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Episode: Episode 601: The Black Dahlia Murder Part II - The Gangster Squad

Author: The Last Podcast Network
Duration: 01:49:23

Episode Shownotes

The boys dive deeper into the case of the Black Dahlia Murder this week taking a close look at some of the key players and suspects involved in the investigation. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_05
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00:00:11 Speaker_03
There's no place to escape to. This is the last podcast on the left.

00:00:20 Speaker_08
That's when the cannibalism started.

00:00:30 Speaker_02
Oh, those murky, murky waters. Murky, murky Black Dahlia waters. I have been up to my nipples. That's deep.

00:00:39 Speaker_05
Yeah. Black Dahlia, man.

00:00:41 Speaker_04
That's like three feet deep.

00:00:46 Speaker_05
Eddie, I'll allow it because it's almost Christmas. It is funny because I've never, I never did the Black Dahlia deep dive. Yeah, I didn't either.

00:00:55 Speaker_05
It was like one of those true crime things that I kind of thought, I think that's because as we were getting deeper into true crime as a person, first of all, I was like more into serial killers, like then I found the Zodiac and I had seen pictures of the Black Dahlia corpse and it wasn't until now that like, it's kind of then the last podcast got going

00:01:13 Speaker_05
And I started thinking, like, you know, we'll get there. Yeah, eventually. You know, so I don't need to look into it now. And now I realize, like, why it's like this. It's very confusing. I am so deep in, I'm losing my fucking mind.

00:01:27 Speaker_05
I'm doing the thing where I'm seeing her face everywhere. I'm talking about hacking tits off everywhere all the time. It's getting a bit of a verbal tic of mine. And then, what I did last night. Verbal tit?

00:01:42 Speaker_05
Last night, what I did is that I wanted to really get in the head space. So? Just started waving knives around the kitchen. And I was just like trying to measure Natalie of where I'd cut her directly in half.

00:01:56 Speaker_05
But I went in and I looked up the top songs of 1947 just to kind of get in the mood and I listened to a bunch of old pop songs and I was just sitting there and Natalie came back. She had a dinner with a bunch of her girlfriends.

00:02:07 Speaker_05
She came in and she just saw like me, no shirt, in my underwear, watching, drinking a fucking three fingers of scotch, listening to, I wish you had those little belts that hold your socks up.

00:02:24 Speaker_01
I'm sitting there drinking about it being like, we'll never know who killed Elizabeth's short wife. We never will know because every mystery unlocks another mystery.

00:02:36 Speaker_05
And you're like, oh! And then it kind of feels nice to be here again.

00:02:39 Speaker_07
Yeah, it does. Welcome to the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with the in too deep Henry Zebrowski.

00:02:47 Speaker_05
Oh, just a little carriage ride with my sweetheart.

00:02:50 Speaker_07
Gonna cut her to size.

00:02:52 Speaker_05
Let's go smile, smile like my baby.

00:02:55 Speaker_07
And the newly traumatized Ed Larson, who just saw the Elizabeth Short crime scene photos for the first time just before walking in here.

00:03:02 Speaker_04
Yeah, you just sent them to me. I asked you to. Yes, you asked me.

00:03:06 Speaker_07
I never send them to people without permission or direct request.

00:03:10 Speaker_04
I was like, while we're doing the show, I might as well see it. And I did not finish my lunch. It was very upsetting. Hey, no, Eddie, you got through most of it. I definitely had a couple more bites.

00:03:23 Speaker_04
But I officially, I think I have a good theory before we get started on who it was. World's worst magician. He cut the box in half and then he's just like, oh no.

00:03:41 Speaker_05
I just, honestly, I had looked at all the manuals and I just thought if I believed

00:03:57 Speaker_07
Now in many ways, Los Angeles is the promise of the American West. It's a place of reinvention. The farthest you can run before you hit ocean. A place where there's ample opportunity to become somebody else entirely if that's what you so choose.

00:04:12 Speaker_07
But within that rebirth lies great vulnerability. And LA has always been host to parasites constantly on the search for a cocoon to suck dry and throw away without a second thought.

00:04:23 Speaker_04
Tell us how you really feel.

00:04:28 Speaker_07
It's pretty close, but that's kind of why I like it. One might even say that much of the entertainment industry has been built on this very principle since day one.

00:04:36 Speaker_05
I feel nothing. The key is to have a sub's inclination to be embarrassed and then the lack of shame to hold anything back. That's the key is that you got to be able to come to Los Angeles, eat shit, and like it.

00:04:50 Speaker_07
Yeah, but since Los Angeles is known to attract desperate people, Or at least people who are apt to become more desperate the longer they're here. It's also attracted criminals of every kind, from gangsters to rapists to murderers.

00:05:06 Speaker_07
And that was never more true of Los Angeles than it was during the time of the Black Dahlia murder.

00:05:15 Speaker_05
all the theories about the murder. Last week we talked a little bit about the Black Dolly Avenger. We brought them in. We know that at this point in the case, when everyone arrives and they are shocked by the body of Elizabeth Short,

00:05:32 Speaker_05
The conspiracy and the cover-up kicks in immediately. Now, what we want to do is, we don't know necessarily. Marcus is sure. Marcus likes his suspect.

00:05:43 Speaker_07
I like my suspect a lot. I really do.

00:05:45 Speaker_00
The magician.

00:05:49 Speaker_07
Bingo the okay.

00:05:52 Speaker_00
I wasn't supposed to do this. I was supposed to be a dentist.

00:05:57 Speaker_05
I cast a little doubt in my own mind, but really what we're trying to set up in this episode is the atmosphere that caused the Black Dahlia murder.

00:06:07 Speaker_05
Without the corruption of Los Angeles Police Department and show business and all of it put together, this doesn't happen.

00:06:16 Speaker_07
Yeah. Well, as one mob lawyer put it, in places like Chicago, the gangsters paid off the police, but the gangsters committed the crimes. In Los Angeles, the police were the gangsters.

00:06:26 Speaker_07
And since the police were so corrupt, Los Angeles was an attractive place for organized crime figures who were either on the run for the law or looking for new opportunities.

00:06:36 Speaker_07
This moral ambivalence trickled down into the very fabric of this city and gave all sorts of people tacit permission to be horrible.

00:06:43 Speaker_07
Because when you mix a virtually untouchable group of powerful individuals with a never-ending stream of desperate naive people, shit's gonna get real ugly and real weird real fast.

00:06:54 Speaker_05
But right before you get your face turned into a hideous clown, you know, macabre display and get sliced in half, it's a lot of fun.

00:07:06 Speaker_04
I think days before it was fun.

00:07:13 Speaker_07
It's a razor's edge. That's the thing about Los Angeles. It's a town where you can walk this razor's edge of danger and you never know when you're gonna fucking fall off.

00:07:22 Speaker_05
Because you could either end up Charlie Chaplin or you could end up Donny Chaplin.

00:07:29 Speaker_01
And you don't want to know what happened to Donny Chaplin.

00:07:32 Speaker_07
And so, on today's episode, we're going to be talking about the disreputable, disgusting men who thrived in the underbelly of Los Angeles during the time of the Black Dahlia murder.

00:07:42 Speaker_07
Along the way, we'll also explain how these men gained enough power to possibly cover up their involvement in one of the most high-profile murders in America's history.

