clothes.

SPEAKER_03 24:07

Yeah.

Tasha 24:07

Um, so the creation of new zoot suits became like a black market activity. That's basically how they had to buy these clothes. They had to buy it on the black market. Yeah. But if you were wore a zoo suit, and I did some research, there were men's zoot suits and women's zoot suits. So it was, you know, it wasn't just the guys, but people saw them as being unpatriotic and not supporting the war efforts, even though some of the zoot suitors voluntarily signed up for the war to fight for the US.

SPEAKER_03 24:40

Yeah.

Tasha 24:40

Okay. They didn't care. So in August 1942, there was a fight that broke out in a home outside of LA.

SPEAKER_03 24:47

Okay.

Tasha 24:47

And there were 10 people who were beaten. One person died, and the newspaper article that I saw said that there was fear that another person had drowned in a pool. And the newspapers, like the LA Times, they reported on it, and they and the police assigned blame for this on the 38th Street gang, which was an actual Mexican-American gang on 38th Street that wore Zoot suits. Okay. Um, and the newspaper article even called out that the Zoot Suit girls took part in it, that like they were being violent too.

SPEAKER_03 25:26

Oh, wow.

Tasha 25:26

So hundreds of Zoot suitors got rounded up by the police after this happened. It was just, you're dressed that way, you're coming with us. Even if they had no tie to the 38th Street gang, they got grabbed and of all of those people, 22 of them were found guilty of this crime. Later, it was considered to be this like huge miscarriage of justice, but that didn't come until years later. And so we're looking at just a ton of people getting rounded up by the police because of the color of their skin, because of the clothes that they're wearing. Yeah. They have been assumed to be associated with a gang and they're being put in prison for it and tried for a crime that they may or may not have had anything to do with. I'm not saying that we're seeing history repeat itself, but when I read about this, I was like, oh my gosh, that is America today. So the reporting on the trial really riled up the community. They sold so many papers reporting on this trial and like creating this villain out of the zoo suitors.

SPEAKER_03 26:29

Yeah.

Tasha 26:29

Um, and all it really did was like confirm for the community that there was a real reason why they should be afraid of zoot suitors and that they were violent threats to society. That's basically the message. So a few months later, a group of 16 US sailors claimed that a group of zoot suitors mouthed off to them. And so they took cabs to East LA and decided it was just fine to go grab whatever person they could find dressed in zoot suits and beat the shit out of them with batons and whatever they had found along the way to use as weapons. So they were just grabbing things off the street to use as weapons against the streets.

SPEAKER_02 27:10

It's just because people like assumed talked bad to them or something. Wow, that's very sensitive.

Tasha 27:22

Uh-huh. So they go down and they are just walking into these communities, grabbing people out of their homes, out of businesses, dragging them to the street. They're beating them, like stripping their clothes off of them, and then catching their clothes on fire in front of them. So these Latinos are literally stripped naked in the street and beaten. The violence just erupted, and it was no longer just these 16 sailors that were fighting. Um, tons of servicemen and civilians alike joined the mob. And for days, they went into Mexican American, African American, and Filipino American communities and just beat and stripped anyone they saw wearing a zoo suit. And the police did not arrest the mobs of violent actors when they arrived. Uh, can you guess who they arrested?

SPEAKER_02 28:13

They arrested everyone else.

Tasha 28:14

They arrested the victims and claimed that they were doing it for their protection. By June 8th, 1943, the rioting had grown so violent that in fear of losing this crucial labor source that they had built up by bringing people into the country, they decided, okay, we need to calm things down. So all military personnel were banned from Los Angeles so that they could get a handle on what was happening. And then they brought in the military police to gain control of the riots, like just hoping that they could get control of it and that things would calm down. So that's how the riots kind of ended. The governor afterwards commissioned a report hoping to make the citizens of LA look better and to point the blame of the riots on the zoo suitors. But the report that was created by the Independent Citizens Commission found racism by white citizens of LA to be the cause for the riots. They called the newspapers out for encouraging the riots. They named the city government and the U.S. military complicit for allowing the riots to continue due to their own racism towards Mexican Americans and other non-whites.

SPEAKER_02 29:27

This that's crazy that a report that like that actually came out.

Tasha 29:31

Yes. So this episode in LA history, this horrific moment in LA history is featured at the beginning of the Black Dahlia, the 2006 film by Brian De Palma. It sadly really reinforces like this justified racism, which is very frustrating and pisses me off. But as the movie is starting, there's a radio bulletin that plays over this fight breaking out in the street. And it says violence between servicemen and zoot suitors reached a new level tonight after the wives of two sailors were criminally attacked. An order listing Los Angeles as a restricted area has not deterred the fighting, but the Los Angeles Police Department assures the public that it has the situation completely under control. Well, first of all, there were not two sailors' wives that were harmed in any way. It was 16 sailors who were pissed off that they felt someone got mouthy with them.

SPEAKER_03 30:26

Yeah.

