I have ceased blogging in real time as I read “Donald H. Wolfe’s “The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles” and am taking requests for particular pages. Wolfe is using the “Laura” format in which the anonymous body is discovered and the narrative proceeds in flashbacks.

Yesterday, we looked at Pages 101-103, today it will be Pages 108-111.

As I continue on this project, I have speculated as to whether Wolfe ever considered the title “Severed: 2006” as it draws so heavily on John Gilmore’s book.

To the haz-mat pile of Dahlia books.

Page 108-111

Wolfe is continuing his portrayal of Elizabeth Short’s purported decline into the world of prostitution. This promises to be rather juicy. Entirely fiction, of course, but juicy.

“One of the Hollywood hopefuls who fell through the tinseltown trappings was the curvaceous blonde starlet, Barbara Payton, who became a prostitute on her way down the ladder of success—before literally dying in the gutter from a narcotics addition. Elizabeth Short met Barbara Payton through Lucille Varela at Al Green’s Nightlife Bar and Grill on McCadden. “Al Green” was Albert Louis Greenberg, a former bootlegger for Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, who had a long rap-sheet and did odd-job robberies and rub-outs on the side for Bugsy.”

Just “for fun” (fun being a relative term) let’s see the source on this—if indeed there is any.

Nope. No source whatsoever.

You’re not surprised are you?

Oh and then Wolfe recycles the old nonsense about Elizabeth Short and Franchot Tone from “Severed,” (I really think this book should be titled “Severed: 2006.” I can’t understand why John Gilmore calls this work “crap” when it relies so extensively on his book. Of course he also called it “destined to become a true-crime classic. A must read!”).

Page 109

“During her stay in Hollywood in 1944, Elizabeth frequented the Hollywood Canteen, where she danced with servicemen and met some of the movie star volunteers.”

Page 110

Well this is actually somewhat interesting. Sort of like catching a card sharp palming an ace.

Of course Wolfe knows none of this happened because he has quoted from “Movements of Elizabeth Short Prior to June 1, 1946,” in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s files, which says that Elizabeth Short was nowhere near Los Angeles in 1944 and 1945. Not being one to let the facts get in the way of some scandal, Wolfe buries that information and picks up the lies from “Severed” (25% mistakes, 50% fiction).

Ah, but for some reason he wants to graft back on to reality, saying that in 1945, Elizabeth Short returned to Medford. I don’t know why he bothers at this point, but he does.

Let’s quote the document again:

“In December, 1943, she was employed at the Rosedale Delicatessen, 1437 Washington Ave., Miami Beach, Fla., by Mr. Meyer Yedlin (22) as a waitress, and was living at the El Mar Hotel 220—21st St., Miami Beach. She was employed there a few months and went to work for Mammy’s Restaurant located at that time at 2038 Collins Ave., and was employed there during 1943 and up into 1944, working there until the latter part of 1944. She left there and visited her mother (1) in 1944. She returned later and lived at the El Mar Hotel with Mrs. Devaul (23) during the last part of 1944 and until the first part of 1945 but did not work. She was employed from Mar. 30, 1945 to Sept.1, 1945 at the St. Clairs, Inc., Boston Mass., Mr. Burk (25), Personnel Mgr.”

Page 111

“Following her seasonal travel pattern, Elizabeth returned to Miami and spent the winter at the Colonial Inn, an upscale hotel owned by Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, which was known by the FBI to be a hoodlum-run gambling establishment. Police investigators found no record of Elizabeth’s employment during her stay at the Colonial Inn.”

The end notes, Holmes?

Absolutely, Watson. Shall we wager? “Severed?” Nobody?

I won’t bet with the likes of you, Holmes.

Hm. Wolfe attributes this material to the district attorney’s files, presumably the “Movements of Elizabeth Short Prior to June 1, 1946.” I suppose we are to take it on faith that the Colonial Inn was a mob joint since he doesn’t cite anyone for that little goodie.

Let’s check “Movements of Elizabeth Short,” shall we?

Holmes, you’re laughing! What is it?

Stop, tell me what it is!!!!

Holmes!!!!

Watson, I swear, the man cannot read what is in front of him.

See for yourself.

Holmes!

“In the latter part of September 1945, she registered in the Colonial Inn, 2104 Riverside Ave., Jacksonville, Fla., Mrs. L.U. Burkett (24) Mgr. And stayed there until Jan. 9, 1946. During her stay there she received checks from her mother (1) and there is no work record of her in Jacksonville.”

Great Scott, Watson, calm down!

But Holmes, Jacksonville, Fla., is 354 miles from Miami Beach!

Oops.

Oh, and for the record, Barbara Payton didn’t “die in the gutter.” In May 1967, her parents found Payton’s body in the bathroom of their home at 1901 Titus St., in San Diego. She was survived by a son who was then serving in Vietnam. And she was 39.

Time for my walk.

Shout out to:

Barcelona, Spain (83.50.187.89)

Portugal (193.126.199.39)

My homies in Germany (194.11.170.100)

University of Windsor, Canada (137.207.132.38) Windows 98? Upgrade!

UCLA (128.97.48.42)

Regular visitor at Air Force Systems Command (138.13.212.7)

Regular visitor at Dark Horse Comics.

Hurry back!

I have stopped blogging in real time as I read Donald H. Wolfe’s “The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles. Wolfe is using the “Laura” format, in which the anonymous, butchered body is discovered and the narrative proceeds in flashbacks.

The two-minute executive summary:

As promised, I went through the Wolfe book page by page until I finished with Elizabeth Short’s funeral. As throughout the book, we have found any number of errors, fabrications and instances in which Wolfe cites a source and then contradicts it. For example, he states that Harriette Manley divorced Robert M. “Red” Manley (the last person known to have been seen with Elizabeth Short) a year after the murder.

In fact, as shown in the district attorney’s files (remember that this is called “The Black Dahlia Files”) they were not only still married in 1950, she was present when he was interviewed by Frank Jemison of the district attorney’s office.

Further, Wolfe ignores what’s in the district attorney’s files about Elizabeth Short’s mother, Phoebe, identifying the body, in favor of a maudlin scene from John Gilmore’s “Severed,” embellishing it so that instead of stoically containing her grief (as portrayed in the Examiner) Phoebe collapses, sobbing “She was a good girl! She was a good girl!,” prompting a pledge from Detective Harry Hansen that he would find the killer—alas, the district attorney’s files show that Harry Hansen wasn’t even there.

Oops.

My daily blog concludes with a quotation from Deuteronomy that was read at Elizabeth Short’s funeral.

Now the request line is open and I’m going to take them in order.

So far I have:

Pages 101-103 (Regular Anonymous Correspondent)

Pages 108-111 (Regular Anonymous Correspondent)

Page 119 Mary Pacios

Pages 121-122 Mary Pacios

Page 131 Mary Pacios

Page 167 Mary Pacios

Page 197-198 Mary Pacios

Pages 213-215 (Regular Anonymous Correspondent)

Page 218 Mary Pacios

Pages 219 (Regular Anonymous Correspondent)

Pages 226-227 (Regular Anonymous Correspondent)

Pages 239-258 (ColScott)

Page 277-281 Mary Pacios

Page 284 Mary Pacios

Pages 293-296 (Regular Anonymous Correspondent)

Page 296 Mary Pacios

Page 311 Mary Pacios

Pages 345-357 (Regular Anonymous Correspondent)

So let’s start with Page 101

The title of this chapter is “By a Person or…”

Wolfe is dealing with the “lost week” between the time Elizabeth Short was left at the Biltmore in downtown Los Angeles and when her body was found Jan. 15, 1947.

“Detectives [Harry] Hansen and [Finis] Brown concluded there was no viable identification of her whereabouts during that missing week, and they deduced that she had been abducted and held captive at a secluded location until the murder and subsequent transportation of the body.”

That’s probably somewhat true. At least none of the many purported sightings were ever conclusively verified. I’m not sure Hansen and Brown (and recall that Wolfe has grossly reduced the number of detectives working the case to the two lead investigators) ever decided that she had been abducted but that is one possible scenario. Not the only one, but it certainly is an option.

Hm. I don’t recognize this quote:

“No matter how questionable each lead appeared on the surface,” Finis Brown stated, “we had to track it down, and in this case, each lead seemed to open into something else, and it went on and on, and none of them were giving a clue to the missing week, or to the murder itself.”

OK, now this could have come from Brown’s lengthy statement in the district attorney’s files (and recall this is titled “The Black Dahlia Files”) or it could be from “Severed.” Brown was occasionally quoted in the newspapers, but not frequently.

I’ll guess “Severed.”

Holmes! Why are you never wrong?

Because I’m an author’s creation, Watson. As are you.

But let’s check Wolfe’s homework, shall we? “Severed,” Page 150.

(Isn’t it amazing that this book draws so much from “Severed” and so little from the original sources? I wonder if Wolfe ever considered calling this book “Severed 2006” or something).

Uh-oh. Let’s check that again.

Chapter 7, Page 101. “No matter how questionable each lead…” Gilmore, Severed, P. 150

Actually, Page 150 of “Severed” has nothing to do with any of this. But it is one of my favorite, favorite, FAVORITE pages. Why?

Because it’s about one of the invented characters, cleverly named “Martin Lewis.” Gilmore’s claim is that police found Lewis’ business card in the Elizabeth Short items mailed to the Examiner. Of course, nobody knew then exactly what was in the envelope, so it was a safe claim. The district attorney’s files, however, give an exhaustively detailed inventory. And guess what. No business card from Martin Lewis or anybody else running a shoe store in Hollywood.

But this is my favorite part:

“… if it had not been for a good friend with the Hollywood Citizen-News who was very close with the Hollywood chief of police, they may have continued to badger me.”

Let me run that quote again:

“very close with the Hollywood chief of police”

Now think. Where is Hollywood?

Los Angeles.

Is it part of the city of Los Angeles?

Yep.

Then isn’t it under the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department?

Yep.

And then Hollywood wouldn’t have its own police chief—would it?

Uh. Nope.

Wouldn’t you expect a crime author whose father was a Los Angeles police officer to know an elementary fact like that?

Objection! That calls for a conclusion on the part of the witness!

OK. That’s a totally blind lead. I don’t know where Wolfe got the quote and I’m not going to dig through “Severed” looking for it.

Ohhh. “Investigators learned….” This is almost as scary as “Will Fowler remembers,” perhaps the three most frightening words in the English language.

“Investigators learned that prior to Elizabeth Short’s return to Los Angeles on January 9, 1947, with Red Manley, she had been a resident of Los Angeles on three separate occasions. Her brief initial visit with Cleo and Mrs. Yanke in January 1943 ended when she traveled to Camp Cooke. She was later arrested in Santa Barbara and sent back to her mother’s home in Medford.”

Now this is sort of true. Except Mrs. Yanke wasn’t there.

Ahhh. Then it’s a straight lift from the “Movements of Elizabeth Short” in the district attorney’s files. I don’t know about Finis Brown’s role in it, but this is more or less her location. Don’t know about the “Victory Canteen” either. That sounds suspicious.

But let’s press on.

“In letters to her family, Elizabeth said she was also ‘modeling’ for a Miami man named ‘Duffy’ Sawyer.”

Oh? This sounds like one of the bogus people in “Severed.” Sawyer isn’t in any of the official sources. This has to be from “Severed” if it’s from anywhere. Let’s see.

Hm. Not attributed anywhere or to anyone.

Really nice work by ReganBooks, the publishing house without proofreaders or fact-checkers.

Here we have something really juicy for a true researcher.

“Elizabeth traveled to Los Angeles for the second time in August of 1944. She stayed briefly at the Clinton Hotel in downtown Los Angeles at Eighth and Broadway, where she shared a room with a slim, dark-haired girl named Lucille Varela.”

Now this is completely false and Wolfe knows it. How does he know? Because he had access to “Movements of Elizabeth Short Prior to June 1, 1946.”

And what does it say? She stayed at the Clinton Hotel? She knew Lucille Varela?