00:07:52 Speaker_07
Now, while organized crime was certainly a problem, it operated hand in hand with the LAPD.

00:07:57 Speaker_07
And in the time period we're talking about here, the 1930s to the 1950s, it's been said that the LAPD had absolute disregard for both the Constitution and the law itself.

00:08:08 Speaker_05
What if instead we posit it like this is very harsh language, right? And we love the LAPD. We're not trying to remotely criticize the LAPD in any way, right, Eddie? No, no.

00:08:19 Speaker_04
This is a very long time ago.

00:08:21 Speaker_05
Yes, yes, but I think that more, a way to kind of put this more gently is that the LAPD came and were taught improv classes by mafia men.

00:08:31 Speaker_05
And then when that dude was in that play acting in that yes and like scenario, they then ended up committing quite a bit of crimes at the time. But it really was about staying in character. Yes. There wasn't many checks and balances out here. No.

00:08:46 Speaker_04
You're right. There absolutely weren't.

00:08:49 Speaker_07
There really weren't. Now that's not to say that law enforcement during this time period was a paragon of virtue across America, but the LAPD were especially renowned for their lawlessness and brutality.

00:09:00 Speaker_07
They struck deals with anyone who could line their pockets, from lawyers to snitches to bail bondsmen, and they created a grift in which the criminals, the cops, and the lawyers were all on the same side trying to squeeze as much money as they could out of the city of Los Angeles.

00:09:15 Speaker_04
And how long do you think this lasted, like 15 years? No. To about 2024. I mean, there's always going to be police corruption, but obviously- At its worst, it was a decades-long thing that lasted from the 20s up until around the 50s.

00:09:32 Speaker_07
Okay. Where there was no law. Yeah, none.

00:09:37 Speaker_04
Lots of good movies and lots of bad movies made about it.

00:09:39 Speaker_07
Yes. Well, all this only got worse in 1933 when a man with an actual Hitler mustache named Frank Shaw was elected mayor.

00:09:48 Speaker_03
It was still in.

00:09:48 Speaker_05
It was still in. Is it a Hitler mustache in 1933? Because I don't think it is. I think you'd call it a Lincoln mustache. No, you'd call it a chaplain. Lincoln didn't have that mustache. The hat. What? The mustache looks like a hat for the lips.

00:10:05 Speaker_07
No, because there's no brim. The lip! It's a chaplain mustache at this point. But in 1933, though, Hitler was a world-renowned figure, so you do know that you have the same mustache as a... It's kind of like now having the same haircut as Elon Musk.

00:10:21 Speaker_07
Okay.

00:10:21 Speaker_05
I mean, that's easy to do. You just go to Turkey and you spend $8,000 to get it.

00:10:27 Speaker_07
Well, Frank Shaw was essentially bought and paid for by organized crime, and his first action in office was to appoint his brother, Sailor Joe Shaw, as a secretary whose sole purpose was to organize and collect bribes.

00:10:41 Speaker_07
By making an under-the-table payment to Sailor Joe, a police officer, or even a firefighter, could easily... Give me that, you wanna pee up there?

00:10:51 Speaker_00
Let me tell you something funny there, Jack.

00:10:55 Speaker_07
I can't swim. Through him, a police officer or even a firefighter could easily buy a promotion, and Joe was even known to sell the answers to local civil service exams to anyone who wanted them.

00:11:07 Speaker_07
As one person put it, everything in City Hall from the furniture to the toilet paper was up for sale just so long as you paid cash.

00:11:14 Speaker_04
What kind of asshole's buying the toilet paper?

00:11:16 Speaker_05
Hey, how much funnier would it be? Like, let's say, yeah, I mean, this is all bad, though, but at the same time, it'd kind of be fun to go in as a businessman. You were mad at the cops, buy all the toilet paper. Now they all gotta shit dry.

00:11:30 Speaker_04
Man, imagine 1940s toilet paper.

00:11:33 Speaker_05
I'm pretty certain it was made out of hemp.

00:11:37 Speaker_07
What Shaw was in office, he was able to flip the tables on organized crime by forcing them to pay him protection.

00:11:45 Speaker_07
And as long as you stayed up-to-date on your payments, you never had to worry about a raid on your brothels or your casinos by the biggest gang in town. That was the LAPD.

00:11:53 Speaker_05
Yeah, see? Yeah! Come for you, come for you die, see? Listen, nothing Hitler about my mustache. Alright? This is America mustache. This is Frank's mustache. That's what it needs to be called.

00:12:06 Speaker_05
You know that Hitler apparently shaved the mustache down in order to fit into a gas mask. Really? That's what they said according to him. That's what Hitler said. And if you want to trust him, which I do, why not just shave the whole mustache?

00:12:18 Speaker_05
Because he needed a little bit of something.

00:12:21 Speaker_07
Yeah, a little something to make him Hitler. Shaw's entire operation, however, came crashing down when he got involved with the attempted murder of a private investigator in 1938.

00:12:35 Speaker_07
The investigator was working with a concerned private citizen to expose the LAPD as essentially a legalized mafia.

00:12:43 Speaker_06
I just happen to know this. I do know. I feel that the, excuse me, police, you're being naughty, and I feel that you all should be ashamed. For your B.A.!

00:13:03 Speaker_07
Well, this private investigator got car bombed for his trouble. The entire operation had been orchestrated by the head of the LAPD intelligence squad.

00:13:12 Speaker_07
And interestingly, that officer was convicted for his crime partly due to testimony from Jack Parsons. That's, wow, holy fucking shit, another connection. Yeah, that's actually, this case is actually how Jack Parsons made his name.

00:13:25 Speaker_07
That's how Jack Parsons got famous was by being an expert witness in this case.

00:13:29 Speaker_05
That's fascinating. I didn't even realize that that's where he shows up in the, wow.

00:13:33 Speaker_07
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because when I was reading about it, I was like, I know this case from somewhere. Yeah, it was Jack Parsons. And after the intelligence officer was convicted, Mayor Frank Shaw resigned along with the LAPD chief, James Tougan Davis.

00:13:46 Speaker_07
and dozens of LAPD officers quote-unquote retired to Mexico soon after to escape further scrutiny.

00:14:03 Speaker_07
Soon after, another 200 cops were demoted or fired, and the administration that followed Mayor Shaw's corrupt regime appointed an elite group of cops dedicated to removing mobsters and the corrupt officials from within.

00:14:17 Speaker_07
That group was called the Gangster Squad.

00:14:22 Speaker_05
And the gangster squad is interesting because a lot of them are pretty fat. Which actually, I like a fat cop. I think a fat cop is great because it means they think a lot. Yeah, and you can get away from them.

00:14:34 Speaker_04
Oh yeah, but these guys weren't the runners. They weren't first responders, they were like third and fourth responders.

00:14:41 Speaker_07
Call me when you get them respond.

00:14:42 Speaker_05
Yeah, we respond from the office These guys were very It's gonna get deep into the murky worlds cuz these were now supposed to be the new good guy. Yeah, right These are the new good guys.

00:14:55 Speaker_07
These are hand-picked recruits. These are like this is like Gotham City This is this is Commissioner Gordon combing the ranks of the fucking Police Department to find the few guys who aren't good paying to Oswald Cobblepot who's not on the take?

