Tasha 0:00

On the evening of January 9th, 1947, a married traveling salesman dropped a young woman at the Biltmore Hotel. She made a phone call from the lobby, and then she left the hotel without checking in. The woman walked south and stopped in a lounge before setting back off down the street. No one reported seeing her again until her body was found the morning of January 15th, about seven miles away. Her body showed signs of a restraint, a brutal beating, knife wounds, and mutilation. It had been bisected and left in the weeds of a vacant lot of the Lemert Park Housing Development. Elizabeth Short, dead, mutilated, and left for show in a family neighborhood. Within the week, her name would be replaced with a new moniker, the Black Dahlia. I'm Tasha.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

This is Matt.

Tasha 0:41

And today we are discussing the Real Twisty murder investigation of Elizabeth Short. Welcome to Real Twisty Settings Story Straight, where we are on part four.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

Part four.

Tasha 0:58

Like parkour, but part four.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Part four. Part four.

Tasha 1:01

The final part.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Which was actually supposed to be part two.

Tasha 1:04

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:04

It's part two of part two.

Tasha 1:06

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Of what was our original plan.

Tasha 1:08

Of Elizabeth Short's story. Yeah. And we started way back at part one with the 2006 Brian De Palma film, uh The Black Dahlia, based on the novel by James Elroy.

SPEAKER_00 1:17

100% true.

Tasha 1:18

James Elroy's book, The Black Dahlia, was the first in his LA quartet series. Four books that portray the 1940s and 50s, Los Angeles. The quartet includes LA Confidential, which was made into a very successful 1997 neo-norm movie.

SPEAKER_00 1:32

And it kind of I have not seen that movie.

Tasha 1:34

It's good. And it it the success of that film encouraged them to make The Black Dahlia Nine Years Later into the not as successful film that it is. But before we jump into that, we just want to apologize for being a little bit late this week. But Matt was traveling for work. We both have full-time jobs. And you know, we do this when we can get it in there. Yes. Uh like, subscribe, follow, share with a friend. Yes. And uh maybe one day we won't have to work full-time jobs.

SPEAKER_00 2:00

Maybe.

Tasha 2:00

Maybe. But also, very exciting. We have our first comments.

SPEAKER_00 2:04

Oh, nice.

Tasha 2:05

Yes. And um, we're gonna read it on air as requested. Hello, people of Real Twisty. This is your first viewer. I know I am your first because I am better than the others. You know who I am. The one with the most aura, the whimsical one. Read this on your episode after next. I dare you. Yeah, I know you've already recorded your next episode. I know your secrets. You can't hide them from me. Goodbye. That was from our oldest. So we were very excited.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

Oh, I thought that was like from the Zodiac Killer or something like that. I mean, he's still alive. Or she or they or whatever.

Tasha 2:38

They are very um spooky sometimes. So I don't know. Maybe, maybe they did somehow figure out how to be the Zodiac Killer 75 years ago. So uh want your comment read on the air?

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Uh yeah.

Tasha 2:51

Send it to us. We might pick it and choose it and read it if it's really enjoyable or if you give us permission, you know? And we love comments, we love uh advice, we love interacting with people.

SPEAKER_00 3:00

You can email us at stories at real twisty.com.

Tasha 3:03

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

Real as an R-E-E L.

Tasha 3:06

Which hopefully you know that if you're listening and you've been paying attention to the podcast that you hit play on. I don't know. Maybe you didn't. Maybe you just let it run into the next thing. If you let it run into the next thing, we're real twisty. You're here with us, and we're covering the black dahlia.

SPEAKER_00 3:19

I also have not made reels in like three or four weeks. I know. Um to place on. Yeah, I I love that. Okay.

Tasha 3:26

Yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Again, we have other live.

Tasha 3:27

We have other we have jobs. And we were traveling this weekend to get to our next campsite, so we just had a lot going on.

SPEAKER_00 3:33

So there'll be like a startup of plethora. I mean, it'll be a lot of like black dahlia stuff.

Tasha 3:36

Well, I mean, it would have to be because we've got four episodes now of Black Dahlia.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

Black Dahlia, which is just about half of our episodes.

Tasha 3:43

Just make sure that you're not posting like the this is how they found her body clips.

SPEAKER_00 3:48

Yeah, I try not to do that. I try to get the blooperish type stuff or like the random comments. That's good because we have stuff that's like relevant to it as well. And try to leave like a cliffhanger. Be like, oh, what was the answer gonna be?

Tasha 3:59

I need to know.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

What did they see in the grass? Click lay. Who was on the grassy knoll?

Tasha 4:03

Follow, like, click all the things. Yes. Now, to that, I do want to say that uh you will not find the gritty details of how they found Elizabeth's body in this episode. We did cover it at the end of the third episode in this series. Um, so if you are interested in knowing that and never sleeping again, or if you're a woman like me, never feeling like it's safe to walk further than your front door, go back an episode and listen to that and we'll wait for you right here. Or if you'd like to know the more joyful things about Beth, like how she grew up, her wonderful mother, her beautiful four sisters, you know, any of that. Or no, three, four, five. She's one of five. So, yes, her beautiful four sisters. You can go back to episodes one and two where we talk about who she was and how she got to LA.

SPEAKER_00 4:47

You could watch it like uh Netflix kaleidoscope and watch them in like different orders and see how it perceives to you that way.

Tasha 4:52

Oh, I mean, I guess you couldn't.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

I mean, I watched that. I don't think you guys watched that.

Tasha 4:55

A better idea, start at episode one of Real Twisty and just binge the whole thing. Yeah, you know, this is episode 12.

SPEAKER_00 5:01

I think 11. Maybe.

Tasha 5:02

And our first episodes were longer, so you'd have a lot of content to get through.

SPEAKER_00 5:05

Yeah, we're trying to, yeah, we're trying to cut down each episode.

Tasha 5:08

Which is why we should get back to the black dahlia.

SPEAKER_00 5:10

Yeah.

Tasha 5:11

Yeah, we've got like a lot of talking now.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

But we've done Veronica, Nightmare on Elm Street, uh huh, social network.

Tasha 5:16

And Halloween is coming.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

I know, October.

Tasha 5:18

Not Halloween, the movie Halloween, the spooky season Halloween. Tasha's favorite Halloween or Tasha's favorite holiday Halloween. Yeah. Yes. So we're gonna get back to the Black Dahlia now because we are not making any sense. Okay, so in the film, The Black Dahlia, we're gonna go back to the film a little bit because that is what we do here. We take the films that have taken real life events and twisted them all up and we untwist so that everybody's on the same page and we talk about why they might have done that. So in the film The Black Dahlia, the Black Dahlia is lured out to a house under the Hollywood land sign where her last moments are spent in torture after making a nudie film with her friend Lorna Mertz for $200 cash. Now, we've already discredited the porn claim and the story that Beth was this promiscuous floosie in our previous episodes. She was not. So again, if you haven't heard that, head back and catch up. Lorna Mertz was not a real person, not in Beth's life. I don't know. There might be, I think there's an actress named Lorna Mertz. Yeah, I might be wrong. Don't quote me on that, but not in Beth's life, not in 1946 and 47. So the story of that character was based on 15-year-old Lynn Martin, who we did meet in a previous episode and was briefly in Beth's life. And you kind of get a sense for that because when they introduce her character, she comes out in like this schoolgirl-looking outfit, licking an ice cream cone.

SPEAKER_00 6:31

Yeah. So, you know, walking through a park trying to seduce the guys that are walking around with their kids.

Tasha 6:35

Yes, carrying a real, a film reel tin, which is, you know, makes all the sense in the world. So the movie's portrayal of Beth's investigation is mostly portrayed as like accidental happenstance. Josh Hartnett's Bucky pretty much stumbles onto every bit of evidence he finds. Yeah. And all because he's sleeping with a member of the family responsible.

SPEAKER_00 6:55

Which you don't know until the end, but yes.

Tasha 6:57

You don't know until the end, but yes. And that family, they also didn't exist in real life. And what he finds out happened to Beth, that also didn't happen. So in the movie, they find these or they show these screen tests of Beth. Beth did not do any screen tests. That is like a long-running myth. She did not do any screen tests. There were none that they could find.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

But she told her mom she didn't do them.

Tasha 7:16

She told her mom that she was doing them. I think that she was just trying to like give her mom a sense of calm, a sense of like satiate that. Don't worry, I'm doing things. I've got work. I'm taking care of it. You know, because she also told her that the whole reason she was going to California was because she was engaged to Gordon Ficling. And as we've mentioned previously, they were never engaged. I I don't even know if you could call what they had a relationship. I don't know. They had a weird friendly friendship. In the movie, during a screen test, she does mention her real life fiance, Matt.

SPEAKER_02 7:47

Yeah.

Tasha 7:47

But erroneously, they say that Matt proposed the first night that they met, which is not correct. We know that they met, they continue to correspond, and then he wrote from the war later after much correspondence and asked her to marry him. Yeah. They do get the basic details of Matt's death correct, but it's all really weird, and she's using it. She's using it to show ranges of emotion for the screen test, and it's just very weird. The whole thing's weird. Yeah. But Bucky in the film connects his girlfriend's dad to the porn, the nudie film that Seth made with Lorna Mertz. And he does that because the very final screen says something like, Thank you to Emmett Linscott for your help. Filmed in Hollywood. And that all helps him find the location of the murder, which they say happened in a house in the Hollywood land housing development beneath the Hollywood land sign, which is why I bring that up. In the movie, the housing development is filled with these decrepit, run-down houses that the our corrupt Emmett Linscott built during or like using discarded movie sets. Right.

SPEAKER_00 8:46

Which is which is cheap wood.

Tasha 8:47

Cheap wood, so that they're just basically piece of crap houses that are gonna not last and not cost him much, but it's gonna cost the buyer a lot. That is all false. That's all a story that James Elroy created for his 1940s, 50s LA universe. Yeah. Actually, in Hollywood, in World War II, you know, in 1941, they were using things from the movie industry to help in other ways, like their trucks were no longer being used to cart or transport sets and things like that to filmings. Instead, they were using them to transport troops from where they needed to go to or where they trained to where they needed to go. Actors had enlisted. We talked about how theaters were showing the news reels instead of movies in some instances, sometimes just short ones before a film started. And they had stopped making all of the like really extravagant movies and and in exchange gave us noir, which is why this is filmed as neo-noir, is that is like a hearken back to that time. Brian De Palma's leaning on the mood and the you know, the ambiance of it to be.

SPEAKER_00 9:47

Yes. And it was a craft that was more that was simplistic.

Tasha 9:50

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 9:51

Uh so that they didn't have to use like huge huge sets or anything like that.

Tasha 9:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

Or illustrious costuming or anything.