Try this:

“In December, 1943, she was employed at the Rosedale Delicatessen, 1437 Washington Ave., Miami Beach, Fla., by Mr. Meyer Yedlin (22) as a waitress, and was living at the El Mar Hotel 220—21st St., Miami Beach. She was employed there a few months and went to work for Mammy’s Restaurant located at that time at 2038 Collins Ave., and was employed there during 1943 and up into 1944, working there until the latter part of 1944. She left there and visited her mother (1) in 1944. She returned later and lived at the El Mar Hotel with Mrs. Devaul (23) during the last part of 1944 and until the first part of 1945 but did not work. She was employed from Mar. 30, 1945 to Sept.1, 1945 at the St. Clairs, Inc., Boston Mass., Mr. Burk (25), Personnel Mgr.”

So where does all this mumbo-jumbo about the Clinton Hotel come from?

From “Severed” Pages 34-35!

How wonderfully funny. Gilmore makes up the Clinton Hotel “on Broadway” (“Severed” Page 34) while Wolfe locates it more precisely at Broadway and 8th.

Um. Now not everybody has a 1944 Los Angeles Yellow Pages lying around the house. But I do. (Thank you, ebay).

How much do you want to bet there’s no Clinton Hotel listed?

Uh-oh.

Looks like Elizabeth Short would have had no place to stay even if she were in Los Angeles in 1944, which she wasn’t.

So all this stuff up to Page 103 about Elizabeth Short being a B-girl with Lucille Varela in 1944 (lifted from “Severed”) is made up.

I know this goes down hard for all the fans of “Severed,” but the book is 25% mistakes and 50% fiction.

That’s it for today.

Shout out to:

France (82.229.63.38)

Livonia, Mich. (65.29.123.149)

Belgium (213.118.127.56)

West Virginia Network For Educational Telecomputing (129.71.136.141)

Regular visitor in Kerkira, Greece (213.80.115.71) Looks like a nice spot, judging by Google.

Hurry back!

I’m blogging in real time as I read Donald H. Wolfe’s “The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles.” Wolfe is using the “Laura” format in which the anonymous body is discovered and the narrative proceeds in flashbacks. We’re at the point in the story when Elizabeth Short’s body has been identified by her mother, Phoebe, sister Virginia and brother-in-law Adrian. The inquest is next.

Note: Because this project is incredibly time-consuming, I have decided to end my page-by-page blogging of the book once I reach the funeral, which I presume will be soon. After that, I will take requests for specific pages. Mary Pacios and Regular Anonymous Correspondent have already given me enough to keep me busy for a week and I invite anyone else to submit their favorites. I will take them in numerical order to maintain some semblance of chronology.

Page 92-93

My goodness, chronology is certainly a challenge for some people!

“When Phoebe and Ginnie recovered their composure, they were escorted to the coroner’s hearing room in the Hall of Justice, where the inquest into Case # 7569 was scheduled to take place at 10:30 a.m.”

Well, no.

In reality, the family identified Elizabeth Short on Jan. 20, 1947, as reported in the Los Angeles Times and the Examiner of Jan. 21. The inquest was held Jan. 22, 1947, as evidenced on Page 327 and Page 339 of Wolfe’s own book.

But my dear Holmes! How could this happen?

Shall we check the end notes, Watson?

Statistically, this should be from either Will Fowler’s “Reporters” or John Gilmore’s “Severed.”

Care to make a friendly wager, Watson?

Not with you, Holmes!

Ha. Not attributed to anyone! But let’s not quit so easily.

What does M’sieur Gilmore have to say? Ah, “Severed,” Page 147.

Holmes! Why are you never wrong?

Because I am a fictional creation, Watson, just like so much of “Severed.”

Here:

“The family members were then escorted upstairs to a hearing room on the first floor of the Hall of Justice. Phoebe testified during the inquest, along with [Harry] Hansen, Red Manley and Jess [Jesse] Haskins.”

Let’s see if Will made this error. Nope, he doesn’t talk about it. How about Steve Hodel’s “Black Dahlia Avenger?” Hm.

Page 130

“At the coroner’s inquest, held in Los Angeles on January 22, 1947, seven days after the discovery of her daughter’s body, Mrs. Short identified Elizabeth at the coroner’s office and testified that she ‘was twenty-two years of age, a waitress by occupation, and to her knowledge had never been married.’ ”

What’s really interesting, is that we know Wolfe had access to the correct information, because he cites the Jan. 21, 1947, Examiner on Page 367 of his end notes. He apparently found it easier to lift something fictitious from “Severed.”

Page 93

“The nine inquest jurors were presided over by Coroner Ben H. Brown.”

Well, no. It was actually Deputy Coroner Edwin Lenox. Give Wolfe a chance to make an error and he will.

What’s this?

Oh we’re going to have fun here.

“In what was an inquest into the most bizarre murder case in the history of Los Angeles, the testimony was rather perfunctory and without surprises. Ordinarily in a homicide case, a full copy of the autopsy report is presented to the jury and read and elaborated upon by the medical examiner on the witness stand; but in the Black Dahlia Case, the jury was not presented with a copy of the report, which had been sealed. And the transcript of the inquest reveals that, as Dr. [Frederick] Newbarr read the report, Coroner Brown [Lenox] interrupted when he approached the most significant part of the autopsy—the description of the organs of the victim that had been removed by the killer.”

Now I don’t know how many inquests Wolfe has ever attended. They are extremely rare these days.

First: What he says about the procedure is quite wrong. I’ve read probably half a dozen transcripts of inquests, notably in the Jeanne French case, and most of the time Newbarr didn’t even attend. Instead, someone, usually Lenox, read his report into the record. So in fact, it was unusual to have him there in person.

Second: Wolfe is also entirely wrong in stating that jurors got copies of the medical report. Just as in a jury trial, jurors aren’t given copies of any reports. Material is submitted into evidence.

Third: Because medical reports often contain key material that can be used to identify or eliminate suspects, the presentation was almost always incomplete. Remember, the purpose of an inquest is to determine the cause of death, not to air lots of extraneous gory details.

Fourth: Nothing was missing from the body of Elizabeth Short.

But clearly Wolfe is headed somewhere with the claim that something was gone:

“Had Dr. Newbarr been allowed to continue, the dark forensic secret sealed within the autopsy report would have become public, and the startling motive and MO in the murder of Elizabeth Short would have become evident to the jurors. But the truth was concealed within the sealed report, where it has remained hidden for more than fifty years.”

Uhhhh. OK.

Page 94

Oh isn’t this just so interesting?

“Author Eliot Paul (Life and Death in a Spanish Town, Random House, NY, 1939) was visiting Los Angeles at the time and was one of the few to note that the slashing of the mouth from ear-to-ear was characteristic of an age-old Sicilian mode of murder—connoting the mortal danger for those who violate the code of Omerta (silence). Although the symbolism was apparently lost to the investigators and the press, the morbid message would have been recognized by the Sicilian Capo de Capo of the city—Jack Dragna.”

And who might Eliot Paul be? Writer, eh? In Los Angeles, eh? Well, according to The Times, he was in Los Angeles in August 1946, New York in November 1947. And his name was Elliot (with two Ts) Paul.

Oh look what I found on Google! “The Black Gardenia” by Elliot Paul, 1952. Gangsters, Hollywood and aspiring starlets. Did he really name a character Finke Maguire? What’s this?

Professor Crapola?

You have GOT to be kidding me.

OK, Wolfe is wrapping up some loose ends. He talks about the discovery of Elizabeth Short’s purse and shoes. Except he goofs it up.

“Robert Hyman, the proprietor of a café [note the telltale accent mark that Microsoft Word insists in putting on cafe for no good reason] at 1136 South Crenshaw, reported that someone had put a relatively new pair of high heel shoes and a large handbag in an incinerator behind his café, which was near Pico Boulevard—just twenty blocks north of Thirty-ninth Street and Norton. Suspecting they may be connected to the murder, Hyman removed the items from the incinerator and placed them on top of a trashcan while he called the police. But by the time the police arrived to check out the report, a rubbish truck had made its rounds and removed the shoes and handbag, along with the trash.”

Where on Earth does Wolfe get this incinerator business? It’s certainly not in any of the original reports. He says it’s in the Examiner, Jan. 20, 1947.

Let’s just see, shall we?

Oh this is interesting, the Jan. 20, 1947, Examiner leads with the arrest of Red Manley. So that should tell us something is wrong, since at that time Red Manley was still a suspect and he had been cleared by the time he identified her purse and shoes.

Uhhh. Actually, the purse and shoes were found Jan. 24.

Oops. And the newspapers of that date say nothing about an incinerator.

Page 95

More about the purse, shoes and Red Manley.

Page 96

Oh my, aren’t we just going to moralize a bit over poor Red Manley:

“The adulterous affair with Elizabeth Short ultimately turned his life into a nightmare. Manley’s shadowy face had been published along with his shabby story in newspapers nationwide, and his moment of marital infidelity cost him his marriage, his job, his sanity and ultimately his life. Divorced by Harriet the following year, Manley was plagued by guilt and was in and out of mental institutions before being remanded to the Patton Asylum for the insane, where he committed suicide.”

Now remember, the only person claming that Red slept with Elizabeth Short is Wolfe.

But he’s not playing fair with the reader at this point. Remember Wolfe quoted the district attorney’s interview with Red back on Page 80, the one conducted in 1950?

He didn’t tell you who else was there.

Like Harriette Manley. The Harriette Manley who divorced him “the following year.”

Oh, and his suicide? Notice there’s no date. Of course he could have gotten the correct date out of John Douglas’ “The Cases That Haunt Us.” But instead he went to…. I’ll guess “Severed.” Or no source at all.

Nope, Will Fowler in “Reporters” Page 86.

Well, kinda/sorta:

“Not only had his face been displayed and his story published in newspapers throughout the country, but the wife he had betrayed eventually divorced him.

“Not so long afterward, Robert Manley was remanded to an asylum for the insane, and shortly thereafter, committed suicide.”

Manley actually died in 1986, as reported by me in the Los Angeles Times and cited in “Cases That Haunt Us,” Page 238.

Some people can do research and some people cannot.

Note that Wolfe concludes with one final mistake:

As show in the adjoining photo, Elizabeth Short’s tombstone reads:

July 29, 1924—Jan. 15, 1947

Wolfe cites this as

July 29, 1924—January 15, 1947

The man clearly cannot read what’s in front of him.

We are now at the funeral of Elizabeth Short. The minister drew his text from Deuteronomy 33:24:

“And of Asher, he said, Let Asher be blessed with children; let him be acceptable to his brethren, and let him dip his foot in oil.

“Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be.

“There is none like unto the God of Jeshurun, who rideth upon the heaven in thy help, and in his excellency on the sky.

“The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms; and he shall thrust out the enemy from before thee, and shall say, Destroy them.

“Israel then shall dwell in safety alone: the fountain of Jacob shall be upon a land of corn and wine; also his heavens shall drop down dew.

“Happy art thou, O Israel: who is like unto thee, O people saved by the Lord, the shield of thy help, and who is the sword of thy excellency! And thine enemies shall be found liars unto thee; and thou shalt tread upon their high places.”

That’s it for page-by-page blogging.

From now on, I’m taking requests.

I’m blogging in real time as I read Donald H. Wolfe’s “The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles. Wolfe is using the “Laura” format in which the anonymous, butchered body is found and the narrative proceeds in flashbacks.

In response to my decision to stop page-by-page coverage once I reach Elizabeth Short’s funeral, several people, including Mary Pacios and Regular Anonymous Correspondent, have urged me to continue this blog. Given the demands on my time—this blog takes several hours every day—it’s impossible for me to do the entire book, so I will take requests. Mary has already filed a long list of pages she’d like me to cover, including:

Pages 119, 121-122, 131, 167, 197-198, 218, 277, 278-281, 284, 296, 311

Fair enough.

Anybody else have specific pages? Send ’em in.

Page 90

You know, poor old Wolfe can’t get anything right. He publishes a photo of Phoebe Short on an airplane captioned “Phoebe Short arrives in Los Angeles,” when she has clearly boarded a plane for the trip to Oakland.

Hm. No source for the photo. That’s odd.

Now this is peculiar. Note that the photo is tacked to the wall in the picture of John Gilmore on the back cover of “Severed” and the page facing Page 139 of “Severed.”

