Recurring Pain : An Anaheim woman says for years she repressed memories that her father killed the Black Dahlia and, she says, it was only one of his unspeakable crimes.

Normal life goes on at the other booths in this Norm’s restaurant. At the table next to Jan Knowlton, a suntanned blonde is complaining to the waiter about how there usually isn’t enough brownie in her ice cream brownie.

Meanwhile, Knowlton is sifting through a sheaf of little-seen autopsy photos. Like the famous published photos from the crime scene, but in greater stark horrific detail, they show a nude body in two parts, severed at the abdomen, and cruelly, insanely mutilated, so that the woman’s mouth had been slashed into a terrifying clown’s grin. It is Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia.

As sickening as these photos are to behold, they are but the mere dust jacket for the story Knowlton claims as her childhood. In the past three years, she says, repressed childhood memories have returned to her, memories of watching her father, George Knowlton, murder and dismember Short in 1947. Knowlton said she was herself raped and abused from infancy by her father, whom she recalls also murdering several other women.

As she now recollects him, her father--who died with a young son in 1962 in a car wreck that Knowlton believes was a suicide--was an unspeakable monster: a serial killer, a baby-murderer, a pedophile, a necrophiliac, a satanist, a sadist who tortured pets to death and mutilated his victims.

Knowlton’s story has its supporters, including her Tustin-based therapist Jim Frey and writer Michael Newton, author of “Hunting Humans” and other books on serial killers. Newton and Knowlton are collaborating on a book about the case that is slated to be published by the Pocketbooks division of Simon & Schuster next year.

She also claims support from some family members, though other relatives dispute her memories. The police in both Los Angeles and Westminster, where she claims the Dahlia murder and other horrors occurred, have placed little credence in her story. Knowlton did get the police to dig up her old Westminster yard two years ago. They found, buried two feet deep, a knife, costume jewelry, farm tools and the skeleton of a dog. The police said they didn’t find sufficient evidence to support a criminal investigation.

Knowlton, who lives in Anaheim, has made an admitted obsession of proving her case. Two years ago she made the talk-show rounds, going on “Larry King,” “Hard Copy” and other programs, on which psychiatrists and experts on post-traumatic stress disorder said they found her story plausible.

She looks far more at ease and happier now than she did then, when her face bore the anxious, almost spiteful look common to the victims who haunt tabloid TV. Still, she walks with a cane because when she gets a memory flash, it temporarily disables her, she says.

As we spoke this past Thursday at Norm’s, our corner booth turned into a cluttered museum of items supporting her story. From her bags she pulled old newspaper clippings on unsolved murders, a photo of her father posed with a dead deer’s head resting on his thigh, a $125 medical text on the function of the brain, color slides, an autopsy report, and Post-it notes she affixed to the booth’s vinyl seat-back, with points she wanted to remember to make.

There was a time, she said, when the last person she would have been able to convince of her story was herself.

“When I began to have the flashbacks, I didn’t want to believe them. An old friend of mine saw the agony I was going through and asked, ‘Do you think your father ever could have molested you?’ I said, ‘Oh, no. He’d never do that!’

“I had what I thought was a pretty normal life, although I had an awful lot of tension and stress, but I didn’t know any other way but that. I was really good at repressing, because my father started (molesting) me when I was an infant. All I remembered before four years ago was that my father beat me up once and emotionally abused me, but I adored him. I loved him. After my mother divorced him, I went to live with him and my stepmother by my choice. So it was devastating for me to try to separate all this.

“Have you ever tried to tear off the adhesive-backing on something, and finally you go, ‘Where the hell is the separation here?’ and throw it out? It’s like that trying to sever yourself--I hate using words like sever --from the love you have for your parent,” she said.

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Knowlton had worked as a professional singer, including five years for Disneyland, and had run her own public relations firm. After she had a hysterectomy in 1986 she began having anxiety attacks. She believes the procedure upset her hormonal balance, creating an excess of adrenaline.

In studies of those with post-traumatic stress disorder, it has been found that replicating the adrenalized state a person was in when first traumatized can trigger emotional responses or memories of the event, Frey said.

After the deaths of her mother and stepmother three years later, Knowlton began experiencing memories that justified the terror she had been feeling. She recalled her father molesting her, recalled him with a dismembered infant, recalled him burying a woman in a basement and telling her he would throw her in the coal furnace and kill her mother if she ever told anyone. “I think my subconscious said it was safe to come out now and tell,” she said.

In therapy with Frey, a family, marriage and child counselor who specializes in adults who were abused as children, she began remembering Short and her murder. She claims she first saw Short and her father together in 1944, necking at a childhood home in Lynn, Mass. (Short came from a nearby town where her father worked.) Two years later, living in California, he’d take her with him when he’d go to see Short in Hollywood.

She says George would casually flaunt his infidelities to his battered wife and installed Short in a guest bedroom attached to the garage of their Westminster home when she was recovering from an abortion or miscarriage. Knowlton says she saw the fetus, saw her father kill Short in a psychotic rage and cut her body in two with a circular-blade Skil Saw.