Tasha 9:57

One good thing that came out of that, I hate to say, you know, a good thing that came out of being destitute and you know, poor um frugal. Frugal is the word we're gonna use, is that we have they did come upon this like really beautiful style of filmmaking. And, you know, a lot of our camera shots today and our lighting tricks, they harken back to that time of when the directors had to get and the cinematographers had to get more creative in how they were capturing scenes because they didn't have the big budgets. Yeah. So it's you know, it's not all lost. But after the war, the city turned from this like Hollywood that was completely focused on supporting war efforts to now they needed to support the soldiers that were returning home. And they in downtown Hollywood, the returning home soldiers now outnumbered civilians 10 to one. So for every one person who, you know, was just a normal everyday person who did not go to war, there were now 10 soldiers. Yeah, there's nowhere for these people to live. And so this overcrowding meant that these soldiers were sleeping in parks, they were sleeping in the lobbies of theaters, they were, these canteens went up to help support these returning soldiers, and they offered three meals a day and beds for free to officers who didn't have a place to sleep. There was one that it was called mom's moms or ma's, I think it was moms, and mom housed 800 people on weekdays and 1,200 on weekends. And then there was another canteen, I think it was the Hollywood canteen, that not only did they like give them a place to stay and give them food, but they also brought in bands and um actors and actresses to like entertain them. And at that one, they housed and fed 2,000 servicemen a night. So, you know, just to put that in in purest like numbers, that means that on the weekend, there were 3,200 servicemen homeless who were being taken care of in canteens. And that was not all of them. That was just how much they could house and take care of. So it there were there was a major overcrowding, and that really caused some issues in the cases that they were trying to solve. There was an extreme increase, as we talked about, in murders against women at the time, and they were becoming extremely violent, extremely graphic. And for the LAPD, this was a really difficult thing to wrap their hands around because they couldn't get a hold of it because there were just so many people that didn't even have actual addresses. Yeah. So, you know, you might talk to Guy A at the canteen on Friday, but he's probably not going to be there when you go back on Monday to continue interrogations or if you've got another clue that leads to him. So we have this overcrowding, we have this kind of just moving around. What is the word that I'm trying to think of? They were like how we do. We move around. We are they're like vagabonds. There's a lot of vagabonds in Hollywood. They migrate around the same. Yes. So the overcrowding was made worse because, as we talked about, the real estate developments had stopped being built. So they had either stopped or like Leamert Park, which is where Beth was found, or they had completely gone under like the Hollywood land development that is featured in the film. So the Hollywood land development, I thought I would give a little bit of history about this because I think it's really cool. And they do feature it in kind of a, in some ways very inaccurate, in other ways very accurate in the film. So the development was 500 acres of land that was advertised as an escape from urban LA. And it had swimming pools, tennis courts. They were like, we're gonna have a horse stable and a golf horse and you know, tea gardens. And I was like, What's a tea garden? Is that just a garden? And do I bring my own tea? I don't know, but I want one. And they said it was a quote, superb environment without excessive costs on the Hollywood side of the hills. And even though it was advertised without excessive cost, these houses targeted people who worked in the film industry, either actors and actresses, the people who were actually on screen or the people behind the screen, as long as they had money. It was like, this is your home.

SPEAKER_02 13:36

Home, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Tasha 13:38

They made, they built 569 houses in Hollywoodland between the 20s and the 30s, before um 1933, when it it just really slowed down because of the depression. But those houses, a lot of them are still standing today because they were built so well. These houses are between one and 8,000 square feet. I think the biggest house we've ever been in was like a little over 2,000 square feet.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

That we lived in?

Tasha 14:02

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 14:03

Uh like 1,700.

Tasha 14:04

And it was like more room than I knew what to do with. I don't know what that says about me, but I do not know what I would do with 8,000 square feet. There, we would have a lot of podcasting rooms, maybe some craft rooms, yeah, and a movie room. Oh, yeah, like a little theater. Here's our theater room. That's all it would be. It's a theater room. Uh, David, this is what's gonna happen when you move out.

SPEAKER_00 14:21

We have multiple theater rooms, depending on if we want to watch it as a family or watch our own movies.

Tasha 14:25

Are we in the mood for comedy? Let's go in the one that has clowns. Are we in the no? Are we in the mood for a horror film? Let's go in the one with clowns. Let's go.

SPEAKER_00 14:34

Especially on our documentary kick. Let's let's go watch something else over in this other thing.

Tasha 14:40

Yeah. Um, but so these houses are big, they are expensive. Just to give you kind of a frame of reference of what they're worth today. These are if you Google storybook houses in Hollywood, these houses literally look like they came out of children's storybooks. They look like castles or like fancy mansion-looking things, cottages, but like very there's like German architecture, French architecture, Spanish architecture, all of these things coming together to create these storybook homes. One of them in 2024 went up on the market and it was listed at $3,249,000.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

So that's cheap.

Tasha 15:15

Yeah, I've got that in my pocket.

SPEAKER_00 15:17

I mean, if you see other houses over in the Hollywood Hills, that's that's cheap.

Tasha 15:21

It's a lot of money. So the Hollywood land sign was erected above this community. And today we've got the hot just Hollywood. But when it was first erected, it was erected in July 1923. Actually, on the day that we originally planned on going live, our first time was July 13th. And if you look it up, there's some like hemming and hawing on the internet because it's hard to get accurate information. But it either began construction of the sign on July 13th or it ended on July 13th. But um, I was like, oh, that's such a good day for Real Twisty to go live. That's wonderful. And then Veronica, you know, Estefania had her way with us and was like, no, you're going live on my date.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

On the day that I died.

Tasha 16:00

July 14th, not the 13th. So anyway, this sign that said Hollywood land was actually a it was just an advertisement for the new development, which is crazy to me that it still stands today. Literally, it went up in 23, so it's 106 years that that sign has been up there, which is just 103. Oh, yes, 103, because it's only 2026. But 103 years that that sign has been probably the longest billboard. Right? I mean, that's that's huge. And what's even funnier is that they they found an interview with the guy who was kind of responsible for mapping out the whole development. And he said that the sign was not, it was like an accident how it came to be. He had written Hollywoodland on the hills in the like architecture or whatever survey map survey, just to say, like, oh hey guys, this is my map of Hollywoodland. Yeah. But the the real estate guys were like, Oh, that's genius. We want that sign. So the sign went up. It was 30, every letter was 30 feet wide. And the uh letters, they were metal letters, they were between 45 and 50 feet tall. And it at the end of it, the word Hollywoodland was a 450-foot long, $21,000 billboard that was supposed to stand for a year and a half.

SPEAKER_00 17:12

$21,000 that that time?

Tasha 17:13

Yes, that time. It cost them $21,000. And what's really interesting is that, you know, we've gone hiking up in that area and we've kind of walked around there. You may remember that there's not like roads that go up to that area. And especially back then, none of that was developed, even as far as it is now. And so they couldn't take the vehicles that they needed to to get the poles up there. So they were carrying the poles on the back of donkeys, and that's how they got their materials and their equipment up to where the sign was put, which is just crazy to me. Like the story of how that came to be is just one of the most exciting, I think, out of Hollywood. But like I said, it was only supposed to stand for a year and a half. We're at 103. So somebody like didn't do their job and take it down when it was supposed to come down.

SPEAKER_00 17:51

Like I've seen other billboards.

Tasha 17:52

But it was left up because the the people in Hollywood land that had bought those houses, they loved the sign. They it like gave them a place of being, it made them feel seen or like an ownership.

SPEAKER_02 18:03

Yeah.

Tasha 18:03

So it was regularly maintained until 1933 when keeping the lights on just became like way too dang expensive. The depression era had really hit Hollywood by that point. And this sign took thousands of lights and they would light it up Holly, then wood, then land, and then the whole thing would light up together. So, and you've got that every night. So those lights are burning out, and it was just way too expensive. Plus, the effort of going up the hill to get there, they didn't just turn the lights off, they also stopped maintaining it because they couldn't afford to pay people to go do it or to pay to fix up these big metal signs. So in September of 36, the second O of the word Hollywood collapsed in a windstorm. So now we're down that. And then over the next three years, two more letters flew down. So by 1939, we're down three letters. And then while all of that is happening in 1937, because of the depression, it really hit the the housing development, the the estate company, the real estate company, it hit them really hard and they ended up like completely stopping any new houses in the Hollywood land development. So then in 1939, when we've got three letters down, somebody finally repaired the sign. I think I remember reading that it costs maybe it cost like 2100 or something to at the time to repair the sign. But then in March 44, the LA Times reported that either really rascally vandals or the Santa Ana winds knocked down the H. And you can see this in the movie The Black Dawlia. They have created, they've recreated the Hollywoodland sign and the H is down. Do you have to like know that you're looking for it or you don't like your brain just reading front and center? Well, it's like it's like zooming into the area. And if you don't know that the H is down, you're it's like whenever you see a word and it's misspelled, but your brain puts it in, puts it together because it's like, oh, I remember this. So look for the H. There is no H. But it took me a couple times watching it before I was like, oh, the H is gone. They got that right. But so that was March 44 that they fixed the or that the H went down. Okay. December 18th, 44, the Hollywood land developers filed bankruptcy. They're like, we can't do this anymore. Our business has gone under. Now remember, they started with 500 acres of land they were building on. They still had 425 acres of untouched land. So they donated that to the city of Los Angeles for one dollar.

SPEAKER_02 20:14

Nice.

Tasha 20:14

Yes. I feel like that's the best deal anybody's ever made for real estate. The land was added to like my favorite place in LA, Griffith Park. Yeah, nice. Um, under the control of the Recreation and Parks Commission. So that made that, you know, park bigger. In 47, the Recreation and Parks Commission had wanted to tear the sign down. They were like, this is ridiculous. The H is a problem. Every time Santa Ana wins come through, there's damage. We cannot come up here and fix this every time. But the Hollywood land residents were like, Yeah, no, that's our sign. Like, that's ours. So the Chamber of Commerce president said, Look, I will fix the H, my cost. I will pay for the whole thing if we can take land off the end of it and just let it be Hollywood and let it stand for the whole community, the whole Hollywood district, and not just this one little neighborhood.

SPEAKER_00 20:58

Subdivision.

Tasha 20:59

Yeah. And I was like, that's such a great deal. They'll take the cost, you know, and it it becomes everyone's. And they fought about it for two years. It wasn't until 1949 when the H was finally fixed, land came down, and we had what we now see as just the Hollywood sign. So the whole time that Beth knew of the sign, for her, it read Hollywood land with an H that was down.

SPEAKER_00 21:20

Yeah, Hollywood. Hollywood land. At least Hollywoodland. At least there might have been other letters down as well, right?

Tasha 21:28

The three letters they went down in, let me go back and look. 37, 39. Yeah, so in the 30s. So even that being down was before it was in 39 that the sign was repaired. And then in 44 the H went down. Okay, so it so it was Olliewood land for for Beth. And later in the 70s, there was more damage to it, and they had to go through and completely tear the whole thing down and rebuild it. And to do that and to keep it like well cared for, basically a person took every letter. So like Hugh Hefner was one of them. He took one of the letters and was like, I will pay. For the reconstruction of this. And I read that they had found the original molds or the original stencils that had been used. They thought they were gone, but somebody had actually like bet on them in an auction and got them. So they were like, oh great, we can just sketch it back out to what it looked like.

SPEAKER_00 22:16

Well, you mentioned earlier, like they used like thousands of bulbs. Was that like to like outline it? Because I don't think Hollywoodland or Hollywood does that anymore, does it? Is it more of like a spotlight coming from the ground?

Tasha 22:26

Isn't it? But yeah, they had individual bulbs that were on the ground that lit everything. So you know they were on the think about it. They had to put in like and the I was reading that the posts were the letters that like actually held up the letters because the letters were so big, they had to use electric poles, like the poles that they were using for electricity. That's what they were using. So can you imagine putting one of those on the back of a donkey and being like several? Come on, boy, go on up there.

SPEAKER_00 22:49

Well, and them not being able to travel up there with a crane or anything like that.

Tasha 22:52

Like they have to and they're putting all of that in my the fact that we've got the Hollywood sign is a marvel to me. I love that sign so much. But yes, if you want to see a vision of the Hollywood hand I can't even say Hollywoodland Hollywoodland sign, go to the last 20 minutes of the Black Dawgia by Brian DePalma, and you can see it. That is about all they got right uh for that neighborhood.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

Um for the neighborhood.

Tasha 23:14

Yeah. There were some like springs, natural springs in that area, and they're the house that Bucky finds does have like a spring that goes behind it. Oh, yeah. None of those houses were made out of like that whole thing's made up. So anyway, Bucky finds the house in question. He sees where Beth pierced her hand inside on like a bed post or like a thing on the wall or something. The thing is that there's no piercing in her hand in the autopsy report. So that is entirely made up for the plot. Second, they show her death with bad guy putting her head in like this vice grip thing. There's no indication that that happened to Beth. In fact, in fact, the rope burns um that she had indicated how she was restrained. So basically, everything about her death in the movie is BS. Yeah. Just both. There's a stream running through the property, like I mentioned, and you you figure that that's how they cleaned her body. And they say that the killer's father was a famous surgeon back home. Yeah. And so that must have been how he knew how to bisect her body so cleanly. Yeah. So then we've got the Glasgow smile, which we know was a thing from, as we talked about this, from the Scottish gangs in Glasgow. In the movie, that what am I trying to say? The mm mm mm mm mm mm starts with an M. Not manipulation. The mutilation of her face in the film is not a symbol of the Glasgow smile. It's not a replica of that or mirrored after that. It is being pulled, the idea is pulled from a painting that is in the house of the Lynn Scots. And the painting is of Gwynplaine. Gwynplaine was a character in Victor Hugo's The Man Who Laughs. The character, the Victor Hugo piece, they're all real. The painting is not. Basically, the prop guys were like, how do we explain what Gwynplaine looked like without everybody knowing what Gwynplaine was? So they made a painting. Yeah. And the plot wraps up the investigation of Death's of Beth's death with the Lynn Scott family. They didn't ever really exist. So what actually happened to get us there? We're going to go back to the morning of January 15th, 1947, and walk through the real life investigation and the real people who really like looked at Beth's murder. We're going to touch on some of the people that were considered prime suspects and how some of them were taken off the list. And I am going to be very careful, like I mentioned a couple episodes ago, and try to avoid saying last names. But there are, as we've also mentioned, there are a lot of names that are very, very similar. You know, Betty found Betty, that kind of deal. Another example is that the gentleman that she lived with for a while, his name was Mark Hansen. The lead detectives were Harry Hansen and Finus Brown. So I'm going to have to throw some last names in just to keep us clear on who we're talking about. But for the most part, I would like for the people who are living that are family members today to not get harassed about something that their no longer living family members were tied to. So I'm going to try and respect that as much as I can. Let's talk about the first 48 hours. Are you ready?