I guess it’ll just be Wolfe’s little secret as to where he got that picture. It was published in the Los Angeles Herald-Express, Jan. 18, 1947, Page A-4, and is credited as a Herald-Express photo.

But if you want a copy, it’s in the Gilmore archives at UCLA, Box 15, Folder 1.

Time for another botched quote from Phoebe:

“Betty always wanted to be an actress. She was ambitious and beautiful and full of life, but she had her moments of despondency. She was gay and carefree one minute then blue and in the depth of despair the next…. She was a good girl. She wrote often—at least once a week. It was only two weeks ago that I received a letter from San Diego. I can’t imagine who did this dreadful thing. I’m anxious to do anything to help in tracking down the fiend.”

But wait! Hasn’t Wolfe been claiming all along that Elizabeth Short wrote to her mother that she was coming back to Los Angeles with Red Manley? That couldn’t have happened if the last letter arrived two weeks ago, could it?

Hm. The end notes, Holmes?

To be sure, Watson!

Los Angeles Examiner, Jan. 20, 1947.

Hum. Not there.

Well here’s the exact quote, from the Herald-Express of Jan. 18, 1947.

“Elizabeth always wanted to be an actress. She was ambitious and beautiful and full of life, but she had her moments of despondency. Sometimes she would be gay and carefree one moment—then in the depths of despair another.

“She has suffered from asthma since she was 10 and during the winters back home, she usually went south. She was a good girl. She wrote often; at least once a week. It was only 10 days ago when she wrote me from San Diego telling me she had a job in the naval hospital there. I never dreamed she was having financial difficulties. Her letters were always so cheerful.”

OK, so what about this:

“I can’t imagine who did this dreadful thing. I’m anxious to do anything to help in tracking down the fiend.”

That’s from the Examiner, Jan. 19, 1947:

“ The mother, Mrs. Phoebe May [Mae] Short, said she was anxious to do ‘anything to help in tracing down this fiend.’ ”

And finally, the Herald, Jan. 18, 1947:

“I can’t imagine who did this dreadful thing. If only I could get my hands on him….”

Whew! How’s that for a tortured ancestry for one quote?

Never shy about inserting himself into the Black Dahlia story, Will Fowler always claimed that the Examiner photo of Phoebe Short on Jan. 19, showed the back of his head. I don’t happen to have a reference photo of the back of Will’s head, but I’m skeptical.

Page 91

Now for the coroner’s office. I can already see this is going to be a doozy.

“Upon their [Phoebe, Adrian and Virginia West] arrival, Harry Hansen and Finis Brown escorted them to the morgue-viewing window [why on Earth is this hyphenated? It would more properly be “the morgue’s viewing window.” ReganBooks, the publishing house without proofreaders or fact-checkers], where they would have to identify the body that was lying on a gurney behind the glass.

“Phoebe gasped as the coroner’s aide pulled back the sheet and revealed her daughter’s mutilated face. There was a moment of stunned silence before Ginnie said, ‘I can’t tell, Momma, I don’t know.’

“Phoebe told Hansen that her daughter had a birthmark on her right shoulder that she could recognize. When the sheet was lowered, Phoebe and Ginnie started sobbing. No question—it was ‘Betty.’

“While Phoebe had been brave and resolute from the day she received the call from Richardson’s office, the sight of her daughter’s mutilated remains broke her heart, and she sobbed uncontrollably. Hansen escorted her to a chair and sat down beside her while trying to reassure her that he would do everything in his power to find the person who so brutally murdered Elizabeth. Phoebe wondered aloud why the newspapers and the police had painted such a bad picture of her daughter. ‘She was a good girl,’ Phoebe kept repeating over and over through her tears—‘She was a good girl!’ ”

Now isn’t this just so terribly maudlin?

Think any of it’s true?

Want to bet?

Source, please.

“Severed,” of course, Page 146.

“On the morning of January 22nd, she [Phoebe] returned to L.A. with Ginnie and her son-in-law. They were met at the airport and brought downtown to the Hall of Justice entrance to the morgue. Harry Hansen and [Finis] Brown were waiting.

“ ‘Harry wanted to talk to Mrs. Short personally,’ Brown says. They went to one side of the room, where Mrs. Short sat in a chair, and Harry pulled up another one and sat facing her, his back to the others, blocking their view of Mrs. Short.’

“She had been telling the detectives she objected to the newspaper stories, and was disappointed that the Examiner reporters—who had been so helpful at first—were saying that Betty seemed to be ‘not a very nice person.’

Snippage

“Hansen was notified by a deputy coroner, and he told Phoebe it was time for her to make the identification—it had to be done for the record. He escorted Phoebe to a waist-high window where venetian blinds were pulled up. The sheet-covered body was on a gurney directly behind the glass.

“Ginnie and her husband joined Phoebe at the glass as the attendant behind the window pulled down the sheet revealing the face.

“Phoebe and Ginnie stared at the face, which in death was still puffed and battered. Ginnie said, ‘I can’t tell, Mama. I don’t know….’ She turned to Hansen and asked if they could lower the sheet a little beneath the left shoulder.

“ ‘She had a beauty mark there,’ Phoebe said. Her voice was distant. The shoulder was bared and Ginnie made a sound. It was Betty.

“The family members were then escorted upstairs to a hearing room on the first floor of the Hall of Justice.”

But my dear Holmes! What about:

“While Phoebe had been brave and resolute from the day she received the call from Richardson’s office, the sight of her daughter’s mutilated remains broke her heart, and she sobbed uncontrollably. Hansen escorted her to a chair and sat down beside her while trying to reassure her that he would do everything in his power to find the person who so brutally murdered Elizabeth. Phoebe wondered aloud why the newspapers and the police had painted such a bad picture of her daughter. ‘She was a good girl,’ Phoebe kept repeating over and over through her tears—‘She was a good girl!’ ”

Not there, is it, Watson? Not a word of it.

Just for fun, Watson, old boy, let’s check the Examiner, shall we? Jan. 21, 1947.

Holmes! What’s this!

“Meantime after refusing to look at her daughter, Mrs. Phoebe Mae Short, who flew here from her home in Medford, Mass., finally asked morgue attendants to remove the sheet from the body.

“With Mrs. Short at the time was the slain girl’s sister, Virginia, now Mrs. Adrian West of Berkeley.

“Both mother and sister stoically contained their grief and emotions as they looked at the body. Said the mother, as she closed her eyes, “It looks like my daughter but I can’t be sure.”

“Mrs. West also ‘couldn’t be sure.’ ”

But what about:

‘She was a good girl,’ Phoebe kept repeating over and over through her tears—‘She was a good girl!’ ”

Offhand, Watson, I’d say that’s not how it happened.

And what about this birthmark stuff? Wolfe says the birthmark was on her right shoulder while “Severed” says it was on her left? I never knew birthmarks were migratory.

Now here’s the actual description of Jane Doe from the Herald, Jan. 16, 1947:

“One large wart center of back of neck and about even with shoulder line, two small warts one inch to the right of this, one small wart to right of the above about one-half inch higher. Two warts to left of midline of neck about on shoulder. One wart on back about one inch to the right of medial line. One large mole on left shoulder.”

But we’re not through, Watson. What’s in the district attorney’s files that Wolfe isn’t telling us? Remember that this book is called “The Black Dahlia Files” although it’s mostly a rehash of “Severed” and Will Fowler’s “Reporters.”

Ready? This is from the LAPD summary of the case, Page 8.

“Mrs. Short, in company with Adrian West and Mrs. West (sister and brother-in-law of the deceased) arrived in Los Angeles and they were requested to make the personal identification of the body. They went to the coroner’s office but returned shortly, stating they could not make the identification because the newspapers had insisted upon taking pictures of them while identifying the girl in the identification room of the coroner’s office. Later in the evening they were accompanied by Sgt. [Finis] Brown to the rear of the coroner’s office and they did make the identification without the presence of the newspaper photographers or reporters.”

In other words, Harry Hansen not only didn’t make a personal vow to Phoebe Short to find the killer, he wasn’t even there. Does that mean the scene in “Severed” is fictitious? That’s my call. As I keep saying, “Severed” is 25% mistakes and 50% fiction. It’s full of people who don’t exist and things that never happened.

Now look at the picture on Page 92 of Wolfe’s book of Phoebe, Virginia and Adrian West at the coroner’s office. That is a portrait of grief. Again, Wolfe doesn’t give a source for this picture. And just to prove that ReganBooks has no proofreaders, Adrian West is identified as “Charles.”

Remind me again how well-researched this book is. I keep forgetting.

That’s it for today.

Shout out to:

Microsoft Corp. (65.54.154.114)

Hurry back. And send in those requests.

I’m blogging in real time as I read Donald H. Wolfe’s “The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles.” Wolfe is using the “Laura” format in which the anonymous, butchered body is found and the narrative proceeds in flashbacks. We are at the point in the story when police and reporters have discovered Elizabeth Short’s trunk and suitcases, events that occurred on separate days.

Note: I am now on Page 86 and will conclude this exercise whenever we get to Elizabeth Short’s funeral. I am roughly 25% through the book and have made whatever points I am going to make—and believe me, this tome is not going to suddenly mend its ways and become scholarly.

Thereafter, if someone wants to query about specific points in the book, I’ll entertain them.

OK, now get this:

Page 85

“To this day, the contents of Elizabeth Short’s luggage, checked at the Greyhound bus station on January 9, have never been disclosed to the press or the public.”

Page 86

“When the luggage was opened in the newspaper’s conference room, detectives and reporters scrutinized the memory books, which were found to contain dozens of photographs of Elizabeth in Miami, posing with a number of servicemen—including a four-star general.”

Now apparently statements like this do not cause intellectual whiplash to Wolfe’s editors, Cal Morgan and Anna Bliss. I have no idea what Morgan and Bliss did on Wolfe’s book, but I can tell you absolutely what they didn’t do.

Now where did Wolfe get this nonsense about the four-star general? That’s a new one on me.

Let’s check the end notes.

Ha. Nowhere. Completely unattributed. Tell me you’re surprised.

Aha. Wolfe puts some interesting material in a footnote.

“Some of the material found in Elizabeth Short’s lost luggage by the Examiner was returned to Phoebe Short, but many of the photos of Elizabeth ended up in the Examiner archive, which was donated to the Special Collections Department of the University of Southern California in 1988. Most of these photos vanished from the USC Library in the early 1990s and were eventually auctioned off on eBay in 2002.”

Some of Elizabeth Short’s photos were indeed auctioned off on eBay, but in 2003. The final price, which Wolfe does not disclose, was $7,611.11 paid by Steve Hodel, who published them in “Black Dahlia Avenger,” Page 515.

The eBay photos’ provenance is murky. The seller is a well-known enthusiast of antique motorcycles and says he found them in going through a massive collection of photos searching for pictures of old motorcycles. The seller claims that whoever had the photos didn’t know what they were. Presumably these photos were in the possession of an Examiner employee at some point, but it is unclear whether they were ever part of the USC archives, which holds much of the Examiner material, but has many holes in its collection.

For example, when the Examiner ceased publication in 1962, some material was transferred to the new Herald Examiner. When that ceased publication, the material was transferred to the Los Angeles Public Library, including some Black Dahlia photos now on library’s online database.

However, a large stack of Herald Examiner photos from the Black Dahlia case are in the John Gilmore collection at UCLA. I will leave it to others to explore their provenance. But look at the photo of Gilmore in the section of photos following Page 210 in Wolfe’s book to get an idea of the vast number in the Gilmore material at UCLA. Gilmore is sitting at a desk with the wall behind him plastered with Dahlia pictures. You can even see the news editors’ crop marks on the photos from where they were prepared for publication.

Did I mention that Gilmore dismisses this book as “crap” even though his book jacket blurb calls it “destined to become a true-crime classic. A must-read!”

I still don’t get that one.

Wolfe has several pages of Elizabeth Short’s love letters lifted from the newspapers. He makes an elementary mistake when he says Matt Gordon died in November 1945. It was in August 1945.

