Adding to mystery of the Black Dahlia

FIFTY-NINE years ago, in a vacant lot near Crenshaw Boulevard and Santa Barbara Avenue (now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard), the body of Elizabeth Short was discovered by a housewife taking her 3-year-old out for a morning walk. Short’s murder has spawned endless speculation as to whom her killer or killers were, and the case remains one of the most enduring unsolved crimes in American history and the source for films, TV specials, novels and true crime books.

Donald H. Wolfe’s “The Black Dahlia Files” adds another layer to this mystery. Unfortunately his version, like the others before him, ends up asking more questions than it answers. This latest chapter of the Dahlia saga produces not one but five suspects, the primary figure being none other than mobster Bugsy Siegel. Along with gynecologist Dr. Leslie Audrain; Maurice Clement, a shady procurer of prostitutes; and two of Bugsy’s henchmen, Siegel supposedly murdered Beth Short and her fetus in a brothel bungalow behind the Ambassador Hotel. The motive? To silence any attempt by Short to reveal that none other than Los Angeles Times chief Norman Chandler had sired the child.

As preposterous as this sounds, Wolfe, building on previous information and new files resurrected from Los Angeles County District Atty. Steve Cooley’s directive to solve cold cases, sets out to piece together a believable account involving many of the main crime characters and power brokers of postwar Los Angeles. Armed with these newly unearthed files, he reveals some interesting facts.

Among the files is a list of 22 suspects compiled four years after the murder. It becomes the pretext for reexamining a cast of characters including assorted abortionists; Dr. George Hodel (named as the killer by his son Steve Hodel in his book “Black Dahlia Avenger”), Mark Hansen, owner of the Florentine Gardens nightclub and Clement, a dubious employee of the Columbia Studios talent department who is the connection to Siegel. Also woven into his tale is a company any screenwriter would kill for: Marilyn Monroe, Hollywood madam Brenda Allen, William Randolph Hearst and numerous police and sheriff’s personnel.

This much is known. Short was a dreamer from a broken Massachusetts family. She arrived an 18-year-old in California in 1942, staying with her estranged father in Vallejo. She ended up in Santa Barbara working at Camp Cooke (now Vandenberg Air Force base) in 1943 and was sent home by authorities after being arrested for being drunk and disorderly at a rowdy party.

Like the countless drifters who continue to clog the world on and off Hollywood Boulevard, Short returned to Southern California, where she flitted in and out of bars and hotels in the last few months of 1946.

She spent the last months of her life telling half-truths about her past, thus compounding the mystery of the days before her death. Short made a December 1946 trip to San Diego, where she met Red Manley, a married salesman on a business trip. She returned to Los Angeles with him. On Jan. 9, 1947, at approximately 6:30 p.m. Manley dropped her off at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. He and the doorman were the last known witnesses to see her before her body was found Jan. 15.

What captivated the public then as now was the brutality of the murder. The face of the corpse was battered and the mouth slit from ear to ear. Her bowels were eviscerated, breasts slashed and chunks of flesh carved out of her skin. Expertly bisected at midwaist, the two sections of the body had been drained of blood and scraped clean with a wire brush, suggesting that Short was murdered elsewhere. The press covered the case for weeks, but then leads began to dry up. Unreliable witnesses, cover-ups and lost evidence eventually led to dead-ends, and the case languishes to this day.

“The Black Dahlia Files” is a good read, but in the end Wolfe’s account is pure speculation. Relying on the premise that dead men don’t talk, there are too many sentences buttressed with “may have,” “rumor had it,” “I got the impression” and “there was talk” to pin the murder on Siegel and his cohorts.

It’s easy to construct a complex story about murder and mayhem in 1940s Los Angeles given the LAPD’s scandal-plagued history and a political structure that was rife with payoffs and corruption. But a case that has been cold for almost 60 years becomes subject to supposition. This is the underlying fault of all the Dahlia books that have claimed to reveal the murderer. Missing some key evidence -- the torn pages from Short’s address book, clothing or any blood samples -- Wolfe is bound by the same barriers that have prevented previous authors from definitively naming the murderer. Ultimately, until more conclusive evidence emerges -- a highly unlikely proposition -- the killing of Elizabeth Short will remain the murder that refuses to die.

Jim Heimann is the author of “Sins of the City: The Real Los Angeles Noir.”