00:15:08 Speaker_02
Yeah, but then it turns out a lot of those guys What is the term, Sid, that you have to be careful when fighting monsters to not become one yourself?

00:15:16 Speaker_05
Of course! And so the Gangster Squad would then go to bend quite a bit of the rules to do this very honest work.

00:15:22 Speaker_04
They had that horrible movie that came out like 10 years ago called Gangster Squad. Oh, was it like Jeremy Renner in it? He plays like the fluid in it or something? Yeah, and I think Sean Penn plays Mickey Cohen or something like that.

00:15:34 Speaker_04
But then they had to halt the release of it because they had this scene where, it was in the preview, where they came out and they just shot everyone in a movie theater and then the Batman thing happened.

00:15:44 Speaker_04
And so they were like, okay, I guess this movie's coming out in winter instead of summer, and they had to go reshoot a bunch of shit.

00:15:52 Speaker_05
Jesus. And it's just them handing out gum to a bunch of people in the theater being like, don't say we didn't give you anything, you see? Here you go, enjoy some sugar-free gum, it won't hurt your teeth, see?

00:16:01 Speaker_07
No, Mickey Cohen hated the Gangster Squad. He called them, more like the Stupidity Squad. The mobsters aren't super clever when it comes to names.

00:16:10 Speaker_04
Especially not them.

00:16:10 Speaker_07
Yeah. Working deep undercover, the seven-man Gangster Squad operated solely out of two unmarked sedans.

00:16:17 Speaker_07
They had no offices, and they began making a name for themselves as crack investigators who were just as unconcerned with the Constitution as the men they were hunting.

00:16:27 Speaker_07
As such, the gangster squad was sometimes given special assignments outside of their purview, which is how they came to be involved in the investigation into the Black Dahlia murder.

00:16:36 Speaker_05
It's kind of like using a dental dam, right? You know, you want to get at that pussy, man. You brought it back up into my mind. That's all the Constitution is, right? Because the pussy is crime, right?

00:16:50 Speaker_04
Yeah, and America is the pussy.

00:16:52 Speaker_05
Yeah, America is the pussy and the crime is the clit. Tongue in the mouth of the police. A dental dam is the Constitution. Get it? Between them and the crime. We have to remove the Constitution. Never forget.

00:17:04 Speaker_05
Right up inside of the pussy hole of America and at the clit of criminality. Perfect. Perfect analogy.

00:17:12 Speaker_07
Thank you. Now the seven men of the gangster squad could only do so much to root out police corruption.

00:17:17 Speaker_05
Because they kept arresting themselves.

00:17:20 Speaker_07
So in 1947, when the Black Dahlia murder occurred, there were still plenty of LAPD officers on the take at every level.

00:17:28 Speaker_07
Unfortunately for Elizabeth Short, it just so happened that the two homicide detectives in charge of her case, Phineas Brown and Harry the Hat Hanson, were just about as corrupt as they come.

00:17:42 Speaker_07
Around the offices of Los Angeles Held Express, Finnis and Hansen were called the Ego Stoops, which was a portmanteau, meaning they were a combination of egotistical, arrogant, and stupid.

00:17:53 Speaker_05
Hey! I'm not arrogant!

00:17:56 Speaker_07
Lieutenant Harry Hansen was described by author Pew Eatwell as a tall, balding redhead with a basset-hound face, Mickey Mouse ears, and sleepy eyes.

00:18:06 Speaker_02
Sorry about that, y'all.

00:18:07 Speaker_07
I don't mean to make anybody upset. Along with his pinstripe suit and loud ties, Hansen also never took off his fedora for anything, which is why they called him The Hat.

00:18:17 Speaker_05
You don't want me to take my hat off, because then, unfortunately, you would see my brain. I lost the top of my eyebrows in World War I. So the hat is, unfortunately, my head.

00:18:33 Speaker_07
Yeah, medicinal hat.

00:18:34 Speaker_04
It's my medicinal hat.

00:18:35 Speaker_05
It keeps my brain away from the wind.

00:18:37 Speaker_04
It's like when some people get half a face, you know, given after they get blown off in the war, he got a hat. I got a scalp that I have to screw up.

00:18:45 Speaker_07
A nearly 20-year veteran of the LAPD by the time of the Black Dahlia murder, Hansen was known as a brute who beat suspects mercilessly and would pressure newspaper photographers to edit photos of suspects' faces to remove the blood produced by his enhanced interrogation techniques.

00:19:02 Speaker_07
Hansen was particularly proud of what he called his third street bridge confessions, where he'd dangle suspects over the third street bridge if they didn't cooperate.

00:19:11 Speaker_07
Hansen was also known to call a suspect's bluff, often dropping them to the concrete below if they didn't tell him what he wanted to hear.

00:19:18 Speaker_05
I'm sorry, I got slipped.

00:19:19 Speaker_04
I had dish soap on my hands from earlier today. So he's like a serial killer.

00:19:28 Speaker_07
We don't know how many people Harry the Hat killed, or if he killed anybody in particular.

00:19:32 Speaker_04
He just said he dropped people off the fucking bridge all the time.

00:19:34 Speaker_05
It wasn't that tall of a bridge. Oh, so they lived? Yeah. Oh, okay. Cops also, we know, they don't ever tell fishermen's tales of the things that they've done in the past and have exaggerated how powerful and masculine they are.

00:19:52 Speaker_07
They never do that. Harry Hansen's partner, though, Phineas Brown, was Hansen's polar opposite in both looks and demeanor.

00:19:59 Speaker_07
While Hansen was a smooth talker, Phineas Brown was clumsy and strange, a squat and swarthy cop with heavy jowls and rumpled suits.

00:20:09 Speaker_05
That picture of the two of them looking at the bodies like so, they're just like, why are you crouching like that? You obviously can't crouch. On a hill, it's a sloped hill, you're gonna fall over. Yeah, they both look like rumpty dumpties.

00:20:23 Speaker_07
While Harry Hansen got the relatively flattering nickname of The Hat, Finnis Brown, the other guy in charge of investigating Elizabeth Short's murder, was called F.A. or Fat Ass.

00:20:34 Speaker_05
I don't think he approved of the nickname and I don't know if people said it out loud. It might have been more accepting to be called Fat Pack then. Oh sure, it was. I think it was almost a compliment.

00:20:45 Speaker_05
It was a compliment because it meant you were rich, charismatic, you were healthy, you were safe. Charismatic.

00:20:57 Speaker_07
In addition to being corrupt, Finnis Brown also moonlit as a bookie and a bagman for the mob, collecting money from shakedowns and protection rackets throughout Los Angeles. Finnis' brother Thaddeus, however, was known as a cop's cop.

00:21:11 Speaker_07
Thaddeus was a beloved figure in the department, who didn't have much regard for the Constitution either due to his obsessive hatred of communists and his obsessive love for cops.

00:21:20 Speaker_05
It's just a very, it's like a combo of like Thaddeus is the good son, right? Thaddeus is the son that got the quote-unquote goods.

00:21:27 Speaker_07
I mean, he's like, he's like lawful evil.

00:21:30 Speaker_05
That's how I view him. I view him as the, he's the face, he's the front-facing one.

00:21:34 Speaker_04
He's the one that is a quieter, murdering cowboy.

00:21:36 Speaker_05
Yes, he is the political sweetheart of the LAPD. That's why they like him.