Page 89

Now this is interesting. After wallowing in the image of Elizabeth Short as a lazy tramp in San Diego, Wolfe uses Jim Richardson’s quote, which I cited earlier:

“She had been a pitiful wanderer, ricocheting from one cheap job to another and from one cheap man to another in a sad search for a good husband and a home and happiness. Not bad. Not good. Just lost and trying to find a way out. Every big city has hundreds just like her.”

Page 90

Wolfe claims that Richardson arranged Phoebe’s plane trip from Boston to Los Angeles. This has to be from Will Fowler. In reality, First Baptist Church of Medford paid the tab. Yep, Will Fowler’s “Reporters,” Page 84-85.

Let’s check his homework:

“Reporters,” Page 84-85

“Wrapping the story, the last paragraph said Mrs. Phoebe May [note: Mae] Short was expected to arrive in Los Angeles from Berkeley and that no date had been set for the coroner’s inquest.

“Footnote: The Examiner had already met Phoebe in Los Angeles earlier, before she flew up to Berkeley to be with her sister, Mrs. Adrian West. [Of course that’s Elizabeth Short’s sister, not Phoebe’s sister.]”

Nothing about the Examiner arranging Phoebe’s flight to Los Angeles, although that was one of Will’s many claims—he also said the Examiner hid Phoebe from other reporters when in fact she was in Berkeley with her oldest daughter. As I keep saying three of the most frightening words in the English language are: “Will Fowler remembers.”

Page 91

Oh you must be kidding!

“When Phoebe returned to Los Angeles, accompanied by Virginia and her husband, Adrian, they were met at the airport by Examiner reporters, who drove them to the coroner’s office at the Hall of Justice.”

Where on Earth did Wolfe get that? Will?

To the end notes, Watson! And hurry!

Why my dear Holmes! John Gilmore’s “Severed,” Page 146.

To the haz-mat pile of Dahlia books, Watson.

Hum. As we’re switching books, do you wonder why Wolfe would use “Severed” over someone who actually worked for the Examiner—granted Will Fowler is not exactly the soul of veracity but I don’t think that’s a major issue for this opus.

Now before I tell you, guess what “Severed” says.

Go ahead.

I’ll wait.

Think it’s all about how the Examiner reporters took Phoebe, Virginia and Adrian to the coroner’s office? I mean that is what Wolfe says, right?

“Severed,” Page 146.

“On the morning of January 22nd, she [Phoebe] returned to L.A. with Ginnie and her son-in-law. They were met at the airport and brought downtown to the Hall of Justice entrance to the morgue. Harry Hansen and Brown were waiting.”

But Holmes! There’s not a word about Examiner reporters!

Not a word, Watson.

Time for a walk.

Remember, we’re counting down to Elizabeth Short’s funeral. That’s when I stop.

Shout out to:

Ljubljana, Slovenia (193.77.78.234)

Caltech (131.215.192.127)

Pittsylvania County, Va., Public Schools (216.146.50.3)

Spotsylvania County, Va., School Board (205.174.123.52)

Hurry back!

I’m blogging in real time as I read Donald H. Wolfe’s “The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles.” Wolfe is using the “Laura” format, in which the anonymous, butchered body is found and the narrative proceeds in flashbacks. We’re at the point in the story when police have questioned Robert M. “ Red” Manley, the last person known to have been with Elizabeth Short.

I took another vacation from the Dahlia to attend a lecture at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens by Terrence Roberts, one of the “Little Rock Nine.”

During his presentation, Roberts noted that there is no concrete dividing line between what is the present and what is history; it’s continuous. A lo-fi version of his lecture is here.

Page 84

This chapter is titled “Inquest,” so presumably Wolfe will be dealing with the public hearing on Elizabeth Short’s murder.

Well this is interesting:

“Although Capt. Donahoe expressed confidence that the LAPD had apprehended the Black Dahlia killer, Harry Hansen became convinced that Robert “Red” Manley had not attended the ‘sacred setting.’ ” [This is a reference to some malarkey in John Gilmore’s “Severed” attributed to Hansen about the murder scene being a “sacred setting” between killer and victim. As I have noted, although Wolfe’s book is called “The Black Dahlia Files,” it relies mostly on Will Fowler’s “Reporters,” “Severed” and the Los Angeles Examiner. A statistical study shows that 50% of the book is drawn from those sources. The district attorney’s files account for a mere 8% of the book.]

Now I don’t recall Donahoe ever saying that he was sure Manley was the killer; Donahoe was a smart, experienced investigator, although he was more at home handling robbers rather than homicides.

Attribution? Are you kidding? Zero.

Page 84-85

Oh boy, this is going to be fun!

One of the more confusing aspects of the Dahlia case involves Elizabeth Short’s luggage and a steamer trunk. Although these are frequently fused into one entity, there were actually two sets of luggage. The first was a large steamer trunk that got misplaced after she sent it from Indianapolis, Ind., to Chicago. The trunk ultimately ended up at the Railway Express office in Los Angeles. There was also a set of suitcases that she had with her and which Red checked at the Greyhound bus station.

Remember that three of the most frightening words in the English language are: “Will Fowler remembers.” So who is Wolfe’s source for this section of the “Black Dahlia Files?” Will Fowler, of course.

“After an exhaustive search, police investigators and Examiner reporters succeeded in finding the luggage that Red Manley insisted Elizabeth Short had checked at the Greyhound bus station on January 9. However, it was quickly confiscated by Capt. Donahoe. Up to that time, newspaper coverage of the Dahlia case had been pictorially weak. There was only the one police mugshot of Elizabeth Short and the press had to resort to artist renderings, along with the usual X marks the spot diagrams to illustrate the crime. Richardson implored Donahoe to allow photographs to be taken of the contents of the murder victim’s luggage, but Donahoe refused, stating that the contents were ‘dynamite’ and were being held in evidence. To this day, the contents of Elizabeth Short’s luggage, checked at the Greyhound bus station on January 9, have never been disclosed to the press or the public.”

If you aren’t up on the Dahlia case, you won’t realize precisely how badly this is done. But to anybody who knows the story, this is hilarious. Without looking, I’m going to guess this is more of Will’s nonsense. Let’s see.

Oh, worse than I thought. Jim Richardson’s “For the Life of Me.” Allegedly Page 305.

To the haz-mat pile, Watson!

Proving once again that Wolfe isn’t the least bit shy about citing a source and then completely contradicting it, we have Richardson’s account (too long to quote here) of finding the trunk and dictating terms to Donahoe.

Here’s a snip:

“We got the trunk but I had to call in the police to get it. The company wouldn’t turn it over to the reporter. I called Jack Donahue [Donahoe’s name is quite a challenge for many writers], chief of the homicide squad.

“ ‘If I tell you where you can find the Dahlia’s trunk, will you agree to bring it to the Examiner and open it here?’ I asked.

“ ‘Look, Jim’ he said. ‘If I do that every other paper in town will be after my scalp. Don’t put me on the spot like that. You’ve caused me enough goddam trouble the way it is with all those stories you’ve been breaking.’

“ ‘You want the trunk, don’t you?’ I said. ‘No deal, no trunk.’

“Jack actually moaned. I could hear it.”
Notice that this is, correctly, her trunk, which was found by Jan. 17, when the first photos from it were published in the Herald-Express. Recall that Elizabeth Short hadn’t been identified until that morning’s Examiner and Los Angeles Times, so rather than being “pictorially weak,” the newspapers got photos immediately.

The luggage from the bus station, meanwhile, wasn’t recovered until Jan. 19, 1947.

This is my favorite part:

To this day, the contents of Elizabeth Short’s luggage, checked at the Greyhound bus station on January 9, have never been disclosed to the press or the public.”

Please note the three-column photo on Part 1, Page 2, of the Los Angeles Examiner in which fingerprint technician George Wheeler, left, and Lt. William Cummings are going through Elizabeth Short’s suitcases.

Did I mention there’s a story with the photo?

The headline?

Examiner Scores Third Break in Case

“Discovery last night of missing luggage belonging to Elizabeth Short, mutilation murder victim, was the third important break in the case resulting from investigation by Examiner reporters.”

Or even better, look at the photo in Wolfe’s own book, in the section of photos following Page 114, of Ray Giese going through one of Elizabeth Short’s scrapbooks. Obviously Wolfe is incapable of seeing what’s in front of him.

Oops.

This is even funnier:

“Fowler remembers searching a number of Railway Express offices, freight depots and train and bus stations before finding Elizabeth Short’s lost luggage in the storeroom of a Railway Express agency in downtown Los Angeles. ‘The luggage turned out to be a suitcase and some bags—not a trunk,’ Fowler recalled, ‘but sure enough the memory books were inside. After that the Black Dahlia case became the best-illustrated crime story in newspaper history. And it all emanated from the Examiner.’ ”

As I said, three of the most frightening words in the English language are: “Will Fowler remembers.”

How does Wolfe handle this?

“Before this new cache of information hit the headlines, Richardson gleefully called Capt. Donahoe and said, ‘You’re welcome to the luggage we found, Donahoe, but I want it understood that the story is ours exclusively.’ And Richardson laid down the conditions that the LAPD detectives would have to come to the Examiner offices, where the luggage was to be opened and examined. ‘Donahoe blew a fuse,’ Fowler recalled. ‘But what could he do? If Donahoe refused to cooperate, Richardson told him he’d just have to damn well read about the contents of Beth Short’s luggage and the progress of the case in the Examiner.’ ”

Now recall that Will claimed he was present when Red was arrested in Eagle Rock. Also recall that the luggage was found at the same. How on earth Will could be looking for luggage, witnessing the arrest of Red Manley in Eagle Rock and be at the Examiner office to observe the opening of the suitcases is beyond me.

Now just for fun, let’s check in with the haz-mat pile. Where’s “Severed?” Aha. Note the picture of Detective Sam Flowers examining Elizabeth Short’s scrapbooks in the section of photos following Page 138.

“Severed,” Page 138

“Beth’s trunk was opened officially, revealing clothes, photo albums and dozens of letters going back over the past few years.” Unfortunately, “Severed” isn’t indexed and it’s torture to leaf through all this nonsense, so I’ll pass on finding the passage on the suitcases.

Time for my walk

Shout out to:

Fema (71.252.64.8)

State of Alaska (146.63.141.61)

General Electric (3.209.129.190)

Hurry back!

I’m blogging in real time as I read Donald H. Wolfe’s “The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles.” Wolfe is using the “Laura” format, in which the anonymous, butchered body is discovered and the narrative proceeds in flashbacks. We’re at the point in the story when police are questioning Robert M. “Red” Manley, the last person known to have been seen with Elizabeth Short.

I took a holiday from the Dahlia last night to attend a lecture at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens by Elliott Gorn on John Dillinger. Given the pouring rain, it was a fairly small crowd, but we were rewarded with an interesting portrait of the famous Depression-era bank robber. Gorn’s lecture was quite a change of pace from the Huntington’s usual fare, especially the long discourse on the myths about what precisely is (and is not) in the Dillinger archives at the Smithsonian.

For those who are interested, here’s a lo-fi version of Gorn’s presentation.

Page 81-82

Wolfe is in the middle of lifting Aggie Underwood’s jailhouse interview with Red. Recall that Wolfe offered a snippet from the material in the district attorney’s files, merging a quote from Page 3 with a quote from Page 6 without warning.

Oh, that confusing California geography.

“The Greyhound bus station was on Sixth and Los Angeles Street—just four blocks from the stately Biltmore, a fashionable luxury hotel on Olive between Fifth and Sixth Streets that had been built in 1929 by Harry Chandler and a group of wealthy Los Angeles businessmen.”

Here’s the Google map (note that Google takes account of the one-way streets in planning the route).

Now maybe it’s the aging process, but I don’t recall hearing anything about Harry Chandler when I took the L.A. Conservancy’s tour of the Biltmore. (A fine tour it is, and I highly recommend it. I’m a member of the L.A. Conservancy and a big fan of its “Last Remaining Seats” movie series).

The end notes, Holmes?

Lead on, Watson.

But my dear Holmes!

Yes, yes, Watson, I know. No attribution.

Just for fun let’s see if Harry Chandler had anything to do with the Biltmore.

