Buried Bones Halloween Special: The Black Dahlia

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the
last twenty five years writing about true crime.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I'm Paul Hols, a retired cold case investigator who's
worked some of America's most complicated cases and solve them.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most
compelling true crimes.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring
new insights to old mysteries.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime
cases through a twenty first century lens.

Speaker 3 (00:34):
Some are solved and some are cold, very cold.

Speaker 1 (00:38):
This is buried bones. Best looking crowd I've ever seen,

(01:06):
and it's not just all the beverages that they give
you on this cruise. I call this Thank you all
for being here.

Speaker 3 (01:14):
That's amazing.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
Yeah, and it's our first live show. We've never done
anything like this before.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
So, Hey, Kate, how are you?

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Hey Paul, I'm doing well. How about you?

Speaker 3 (01:25):
I'm doing great. I'm here on this cruise.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
I can't believe in me.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
One of the things about this case that we're going
to talk about. If you're true crime officionados, you of
course have heard about the black Dahlia. One of the
unusual aspects of this case from something from the nineteen
forties is there's a lot of photographs because the media
was allowed at the crime scene where the victim was found.

(01:55):
As a result, I have material that I often don't
have from case.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
Is that Kate picks right.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
However, I'm just giving you a warning up front that
I'm going to be having to talk about some very
graphic aspects to the injuries that the victims suffered, as
well as some very disturbing behaviors about the offender.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
So just be aware of that.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
I will alert you before I start really getting into
those details ahead of time.

Speaker 3 (02:25):
In case you don't want.

Speaker 1 (02:26):
To listen to that, let me do a little disclaimer
because Paul had his disclaimer, but mine is that this
is such a massive case, and you'll hear why in
a little bit. This has been such a massive case.
There's no way we can gram this into an hour
and a half episode. So if you guys have really
done a deep dive, which I know some of you

(02:46):
probably have on this case, we haven't been able to
include everything. There's more suspects than people in this room.
I feel like for black Dahlia. So we kind of
went with the highlights everything. All of our sources are
in the public dome and also, you know, from Paul's knowledge,
but we do have some authors out there who have,
you know, their own opinions, and so when we talk

(03:08):
about those opinions, we'll make sure that we mention who
the authors are for sure.

Speaker 3 (03:12):
Yeah, it sounds good.

Speaker 1 (03:13):
Okay, all right, I'm going to do the very famous
quote with thing I always do. Let's set the scene,
Set the scene. Okay, So we are talking about Elizabeth Short.
This is in la in nineteen forty seven. Elizabeth Short
is twenty two, and she is sometimes called Betty or Beth,

(03:37):
and she's a recent transplant from Medford, Massachusetts. I mean,
you can tell she is striking and she, according to
her friends, is very very outgoing, and everybody thought she
was going to be a Hollywood star essentially. So I'm
gonna give you guys some background, and there's a lot
to kind of go through before I'll have Paul chime

(03:57):
in on some stuff. But we need to know more
about her. My experience with this case has been because
it is such a difficult case and I'm somebody who
talks about murder every single day. I've kind of avoided
it until now looking at the details. But I was
really interested in her as a person. And of course
Paul will say, because of do your line now, I

(04:18):
want to hear your line.

Speaker 3 (04:19):
Yeah, victimology is huge. You have to understand who the
victim is.

Speaker 1 (04:24):
We need to get that printed. That's his big line
you get on a T shirt. Victimology is huge. So
you know, we're going to talk a little bit about
her and then we'll get into the circumstances and all
of that. Okay, So she had died jet black hair
in high school, and she has these beautiful, pale green eyes.
And she had a nickname I had not heard before,

(04:45):
Medford's Deanna Durban. I think you had to be there
in the nineteen forties to get that immediately. So this
was a very famous Canadian American soprano and actress. She
got the nickname Black Dahlia. And interesting way, so she
used to hang out in Long Beach at Landers drug
store and she got the nickname Black Dahlia, which was

(05:08):
a riff off of a movie from nineteen forty six,
which now I'm going to see the more I read
about it, which is about a woman who is married
to a naval officer. He comes back from the South Pacific.
He finds out that she has been having an affair
and she ends up dead, and everybody's a suspect. And so,
of course we know the irony with that is that's

(05:29):
her nickname. So it's I've always wondered where that nickname
came from.

Speaker 3 (05:32):
Yeah, I didn't realize that actually, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (05:34):
Okay, So the people at the drug store thought that
Elizabeth had a very unusual look. She also liked to
wear black and lacy garments and flowers, and she often
pinned a flower behind one ear. And she had a
roast tattoo on her left thigh, which I think we'll

(05:54):
talk about.

Speaker 3 (05:55):
We will be talking about that.

Speaker 1 (05:56):
Yeah, and so she would kind of cross her legs
to show off this rose tattoo.

Speaker 3 (06:01):
Well, what do you say, Kate.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
You know, we're talking nineteen late nineteen forties, and you know,
tattoos that become very accepted today, but back in the
nineteen forties, tattoos were often looked at as almost like
a criminal type of mark or military And now you
have a twenty two year old woman that has a
tattoo that she likes to show show off.

Speaker 3 (06:24):
That tells me she's got a little bit of an
edge to her.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
She does, yeah, very much. I mean I remember my
grandmother talking about how she was horrified and this was
must have been in the seventies by puerced earrings on
women that she always had that I have a bunch
of clip ons, pearls clip on. So that's kind of
where we're headed with this. Yes, I think she had
a little bit of an edge. So there were some
things that you know, I didn't know about her childhood.

(06:49):
She had asthma, bronchitis. Also, she was moody, they said, despondent.
And these are from people who liked her, you know,
who loved her. I know people could say that about me.
I guess every once in w she wore makeup a
lot of makeup. They say an inch thick, which I
would have to say, is kind of be an exaggeration.
I would hope maybe not. So here's the thing about

(07:10):
Elizabeth Short and I think one of the things that
makes this story a mystery and one of the reasons
why people are so fascinated by it is Elizabeth wasn't
trueful about her life. She was about some things, oftentimes
not about other things, or even her location where she
was heading, what she was going to do. And so
I think that makes it a really fascinating case for people.

(07:32):
So we kind of start here. She made up a
bunch of different backstories for various reasons. My kid is
calling me inexplicably on FaceTime right now, but I don't
can't see it. I mean, I'm not going to take
this call, but I kind of want to go DC.
There's four hundred people here, Okay. So she had a
lot of different backstories. So she said she worked for

(07:56):
Western Airlines. She said she modeled for a shop specializing
in hats in Hollywood. These are very specific claims. She
told her mother that she worked at a San Diego
Naval hospital, and sometimes she said that she was a
war widow who not only lost her husband but also
their son. And so, you know, my first kind of

(08:17):
question is, I know it seems obvious, but she's obviously
a complicated victim already.

Speaker 3 (08:23):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (08:23):
Well, and when you said that she's claiming that she
worked or at these various locations, is she being truthful
about it? No, So she's trying to portray herself as
something she's not.

Speaker 3 (08:36):
And my question of why is she doing that?

Speaker 2 (08:41):
Is she ashamed of her background and what she's actually done,
or is she trying to She's reading the person she's
talking to, and she's trying to become something that that
person might be interested in, either as a friend, as
a romantic partner, but she's wanting to manipulate how people

(09:03):
perceive her.

Speaker 1 (09:04):
Well before we approached the timeline of this case, we'll
talk about one man who actually seemed very important to
her is a guy named Matt Gordon, and that's him.
He's very handsome, and he was a World War two
pilot and they had dated, get the impression that they
were going to get married, but he was killed in

(09:25):
a plane crash in India, And so I had wondered
if that was kind of what led her to the
war widow claim. And I'll show you another picture while
you talk like.

Speaker 2 (09:37):
Maybe she's trying to play I mean, obviously that's a
traumatic thing for her. She's in love with this man
and she loses him, but also she may be trying
to take advantage of this war widow aspect, whether it
be for sympathy or whether the benefits she could get
as a result.

Speaker 3 (09:52):
But were they married, You said no.

Speaker 1 (09:54):
They dated in Miami Beach five years before she died,
and he seemed very sick. Because later on they find
some they get some of her belongings, and there was
an obituary with him, you know, mentioned and everything. So
I think this was this was somebody who was very special,
and I don't see anybody else special in her life
as we move forward.

Speaker 2 (10:15):
Well, and I believe offline you and I talked about
her father.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
Yeah, well that's a story coming out right here.

Speaker 3 (10:22):
Okay, am I get jumping ahead.

Speaker 1 (10:25):
He does it sometimes, but you know, I'm usually polite
about it. I like the way you're thinking though. Okay.
She told her Hollywood friends that she was an aspiring actress,
but she never signed up for any classes. She never
auditioned anywhere. I had wondered if that was just the
expectations that people had put on her, because she was

(10:45):
so you know, different than the other kids in Medford, Massachusetts.

Speaker 2 (10:50):
I can believe or she would be an aspiring actress.
She has the looks. She's in the Los Angeles region,
so maybe she was hoping something would catch on.

Speaker 1 (10:59):
Let me tell you about a big lie that she
told and then why it's significant and kind of getting
into her background. So she told friends who asked, have
you been? They said, have you ever been to California?
And she said no, she had been, I think right
after Matt Gordon died and she went to visit her

(11:19):
father in Vallejo. And the thing about what happened with
her father seems traumatizing to me.

Speaker 3 (11:27):
Right.

Speaker 1 (11:27):
So his name was Cleo Short. He left Elizabeth and
her mom and her four sisters in Massachusetts in nineteen
thirty and they were all led to believe that he
had taken his own life. He parked his car right
in front of a bridge over a river. They never
found his body. He had faked it, faked his own death,

(11:48):
and moved to California. And then he ends up reaching
out to Elizabeth and says, you know, why don't you
come and visit me, And she was stunned, I have
to soon, but he said, you know, he had a
history of alcoholism, and he actually mailed her two hundred
dollars to visit him, and she went. But I don't

(12:12):
know what kind of a guest Elizabeth was, but she
gets ejected from several different places and this is one
of the first places, as her dad says, after a
few months, Okay, you're going to have to move out
at some point out of Valletjo.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (12:26):
And so you know, way back earlier in Elizabeth's life,
she thinks her father has killed himself, and then she
loses this boyfriend that she's very attached to. So she's
suffered two traumatic losses, and then all of a sudden,
her father comes back into her life. I mean, so
you can imagine there's going to be a trust issue there,

(12:49):
particularly with men, and not necessarily with the pilots so much,
but because of the father.