00:21:42 Speaker_05
It's because politically he looks good, he is much more handsome than his brother, and because of his rapport with all the police and the fact that he's here to firmly establish what he believes is a lawful boys club.

00:21:56 Speaker_05
And I think that Thaddeus Brown had a problem with Finnis Brown because Finnis Brown is, to be honest, He's a fucking mystery. This man is an unfathomable mystery. And his name is Finnis Brown.

00:22:09 Speaker_05
It's very interesting, but we don't know really what this man's agenda was and what he had to gain from jamming up the process of the Black Dahlia murder. We also know that he might have been on the take. He also might have been deeply undercover.

00:22:27 Speaker_05
He was definitely on the take. But they're also saying that he was undercover, telling people who he was taking the take from. And that this is this is this game. This is what happened in JFK. This is why JFK is like the way it is. This is why.

00:22:38 Speaker_05
Because once assets become an asset, once a cop becomes an informant for themselves and like once they are Corrupt and then double teaming and everybody's on two separate teams.

00:22:51 Speaker_05
They're on their own team and somebody else's team It doesn't begin to muddy the waters very significantly get paid twice.

00:22:57 Speaker_07
Yeah And that's what makes black Dahlia so interesting and so Confusing is because every person in this story is running a game within a game within a game because it is so corrupt And there is so much crime going on here from the top to the bottom

00:23:13 Speaker_07
There are a million games being played at all times, and nobody trusts each other.

00:23:18 Speaker_05
Next episode, we are gonna go into this idea of like, I think truly what's going on here is like, there's like seven mafias of different industries all fighting at once.

00:23:28 Speaker_04
Well, because if you weren't committing crimes, you weren't able to get anything done. Exactly! It's like Lance Armstrong. He wasn't cheating, he was competing. Now, who did their mother love more, though? That's what I want to know. Thaddeus!

00:23:39 Speaker_01
Finnis!

00:23:40 Speaker_07
No, the mother always loves the fuck up more. Always!

00:23:43 Speaker_05
I guess they're forced to, they're forced to.

00:23:45 Speaker_07
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thaddeus Brown, he was such a looming figure in Los Angeles that on the radio version of Dragnet, Joe Friday referenced Tad Brown as his boss.

00:23:55 Speaker_07
And Orson Welles based the character of Hank Quinlan in the film noir classic Touch of Evil off Tad Brown as well.

00:24:01 Speaker_05
which is not a compliment.

00:24:02 Speaker_07
No, it's not.

00:24:04 Speaker_07
And so with Finnis Brown working directly with organized crime and Tad Brown working solely for the interests of the cops, they made an extremely powerful pair that were difficult to stand against if you thought they might not be doing their job correctly.

00:24:17 Speaker_05
And it's probably not a coincidence that they were tossed on one of the most high-profile cases to ever hit the city.

00:24:24 Speaker_07
Or at least Finnis was tossed on it. Thaddeus was doing his own thing.

00:24:28 Speaker_05
That's what I mean. Because of his connection to Thaddeus, he was tossed on the case. But why? And who's involved? Were they the first people to show up?

00:24:38 Speaker_07
They were the cops that show up.

00:24:39 Speaker_04
They were told to go take care of this body we put there. Don't know.

00:24:43 Speaker_07
We don't know. It might have just been their turn in the rotation and it just so happened. That's the thing. The room for coincidence in this case is astronomical. There really is so much room for coincidence.

00:24:55 Speaker_05
Because the world was kind of small.

00:24:57 Speaker_07
Yeah, it was much smaller. LA at this point was half the size that it is now. It's half the population that it is now.

00:25:03 Speaker_04
Yeah, and it's just a bunch of vacant lots.

00:25:06 Speaker_07
At least in places like Leimert Park. Now to the press, it seemed like the cops really weren't trying all that hard when it came to investigating the Black Dahlia murder.

00:25:17 Speaker_07
Because as we established last episode, all the most important aspects of the case have been uncovered by journalists like Jimmy Richardson and Aggie Underwood.

00:25:26 Speaker_07
Jimmy's people had discovered all the weird shit that had gone down in San Diego just before Elizabeth's death, for example. and Aggie Underwood who put together a clear timeline of Elizabeth's last days during her interview with Red Manley.

00:25:38 Speaker_07
The cops hadn't done any of this shit. Therefore, rumors that the Black Dahlia investigation was being shut down and covered up were being spread as early as late January 1947, about a week or two after the murder.

00:25:49 Speaker_05
Well, it sounds like also partially was the issue of all the confessing Sam's is that they got this influx we talked about last week of all of these people wanting to jump in and insert themselves into this case.

00:26:01 Speaker_05
Because again, I think that where Los Angeles comes into play is that you have the Because everybody's an actor in the population, there's a lot of people looking to be like, I can put my mark on this case.

00:26:15 Speaker_05
Oh, I can get my picture on the paper, which I do think is true. I think there's a little bit of the beginnings of this idea of like any publicity is good publicity. No, everyone thinks they're living in Chicago.

00:26:26 Speaker_07
The play, you know, the musical.

00:26:27 Speaker_05
Yes, and so now they're calling in, and so everything got gummed up. They have no specific forensics, because at the time it was a backward science. The body was completely washed clean.

00:26:39 Speaker_05
They can't figure out what to do, and so now it's ... I think that's where we're at.

00:26:43 Speaker_04
Also, when a murder is this elaborate, it's probably easier to solve, and so I imagine that when you go two weeks without no fucking clues or no answers, people are definitely going to ask you questions.

00:26:53 Speaker_05
You'd think it'd be easier to solve, but what we've talked about on the show time and time again, if it's not somebody that knows the persons directly, it's extremely difficult to figure out.

00:27:03 Speaker_04
Which is most murder, right?

00:27:04 Speaker_05
Most murder is done by somebody that you know.

00:27:06 Speaker_07
Yeah.

00:27:06 Speaker_05
Most of the, like 95% of the time.

00:27:08 Speaker_07
In one way or another, like you're associated with them, or a lot of times it is someone you know personally that kills you.

00:27:14 Speaker_05
That's why it's always the husband. It's always the wife. That's what they look for. But when it's a problem, which is in this case probably true, close to a complete stranger, it's hard to figure it out.

00:27:26 Speaker_07
Well, Jimmy Richardson in particular began to believe that the investigation was being purposefully stalled. And it was his theory that the LAPD wanted it gone because of its possible connections to organized crime.

00:27:38 Speaker_07
and the Los Angeles political elite.

00:27:40 Speaker_07
Furthermore, the LAPD were trying their best to distance themselves from even putting work into the investigation, going so far as to say that the murder had probably taken place outside the LA city limits and was therefore none of their business.

00:27:54 Speaker_07
The chief homicide detective in the city, Captain Jack Donahoe, was likewise drawing criticism because of his ridiculous public statements, like his assertion that Elizabeth Short was cut in half solely so the body could be carried more easily, despite the fact that Elizabeth Short only weighed 123 pounds.

00:28:10 Speaker_05
But I do think that there's a theory that holds of that she was cut for transport because of where she was dumped, specifically because she was in a high-populous area. There were people lived around.

00:28:20 Speaker_05
Yes, there were vacant lots, but she was discovered by people just walking through. People walk through Limerick Park all the time.