Of course, Wolfe is entirely wrong in saying that the Biltmore opened in 1929. It actually opened in 1923 (Los Angeles Times, Sept. 23, 1923). Even the simplest of facts seem to be very slippery things for Wolfe. Remind me again how well-researched this book is, will you?

Now what about the Harry Chandler connection? I mean I really don’t want to get derailed into the complicated financing behind construction of the Biltmore. Ah. Apparently Harry Chandler was among a raft of people involved in the Biltmore.

Next, another straight lift from the Underwood interview.

Hm. What’s this?

“As Manley walked toward the Olive Street door, he glanced back to wave at Elizabeth, but she had already turned and was talking to the clerk at the tobacco stand and getting telephone change. She was still standing there when Robert ‘Red’ Manley exited the hotel at approximately 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, January 9, 1947.”

Now isn’t that just too, too interesting. Red turned to wave but she was getting “telephone change.” That, presumably, would be change for the pay phone. I’ve never read a word about Red turning to wave and I’ve been through the original material fairly closely. It’s certainly not in Underwood’s jailhouse interview with Red, nor in any other original source. So where does Wolfe get it?

My dear Holmes! Why, there’s no attribution whatsoever!

It appears, Watson, that our friend Mr. Wolfe has an extremely active imagination.

Let’s compare:

Page 82


“ ‘That is the last time I ever saw Miss Short,’ Manley told Aggie Underwood. ‘I’ll take truth serum or anything they want to give me. And I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles, and tell my minister, too—that was the last time I saw Beth Short. I did not kill her!’”

Herald-Express, Jan. 20, 1947

“That is the last time I ever saw Betty Short. I’ll take the truth serum or anything they want to give me. And I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles and tell my minister too that was the last time I ever saw Betty Short. I did not kill her.
“But brother I’ll never cheat on my wife again!”

Note that Wolfe drops the important last line of the interview and note the discrepancy between “Miss Short” and “Betty Short”; and “Beth Short” and “Betty Short.” Now whom do we know who refers to Elizabeth Short as Beth?

Hm. Wolfe attributes this to the Herald interview. Let’s check John Gilmore’s “Severed,” which is unique in referring to Elizabeth Short as Beth.

Well isn’t this just too interesting:

“Severed,” Page 117

“She [Elizabeth Short] was just looking at him—smiling at him. Her eyes looked very clear and blue and they seemed to be shining. He [Red Manley] said, ‘Well…all right,’ and told her she could send him a letter at the business address and let him know where she was going to be. She said she would do that and he turned around and headed for the Olive Street door. He glanced back to wave to her, but she was talking to the cashier at the cigar stand. She handed him a dollar and he returned some change. She was still standing there when Red left the hotel.”

It is a continuing mystery how Gilmore can call this book “crap” when so much of it is based on his own work. Of course he also called it a “destined to become true crime classic.” I guess he’s got all the bases covered that way.

Hm. “Severed” isn’t indexed and I can’t find Underwood’s jailhouse interview with Red. I don’t want to spend more time poking through the nonsense in “Severed,” so let’s press on. I want to finish this chapter today. Maybe the “Miss Short” and “Beth” thing is simply Wolfe’s error. Lord knows they wouldn’t be his first.

“Biltmore Hotel employees recalled noticing Elizabeth Short in the lobby and the ladies room attendant remembered seeing her at the ladies’ room mirror, where she had lit a paraffin candle and applied the melted paraffin to her teeth.”

This has to be pure Wolfe. Nobody else is quite so wordy (“a ladies room attendant remembered seeing her at the ladies’ room mirror”? “she had lit a paraffin candle and applied the melted paraffin”? Cal Morgan, Anna Bliss or some other editor at ReganBooks was taking a nap to let that get through).

As I recall, there was speculation that Elizabeth Short might have put wax on her teeth in a Biltmore restroom, but nobody saw her do it.

“Bellboy Captain Harold Studholme told the police that he saw her make several telephone calls and wait in a chair near the Bell Station for some time before crossing the lobby and walking out of the Olive Street door at about 10:00 p.m.—approximately three-and-a-half hours after her arrival. The doorman remembered greeting her as she exited the hotel and walked toward Sixth Street before vanishing into the night.”

Now this is what’s actually in the district attorney’s files, from the LAPD summary of the case:

“She was observed alone by employees of the Biltmore until approximately 10 p.m. Jan. 9. Mr. Studholme of the Biltmore Hotel stated that he observed the girl get up from the lobby as if she had been signaled by someone on the outside and walk out of the Olive Street entrance. He last saw her walking south toward 6th Street on Olive, on the west side of the street. Investigators were unable to determine whether she made a phone call while there or not, but witnesses state they observed her on several occasions go toward the telephone booths.”

And there’s nothing in the district attorney’s files about the fictitious noble doorman tipping his hat as Elizabeth Short went out into the night. In fact, the noble doorman was concocted by Jack Webb in “The Badge” as a way to write the Black Dahlia out of the picture.

Time for my walk.

Shout out to:

Nebraska State College Board (198.133.245.253)

Tennessee Board of Regents (198.146.213.139)

Rutgers University (204.52.215.12)

University of Windsor (137.207.132.38)

France (193.47.80.87) What’s this? Using Linux and a browser called Konqueror 3.4?? Tiens!

I don’t want to say anything to spoil the surprise. Another snip of film from Edison, c. 1904.

I’m blogging in real time as I read Donald H. Wolfe’s “The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles.” Wolfe is using the “Laura” format, in which the anonymous, butchered body is found and the narrative proceeds in flashbacks. We are at the point in the story when police have detained Robert M. “Red” Manley, the last person known to have been with Elizabeth Short.

Regular Anonymous Correspondent submitted a comment yesterday about an appearance at the Pompidou Centre by Steve Hodel, author of “Black Dahlia Avenger.” Now really, can’t we all just try to be happy for Steve Hodel? Obviously, his book is junk, but if the French want to spend money to bring him over and listen to his mumbo-jumbo about “flashing red lights” and “thought prints,” more power to him. What do you expect from a nation that considers Jerry Lewis a comic genius?

In truth, I would be far more indulgent of the ridiculous claims of “Black Dahlia Avenger,” “Mogul” and “Severed” to name but a few, if they didn’t inflict uncountable grief on the loved ones of Elizabeth Short—as well as the rest of the Hodel family (“Avenger” was written in total secrecy, remember. Even relatives didn’t know), along with the survivors of George Hodel’s alleged co-conspirators.

In reality, George Hodel’s worst crime was to bring children into the world and abandon them to his ex-wife, a hopeless alcoholic who went to jail for neglecting her kids, instead of gaining custody and ensuring that they had a safe and nurturing home. And that, in my book, is not a trivial offense.

Page 76

Wolfe is in the middle of fabricating a little romantic interlude between Elizabeth Short and Red Manley at the Mecca Motel. Attributed to nobody. This is more or less a lift from Aggie Underwood’s well-published jailhouse interview with Red, so I’m going to press on.

Page 78

A couple of major and minor errors. Wolfe says that Elizabeth Short wrote her mother that she was driving back to Los Angeles with Red. Recall that Phoebe Short told Wain Sutton of the Examiner that as far as she knew Elizabeth Short was still in San Diego. Source: None.

“As observed by Forrest Faith, the Frenches’ neighbor across the street, Manley parked his tan Studebaker coupe in front of the Frenches’ residence in the late afternoon of January 8.”

1. Faith lived next door. 2) The Studebaker was black, as shown in the Los Angeles Times photographs.

OK, more of a lift from the Underwood interview and Red’s interrogation by Frank Jemison of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office—which Wolfe continues to call the Los Angeles district attorney. I wish he could sort out the difference between city and county agencies, it isn’t brain surgery.

Ah-ha. Finally, Wolfe is going to quote something from the district attorney’s files. You think you’re going to get it straight without lots of snipping and deletions?

Nope.

Wolfe ruthlessly trims Red’s statement. It’s too long to quote here, but this is a sample:

Page 80

Jemison: During the course of your conversation with her, during that five or six hours when you were driving to Los Angeles … what did you talk about?

Manley: Things we talked about were so unimportant, I don’t even remember them. In fact, she talked very little on the way to Los Angeles. I don’t know what was the matter with her. I don’t know if she was worried about something or what.

Note the telltale ellipses. That’s your warning sign.

Here’s the actual interchange, from Page 3 of the interrogation:

Jemison: During the course of your conversations with her, during that five or six hours when you were coming to Los Angeles, did she speak about how she liked to go dancing or that she liked to go dancing?

Manley: Oh yes, she liked to dance, alright. Things we talked about were so unimportant I don’t even remember them. She didn’t talk much on the way in. I don’t know if she was worried about something or what.

And what does Wolfe do without warning? He jumps to Page 6 of the interview for the next paragraph without telling the reader.

And that’s it for the Manley’s entire interrogation, which last 12 pages.

Oops.

Page 81

“In his Herald Express interview with Aggie Underwood, Manley said it was in Laguna that Elizabeth told him that she had to make a phone call to somebody in Los Angeles. He waited in the car until she returned. Manley stated he didn’t know who [note to ReganBooks, the publishing house without proofreaders or fact-checkers, that should be “whom”] the call was to, but thought it may have been to her sister, Mrs. Adrian West (Ginnie), who [ReganBooks: whom] Elizabeth said she was supposed to meet in L.A.”

Holmes, shall we check some end notes?

Yes, Watson, lets.

District attorney’s files and Underwood’s interview.

Let’s pull Underwood’s interview, shall we?

“Then we drove to Laguna Beach. There we stopped and got gas. En route she asked whether she could write to me. She said she was going to meet her sister from Berkeley, Mrs. Adrian West.”

My dear Holmes! There’s nothing about a telephone call from Laguna Beach!

Precisely, Watson. This is bad business all around. Very bad business indeed.

Want to see some more fabrication in action? Here we go:

Page 81

“I asked where she [Elizabeth] was going to meet her [Virginia West] and she said, ‘The Biltmore Hotel.’ …. When we got into Los Angeles, she wanted me to take her to the Greyhound bus station so she could check her bags before she met her sister. I drove her to the bus station and carried her bags in. I had to go out to move my car, but told her I would drive around and pick her up and take her to the Biltmore.”

Note the telltale ellipses. That should be your warning. Here’s the actual interview:

“I asked where she was going to meet her, and without waiting for her to answer I said ‘the Biltmore’? and she answered yes.

“She wrote my name and business address in her notebook so she could write to me.

“When we got in to Los Angeles she wanted me to take her to the Greyhound Bus Station so she could check her bags before she met her sister. I drove her to the Greyhound Bus Station and carried her bags in. I had to go out to move my car, but told her I would drive around and pick her up and take her to the Biltmore. I didn’t want to leave her in that neighborhood.”

I swear, the man is absolutely incapable of reading what’s in front of him.

Shout out to:

Istanbul, Turkey (85.97.33.46)

TV Guide (144.198.2.240)

Regular reader in Kerkira, Greece (213.80.115.71)

My pals at Dark Horse Comics (70.96.128.8)

Regular reader at Cambrex Corp. (216.83.185.164)

OS breakdown:

Some flavor of Windows 87%

Mac OS X 11%

Unknown 2%

66% are using some flavor of Firefox.

Hurry back!

I’m blogging in real time as I read Donald H. Wolfe’s “The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles.” Wolfe is using the “Laura” format, in which the anonymous, butchered body is discovered and the narrative proceeds in flashbacks. We are at the point in the story when police are questioning Robert M. “Red” Manley, a traveling salesman who gave Elizabeth Short a ride from San Diego to Los Angeles in January 1947.

The two-minute executive summary:

We have seen that although this book is titled “The Black Dahlia Files” half of it is taken from Will Fowler’s “Reporters,” John Gilmore’s “Severed” and the Los Angeles Examiner. The district attorney’s files account for 8% of the book so far. In relying on “Severed,” Wolfe picks up and embellishes Gilmore’s ruthless smear of Elizabeth Short as a lazy tramp. Wolfe also reduces the vast number of detectives working the case to three: Homicide Capt. Jack Donahoe and Detectives Harry Hansen and Finis Brown, forcing them to be supposedly be in San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Lompoc at the same time. A neat trick, you must agree.