Speaker 1 (12:54):
Yeah. And you know, this is obviously a man who
who was living some kind of a false life to
make people believe his family, i mean five kids, Yeah,
and his wife believe that he had taken his own life.
So that just sets her up for right insecurity and
everything else.

Speaker 3 (13:12):
Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
Yeah, Okay, So she does something interesting. She worked at
a post exchange as a clerk at Camp Cook which
was in Santa Barbara County, and so it was a
training post for serviceman it's called something different now. She
was named Camp Cutie, which is I think when she

(13:33):
was attractive, and then she quit suddenly, So now we
start getting into people who might have been involved but
were not sure. She had gotten into what she described
as an abusive relationship with a guy that she called
Sergeant Chuck. There was a court martial proceeding and she
testified that he assaulted her, and he was transferred overseas,

(13:56):
but she stayed in Santa Barbara. I don't think they
ever tracked down Sergeant Chuck, but that just shows you,
you know, she was at the beginning kind of gravitating
towards this kind of relationship.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
Ye sure, And anytime you get involved at an investigation
and you're starting to dig into the victim's background, of
course you're going to be taking a look at the
men that were in her background even years prior.

Speaker 3 (14:21):
Could somebody come back out of vengeance.

Speaker 2 (14:24):
They're vindictive, they've been feel like they've been spurned, and
possibly cross paths with her again, tracked her down in
order to exact that vengeance. And so here it sounds like,
at least from her perspective, this was an abusive relationship.
So of course the investigators are going to kind of
pay attention to this guy and figure out where was
he at at the time she was last seen.

Speaker 1 (14:46):
So if we're catching up here, she's nineteen, nineteen forty three.
She's been telling lies. We don't really know why. We've
talked a little bit about the psychology, but there's no
grifting or manipulation or law breaking until she's arrested at
nineteen for underage drinking. They instead of putting her in jail,

(15:08):
they shipped her back to Massachusetts, which didn't last very long.

Speaker 3 (15:12):
Sure, you know.

Speaker 2 (15:13):
And again, this I think starts going to Elizabeth's personality
and maybe some of the lifestyle choices that she's wanting
to make as she's getting older. I mean, obviously underage
drinking is not something that is what would be considered
just a horrible thing to do, really, But at the

(15:33):
same time, it again kind of speaks to maybe there's
an edginess to her, maybe a little bit more of
a risk taking aspect to her personality.

Speaker 1 (15:42):
Yeah, and I think it gets a little riskier too.
So she bounced around between Medford, Miami Beach, Atlanta, and
then June first, nineteen forty six, she gets on a
Greyhound bus and goes west. She's drawn back to California.

Speaker 3 (16:00):
Yeah, extraordinarily independent.

Speaker 1 (16:02):
Yeah, she ended up in Indianapolis. Then she went to Chicago,
and then she landed in Long Beach, so she had
been to Vallejo to see her dad before. By early fall, though,
she's in LA and she wants to be. It sounds
like in LA she's not there the whole time, but
she'll go back and forth, and ultimately she ends up
dying in LA.

Speaker 3 (16:22):
Right.

Speaker 2 (16:22):
And one of the things, as I didn't realize this
about Elizabeth, was her familiarity with Los Angeles, and I
believe that comes into play a little bit.

Speaker 1 (16:34):
Later on here, Yeah, it does. Okay, here's the first
guy that we have to be concerned about. His name's
Mark Hanson. And her friends and acquaintances say that she
was able to stay in LA different parts of California.
She was relying on friends, not just male friends, but
female friends, and also on men. So she would meet

(16:55):
men and she would date them. I'm not saying she's
sleeping with all these people, but she would, you know,
befriend them and date them, and then you know, this
is what complicates the case. This is one of those guys.
He pops up later. So she would move between residences
in Hollywood and downtown, and she seemed to gravitate towards

(17:18):
serviceman like Matt Gordon, and she was also attracted to businessmen.
This would be one of them. Mark Hanson was fifty five,
he was Danish. She was a businessman. He owned a
theater and he was a silent partner in the Florentine
Gardens nightclub mover and shaker. I would say, we don't
know the real nature of their relationship, and I think

(17:42):
people have said, oh, it has to be sexual. It
didn't have to be sexual. And he becomes a suspect
later on because one of the theories was that he
tried to make it sexual and she rebuffed him, and
this is what ended up happening. But we do know
that she rented a room from him for a certain
period of time right around when she was murdered in La.

(18:04):
She also had a boyfriend at the same time, and
she would stay with that guy, and I'll tell you
about him in a little bit. So this is the
first one.

Speaker 2 (18:10):
Yeah, so older gentlemen, well resourced, you know, and this
can come into play in terms of what happens the
night that she disappears.

Speaker 1 (18:18):
Yeah, yeah, Okay, we have another guy named Marvin Margalise,
and we're going through these people now because there were
significant in her life before she died. So when she
wasn't staying at Mark Hanson's place where she was renting
this room, she was living with her boyfriend. He was
twenty Navy veteran and when they dated, he was also

(18:40):
a medical student. And when you hear about the injuries,
you'll understand why he was smack in the middle of
the radar for LAPD. He was at USC So we
talked about this before. She is in LA a lot,
and she's involved one way or the other in men
who you know, range from young to middle.

Speaker 2 (19:00):
Aged, and connections based out of LA somebody that she
potentially could reach out to if she needed a favor
or she needed a place to stay, possibly even cash
for maybe Hanson. So you know, she's pretty well established
in the LA area.

Speaker 1 (19:16):
Yeah, and you know, I know that we described her
before as erratic and some you know, kind of despondent,
but she really had a lot of people who liked
her for one reason or the other, and people who
wanted to help her. And then it sounded like, you know,
she outgrew her welcome. What was the Benjamin Franklin. You're
not going to know this. The Benjamin Franklin quote, like

(19:37):
house guests are like fish. You should get rid of
both of them within three days. Isn't that what they quote?

Speaker 3 (19:42):
I've never heard of that in my life. That what
you thought?

Speaker 1 (19:44):
Trust me, it's a quote. So I don't know what
kind of house guests she was, but but she was
definitely complicated. Let's get to San Diego and then we're
quickly getting to La where a lot of this stuff happens. Okay,
So she goes down to San Diego and winter approaches
and the holidays are coming up, and she had told

(20:05):
her friends that she was going to visit her sister
in Oakland. She did not do that. She caught the
bus to San Diego. That night before her trip, she
had dinner with Mark Hanson, the older man, and then
she saw a guy that she was friends with at
Camp Cook who was Carl Baalsinger, and he took her

(20:26):
to the Hollywood station and then she goes to San Diego.
So when she gets to San Diego, that's December ninth,
and she ends up at this all night Aztec Theater
in San Diego and she secures a place to spend
the holidays by befriending the cashier, who was a woman
named Dorothy French. So like I said, likable woman, it

(20:50):
sounds like. But then the fish thing, she outstayed her
welcome because after the holidays January eighth, the French family
said you got to hit the road, and so she
So this is where she ultimately ends up. So she
ends up at the Biltmore and this will be interesting
to talk about. This is a very upscale hotel. There

(21:11):
is a man who will talk about a little bit.
His name is Robert Red is his nickname Manly, And
this is a friend of hers. He was twenty five
years old and married salesman. He picks her up in
San Diego and he drives her to the Biltmore Hotel
in downtown LA. He drops her off at six thirty pm.

(21:32):
So this is all we know about this last night,
he drops her off the hotel. He doesn't go in.
He says she's in the hotel, and she comes back
out at ten o'clock. She's wearing a black suit, white
fluffy blouse, black swede, high heels, white gloves. She heads
south on Olive Street, and then we don't know what

(21:54):
happened after that? We know the state that she was
found in, but she vanishes. We don't know what happened
in the hotel. Well, Paul asked me, well, was she
at the bar with anybody? Never reported any of that.
So she went in the hotel, came out, and then
that was that.

Speaker 2 (22:09):
Well, and so now here you have a twenty two
year old woman who's she's flopping right. She's down in
San Diego, she's making friends, she's very comfortable, just kind
of probably sleeping on a sofa as the way I'm
imagining it to a point. And now she's up at
the Biltmore. How is she affording the Biltmore? Did somebody
give her cash? Does she steal cash from somebody? What

(22:32):
are her actual financial resources?

Speaker 3 (22:34):
But she gets.

Speaker 2 (22:35):
Dropped off at the Biltmore at six point thirty. She's
last seen leaving at ten, and she's obviously made up,
she's dressing nicely. She's going out now she purposely. Is
she going out to meet up with somebody? Is she
going out to have some fun, local bar, nightclub whatever?
Downtown La. We've already established she's very very familiar with

(22:57):
this area. She's very comfortable. Ten o'clock at walking out
of the Biltmore. One of the things I want to know,
which we don't have access to because the case file
hasn't been released, is once she was found to have
been last seen and had a room at the Biltmore,
did the investigators go and confirm that. Did they talk

(23:20):
to the front office staff? Did they check her room?
Were there any phone calls made from the room or
out of that room? Was there anything left at the
front desk for Elizabeth?

Speaker 3 (23:32):
You know, your.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
Typical investigator steps to compile and maybe see was there
some pre arrangement that happened after she was dropped off
by Manly. So that's what is interesting to me is
do they have that information or not?

Speaker 1 (23:49):
And I think that Paul's bringing up a really good
point in that because LAPD hasn't released everything clearly because
they want to work on the case currently too. What
that leads to is so much speculation. I mean, we
have to speculate too, because we don't have all of
the information. I mean, Paul will tell you later on
that they haven't released the official autopsy right from the time.