00:28:26 Speaker_05
So I do think that there might actually be reason that she was cut in half, and that's why my main theory is that it was done by several people. But we'll get there. We'll get there. But they could have just put straps on her and carried her.

00:28:38 Speaker_05
That's why I do a Rambo.

00:28:40 Speaker_03
I put these straps on.

00:28:41 Speaker_04
But how does Julie get you into the bath? Oh my god, that's a pulley system.

00:28:49 Speaker_07
But the problem with that though is the clean surgical nature of the cut, is that if they're just cutting her in half solely to transport her body, why did they take so much care in cutting the body? Because of the guy they brought her to.

00:29:02 Speaker_07
But that doesn't make sense because why are they bringing her to a guy to cut her in half so they can transport her somewhere else? They're transporting her to transport her?

00:29:11 Speaker_05
Guy went to her. It was, yeah, like a doctor.

00:29:14 Speaker_05
I think that one connection could be to the legal abortion circuit, and that they have a guy, if this is a mafia hit, which I do think that is correct, I think that it is involving the mafia on some level, is that they bring in an abortion doctor to, essentially who's also in the cut, to being like, how the fuck do we, the psychopath did this to her, we need to get rid of this right now, we need to do it right now, and his first thing is like, oh, we put her in two burlap sacks, and we go drop her off somewhere.

00:29:42 Speaker_05
Sure. But let's not get too hard.

00:29:44 Speaker_01
No, I'm just saying, now I'm here.

00:29:45 Speaker_04
This is just one of the days of this. So you think it's an evil doctor? No, I think he's more- Dr. Giggles. It wouldn't be so straight if it was Dr. Giggles. Dr. Sirius.

00:29:54 Speaker_03
Yeah, Dr. Rulers.

00:29:58 Speaker_04
Was the spine cut cleanly? Yes, it was.

00:30:02 Speaker_07
Like the spine was cut very cleanly and very deliberately. Specifically cut very nicely. But yeah, and that's the thing is that we're gonna really try really hard in this episode. There's so many different lines. Yes, I'm doing my best.

00:30:13 Speaker_07
We really have to stay like fucking laser focused. All right. And the investigative lines that Donoho pushed were even more ludicrous. The Hawaiian guy, Donoho?

00:30:22 Speaker_01
No! Are you not listening?! Jack! Donna Ho! Not Don Ho!

00:30:29 Speaker_07
Was Donna Ho, he had become a big proponent of the homicidal lesbian angle. This was a line of investigation that was sure to go nowhere except to the harassment of LA's LGBT community, which was at the time a target of the LAPD anyway.

00:30:44 Speaker_07
Now, you may ask why the head of homicide would be so invested in derailing the murder investigation of one young woman, especially when leaving the case unsolved made his department look that much more incompetent.

00:30:57 Speaker_07
Because people were getting killed every fucking day in Los Angeles. It was a bloodbath out here. Fucking innocent citizens were getting caught in the crossfire of all these fucking gang wars. Women were getting killed.

00:31:08 Speaker_07
Hell, we talked about two murders last week that occurred just after Elizabeth Short that also went unsolved.

00:31:13 Speaker_05
Oh yeah, because we all say, what, the werewolf murders, which we haven't even really factored into any of this. That's a whole book about the Black Dolly that we not even get to about the werewolf murders.

00:31:25 Speaker_05
And then how it's connected back to the three- Frankenstein murders? Eddie, they were the Dr. Frankenstein murders.

00:31:36 Speaker_07
The answer is that Captain Jack Donahoe was one of the men who arranged bribes for the organized crime syndicate that had Los Angeles in a stranglehold in the late 1940s.

00:31:47 Speaker_07
And the more that investigators looked into Elizabeth Short's death, the more it led them to organized crime figures.

00:31:54 Speaker_07
Now, organized crime was such a fact of life in Los Angeles during the time of the Black Dahlia murder that mobsters were hired as consultants on noir movies for accuracy. And in some cases, they even got producer credits.

00:32:07 Speaker_04
That's kind of amazing. I mean, it still happens, especially with military movies.

00:32:10 Speaker_05
Yeah, I mean, we had a deal on Wolf of Wall Street where they had to keep Jordan Belfort off set because he kept trying to show up.

00:32:16 Speaker_07
Yeah. Mobster Johnny Rosselli, for example, produced a prison break movie called Cannon City.

00:32:23 Speaker_07
And this was in addition to Johnny being responsible for getting Marilyn Monroe some of her first roles, as well as Johnny being involved in CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro.

00:32:33 Speaker_07
And he was also quite possibly the man in the sewer at Dilly Plaza when JFK was killed. Hey, that's just where I was.

00:32:45 Speaker_05
It's the only Catholic president I would never kill a Catholic president. I'd never do that. Okay.

00:32:49 Speaker_07
I was down there because I like slime Well, that is true Johnny Raselli he was responsible for getting Marilyn Monroe some of her first roles He was in the business and he was heavily involved in a CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro.

00:33:03 Speaker_07
In other words, people like Gianni Rosselli, the ones involved in both organized crime and the movies, they had connections to the government on both a local and national level.

00:33:14 Speaker_07
And they had the power to pull strings if they wanted something covered up.

00:33:17 Speaker_05
Remember, I just always want to say this these what we consider to be big cover-ups My belief will always be that they're small and that the we're looking at as human It's like this makes me wonder whether or not Meryl Monroe was actually killed just because of the fact that she was connected to like it's human It's a lady.

00:33:38 Speaker_05
That is a famous kind of like a mess at this point. Like she seems to be kind of like an out-of-pocket person that you'd want to get whacked just like Elizabeth Short. And then she's been shipping to President and his brother.

00:33:52 Speaker_05
And she maybe probably been around a bunch of different shit and probably was popping off saying all the stuff that she was going to say about the time when she was fucking the President and fucking his brother at the same time.

00:34:00 Speaker_04
Yeah, but she's out of pocket because they were filling her full of drugs.

00:34:03 Speaker_05
It's not her fault. You're right. But still, you get whacked for it.

00:34:07 Speaker_07
Yeah, it really is. And the things about these conspiracies is that I think it really does start with one guy telling another guy, take care of it. And then another guy tells another guy, why don't you take care of it.

00:34:18 Speaker_03
And then the first guy's like, I didn't say kill her! That's the problem! You didn't want it, then you were going to get her a fucking bus ticket!

00:34:27 Speaker_07
Now, bombings, shootings, and murder of all stripes were committed by the mob with near impunity during this time period, giving Los Angeles the reputation as the gang capital of the nation, in addition to being the center of the world's entertainment industry.

00:34:41 Speaker_07
Such was the prominence of mob violence in Los Angeles that coverage of the Black Dahlia murder shared headlines with a gang war that ultimately culminated in the assassination of infamous gangster Bugsy Siegel just five months after Elizabeth Short's body was found.

00:34:56 Speaker_07
Have you ever heard about how Bugsy Siegel was fucking assassinated?

00:34:59 Speaker_05
We have to do all, we gotta do the series, buddy.

00:35:01 Speaker_07
God, he was sitting in his house and some guy from outside shot him in the head with such accuracy that the bullet ricocheted off his nose and blew Bugsy Siegel's eye across the room.

00:35:11 Speaker_05
Whoa. This is like, you say you don't like mafia stuff, but then some of these things are really fun. I like the mafia murders, I just don't like the, hey, we gotta go check out the numbers. Yeah, it's all, go check out the numbers game.

