SIX
The Prime Suspects


The handsome couple faced each other in profile—Robert Manley and his wife, Harriet. The pretty woman had an upturned nose like Beth Short, and full lips that were poised for a kiss. A flowered kerchief tied in back covered her honey-colored hair. Harriet was looking up, meeting her husband’s gaze. Her hands gently touched his cheeks, an expression of faith minutes before Robert “Red” Manley, Suspect Number One, was booked. The tender moment was caught by a Hearst photographer and sent over the wire, making front page news across the country and a full-page spread in LIFE magazine. (See Appendix B.)

Captain Donahoe led the relay teams questioning Manley throughout the night, hoping to wring a confession before turning Manley over to the reporters. The detectives knew they had their man. The FBI’s search through army records turned up information that Manley had been discharged as “mentally unfit for service.”

Ray Pinker administered the polygraph test. “The results,” he said, “were inconclusive.” The exhausted Manley kept falling asleep. Another polygraph was slated for later in the day.

Manley told of a few uneventful dates, dining and dancing, and admitted kissing “Miss Short,” describing her as “rather cold.”

“Miss Short talked endlessly about ‘Matt’ someone, her dead husband,” Manley said. “I confided to Miss Short the problems I was having adjusting to married life.”

Manley admitted staying at the motel on January 8 en route to Los Angeles, but “nothing happened,” he said. “She was sick with chills and sat up all night in a chair.”

Manley ignored the squadron of reporters hurling questions at him when he was escorted back to his cell by Finis Brown and a guard. If a reporter approached his cell, Manley closed his eyes, pretending to be asleep. Manley definitely was not talking to the press.

Agness Underwood joined the newsboys across from his cell and flashed Manley a friendly smile. Sid Hughes told Aggie to forget it. “We’ve all tried to talk to him,” he said.

Aggie quipped something about it needing a woman’s touch and walked over to the cell. She told Manley he looked like he had been on “one helluva drunk” the night before, and she offered him a cigarette. Manley said he sure could use a drag. Aggie gave him a whole pack.

“Look, I don’t think you did it,” Aggie said. “And I’d like to tell your side of the story.”

The guard and the other reporters hung back while Aggie talked. They could see Manley hesitating, as if he might open up to Aggie.

“Hey, if you can trust anyone, you can trust this little lady,” the guard said. “She’ll do right by you.”

“You a vet?” Aggie asked.

“Musician,” Manley said. He took a puff on the cigarette, slowly blowing the smoke out. “I was in the Army Band.”

Manley told Aggie that “Miss Short” told him she was to meet her sister in Los Angeles at the Biltmore Hotel. Manley said he paid to have double taps put on Beth’s shoes when he stopped to make his business calls. They arrived in Los Angeles around five o’clock, he said, and he brought “Miss Short” to the Greyhound Bus Depot on 7th Street. He helped put Beth’s hatbox and suitcases in a locker.

He was reluctant to leave her alone in that part of town, he said, so he drove to the exclusive Biltmore Hotel on Olive Street. Beth asked him if he would do one last favor, inquire at the desk to see if her sister, Virginia West, had registered at the hotel. It was now past six o’clock on the evening of January 9, and Robert Manley was eager to go home. The desk clerk told Manley that no one by that name had checked in.

When Manley said goodbye, Beth touched him lightly on his arm and thanked him with a smile. He remembered vividly gazing at the pretty girl with jet-black hair. Manley could recall in detail the black tailored suit, black stockings, and black suede shoes she was wearing, and the light-colored coat she carried over her arm. With her soft alabaster skin and aquamarine eyes, she made a stunning figure, difficult to forget.

As he left, he glanced back, he said, but Beth had turned away and was talking to the clerk at the cigar stand. The newspapers reported that hotel employees saw her walking back and forth across the marble floor to the telephone booths. They estimated she stayed in the lobby for a couple of hours.

“I had nothing to do with it,” Manley kept repeating to Aggie. “I felt sick when I found out.” Manley insisted that he was playing cards with his wife and a couple of friends, Mr. and Mrs. Don Holmes, the night of the murder. The friends substantiated his alibi.