SPEAKER_02 25:58

Yes.

Tasha 25:58

All right. So her body was found the morning of January 15th in a vacant lot on Norton Avenue in Leemert Park, which we talked about. And the lead detectives, Harry Hansen and Finus Brown, when they took Betty's body, I just said Betty, when they took Beth's body to the morgue, Harry Hansen and Finus Brown left the lot and followed the coroner there. Um while they were gone, the neighborhood canvas continued with the police officers that stayed behind. And they talked to basically everybody who lived in the neighborhood, just going door to door, asking them, did you see anything? Some night neighbors said that they passed the law as late as 8 30 a.m. that morning and did not see a body. Did they pass it and they just didn't see a body because they weren't paying attention? I don't know. But they have reports from neighbors who said I passed it at 8 30 a.m. and there was nothing there. Now, if you take that into consideration, if you take that as truth, they found her body. Betty found her body by 11 a.m. Yeah. So that's a very short amount of time. That would be a very small window where that's an hour and a half-ish. Yeah, but I mean to place a body in daylight and five minutes. In a neighborhood in daylight.

SPEAKER_00 26:58

But they were but the closest house was how far away though?

Tasha 27:00

500 feet.

SPEAKER_00 27:01

So I mean that's a good that's a good w you know distance away. If you're just 250. If you're just going around here, you know, you're not like paying attention to the empty lots when you're getting ready in the morning and looking out the window. See, you know, you know, I could see that it's a vacant lot.

Tasha 27:15

If you see someone out there, you're gonna be like, what is this person doing at this lot that nothing is happening at because nobody has any money to build anything?

SPEAKER_00 27:22

Well, so I mean, I don't know. So I I think by 8 30 to 11, like most of everyone that's going to work is it's probably already gone that past that away. And so that gives them ample time to now it's just really the housewives and their children that might still be home or whatever.

Tasha 27:35

Um which was Betty.

SPEAKER_00 27:36

But also, like you you were saying, they might have not seen it while driving because how many of us have like paid attention to everything that's in a large? We know our route, so we're just like thinking about other things, like what am I gonna buy today or whatever? And that that could have been the case unless they you know saw. I mean, she was really like white as a mannequin, like because she had been dead. So maybe that would have like flashed, so maybe it was still between 8:30 and 11, but um so we don't know.

Tasha 27:57

No, we still don't know. We know that do had fallen, all we know. Um they the chief autopsy surgeon who I mentioned last episode, but I never gave his name. His name is Frederick Newbar. Oh, really quickly before we do this, I said something in the very first episode, and I keep forgetting to correct myself. I said that Betty, Betty, I said that Beth missed about 57 days of school in that third quarter. It was 51. That's been driving me crazy. I just want to correct that right now. So now let's go back to Frederick Newbar. Frederick Newbar was the chief autopsy surgeon who did her autopsy, which we covered in the last episode. Today it would be the equivalent of a chief medical examiner. We've like renamed some things, jiggled some jobs around. But Frederick took her fingerprints, gave them to the LAPD, but it her fingerprints didn't match anything that the LAPD had on file. Yeah. This was definitely in a time when precincts were not talking to each other. So they didn't, you know, they didn't go to other precincts and say, Do you have these fingerprints? So she was logged by the LAPD as Jane Doe number one because she was the first female victim of 1947. There was in Linwood nearby, there was a 15-year-old girl who was missing. And homicide captain Jack Donahoe knew this. So he said, Let's wait on the autopsy, let's give it a day. I'm gonna reach out to Linwood Police Department and see if they can look at her and see if this is their girl. She was not. He he wanted a chance for the family to be notified before an autopsy was done, but they still didn't know who she was. They knew she wasn't the missing girl from Linwood, so you know that he did what he could. He also sent off her fingerprints to the FBI, or he tried to send her fingerprints off to the FBI, and we'll get into that delay a little bit. So, having done that, Newbar, Hansen, and Brown talked with reporters outside of the morgue at about 1 p.m. This was their form of a press conference, but it's not the type of conference, press conference that we see today with big crimes. It wasn't very official. It was just a casual conversation where they were like, hey, you guys want some facts. This is what we know. But of course, it's 1 p.m. the day of. So all they have really is what they saw at the scene, and then just what has been noted as her body has been transferred to the morgue because they didn't start moving her until about noon. So they tell the reporters, we know she's been dead about nine to ten hours. We'll be able to narrow that time down once we or narrow the time that she was in the lot once we know what time dew fell, because the dew was found underneath her body. She was bisected about an inch above the navel after death, probably with a butcher knife or a small saw. She may have been strangled, but the autopsy would have to tell them more. She had been cut repeatedly with a sharp knife, her blood drained and her body washed. Flesh had been deliberately cut from her thigh, but they had not found the flesh. And that was all of the information that they gave the press. They were like, this is all that we can confirm for you right now. We do not know who she is. I think they did say we we suspect that she's between the ages of 15, 16, and 20. Yeah. So from there, the press just ran wild. They just took over with the story. And like we talked about in the last episode, the LAPD let them because uh they wanted to keep the actual facts close to their chest for their investigation. So in identifying Beth, I mentioned that there were some delays getting the fingerprints from the LAPD to the FBI. And the problem was that there was a whole airplane delay fiasco happening at the time. And so because they couldn't get the prints flown to the FBI, they had to rely upon the examiner, the LA examiner. We're going to see the examiner a lot in the story. They really take over the race for facts. And unfortunately, they always seem to be a couple steps ahead of the police in their investigation here at the beginning. But that also means that they were reporting on things before they were confirmed just because they were trying to beat people to the stands. But the LA examiner, which was a Hearst paper, they had a wire photo system that they had started using during the war. And they were like the only newspaper in town that had it. So they told LAPD, look, we will use our wire photo system and transport these for you to the FBI in exchange for an exclusive. And the police were like, Well, you know, we want to figure out who this girl is. So we will, we will agree. The FBI matched her fingertips or fingertips, her fingerprints to the prints that had been taken in 1943 when she worked at Camp Cook and then her police record from that area where she had been arrested for being with people who were drinking alcohol, essentially, underage. And so they knew Beth's identity by the evening of J January 16th. So by the very next night, they've got her identity. But the newspaper had it before they gave it to the police. So they got a little slimy and the press just took over. So the LA examiner who led the race for the story, they now have her name. And because of that, they've got a little bit of information about her. They know that she worked at Camp Cook. They've done a little bit of digging. So they say, look, we're gonna send a whole handful of reporters to San Diego. We're gonna send a handful of reporters to Santa Barbara. And we want you guys to start hitting every motel from their coming back to LA asking, have you seen this girl?

SPEAKER_02 32:46

Yeah.

Tasha 32:46

And find out what you can. So they've got reporters doing that. Then they called Beth's mother, Phoebe, in Medford. Oh, and they told her, guess what? Your daughter, Beth, has won a beauty contest and we haven't been able to get a hold of her. We are running a front page story, and we're wondering if we can ask you some questions about what she was like growing up and her life before she came to LA that could help us write this story. Get it on the papers faster. Get it on the front, you know?

SPEAKER_00 33:11

Very funny, very shady.

Tasha 33:12

Yes. So Phoebe is like, My gosh, my beautiful daughter won a contest. So she's answering questions, and then the questions start to get weirder and more personal. And she's like, Why do they need to know this? Once they had gotten everything that they could from her, they finally admitted to her, hey lady, listen, there was no beauty contest. Uh, hate to be the one to tell you this, but your daughter has been murdered. So not only do they now have all of this information about her life that no other newspaper has, they also have the first impressions of her family. Yeah, because they have told her family before anybody else has. In searching the hotels um and the motels, they ended up finding Beth's luggage before the police. And they told the police, yeah, we'll give you what we got, but you have to let us open it here and get the exclusive on what's inside. Uh-huh. And I don't understand why Captain Donahoe did not say, uh, no, uh, here's a warrant. This is an open investigation. You're going to give me the luggage. You're impeding an investigation and take it from them. He did not, however. He said, Okay, yeah, sure, you can see what's inside. So he sent a sergeant over, not even Hansen or Brown. He sent a completely different sergeant over to oversee the opening of the trunk. And it was a sergeant and then just like a circle of reporters and press photographers opening this. He did not consult Hansen or Brown. They actually found out about it after the fact and they were pissed because they were like, This is not how you run a murder investigation. This is definitely not how you tell your lead detectives what information we have and what information we don't have. Like you're you are letting the press know what we know and don't know, which means you're letting the killer know what we know and don't know, which is gonna impede everything. The examiner also in this search, because they went to all of the motels, they located Red before the police basically even knew he existed. So after this, Phoebe is freaking out, you know, because you would be. So she reaches out to the Medford police and they're like, We have not heard anything about this. We will investigate. Give us a minute, right? So she's like, Okay, Medford doesn't know anything about this. I'm going to believe that Beth is still alive until I hear otherwise, my daughter is alive. And then the Medford police had to come back and say, We're so sorry. We have confirmation from the LAPD and the FBI that it is your daughter. So they start asking her questions to send information to the LAPD for their investigation. And she tells them that her husband is dead, which we know that in actuality he isn't. He later was investigated and dismissed as a as in California. Yes, he's he's in LA still. She said that she had last heard from Beth about 10 days earlier in what she described was just an ordinary letter, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing suspicious or anything.

SPEAKER_00 35:48

Yeah.

Tasha 35:48

It had a return address in Pacific Beach, which is just north of San Diego, where Beth was living with the Frenches. Yes. She believed that Beth was working at a naval hospital there because that's what Beth had told her. Beth had said, Yeah, I lost my job as a movie extra. There was a big strike and it's closed all of the studios. Um, she later found out that wasn't true, that Beth had not been a movie extra in anything, nor had she been working at a naval hospital. She was borrowing facts from people as she went along. So the movie extra was Anne Toth. That was a story that she borrowed from her, told her mom. The naval hospital was where Mrs. French worked. And when the police went to her to ask her about Beth, she said, Yeah, she did not work there. I worked there. In William J. Mann's book, which we reference a lot, it'll be in the show notes. Um, it's a beautiful book. He says that Beth would borrow these details from other people's lives and present them as her own. And she did that to get things, she did that to protect herself. That's just what she did. Yeah. And again, I think that she was trying to keep her mom from worrying. And I think that's why she told her those. Phoebe believed that Beth was engaged to Gordon Fickling. That's what Beth had told her, and that he was planning on helping her. And Phoebe said, I never would have let her go to Long Beach if I had known she was not actually engaged to him. Yeah. Because she thought that he and her other friends were helping her get settled, helping, you know, make sure she was taken care of. She also thought that Beth was going to be coming back at the end of the season. Yeah. And she said that if she had known, she would have had her go to Florida and stay with the family friends. Yeah. So again, she thought she was just going to ease her seasonal breathing problems. She was going to be coming back, but now she knows that's not true. And now LAPD is saying, ma'am, we're very sorry because they don't know that her father is alive yet. Yeah. Ma'am, we need you to come to LA and identify your daughter. They later found her father, found out that he was alive. Phoebe found out that her stupid husband was living in LA. He refused to go identify his daughter. He could have saved Phoebe that trauma and he refused. He could not be bothered to go see his daughter. I top-notch guy. Just can't with that man. So the examiner had offered to pay for Phoebe's airfare and hotel for the trip. It was just another ploy for them to be able to keep her away from competing reporters and keep the story to themselves. But instead, Phoebe's reverend at her church down the street, he arranged for the Red Cross to pay for a flight to San Francisco. That's where Jenny, Beth's sister, was living with her husband. He could only, like the Red Cross, he could only get them to pay for one flight, though. And so none of Beth's other sisters went with her. She went on this flight, her very first flight by herself to go identify her dead daughters.