00:35:23 Speaker_06
He's got a guy, he's gonna do things.

00:35:24 Speaker_05
Well, they invented the numbers, it's the latter. There's too many names! I know, but Bugsy Siegel's fascinating.

00:35:31 Speaker_04
You just like him because he invented Vegas.

00:35:34 Speaker_05
These are our real forefathers.

00:35:37 Speaker_07
Out West, yeah. Well, Los Angeles was one of America's newest cities, and a lot of mafiosi came to California to escape either the law or previous associations with crime families mainly on the East Coast.

00:35:51 Speaker_07
Now the other big crime cities, New York and Chicago, thought of the LA mob as a bunch of country bumpkins. And that's if they thought of them at all.

00:35:58 Speaker_05
And you're not wrong. Basically a lot of these guys came out to LA really because they couldn't hack it, New York and Chicago.

00:36:06 Speaker_07
Or because they'd gotten into trouble. A lot of them came out because they were too hot-headed to be out there. And they'd beaten the shit out of the wrong guy and it's like, okay, you gotta go to fucking California now.

00:36:16 Speaker_05
And it's an open territory. Yes. And then you come out here too. It's like, and they were also, they would also send people out. They'd be like, all right. Oh, you know, like old sloppy Fred. No, Mickey Cohen.

00:36:28 Speaker_07
Mickey Cohen was a guy they sent. I was like, okay, now you got to deal with Mickey Cohen. And then he ended up becoming one of the biggest gangsters in the city's history.

00:36:35 Speaker_02
And that shows that anything's possible in this town.

00:36:38 Speaker_07
Yeah. But what Los Angeles had that no one else did was Hollywood, with all the new opportunities that the movie business brought.

00:36:47 Speaker_07
See, the motion picture industry was essentially contained within a 20-square-mile grid with supply chains that could be manipulated and squeezed at any point, and its workforce was almost fully controlled by unions. Yeah!

00:37:00 Speaker_07
At one point, gangster Bugsy Siegel had complete control of the Screen Extras Union, of all things.

00:37:06 Speaker_05
Well I think Screen Actors Union is a really good way to hire people very quickly and then you get people that are in dire straits under your control.

00:37:14 Speaker_04
Also it's a good way to go make sure that people are on set taking a look at the director and having informants getting back to you and what's going on on set. And it's also a good way to get hot new desperate ladies.

00:37:26 Speaker_04
Also, you think about this, because when you say- It's actually served a lot of great- It really is a very good product. L.A. had Hollywood, New York had Broadway, and that's why L.A.

00:37:33 Speaker_04
and New York are better than Chicago, because Chicago just got the Cubs. It just got Cubs and heart disease.

00:37:42 Speaker_07
You also out here had a lot of rich and famous people with, shall we say, predilections. And we talked about predilections.

00:37:49 Speaker_07
And those predilections could be exploited and used for extortion should a movie star or producer or director need some help getting rid of a dirty little secret.

00:37:59 Speaker_05
And movie stars and directors haven't changed all that much. No.

00:38:03 Speaker_04
And I've had them all over the world!

00:38:08 Speaker_07
And when it comes to dirty little secrets, Elizabeth Short may have gotten herself involved with a shady, publicity-phobic Hollywood businessman heavily involved with both organized crime and the LAPD, a man named Mark Hanson.

00:38:24 Speaker_07
And she just may have gotten killed as a result.

00:38:26 Speaker_04
The man from Batavia. Hanson's great-grandfather. Oh, wow!

00:38:34 Speaker_05
I love those little girls. God damn, I just want to break off a piece of some of them handsome women.

00:38:42 Speaker_07
Everyone was always talking about the Olsen twins when we were growing up. I was thinking about the Hanson sisters.

00:38:47 Speaker_00
Oh, you tell me, friend.

00:38:49 Speaker_07
Now, if you'll remember, when the LAPD received the package from the man who had claimed to have murdered Elizabeth Short, included with that package was an address book with the name Mark Hanson printed on the front.

00:39:01 Speaker_07
I believe whoever sent the package is the only person who knows who killed Elizabeth Short. Hansen claimed that he barely knew Elizabeth and that she'd stolen this book from him to use herself.

00:39:12 Speaker_05
She was always trying. She was jealous of my contacts.

00:39:14 Speaker_07
And that was the extent of their relationship. It is, however, almost positive that Elizabeth Short and Mark Hansen were involved in an affair shortly before the Black Dahlia murder.

00:39:25 Speaker_05
Or did he want to be in an affair with Elizabeth Short?

00:39:27 Speaker_07
Yes. When I say affair, I use that term loosely. Like, there was definitely some sort of relationship between the two of them, although it's very murky as to what that relationship really was.

00:39:38 Speaker_04
I'm sure it was completely innocent.

00:39:42 Speaker_07
Mark Hanson, his story is quite interesting. Yeah, Mark Hanson was involved in motion pictures, but his business was on the distribution side.

00:39:50 Speaker_07
He owned movie theaters, and he'd gotten his start in Minneapolis, where he opened a chain of theaters that were successful enough to necessitate a move to Hollywood.

00:39:59 Speaker_07
Once in Los Angeles, Hanson opened a nightclub called the Florentine Gardens, where you could find an aging Errol Flynn or a young Marilyn Monroe hanging out if you went on the right night.

00:40:11 Speaker_07
But the big secret at Florentine Gardens was that it was also a mob casino. And a big part of the reason why Hansen and his mob associates were able to operate Florentine Gardens so successfully was because they worked hand-in-hand with the LAPD.

00:40:25 Speaker_05
Mark Hansen, his whole storyline is that he was an immigrant. He was Danish. Yeah, he came in. He was desperate to get in the movies. The way he got in the movies was by distribution, which happens a lot.

00:40:39 Speaker_05
He got in and what he found, according to people who knew Merkansan, he was a family man. He had wife and kids. And when he started, he considered himself a very honest businessman. Like he was trying to set up a way for him in LAPD, in L.A.

00:40:57 Speaker_05
that would be successful for forever. And what then happened is that he ran into what happens to anybody that tried to run into any one of these businesses in Los Angeles at the time.

00:41:06 Speaker_05
You had to speak with various mafia members that would also be members of the police force and all this kind of stuff. And it just seems kind of perfunctory and it seemed to be a part of business.

00:41:17 Speaker_05
A lot of people mark the Florentine Gardens gambling group as to actually be kind of small and kind of low level. And it was considered just to be sort of like casual in terms of what they were doing there.

00:41:29 Speaker_05
He was really trying to get into show business. That's what he wanted. And make money in show business. And then what happened is that he got addicted. to ladies.

00:41:38 Speaker_07
Yep. And there was also actual mobsters involved. Oh, yeah. Jimmy the little giant Utley was his mob contact. But the little giant.

00:41:47 Speaker_07
But remember, you know, these guys like no matter how much like there are these huge syndicates that are operating out of Los Angeles that involve Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen. But then there are also these small ones that work

00:42:02 Speaker_07
Directly with the police because Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel fucking hated the cops. They hated anyone.