Tasha 30:26

And that's what started the shit. So the movie completely represents it like they did it because women were harmed or wronged. And that is not how that played out at all. So that pisses me off. I was very unhappy when I went back and watched it and found that that moment in the film. The movie then like shows a ton of overturned cars that are on fire and like just lots of cars on fire in the street with sailors fighting, zoot suitors, and then the cops are like just standing nearby. They're like making comments about how fast a Latino man can run, and they're using really extremely offensive slurs to describe the man. Yeah. And then there's a sailor and a member of the military police who were like making bets on who's gonna win. Yeah. The the zoot suitor or the sailor. And um, and it this the riots are just continuing on in this madness, right? But in actuality, there were no fiery overturned cars. The things that were caught on fire were their clothes, and there weren't these like huge street battles that played out the way that they were making it look. They they made it look like the zoot suitors were part of it, like they were like LA riot type. Yeah, but these people were literally getting drugged out of their homes. Um, so if they were, if a person was non-white wearing a zoo suit, they were targeted. Period. Victims were as young as 12 years old. In the movie, we get a taste for the corruption in the city, but we also get at this moment introduced to Aaron Eckhart's character and um Josh Hartnett's character. And they are fighting off multiple sailors to protect this one zoot suitor who's like backed up against a wall in fear. And so you're like, yes, they're like, they're the only two good cops in the city. The other cops are being lazy or like standing on the side making bets and jokes. These two guys are like getting in it to protect this man. And so for a second, you're like, yes, but then they arrest him after they save him. Um, and later it's justified because we find out that he was a criminal. And the whole reason why they were fighting off the sailors was so that Aaron Heckart's Eckhart's character could um arrest him because he recognized him as a as a wanted criminal. Wow. Yes. So it really reinforces this.

SPEAKER_02 32:51

They didn't pay attention too much to that scene. So no. I knew that the riot thing was going on, but I did not pay attention to what they were doing or whatever.

Tasha 33:00

It's it's just really, really shitty. So church and civic leaders claimed these rising crime rates on moral decay and collapse, and they put a lot of focus on women in the workplace, families breaking up, single-parent homes, children out of wedlock, the fall of the traditional family. Between 1940 and 50, female-headed households raised by 33 percent. Oh, and that was like a huge thing for the churches. But hello, how many of these homes had men that didn't come back from war?

SPEAKER_02 33:31

Yeah, correct. That's what I was just thinking. Yeah.

Tasha 33:33

Between 42 and 48 out of wedlock births raised by 20%. And I'm like, okay, well, how many of them like had sex before the guy took off for war?

SPEAKER_03 33:44

Yeah.

Tasha 33:44

You know, in one decade, divorced or widowed women running households raised by 94%. So literally from 40 to 50, divorced and widowed women ran households raised by 94%. Oh, the number of divorced women doubled in the US during that decade. But this was largely due to the number of couples that married like hastily at the start of the war. You know, I'm never gonna see you again.

SPEAKER_02 34:11

They barely knew each other or something like that.

Tasha 34:13

And then the guy comes back, the war's over, and then they are living together, and they're like, the heck do we do? We are the most incompatible people ever. And they really like that's where a lot of this is.

SPEAKER_02 34:25

Well, and then even like the guys coming back from the war, like their personalities are way different.

Tasha 34:29

Yes. Not to mention that while they were gone, you know, a lot of women had their wives had met other men while while their husbands were at war, but also the husbands at war had met European women and had fallen in love with them. So this is a whole thing. But keep in mind that divorce was very difficult on the women, not on the men, on the women, yeah, but more so that than just like that social shame that Phoebe short experienced herself.

SPEAKER_02 34:58

Well, I'm sure like financially it was just like because they couldn't get credit, they couldn't, you know, like we talked about before.

Tasha 35:04

They hadn't earned the nationwide right to keep their own wages and property until 1900. So literally some 40 odd years before, they had just begun to have the right to keep their own salaries, to keep any property that they owned before they got married. Yeah, it no longer just transferred straight over. But now in the 1940s, women are in the workforce because they have to be. We have to keep things running back home. Yeah, they now have the financial means to escape bad marriages, but they were unable to file for divorce without proof of some fault on their husband's part, like adultery, um, bigamy, or physical abuse. And physical abuse didn't even work in every state because there were states that made allotments for you can beat your wife with a stick up to this thick. Like those are real things. So in 1940, a quarter of women were employed outside of the home. But by 1950, that number had increased to one-third of all women, which is not a significant jump, but was significant enough that the churches were pissed off. Yeah. Though they were working, though, they wouldn't earn rights against employment discrimination and they wouldn't earn protection for equal pay until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So, yes, there are more women working, but these women are facing so much crap in the workplace and they're not getting paid the same.

SPEAKER_02 36:29

Received equal pay, right? Yep. Still not really there.

Tasha 36:33

And then no fault divorces, in which the husband and the wife could say, look, there's no fault, nobody has cheated, nobody's done anything wrong, but we are completely incompatible.

SPEAKER_03 36:44

Yeah.

Tasha 36:44

That didn't exist until California, which was the first state to do so, signed it into law in 1969. Do you know who signed it into law?

SPEAKER_02 36:54

1969.

Tasha 36:55

It's really my favorite.

SPEAKER_02 36:56

Was it Reagan?

Tasha 36:57

It sure the heck was.

SPEAKER_02 36:58

Oh my goodness.