In addition, “Mogul” shows once again that Wolfe isn’t shy about citing a source and then contradicting it completely, in this case the account of retired Officer Vincent A. Carter. Wolfe states that according to Carter, Red admitted having an affair with Elizabeth Short, while Carter’s own book states the exact opposite.

A regular correspondent writes to share a news release on an upcoming appearance by “Black Dahlia Avenger” author Steve Hodel at the Centre Pompidou. I don’t think anyone has ever accused the French of lacking a sense of humor.

Page 75

Wolfe is doing what Raymond Chandler used to call “passage work” in covering Red’s background and Elizabeth Short’s fairytales to the people who befriended her that Red was a Marine pilot. Then he picks up more of Aggie Underwood’s jailhouse interview with Red.

But not so fast. Wolfe attributes the Red Manley material to the district attorney’s files. Here’s his exact citation: “Manley’s service record and the notations regarding his ‘Section Eight’ are included in the Black Dahlia Case files at the office of the Los Angeles District Attorney.”

I really wish Wolfe could sort out the various agencies in play here. The district attorney is an elected officer for Los Angeles County and Wolfe keeps treating the job as if it were part of the city of Los Angeles bureaucracy. That would be the city attorney, another elective office.

But the real humor, of course, is that Wolfe’s citation leads to two boxes of jumbled paper. Somewhere in there, supposedly, is Red’s service record and material about his discharge from the Army for being mentally unfit.

Let’s go pull the box of district attorney’s files in the Dahlia case and see what we’ve got, eh?

Now I can tell you before I even look, that Red’s Army records (when he enlisted, when he was discharged, evaluations, etc.) are not there. There is a transcript of his interrogation by Frank Jemsion of the district attorney’s office, conducted Feb. 1, 1950, but there’s nothing about his service record in it.

Hm. Nothing about Red’s Army record in the LAPD summary of the case.

Let’s keep looking. Well, how about the list of 22 suspects?

Nope.

Let me check my index of the district attorney’s files.

Guess what.

Nada.

The truth is I could spend an entire day digging through these files and might still come up empty-handed. The point being that the material on Red’s service record isn’t in the main places you’d look: His interview, the LAPD summary and the list of suspects (in fact, in the interrogation, Jemison goes out of his way to emphasize that Red was not a suspect).

Now let me skip over some of the Underwood interview to get to:

Page 76

Because Wolfe is going to fabricate out of thin air, a tryst between Red and Elizabeth Short at the Mecca Motel.

OK, folks, watch a master fabricator at work. If you ever want to know how to make up some bogus material, this is how it’s done:

“At this point Manley hesitated in his story. Correcting himself, he said, ‘No—we started to drive to the Club, and it took us two and a half or three hours to find it… Boy it’s sure easy to get lost in San Diego!’ ”

That’s verbatim from Underwood’s interview, except that she didn’t capitalize “club.” A point apparently lost on ReganBooks, the publishing house without proofreaders or fact-checkers.

Ready? Here we go!

“Before correcting himself, Manley may have been about to say that they left and tried to find a motel. Though Manley told Aggie that he had left Elizabeth Short at the Frenches, and then found a ‘room’ up the coast, and registered ‘for myself,’ the Examiner reporters had discovered that both Manley and Elizabeth Short had registered at the Mecca Motel on the day in question—December 16. The ‘two and a half or three hours’ supposedly spent trying to find the Hacienda Club were more than likely spent at the motel where they had both registered before going to the club, which was only a fifteen-minute drive from the French residence in Pacific Beach and only ten minutes from the Hacienda Club. Manley continued: ‘When we got to the Hacienda Club, we had a few drinks and danced a few times. Then it was twelve o’clock. We went to a drive-in, had a sandwich, and I took her home.’ ”

Notice that this makes no sense. Let’s run that again:

The ‘two and a half or three hours’ supposedly spent trying to find the Hacienda Club were more than likely spent at the motel where they had both registered before going to the club, which was only a fifteen-minute drive from the French residence in Pacific Beach and only ten minutes from the Hacienda Club.

In other words, the nightclub is only 10 minutes from itself. OK California geography can be complex, but not that complex. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume (or “speculate with confidence” as Hodel is so fond of saying) that Wolfe means the motel was 15 minutes from the Frenches’ home and 10 minutes from the Hacienda Club.

Of course, for this to work, Wolfe must have found the Hacienda Club. Think so? Let’s dig through the book and see if he says where it is. I’ll bet he doesn’t know.

Nope. Wolfe hasn’t a clue where the club was. In truth, the reason Red had such a hard time finding the club is because it wasn’t anywhere near Mission Valley.

Oops.

But there’s more.

Red didn’t stay at the Mecca Motel on the December trip, but on his second trip in January.

Excuse me? What’s my source? It’s an unidentified newspaper clipping in the Gilmore archives at UCLA. Box 16, Folder 3.

Here’s the headline:

‘Red’ Here Night Girl Slain. L.A. Police Checking His Alibi.

Tell them I sent you.

And here’s something really peculiar. Gilmore doesn’t even use his own material (“Severed,” Page 106).

Time for my walk.

Shout out to:

Riverdale, Ill. (12.100.216.67)

Salem, Ore. (67.166.94.152)

France (80.124.192.14) (Tiens! Going to the Hodel appearance?)

Windows 98 user in Portland, Ore. (24.21.137.251) Upgrade!

Hurry back!

I’m blogging in real time as I read Donald H. Wolfe’s “The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul and the Crime That Transfixed Los Angeles.” Wolfe is using the “Laura” format, in which the anonymous, butchered body is discovered and the narrative proceeds in flashbacks. We’re at the point in the story when police have arrested Robert M. “Red” Manley, the last person known to have been with Elizabeth Short.

I was, I have to admit, skeptical of the claim by former Officer Vincent A. Carter that he was at Hollenbeck Station when Manley was interrogated. But I found a picture of him in October 1947 teaching youngsters how to shoot. So that part of the story holds up. Of course, while Carter says Elizabeth Short wouldn’t sleep with Red, Wolfe turns this into:

“According to Administrative Vice officer Sgt. Vincent Carter who was at Hollenbeck when Manley was interrogated, the story Manley told [Aggie] Underwood for public consumption wasn’t exactly the same story he had told detectives and Brown during the interrogation. Desperately trying to save his marriage, Manley publicly denied having an affair with the murder victim, while privately admitting that he had indeed been intimate with Elizabeth Short.”

Page 74

This appears to be a straight lift from Aggie Underwood’s jailhouse interview with Red Manley, which appeared in the Herald-Express Jan. 20, 1947. Let’s see if it is.

Well, no, it isn’t a perfect quote. Wolfe drops words here and there and swaps “Miss Short” for “her.” Nothing crucial, but it shows a certain disinterest in treating quotes as anything other than raw material.

But here’s something interesting: Wolfe adds “Manley said he drove around the block before pulling his car up to the curb where Miss Short was standing.” Now that isn’t anywhere in Underwood’s story. In fact it isn’t anyplace in the official documents or original news reports and I can’t imagine where Wolfe got it unless he simply made it up. Who’s going to know?

Hmmmm. We know from our statistical analysis, that Wolfe’s three major sources are 1) Will Fowler’s “Reporters,” 2) John Gilmore’s “Severed” and 3) the Examiner. Let’s check in with Will.

Nope. But here’s one paragraph from “Reporters” that Wolfe didn’t use:

Page 87

“A reliable nonfiction author must always deal with facts, even though he has the privilege to dissect and conjecture them. The author must not ever be tempted to stray from the basics in a moment of weakness to dream up these pieces of sensational non-information in order to entertain his readers.”

I wonder if Will appreciated the irony of that statement. He was a smart man. I’m sure he did. And obviously, it was totally lost on Donald H. Wolfe.

How about “Severed”?

Oh this is hilarious!

“Severed,” Page 103-104.

“The street he’d just turned onto was one-way, so if the girl crossed the street when the light changed, he might not be able to get around the next block to catch her before she disappeared into one of the office buildings.”

As I believe I’ve said, “Severed” is 25% mistakes and 50% fiction. Elizabeth Short was standing across the street from the Western Air Lines office when Red picked her up. And where exactly was the office? As anybody who has researched the story knows, the Western Air Lines office was on Pacific Highway, the main drag along the coast. Not a exactly a little, one-way street in downtown San Diego. California geography really baffles some people, doesn’t it?

But nothing about circling the block. In fact, “Severed” says (wrongly) that Red couldn’t have circled the block.

My head’s spinning. That’s it for today.

Hurry back!

I’m blogging in real time as I read Donald H. Wolfe’s “The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles.” Wolfe is using the “Laura” format in which the anonymous, butchered body is discovered and the narrative proceeds in flashbacks. We are at the point in the story when Elizabeth Short has left the French family in San Diego and is with Robert M. “Red” Manley, a traveling salesman who picked her up and is giving her a ride back to Los Angeles. Police have detained Red and are questioning him about the Black Dahlia.

Do you like statistics? No? Good. Let’s have some.

Just for fun (OK, my idea of fun may not be yours), I added up the different citations in Wolfe’s end notes to determine his primary source. Recall that the book is titled: “The Black Dahlia Files.” So they are going to be the main source, right?

Uh. No.

Up to Page 73, Wolfe’s leading source is:

William Randolph Fowler—interviews and “Reporters.” (22.5%)

Followed by John Gilmore’s Severed” (16%) and the Los Angeles Examiner (10.5%). Statistically, those three sources account for nearly half of Wolfe’s source material.

To be sure, the district attorney’s files are there, accounting for a whopping, mind-boggling, eye-popping….

8.0645161290322580645161290322581%

Or as noted critic Lorenzo Matawaran (OK, well the contributor of exactly one review to Amazon.com) raved:

At last, a Black Dahlia book with plenty of photos, illustrations, and source notes. It even had an index! Wolfe’s book is well researched, fascinating, and it has a great deal of new information. For those who are interested in the true story behind the Black Dahlia murder this is a must read.Lorenzo Matawaran

Hard to imagine that a rewrite of “Severed” and “Reporters” is new information but apparently it is to some people.

Wolfe’s total end notes as of Page 73 = 124

Citations of Will Fowler = 28

Citations of John Gilmore/“Severed” = 20

The Los Angeles Examiner=13

District attorney’s files = 10

Page 73

Recall from last time that Wolfe has ruthlessly reduced the legions of forces in the Black Dahlia investigation to a paltry three police officers: Homicide Capt. Jack Donahoe and a mere two detectives, Harry Hansen and Finis Brown. This, of course, requires Hansen and Brown to be up in Santa Barbara and Lompoc investigating Elizabeth Short’s months at Camp Cooke at the same time they were in San Diego interviewing the French family AND giving Red Manley the third degree as well as two polygraph exams.

Donahoe, meanwhile, was doing nothing but lounging around the homicide office, sitting next to the phone in case Los Angeles Examiner City Editor Jim Richardson called with another tip, at least in Wolfe’s account of the case.

But it’s time to introduce another police officer into the mix. Our old pal Vincent Carter, author of “L.A.P.D.’s Rogue Cops Cover Ups and the Cookie Jar” from the noted publishing house Birmingham Printing and Publishing Co., 130 S. 19th St., Birmingham, Ala. 35233.

Here are some other books in this publisher’s catalogue:
James R. Bennett, Old Tannehill: A History of the Pioneer Ironworks in Roupes Valley, (1829-1865), (Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Printing and Publishing Co., 1986) ISBN 0-9617257-0-2
Eve Ida Barak Briles, Moods, Seasons, and Love. Birmingham, Ala.: Birmingham Printing and Publishing Co., 1982.

Richard H. Gamble, A Competitive Spirit The Story of Central Bank of the South Birmingham, AL, Birmingham Printing and Publishing Co., 1987, Hardcover, Fine in Fine dust jacket 0961809108 Inscribed by author. Dust in brodart mylar protective cover! Fully Indexed. 8vo; 191 pages; Signed by Author (Banking, History, South, Author Signed)

Helen Irvine, June 2002, “The Legitimizing Power of Financial Statements in the Salvation Army in England, 1865-1892”, Accounting Historians Journal, Edition.1, Issue.1, Volume.29, Birmingham Printing and Publishing Co, Birmingham, pp.1-36.