00:42:07 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:42:07 Speaker_07
Yeah, they were New York guys But these guys guys like Mark Hanson and the mob associates he had they worked directly with the police Because if you'll remember I mentioned earlier that one of the homicide detectives in charge of the Black Dahlia murder Phineas Brown was a bag man for an organized crime figure

00:42:24 Speaker_07
with the organized crime figure Finnis Brown worked for was Mark Hansen.

00:42:29 Speaker_07
And one has to ask how much of a coincidence it is that while Finnis Brown was investigating Elizabeth Short's murder, a package should arrive from the killer that has an address book with his boss's name on it and the investigation stalls soon after.

00:42:45 Speaker_07
I think that's quite possible. But also, why would he be incriminating himself?

00:42:50 Speaker_04
He's saying by receiving the package that he's eliminating himself as a suspect.

00:42:58 Speaker_07
Mark Hanson didn't send the package. Mark Hanson had no idea that the package was being sent. All of this was happening outside of Mark Hanson's purview and that's the problem here.

00:43:07 Speaker_07
Now as far as how Mark Hansen came to be involved with Elizabeth Short, we really are looking at a very Laura Palmer-esque plot straight out of David Lynch's creative universe.

00:43:17 Speaker_05
Just go and turn on some Count Basie, go get some, I love this, the new song I like was Near You, this is like, it's a very kind of, like when we talked about how every song from the 1940s in the right context is truly frightening, because it's just, I was just looking at these and just like, I was looking at pictures of Elizabeth Short over and over again.

00:43:35 Speaker_05
Just remember that, it's all like, I wanna sing. But it's like, filled with serial rapists.

00:43:42 Speaker_07
Yeah, and all the songs are about trains.

00:43:44 Speaker_05
Yeah.

00:43:45 Speaker_07
See, in the 1940s, Mark Hanson had a sort of casting couch situation going on in which he would recruit young girls for his nightclubs. And these girls were found and recruited by a man named Nils Thor Granlund.

00:43:58 Speaker_07
And they called him Granny for short, N-T-G. Nils Thor had actually pioneered the New York City nightclub scene of the 1920s. Hearing about the Charleston, I invented the Louisville.

00:44:09 Speaker_04
So his name is Thor and they called him Granny?

00:44:12 Speaker_07
Yeah, because his last name's Granland.

00:44:14 Speaker_04
Because his last name's Granland.

00:44:18 Speaker_07
Well, he was the one who kind of pioneered the concept of the girl in the G-string wearing high heels. Thank you.

00:44:25 Speaker_08
Can we hold a moment of silence and say,

00:44:28 Speaker_07
Thank you, Granny. For he was a very particular flavor of piece of shit. He would travel to rodeo shows across the country where he would find jailbait that he could lure to L.A. for Mark Hanson.

00:44:43 Speaker_07
But from the girls that worked for him, Mark Hanson would choose a sort of harem for his own home, which was located just behind the Florentine Gardens Club. Not all the girls who stayed at his home, however, worked for Mark Hansen.

00:44:57 Speaker_07
According to well-placed sources, one of the girls that came in and out of Hansen's home, who fit that bill, didn't work for him, was Elizabeth Short.

00:45:05 Speaker_05
So he was married, the wife left him, so now he is... Why? I don't know. It seems that like, we have a lot of friends that have run nightclubs, but it seems that when you run a nightclub.

00:45:16 Speaker_01
We do?

00:45:17 Speaker_05
I mean, back in the day, we've known people that have, I know people that have. I have, yeah.

00:45:22 Speaker_05
And we, it does seem to hurt your relationships because what happened was is that he fell in love again with the biz, which is always like the worst thing for a business owner, especially in show business.

00:45:35 Speaker_05
where he became really into this idea of, oh, I can control all of these young women. They have to. They're being really nice to me and they're flirting with me because I have something to give them. And then he started renting his own apartment.

00:45:50 Speaker_05
right behind the place, and his wife had left him, and then eventually, because they were there with him, and when the family left, he's like, oh, I'll just bring the chicks in here. Yeah.

00:45:59 Speaker_05
So they started hanging around, and now what we know, because what do we know about Elizabeth Short? She pretended to want to be an actress. Yeah. She did not actually- She talked about it a lot.

00:46:08 Speaker_05
She talked about it, but she didn't actually want to be one. So Mark Hansen was sold originally on this idea that, well, this is Beth, she's here, she wants to be a dancer, and Mark Hansen fell. so butt-deep in love with her.

00:46:23 Speaker_07
Yep. Now, Elizabeth had been introduced to Mark Hansen's world through a friend named Marjorie Graham. Graham, a heavyset girl who was also from Massachusetts, like Elizabeth, she had a weakness for the sauce and often found herself... Marinara? Yeah.

00:46:39 Speaker_00
You beat me!

00:46:40 Speaker_08
You beat me!

00:46:42 Speaker_07
And she often found herself in bad situations as a result. Elizabeth and Marjorie... Terrible.

00:46:48 Speaker_05
You know, Olive Garden.

00:46:52 Speaker_07
Elizabeth and Marjorie had been staying together at the Hawthorne Hotel in Los Angeles during the summer of 1946. This was shortly after Elizabeth's relationship with Major Matt Gordon had ended. Remember him?

00:47:04 Speaker_07
He was the guy that supposedly had died over India and that she had supposedly married him and she supposedly had a kid with him that supposedly died and all that. No matter what happened, this is around the time that that whole thing ended.

00:47:16 Speaker_07
And Elizabeth and Marjorie were running out of money. But they could, according to Marjorie, stay for free at the home of a club owner named Mark Hansen.

00:47:26 Speaker_07
Although it's unclear if Marjorie told Elizabeth what was expected of her if she did choose to stay at Hansen's home.

00:47:33 Speaker_05
Technically Mark Hansen was doing the more of the Romeo what they call Romeo grift or Romeo con for pimps versus the Versus coercive where they come on baby do this for me.

00:47:46 Speaker_05
Yeah, well he it's more like of all the girls which seemed to happen to Beth short quite a bit is that he chose her specially. Like, the other girls, he was just trying to fuck. Yeah, and turn out. Yes, but when he met Elizabeth Short, he fell in love.

00:48:05 Speaker_05
Yes. Like, it was something else. Like, he became obsessed with her. Yeah, but guys like that, it probably happens to them, like, once a month.

00:48:12 Speaker_05
Yes, but then they don't turn into the Black Dahlia, which is, you know, always the kind of issue with all of the stories in this episode.

00:48:18 Speaker_07
Yeah, but Mark, again, Mark Hanson didn't turn into the Black Dahlia. Now, while Mark Hansen did have sex with the young woman who stayed at his home, Elizabeth was said to be different from all the other girls.

00:48:29 Speaker_07
According to a friend of Elizabeth's who lived there, Mark tried having sex with Elizabeth on many occasions, but she was always able to get out of it, which only made him want her more.

00:48:38 Speaker_05
Because remember there was also one of a theory, it's because Elizabeth Short said that her pussy was destroyed? Well, that was disproven. Oh yeah, of course, yes. But it was one of the weird lines that she gave.

00:48:46 Speaker_05
One was that she was a virgin, and the other one was just like, my vagina doesn't work.

00:48:50 Speaker_07
Yes. Well, this yearning was only made stronger by the steady stream of dates Elizabeth would go on while staying at Mark's house.

00:48:58 Speaker_07
Now, Elizabeth was well aware of Hansen's jealousy, so she would always make sure her dates picked her up and dropped her off on a corner a block away so Hansen would never see her with another man.