SPEAKER_00 38:21

From the East Coast, West Coast. That's a long flight.

Tasha 38:23

From Massachusetts to San Francisco, she had three layovers, I believe. It was either two layovers and three planes or three layovers and four planes. Cannot remember exactly, but there was three of something. So it was a long flight. It was a long trip. You know, and this is the 1940s. So we are early on in flight. In flight. Yeah. Commercial flight. Yeah. Yes. So she goes to San Francisco. She meets Jenny, her daughter Jenny, and Jenny's husband there. And then the three of them together took a train from San Francisco to LA. Once they got there, it took Phoebe two days to work up the nerve to go and identify Beth's body. And when she got there, Beth's face was so swollen from all of the beatings and from the Glasgow smile that Phoebe could not conclusively say it was her daughter. And she ended up having to identify Beth by her surgical scar on her back from the pleurisy. Yeah. So men, as they were investigating, they found out that men at a Long Beach drugstore, the one that she used to frequent when she first got to Long Beach, that they sometimes called her the Black Dahlia amongst themselves because of her black hair. They were playing off of the 1946 film The Blue Dahlia, which was a huge hit at the time, but Beth never knew about the name. The drugstore owner said it was just the guys talking amongst themselves. They'd be like, oh, there's the Black Dahlia. Nobody ever called Beth that to her face. And none of her friends knew that she was ever referred to that. So when Ann Toth read it in the papers, she was like, nobody called her that. Her name was Beth. Like this is, you know. But the Hearst papers, which just like to point out, Hearst really reminds me of the word worst. The Hearst papers were the Examiner and the Herald Express. And they were the ones who took the Black Dahlia name and like really pushed it and took this story of her jet black hair and twisted it into a story of her wearing tight sheer black clothing. They said that she prowled Hollywood Boulevard like that. And yes, and that really fed that um story and took her from being this innocent, beautiful girl, which was how they originally portrayed her. And within just from the 15th to the 17th, they had turned her into the black doll. Her identity of Elizabeth Short, Beth, Betty, as her friends knew her, that was fine. It was absolutely twisted. Yeah. So the LA Times on January 17th called the murder a sex fiend slaying, which just furthered this narrative of her as a promiscuous girl because what kind of girl would get herself in that kind of position to begin with?

SPEAKER_00 40:40

Because it's always a girl's fault.

Tasha 40:42

Exactly. And then the nickname turned Beth from this innocent murder victim into a noir icon. And so she has become what they are going to the film theaters to see. They can now read about it in their homes in the papers, right? And papers are flying off of the racks because of this. The coverage recasts her as this dangerous seductress. And it's really the first place where her story gets taken from her. It's a nickname she's never heard attached to a reputation that she didn't have, all because it sold papers and because she was a beautiful white girl. And that is still a problem today. Man in his book, he talks about a young woman, a young black woman who was beaten and strangled in Little Tokyo three days after they found Beth. And while they didn't know who had done that to her, it was an unsolved case. She got, like, you know, backpage, very little coverage. It did not carry over. But Beth's whiteness made her this dream girl for reporters. And they completely forgot about Mary Hodges Tate. They did not report on her story, but Beth's story took front page news and took front page news for a very long time. The examiner ran her as front port front page story for 35 days straight. The LA record kept her on the front page for 31 days. That is unheard of back then and today. I mean, you think about how many things we have hit our newsfeed and stories that hit our newspapers, even our local papers, they do not stay front page more than a day. Like they just don't. But she kept the paper selling. The examiner sold more copies the day after she was found than on any other day in its history, except for the day that it announced the Allied victory in World War II. And the LA Daily News had taken like a different approach. They said the case is stalled. The police are stonewalled.

SPEAKER_02 42:24

Yeah.

Tasha 42:24

But the examiner kept running stories about new leads. Even if they were fake leads, they just kept going with that. Exactly. So you want to know, like, well, how much of what they're reporting is real. John Gilmore, his father was a detective on the case. He said that the police would not give reporters leads and, quote, they had nowhere to go except to speculate. So they went wild with speculation. And then later he said the newsmen went on a lot of rumor and very little stuff that had to do with actual fact. And some of them outright lied about some of their involvement and really glamorized what they did. And so we get kind of a look into the start of yellow journalism. It's just what is gonna sell. And it wasn't just reporting false stories about Beth. One of the examiner reporters, he put himself into the story. He said that like he was at the autopsy, that he moved the body, that he took a picture with her like up close at the scene, like him and her in the frame. And none of that happened. And he could never prove any of it later either. It was just false. It start to finish. Aggie Underwood, who we mentioned last episode, she was kind of thought of to be one of the more up and up reporters. She was more truthful. There's a gnat. She she was more forthcoming in her reporting and that she she took less liberties with what she was saying. And even she said in a quote, a good story is a good story, and you fill the holes with putty if you can't make it hold together. Yeah. So at the time it was just say what you gotta say to sell the story, to get the papers out. So maybe it was because of all of this and how quiet the police were being. The killer or someone claiming to be the killer ended up contacting the papers instead of. Going to the police. And he used the papers, much like the Zodiac killer did, to and BTK to um kind of nudge the police along and to harass them. So this started on January 17th. So two days after they find Beth. A caller called James Richardson at the examiner. He identified himself as the killer. He congratulated James Richardson on the examiner's coverage of the case and said he would turn himself in after he had given the police just a little bit more of a chase. Um he said, quote, expect some souvenirs of Beth Short in the mail. So I want to point out immediately he knew that she went by Beth. So I think that that's also like because in different places in LA, she called herself Beth and Betty. I wonder if anybody ever like looked at where does she call herself Beth? No. Because he specifically called her Beth Short. Okay. On January 24th, the examiner received a manila envelope and it was addressed in like the standard cutout ransom style letters that were cut from newspapers and movie ads. Inside, they found Beth's birth certificate, her social security card, the bus station claim ticket for her luggage. They got photos, business cards, names written on paper, a newspaper clipping, the one that she always carried about Matt Gordon. Um it had Hollywood Wolf's Club membership card and then her address book. And her address book um was embossed with Mark Hansen's name. Yeah. Which just remember this is not Hansen the detective. This is Hansen, who she lived with.

SPEAKER_02 45:20

Right.

Tasha 45:21

So some pages had been torn out of the book, which I'm like, whose name did you take? But it still had about 75 different men's names and contact information in it. So everything in this packet and the envelope itself had been cleaned with gasoline to remove fingerprints. The police believed that Beth's body had been cleaned the same way. So they took this incoming envelope to be from the killer. They were like, This, you know, how would they have known to clean it that way? That has not been in anything. Partial prints were lifted from the envelope, but they were damaged while being mailed to the FBI and they could never be analyzed. So that was just gone. The same day that they received the letter, a handbag and a suede shoe were found on top of a trash can in an alley about two miles from the lot where they found Beth's body. Those two things had also been wiped clean with gasoline. So there were no prints to be found on those. And Mark Hansen came into the police station and identified the purse and the shoe as belonging to Beth. On January 26th, then, two days later, the examiner received a handwritten letter that said, Here it is, turning in Wednesday, January 29th, 10 a.m. Had my fun at police, Black Dahlia Avenger. And it named a place where police could find him. But of course, no one showed up. Yeah. So at 1 p.m. on the 29th, another cut and paste letter arrived. And it said, Have changed my mind. You would not give me a square deal. Dahlia killing was justified. Wow. Yeah. So then the Herald Express got ransom style letters too. One read, I will give up on Dahlia killing. If I get 10 years, don't try to find me. So you go, okay, well, why did the examiner get all of this? Well, it had been the most involved paper from day one. That's probably why the killer chose them. March 14th. So we are now almost exactly a month out from her death. There's a note found at March.

SPEAKER_00 47:04

So that's two months.

Tasha 47:05

Oh, it is because February is a month. So two months that there's a note found at Venice Beach. A beach caretaker found a pile of men's clothing on the beach. Looked like somebody had just stripped down and left all of their clothes on the beach. And he reported it to the lifeguard captain whose name was John Dylan. This is another name. We're gonna meet another Dylan later on, where it gets kind of slippery. So when you go looking on the internet for information, people get the two Dylans confused. And it's very tricky. You gotta really pay attention to what you're looking at. But lifeguard captain John Dillon then called the West LA police and tucked inside a size eight shoe, there was a note and it said, To whom it may concern, I have waited for the police to capture me for the Black Dahlia killing, but have not. I am too much of a coward to turn myself in. So this is the best way out for me. I couldn't help myself for that or this. Sorry, Mary. No one could ever determine who these clothes belong to, who Mary could have been. The assumption was that the person or it was made to look like the person had stripped down, left all their clothes, and thrown themselves into the ocean. Um, they never verified if this had any actual tie or if it was a hoax. Along with that, more than 500 people have given false confessions over the years since 1947. Some of the people who have confessed to this were not even alive in 1947. Um City Councilman Lloyd G. Davis offered a $10,000 reward. And when he did that, confessions and false tips just poured in. Some of the people who confessed falsely to the crime were charged with obstruction of justice. So there there was some you know fallout for fabrications. Yeah. But there were approximately 750 investigators who worked the case in its early stages, and that include 400 sheriff's deputies and 250 California State Patrol officers, in addition to the LAPD from that branch. Um, they searched abandoned buildings, storm drains, sites along the LA River, and nothing new turned up. They could not find anything. So police ended up interviewing more than 150 men. Most of them, or about half of them, were pulled from the address book, but many of them were cleared by alibis. So those, you know, they were able to get through that quickly. Yeah. The men in the address book, though, they all told similar stories. So yes, I know that there are 75 men's names in this book, and that does not shine a pretty light on Beth. But listen, this is a story that all of these men said. They met Beth, they bought her dinner, or they took her to a nightclub. She may have asked for money saying that she couldn't cash a check. So it was like, I can't get this check cash because I don't have my ID. Could you loan me a few dollars? So they would give her money and then they would drop her off somewhere. They all said nothing romantic happened. It was just a girl that they met, went to dinner with, and loaned some money. So the theme of this is dozens of men, one consistent story, dinner conversation, ride home. Yeah, and that is the opposite, complete opposite of the story that the papers are selling at the same story of this man crazy black dahlia seductress. Yeah. Okay. So we're gonna talk about now the early suspects, not all of them, because again, they interviewed 150 men, um, but why they were cleared. So the first one was Robert Red Manley. Um, this is the this is Red. This is the married salesman from our cold open. He was an early focus of the man hunt. He told Aggie Underwood that he met Beth in San Diego on a street corner. Now you may remember that when Beth told the Frenches about Red, she said that he was an old friend that she had happened upon there and he was there for work, right? But what he told Aggie Underwood is that he was driving down a street in San Diego and he saw Beth on a corner waiting to cross the street, and he pulled up and offered her a ride. And she turned away and wouldn't look at him, but he kept talking. And she asked him if he thought it was wrong to just drive up and ask a girl on a street to get into his car. And he agreed, but he said, I'd like to take you home anyway. And so she let him. So he drove her to the Frenches and then he said that he began to see her. And he said that he even set up a job interview for her, but she ended up skipping it. So they went out four nights in a row before he went home to his wife and son in LA. After the holidays, Beth wired him asking him for a ride to the Biltmore back in LA because the Frenches were like, listen, this isn't, you know, what we signed up.

SPEAKER_00 51:10

Must be one night and it turned into 30.

