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PART TWO OF TWO
Her lovely face has haunted generations of homicide detectives.
Most will tell you that speaking for murder victims like Elizabeth Short is what drives them. It is often a quixotic quest for justice that can take months, years or, in the case of Short, decades.
In the nearly 80 years since Short’s bisected body was dumped in an empty lot at 39th and Norton in Los Angeles on January 15, 1947, sleuths both professional and amateur have had one question.
She got the name from a crime writer
Who murdered the Black Dahlia ?
And why?
Short, 22, picked up the nickname from Los Angeles Herald-Express crime writer Beavo Means due to her raven-coloured hair and preferred attire. And it has stuck down the generations. It is a byword for a cautionary tale.
Producer Jeff Thomas of Talestorm Productions has assembled an all-star team of former investigators and they have unearthed a trove of new evidence on the Black Dahlia.
Launch petition demanding autopsy
“It is the great white whale of unsolved American murders,” Thomas said, adding that his team knows who the killer is, where Short was murdered, the weapon used and why she was killed.
At this point, he’s keeping his cards close to his chest.
The Thomas team and Short’s family have launched a petition demanding the Los Angeles Police Department release the long-secret autopsy report and the case files.
More than 10,000 have already signed.
It’s all part of an upcoming docuseries entitled Deconstructing Dahlia, which is currently in production.
Short was last seen on January 9, 1947, around 6 p.m. in the lobby of the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. She was discovered six days later and the intervening time had been known as her missing week.
Tight-lipped on details
“That’s a cornerstone of Dahlia lore but she doesn’t have a missing week,” Thomas said, adding that the murder motel is not far from where Short’s body was dumped.
The producer was tight-lipped on the killer’s M.O., saying that the team is close to hammering down that aspect. He believes politics stopped the case from being solved.
“Back to the original two detectives (Harry Hansen and Finis Brown), based upon the files and the information that we have, I would say that they were either ordered not to solve it or did not want to solve it,” he said.
“I can point exactly in the case files to where one of those two investigating officers went back and interviewed people. And the very first thing he said is, oh, I’m friends with another individual. That’s tied into the case,” Thomas explained.
“He lets these people know that he’s friends with somebody before questioning them. And to me, that is nothing but witness intimidation. Am I missing something here?”
Thomas added that while the case is almost 80 years old, interest remains high in Southern California and has become part of the region’s legend and lore.
“This crime deserves to be solved, and something that is a public document like an autopsy report should not be sequestered by one government agency,” Thomas said. “In fact, in this age of transparency, we need more of it.”
Seedy motel became focus of probe
One of the key discoveries has been a forensic focus on the seedy motel where Short was tortured and murdered. Built in the 1940s, the motel, not far from where Short’s body was dumped, was a chamber of horrors.
With some coaxing, the owner allowed the team to remove layers of drywall that told a brutal tale. Thomas recruited two forensic whizzes to help.
“We told them, we have a motel that was built in the ’40s. This is a crime scene from the ’40s. What are the chances here? What do you think?” Thomas said. “And they looked at it and said, ‘Well, in order to process this room, we’re going to need crowbars; we’re gonna need hammers.”
A deal needed to be struck with the motel owner to tear the room apart. The experts decided it was worth it.
Was the blood evidence old or new?
“Eyewitnesses described the room covered in blood,” Thomas said. “There was also eyewitness accounts of a massive amount of blood in there (in an alcove) as well. So we had all these sworn grand jury testimonies, and we decided it was a matter of why hadn’t it been done before?”
And then the team began tearing the room apart.
“We found blood evidence in the first 15 minutes, but then realized, ‘oh, my gosh, on that piece of wall, we have like, a barcode. So that’s, you know, pretty, pretty recent blood evidence,” Thomas said.
“So we had to go back digging and digging and digging. When all was said and done, there was actually seven layers of drywall removed to get back to the original plaster wall. And thank God that plaster wall had not been touched.”
The wall had been painted over but it had never been repaired. Instead, the ugliness was covered by layers of drywall.
‘We believe there are other victims’
“Besides having eyewitness accounts of seeing a room covered in blood, we also had sworn grand jury testimony that placed Elizabeth Short there at the motel at the time of the murder. And we also have sworn grand jury testimony that the suspect is also seen there at the motel, at the time of Elizabeth Short’s.”
The killer?
“This is still an ongoing investigation, but yes, we believe there are other victims. Not only in California, but in several other states as well,” Thomas said. “Like Elizabeth Short, these are also unsolved, sadistic sex crimes, mutilation murders. Plus, we can place the offender in these cities at the times of the murders in addition to other evidence.”
bhunter@postmedia.com
@HunterTOSun