Aggie knew she had front page on this interview—”Red Tells Own Story of Romance with Dahlia; Suspect Squirms as Science Tests Alibi.”

Finis Brown and Ray Pinker administered Manley’s second polygraph test. They were given the autopsy report and were now “inclined to believe Manley’s story.”

Aggie’s photographer, Perry Fowler, caught the trio on film. Perry crouched down, angling his Speed Graphix and dramatizing the ominous shadows on Manley’s face. Pinker and Brown stayed in the background. Manley looked as if he was sitting in the electric chair—a wide band was strapped across his chest, while wires connected to his arm led to a boxlike contraption on a sturdy mahogany table.

Detectives checked Manley’s alibi, hour by hour, accounting for the six days that Elizabeth Short had dropped out of sight until her body was found.

Red Manley never recovered from the ordeal. He had a number of breakdowns, always around the anniversary of the murder and his interrogation. In March of 1954, his wife Harriet committed him to Patton State Hospital for the fourth time. He was not violent, she said, “but hears voices and scribbles nonsense. He cries and feels guilty.”

For years, Harry Hansen remained suspicious of Manley. During one of his confinements, Manley agreed to take truth serum. An official police source told reporters that the results indicated Manley “knows nothing of the crime.”

In the 1970s, Ed Gelb, the renowned polygraph expert, found Manley living alone in a trailer. Gelb, working as a private investigator, had been hired by a movie studio to track down people connected to the Black Dahlia case and obtain signed releases.

Gelb said he didn’t know much about the case at that time and didn’t know Manley had been a prime suspect. “Manley was just another name I was checking out,” Gelb said. “I told Manley he would be portrayed favorably in the TV movie that was starring Lucy Arnaz. Manley was very cooperative. We sat for a while and drank a lot of beer. We started to B.S.”

Gelb wasn’t sure what set Manley off. “It could have been when I asked Manley how he was connected to the case,” Gelb said. “Manley suddenly grabbed an ax and chased me out of the trailer, saying he was going to kill me. He never did sign the release form. A few days later, Manley checked himself back into a psychiatric hospital.”

Elizabeth Short’s father, Cleo, became a suspect, until eliminated two years later by the investigators for the 1949 Grand Jury. Cleo was interrogated twice. The police couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t come forward once his daughter had been identified as the victim. Cleo was found a few days after the murder by Ken Scarce, a policeman who happened to reside in the same Los Angeles apartment building. “My landlady tipped me off about Cleo Short,” Ken Scarce told me. “One of her tenants, someone she described as ‘secretive,’ had a photo of the girl she saw in all the papers. The landlady let me in with a key, and sure enough, there was the photo, the one with the curl over her forehead. We were waiting for him when he got home. He said he had a right to the photo of his daughter. I didn’t know what to make of it.”

Cleo Short told reporters he wanted nothing to do with the investigation. “I broke off with the mother and the family several years ago. In 1943 I told her to go her way, I’d go mine.” Cleo said his daughter was more interested in going out dancing with servicemen than doing the dishes and keeping house.

Ken Scarce went on to become a police lieutenant and LAPD’s resident polygraph expert, refining the technique to discern “half truths.” The major benefit of the polygraph, Scarce said, is to narrow down the investigation, clear the innocent quickly, and point out people who should be checked out further. “The polygraph is useless with schizophrenics and someone who has been grilled,” said Scarce.

He explained: “If you hammer away at a suspect saying, ‘You did it... You did it...,’ when he takes the test he may be responding not to what he actually did, but to what he was told he did. Scarce, who hates the use of the word “lie detector,” said the polygraph was new to LAPD in 1947. “Because of the intense questioning Manley underwent,” Scarce said, “Manley’s polygraph tests were useless.”

After Manley was exonerated, the reporters had a hard time coming up with new angles. “You could only interview the ex-roommates so many times,” Will Fowler said. “By this time, no one except the crackpots wanted to admit they knew the Dahlia.”