(24:12):
I understand he knows a lot of details about it.
But because of that, that's when you end up with
all of these people who have all different kinds of
theories because you have to speculate, and so that's one
of the things that's frustrating.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
And anytime you have that speculation, that's where people when
there's gaps and knowledge, that's where people will fill those
gaps in and conspiracy theories come up.

Speaker 1 (24:35):
Yep. Okay, So this case is very theatrical in a
lot of ways, and I'm going to illustrate that right now.
So there is a woman who ends up finding her body, okay,
and I'm going to describe that in a second, but
I do kind of want to get this out of
the way. It's clear to me that the LA newspapers
and magazines when they found key witnesses, they were asking

(24:59):
them to kind of reenact what happened. So this is
Betty Baron Zerr and this is a very dramatic photo.
She ends up calling the police because she discovers the body.
But I just didn't want you guys to be startled
because I saw what is happening. She's in full makeup
and so clearly they are trying to reenact something, and

(25:19):
I just thought this is an odd I really wanted
her to be in like a night code or something,
you know.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
But it also with one photo illustrates that from the
very beginning, the media started setting a narrative on this
case because the media was out there at the crime
scene from the very get go oh.

Speaker 1 (25:36):
Yeah, huge case. Okay, I'm going to have two crime
scene photos. I am way more squeamish than any of
you out there, I promise, and so I made sure
that I only picked these two photos. You can't see anything,
but I think it was important for Paul to be
able to see, you know, where she was found before
we talk about what happened, but we shouldn't be able

(25:59):
to see her clearly here. Okay, let me tell you
what happens. So Betty is out with her daughter and
they're on South Norton Avenue in Limert Park, which is
seven miles southwest of downtown LA and on Norton there
is a vacant lot between thirty ninth and Colisseum and

(26:20):
she sees what appears to be opposed mannequin. So this
is the beginning of the scene. She starts describing it,
and it's this mannequin that she then figures out as
a body is just eight inches from the sidewalk, and
it is alabaster white skin body of a woman. She

(26:41):
is posed face up with elbows bent at right angles
and legs displayed just above the navel. Her torso is cleanly,
they think, surgically cut so that her body is completely bisected, right.

Speaker 2 (27:00):
You know, And I think, you know, this is not
where I'm gonna be getting into too much graphic detail,
but this is one of those extrapolations here. Elizabeth's body
has been cut into through the waste. And historically people
involved in this case have said, well, must be done
by somebody with medical knowledge. And I know on previous

(27:24):
episodes where we've had dismemberments, there always seems to be
you know, that type of opinion.

Speaker 3 (27:30):
And the reality is is.

Speaker 2 (27:32):
What when I look at what happened to Elizabeth, there
is nothing about the transaction of her body that indicates
that anybody, this person had specialized medical knowledge.

Speaker 3 (27:44):
You know, this is somebody who could have medical knowledge.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
This is somebody that could be involved as a butcher,
a hunter, somebody. If you're getting into certain types of predators.
As they grow up, they kill, torture and dismember animals,
and they learn animal anatomy as a result, but it's
also just common sense. If you're going to cut a
body in half, the easiest place to do that is

(28:08):
through the abdomen, and the easiest place to cut through
the spine is between two of the vertebrae versus trying
to cut through bone with a knife. So from my perspective,
there is nothing about what I am seeing with the
transaction or any other aspect, and I'll get into that
later on that indicates you're dealing with somebody that had

(28:29):
to have medical training or was a surgeon. I do
think what's important, though, is that the cutting her body
in half.

Speaker 3 (28:39):
When I take a look at.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
The ends of the wounds, they are devoid of any hemorrhage.
She is absolutely dead at the time she is cut
in two. The offender is cutting her in two for
transport purposes. He didn't start this transaction and cutting her

(29:01):
while she was still alive.

Speaker 1 (29:02):
And I think it's interesting because when I, before you
and I started this show, I always thought about dismemberment
cases that this is just somebody who's, you know, kind
of a sick person. How could somebody do that? And
then Paul brings up the word packaging, which I had
never really heard before in that how do I get
rid of this person efficiently and carry them somewhere? You know,

(29:23):
which is why how a woman could carry a very
large man. And it's all about the packaging, which I
thought was interesting.

Speaker 2 (29:30):
Well, and it also goes to even though Elizabeth is
not a real heavy woman, she's.

Speaker 3 (29:36):
One hundred and fifteen pounds.

Speaker 2 (29:37):
I think five four hundred and fifteen pounds, right, But
one hundred and fifteen pounds is still one hundred and
fifteen pounds. If you've ever picked up a ninety pound
bag of cement, you go, well, that's heavy. Let alone
a floppy body that's one hundred and fifteen pounds. So
carrying two parts of a body that each are roughly

(29:58):
fifty to sixty pounds is a lot easier. Plus you're
able to hide those body parts easier within let's say
a vehicle.

Speaker 3 (30:07):
There's no question the offender drove out to this location
in a vehicle. And you know.

Speaker 2 (30:13):
Part of this aspect of looking at her, Kay talked
about how her arms are, you know, bent at the elbows. Well,
the reality is is her hands are above her head
on each side, she's laying face up, her lower body,
her legs are spread very wide.

Speaker 3 (30:32):
The body is positions anatomically correct.

Speaker 2 (30:35):
The upper part and the lower part are in the
right spatial situations, with the upper part slightly offset. This
is what we call posing. If this offender was just
dumping the body out of the car and trying to
get away as fast as possible, this is not how.

Speaker 3 (30:52):
Elizabeth would be looking. She would just be.

Speaker 2 (30:55):
A pile right on this sidewalk. He has taken the
time to put her in this position. He is in
the process. He wants that shock, and so he is.
Now she's completely nude, She's been extensively cleaned. He has
purposely moved the upper body away from the lower body,

(31:16):
both in terms of distance away from each other as
well as offsetting. So anybody looking at this body would
go she's been cut in half.

Speaker 3 (31:25):
Of course, the displaying of the legs.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
She's absolutely nude, no articles of clothing on her body,
but the way that her legs are splayed is indicating
the sexual intent of this offender.

Speaker 3 (31:36):
And then there's other injuries to her body.

Speaker 1 (31:40):
Yeah, well, let me tell you, you know, a couple
more little details. And Betty goes and calls rightly, calls
the police. The two halves are about a foot apart,
which is dramatic to me. I mean, there is a
clear delineation between that. There are flies everywhere and no blood.

Speaker 2 (31:58):
People make a lot of about this there's no blood,
and well, she's been cut in half, so the major
reservoirs of blood inside the human body have been opened up.
So the manipulation of this body after it's been cut
in half, you're going to have a lot of blood loss.

Speaker 3 (32:17):
In addition, you've got extensive cleaning that's occurred from her.

Speaker 2 (32:21):
However, when I'm looking at the crime scene photos, I'm
seeing blood smears on her right rib cage up into
our armpit. That looks like a bloody hand post problem,
you know, the offender's hand as he's manipulating the body.
There's actually blood staining on the right side of her
head like she had laid faced on the right side,

(32:42):
probably during transport. So this idea that there's absolutely no
blood in her body is like, it doesn't mean anything
to me. It's not like she was purposefully you know,
like hung up and you know, like what you see
with animals and her neck cut, that's not is what
is going on on here.

Speaker 3 (33:01):
She's just lost the.

Speaker 2 (33:03):
Primary reservoirs of blood in her body, and then as
those body parts are manipulated, some of the smaller reservoirs
of blood, of course, will.

Speaker 3 (33:11):
Start seeping out.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
I'm pretty confident that the offender probably did have some
blood stating inside its vehicle or whatever packaging material he
used to get those body parts out to this location.

Speaker 1 (33:27):
Let me give you some details about the timeline, and
you can tell me what you think about this. Okay.
So she leaves the Biltmore at ten PM. She's discovered
by Betty the next day at ten forty five in
the morning. This is what they say post mortem lividity
is apparent on the top part of her entire body,
especially on her upper right leg. But rigor mortis hasn't

(33:50):
set in yet.

Speaker 2 (33:52):
So libidity is after you die, your heart stops pumping,
the blood settles down to gravity. When the body is
turned over, that blood can then reposition itself inside the body,
But if the body is left in a position for
a long enough period of time, the blood will kind

(34:13):
of stick to where it's settled with gravity.

Speaker 3 (34:16):
This is what we call lividity. So externally, we can
see this purplish hue on the body here. In this case,
you're starting to see lividity, which is described on the
upper side, let's say Elizabeth's thigh.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
Yet her thigh is as if she were lying on
her back. That libidity is inconsistent with the position that
her lower body was found. That tells me that her
body was in a different position with her thigh face down,
the blood settling with gravity, and it was in that
position for a long enough period of time to where

(34:53):
now that blood has set, that lividity has set, and
then her body was manipulated. That's some sequence, some temporal
information that I can use to help start reconstructing what
happened to Elizabeth after she died. Can you go back
one slide to take a look at where her body
has been dumped? And again I use that term dump

(35:15):
in terms of where it's been deposited. The offender has
purposely chosen this location. Everything the offender has done about
where her body has been put is purposeful. If somebody's
just trying to hide her body, is he going to
be dumping it right off the side of the sidewalk
in a neighborhood. It was a woman out pushing her

(35:37):
baby in a stroller that found Elizabeth's body. He is
purposely choosing this location because he wants it found, and
he wants it found in that shocking state that he
posed her body in. For those that are involved in construction,
you know, the neighborhood construction, you know, obviously this is
the same street the neighborhood the contractors have already laid

(36:01):
the sidewalks, already formed the driveways in the street, and
probably all the other stuff, as there's going to be
a newer phase of construction happening in this neighborhood. He
chose this location because he knew he would be able
to spend the time to pose the body and not
be seen. He didn't go up to where the houses are,

(36:23):
but he knew, probably from familiarity, that in short order,
once you know, the sun comes up, her body was
going to be found.

Speaker 3 (36:32):
Tells me he likely knew about.

Speaker 2 (36:35):
This neighborhood ahead of time, so he must have some
familiarity with this particular part of La. Now, does that
mean he's a lifelong residence of La. No, It's just
like he is not just doing this kind of what
i'd call it a dump and dash type of thing,
where he's just finding a somewhat of an isolated location
getting rid of the body.