Knowlton says he made her come along when he disposed of the body, an event that reels off like an incredibly dark version of “Weekend at Bernie’s.” He tried, she said, to dump the body in the ocean by the Seal Beach Pier, but it floated; he gutted it in a fish shack; then he drove it to an American Legion post in Culver City, where he washed the body; then drove to a cemetery, where they were interrupted by winos sleeping on the graves; and finally to the field where the corpse was discovered later that Jan. 15, 1947, morning. Knowlton was 10 at the time.

Like the cascading atrocities of a James Ellroy novel (who wrote a bestseller on the Dahlia), her story goes on to describe other monstrous events, including a pregnancy she had at 14, with George the probable father, when he murdered one of the babies with a hammer and put the other up for adoption. She says she had repressed any memory of the pregnancy.

“For people who have no experience in repression, they think that something like that you’d never forget,” Knowlton said, “but it’s the worst you forget, not the endurable.”

She lives now with that and the recollections of further murders and horrors. Though she can’t claim any memories to support her belief, she thinks the police knew her father was guilty and covered it up because, again without memory or proof, he may have been linked to a former policeman who ran the gambling in Seal Beach.

Her litany of mayhem and intrigues may strain credulity, as does the notion that--like the people whose “past lives” always seem to be that of a major historical figure--her most detailed memories aren’t of some little-known event, but, rather, of what may be the most notorious unsolved murder of this century.

Spend any time talking with Knowlton, though, and she convinces that, for her at least, her memories are true. As funny, positive and upbeat as she often is, her voice breaks in sobs like a child’s when relating particularly difficult parts of her story.

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Her story has also convinced others.

“With any patient that starts to describe what they perceive as a memory we’re always cautious as to what might be the child’s perception as opposed to the true reality,” therapist Frey said. He said therapists learn through a variety of physical cues and other means to determine when a memory is valid. He said Knowlton has also been rigorous in questioning her own accuracy.

“One good thing about Jan is she seems to have a high integrity issue. . . . For most of the things she has said, especially the significant issues, yes, I would say that they are very true,” Frey maintained.

Reached by phone in Indiana, author Newton said he became interested in her tale after seeing Knowlton on television. Since the Dahlia’s death, some 500 people have confessed to the crime or claimed to identify the murderer. Rather than write Knowlton off as No. 501, Newton became impressed with the amount of research she had done to substantiate her memories. He claims his own investigations have only further corroborated them, though he said the elapsed decades may make positive proof impossible.

He says her memories include details that run contrary to accepted, published accounts of Short’s murder but coincide with the actual unpublished autopsy report. Further, he says, her drawings of buildings where Short lived match up with old blueprints they’ve unearthed.

There is also circumstantial evidence, including that initially police were looking for a suspect named George and a tan car. George Knowlton drove a tan LaSalle.

“We uncovered an actor, now deceased, named Tex Driscoll, who was dating one of Short’s roommates in 1947, and he actually saw this guy who introduced himself as Georgie hanging around the place,” Newton said. “The physical description he gave to several of his neighbors before he passed on fits George Knowlton to a T, right down to the fact of the compulsive deer hunting, the work in a foundry, and having come from a New England town near where Short was born. To have another George who fit that description to me would be almost coincidental beyond the realm of plausibility.

“Everywhere her father appeared to be, there were very similar mutilation murders of women. . . . Based on what Jan has said and the independent research I’ve been able to do, I’m sure that Georgie was good for at least 11 or 12 murders.”

Though she wouldn’t identify them, Knowlton and Newton said she has some family members who strongly object to her recollections. There are others who, while not seconding her account, don’t dispute it, either. One sister, who preferred not to be identified, said: “He had a violent temper. We were all kind of afraid of him.” Asked if her father ever beat her, she said, “He beat all of us.”

Knowlton’s great-uncle Phil Knowlton, who admits he had only limited contact with George, said, “Knowing my nephew, I’d believe anything. He had a vicious temper. Some of (Knowlton’s story) sounds kind of weird, but he had that personality.”

Newton said: “Some of the family members describe him as a virtual angel, a godlike philanthropist who could do no wrong. Then you have someone who lived a house away from them and you hear about this whoremonger who was torturing dogs to death in the back yard.”

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Knowlton’s memories have strained family relationships. She has friendships that have fallen by the wayside, though others have strengthened. She’s had to question her own sanity at times, and the trauma she’s felt has left her bedridden for much of the past three years. She hopes that in writing the book she’ll be able to put it all behind her.

Not long ago, one exasperated friend confronted her.

“She said, ‘Can’t you just forget about this?’ Yeah, but I’ve got to remember it before I can forget about it. I never processed it the first time. I’ve been like a film editor with my life. We all do it to some extent, but I did it to the max, editing out things I couldn’t tolerate, to where my life, which should have been a full-length motion picture, turned out to be a short subject,” Knowlton said.