A middle-aged ex-con and self-proclaimed artist, Arthur James Jr., alias Charles B. Smith, claimed to have made some sketches of the Black Dahlia and painted her in oils. They met, he told reporters, at the City of Paris cocktail lounge in August of 1944. In November of the same year, James was arrested in Tucson, Arizona, for passing bad checks and violating the Mann Act. The fifty-six-year-old James had brought Geraldine Ann Gillig, age nineteen, across the California state border for “immoral purposes.” At the time he was arrested, James told police he was “the son of one of the twelve richest men in the world.” One of the bogus checks he signed was for $50,000. According to Tucson police, James also claimed to have been everything “from a switchman for the Southern Pacific to an FBI agent.”

When Bette Short left California in September of 1943, she did not return until June of 1946. Arthur James’ “Dahlia” story was just another of his fantasies.

“The Best Suspect Yet,” a bellhop named Leslie Dillon, became more than just an embarrassment to police officials. Upon his release, Dillon filed a $100,000 lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles for false arrest. Dillon came to the attention of the police when he wrote a letter to Dr. Paul de River, expressing an interest and more than a passing knowledge in “sexual sadism.” Lured from Florida under the guise of “helping” de River write a book, Leslie was held “incommunicado” in San Francisco and subjected to a relentless third degree by the “gangster squad.” Dillon’s friend, a bit actor and writer named Jeff Connors who claimed to have known the “Dahlia,” was also arrested, questioned, and finally released.

Bette’s friendships became open to interpretation, with comments about her “bizarre behavior” sprinkled throughout the news stories. A simple statement, “She readily made friends with men and women,” had sexual overtones that implied “deviant” and “sinister” behavior.

“Elizabeth Short wasn’t a bad gal,” the prize-winning Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith told me over the telephone. “I sure have seen a helluva lot worse.”

I asked Jack about his work as a rewrite man on the Daily News.

“Well,” Jack Smith said, “in those days, we tended to infer... We had deadlines to meet.”

“What about her boyfriends?” I asked. “Was she sleeping around?”

“None that we found. But look how Manley was raked over the coals.”

“Lesbian?” I queried.

“No, nothing.”

I asked Jack Smith if it would be possible for me to look through his old files. “If I had them,” he said, “but a few years ago I took them out back and burned them.”

“Burned them? Why?”

“For my wife,” he said. “She wanted me to stop thinking about it. So out of respect for my wife, I burned them.”

Gerry Ramlow agreed that there was nothing to the lesbian angle. “After Manley was let loose,” he said, “Aggie thought a woman might be involved. If she wasn’t sleeping with guys, we figured she must have been doing something. Bevo was acting like he knew something we didn’t know, like directly from the horse’s mouth, a horse named Harry. Bevo was saying something about ‘lesbian pathology,’ whatever the hell that meant. That’s what sent Hughes chasing the dykes.

“Sid Hughes wouldn’t give up on the lesbian angle. He checked it out pretty thoroughly and couldn’t find anything. The police were pretty adamant that she wasn’t a lesbian.

“Hughes hit every bar on Main Street and the Boulevard, and we were on his tail. That gal sure got around. ‘Adept at fending off passes’—that’s what one of the guys said. Could’ve made dough as a B-girl, but didn’t. She liked coming and going as she pleased, making the rounds. And no complaints about her decorating the place. Guys would buy drinks, and she’d talk to them, nursing the drink, be friendly. Then just when the guy thought he had something going, she’d up and leave.”

“Someone told me that some of the guys even complained to the police,” I said.

“Yeah, could be,” Ramlow said. “Figure that one. Sid thought either some lesbian was jealous or the Dahlia gave some guy a real bad time. Sid said she was one f---ing tease and that’s what did her in. He thought she might have been asking for it. He said she probably was giving guys head, because she sure as hell wasn’t putting out as we know it.”

Will Fowler said much the same thing. “The Dahlia liked to turn men on and leave them high and dry. Call it what you will,” he said, “she was a cock-tease and asking for trouble.”

Detective Harry Hansen in a newspaper interview years later said, “The killing seems to be based on an unbelievable anger. I suppose sex was the motive, or at least the fact that the killer was denied sex.”

Will Fowler told me Harry Hansen had a secret question, and only Fowler and Bevo Means knew the answer. “But if one word was ever printed or even hinted at,” Fowler said, “Harry Hansen would have come down so hard and heavy on whoever spilled the beans, they wouldn’t know what hit them!