Speaker 3 (36:56):
This is all purposeful.

Speaker 2 (36:57):
He has planned this, and he is wanting attention, and
he is wanting to shock the people that are now
going to get involved in the case.

Speaker 1 (37:07):
This will maybe change stuff for you. I just want
to be very clear on the timeline. So she leaves
the French family in San Diego on the eighth of January.
She goes the next day with Redmanly up to la
He drops her off at the Biltmore. That's January ninth.
She is discovered by Betty five to six days later.

(37:31):
So that's why there's a debate over her time of death.

Speaker 2 (37:35):
Okay, And then I would say she was probably kept
a lie for a period of time.

Speaker 1 (37:40):
That seems like a long time for it to be
a stranger or is that not a long time? I mean,
we've all heard the awful stories about people being kept
for years. I'm just wondering, what do you think.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
You know, I think there's going to be some insight
as to not necessarily specifically who, but the type of
offender that killed Elizabeth. And you'll see where there is
a possibility that that offender could have kept Elizabeth alive
for a period of time.

Speaker 1 (38:09):
Let me tell you one more detail. When they move
her body to their vehicle, the deputies noticed that the
grass under the body is still wet with dew, and
they think that that must mean that she was murdered
somewhere else about ten to twelve hours earlier, and brought
to the site earlier in the morning.

Speaker 2 (38:28):
Sure, so the du has set and then the body
is placed on it, and by ten forty five in
the morning, the uncovered grass is dry, but the grass
that's underneath her or the plant material is still wet.
So I think that's actually a good observation. Doesn't necessarily
it shortens the window. But because when you start talking

(38:49):
about estimating the time of the time of death, you know,
these are big windows we're talking about. So he's say,
you know, pathologists saying ten or twelve hours. It could
be hours on either side of that range.

Speaker 1 (39:02):
So at this point, do you want to get into
more detail about what's on the scene or have you
covered everything as far as the way that she's found.

Speaker 2 (39:09):
Well, I think you know, in terms of the observations
at the scene or just from initial observations at autopsy,
and most people who are familiar with the case are
aware that her mouth has been cut on both sides
from the corner of the mouth extending towards each ear,
and so that's a very visual aspect that even the

(39:33):
you know, the media and the person that found Elizabeth
notes that that is a very startling looking injury that
the offender inflicted. The other thing that's important to know
at this point in time is that Elizabeth both risks
showed evidence of binding marks. Both ankles showed that as

(39:56):
well as there appear to have been some cordage of
some type that had been wrapped around her neck.

Speaker 3 (40:04):
However, it had not been used to strangle her.

Speaker 1 (40:07):
Okay, so they found several fibers, which they concluded were
bristles from a stiff brush, are found in her facial lacerations,
her breast wounds, her pubic region. On a tire track
found in a nearby driveway, there is a smear that
might have been left by the heel of a bloody shoe,

(40:29):
and other blood spots are found one inch from the
driveway's curb and on a canvas bag emptied of cement.
They eventually match Elizabe's fingerprints to the ones on she
got arrested. So that's how they were able to idea right.

Speaker 3 (40:44):
You know, and so you know, of course the brush bristles.

Speaker 2 (40:50):
You know, there's no question Elizabeth's body was extensively cleaned.
And it's more than just you know, rinsing the body
in a bathtub. The effect is actually taking a brush,
it sounds like, in order to be able to more
thoroughly scrub her body. Now this is in the day
well before DNA and a BO testing, you know, So

(41:12):
why is he spending so much effort to clean the body?

Speaker 3 (41:16):
You know?

Speaker 2 (41:16):
Part of it I thought of, well, is he concerned
about bloody fingerprints that he may be leaving behind on
her body, which is a possibility, you know.

Speaker 3 (41:25):
But also there's just a practical aspect.

Speaker 2 (41:27):
He's wanting to transport Elizabeth's body and if it's very,
very bloody, you know, now it's it's a little bit
more care that he has to take not to get
the blood in his vehicle or on other things. So
he may just be I need, I need to clean
this body up. I also think there may be other
things going on, and I'll address that later.

Speaker 1 (41:48):
Yeah, I was going to ask if you've seen this
situation in more modern cases where it's not any of that.
It's like a fetish or something like they feel that
needs to cleanse the victim.

Speaker 3 (41:58):
Well, you know.

Speaker 2 (41:59):
When I've had cases in which victims, and sometimes they
are sexual assault victims, that are made to clean, they
are made to go in the shower, and sometimes you
have other bodies where like I've got one case in
which bleach had been extensively used on this woman's body.
You know, in this day and age, offenders are paying
attention to how they can be identified. And of course

(42:20):
DNA is a huge thing, and so they're understanding, I
need to get rid of the DNA containing evidence. That's
where in the nineteen forties, what is the offender thinking
could be used to get him caught and it would
be fingerprints back then.

Speaker 1 (42:34):
Now listen to this, woof. I don't understand people who
think like this. So we have a lot of suspects.
In the forties, there were during the initial investigation sixty
people who confessed. Can you imagine, I mean, poor I
don't want to feel sorry for LAPD too much, but
poor LPD. And now this is even worseful. So early

(42:56):
in the investigation, the detectives received more than four hundred
clues from amateur sleuths, and by the time twenty twenty one,
just four years ago, comes about, there are the number
of tips is so great that LAPD had to stop
accepting calls about the case. Yeah, you know, I mean
it's incredible. So five hundred people confessed by ninety.

Speaker 2 (43:18):
Six, So well, you know, this is where you know,
people will criticize law enforcement. Why doesn't law enforcement release
more information about cases. It's because unless you have that
identifying evidence like DNA evidence that you know and can
prove came from the killer, you need to be able
to have details that during an interview, the actual killer

(43:40):
would be the only one that would know those details.
That's what we call holdbacks because reality is is that
law enforcement sees these nut jobs that are willing to
confess to a homicide like this. This is not just
in these high profile cases. You have these types of
individuals that will come forward in the most mundane case,

(44:01):
or you have other people out there in the general
public that are sending in, you know, during the time
of this case, handwritten letters and they think they have
some sort of knowledge that's going to help law enforcement
solve the case. And they're all false leads, and then
now today because of the Internet and all these online

(44:24):
sluice and some of them are not going to disparage
them all. Some of them are really talented.

Speaker 1 (44:29):
Don't disparage them because some of them are probably here.

Speaker 2 (44:32):
Yeah, but I bore the brunt of the early online
sleuthing community, both for the Zodiac and the Golden State
killer case. And I can tell you it is overwhelming
when you are a so investigator and you have thirty
people giving you tips and asking, well, what have you

(44:52):
done with my tip? I can tell your San Francisco
PD basically for Zodiac is going We're done because we
can't deal with the amount of stuff that's coming in.

Speaker 1 (45:02):
Yeah. Well, let's talk about our first vible suspect. It's
our man read Manly, the twenty five year old married
salesman who was the last person beside the person who
killed her to see Elizabeth Short. So he is arrested
because of that, right, so they put him in custody,

(45:23):
search him, question him, and then the beginning of more
theatrical photos. That's a he's taking a polygraph test.

Speaker 3 (45:35):
He looks suspicious, doesn't he have?

Speaker 1 (45:39):
Even in the forties, I mean My second book was
based in the twenties. Even in the twenties, they knew
that polygraphs should not be admitted in court. So he passed.
Just for the record, he passes two of them.

Speaker 2 (45:49):
So he passes two polygraphs. Does he have an alibi?

Speaker 1 (45:54):
He does have an alibi, and as we'll find out,
he is trying to be helpful in the case, but
we don't know how hopeful.

Speaker 2 (46:00):
Okay, you know, so, I mean this is you know,
the investigation one oh one, the last person to see
Elizabeth alive. You know, it's like, okay, what happened after
you two parted ways? And did you guys reconvene at
some point after she left the Biltmore.

Speaker 1 (46:17):
Carl Passinger was the old friend, it doesn't even say boyfriend,
old friend from Camp Cook and he's the one that
took her to the Hollywood bus station to go down
to San Diego for the holidays to live with the Frenches.
So he's interviewed the day that Red is released. Carl
looked suspicious the first of many and in forty one,

(46:42):
Bosinger's schoolmate in Kansas City was murdered. Her name was
Layla Adel Welsh. She was a beauty pageant queen in
the late nineteen thirties. So she was beaten with a
stonemason's hammer, her throat was slashed with a sharp seven
inch long your knife, and then her killer fled with

(47:03):
a piece of flesh cut from her buttocks. These details
are tame compared to what we're going to be talking about.
So this is, you know, another warning. So, her brother
was tried for the murder, but he was acquitted, and
then he moves to La. Carl moves to La and
Detective Brown tries to get in touch with him, but

(47:26):
learns that he's left the state, which is suspicious, I'll
grant you. They track him down to Saint Louis, Missouri,
and he is forced to take a polygraph test and
he passes.

Speaker 2 (47:37):
Sure, you know, And this is where in a case
like this, and you're digging into Elizabeth's life and you
run across somebody that has a connection to her that
also is associated with another horrific crime, you're going to
pay attention to that. However, I can't tell you how
many times looking at suspects do I find weird circumstances

(48:02):
that initially go, oh, that seems important, and then it
turns out I end up eliminating that guy with DNA
and it was.

Speaker 3 (48:10):
Just a coincidence.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
One of the things I've experienced personally with Golden State
Killer is that when you cast a wide enough net,
let's say, I work to go and investigate every single
man in the audience, I can guarantee I will find
some of you that hass weird circumstances where I'm going

(48:32):
to go, you know what, I better dig into him
some more. That is just part of working these types
of cases. I can't say his name is Carl, I
can't say Carl is Elizabeth Killer, or I can't eliminate
him either, you know. But it doesn't necessarily rise to
a level to where I'm blown away based off of

(48:53):
the fact that he's just associated with another woman who
was horrifically killed.

Speaker 3 (48:57):
He wasn't even convicted of that crime.