Tasha 51:12

Yeah, you've been here a month. And so she told Red that she was meeting her sister Jenny and was going to go with Jenny back to Berkeley. They stayed overnight. He picked her up on the 8th. They stayed overnight in a Pacific Beach motel and he said that Beth slept fully dressed in a chair and it was completely platonic. He said nothing happened. The next morning he had work to finish in San Diego, so he did that. And then they drove to LA. They checked her luggage in at the bus station because she said I'm we're coming back here to take the bus. Yeah. So they go to the bus station, they check in her luggage, and then he took her to the Biltmore. Now, this is where things get a little weird because Beth said, Oh, darling, I have to go to the bathroom. While I'm in the restroom, could you please look for my sister? So she leaves Red to try and find Jenny, who she knows is not coming to the Biltmore. Yeah. And she goes to the restroom. And while she's in the restroom, he said that he asked around, he had Jenny Page. No luck. So he says he left Beth to find her sister alone between 6:30 and 7 because he had to get home. So he drives home. So when I read his story, I was like, why in the world would Beth tell him, please look for Jenny while I go to the bathroom? And I think what I have landed on as a this is my proposal.

SPEAKER_02 52:18

Okay.

Tasha 52:19

Okay. Is that maybe because she knew Jenny was not going to be there, maybe she was hoping that it would like play on his sympathies for, oh, I'm here, but my sister isn't.

SPEAKER_02 52:28

Yeah.

Tasha 52:29

And maybe she was trying to get him to like pay for a room and be like, well, look, if your sister's not here, let me get you a room so that you at least have a place to stay. I don't know. But he was found because the reporters tracked down the Pacific Beach motel during their come from San Diego up to LA check and they got his home address. So an examiner reporter went to his house and knocked on his door, and his sweet wife answered the door and they said, We want to talk to your husband in connection with the black doll yet killing.

SPEAKER_00 52:56

Yeah, that's probably eye-opening.

Tasha 52:57

And she's like, Excuse me, he's on a business trip. And so she gave the reporters the address of where he was at in San Francisco. And one of the reporters then led the police to Red in San Francisco. That's the one thing that I can say for the reporters at the examiner is that they knew what they were doing was out of line. So they at least like told them, Hey, we've got this, we're gonna go do it if you want to come along. So at least there's that. He denied any involvement. And the LAPD actually gave him a polygraph, which I have qualms with the polygraph test. Um, first of all, as many people know, it is not allowed in court as evidence because you can't trust them.

SPEAKER_00 53:31

Well, you could feel like you're in a high stress situation doing a polygraph and it's gonna like yes.

Tasha 53:35

The opposite side of that, I cannot remember if it's I want to say it's sociopaths have the ability to lie without having any indication. So if you are dealing with someone of that magnitude, it's not gonna register. Not because they're like, you know, no matter what they say, it's not going to register. It's all gonna look baseline to them or for them. So we're gonna see a lot of that here where someone passes a polygraph. And I'm not going to say which of these I think they should have pushed further, but there is one of these that I think they should have pushed further, and it was someone who did pass a polygraph. But who am I to say anything? I'm not a detective. So he passes a poly test or a polygraph test, but on top of that, he also was able to give an uh alibi or something.

SPEAKER_00 54:14

Thank you.

Tasha 54:14

Yes. The only word that was coming to mind was ally, and I was like, this is not the war. He gave an alibi. So he was taken off the list. When he was taken off the list, Aggie Underwood, the reporter, she talked to him and he said, quote, I'll never cheat on my wife again.

SPEAKER_02 54:27

Uh-huh.

Tasha 54:28

Now, yes, he got cleared of this, but this case never really left him. He in 1954 had a breakdown, and his wife ended, she ended up committing him to Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino.

SPEAKER_02 54:39

Oh wow.

Tasha 54:40

Later that year, he was at the Brentwood VA hospital and they gave him a truth serum and questioned him about Beth again, and he was cleared again. So, I mean, this is in 54. We're talking years later, not just like the next month or whatever. This is a eight year minute, right? After Red left her at the Biltmore, Beth's whereabeth whereabouts for the next six days remain unknown. Nobody knows knows what happens to her. And if Red is to believe be believed, he left her on the 9th. So that's the last that we've got. The next person that the police really wanted to talk to was Gordon Fickling. And that was after they talked to Beth's mom, Phoebe, and she was like, no, this is her fiance. They tracked him down in Charlotte, and he showed the police a letter that he had received from Beth that was dated January 8th. So the day that she left San Diego, she mailed a letter to him. She told him she was leaving California because the weather was bad for her asthma. And she said that she was going to Chicago to chase her dreams of becoming a model. And she told him that she had lined up a job with someone named Jack for modeling. They never found Jack. They don't know if that was a made-up person or what. So she told the Frenches she was going to Berkeley to stay with her sister Jenny. She told Red she was meeting her sister at the Biltmore, and she told Gordon that she was going to Chicago to model for Jack. So she's now got like three stories because I think she told the Frenches that Jenny was coming to the Biltmore to stay with her. And then she told Red she's still all be true. No, because Jenny was never planning on going.

SPEAKER_00 56:07

I mean, in her time in her own timeline. I get you.

Tasha 56:09

But Jenny had no plans. Why would Jenny go stay in LA? She was married. So they also got a confirmation from Gordon Fickling that they were never engaged. He was like, She's a very nice girl, but no. Kind of flighty. So he was cleared because since he had been in Charlotte since November 9th, he had been working for 20th Century Airlines. Yeah. And they were able to confirm that the day of the murder, he was flying a route from Charlotte to Chicago. There's no way that he could have been in LA killing Beth. The next person that they looked at was Mark Hanson, which I'm like, that I'm surprised it took you all this long. But he was the nightclub owner. Yeah. And his name was on the address book. So they were like, gotta talk to this guy. Why does she have his address book? He was considered a suspect very quickly, especially because Anne was like, maybe he did it because Beth turned down his sexual advances. And so they were like, okay, well, we got to talk to this guy. He admitted to the police during his investigations that through his businesses, he did have ties to the mob, which, you know, on the flip side, most business owners at the time did.

SPEAKER_00 57:01

Willingly or not.

Tasha 57:02

Right. Right. But it kind, and this is me speculating. Okay. But if he has mob ties, that makes me wonder with the Glasgow smile, does this in some way tie Mark? Like, you know, was it like he asked someone to get rid of a nuisance, or maybe like a threat aimed at him and they knew how Mark felt about Beth, and so they went after her. And the Glasgow smile really was a statement. Like it really was, hey, look at us, we're the mob. I don't know. This is not documented anywhere. This is just my little brain going crazy while I was investigating.

SPEAKER_00 57:30

Either he asked someone to do it, or maybe they reason it as a threat to him.

Tasha 57:33

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 57:34

I think.

Tasha 57:34

That's that's what I was wondering. He allowed the police to do blood tests at both of his properties, both of his homes, and at his businesses. And all of the blood tests came back negative. So there was no evidence of blood. And we know that she was completely drained of her blood. So their thought is well, if he did it, then there must be blood at one of his properties. Yeah, correct. There is also no evidence of a motive that they found. They were like, if he wanted her around, he could have had her around. She wanted to stay there. So what, you know, what would have been the purpose of him having this done? William J. Mann dismisses him, but there are other people who have outside theories that include him. So we'll come back to those later. But they also interviewed some people from the address book. Maurice, who was a married radio dispatcher that bought Beth Meals. There was Michael, the OSC graduate that had like paid for her rent and things like that when she couldn't. They talked to him, they talked to others. No evidence ever connected any of them to the murder. So now we come to like a wild goose chase that I just don't even know what to do with. This came up during the police canvas. A man who lived in the neighborhood said that he saw a sedan parked at the lot. Okay. I have found two stories of the sedan. Both of them end with Detective Ralph Asdell looking into it. So I'm going to tell you both of the stories. One of them is that he saw a black 1936 Ford sedan parked near the site between 6:30 and 7 a.m. The other one is that he saw at 9 p.m. the evening before a light-colored 1935 Ford sedan. And in both of them, the right rear door was open. He said that he was driving past the lot. He was going to like get rid of some brush from his property. And he drove past and saw the sedan with the right rear door open. And both of them, both tails, a thin man in his mid-40s in a tan top coat with a dark hat pulled low, stood beside the car. And the neighbor stopped across the street because he was like, What is this guy doing here? And he said, The man left his car, crossed the street, walked over to his the neighbor's car, stared him down, looked inside his car, like in the back seat, and then he went back to the sedan. The neighbor was freaking out and thought he was getting ready to be robbed. Yeah. So he takes off and he's like, I no, I've got to go back. I've got to see what's going on. So he circles the block and when he comes back around, the sedan's back doors closed. And he said that the man was now in the driver's seat. And that when he saw the neighbor, he took off so fast that his tires squealed. So I don't know if it was 9 p.m. or 6, 7 a.m. the morning of. I don't know. I don't know if the car was black or it was light colored. I don't know if it was a 1935 sedan or a 1936 sedan. What I do know is that Detective Ralph Asdell said that this was a claim that he took and that he investigated it. And he claimed even later in his life that he believed the man at the sedan was not only the murderer, but was also somebody that he interviewed. So he said that he found a man who matched the description and worked at a restaurant a few blocks away. Yeah. And what's interesting is that he said that he had noticed that the man's car had recently been painted black. So it used to be lighter color, but now it's black. And I think maybe that's why the stories over time have been it was a black car, it was a light colored car. Asdell said that he turned in his report, but there wasn't enough proof that it was the same man and he was never pursued. And part of why he says this was never pursued and why there wasn't enough like backing behind it was because in 1951, they launched the abortion squad and they put most of the LAPD detectives into the squad to hunt down doctors who were giving illegal abortions and women who were seeking them. And so suddenly it became we're no longer looking at these murders, we're looking at others, abortion doctors. So a lot of the resources were taken off of these unsolved murder crimes. Asdell told the LA Times in 2003 that he believed until the end that he interviewed Beth's killer. So I don't know. Then we have an open thread with Ted or Tom. Okay. So Beth told her friend Ann, you may remember, about a flyer named Ted or Tom. Ann could not remember if his name was Anne or Tom. Uh Anne could not remember if his name was Ted or Tom. She said that Beth told her he lived near the Burbank base and that they were dating and she was planning on moving there to be near him. Okay. A flyer named Ted or Tom. Later, we meet Red, who shows up in San Diego, and Beth tells the Frenches that he's a former Marine flyer who now flies for Western Airlines. Red, Ted, sound a lot alike. Maybe she did say red to Anne, but Anne was remembering it wrong and it was Ted. I don't know. Are they the same person? Are they two different people? Is there another man out there they never found?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:58

I don't know.

Tasha 1:01:58

I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:59

Because Massachusetts accents make R's and T's sound similar.

Tasha 1:02:03

Maybe. I mean, she's got a really she never lost her accent. Her they people said that her accent was very thick. It was a very thick Boston accent. So I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:10

Maybe you need to ask Morbid.

Tasha 1:02:11

I that's what I should do. I should send a message to Morbid and say, can you please record yourself saying Red and Ted? Yeah. Send it back over to the side. Just a natural sentence. Just your like throw it in a discussion. I don't know. So we never find out. That is just a loose thread that's never tracked down. So now we're gonna get into our Dylan situation. Okay. And I understand that this is running long, and I should have said at the beginning this is gonna be a long one, but we have got to tie up Beth's story. I cannot do an episode five. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:33

I agree.

Tasha 1:02:34

So Dr. Deriver, his name was J. Paul Deriver, and he was LAPD's consulting psychiatrist, and he was a loose canon if there ever was one. He kept pushing theories that the lead detectives dismissed, but he would not let them go. So almost two years after Beth's murder, there's a gentleman named Leslie Dillon. Again, different Dylan from the beach.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:56

Yeah.