Tasha 37:00

Then Governor Ronald Reagan signed it into law. Now, later, when he was president and he was being backed by churches and, you know, the religious sector and everything for him was all about saving the traditional family. He was very regretful of signing that into law. I would also like to point out that he is a once divorced man. He himself had been divorced before marrying Nancy. So, but yeah, he was very vocal about how he regretted signing the bill now that, like, you know, large religious groups were writing his campaign checks. Regardless. Um, like regardless of their right to divorce with no fault, they still didn't earn the right to have their own credit or get their own loans without a male co-signer until Ford signed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1976. Right?

SPEAKER_02 37:53

That's like 30 years later.

Tasha 37:55

Yes. So divorce was still in 1946, 47. It was very hard for them. And we can understand why women in our story, like Margie, left but didn't file for legal divorce.

SPEAKER_03 38:08

Uh-huh.

Tasha 38:08

Because it would have done her no good at all. And it would have cost her a ton of money and she wouldn't have been protected. So in the movie, we see them jump from the zoot suits pretty quickly to New Year's 1947. Like, yeah, there's a boxing match in there and a fake prop B that doesn't really exist. But you get to New Year's 1947 pretty fast. And if you don't know the dates of the riot, if you don't know that that happened in 1943, then when you're watching the movie, it looks like one day there were riots, the next day it just seemed like maybe it's like a couple months. And then it was New Year's Eve.

SPEAKER_02 38:44

Yeah.

Tasha 38:44

You know? So um the next day of work in the movie, there's a report that Raymond Jr. Nash, who's part of the mob, we understand, has he's guilty of statutory rape, armed robbery, felony mayhem, and he's served time in the Texas State Prison in Alcatraz. They tell us he has pistol whipped a little old lady near Lemert Park, and she's died. And all of his sexual misconducts, they tell us he's targeted young black girls. All the complainants have been colored, is what they say. And that is not me calling them colored, that is the actual quote from the movie. So then we hear Josh Hartnett's character say he raped children, he beat senior citizens to death, and I wanted to put him down. Like he is on a mission now because he is our good guy, right? Then we overhear this conversation that Blanchard played by Eckhart. Blanchard's having, and he's told that there's a hophead who is going to be at Norton and Coliseum that night. Norton and Coliseum are that is that is where Elizabeth's story takes place. We find, well, not we, but Beth's body is found on Norton between 39th and Coliseum in that block.

SPEAKER_03 39:56

Yeah.

Tasha 39:57

So Blanchard says that this is Nash's new quote unquote fuck pad. And the two cops go to stake out the place so that they can catch him.

SPEAKER_03 40:07

Yeah, yeah.

Tasha 40:08

When they get there, it's this apartment that's above a pet store, and it is very seedy looking. Um, a guy comes out of the apartment. He is clearly a pimp and he's sending off his two sex workers and he's like, go make me some money. Like, you know, yeah. He's just like, get out of my face. And then on the street behind the building, um, later in the morning, we see this woman walking with a pram. And then she sees something in the grass.

SPEAKER_02 40:35

From a far distance.

Tasha 40:36

Yeah, we see it from a far distance. Yeah, she's walking down the sidewalk with her pram. She sees something in the grass. She stops walking. She deserts her baby in the pram and takes off screaming down the road for help. Yeah. Baby be damned. Like she does not care about the baby, right?

SPEAKER_02 40:53

It is empty lots, though.

Tasha 40:54

It is empty lots, but then a gunfight breaks out back on the other street, right? It's a very big moment in the film for Bucky and Lee Blanchard, like huge shootout.

SPEAKER_03 41:06

Yeah.

Tasha 41:06

And after which they happen upon another crime scene, the discovery of Beth's body, just a street over. And one of the cops arrives to handle the shootout, and he's like, busy neighborhood. All right. It was not a busy neighborhood, and we're going to talk about the neighborhood now. And I'm really sorry, but we are. Leemurt Park was a 1920s era planned community neighborhood. Some of the community was already standing. There's a photo that exists as early as 1940 that shows that some of the homes had been built. People had moved into them. Um, but the building had stopped during the war. So when the killer leaves Beth's body in this empty lot, it is not just an empty lot, it is a lot on a street that actually has homes built around it. Yeah. Families living in it.

SPEAKER_02 41:53

He knew it's planned to be more residential area.

Tasha 41:56

Yes. The killer knew he was leaving the body in a place where it would be seen. This is a very intentional leaving of Beth's body. It's very intentional. Um, William J. Mann talks about how children would have walked past this on their way to get to school. Oh gosh. Yes. Um, he knew the families were nearby, and today the property now holds someone's house because the the building continued after the war.

SPEAKER_02 42:21

Yeah. After the war.

Tasha 42:22

Leamert Park was developed by Walter H. Leamert. It was 231 acres, and he was having them build spacious homes in Spanish, in like a Spanish model, and it was sold to solid middle class families. So the 1940s census showed that this neighborhood consisted of professional workforce of car and cigar salesmen. It had managers, dentists, doctors, firemen, um, hairdressers, bank execs lived in this neighborhood, bakery owners, furniture designers. This was not a seedy neighborhood, the way that they present it in the movie. There was not a shootout, right? Yes, because non-whites were barred from buying into the area. During the war, the development stalled because all of the material and labor was sent out to work on things for the war efforts. The north portion of the community was mapped out. The streets, the sidewalks, the curbs, all of that was laid. The water and the sewer pipes had already been installed, but the homes had not been built. So there were these open fields that did have weeds in them because people were not going out and managing the line. Correct. You know, now a couple named Betty and John Bursinger, they moved into Leamert Park in 1945 and they remembered the neighborhood as a nice, middle class, very congenial neighborhood, lived in by mostly new families with young children. They said it was a good place to raise a family, and that's why they chose it. Betty Bursinger is the woman who found Elizabeth Short.