Speaker 1 (49:00):
So now we've insulted the audience. Who are the amateur
slits and all the men it looks like in the audience. Okay,
So to me, this is the most kind of tangible
set of clues that we have. So there is a
package of her belongings that arrives eight days after her
body is found and it's sent to the Examiner newspaper.

(49:22):
The envelope has a faint odor of gasoline, kerosene or
rubbing alcohol. There are you can see cutout letters on
the front. It reads, here is Dahlia's belongings letter to follow.
Inside there are twenty three items belonging to Elizabeth confirmed,
I mean, including her social Security card. So there's newspaper excerpts, photographs,

(49:47):
business cards, birth certificates, social Security card, and that obituary
I told you about that she carried around. And there's
also an address book from Mark Hanson, the Danish businessman,
the fifty five, and so there's that detail too, and
I can tell you about that, But you want to
talk first.

Speaker 2 (50:04):
Well, you know, these belongings to me look like, you know,
items that she likely would keep in her purse. She's
moving around so much that she probably would keep those
with her. So when she's setting out to go do
whatever she was going to do that night, she's got
her purse with her. The killer ends up acquiring these belongings.

(50:28):
And then this is entirely consistent with the psychology of
how her body is posed for the shock.

Speaker 3 (50:35):
He wants attention. Now he's seeking attention. He could have
sent these into law enforcement. Do you think the law
enforcement would have run to the newspaper and say, look
what we got. No, he sent them purposefully to a
media outlet. What does this sound like? Zodiac?

Speaker 2 (50:52):
Right in terms of the type of psychology I want attention,
And I'm going to tell you right now now, whoever
killed Elizabeth is not the Zodiac. But I'm just saying
that there is this narcissistic need to reach out. We
see this with BTK and Dennis Rader. This is very

(51:13):
different than Joseph Dangelo, the Golden State killer, who does
not want any attention at all.

Speaker 1 (51:22):
There's more stuff, as I had mentioned, in this package
that was sent. So there is in her belongings a
brown imitation leatherbound book with gold letters nineteen thirty seven
as you can see, and Mark and Hanson printed on
the cover. Inside the addresses for nearly seventy five men

(51:44):
are listed in Elizabeth's handwriting, even though the envelope has
been dallased with something gasoline I think is what I
had heard last and handled by a lot of postal workers.
The detective does for fingerprints, but he can't find anything,
so gasoline or any kind of would that just be
a no go for people pulling prints off something like that.

Speaker 2 (52:03):
Well, what's interesting if you go back to the last slide.
You know, as I look at these first, even though
there's a maybe an odor of kerosene or gasoline on
these items, you know, there's actual ink on these items
that with that type of solvent would start to run.

Speaker 3 (52:20):
I'm not seeing that.

Speaker 2 (52:22):
Plus, the here is Dahlia's belongings that you know, magazine
article words out of magazine that's been you know, taped
or glued onto there. You can see these smudges. Well,
that to me looks like it's it's been processed by
a fingerprint processing technique called n anhydrant. So I'm questioning

(52:44):
whether or not these items were truly doused in a solvent.
There may have been an odor, but that may be
more because maybe they were up against something in this
guy's trunk and some of that odor got onto these
these paper items.

Speaker 3 (52:59):
It's just like you pump gas.

Speaker 2 (53:02):
You know, and you get in your car and you
can smell the gas on your hands. I have a
feeling that's more like that, because I'm not seeing evidence
that these things were saturated with a solvent.

Speaker 1 (53:12):
If this was some kind of an effort by the
killer to cover up something, does that mean between that
and scrubbing her body? Is that law enforcement or somebody
out there who has knowledge like that.

Speaker 2 (53:25):
It has to be right well, or as an reasonably
intelligent person that is understanding that there are things that
law enforcement does that could get him caught, and so
he's taking steps. This is risk management by the offender.
And so you see offenders that are well, i'll say,
a sophisticated intelligent that will plan their crimes to be

(53:46):
able to carry out the crimes so.

Speaker 3 (53:48):
They can get away with them.

Speaker 2 (53:49):
And then there's the post offense behavior in terms of
how do I continue to do things to not get caught.
But he is taking elevation risk by communicating. He's basically saying, look,
I've got her belongings. And you know he's taken the
time not to have his handwriting. But it's something where

(54:12):
he is reaching out to law enforcement. So there is
a compulsion that he has. Part of his psychology is
to need this attention. He wants this case to blow
up as big as possible.

Speaker 1 (54:26):
Well, there are an awful lot of things people reaching
out writing letters at this point, once this information comes out,
there's a story that I told you that I think
I'll just throw out there to the audience listeners. Here,
the examiner says that they've got a phone call from
a mysterious person saying I'm going to send this package,

(54:48):
you know, And it happened the day before the package arrived,
And maybe this will be kind of the beginning of
the investigation, but we talked about maybe dismissing that kind
of a phone call.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
This is where if the killer is calling into a reporter,
is that reporter immediately calling up law enforcement said I
just got a phone call from this guy.

Speaker 3 (55:09):
That's what I would want to know.

Speaker 2 (55:10):
How early was this documented before a package actually arrived.
I kind of suspect that once the package arrived, the
reporters said, oh, I remember receiving a phone call. Then
I questioned, is is that reporter telling the truth or
is he looking for attention himself.

Speaker 1 (55:26):
Well, they get a bunch of letters to different newspaper
outlets and nothing can be attributed directly to the killer
except for the package of her stuff, and the police
suspect that the journalists are actually writing the letters themselves
to get attention. For the newspapers, and so any letter
that came that could have really been from the killer

(55:48):
was pretty much immediately dismissed because there was no information
that was unique. And I know how important you say
that is.

Speaker 2 (55:55):
Well, and again, here's now you have people who are
wanting to insert themselves into the invent instigation.

Speaker 3 (56:00):
Either they genuinely think that they.

Speaker 2 (56:02):
Are helping, or they get some level of satisfaction from
the fact that they are part of the investigation, even
if it's so small as sending in a letter saying, hey,
you need to look at so and so.

Speaker 1 (56:15):
I think the LA Police Museum has a great display,
which is all They call them crank letters. That's literally
what the display is, crank letters in black Dahlia. So
I'm wanting to put that one up. Okay, another big
break comes with the dumpster what I refer to as
the dumpster discovery. So January twenty fifth, Elizabeth's black patent

(56:36):
leather purse and one of her swayed high heeled shoes
are recovered, and they had been reported the previous day
by a cafe owner who found it in the dumpster.
He had spotted the items and this was about fifteen
blocks about two miles from where Elizabeth's body had been found.
He says they were not there the night before Thursday night,

(56:57):
the two days before, and he said that by the
time the police acted, the trash had been collected and
dumped at a nearby byproducts plant. And it's you know,
eight miles away from the cafe at this point, and
they find the purse and the shoes. I'll tell you
in a second the rest of the story about who
identifies these things. But it's a big question mark whether

(57:21):
this purse and this shoe belonged to Elizabeth.

Speaker 2 (57:24):
Right, you know, And that becomes a question because if
that is her purse, and then he had the killer
actually malely or sending in her belongings, you know, the
purse is the source of that type of material, you know,
but the question is is that truly her purse. In
this day and age, we might be able to do
that with DNA or fingerprint technology. There isn't enough unique

(57:46):
markings on this purse, at least on the outside, to
be able to say, well, that just matches exactly, you know,
it has to be elizabeth purse.

Speaker 1 (57:54):
So Red is back in the picture, the one who
dropped her off in La to begin with, and he
identifies the purse and the shoe is hers. The issue
is is that friends that she had said, we've never
seen that purse. That is not her purse. And that's
when the question is, is this even this woman's purse.
Nobody knows for sure. Red says, in dramatic fashion, I

(58:18):
can still smell her perfume on it, even though it's
been in a dumpster for however many days, So I
don't know if Fred's reliable source here.

Speaker 2 (58:26):
Well, and you know here, you first, they have this
suspect handling evidence while he's smoking a cigarette no gloves,
so there's a problem there.

Speaker 3 (58:37):
And second, this looks like it.

Speaker 1 (58:39):
Though I don't think he's lit that cigarette yet.

Speaker 3 (58:41):
It still helps. But there's a photographer, you know, capturing
a photo of this. Is this the media reporter doing?

Speaker 2 (58:49):
I mean, this is just showing the media contamination in
this particular case, yeah, I mean, and other types of contamination.

Speaker 1 (58:55):
And you know, the cafe owner says, I have no
idea they took this away, this stuff away before after
he had reported it, so he doesn't know whether it's
hers or not anyway. Okay, so now we return to
Mark Hanson. This is another angle of him. So they
start to focus on Mark Hanson, and I cannot understate
enough how important it was for them to solve this case.

(59:19):
I mean, the pressure was really incredible on LAPD and
I think in some ways still is probably otherwise they'd
be looking for all kinds of help. And so they
are looking again. They go back to every man that
they could find in her life, and they end up
finding some more. But they look at Mark Hanson because
they start talking to mutual friends and they said that

(59:41):
apparently Mark had a yen for Elizabeth and he treated
her differently than other women that he had had in
his life. He had two dresses tailored for her, he
was ticked off when she would bring her boyfriend around.
When they questioned him, he was giving contradictory statements, but
not about, you know, anything that really had to do.

(01:00:03):
It was more of like their relationship. It wasn't details
about the case. But they search his house and buget also,
and they can't find any evidence. What do you think
about that? You know, he's directly in her life and
he liked her, sure.

Speaker 3 (01:00:19):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:20):
But at the same time, this is where as I
evaluate this case, you know upfront, I can't necessarily say,
you know, of like the names of the men in
her life, anybody stands out above anybody else. I need
to have a better understanding of the type of offender
I'm looking for, as well as what kind of physical
evidence might be present that I could use to either

(01:00:42):
corroborate or refute statements that Hanson is saying. As of
right now, he's just a man in her life. There
needs to be something more that says, Okay, there's something
about him that potentially could indicate that he is her
killer right now out anything that you've.

Speaker 3 (01:01:01):
Told me is just it's just facts about him.