“There was something physically wrong with Elizabeth Short. She couldn’t have sex without medical help. Infantile genitals—an extra thick hymen or something like that, not fully developed,” Fowler chuckled. “Think irony... you have to think irony,” he said. “Think of this beautiful woman with all the guys after her... and she couldn’t put out, couldn’t give them what they wanted.”

I thought Will’s statements were absurd. I knew what Bette looked like. Bette bore no resemblance to any of the photos I’d seen as a child—people with all sorts of hormonal and sexual developmental problems.

But I thought I should check it out. I went to the medical library at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. A librarian found some references: women with undeveloped vaginal canals, a condition that occurred once in a million births. I thought of an article I read about Harry Hansen and his comment, years after the murder, that there was information only the killer would know, a “one-in-a-million guess.” I thought of Bette’s friend back home and Bette’s “shocking secret”—the secret the friend would never reveal.

The first book describing the rare genital condition was published in 1953, six years after Bette’s murder. The photographs in the book showed very attractive and well-built women.

I contacted Dr. John Money, a leading forensic sexologist with Johns Hopkins University. He informed me that there were variations in this condition, but that all of the women tend to be very feminine and quite attractive. The women also tended to be motherly and nurturing. Mood swings were common. Sometimes the women felt optimistic, as if they would wake up one day and the condition would be gone. Other times they would feel hopeless, as if nothing could change their plight. Dr. Money stated that a famous actress and a well-known model, whose names he could not divulge, had some form of the condition.

Dr. Money said there was not enough information to determine the exact nature of Bette’s medical problem. It could have been any number of conditions: imperforate hymen, vaginal agenesis, vaginal atresia, longitudinal vaginal septa, transverse vaginal septa, or Rokitansky syndrome. Androgen-insensitivity syndrome could be ruled out because according to the autopsy Bette’s female organs were normal. “The uterus is small and no pregnancy is apparent. The tubes, ovaries, and cul de sac are intact.” However, a document in the district attorney’s files states: “According to the autopsy surgeon her sex organs indicated female trouble.” A document in the files also states that one fact has been kept secret “as a measure of interrogation of suspects, present, past and future.”

Muriel Short confirmed that Bette had some “female” problems. She remembered Bette’s giant-sized Lydia Pinkham bottle. “But we never discussed what the problem was,” Muriel said.

Valerie Reynolds, Bette’s niece, became indignant at the suggestion. “Why is it that if my aunt wasn’t sleeping around, it has to be attributed to some medical condition, not that Aunt Bette was trying to live a moral life,” Reynolds said.

Bette’s “strange behavior,” her “secretiveness,” and her constant moving around gave rise to speculation and rumors of prostitution. Writers and amateur sleuths began taking their cues from the newspaper innuendoes and went a step further by portraying Elizabeth Short as an actress—in porno films.

Harry Hansen scoffed at the speculative dark-side musings of writers and the armchair detectives. In a TV interview, Harry told Tony Valdez of Fox TV:

There was no record of any solicitation, offering or resorting or prostitution in any way, shape, or form. She was no pushover. She’d bait and take all she could get and give out nothing. She did not put out. Looking at it in perspective, I suppose, the killer did his thing and got away with it.

The district attorney’s files confirm that Bette Short was not a prostitute.

With all their digging, within a couple of weeks of the murder, the police and reporters had exhausted their leads. The forty policemen who went door-to-door asking questions were beefed up with Sheriff’s deputies to four hundred—and they still turned up nothing. Whatever “sightings” reported between January 9, when Elizabeth Short was last seen, and January 15, when her body was found in the vacant lot, appeared to be false. The trail of the Black Dahlia ended at the Biltmore Hotel—until the day Jimmy Richardson received a telephone call that “sent a shiver” up his spine.

On January 24, 1947, a caller made a joking reference to the lagging news coverage and offered his assistance to the City Editor. The “silky” voice on the phone promised to send the Examiner a special packet with some personal effects belonging to the victim.

Richardson said he could barely speak. Was this a hoax or the killer? Richardson managed to ask, “What things?”

“A few things from her handbag,” the voice said.

