LAPD Images Capture Decades of Grisly Scenes

Coroner’s investigators, shrouded in mist, stand over an unidentified murder victim lying crumpled in the concrete bed of the Los Angeles River.

A dead woman’s high heels protrude from beneath a white sheet.

Two men are slumped against the side of a restaurant booth, their bodies bloodied by gunshots as their plates of spaghetti lie barely touched beside them.

These black-and-white images are at once haunting, artistic, sublime and gratuitous. And they are part of history in a new coffee-table book capturing decades of crime scene photos from the archives of the Los Angeles Police Department.

“You will meet prosaic defilers, celebrated killers, Chief [William] Parker and Jack Webb,” author James Ellroy writes in the introduction to “Scene of the Crime.” “Minute details will accrue. You’ll come to know the psychic cost of crime.”

Compiled from tens of thousands of images in the LAPD archive, the 240-page book includes crime scene images photographed between 1926 and 1974, including the Manson murders and the “Black Dahlia.”

The photos are of crime victims who lived to tell about it, portraits of coldblooded killers, and instruments of death, such as the close-up of a handgun or a dagger. But the book mostly conveys what Ellroy calls the “grinding and depressive rot of death.”

The murder or suicide victims expired in cheap hotel rooms, bars, beside roadways and railroad tracks, at dump sites and on farmland, in automobiles and on a park bench.

Ever present but sometimes unseen are the officers themselves, experiencing what Chief William J. Bratton describes in his foreword to the book as “a small taste of the sometimes-harsh reality of police work.”

The book, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc., retails for $35 and will be released Oct. 1 but is available now in some bookstores.