Speaker 1 (01:01:04):
Yeah, And I mean they're not going to let go
of him just yet, but they're becoming very frustrated. So
now we're back to the surgical precision and how they're
convinced that, I mean, all the way back to Jack
the Ripper times. We know that with profiling, if there's
something that looks even remotely like a doctor did it,
poor physicians were under fire for it. So given the

(01:01:27):
precision of her body, the way it was cut, medical
professionals become the early suspects. So Marvin Marvelus, he was
the one who was her boyfriend. He was a medical
student at USC. She would live with him off and on,
but she was also living at Mark Hanson's at the
same time. He had gone through part of the war

(01:01:49):
and was very traumatized PTSD, and people said that it
changed his personality pretty directly. In one psychiatric report, it
said that that Marvin and had time and training where
he had ample evidence of open aggression, being resentful over
not granted instruction in operating technique, which it sounds like

(01:02:11):
was probably a good idea, and not to give him
instruction on that there was no physical evidence though, no, well.

Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
There's nothing there to be frank, you know this is
this is often what I see because I have fallen
into traps myself where I start taking a look at
certain circumstances about a suspect and then go, oh, there's
a there's significance in the case to these circumstances.

Speaker 3 (01:02:34):
Where I have failed and where I often.

Speaker 2 (01:02:36):
See other investigators or even especially in the online community,
is people are missing. You have to establish a nexus
to the crime. You're looking for the person who actually
committed the crime, not somebody who had some sort of
geographic location to the general proximity where the crime occurred.
You need more, you know, and this is where you

(01:02:56):
really if you start getting somebody that you're really digging
in into, you start narrowing the scope, if you will,
starting to focus in where Now all of a sudden,
this man is showing a nexus to the crime one
way or another.

Speaker 3 (01:03:11):
There's something that is now.

Speaker 2 (01:03:13):
Popping where you go, Okay, now I've got something real
versus yeah, he might have been in the area.

Speaker 1 (01:03:21):
So now we're going to go to a mysterious location
where police wonder if this is where she was killed. Okay,
So we're at the Astor Hotel. And in nineteen forty nine,
there's a new investigator named Frank Jamison. He takes the lead.
He learned, now this is two years after this happens.

(01:03:42):
He learned that there were bloody clothes that had been
found in a room at the Astor Hotel, which was
about four miles from where Elizabeth Short's body was found.
It was described by people at the hotel hotel workers
that found it, so it was blood soaked mattress and blankets.
There were men's shoe prints that had been smeared and tracked,

(01:04:05):
and human feces was all over the apartment. The astor
had an unusual guest according to people who were there.
He was a man from Europe that was unusual for them,
and he stayed at the motel around the same time.
I think they thought he was creepy. And now they
go back to Mark Hanson because he's Danish. So this

(01:04:28):
is where we're going here, is you know, they find
this creepy guy. They have absolutely no physical evidence from
this blood soaked scene because it happened, you know, a
year and a half or two years earlier.

Speaker 2 (01:04:38):
Sure, and of course you know the blood soaked mattress,
the human feces, and I'll be talking about that in
a little bit. You know, there is some significant aspects
to that because of course we know Elizabeth has blood significantly.
There's also aspects related to feces associated with her. Take

(01:04:59):
a look at this motel, this is a motel in
la Is there a chance that there was another crime
that committed was committed.

Speaker 3 (01:05:06):
That had nothing to do with Elizabeth?

Speaker 2 (01:05:08):
In law enforcement, I've been in hotel rooms and where
now you have there's a lot of blood in here.

Speaker 3 (01:05:15):
It happens.

Speaker 2 (01:05:17):
Is that your phone, this is my my Google assistant
it just started answering a question for me.

Speaker 1 (01:05:23):
I need you not that guy.

Speaker 2 (01:05:29):
So, you know, I think it would have been nice
that somebody had reported that earlier and then they could
actually have that evidence. But now you're still you're still
talk about the nineteen forties. You know, at best, maybe
a bo testing similar type. Now, I think you had
mentioned to me offline that she was type AB. Yeah,
you know, and that's a rare blood type. So that
would have been something that I would raise my eyebrows about.

(01:05:53):
But two years later, and you know, the lead now
is as well, who is the creepy guy? And then
now is there a way to associate him with Elizabeth's death?

Speaker 1 (01:06:04):
So far, you know that this guy is not Mark Hansen,
is not directly connected except that he was in her
circle so far, and he had feelings for her. We
don't understand the relationship. Okay, Now we're going to get
into I would say two of the most publicized because
they were in books theories that are out here. There's

(01:06:25):
a doctor who sounds like an awful person. His name
is George Hodell. Oh see I heard it. Somebody knows
about the same. Okay, So Detective Jamison, who had taken
over and now again, you guys, this is a year
and a half to two years after this happened. He's
taken over. He is starting to look at George because

(01:06:47):
this guy is number one of a neereal disease specialist
and a sex offender. So he first comes to the
detective's attention in forty nine because his fourteen year old daughter,
this is him. Ten year old daughter accused him of
hosting orgies, sexually assaulting her, and pregnating her and then

(01:07:08):
forcing her to terminate the pregnancy. This is what the
doctor said. And he goes to trial and he says
she's a pathological liar. So to prove their point, the
defense asks the daughter if she had told one of
the you know, male boarders that her father was a

(01:07:29):
murderer of black Dahlia, and she said she doesn't remember,
and so they're trying to prove, you know, that she's
a liar. And he is acquitted, and they bug his
residence now in nineteen fifty because black Dahlia, anytime anybody
mentions Black Dahlia connected to a man, this is at
this point, they're a suspect in a case. So they

(01:07:51):
bug his residence they record him saying, supposing I did
kill the black Dahlia, they couldn't prove it now, but
when they try to link him to Elizabeth, the evidence
doesn't hold up, but his son will circle back to
it decades later.

Speaker 3 (01:08:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:08:11):
Yeah, And I think the interesting thing about you know,
at least what is really known about George Hodell as
he was an incestuous child molester. So he's a sex offender,
and part of an investigation into a sexually motivated homicide
is to start taking a look at, well, who are
all the sex offenders at any particular area, and start

(01:08:35):
digging down on them, even if there is no known
connection between that sex offender and in the victim, like
with Elizabeth. All I can really say at this point,
I can't tell you one way or another if he's
the one that is Elizabeth's killer or not. I know
that I have read his son's book, and I'm unconvinced
about the evidence that he has put there linking his

(01:08:57):
father to Elizabeth's case.

Speaker 1 (01:09:00):
And so when we talk about that theory, so, as
Paul mentioned, his son has written I think several books.
In ninety nine, when George Hodel dies, his son, who
was a former LAPD detective becomes convinced that George was
a sato sexual serial killer. I think sato sexual part

(01:09:20):
is probably pretty accurate. I don't know about the serial
killer part. And he believes that not only was his
dad the killer of Elizabeth Short, but also the Red
Lipstick killer, the Green Twig Killer, and the Zodiac killer.
Two out of three. I think we should probably do
on the show, obviously, you know, because they sound really interesting,

(01:09:44):
and I know you've looked into this sort of thing,
this accusation.

Speaker 3 (01:09:47):
You know, I am intimately familiar with the Zodiac case.

Speaker 2 (01:09:50):
I did some work on that, and that was a
case that occurred, you know, literally where in my backyard
where I did my entire law enforcement career.

Speaker 3 (01:09:58):
I do not.

Speaker 2 (01:09:59):
I think what happened to Elizabeth Short is a completely
different type of offender than who the Zodiac is, even
though there is this narcissistic want for attention. But as
I get into shortly, you will see that the types
of crimes that these two offenders committed are so diametrically

(01:10:21):
opposite from each other that I don't see where there
is a connection now these other things, the lipstick killer.

Speaker 3 (01:10:27):
Out of Chicago, or the Green Twig Killer.

Speaker 2 (01:10:29):
I don't know anything about those crimes at all, but
I often will see where people will start to what
I call overlink cases that they think all the same
offender committed these different series, and that's just a real phenomenon.
I've seen the opposite where now everybody talks about linkage blindness.

(01:10:52):
It really does come down to evaluating the core of
what happened to Elizabeth Short and then that is where
I would probably say, I'm thinking there might be over
linkage with George Odell being these other serial killers, particularly
with Zodiac. I can't really speak about the other series.

Speaker 1 (01:11:13):
Okay. The other theory that I've read about is from
Larry Harnish, who was a writer for the La Times
for twenty seven years. He was a future story writer,
and he believes that it was Walter Alonso Bailey, who
was a surgeon who specialized in hysterectomies. In the stectomies.
He has been proposed as a suspect because even well

(01:11:36):
Bailey wasn't even on the radar at the time for LAPD,
anybody else or the FBI, but his office was just
a couple of blocks from the Biltmore where Elizabeth was
his estranged wife. Ruth lived on Norton Avenue, just a
block from where her body was found. And there is
this is what I thought was most interesting. There is

(01:11:57):
evidence that Bailey and the Short family knew each other.
That Bailey's daughter, whose name was Barbara, was the maid
of honor at Elizabeth's sister's wedding, So there's at least
that connection. I think what ends up happening, and what
you know, Harnish says, is that Bailey's life was in
shambles when she was murdered. At this point, he had

(01:12:18):
not held a professional position for several years. He never
recovered from the death of his son, who was eleven.
He deserted his wife for a younger woman. He had
a big change in personality. He died of natural causes
a year later, okay after Elizabeth died, but the cause

(01:12:40):
was a lesion on the brain that can cause personality
changes as well as dementia and you know, urges for
bizarre behaviors the way they described it. But there's still nothing,
no conclusive anything with him either.

Speaker 2 (01:12:54):
And this is again we get into where there's some
circumstantial aspect. His offices near downtown in La where she
was last seen. His ex wife is living on the
actual road where her body.

Speaker 3 (01:13:06):
Is, so you could see.

Speaker 2 (01:13:06):
Okay, he's he's really upset with his ex wife. He
goes out, there's this horrific murder on this younger woman
and deposits her body as sort.

Speaker 3 (01:13:15):
Of a message to his ex.