SPEAKER_02 43:58

Another Betty.

Tasha 43:59

Another Betty. Betty found Betty.

SPEAKER_02 44:00

That's crazy.

Tasha 44:01

I know. So she was walking down Norton Street with her three-year-old daughter to a shop at about 10 a.m. And she saw something in the grass. And when she gets closer, she realizes this is a body. So she picked up her daughter and she ran across 39th Street to the other houses. She knocked on one house, didn't get an answer. She went to the next house, they answered, and from there, she telephoned the police. Beth was back at about what is 3815 Norton now. And that 3,800 block is where she was. So the that side of the street had 13 lots. She was almost exactly midway down the block. She was 54 feet north of the neighborhood fire hydrant. And she was in the lawn. It was literally like at most 200 to 250 feet between where her body was found and where the next person lived. Yeah. I mean, it was very close. And Beth was left right by the street. Her body was eight inches from the sidewalk plate, like um pavement.

SPEAKER_02 45:03

Yeah, that's crazy.

Tasha 45:04

So there's there's a lot of like speculation or talk that her body was way off in the distance.

SPEAKER_02 45:10

It was yeah, that's what I was reading when I was first looking into it.

Tasha 45:14

You could not pass by and not see her. It was very close to the walkway, eight inches from the sidewalk. Um, when Betty called the police, they asked what number she was calling from, but they did not ask her name. So the police were not sure of who called in the event for quite a while after. Okay. And that that also kind of led to speculation because it was like, did the did the murderer call? Like what, you know. Um, but January 15th, 1947, just before 11 a.m., the call came in over the police radio for a possible 390 down on Norton between 39th and Coliseum, which was at 3800 block in the middle of the block, west side and vacant lot, is what they said. A 390 down was code for a drunk man on the ground. Frank Perkins, who was 22, and Wayne Fitzgerald, who was 27, were the first two officers on the ground.

SPEAKER_02 46:08

That would have been like very jarring to be not a drunk person down.

Tasha 46:12

And neither of them fought in the war. So they had not even come back from having the experience of seeing like dead bodies and things.

SPEAKER_03 46:21

Yeah.

Tasha 46:21

Um, they were very new to the force and they had completely missed like the horrors of war. Frank, who was 22, had been recruited to the police force from selling shirts at Sears back when it the war was going. Yeah. And they needed to build up the force because so many of their police officers had gone to war.

SPEAKER_03 46:41

Yeah, yeah. Wow.

Tasha 46:42

So he stopped selling shirts at Sears and Roebuck and he went to train to be a police officer. Wayne, who was 27, had served stateside for war efforts, but he did construction.

SPEAKER_03 46:55

Okay.

Tasha 46:55

So none of his war experience was battled.

SPEAKER_02 47:00

He was background, yes.

Tasha 47:01

He was background worker getting things built to send off to war. They worked in the university district close to um the University of South Carolina or South Carolina, Southern California. Let me try that again.

SPEAKER_02 47:13

That was a different coast.

Tasha 47:14

That was a different place. Um, but they patrolled neighborhoods and schoolyards.

SPEAKER_03 47:19

Okay.

Tasha 47:19

That was their beat. In fact, they and all of the other area police in the loss at the Los Angeles um university district precinct, they were actually that morning looking for a four-year-old boy who had wandered away from home the day before. So wow. Their focus was, you know, all about we're trying to find this kid. And this call comes through that there's a possible downed, drunken man a couple blocks over. So since they are the closest, they are taking the call.

SPEAKER_03 47:47

Yeah.

Tasha 47:48

But they had never seen anything like they were getting ready to see. They were not prepared for what they were about to witness. So this is where we're gonna go into what they saw. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 47:58

And um time stamp start.

Tasha 48:00

Time timestamp now. Yeah. Um, and uh this this episode and the next episode are gonna be a little bit longer, but I'm gonna try and get through this as much as quickly as I can. Yeah. Uh, but I it needs it needs the right amount of attention.

SPEAKER_03 48:15

Yeah.

Tasha 48:15

So their police report says that they turned north from 39th onto Norton Avenue, driving 10 miles per hour. They saw two objects in the weeds of the lot and they got out to get a closer look. And they realized it was not a drunken man. This is definitely not a drunken man. No. Fitzgerald said they thought it was a mannequin and that someone was just playing a trick on them. At about 1110 that morning, they realized what they had and they radioed back to LAPD headquarters and asked for homicide backup. Newsrooms had police radios in them.

SPEAKER_03 48:46

Yeah.

Tasha 48:47

And so the news reporters thought very early what was going on, and they are on their way as well. Reporters from the Examiner, the Daily News, the United Press, the Associated Press, the Citizen News, and the Los Angeles Herald Express, in addition to the Los Angeles Times, um, they all started out that way. Agnes Underwood was from the Herald Express, and she actually got there before the backup detectives did.