Tasha 1:02:56

Okay. That was John Dillon. This is Leslie Dillon. Leslie Dillon had been a bell hop in LA at one time, and he worked as a mortician's assistant before that. He wrote to Deriver about a friend that he named Jeff, who had he said, matched the killer's profile. Okay. Derriver worked with the gangster squad, which was the secretive LAPD unit known for outside tactics that were not judicial. Gotcha. And he used them to lure Dylan back to California because Dylan had gone to Oklahoma. He was now living in Oklahoma. He gets him to come back to California so that he can arrest him. Okay. This whole thing collapses because there is a Jeff. Derriver is like, there's no Jeff. Dylan's the one who did it. He knows way too many details. Dylan's story was I know this guy, Jeff. He told me a bunch of stuff. It had to be him, and he totally looks like how you would imagine the killer to look. Right. And Deriver's theory is there is no quote unquote Jeff. Yeah. Dylan is Jeff. He has some sort of a split personality, or he's just straight out lying, and it's definitely him, and he's just trying to get some attention. And so what actually happened is that there was a Jeff. And Jeff was a real person with a real alibi. And Dylan was also confirmed to be in San Francisco the week of the murder. But Deriver would not let it go. He had arrested Leslie Dillon. He had held Leslie Dillon basically hostage, first at a hotel and then at a jail cell, to the point that Leslie Dillon had gotten a hold of, like, I think it was a napkin and had written like help being held hostage, threw it out a window to try and get somebody to call because he was not given an attorney. He was not allowed to call his family. He was not anything. So no one knew that he had been held by Deriver. So the fallout of this is that the daily news reporter Sarah Boynoff exposed eventually that De River had no actual psychiatric credentials at all. Later on, he was convicted on narcotics charges. Um, and the as a result, this police psychiatrist position was completely abolished from the precinct altogether. Like they didn't even backfill him with another person. They were like, Yeah, no, this is a hot mess. In William J. Mann's book, he notes that De River's methods likely contributed to wrongful executions in other cases. There's a possibility that there are other cases he worked on that he pegged somebody, saying that he had the psychiatric background to say that they were guilty, even though they weren't, even though they were claiming innocence, and that those people were eventually executed for it. Um, he also suggests that Leslie Dillon narrowly escaped the same fate because that was exactly where Deriver was trying to get him to. So even though he was cleared, Dylan comes back in two later outside theories that we are going to get into in just a minute, um, in the year 2000, and then again in 2017. So in 1949, we are now two years after the death, the grand jury, a grand jury starts reviewing the LAPD's failure to solve not just Beth's murder, but several other murders in the area. The investigators dug further into Beth's timeline. They researched her time in Massachusetts, California, Florida. They interviewed people in Texas and in Louisiana. They got no new evidence. It really helped us in. 2026 to have all this background to where Beth was at. But at the time, there was no new evidence that came up to help them. There was an investigator for the district attorney. His name was Frank Jemison. And Jemison reviewed the case independently and he compiled a final list of 22 suspects. Among them, you'll see notes about another person who's on our outside theory list, but I'm going to touch on very briefly here, Dr. George Hodel. And he makes mention of a wiretap. It came out in 2003 that the grand jury file showed that they had wiretapped Dr. George Hoddle's home. On February 19th, 1950, they have a recording of Hodel talking to an unidentified visitor. And George Hoddle says they thought there was something fishy. Anyway, now they may have figured it out. Yeah, they couldn't prove it now. They can't talk to my secretary anymore because she's dead. So we're gonna come back to Hodle. Keep that in your thoughts. So there's another gentleman named Carl. His name um and information was on a folded piece of paper in Beth's address book. When they tracked him down at first, he was like, No, Beth, who? But then he admitted Beth spent her last two days in LA before she went to San Diego with him. So that time after she left Mark Hansen's house and Mark said, No, you cannot live with me. And then we're like, where'd she go for two days before she went to San Diego? She was with Carl. Carl was going on a business trip. He said that he met her, he invited her to come along. She knew that she had nowhere to go. And so she went with him. There's speculation that Carl may have been that crazy guy that she said she was hiding from in San Diego. The reason for that is because when they looked into Carl's background, they found out that he had been accused of assaulting two women in his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri. Oh God. He gives my hometown a bad name. Additionally, there was a fellow student at KU while he was studying there. She was murdered while he was studying there in 1941. Now, he was never tied to that murder in any way. He was not on the list of suspects. But why this came up was because the Los Angeles DA report said that the manner of her death was similar to Beth's, in that specifically, the killer had cut a piece of her flesh off, like the killer had cut a piece of Beth's leg off. Yeah. And then he left it farther off on the ground to be found. Again, Carl was never linked to the crime, but he lived a it was a 20-minute walk from where the woman's body was found and where he lived. They never found the killer. They at one point accused her brother of killing her, but he was later exonerated. Like they were like, oh no, you didn't do it. Carl passed a polygraph in Los Angeles and he didn't have any medical training. So they were like, there's no way that you did this. Your polygraph's clear, you have no medical training. William Mann concludes, he says that he lacked the rage that a crime like this would require.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:41

Okay.

Tasha 1:08:41

I disagree. If you have beat the shit out of two women that you've dated, that to me is a big enough rage to take it further. I just I have no qualms with saying that. Um, if you have beaten two previous women, who's to say that you then would not beat a third and then bisect her? You know, I don't know. Agreed. However, that's not me saying that I think that Carl did it. That's me saying that there's shit in his background that shows he had a rage. Yeah. Right? We talked about Mark Hansen. He was also on the list of 22. Um, and then we have Marvin. And you may remember Marvin of Bill and Marvin, the apartment man that Margie and Beth stayed with.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:15

Yeah.

Tasha 1:09:15

This is really where they're abusive. Yes. This is really where man puts his focus. Like he's like, if any of these people did it, it was probably Marvin. Michael Connolly, the crime fiction writer, he also is like, it's Marvin, to the point that Marvin's family is being harassed now. And we're talking like grandkids and great-grandkids, and that's just ridonkulous. So we're not going to get into Marvin's information. I'm just going to leave his name at Marvin. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about why they think he is a good suspect. Military records show that he served as a surgical apprentice in the Navy Medical Corps while he was at war. He witnessed horrific combat. He was responsible for collecting body parts and he was diagnosed with severe PTSD. When he returned from the war, he enrolled as a pre-med student at USC. And that is, like we mentioned, he like keeping that in mind, he never graduated. I've seen an account that said he was in school to be a chiropractor. And I've seen another that said he was registered in the school of pharmacy. So I'm not sure what medicine he studied while he was at USC, but it's notable that he was there. A psychiatric evaluation while he was at war described him as a resentful individual who shows ample evidence of open aggression. It said that he wanted to be in the operating room and he asked to be in the operating room and he was not given rights to it, and that pissed him off. So it said, quote, attention state has resulted, lack of interest, aims, and ability to concentrate, a beginning hypochondriasis, and self-seated resentment. He was then, after all that, sent to Okinawa. I don't know if you know about Okinawa, but that was that was a pretty big site of World War II battles. Over like a month, I think it was a month's time, there or maybe two months, there were seven kamikaze attacks on Okinawa. He was in the first group of people sent to Okinawa. He spent 65 days under those attacks there. And then he was sent to the front lines for two weeks to treat two companies that had heavy casualties. At one point during those two weeks, there were torrential rains and he had been working out of a cave. Mud washed in, and he got buried up to his neck in mud. It took him a day to work himself free. So after this, his record said that he was amnesic, that he was emotional with depression and instability. And I'm like, well, yeah, you just had him where he was bombed for 65 days, and then he went to the front line for two weeks, and then he got buried alive in a cave. Like these are big things. When he left the Navy, he left with disability pay for neurosis resulting from being in the first landing group on Okinawa. That is literally what they said. Wow. That is the quote. He was noted as quote, sullen. His personality is not leasing, apathetic, inclined to sarcasm. And I was like, but that's like my son. Would you give him disability pay? I'm very confused, but obviously his was worse worse. And this was before he ever met Beth. Yeah. Okay. So in 1954, about the time that Sinus Brown had made a public statement hinting that there was an arrest close. Marvin changed his name and disappeared from Chicago. Okay. That is how you will find it everywhere on the internet. Sinus Brown says, I'm getting ready to make an arrest. And then Marvin disappears, changes his name, moves from Chicago. Pretty shady. We need to mention before, or we have mentioned before, we need to remind you of what we mentioned before that a name change was not uncommon for Jewish men at this time because they were being assaulted dramatically. Their lives were in danger. Great, huge numbers of this across the United States. In fact, while Marvin was a student at USC, he experienced firsthand a burning cross that had been placed on the front lawn of a Jewish fraternity house. Also, I'd like to point out that it's not a crime to move a pl move away from a place that you live. You and I move every three weeks. Not to mention, he and his wife, that move, they moved from Chicago to just south of San Francisco. I would like to posit that if you are trying to hide from the police, why would you move your family back to the state in which the crime was committed? And then they moved from San Francisco near San Diego and he lived there into the 70s. So again, why would you stick around that long if you're not wanting to be found out? Marvin in man's scenario, and he says, like, I don't have proof, but this is my hypothetical. Mann's hypothetical is that Marvin killed Beth on the USC campus during semester break when he had access to the cadaver lab and a way to clean the body and drain the blood without anyone finding it. Gotcha. That's his circumstantial hypothetical. He's very clear that this is him just estimating, speculating, whatever. And he is very clear in his book that there is no hard evidence for any of what he speculates. Michael Connolly also uh claims that he has a theory, but he does not say there's no hard evidence. He links a bunch of really circumstantial stuff. And um, I've read very strong arguments to the reasoning that Michael Connolly presents. So take that with what you will. So John Douglas, our famous FBI profiler guy, the guy who like wrote the book on FBO pro or FBI profiling. Yeah. He was the former head of the FBI's serial crime unit. He was the author of the book Mindhunter, which is such a good show, and I'm so mad that they canceled it. Yeah. And he was a leading expert on profiling, like we mentioned. He reviewed the coroner's inquest and case summary, and he gave a profile of the killer. His profile is a white man, late 20s or older, high school education, living alone, who worked with his hands, was adept with a knife and comfortable wallowing in blood. That's a quote. Like a butcher, slaughterhouse worker, or ear hunter. He said the man would be familiar with prostitutes. He was rigid, patient, compulsive, and deliberate. He said that he would be argumentative when drunk, probably had a record for threatening or assaulting someone with a knife under heavy personal and financial stress. For example, one of the Southland butchers in the six-week strike that ran through Christmas and New Year's in the area. That was something he mentioned. Douglas imagined that the two spent, Beth and the killer spent several days together. He had probably been drinking. She rejected him, maybe mocked him for like a handicap or a stutter or something. And the stress of being poor and unemployed, coupled with the alcohol and the rejection from Beth, exploded into rage. So he says that the man cut her in half because it was practical. It made her easier to move, but the mutilation shows personal rage. Quote, he was dehuman dehumanizing her and defeminizing her. And then he cuts that smile in her face. And there's some things to what he says there that I'm like, that I've always thought yes. You know, the fact that he takes the rose tattoo off of her leg and he shaves her pubic hair. And then he hides those. And I'm not going to go into description of where or how. Some speculation is that he he hid it for the coroner to find. But I kind of wonder if he hid it, not thinking about the coroner is going to find it there. More of a, I need to hide this. Because if you think about what are people going to identify Beth by? She's always been known for her black hair. At the time, her hair is dyed red. She's got this tattoo on her leg of a rose that is very identifiable. That people, you know, she showed off. People knew about this tattoo.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:06

Yeah, correct.

Tasha 1:16:06

So those are the two main identifying factors for Beth. If they had put that in the paper, we're looking for the identity of a black-haired woman who has a rose tattoo. People are gonna know who it is right away. Her hair is dyed red, as you all know. The carpet don't lie. So taking out or shaving her pubic hair would have hidden the natural color of her hair. Oh, you know, and then taking off the rose, I think that they were trying to hide her identity. That makes sense. That's that's just me speculating. But and then the smile in her face, I also think that that was more of like a comment on how she was always smiling and she was always being nice and like, but also she was always like making herself friendly with guys because she knew that if she did, she could get a meal. And maybe it was somebody who she tried to get a meal out of and he expected it to be more.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:50

Yeah, maybe.