Mary H. and Dallas M. Lancaster, The Civil War Diary of Anne S. Frobel of Wilton Hill in Virginia. 1986

William Lindsay McDonald, History of the First United Methodist Church, Florence, Alabama, 1822-1984. Birmingham, Ala.: Birmingham Printing and Publishing Co., 1983.

Now here’s their website:

Now I don’t find any books on their site, but they do have a long list of equipment. In other words, this looks like a job shop. You bring in your precious tome and voila, out comes the printed word. It would be rather a challenge to assume these fine Alabamans exercised any editorial control over this opus. And I doubt they had anything to do with the “update” on the Black Dahlia case that has been photocopied, stapled and just stuck into the front of the book. Not something you see in ReganBooks’ finest efforts.

So let’s keep checking:

Desert View Books
PO 1604
Lucerne Valley, CA 92356

Well let’s check their catalogue. Hm. I can’t seem to find anything from this publishing house aside from Carter’s book.

In other words, this is a self-published book. I write whatever I want, take it to the printer (in this case, the folks in Birmingham) and out comes “Rogue Cops.”

Just so you know who we’re talking about.

The good news is that Vince Carter is a real human being, unlike, Detective Herman Willis, one of the main sources in “Severed.” And in case there was any doubt, Wolfe includes a picture of himself with Carter.

So what does Wolfe say about Carter?

“Aggie recalled that she primed Manley with a few casual queries before he began to open up and tell the whole story, which was printed in the Herald Express that evening. But according to Administrative Vice officer Sgt. Vincent Carter [note to ReganBooks: proper style would be “administrative vice Sgt. Vincent A. Carter,” although Cal Morgan or Anna Bliss are apparently not the kind of editors who lose sleep over such trifles] who was at Hollenbeck when Manley was interrogated, the story Manley told Underwood for public consumption wasn’t exactly the same story he had told detectives and Brown during the interrogation. Desperately trying to save his marriage, Manley publicly denied having an affair with the murder victim, while privately admitting that he had indeed been intimate with Elizabeth Short.”

Now this is going to be bad business, folks, because Wolfe is not only smearing Red Manley, but the police and Aggie Underwood are being tarred with the same brush. On the basis of what is supposedly found in this self-published autobiography. Already my spider sense is tingling.

The end notes, Mr. Gallagher?

Absolutely, Mr. Shean.

Oh, this is much worse than I thought. After all my buildup, Wolfe doesn’t even attribute the above paragraph to Carter’s book. In fact he doesn’t attribute it at all—not even to an interview with Carter.

The fact-checker in me just licks my chops over this one.

Any bets on whether this is in “Rogue Cops” before I start looking? Because if it’s not here, Wolfe has really hit a new low in fabrication.

First, let’s check Carter’s index.

OK, Robert Manley, Pages 10, 175-177, 179, 181.

Page 10. Hm. Carter calls her Elizabeth Ann Short, even though she had no middle name. Obviously a real student of the case since it’s well known that she had no middle name.

Carter quickly establishes himself as a master of understated insight:

“It was obvious that the murder and mutilation of the body had not taken place at the site where the body had been found.”

Aha. This makes a bit more sense:

“I was on duty when Manley was brought in for booking. I had been on the force for five years and had later taken a job with the Reserve Unit in the Hollenbeck Division in order to have more time to study for an upcoming sergeant’s exam. I also wanted to get into the detective bureau. I was more than casually interested in the Black Dahlia case which I quickly recognized as the kind of crime of passion that is normally solved comparatively quickly.”

But what’s thissssssss? “Rogue Cops,” Page 11.

“…although I never worked directly on the Black Dahlia murder, I never lost interest in it.”

Uh-oh.

Now let’s press ahead here.

Donald H. Wolfe, you are busted again!

You knew this was going to happen, right?

“Rogue Cops,” Page 176.

“When Manley picked Elizabeth up at the French home in San Diego on January 8, he took her to dinner and then to a motel where he rented a room. When she would not consent to have sex with him, they left and drove to Los Angeles.”

This is where Perry Mason smiles and says: “No further questions.”

Time for my walk.

Shout out to:

United Way of Greater Los Angeles (207.105.48.253)

Timber Ridge Group (66.138.106.188)

Radboud University Nijmegen (131.174.206.125)

Burns Flat, Okla. (216.89.32.23)

Batelco Jeraisy Autonomous System (83.101.150.115)

University of Wisconsin at Madison (146.151.18.95) Here’s to all my Norske homies! Let the Rosemaling begin.

Hurry back!

I’m blogging in real time as I read Donald H. Wolfe’s “The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob (and were are those pesky thugs, anyway?), the Mogul (missing in action so far) and the Murder That Transfixed (fixed, yes, but transfixed, hardly) Los Angeles.” Wolfe is using the “Laura” format in which the anonymous, butchered body is discovered and the narrative proceeds in flashbacks. We’re at the point in the story when Elizabeth Short is in San Diego in the last month of her life and has just met Robert M. “Red” Manley.

Page 70

Wolfe is discussing Manley’s arrest in Eagle Rock after his return from a sales trip to San Francisco. Remember that while Los Angeles police and reporters were madly searching for the mysterious red-haired man last seen with the Black Dahlia, he had left his car in the garage of a friend and driven up to San Francisco.

The usual source for this episode is Will Fowler, who claimed to have witnessed the arrest. I would imagine Wolfe lifts this more or less from “Reporters.” It is amazing, isn’t it, that although the book is called the “Black Dahlia Files” it consists mostly of an embellished rehash of “Reporters” and John Gilmore’s “Severed,” which is 25% mistakes and 50% fiction. With a bit of garnishing from Jim Richardson’s “For the Life of Me” and Mary Pacios’ “Childhood Shadows.”

Now Wolfe is going happily along insisting that Richardson, the Examiner’s city editor, called poor old hapless homicide Capt. Jack Donahoe to tell him about Red Manley. Wolfe presumably wants the reader to think Donahoe did nothing in the way of investigation but baby-sit the phone waiting for newsmen to call him with tips.

Ah, here’s a nice bit of fiction.

“It was hours before [Manley’s companion] Palmer’s car finally showed up, and Robert ‘Red’ Manley stepped out. Dressed in a heavy, gray overcoat and broad-brimmed hat that partially concealed his red hair, he briefly stood near the curb talking to Palmer. As he turned toward his tan Studebaker parked in the driveway, the police detectives jumped out of their car with guns drawn and closed in on the fugitive suspect. Spotting the detectives, Manley quickly raised his arms high in the air and said, ‘I know why you’re here, but I didn’t do it.’ ”

This reads like a lift from “Reporters.”

The end notes, Holmes?

Yes, Watson, lead on.

Hum! Wolfe is getting sloppy about his noting. He attributes the quote “I know why you’re here, but I didn’t do it” to “Reporters,” but not the rest.

Watson, the haz-mat pile of Dahlia books!

“Reporters,” Page 82

“Ferde Olmo and I sat in the back seat of a homicide stakeout car being used by Sgts. J.W. Wass and Sam Flowers. We were parked at the curb of Palmer’s Eagle Rock house, waiting for his car to drive up.

“Eventually, it arrived and when Manley stepped out, the detectives with guns drawn, darted toward him. Manley raised his arms and Olmo flashed pictures. Manley said, ‘I know why you’re here, but I didn’t do it.’ Dressed in a heavy gray overcoat and broad-brimmed hat, he was frightened out of his wits.”

Notice the economy that Will uses and how Wolfe loads his writing down with extraneous words:

Wolfe: Manley quickly raised his arms high in the air.

Fowler: Manley raised his arms.

One thing about Will—he knew how to write tightly; it’s that newspaper training.

Notice that Will doesn’t have anything about Manley’s tan Studebaker parked in the driveway. And why is that?

As anybody who has read The Times’ account knows (and isn’t it interesting Wolfe hardly refers to The Times), it was parked in the garage. In fact The Times ran pictures of the car—and by golly it was black, not tan.

More important, you’ll notice in the photos that it’s daylight outside, not evening, which is when Manley was arrested.

Hmmmm.

I’m going to skip ahead a bit and simply point out that Wolfe has reduced the LAPD’s homicide bureau to three men: Donahoe and Detectives Harry Hansen and Finis Brown. In reality, of course, everyone in the Homicide Bureau was working the case, along with men borrowed from other jurisdictions. But the barrage of unfamiliar names is far too complicated, so Wolfe just tosses them out and has Hansen and Brown do everything.

Meaning that they’d have to be giving Manley polygraph exams in Los Angeles while they were down in San Diego interviewing the Frenches and up in Lompoc and Santa Barbara digging into Elizabeth Short’s time there.

A rather neat trick, wouldn’t you say?

Page 72

“According to practice, the official record of Manley’s full statement to the police was sealed within the LAPD Dahlia file, which remains locked in the Los Angeles Police Department warehouse; but in an unusual procedure, Capt. Donahoe allowed reporter Aggie Underwood to visit the suspect. As the Examiner’s blazing headlines about Red Manley’s capture landed on thousands of Los Angeles doorsteps on Monday morning, January 20, Aggie Underwood of the Herald Express was escorted by Harry Hansen to Manley’s cell for an exclusive interview with the exhausted suspect.”

There are so many mistakes in this paragraph that I could easily spend a day on it.

Here are a few goofs:

• The Black Dahlia “file,” actually an entire file cabinet, is not in some LAPD warehouse, but locked up in Robbery-Homicide at Parker Center.




• Donahoe and Hansen had nothing to do with Underwood interviewing Red Manley.

Let’s check Wolfe’s source on this. Ah! Proof that Donald H. Wolfe is absolutely incapable of reading what is in front of him. As I said previously, I don’t know what editors Cal Morgan and Anna Bliss did with this book, but I can tell you all things they didn’t do, which is to check a single reference.

Wolfe cites Underwood’s autobiography (written with Foster Goss) “Newspaperwoman,” Page 63.

OMG. Let me check this citation again. Yep, “Newspaperwoman,” Page 63.

Well, it isn’t JonBenet Ramsey, but by golly it is close:

“Newspaperwoman,” Page 63:

“On December 5, 1932, an adventurer atmospherically named Captain Walter Wanderwell was shot and killed while in the cabin of his boat, the Carma, tied up at a Long Beach dock. It was a mystery slaying, spiced with attractive girls in the passenger-crew list of a party planning an exotic voyage. For “class” purpose, the vessel became a yacht; the case was dubbed the “yacht death,” the tag preceding by almost fifteen years the similarly identified Overell case at Santa Ana, California, in 1947.”

As Aggie Underwood writes on Page 63:

“What the hell is going on here?”

So, as a service to everybody who doesn’t have a copy of “Newspaperwoman” handy, here is the relevant citation on Pages 7-8.

“Look, fella,” I continued as [Red Manley] inhaled [a cigarette]. “You’re in one hell of a spot. You’re in a jam and it’s no secret. If you’re innocent as you say you are, tell the whole story; and if you haven’t anything to hide, people can’t help knowing you’re telling the truth. That way, you’ll get it over with all at once and it won’t be kicking around to cause you more trouble.”

“She’s right,” said Harry S. Fremont, homicide detective. “Tell her everything that happened. I’ve known this lady for a long time on lots of big cases, and I can tell you she won’t do you wrong.”

Harry Fremont?

“What the hell is going on here?” “Newspaperwoman,” Page 63.

Time for my walk.

Note to prospective commenters: Consider the phrase in Steve Hodel’s “Black Dahlia Avenger” : “It’s possible to speculate with confidence.” (Page 368).

We don’t do that around here. The whole point of this blog is to NOT speculate. Remember the motto of my old pals, the Lookies: “We don’t guess, we look it up.”

Speaking of Hodel, how about his treatment of this episode? He takes it fairly straight from “Newspaperwoman.” In this case, that puts him ahead of Wolfe.