SPEAKER_03 49:13

Wow.

Tasha 49:14

She wrote about it in her memoir, and this is the one that I've not read, but man has read. And he quotes saying that she was able to give more details there than in the article that she wrote for the paper because it was so gruesome she could not put the information in her newspaper article. So, again, if you are not one for details, now is your time to tap out, and we will see you next time. But if you're ready, here we go. You ready? Yes. Her write-up says, Amid sparse weeds, a couple of feet from the sidewalk, lay the body. It had been cut in half through the abdomen, under the ribs. The two sections were 10 to 12 inches apart. The arms bent at right angles at the elbows were raised above the shoulders, the legs were spread apart. There were bruises and cuts on the forehead and the face, which had been beaten severely. Both cheeks were slashed from the corners of the lips, almost to the ears. The liver hung out of the torso, and the entire lower section of the body had been hacked, gouged, and unprintably desecrated. So Agnes thought that Beth's hair was matted with blood. But in actuality, Beth had dyed her hair red with the henna.

SPEAKER_02 50:20

Which you talked about earlier.

Tasha 50:22

Mm-hmm. And she thought that Beth had teeth missing, but they weren't missing. It was just because Beth's teeth were so terrible.

SPEAKER_03 50:29

Yeah.

Tasha 50:30

Um, the autopsy report said that there were teeth that like had been filled in with she filled it in um with candle wax.

SPEAKER_03 50:38

Yeah.

Tasha 50:38

But then he commented that every tooth in her mouth had a cavity. So Beth was left in the lot without any clothing or jewelry. Her pubic hair was cut off almost to the skin. There were slashes carved into the skin above her vulva, and there was a deep slash on her left thigh. At this point, without a proper inspection, the right breast looked to the officers on site like it had been sliced off, and that the less the left breast looked like it had just been hacked to death. Um, but the official dead body report that was written by Detective Sidney Lambert, and he was one of just a handful of detectives that were on site, read found deceased lying with head to north, feet to south, body severed completely, approximately one inch above the navel. A portion of flesh, approximately three by four inches, had been cut from the left upper leg. He observed that rigor mortise had not set in. So he wrote that post-mortem lividity was most apparent in the front of the upper right leg, indicating that the pro the body had probably been lying face down sometime prior to its finding. He made note that her toenails were painted red and that there was a tire track in like the driveway area of the lot.

SPEAKER_03 51:50

Okay.

Tasha 51:51

In the dirt where where the driveway would have been completed and paved up to the house. Within the track, he noted that there was a smear of what looked like was possibly left by a bloody shoe. And there was another blood stain that he noted about an inch from the curb and on an um, and then blood on an empty sack that was about a foot from the body. And the sack was a bag that had previously been filled with cement, um, like concrete, okay, dried concrete before it gets mixed in. At this, but it was empty. At the scene before the investigation was even really underway. Lieutenant Paul Freestone he told the reporters, this is the most brutal example of a sex crime I have ever seen. So before they've got the autopsy, before they know what's been done to her, he automatically tells the reporters it's a sex crime. And the reporters went wild with that information. Um, I was reading one account of a reporter's, he said that he had written body and and man talks about this as well in his book, but he said that his headline, his byline for the story was woman's body left, something like woman's body left mutilated in vacant lot.

SPEAKER_03 53:03

Yeah.

Tasha 53:03

And he turned his story in, and then when it got printed, he saw that they had put beautiful before woman because oh yeah, that was gonna get more response and was going, yeah, was gonna sell more papers. Um, William Mann is very careful to set the story straight where there have been accusations in the past. Yeah, the crime scene was not compromised, it was not trampled. And in the movie, they're like suddenly all of LAPD is there.

SPEAKER_02 53:34

There's three dozen people there.

Tasha 53:35

And those are just the detectives before the reporters even show up. And they're all over the scene. Like they're walking in the grass and they're doing all sorts of bullshit things that cops would not do. Even back then, they knew not to do. Um, he was very clear the scene did not get trampled, um, no matter how it was presented, and it was not swarmed by the entire police force. They had very designated these are the cops who need to go there, these are the detectives that need to go from homicide.

SPEAKER_03 54:01

Yeah.

Tasha 54:01

The first responders did a really good job of securing the scene and the body, much of what spread about the evidence being destroyed and the body being like there were claims that a reporter had posed with the body and for a picture. Yeah. Just all of these like really horrific tales about the scene being compromised. Those were made up by newspaper men trying to get sales. Yeah. And you can actually track the majority of them back to one specific newspaper man that I will not give his name because I don't feel like he needs the time. And also, I feel bad for any family that he has left that, you know, to have that come back to bite them in the butt. But the crime scene photos and photos from newspapers show that the only detectives that were allowed on the grasp were the detectives who were there. Like, only let me try this again. Not that the only detectives, the only people on the grasp were the detectives and that they were keeping a distance from her body.

SPEAKER_03 55:00

Yeah.

Tasha 55:00

Um, man points out that there's even photographic evidence of them keeping the press back. In fact, like there's a photo of a press photographer climbing onto the roof of a car to try and get a shot of the crime scene because that's how far they had kept the press back.

SPEAKER_03 55:15

Yeah.