Tasha 1:16:51

And so maybe the Glasgow smile was a comment on you're always smiling, you're always playing a part, I'm gonna make it permanent in death. I don't know, but that is something that that I agree with in his um assessment here. He says Norton Avenue, he was like, there were far better places to hide a body if he wanted her to be hidden. He could have taken her to the mountains, to the desert, he could have dumped her in the ocean, but instead, he chose a flat open lot, physical, visible for blocks, and right in the middle of where families live. Douglas believed that he wanted to put the fear of God in that neighborhood and that he had some sort of personal connection to it, like financial loss from the construction stopping, or that maybe the union boss lived nearby. These were his speculations. He said that afterwards, these are the things that would have given him away. He would have washed the inside of his car as well as the outside. He would have dropped his usual hobbies to follow every newspaper and radio update. He says he would have just like been obsessed with the investigation. He would have criticized the police at local bars and cafes, saying things like, Yeah, you know, this used to be a safe neighborhood, like that kind of thing, to get the conversation rolling. He also possibly would have been feeding police false tips to gauge their progress, mailing her belongings to a newspaper rather than police shows that he wants publicity, not just to taunt the police. Um, he said that he would have kept a souvenir, even just a lock of hair, and that he would have visited the lot or her grave. She was buried outside of San Francisco in Berkeley, that he would have visited to symbolically roll in the dirt. I don't know about the symbolically roll in the dirt. That is a weird quote to me, but I could see him like living it up, like remembering what she did. You know, he says that he suggests there were no further killings because he took himself out of circulation through a self-destructive event. Either he committed himself to an institution, or he um committed other crimes that landed him in prison, or he did something like heavy drinking or drugs or something that resulted in his death. Gotcha. I want to point out though that his version still builds around this motive that Beth rejected and possibly mocked somebody. His whole motive is that there was a rejection. Yeah. And he what bothers me about that, and I guess I fall in that camp too, because I do have the thing about the Glasgow smile, but he's leaning into the story about her behavior that has not been confirmed, that no one can confirm. No one can say.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:03

Well, when you mentioned that, um, I was just like from everything we talked about through how people saw her and everything, um, that she didn't seem like a person that would mock someone.

Tasha 1:19:11

No.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:12

Uh, that just didn't seem like her character.

Tasha 1:19:14

Exactly. And I I don't think that she mocked someone. I think that she thought I'm being friendly with a guy, we're having a nice conversation, and you know, I'm gonna get a meal out of this and I'm gonna go on my way like I have for the last few months. Yeah. And that the individual was like, that's not what I wanted and got pissed.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:29

Well, and hers and hers was probably just a simple no. But if it was someone that was like mentally ill or had PTSD or like a combination of like things from just past experiences, that that simple no just triggered something in them.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:41

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:42

That it was just magnified in their head to be something very hardcore rejectioned that it just flipped the switch and yeah.

Tasha 1:19:48

Well, we're we're gonna talk about the outside sources or theories that I've kind of made mention of, and we're gonna go in order of when they were made.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:55

Okay.

Tasha 1:19:55

First one is 1991 and 1995, and it was Janice Knowlton. She was she wrote a book and she claimed that her father, George Knowlton, killed Beth plus two other women. She was 10 years old whenever Beth died. And she um said that Beth was having an affair with her father and was living in their garage apartment, and that he beat her to death with a claw hammer in Westminster, California in their garage after she had a miscarriage. And then he forced Janice to help dispose of the body. And she said that first they tried to throw her body off the ocean or into the ocean off a pier, and when she wouldn't sink, that they then took her to LA. When asked why are you just now saying this in 1991? She said that they were long repressed memories that she had pulled forward with a psychiatrist. So we're in the satanic panic. We're in the time when like the school teachers are being accused of um molesting children. And there's a book that I cannot remember the name of, but it was a woman who uh through hypnotism, she had stumbled upon these long repressed memories that um basically revealed that she had been victim of a long satanic ritual by her family. It was a whole thing. Um, this is the time that she's writing this book, and she's saying, I had these repressed memories, and I'm just now having them come up. Um, her book is called Daddy was the Black Dahlia Killer. And I've linked these books in case anybody wants to look at them on our bookshop.org page, which will be in the show notes. Her book came out in 1995. Her claim does not hold up, and this is why. The property that they lived on was excavated after she wrote her book. And the only thing that came up on this property was a knife, farm tools, and some jewelry. And um, the LAPD detective at the time said that her claims of the case didn't fit any of the case facts. So after she died in 2004, her stepsister told the LA Times that the book was trash. And she said, quote, she believed it, but it wasn't reality. I know because I lived with her father for 16 years. So she was just like, there none of this happened. There was not a girl living in the garage. There, you know, it just wasn't a thing. She convinced herself it was the truth, but it was not the truth. Then in 1994, John Gilmore wrote a book called Severed, The True Story of the Black Dawlia. Uh-huh. And this was being published in the shadow of the O.J. Simpson case. Okay. Gilmore claimed that at the age of 11, he met Beth when she came to his grandma's house asking about her father, who he said had been like a boarder in this house. Okay. His own father was put on the case later. He was um an officer. And his grandma, he said, made him promise not to tell his father that he had seen Beth short in the house because she was like, his claim is that his grandma said they'll take him off the case and it'll make him a suspect because he's not tied to it. So he named Jack Anderson Wilson, aka Arnold Smith. This is like a whole thing, saying that the investigators were closing in when Wilson died in a hotel fire days before he could be arrested. But he said that Jack Anderson Wilson, who also went by Arnold Smith, revealed to him details that only the killer would know. And apparently John Gilmore, because his father was the detective. He said that he interviewed Wilson in the early 1980s and that Wilson mentioned details only the killer would know. He said Wilson indirectly admitted through a Jones, like he, like I'm, you know, there was a Mr. Jones did it. But, you know, it's the same thing that DeRiver was saying. Oh. He thinks he's he's telling the story as someone else. So he said that his friend Jones told him all of this, and that he there had been a killing of a Hollywood socialite months before Bet. And Gilmore said that it was a case that was hushed up by William Randolph Hearst at his request of the police because he had been friends with the socialites family and they didn't want it in the paper. It's very twisty. It's very interesting that this man would have mysteriously died in fire right before the police got to him. That's John Gilmore's story. That Jack Anderson Wilson did it. And that he met, like in all of that, he also had to tie in that he met Betty. Oh, you know, good on him. In 2000, Mary, you may remember Mary, she was the little girl that grew up next door to Beth.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:55

Yeah, she's like 10 years younger or something like that.

Tasha 1:23:57

She released a book in 2000 speculating that Orson Wells was the killer.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:02

Wow.

Tasha 1:24:02

Yes. It's a big swing.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:04

That's a huge read.

Tasha 1:24:05

Yes. Uh the book is called Childhood Shadows: The Hidden Story of the Black Dahlia Murder. And I have not read it, but I have read some people's thoughts on it. And apparently, the story is that she had seen Orson Wells cut a woman's body in half, and so he knew how to do it. Okay. Also in 2000, Buzz Williams, apparently 2000 was the year for the Black Dahlia. Um, Buzz Williams printed in the rap sheet, which was the Long Beach PD's newsletter. He was a retired Long Beach police department detective. I'm gonna get these words out of my mouth. His father was Richard F. Williams, and his father's friend, Con Keller, um, he and his father's friend were gangster squad members who had worked the case in the 40s and 50s. He said that his father believed Leslie Dillon was the killer and that he escaped extradition by going home to Oklahoma. Supposedly, his ex-this is one of those my sisters, brothers, cousins, friends. Okay. Supposedly his ex-wife's, Leslie Dillon's ex-wife's second cousin was Illinois governor Adalai Stevenson II, and that he put in a call to Oklahoma's governor on his behalf and said, Can't extradite Leslie Dillon to California. He said that on Keller, his father's friend, who was also a member of the gangster squad, that he believed Mark Hansen did it. So the two partners had different opinions. His father thought Leslie Dillon did it, his father's partner thought Mark Hansen did it. Um, because he said that Hansen had studied at a Swedish surgical school before coming to the United States. And he threw elaborate parties for the LAPD officers and the officials in the area to like keep himself clear, to like make them favor him.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:38

Yeah.

Tasha 1:25:39

The article that that Buzz wrote for the newsletter said that Dylan sued, and this ended up being true, Leslie Dillon sued the LAPD for three million dollars for defamation. And also because he was held hostage. The suit was dropped. Harnish, who was a reporter at the time, we've mentioned him several times, he says that Dylan was cleared after a thorough investigation that placed him in San Francisco and that there was no LA day LAPD cover up for Hansen and that Dillon got a settlement from the city of LA. There's no concrete evidence produced for Williams' claims that are in there. So Larry Harnish, our LA Times copy editor, reporter, historian for Los Angeles, he believes that Dr. Walto, Walto, Dr. Walter Alonzo Bailey is our killer. And he has so much stuff written about this. Like the man has put his back into it. Okay. Um, he said that John Douglas told him the location of the body mattered and he listened. You know, the FBI profiler says location is important. So the killer was making a statement to that neighborhood. So Harnish started looking for a connection between Beth and the neighborhood, and he found one. And this is really interesting, and I just don't even know what to do with this. Okay. So Bailey had a daughter named Barbara Lindgren. Barbara was the signed witness at Beth's sister Jenny's wedding to her husband, Adrian.

SPEAKER_02 1:26:54

Okay.

Tasha 1:26:54

A little kooky. Okay. Barbara attended Adrian's church while he was training in LA for the Navy, I believe. Okay. He attended a church in Los Angeles, and that's where he met Barbara. When he and Jenny got married, they went back to this church, and it was this church was where they got married. The pastor was the one who married them, and Barbara was the signed witness for the wedding. The address that Barbara put on the marriage certificate was for her mother's house, Ruth Bailey, who had been married to Dr. Walter Alonzo Bailey. This house is exactly one block from where Beth was left.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:27

Oh wow.

Tasha 1:27:28

Yes. So we've got a tie of Beth. It's like six degrees of Beth. Beth.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:32

That felt like lessons. That's like three degrees.

Tasha 1:27:34

Beth knows Jenny, who knows Barbara, who lived with her mother, who was married to the doctor, and they lived a block away. Walter was a prominent LA surgeon. He was um at one time chief of staff at LA County Hospital. He was assistant professor of surgery at USC. He had a private practice that was five blocks from the Biltmore. And of course, Beth had been seen at the Biltmore because that's where she had read drop her off at for the fake meetup with Jenny. Harnish says that he fits Douglas. Profile, the FBI profile. He's comfortable with a knife and blood and he has medical training. In 1946, the year before Beth's murder, he was no longer teaching or serving as chief of staff, and his family was under enormous financial strain. On October 26th, he left his wife Ruth and he filed for divorce. And in the process of this, he also disinherited Ruth and their daughter Beatrice in favor for a younger woman doctor that he was allegedly having an affair with that he had brought into his practice as a partner. He ended up having a brain lesion that had dramatically changed his personality. And he was showing signs of Alzheimer's when he died. He died at the VA hospital on January 4th, 1948. So a year after Beth's death. His autopsy confirmed that he had here we go encephalomyasia. What it is, okay, though I can't pronounce it, is a softening of the brain that causes mental impairment. And it was because of that lesion. A few weeks before this, on December 22nd, 1947, he had written a new will that left basically half of his estate, his jade collection that was worth like $5,000, all of his office equipment to this younger woman doctor. Okay. And his library. Ruth, though, is still legally his wife because the divorce is not finalized. And so she's like, what the F? The divorce isn't finalized. Well, yeah, because like she can't even say, I want my half of the settlement, which I mean she couldn't have done anyway because of the time it is. But anyway, she sues the estate and she says, Look, this woman doctor had learned a secret about his medical practice that would ruin him. And she threatened to expose it if he tried to come home. So she gained quote unquote undue influence through this is my favorite, a natural flattery and feminine wiles. Those crazy women and their wiles. Ruth said that he lived in constant fear and changed his will under intimidation. Bill Harnish gives us this timeline. He says that Walter left his family October 26th, 1947. Beth is dropped at the Biltmore blocks from his office on January 9th, 1947. She's then killed around the 15th of January, 14th, 15th. And then he writes a new will December 22nd, so the end of the year. And then he dies that following January, 1948. His theory is that Beth reached out to Walter because she knew of him through her brother-in-law's church and that she had spent a few days with him. Like, so basically she gets dropped at the Biltmore and she's like, I'm gonna walk down to his office, his office and ask him for help because he knows my family. So he speculates that Walter tried to seduce her, she refused, and under financial, emotional, and medical strain and alcohol, though there's no proof, I don't know where that comes from, that he killed her. I think he just threw it in because that's what Douglas had said. The woman doctor figured it out, and the will was the price of her silence.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:49

She is blackmailing him.