Shout out to:

Swiss Federal Government (193.5.216.100) Windows 2003? What kind of OS is that?
State of Minnesota (156.99.14.161)
Macedonia (212.110.86.34)
Cardica.com (64.160.34.10)

Cummins Engines (12.148.202.85) (Between Grimstad, Norway; Minnesota; and Stoughton, Wis., we got Norskes all over the place). Ever read “Wisconsin Death Trip”? It is too gruesome for words; sort of a “Dairy State Babylon.”

Hurry back!

I’m blogging in real time as I read Donald H. Wolfe’s “The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles.” Wolfe is using the “Laura” format, in which the anonymous, butchered body is discovered and the narrative proceeds in flashbacks. We are in the last few weeks of Elizabeth Short’s life, in which she met Robert M. “Red Manley,” a traveling salesman from Los Angeles who picked her up on a trip to San Diego.

Imagine my surprise—no, my shock—to read this in L.A. Weekly. Here’s a screen shot to show I’m not making this up.

A writer named Jeffrey Anderson is exploring the legacy of Owens Valley and interviewed a man named Don Odell, identified as: “a semi-retired lawyer and former member of the Inyo County grand jury.”

“Odell muses about his days arguing over a solution down in L.A. City Hall and a conversation he once overheard between Mayor Tom Bradley and an LAPD detective who investigated the Black Dahlia murder named Ralph Asdel. “I’m standing there one day and the mayor is talking to Asdel about Owens Valley and he says, ‘Ralph, someday we’re gonna have to fill that lake.’ ”

It’s a nice picture; Odell overhearing a conversation between Bradley and Asdel, a former LAPD detective who was loaned to the Black Dahlia investigation.

But you’re not going to like this.

Ralph was a friend of mine. I was a pallbearer at his funeral in 2003. He was working in Boyle Heights when he was loaned to the Dahlia investigation. He later worked as a detective in the San Fernando Valley, before going to motors.

And according to his obituary in the Los Angeles Times:

“Asdel, who later became a motorcycle officer, injured his leg in an on-duty accident and was forced to go on medical retirement in 1965.”

Tom Bradley was indeed mayor of Los Angeles.

From 1973 to 1993.

Do you think something could something be wrong here? Note: Ralph’s obituary is online and easy to find.

Page 69

Wolfe is telling the Red Manley saga, using Will Fowler’s yarn virtually intact. In Will’s version, he goes to the Manleys’ home in Huntington Park, interviews Manley’s wife, Harriette, and tells her not to open to the door to nosy reporters.

The source for this ought to be either Will’s “Reporters,” or an interview with him. As I said before, one of the most frightening phrases in the English language is “Will Fowler recalls….” but let’s check.

Yep, “Reporters,” Page 81 and 82.

Should I take the time to see if this is screwed up? OK, I will.

Watson, to the haz-mat pile of Dahlia books!

Why am I not surprised?

Now with any other writer, I wouldn’t bother. This seems to be a straight lift job. But I swear, Wolfe can’t read what’s in front of him.

Here’s Will’s version:

“While I was there, the phone rang. It was Red and Harriet put her hand over the mouthpiece and asked: ‘Do you want to talk to him?’ ”

“ ‘You better not tell him I’ve been here,’ I said.”

Compare this with “Mogul”:

“When Harriet learned that her husband was being sought by the police, she became nervous but cooperative. She told Fowler that she had just heard from her husband, who had telephoned from San Francisco.”

OK, Will, let me get this straight: Every police officer and every reporter in California is looking for the mysterious red-haired man in the murder of Elizabeth Short. You’re at the man’s home, talking to his wife. He calls. She asks if you want to speak to him.

And you say:

No.

If that were a true story and I were your editor, you would be out the door.

And here we see Wolfe’s skill in creating quotes for conveniently dead people:

“Reporters,” Page 82

“She didn’t seem to object when I asked for them all [family photographs] and instructed her—a bride of only 15 months—not to talk to anyone, especially if newspaper reporters started coming around the house.”

“Mogul,” Page 69

“Electing not to inform Mrs. Manley that her husband was the number one suspect in the murder of Elizabeth Short, Fowler cautioned her not to talk to anyone about her husband—especially ‘any nosey reporters who may come knocking at your door.’ ”

Of course, Will’s story (which I heard from him countless times) was that he bamboozled his way in the door by flashing his badge (reporters were indeed issued badges by Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz that were later confiscated by Sheriff Peter Pitchess) and claiming that Red had lots of unpaid parking tickets.

Was there any truth to it at all? I don’t know. Maybe. Will also claimed that he was on the stakeout when Red was arrested in Eagle Rock and present when police showed up at the Examiner with Elizabeth Short’s luggage. Since those events occurred at roughly the same time, he couldn’t have been in both places.

Time for my walk.

Shout out to:

Dark Horse Comics (70.96.128.8) man you guys are really going nuts on this site!

Grimstad, Norway (62.101.234.10) (say hi to my homies in Andoya!)

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Mysterious visitor (75.1.5.136)

Chicago Linux user (4.252.208.102)

Hurry back!

I’m blogging in real time as I read Donald H. Wolfe’s “The Black Dahlia Files,” more properly titled “Stuff I Scraped Out of ‘Severed’ Thanks to John Gilmore, Who Calls My Book ‘a True Crime Classic’ and ‘Crap’ ” (If you figure that one out, you’re good).

Wolfe is using the “Laura” format in which the anonymous, butchered body is found and the narrative is told in flashbacks. We just finished the portion of the story in which Elizabeth Short has been befriended by the French family in San Diego in the last month of her life.

I heard from one of Elizabeth Short’s sisters yesterday, as I do from time to time. Out of concern for her privacy, I won’t quote the e-mail, but she asked what I knew about the upcoming Brian De Palma movie. I told her I turned down a chance to attend the sneak preview, but that several people who saw the movie said it was horrid. Sample comment: “There is so much wrong with this film that I don’t even know where to start!”

The sister expressed dismay that so many people are so hungry to cash in on the family’s tragedy, and so totally hardened to the grief they continue to feel nearly 60 years after the murder. As I have said again and again, for the Short family, the murder is not some macabre curio of old Los Angeles; for them it’s as if it just occurred. The continuing flood of sleazy, crackpot books only reopens old wounds. And don’t even get me going about the websites plastered with body shots that have made their way onto record jackets. And the free FBI files going for $25 a pop on Ebay. You know who you are.

To the haz-mat pile! The good news is that we’re on

Page 68

Total pages (not counting “end notes” and the index) 357. Hey, we’re nearly 20% of the way through the book.

OK. This chapter is titled “Red,” so I’m going to guess (remember I haven’t read ahead) that it is lifted more or less intact from Aggie Underwood’s jailhouse interview with Robert M. “Red” Manley, the only bylined story of any original account of the Black Dahlia case. With some garnishes from “Severed,” which is 25% mistakes and 50% fiction.

Hm. Wolfe is starting with Jim Richardson suspecting that Red and Elizabeth Short might have left San Diego for Los Angeles late in the day. He continues to call photographer George O’Day a reporter, but at least he is consistent in his mistake. Recall that Elizabeth Short’s father went from strict churchgoer to Jack Daniels’ best amigo in a few pages, something that caused no intellectual whiplash to Wolfe’s agent, Alan Nevins, nor to his two editors, Cal Morgan and Anna Bliss.

Any bets as to whether Wolfe bothers to attribute this? It should be in Richardson’s “For the Life of Me” if it’s anywhere.

Lead on, Watson!

Well, Holmes, it’s supposed to be from “For the Life of Me,” Page 301.

Quick, Watson, the haz-mat pile!

Ah. This is more like it:

“For the Life of Me,” Page 301

“She left the French place about six o’clock on the evening of January 8 with a man known as Red,” Tommy [Devlin] reported. “This Red sent her a telegram January 7 from Huntington Park saying he would pick her up the next day. She told Mrs. French and Dorothy he was taking her to Los Angeles A couple of weeks before she left, Elizabeth told Dorothy one morning that she had a friend named Red who was at a motel near San Diego. When Red picked her up January 8 he had his car and carried her bags out to it. Mrs. French and Dorothy met him and I’ve got a good description of him. He’s our baby. Send somebody out to check that telegram. He may have given an address when he sent it. I’ll start prowling the motels around here for the license number of his car.”

So it wasn’t Richardson’s idea, it was Devlin’s. And notice, please, no mention of photographer George O’Day. That comes from Will Fowler’s “Reporters.”

Oh this is interesting (well, OK, to a total research drudge):

“But at the Mecca Motel, known to be a ‘hot pillow joint’ located less than twelve miles north of Pacific Beach, the clerk recalled a couple that matched the description; however, they had not registered in January. The clerk recalled them registering back in mid-December. ‘Yes, the man was tall, freckle-faced, had red hair, and was in his mid-twenties,’ the clerk recalled, ‘and he was with a striking young woman with jet-black hair.’ ”

Now if you haven’t spent years researching Dahlia stuff you wouldn’t notice what’s going on here. Wolfe is claiming that Red and Elizabeth Short checked into a motel during his previous visit to San Diego—something that is totally unsupported in the original documents. And this nonsense about the Mecca Motel being a “hot pillow joint”—where on earth did Wolfe get that?

Let’s just see if he hangs this on anybody.

Aha. Maybe from “Reporters.” I swear, one of the most frightening phrases in the English language is “Will Fowler recalls…” I considered him a good friend and he lied his head off to me.

“Reporters,” Page 81

“In the meantime, the crew of George O’Day and reporter Tom Devlin continued checking hotels and motels, looking for anything that would lead them to the identification of ‘Red.’ And coming up with a winner, Devlin located a motel where a red-haired man had registered the previous December. Unbelievably, he hadn’t signed in with the usual Mr. and Mrs. Smith. He had actually entered Elizabeth Short’s real name at the motel a dozen miles north of San Diego. He also signed his name: Robert Manley from Huntington Park.”

Note, please. Nothing about freckles, nothing about O’Day being a reporter and most of all, nothing about the Mecca Motel being a “hot pillow joint.” That’s strictly Wolfe’s handiwork. Now Red did check into a motel along the highway south of Pacific Beach, but by all accounts Elizabeth Short did not accompany him. In fact, he picked her up on a corner across from the Western Air Lines office, gave her a ride to the Frenches, went to the motel to clean up and came back and picked her up. They went out and he dropped her off at the Frenches.

Period.

So where does this quote come from?

“ ‘Yes, the man was tall, freckle-faced, had red hair, and was in his mid-twenties,’ the clerk recalled, ‘and he was with a striking young woman with jet-black hair.’ ”

Beats me. From the fertile mind of Donald H. Wolfe, apparently.

I’m increasingly puzzled about the title of Wolfe’s book because the district attorney’s files (remember, this is called the “Black Dahlia Files”) are virtually absent. Wolfe’s main sources seem to be “Severed” and “Reporters.”

And even then, Wolfe is very selective. Here’s another section from the same page of “For the Life of Me” that Wolfe is using. But he leaves this out:

“She had been a pitiful wanderer, ricocheting from one cheap job to another and from one cheap man to another in a sad search for a good husband and a home and happiness. Not bad. Not good. Just lost and trying to find a way out. Every big city has hundreds just like her.”

But of course that’s completely counterproductive in the “Elizabeth Short turns bad girl” motif, so it’s ignored.

Time for my walk.

Ps. I also heard from Mary Pacios yesterday. She says the Wolfe book makes her so angry she can’t read it. Mary calls it “dishonest” and it is surely that.

Shout out to:

Warner Music Group (65.244.245.5)

Larkspur Hospitality Company (12.154.206.226)

My regular visitor in Kerkira, Greece (213.80.115.71)

New Orleans (68.14.106.216)

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Raleigh, N.C. (69.134.176.51)

Win98 user at the University of Windsor (137.207.132.38)

The dudes at Inktomi (72.30.133.13)

Youngstown State University (150.134.171.163)

Hurry back!

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Americans at the turn of the century lacked many things, but they had some amazing live entertainment. Here’s a snip of a performance courtesy of Edison Studios, 1904. These guys rock. I have watched them dozens of times now and I still find them amazing.

Enjoy!

lmharnisch.com

lmharnisch.blogspot.com