Tasha 55:16

Sergeant Harry L. Hansen was 43 and Finus Brown were 40, and they were assigned as lead detectives on Beth's case. They arrived at 11:35. So they're already there within, you know, half an hour or so of the first two policemen arriving on scene. Their notes read brown reddish hair, recently hennaed, fingernails bitten down to quick, the liver was visible, but the other protruding intails were were tucked under her buttocks. That's how they said it. The bisection was done in a way so as to not damage the internal organs, and they wrote the body was comparatively free of blood smears or stains, which strained blood smears or stains, which clearly indicated that it had been washed off sometime after death. They noted strangulation marks on her neck and definite rope or tie marks on both her lower legs and her arms. Because of the lack of blood, they determined that she was killed elsewhere and transported to the slot.

SPEAKER_03 56:15

Yeah.

Tasha 56:15

Hansen and Brown estimated her to be in her late teens to about 20, and the Glasgow smile had been used on her face, and that was familiar to them as being tied to mobs. I see a lot of talk out there about how it was part of the 1930 gangland attacks of LA. But when you go back and you start researching, there's no, like I could not find clear evidence that said the mafia was using it in Los Angeles in the 1930s. In fact, um, before Beth, there's only one other account that I can find in the US of it being used.

SPEAKER_03 56:51

Oh, really?

Tasha 56:52

Which is really interesting. But I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute. The but because of what they knew about that torture technique, they thought if it was they wondered if it was um connected to the mafia.

SPEAKER_03 57:03

Gotcha.

Tasha 57:03

The bisected body and the additional mutilations were so far outside of the realm of other gangland murders that they were just like, that's the only thing that would make us think mafia, because everything else about this is insane.

SPEAKER_03 57:15

Yeah.

Tasha 57:16

There was no concealment, it was a deliberate display of the killer's handiwork, is how William Mann puts it. Um, the coroner removed the body by about noon. And when they picked Beth's body up, they found that the grass underneath her body was still wet with dew. So their report read that it indicated that the body had been placed there after dew fell in the early morning.

SPEAKER_03 57:38

So that same day. Yeah.

Tasha 57:39

Um, and then that paired with the lack of rigor mortise meant that she had only been dead for hours, not more than, I think they said not more than 10 to 12 hours. Yeah, wow. The autopsy showed Beth to be 5'5, about 115 pounds. They said she had light blue eyes, but her mother said that they were green. So I don't know. Brown hair, um, badly decayed teeth. She had ligature marks on her ankles, wrists, neck, and an irregular laceration with superficial tissue loss on her right breast as long as, or as well as superficial lacerations on the right forearm, her left upper arm, and her lower left side of her chest. Um, her body had been cut in half using a technique called now I'm gonna get this wrong. Hemioporectomy.

SPEAKER_02 58:23

That sounds correct to me.

Tasha 58:24

It sounds great.

SPEAKER_02 58:25

So this was That sounds like like an official medical term.

Tasha 58:30

It is. It was a surgical technique that was taught in the 1930s. Wow. Yes, she was bisected between the second and third lumbar vertebrae. It's important to know because this was literally the only place that the killer could have cleanly bisected her without having to literally cut through like bone.

SPEAKER_02 58:48

This was this was path of least resistance.

Tasha 58:51

Yes. Um, the lack of bruising along that incision indicated that the severing was made after her death when she did not have blood flowing through her body. The lacerations on either side of her mouth um measured three inches on the right and two and a half inches on the left. Um, her skull was not fractured, but bruising was noted on the front and right side of her scalp with internal and external bleeding consistent with blows to the head from an iron instrument with a blunt edge. The bruising and blood around the cuts from her mouth indicated that that was done while she was still alive. She had rope burns on her wrists, on her forearms, and her neck. And this is information directly from her autopsy report. The right breast had irregular lacerations with superficial loss of skin, but with greater tissue loss around her nipple. Her left breast had an elliptical carving, and these cuts all took place after her death. The organs of her chest were all in their natural correct locations. Her lungs showed no signs of previous smoking. Her heart and lungs were very healthy, especially like that's notable, especially given her asthma and her previous lung illnesses. Um, the autopsy found that her larynx, her pharynx, uh, those were both still intact. Damage was not done to the hyoid, the thyroid, or the trachea, which indicated that she had not died by strangulation. The cause of death was noted to be hemorrhaging from the lacerations to her face and the shock from the blows to her head and her face. She had suffered a concussion. Some of the abuse to her body suggested that she may have been raped, but testing came back negative for sperm. Um, but I do want to point out that condoms were already in practice at this time. So, yes, there was no sperm present, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there was not a sexual abuse.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:52

Or they could have used objects, right?

Tasha 1:00:54

Yeah, yep. Um, and she what's interesting is that she was actually allergic to the rubber that was being used in condoms at the time. She had seen a doctor for a previous allergic reaction. Wow. She was given the Glasgow smile, also known as the Chelsea smile or the Chelsea grin. Um, and this originated in Glasgow during Scotland's Industrial Revolution in the 1820s and 30s.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:17

Okay.

Tasha 1:01:17

But by the end of World War One, they had these new razor gangs in Glasgow that kind of ran the criminal underbelly.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:24

They razor gangs?

Tasha 1:01:26

I did.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:26

Like Peaky Blinders.

Tasha 1:01:28

Yes, they ran the criminal underbelly of the city.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:32

Yeah, wow.