Tasha 1:30:51

Yes. The other side of this is that people who actually knew the doctor said that he was a gentleman. They said that he was a skilled surgeon, he was a good man, and that he was a devoted family man until his medical decline in 1946. David Lampkin, who was the former head of LAPD's cold case unit, called this his favorite of the book theories because it actually connected the suspect to the lot where Beth was found. The last really big one that we're going to talk about is one that I mentioned earlier, and it's Steve Hodel's book, Black Dahlia Avenger, The True Story. Yeah. Came out in 2003. It was a bestseller. He Steve is a retired LAPD detective. And he found two photos among his father's belongings after his father died that he believed were pictures of Beth. One was confirmed later to not be her. The other has never been verified, but it doesn't look like Beth. She has dark hair and it's from the 40s. He sees these pictures and he sets out to clear his father's name. Dr. George Hill Hoddle, a former surgeon, he had died in 1999. He was convinced his father killed Beth and others before he moved to Asia in 1950. So Dr. Hodel had moved to the Philippines and he lived there from 1950 to 1990. And then after 1990, he came back to the States and then he died in 99. The house that they lived in in the 40s was called the Soden House, not the Snowden House, which we love at Firefly Hills in Kentucky, but the Soden House. It was a Mayan style block home designed by Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright's son. It's now a Hollywood landmark, and tons of people talk about it like it's the place where she died. So it's a landmark for two reasons. In 2012, Steve had soil samples taken from there and tested, and they came back positive for decomposed human remains. He also said that while he was a child in the 1940s, that there had been some renovations done at this house and they had laid cement, and the cement that was used matched the cement bag that was found by Beth's body at the lot in Lemerk Park. So he theorized that his father used empty cement bags from the property to transfer her body. He also claims that he had a handwriting expert look through Dr. Hodel's writing and that the expert said it was a close but not conclusive match to the Avenger letters that were written. Hodel was friends with uh with the photographer Man Ray, and Steve believes that the crime recreated uh one of Man Ray's most famous images, okay, which is um I've got linked in the show notes. I don't see how, but see what you will. I think it's one of those information bias things or confirmation bias. Like I think he's seeing what he wants to see at this point. In 2018, Steve said that he had a letter from a former police informant that named the killer as GH. Hodel had been a suspect in the secretary's death, and he had been accused of raping his own daughter before Beth's death. He lived a wild life. Um, I am not in any way claiming that Dr. Hodel is not above suspicion. He was a very shady character, so hear me out on that, but I don't know that he is the one. I don't know. So the assistant DA at the time of the publication of the book said that if Hodel were still alive, Steve's evidence would be enough to file two murder charges. The LAPD did consider Hodel a viable suspect at the time. They tapped his phone, which we talked about. Steve, after the publication of his book, has never stopped researching. He's his family describes it as an obsession. I think it's really interesting that he continues to research because if you think that you've already found the evidence to confirm that your father is the killer, I don't know why you would continue looking.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:06

But well, he wrote like further books, like part two, part three, blah, blah, blah. And it's supposed to be, and I've not read any of them, but they're supposed to be like additional evidence to what he's already had type thing.

Tasha 1:34:16

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:34:16

And then he wrote a book that was like a fictitious dramatization of and I started like listening to that one. It was like it was night court.

Tasha 1:34:23

Is that the one where I was like, please stop?

SPEAKER_00 1:34:24

Yes, it was it was night court, uh, because the court started at like 12 01 a.m. in the morning, and it was like uh as far as I got, like they were like wit having witnesses of people that had died. So at first you didn't know what was going on, and then they're like, Court's gonna be in session again tomorrow at 12 01 a.m. I was like, who has court at 1201 a.m.?

Tasha 1:34:43

Did you ever watch Night Court when you were a kid?

SPEAKER_00 1:34:45

Oh, I love Night Court. But uh, but then when they started bringing witnesses on, it was like it was uh other people that have died and they were using their witness. Like, so what was your last name? It's like, oh, this is such a weird story. But from what I heard, it he was supposed to be bringing in like some facts from the case into that to be it more like this is information of like kind of his previous books, but more of like a fictitious drama. Well, it's a good time.

Tasha 1:35:07

He's made a life of it.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:08

Yeah.

Tasha 1:35:08

He claims that Beth met his father at his clinic while being treated for a sexually transmitted disease. However, there is no proof that she ever went to his clinic. There are no medical records, there's nothing. In fact, Mark Hansen, the guy she lived with, admitted to taking her to see a different doctor who she again tried to seek care from immediately before leaving for San Diego. Okay. Um, after her trip with Carl. So keep that in mind. This was to seek care for an allergy to rubber in her Uha and other regions. Okay. Okay. She had an allergic reaction to the rubber that was used in condoms. She had sought care from another physician earlier on for the same thing. That physician called it women's troubles, but it was, they speculated that it was an abortion, but her small uterus, people just have a great time with bet. Her small uterus is supposed to mean that she couldn't have sex. But then also seeing a doctor for women's troubles meant that she was a floozy who had an abortion. Like, come on, man. What is the story here? You guys can't get it straight. Neither of these are true. Her small uterus was actually indicative of the fact that she had never been pregnant. Okay. Not that she could not have sex. She was fully capable of being sexually active if she wanted to. But also, what we know is that she was not a girl who was very active. And we know of three times where she sought care for an allergic reaction to the rubber used in condoms during her lifespan.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:26

Okay.

Tasha 1:36:26

Twice with the one doctor that Mark Hansen took her to, and once at another physician. That is it. There's no evidence of her carrying a pregnancy. There is no evidence of her having an abortion. There is no evidence of her being a floozy. There is no evidence that even if she was, it's anybody's damn business. And also WTF is just what I have to say. So that's where we're gonna leave Steve's story because I'm about to get angry. So we're gonna go on.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:47

I could tell.

Tasha 1:36:47

I I did forget this one. 2017. I'm going to mispronounce this woman's name, and I'm so sorry. Her name is U E I U Eatwell. Um, she wrote Black Dahlia, Red Rose, The Crime, Corruption, and Cover Up of America's Greatest Unsolved Murder. And she's an English true crime writer. She argues that Leslie Dillon committed the murder, but that he did it at Mark Hansen's request.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:09

Okay.

Tasha 1:37:09

So she takes like the two favorite suspects and mushes them together. She says that the murder was committed at the Astor Motel because the owner said that he found a room covered in blood and fecal matter the day after Beth's murder, but because he already had trouble with the police department, he went ahead and cleaned up the whole thing and never reported it. Okay. She apparently went in, even though like the Astor Motel has been renovated, I think more than once since 1947. She went in and even tried to do like blood tests, couldn't find anything. But her motive is way twisty. Her motive is that while Beth was living with Mark Hansen, she found out about a hotel robbing scheme between Hansen, a man named Jeff Connors, and Sergeant Finas Brown. She just like links him in. And she alleges that the lead detective had ties to Hansen and was corrupt. And that's how you know that he was in on it. And that he basically just like threw off the trail the whole time he was on the case. And that Leslie Dillon was the bell hop at the Astor Motel. And so that's where it had to have happened. And it was a motel and they were robbing motels. And that's how she ties the whole thing together. And then we've got, of course, our book by William J. Mann, The Black Dahlia, Murders, Monsters, and Madness in Mid-Century Hollywood that was published in January 2026 is my book of choice. Love this book. He points to Marvin, like I mentioned, um, as the last uneliminated suspect, while also leaving room for a stranger. He says if it wasn't Marvin, the only other option is basically that it was a stranger that Beth had just met that hadn't had previous privy to her life. Today, where the case stands, the evidence is really thin. David Lampkin, who headed LAPD's Cold Case Unit in 2001, said that when he was over the cold case unit, that the physical evidence was nearly non-existent. So he believes that it's unlikely to ever be solved. The original investigators are gone. Ralph Asdell, who we mentioned earlier, he was the last living member of the original team. And he died December 31st, 2003, at the age of 82. Wow. Believing to the day that it was the man at the sedan. We have the stranger theory that man mentions. This was also lead detective Harry Hansen. He believed that it was a stranger. Oh. Um, that no one they had interviewed was the killer, that it was someone that they would never find because it was a stranger and they had just never identified him. But I do want to call out how Hansen talked about her. Makes me very angry. And it's just one more time where her story has been taken from her. In a 1971 interview from his retirement home, he called Beth a quote, man crazy tramp, but she wasn't a prostitute. He admitted that all of the men in her life, they found only that out of all of the men in her life, they had only found three who claimed any sexual experience with her. He said, quote, she was a tease. She gave a bad time to quite a few guys. She just asked for trouble. There wasn't very much to like about her. She probably went too far this time and just set some guy off into a blind, berserk rage. So even the man in charge of finding her killer blamed Beth for her own murder, but all the onus of her death on her and on actions of her. And then the papers did the same thing. They did it to sell copies in 1947. It's been, you know, she's been blamed for her own murder to sell books, to make movies, including the 2006 film based on James Elroy's book, Elroy, who called Beth a sad little girl and a whore. That is a direct quote. Everyone has just continued to do it ever since. Carnish said that the people in Beth's story are subject to the frailties of age. Everybody dies, everyone ages, they all disappear. But the black Dahlia is not. And he says that's why even the name of Beth is lost. If you mention Beth Short, Elizabeth Short, very few people will know her name. But if you say the Black Dahlia, everyone knows it because it's a fictional character that is strengthened every year by new fictions. It just keeps going. So Beth's case is a cold case. Um detectives, authors, family members, armchair sleuths all have their own theories, but we may never know who actually killed her. What we do have the ability to do in this case is remember who she actually was, which again, William J. Mann does very well in his book. She was a kind, sweet young woman who was victimized and brutally murdered. She was not the black dahlia that has been sold by men looking to own and make a dime on her all these years later. And so again, read William J. Mann's book. It will be linked. Everything will be linked. All the books we mentioned are linked in our bookshop.org page, which is linked in the show notes, along with all of the other research articles. There's lots of them. They are linked in the show notes of our previous episodes. So I did not repeat the same ones over and over again. Every episode has a different list. They all came together. It's not like the resources on episode three were only used for episode three. It was just a very long list. And we have a character limit. So yeah, you know, I had to get creative. All of that's in the show notes. Lavar Burton, you know, decide for yourself. Don't take our word for it. And next, we're entering October. It's scary movie time. So, Matt, scary movies are coming up. And I don't think that we should tell them what movies are coming up, but we are getting ready to dive into some scary.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:01

I don't even think we know exactly which ones we're doing. I've got I know we have a list.

Tasha 1:42:05

I've got a list.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:05

I just don't know if they are plentiful.

Tasha 1:42:07

Yeah, there's a lot. But until then, until the scary movies arrive. Like, subscribe, share with a friend. You have no idea how much that would help us. Leave a comment. We'll read you on the air to our 16 listeners.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:18

Do we have 16 listeners?

Tasha 1:42:19

I I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:20

I don't know.

Tasha 1:42:21

I get downloads of like, hey, this many people downloaded your episode. And I'm just like, people are listening. Hey, people listening. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:27

Um we do get locations of where people are which is really cool. Which are from. We've had um, well, I mean, we've had the states, we've had Massachusetts, which I don't know if sometimes sometimes when we like don't even click on it, I think it still registers that it popped up on our website. And I feel like some of those might be us.

Tasha 1:42:42

Oh, I hope not.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:44

But it's not like we watched them, but then like we've got some from California, from the Midwest, which I'm just like, that's crazy. And then like Spain and England, which is nuts. Uh I think somewhere, I think I saw one in Australia. What? And then somewhere in South America. But Spain was cool because I noticed because sometimes the locations tell you like what episodes were downloaded for those. And like the Spain.

Tasha 1:43:07

I really wanted to know what they thought.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:08

I was like, so if you're one of those people, I definitely comment.

Tasha 1:43:11

Please, we want to know. Thank you guys so much for Matt, David, and I for giving Real Twisty a listen today. And sorry it went a little long, but I could not do a fifth Beth episode. I love Beth. I I have a warm place in my heart for Beth, but I could not do it.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:24

I think everyone needs their due uh to show who they actually are, or at least have someone speak on their behalf.

Tasha 1:43:30

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:31

And she she deserves it.

Tasha 1:43:33

Yes. So um we will catch you next time on Real Twisty. Okay.