Speaker 2 (01:13:19):
Okay, you know that I could see a set of
circumstances where maybe, but at the same time, it's just
now sort of loose, circumstantial stuff and it sounds like,
you know, the the fact that Bailey was a surgeon
that specialized in the sectomes and hysterectomies, Well, this is

(01:13:41):
going to play into some of the wounds that Elizabeth's
body exhibited. However, I will tell you those wounds are
for different reasons than a and do not shows somebody
having a level.

Speaker 3 (01:13:57):
Of surgical expertise.

Speaker 2 (01:13:58):
And how they were inflicted doesn't mean Bailey couldn't be
the one who committed this crime and inflicted those wounds.
You just can't draw the conclusion that it must be
somebody who has advanced medical training.

Speaker 1 (01:14:11):
Okay, I want to make sure we have enough time
for you to be able to go through everything you
want to go through. With the details of what we
learned about what was probably in the autopsy, I will
shorthand very quickly what happens next. We don't know if
there's any DNA evidence that had been collected. It looks
like they wanted to try to get a toxicology test.

(01:14:32):
They lost her organs in nineteen forty seven. The speculation
is they were thrown away after the autopsy. Post mortem
reporters we talked about before is not available, and you know,
it's been I think very very frustrating. People have cried
out that this is a cover up from the LAPD
because they screwed up. Of course, they deny it, and

(01:14:55):
they were able to analyze, you know, the blood from
the fibers on her body. She's an AB which, as
you said, was you know, a rare blood type. And
they think that the bristles that were found on Elizabeth's
body were made of a plant material like palm tree fibers,
which are used in cheap brushes essentially, And you know,

(01:15:17):
they're trying to settle on time of death and the
kill site, which they cannot conclude anyway. So at this
point you can kind of get into your details. Paul's
got the stuff that I don't even want to look at,
which is on his laptop. Let's just go through some
of the more disturbing stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:15:35):
At the sure.

Speaker 2 (01:15:36):
So this is, like I mentioned at the beginning, this
is where I am going to be talking in graphic
detail about her injuries and I am going to be
talking about some of thunder behaviors that will be disturbing.
This is a disturbing case to me, So just recognize
that I am not showing any of the images at all.

Speaker 3 (01:15:56):
We actually talked.

Speaker 2 (01:15:57):
About it, because if I were in front of law enforcement,
I'd be showing and saying this is why I am
forming this opinion.

Speaker 3 (01:16:06):
I have to verbally describe it.

Speaker 2 (01:16:07):
So just kind of be patient as I go through this,
and I'm going to kind of step backwards. I'm going
to start with the post mortem aspects, which we've already
talked about. She was cut in half, and I've already
expressed my opinion this happened post mortem. Even the pathologist
who did the autopsy reportedly also formed that opinion. She

(01:16:29):
was also stabbed three times in the center of her
chest post mortem. This is now the offender is targeting
her heart right, He is ensuring that she is dead,
probably before she transsects her body. That rose tattoo that,
of course Elizabeth was very special, it was very special

(01:16:50):
to her.

Speaker 3 (01:16:52):
Well, that was excised out.

Speaker 2 (01:16:54):
There is almost a perfect looking square, maybe three or
four inches on each side the margins of where that
tattoo the wound margins are indicating this was done post mortem.
That tattoo was found in her vagina. It had been
shoved up inside of her. When we see tattoos being

(01:17:18):
excized nowadays, you know, typically I've got cases going back
several decades in which oftentimes bodies are dumped, but the
identifying features of the body are removed, and usually what
we'll see is the head is gone, the hands are gone.
Why because the teeth can be used to identify the person,
the facial characteristics can, fingerprints can The offender sometimes will

(01:17:44):
excize tattoos because the tattoos are being recognized as a
way that that body can be identified. So the offenders
will take these steps to delay identification. I'm not sure
this is what Elizabeth killer is try trying to do,
because he's leaving the tattoo within the body, and only

(01:18:06):
he can really answer the question of what that means
whether that was he knows that was important to her,
and he's just having a you know, a thought on
how he can just further you know, desecrate her. But
that's where he is modifying her body post mortem. The

(01:18:31):
marks on her wrists, her ankles, and her neck. The
as I mentioned before, these marks are not deep what
we call furrows, and a pathologist can say, hey, I've
got you know, the skin will stay indented if somebody
had been tied up.

Speaker 3 (01:18:48):
None of these are deep.

Speaker 2 (01:18:50):
I first can say she was not hung up to
be bled out, no question about it. I will also
say that the marks around her wrists and ankles are
so light that if they were used to bind her,
she wasn't resisting against that, nor were they tied very tight.

(01:19:12):
The important thing to me is the neck is that
that also is not deep at all. It was not
used to strangle her. The death certificate is not listing
strangulation as cause of death. The neck is all soft
tissue up front. When somebody has had you know, cordage
wrapped around the neck and pulled tightly, even if they're

(01:19:34):
not killed, you can sometimes see some significant furrows. That's
not what's happening here. One feature that really stands out
to me is there's a series, a linear series of
circular marks on the backside of her neck. These marks,
almost all of them look like they're the same size,

(01:19:56):
they're evenly spaced, and they're in a linear distribution. Some
have attributed these marks as cigarette burns. They do not
look like cigarette burns to.

Speaker 3 (01:20:06):
Me at all.

Speaker 2 (01:20:07):
This looks like a feature of something that was on
the pressed up against the backside of her neck, and
I believe that it's very possible that that was the
underside of a restraint that the offender was using to
tie her down. She is in a five point restraint system,

(01:20:32):
and I use the term system loosely. This she, in
my opinion, she is spread eagle and she is bound
at the neck. The first thing I'm going to address
is her right nipple and surrounding skin have been excized
and that was never recovered. When I take a look

(01:20:55):
at the margins of the wound to her right breast,
it's showing that this occurred while she was alive. There
is bleeding in the margins. As I further look at this,
I can see where practically all the underlying breast tissue
is present. Other cases that I've worked in which breasts

(01:21:15):
have been excised, oftentimes the entire breast is removed. In
this particular case, it is the nipple and the skin
on the sternal side, the inside chest part. It is
a nice clean, straight margin. But then as you get
to the outer side of this wound, it's scalloped.

Speaker 3 (01:21:35):
Well, this happens when.

Speaker 2 (01:21:38):
You see the skin being pulled very tightly, and then
once the skin on one side is cut through, then
the remaining skin forms like that what do you want
to call it?

Speaker 3 (01:21:50):
Fluting?

Speaker 2 (01:21:52):
And when it's cut through, as it's stretched, the remaining
thing is going to be in this scalloped thing. This
is hugely signed magnificant. This is the offender who is
purposely removing her right nipple while she's a live This
is a sadistic act and we see this in certain subcultures.

(01:22:14):
And I'm going to kind of go into some more
aspects of her injuries and then talk about what I
think is going on here. In addition, her pubic hair
had been shaved and it was found inside her rectum.
Her rectum had been dilated almost two inches, and there
is abrasions on the outside of the rectum This isn't

(01:22:35):
an actosodomy. This is foreign object penetration. Possibly that foreign
object was used to stuff the pubic hair up her
rectum and probably doing other things at the same time.
After the pubic hair had been shaved, the offender took
a knife and started cutting into her pubic region. And

(01:22:57):
he's doing it in a cross hatch method where he's
doing parallel lines one direction and then parallel lines going
down the opposite direction.

Speaker 1 (01:23:06):
And is that she's still alive.

Speaker 2 (01:23:08):
And these have hemorrhaging in the margins. She is still
alive when the offender is doing this, So he is
now inflicting pain on sensitive areas of Elizabeth's body. The
smile what people will call the smile, This is not
a smile. What he has done is he has cut

(01:23:30):
from both corners of her mouth going straight back. He's
not carving in to make it look like she's smiling.
This is a functional thing that he is doing. He
initially is cutting into her upper right lip in that
same cross hatch manner.

Speaker 3 (01:23:50):
What is he doing. He's inflicting pain around her mouth.
Why he wants her to open her mouth?

Speaker 2 (01:23:56):
If you don't want somebody to get inside your mouth,
what do you do? You clenched down, you close your lips.
What he has effectively done by doing these incisions almost
all the way back to the ear is he has
cut through the muscles that the victim had to use
to keep her mouth shut. Once he has inflicted these incisions,

(01:24:21):
he can now open her mouth at will. The pathologist
notes that inside her stomach was feces. This is where
it becomes I mean, this is dark. This is where
I teach law enforcement a serial predator course, and I
start out by saying, know thy enemy predators, these sexual deviance.

(01:24:44):
They do things that the average person would never ever consider.
And you have to understand the various paraphilias that these
guys fantasize about. And one of those paraphilias is coprophilia
or scatophilia. This is sexual arousal by feces. Either you're

(01:25:04):
interacting with it yourself or you're watching somebody else interact
with it. Some think that the transaction of her body
is why there is feces in her stomach. No, her
intestine was cut up at the duadno level. This is
the top of the intestine where stomach contents are first
entered into.

Speaker 3 (01:25:23):
For the liver and the.

Speaker 2 (01:25:24):
Pancreas to start feeding their digestive fluids to help do it.
A pathologist will never ever misidentify that as fully formed feces. So,
if the pathologist was correct, and she has feces in
her stomach, she ingested it, do you think she did
that voluntarily? No, she is fighting against this offender by

(01:25:46):
keeping her mouth locked while she is in this five
point restraint system, and he ends up going nope, I
can do this to you, and he does it, and
so now he's putting, my opinion, he's putting feces into
her oral cavity and making her swallow. If she wants

(01:26:07):
to breathe, she's going to have to swallow. It's also possible,
based on the subculture that I think this offender is
likely out of, that there could have been a ball
gag placed in her mouth as part of this restraint system.
What was done to Elizabeth is done by a sexual sadist.

Speaker 3 (01:26:27):
This is the worst.