Tasha 1:01:32

And they were very religious oriented. So, like one gang would be Protestant and the other gang would be Catholic, and that was like a lot of drive behind it, which I just want to be like, guys, you do understand that this is not this is not what is a corruption to real legend, right? Yeah. So this Chelsea grin, Glasgow smile, it was used as a way to scar and intimidate rivals from other gangs. This is some of the most terrific things that I read, but so I'm sorry in advance. But the cut would be started from the corners of the mouth and would just be started, and then they would continue to torture the victim in other ways. And as the victim would scream, oh it would rip it and spread that further up towards their ear. Scotland got a handle on the gangs and the smile in the early 1940s, and it didn't come back around until like the 1970s. But we were, you know, they were good about the 1940s, early 1940s is when they kind of saw that go down. Yeah. Um, but it had already spread to the US. So Albert Fish, who I don't know if you know about him, but he is just a very he was a very, very bad man.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:40

Okay.

Tasha 1:02:41

He was a serial killer, he was a child molester, he was a rapist. Um, there were talks that he cannibalized his victims. His second victim, and this was in, I think it was 1927, but it might have been in 19 early 1930s. His second victim was like a 10-year-old boy, and he gave him a Glasgow smile. Um, so 10-year-old boy. Yeah. He was an all-around creep vest of a human being, like just pure evil. Um, there were some reports that LA pimps had used it to torture their girls when they tried to um leave, to basically say, Oh, you want to leave? That's fine, but you'll never work again. Um, and then largely what I found is that it wasn't really used by the LA mafia, and that Beth's case is like the earliest case of it in Los Angeles.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:35

Okay.

Tasha 1:03:35

Um, that I could find. The coroner's inquest states that all of her internal organs were present. So her small intestine had been slightly nicked at the point closest to her stomach.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:48

Okay.

Tasha 1:03:48

This was the only abdominal organ damaged in the bisection, which really made them think this is somebody who knows what they're doing because they managed to bisect her body without damaging internal organs. Small intestine um at the duodundum was where it had been cut.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:06

Okay.

Tasha 1:04:06

There's a claim that she was forced to eat feces, and this comes from the autopsy report saying that the coroner found fecal matter in her stomach.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:16

Oh gosh.

Tasha 1:04:17

But that does not indicate that she was forced to eat feces. Okay. In fact, what it does indicate in medical terms, fecal matter and feces are two separate things. The fecal matter is before it goes through the process in the intestines and the water is taken out of it to create feces. So when it says that there was fecal matter in her stomach, that would have been what had been processed in her stomach and broken down. And the belief was that in cutting the intestine, that had pushed that fecal matter back up into her stomach.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:54

Okay.

Tasha 1:04:54

Um, there was no report of any feces or fecal matter in her mouth and her throat, her esophagus, none of that. Um, and she had no trauma to her throat. So it wasn't like she was force-fed or something like that. Exactly. Her uterus was present. There's a lot of like question around that. The other thing that is just ridiculous to me, her uterus was noted to be small, but not abnormally so. But people have taken this and turned it into this huge myth around Black Doll Yolore that she had like not developed properly as a woman, and because of that, she was incapable of having sex, and this that is all a lie. None of that is true. Um, and but we can confirm from the autopsy report she was not pregnant. All of her sexual organs were intact, as was the labia majora, but there was an abrasion that extended through the lower half of the labia minora, and it had some bluish discoloration. The coroner believed that that damage had been suffered by the next thing that he recorded, which Which is quite possibly some of the worst things that I've heard done to a body. She had had that bit of skin cut from her thigh, and the coroner found that skin and the fat and all of the tissue that was attached to it shoved up into her vagina.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:14

Okay, wow.

Tasha 1:06:15

And that is what caused the damage to her labia minora was that pressure. Hours after her autopsy, they were looking at the skin that they had taken from her body. And it at the time when they took it, they couldn't figure out what was on it. The killer had put slash marks through it with his knife. Um, and it took them a little bit before they I think I know what you're gonna say.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:40

Yeah.

Tasha 1:06:40

It's the rose tattoo from her thigh. So the killer cut the rose tattoo off of her thigh, then drew lines through it with the knife to try and like keep it from being discoverable or something. That's the only thing that I can imagine, and then shoved the skin into her vagina. There was a laceration that was about four and a half inches long that extended longitudinally from her navel down um to her pubic area. And the coroner believed that this was probably how the killer had determined where everything was, like all of her intestines and her organs and everything, to make sure that they didn't get damaged during the bisection. Um, and he did confirm in his autopsy report that all of this was done after her death. As he turned her body over, he found that her anus was dilated and it had multiple abrasions similar to her minor or her labia minora. And so he inspected, and what he found was that all of the pubic hair that had been shaved off of her body had been forced up there. So they, when they tested for sperm, they tested both her anal cavity and her vagina and both came back negative. Um, her autopsy took about three hours, and another huge myth about the case that was not true, tons of people from the press said that they were in the room during the autopsy. There was no one present in the room from the press. Her autopsy showed a very slight presence of liquor in her system. The coroner made note that alcohol leaves the stomach within an hour of being ingested. So for there to be presence of alcohol in her stomach, that meant that she was killed within an hour of taking this drink. However, there was not enough to have affected her in any way. And it really is just another like she was not a big drinker.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:42

Yeah, correct.