Richardson tried to keep the caller on the line, but there was a click before the switchboard operator, Mae Northern, could trace the call. Other reporters thought Sid Hughes was playing another of his jokes, until the packet showed up a day later.

Large red letters forming the word: “Dahlia’s” caught a postal clerk’s attention. There was a message and an address of sorts on the oversize envelope. Odd-size letters cut from a newspaper formed the cryptic message:

To Los Angeles Examiner and other papers
Here is Dahlia’s belongings
Letter to follow

The postal clerk motioned for his line supervisor, who took one quick look at the envelope and called upstairs to postal inspectors. After a terse discussion of the US Postal Code, the police and all the Los Angeles newspapers were called. The killer’s packet had been intercepted.

Reporters crowded around as the postal inspector put on a pair of gloves and opened the envelope. Out tumbled a Greyhound claim check, Elizabeth Short’s birth certificate, a Western Union message signed “Red,” some snapshots, a few business cards, a small leather address book with the name “Mark Hansen” embossed in gold on the cover, and a newspaper clipping of Matt Gordon’s obituary. Where the clipping said his “bride who he planned to meet and marry in Bedford,” the “and marry” was crossed out. The “B” in the word “Bedford” was changed to an “M.”

A faint smell of gasoline emanated from the three-by-eight inch envelope. The police surmised the killer intended to burn the packet and changed his mind. Richardson thought differently. He pointed out that a person well versed in “contemporary police science” would know that gasoline destroys the traces of fingerprints.

Captain Donahoe called the address book a “big break in the case.” He admitted to the press that “over seventy-five names, both men and women, and some of them well-known Hollywood personalities,” were in the book. “This book is going to be dynamite!” Donahoe exclaimed. He backed down a day later, expressing concern about “protecting the innocent.”

Will Fowler said the reporters looked over the contents of the envelope and press photographers took photos of the various items, “but the names in the address book were off-limits.”

Before the news blackout, Aggie Underwood revealed the names on the business cards: Carl Bausinger, Jimmy Bufello, Dr. A. B. Bux, Robert S. Geissinger, Wayne Grey, Jimmy Harrigan, E. A. Jack Kleinau, Victor Lewis, and Chet Montgomery, whose name was typed on a Hollywood Wolves Membership Card.

“But,” said Gerry Ramlow, “it was the name embossed on the cover of the address book, Mark M. Hansen, that caused the big stir. The police had routinely questioned Hansen the week before, and Mark Hansen claimed to know nothing about ‘the girl.’ This, despite the fact she had been living at Mark Hansen’s home on Carlos Avenue from August through October of 1946. She shared a room with Ann Toth, an actress, and Mark Hansen’s current girlfriend.”

“This time around, Mark admitted the address book was his. For Christ’s sake, his name was on it! But he still wouldn’t admit to dating her. He said he didn’t give her the book. He said she stole it. ‘The book was a gift from some relatives in Denmark,’ he said. ‘I never bothered with her. She dated hoodlum types.’

“His girlfriend, Ann Toth, was sitting beside him, and she got mad when he mentioned hoodlums. Said it wasn’t true. Claimed Beth was a ‘nice’ girl. She was quiet, Toth said, and she didn’t stay out late. ‘She didn’t drink, and she didn’t smoke.’ Toth sent Beth $20 around Christmas time. She admitted that Beth was sometimes cynical about men, and that she’d get herself into hot water but said Beth was adept at getting herself out. Beth would tell men either that she was a virgin or sometimes, that she was married. Toth lit into us, wanting to know why we couldn’t write about the good side of people.”

Mark Marinue Hansen, the gray-haired owner of the Florentine Gardens, became major Suspect Number Two. Although he kept insisting that he had nothing to do with Beth, Ann Toth said Mark had a ‘yen’ for Beth and was very jealous. “Beth left her boyfriends at the corner so Mark wouldn’t see them.”

Witnesses, in addition to Ann Toth, claimed Mark was smitten. Mrs. Ardis, a dressmaker, said Mark Hansen invited her and her husband over for drinks and to meet “the most beautiful creature in Hollywood.” Hansen ordered two dresses for Beth which were fitted and made, but never delivered.