Speaker 2 (01:26:28):
Type of offender that you can run into, and I
would not dismiss the possibility that this offender has a
purpose built space to do this to women. How many
times across a nation have there been men who have
these torture rooms or dungeons found sometimes because they have

(01:26:50):
committed homicides. Sometimes they're fantasized about fantasizing about doing it.
Other times they're enslaving women, and that's a different type
of offender, a sexual sadist. And so in my opinion,
I think the most likely scenario is Elizabeth went out
for a social night, she went to a bar, she

(01:27:11):
went to a nightclub, and she ran across a guy
that somehow isolated her away and got her, whether it
be in a bed and spread eagle, and now he
is getting sexually sexual gratification from inflicting pain once she
is dead. Everything he's doing at that point is just

(01:27:31):
matter of fact, because sexual sadists get off on hearing
the screams, hearing the writhing that their victims are doing.
There are case examples that victims who are being attacked
by a sexual sadist, they play dead, They're like, I'm done,
and these guys will push off and walk away because
their sexual gratification comes from the.

Speaker 3 (01:27:53):
Torture that they are doing.

Speaker 2 (01:27:55):
When you look at like the right nipple, you'll see,
if you want, part of what I've had to do.
And this is because my mentor in the behavioral space,
Sharon Hagen, says, Paul, you have to see what these
guys are looking at to develop their fantasies. Sharon would
go into the adult bookstores and look at you know,
pull the books off the shelf and start taking a

(01:28:16):
look at what these guys are consuming. And of course
now it's all online. If you pay attention to the
hardcore BDSM porn, what do they do. They put clamps
on these women's nipples and pull them super hard.

Speaker 3 (01:28:30):
If that were to be cut while it's.

Speaker 2 (01:28:33):
Being pulled like that, it is going to be exactly
what happened to Elizabeth.

Speaker 3 (01:28:37):
The cross hatching in the pubic area.

Speaker 2 (01:28:40):
You know, the fact that I'm going to force you
to open your mouth, in my opinion, is what's happening there.
This is all part of this type of fantasy. The
cross hatching technique with the knife. I mean, I know
there's got to be artists and drawers in here. Cross
hatching is a drawing technique. I would not be surprised
that this guy had fantasy drawings. And part of what

(01:29:04):
he's doing when he's doing this crosshatch in her pubic
region is somewhat replicating some drawings.

Speaker 3 (01:29:09):
That he's done.

Speaker 2 (01:29:11):
These offenders will do those types of drawings. Dennis Rader
is a prime example of that. So Elizabeth's last moments
of life were horrific. Now, how long could he have
kept her alive?

Speaker 3 (01:29:24):
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:29:24):
Was she alive four days? And bound in the situation?
I don't think so. I think there's some issues with
the time estimates going on there. But when I look
at what happened to Elizabeth, I'm going, this is a predator.

Speaker 3 (01:29:38):
And I started evaluating these suspects.

Speaker 2 (01:29:41):
And I'm going, you know, may I can't eliminate them,
but I'm no, you know, I think if I were
to invest my resources, I'm thinking this guy has done
other types of crimes.

Speaker 3 (01:29:53):
In fact, I found a photo.

Speaker 2 (01:29:56):
If you think this is somewhat, you know, what happened
to Elizabeth is like completely unique.

Speaker 3 (01:30:02):
No.

Speaker 2 (01:30:03):
I had a Michelle McNamara's researcher, who's an amazing digital
space person. He found me a mutilated woman, mouth cut
just like Elizabeth, right, breast almost completely excised, and the
abdominal region cut wide open.

Speaker 3 (01:30:21):
This is what these types of guys do.

Speaker 2 (01:30:24):
So as an investigator, I'm taking a look at Hanson
and Man and hearing the details and I'm going, you
know what, with what happened to Elizabeth, I'm just not
seeing somebody doing that unless they have that secret life
and just decided to go after somebody that they had
an association with.

Speaker 3 (01:30:42):
But one of.

Speaker 2 (01:30:43):
The series of cases that I ran across was a
series of seven women teenage girl up into more mature
women if you will, that had in the years prior
to Elizabeth's case, had been and killed by what was
being described as this sadistic slayer. And I know Kate

(01:31:05):
has some background information on that series.

Speaker 1 (01:31:08):
Yep. So this is the case that Paul was talking about.
So this is from nineteen forty seven January nineteenth, So
journalists from the La Daily News and the Ventura County
Star speculated that Elizabeth was the victim of what they
called a mad killer or acedist who had terrorized San
Diego for fifteen years. So they called him the West

(01:31:32):
Coast fiend, and he was believed to have sexually assaulted
and murdered at least seven women in San Diego between
nineteen thirty one and nineteen thirty six. So here are
five of them. So it's a Virginia Brooks, Louise Toyber, Wb,
Dolly Bibens who is also known as Diamond Dolly, Hazel Bradshaw,

(01:31:56):
maud Dettwire, and Miss Wesley Adams, and one other person
fluriala Qualic. So what they say happened was that they
were sexually assaulted, savagely slash, sometimes as many seventeen times,
and dismembered in one case strangled, and the murderer transported

(01:32:20):
their bodies to well trafficated areas where they were certain
to be found.

Speaker 2 (01:32:25):
So when I hear you know, sadistically slain, you know
for me, when I use the term sadistic, that is
a very specific term.

Speaker 3 (01:32:35):
This is where this.

Speaker 2 (01:32:36):
Person is getting sexual gratification by inflicting pain upon somebody else.
The press uses the term and the general public will
use the term different. So this is where I'm going. Okay,
I have somebody that is committing crimes that potentially could
be done by a sexual satis. I want to know

(01:32:56):
more details about this crime. But then there's certainly behavior
at least in the newspaper article I'm looking at, where
I go, oh, hold on, there is something significant here.

Speaker 3 (01:33:05):
One of the women. I think it was Louise.

Speaker 2 (01:33:07):
Tarber, you know, She's raped, killed, and then moved to
a different location where she is now strung up between
two branches of two different trees on display.

Speaker 3 (01:33:18):
He's posed her, Elizabeth was posed.

Speaker 2 (01:33:21):
Whoever killed Louise Tarbor down in San Diego. He is
wanting that shock in awe, just.

Speaker 3 (01:33:28):
Like Elizabeth's killer.

Speaker 2 (01:33:30):
So now I'm going, there is enough going on here
where I want to know more about the San Diego cases.
I personally think, even though Elizabeth had a connection to
shit just come from San Diego, has that connection to
San Diego. I think that's likely coincidental. I think if
this is the same guy, he's operating down in San
Diego and then possibly relocates up to LA and then

(01:33:53):
somehow some way crosses pass with Elizabeth, you know. And
that's just my kind of working investigator of theory right now.
But it's just based upon I'm interpreting what was done
to Elizabeth, going, this isn't Robert Hansen, this isn't you know,
these other guys, you know, Canny eliminated, but they are
lowered down on my priority list. Then let's say the

(01:34:17):
guy that was responsible for the San Diego.

Speaker 1 (01:34:19):
Series Okay, I have a question that I hadn't thought
of before. Were you talking about the bindings on her
feet and her wrists and her throat. They weren't cut
into the skin in a way where it looked like
she was fighting really hard. Is that right?

Speaker 3 (01:34:34):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:34:34):
It does not look like somebody that is like really
fighting and upbraiding, you know, But she is restrained at
those five points. I'm absolutely confident of that.

Speaker 1 (01:34:48):
Well, what I'm wondering is, since they didn't get toxicology
results because they threw away her organs, is there a
chance that it's like that the lighter marks because she
was drugged really heavily when this was happening.

Speaker 3 (01:35:00):
I think there's a really strong chance of that.

Speaker 2 (01:35:03):
Plus, she also has blows to the head significant enough
to cause some bleeding and what's called the subarachnoid space.
The pathologist didn't think it was sufficient to have caused
death in and of itself. But she also may not
be fully cognizant, and that may be where she's overpowered.
The offender gets her to a location, whether it be

(01:35:24):
to his vehicle or inside his residence or a hotel room,
and now he's overpowering her she's not completely cognizant, and
now he's able to get her restraint and then start
doing the sadistic acts to her.

Speaker 1 (01:35:38):
So now you know why I had so much anxiety
about the Black Dahlia case. But we wanted to end,
of course with Elizabeth Short because you know, I have kids,
and pauldas too, and my kids and his two youngest
kids are basically, you know, within a few year range
of her. And you know, we don't talk about her
mom or her siblings you had four siblings, or her

(01:36:01):
dad for that matter. But so much has been focused
on who did this that we know that the victims
get lost sometimes no matter how much she lied, no
matter who she had in this black book, no matter
what she did. You know, this was an illustration of
just how terrible things can go. But you know, at
the same time, the fact that we're still talking about

(01:36:22):
this case, I am hoping LAPD will reach out to
Paul or somebody who can help, right right, and you
know he has a good relationship with them. But it's
a situation where there's a lot of resources out there,
and you know, certainly we're hoping to get a resolution
to this. But regardless, I mean what a life she

(01:36:45):
could have had. She was twenty two and things could
have changed for her pretty dramatically. So this is one
of the sad stories. I'm sorry to leave it with
you guys like this, but this is the reason why
we do the show, so that we remember victims. Think.
This is why we do it, yep, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:37:02):
And I just want to thank everybody for you know,
sitting through this and hopefully you have a better understanding
of this case.

Speaker 1 (01:37:09):
And thanks so much to iHeart and Divergin and you
got to get started on that true crime only cruise
just like the Murderous Lady or something. I don't know.
Thank y'all for joining us for very Bones. Thank you
so much. This has been an exactly right production for

(01:37:34):
our sources and show notes go to exactly rightmedia dot
com slash Buried Bones sources. Our senior producer is Alexis Emirosi.

Speaker 2 (01:37:42):
Research by Alison Trouble and Kate Winkler Dawson.

Speaker 1 (01:37:45):
Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.

Speaker 3 (01:37:47):
Our theme song is by Tom Bryfogel.

Speaker 1 (01:37:50):
Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.

Speaker 2 (01:37:52):
Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia hard Stark, and Daniel Kramer.

Speaker 1 (01:37:57):
You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and face Book
at Varied Bones pod.

Speaker 2 (01:38:02):
Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, a Gilded
Age story of murder and the race to decode the
criminal mind, is available now.

Speaker 1 (01:38:09):
And Paul's best selling memoir Unmasked, my life solving America's
cold cases, is also available now.

Speaker 2 (01:38:15):
Listen to Varied Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts

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Kate Winkler Dawson

Paul Holes

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