Tasha 1:08:43

And in fact, a lot of people said that she didn't even really start to drink socially until like the last month or so of her life. After her autopsy, the coroner indicated that the rope burns may have been before her death, but somewhere, some were definitely from after her death. And he believed that that was possibly to assist with the bisection of her body. Um, her death had occurred less than 24 hours from the discovery of her body, and he was unsure of how long it took her to die from the injuries to her head and face, but he's he believed it was likely no more than 15 minutes because the blood collecting in her throat would have made it impossible to breathe. He also speculated that there was a chance that the trauma to her head, the concussion that she suffered, knocked her out. And that that may have also sped up her death because again, she's not conscious enough to try and stuff or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:41

Yeah. Gosh.

Tasha 1:09:42

Yeah. The mutilation of Beth's body after death, these he said, would have taken the longest amount of time. They believed bloodletting took place before the bisection because the heart was no longer pumping. They said that the killer would have had to have used an electric pump, like morticians use, uh-huh, to encourage the blood out of her body, or the killer would have had to massage the blood out of her body with their own hands, and that would have taken hours. The coroner defined the bisection as quote, a fine piece of surgery. And he said that there's no way that it could have been done in anything less than an hour. So the killer really took their time with Beth's body after killing her.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:23

Well, they knew what they were doing, so it wasn't just anybody.

Tasha 1:10:26

Yeah. The papers reported super false, super sensationalized manners of death because the LAPD was not giving them any information. So they were just making stuff up. And the LAPD let them do that so that they could try to conceal actual facts of the death to use during their investigation and to try and determine if someone really was the killer or not. The papers also wrote, as we know, fictional scandal about Beth's life, her actions, where she went, who she did what with. And they had gotten wind of her rejecting Hansen's advances when she lived there. And they even printed that. So Lynn, you might remember Lynn, she told reporters that Beth liked to get guys worked up over her, but she'd leave them hanging dry. And reporters took that and started circulating stories of Beth being a lesbian. And then because of that, the police started directing questions towards LGBTQ bars. Um, but the claim was never substantiated by anyone. Um, Captain Jack, Jack Donahue believed that Beth had been killed in a remote building and then transported to Lehmer Park. LAPD was looking into surgeons, doctors, and anybody who would have had any sort of medical knowledge. In the middle of February, as part of their investigation, they actually served the University of Southern California Medical School with a warrant. Um, so that the school had to give them a complete list of all of their students' names and location and all of that. The students' names were kept confidential, but um, they did do very thorough background checks on every single one of the school's students because of the way that Beth was mutilated after her death. Um, and because of the lack of information that police had available to them as they began their investigation. Two weeks after her death, on February 2nd, 1947, state assemblyman C. Don Field, who knew about the case and knew about the problems that they were having getting suspects, he introduced a bill calling for the creation of a sex offender registry.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:45

Oh, wow.

Tasha 1:12:45

And because of that, California was the first state in the United States to make a mandatory sex offender registry.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:52

That's crazy.

Tasha 1:12:53

Yeah. So if we can say anything good came out of this time, it would be that. Yeah. So that's where we're gonna leave it. I wanted to end on a positive note. That's all I got because this is really dark. This is really, it's really gruesome. It's it's not a comfortable thing to talk about. But when we come back next time, we're gonna work through the investigation and the um some of the biggest suspects in the case and yeah, some theories and stuff like that. Yeah. So until then, like, subscribe.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:25

I don't know about using the word like. That's so weird. Share, comment, uh, hit the button. Let us know what you guys think. Yeah. I mean, I know this is pretty dark, but I mean it's reality. I really want to read man's book because it is so it sounds like it it clarified a lot.

Tasha 1:13:41

It really did.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:42

And unfortunately, like that's sometimes things that happen in the future for cases that are happening now. It's like you you won't get the whole story until everything's kind of really sh shaken out and all that stuff. And yeah, unfortunately, it took over 80 years to get some of this info. But you know, encourage you guys to look into the resources that Asha used because I did not I did not find these resources. Uh, but you know, if you are here for the first time, go back and listen to the first two episodes that have to do with this case, um, to just learn about Betty and her life beforehand and uh and then catch up. Um, but we appreciate you guys coming along and listening. Um hope you guys come back to hear the conclusion and go back and listen to all the other stuff we've already recorded. So uh, you know, this is our thing is just trying to take what Media has put out, how they've skewed um real stories into making it, you know, I guess blockbuster or more in enticing for people to listen or watch or whatever. Um, but and we we just want to clarify what those stories are uh that really happened. Um, and also just to bring light of how people really were. And you know, uh Betty wasn't promiscuous or she wasn't neither was Beth. She wasn't a lush or anything like that. Um, what did I say?

Tasha 1:14:58

You're calling her Betty.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:00

Oh we've been calling her Beth too. I'm sorry, yeah, at all you know, for that you know, she came to California in different ways than what was portrayed on screen, and so well from Matt and our brilliant editor slash son slash youngest child, David. He's first an editor and then a son.

Tasha 1:15:20

And from me, thank you guys for giving real twisty a listen, and we hope to catch you with the next one. Bye now. Bye. Bye now.