00:49:08 Speaker_07
But in early December, 1946, about a month and a half before Elizabeth was found dead, Elizabeth and Mark Hansen had some sort of disagreement and he kicked her out of the house.

00:49:19 Speaker_07
Briefly, Elizabeth lived in an apartment where each room had eight young women crammed together in bunk beds, costing just a dollar a night. But since Elizabeth didn't even have a dollar, she skipped out on paying the landlady and disappeared.

00:49:33 Speaker_07
A few days later, she reappeared in the Aztec Theater in San Diego, where she was found by the aforementioned Dorothy French, Soon after, you had the mysterious couple knocking on the French's door looking for Elizabeth. You had the ride back to L.A.

00:49:47 Speaker_07
with Red Manley, the disappearance that night, and her body being found six days later.

00:49:52 Speaker_05
So this is the final run. This is the story of Fire Walk with me. Like, literally. So she... And right now we just have flashes.

00:50:00 Speaker_04
There are so many fucking characters. Yes. Well, it's because she...

00:50:05 Speaker_05
really what was she was homeless she basically was homeless and at this point where they truly say like once the the soldier storyline for her ended she really was kind of left to the winds so that's a

00:50:20 Speaker_05
of what they say that she was probably doing when she was making all the phone calls in the hotel was that she was calling every old soldier that she had known from back in the day. Can you send me money? Can we do this?

00:50:29 Speaker_05
And she was really kind of speed running toward the end of her life. But it sounds like the conflict that got her kicked out of the house

00:50:37 Speaker_05
was also kind of indicative of why Beth Short was considered to be an intense, sometimes people would say difficult person, because she kind of wanted it both ways a little bit.

00:50:47 Speaker_05
So she wanted Mark Hansen to be in love with her, so she'd play that angle up for a while and then hold out, which is her right, she's allowed to do it, made Mark Hansen angry. Eventually he's like, alright, fuck it.

00:50:58 Speaker_05
he tried to move on, new girl comes in, new object of Mark Hansen's affections, she flips out saying all of the stuff, being like, she's going through my bags, she's trying to steal my stuff, and he's all like, why don't you just go?

00:51:12 Speaker_05
And then that's when she, that is like, apparently when it started a bunch of drama, because that's what happens when you put all of the showgirls that you're having sex with in one apartment.

00:51:23 Speaker_05
And that's just like, I'm just going to say this, as a producer,

00:51:26 Speaker_04
Don't do that. Well, there's also, I mean, half of the houses that are like a million five in Hollywood right now would just hold actresses for producers.

00:51:35 Speaker_05
Oh, dude, if you go up and down, I always think about the on rampart when you go up to like, they used to have these furnished housing and that's like where all of this shit kind of happened.

00:51:45 Speaker_05
They used to have actors housing where they used to kind of put them weirdly like in tenements where they were just all hanging out.

00:51:50 Speaker_04
Cause they owned you. You'd be on like a three or five picture deal and you'd live there and as soon as your deal was up or they fired you, you would lose your home and your clothes. Just very Three Amigos, it was real. Yeah.

00:52:00 Speaker_05
But it's also kind of got, though in a way though, that contract system must have been kind of fun. Like you hear like all those Ernest Borgnine types, cause you show up, you have no idea what part you're playing.

00:52:09 Speaker_05
You're like, oh, I guess I'm a farmer today. And like, oh, I guess I'm a coal miner today. Like that's kind of stuff that's funny. And then you're an alien and then your stuff else is kind of, you know. It's like improv class. Yeah.

00:52:21 Speaker_07
Now, Mark Hansen was able to evade investigation for a long time after his former address book showed up at the Los Angeles examiner offices, along with Elizabeth Short's other belongings.

00:52:31 Speaker_07
But that was because he was in cahoots with one of the homicide detectives. Hansen, however, almost got a dose of street justice in July of 1949. a year and a half after Elizabeth's murder.

00:52:44 Speaker_07
That month, a dancer at his club named Lola Titus shot him in the back after an argument, accusing him being quote, a goddamn cop lover.

00:52:53 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:52:54 Speaker_05
Yeah, a damn cop lover. Lola Titus, have you researched into her at all? Bucks a woman. She was a

00:53:02 Speaker_05
She was his Rubenesque affair, like he was super into this lady and she was known for like, she'd get naked at the drop of a hat and she was like, she's a fun lady. A lot of energy.

00:53:14 Speaker_07
Hansen, however, survived the gunshot to the back. And when he arrived at the hospital, the first thing he said was, Get me Brown! Get me Brown! He did not, however, mean Finnis Brown. He wanted Finnis' brother, Thaddeus Brown, the cop's cop.

00:53:29 Speaker_07
And Thaddeus Brown quickly rushed to Hansen's side, I suppose to make sure that Lola Titus got what was coming to her. No one really knows what went on between Thaddeus Brown and Mark Hansen during that conversation.

00:53:43 Speaker_07
All they know is he said, get me Brown and Thaddeus Brown fucking jumped.

00:53:46 Speaker_05
Just understand that this is why this case is so difficult, because it's just everybody's a villain. Yeah. No one's telling the truth. It is the it's like dealing with the CIA. No one is. No, you don't know what anybody's actual story is.

00:54:01 Speaker_04
So was Hansen dying and he just wanted to get Thaddeus some information?

00:54:05 Speaker_07
I don't know. I think he won. I think what he wanted to do is bring Thaddeus and say, Get the bitch who did this to me. Get her. It was Lola Titus. Get her. Make sure she goes down.

00:54:14 Speaker_05
This really probably has nothing to do with the Black Dahlia directly.

00:54:17 Speaker_05
It's more just showing that Mark Hansen had definitely had a relationship with the police, which means that he was more than more than probably an informant, which would mean that if Finnis Brown worked for Mark Hansen or was like a bag man for Mark Hansen, it's like he was then conversely working for a gangster that was also working for the police.

00:54:38 Speaker_07
You're making things purposefully confusing for people But Mark Hanson's close relationship with the police wasn't the only reason why she shot him Allegedly Lola Titus and Elizabeth Short were friends and Lola had accused Hanson of being involved in Elizabeth Short's murder

00:54:58 Speaker_00
I knew you were trying to cut me in half. I knew what you were trying to do. You drew that line above my belly button, and you said you were trying to make measurements for the new pool. And I know that that's not what was happening.

00:55:08 Speaker_00
Hocus pocus yourself. Oh, Mr. Magic Man, you're not getting me, because I'm a free lady. I'm going to be. I'm going to go take my dancers out. I'm going to put a banana up her pussy.

00:55:21 Speaker_04
What did the guy say who killed Elizabeth Short right after he killed her? What? Abracadabra. Marcus liked it.

00:55:31 Speaker_05
I won't give it to you. I won't give it to you, because it's mean. And again, the magician theory has not proven out.

00:55:37 Speaker_04
Did you think it was Crocus Pocus?

00:55:38 Speaker_07
That I enjoyed. Unfortunately, though, Lola was not the most stable witness.

00:55:46 Speaker_07
After she was arrested and taken to the Hall of Justice, the officer in charge of taking her to the courtroom opened the door to the room where she was being held to find her nude and spread-eagled lying on the floor. Want to check me for a gun?

00:56:02 Speaker_05
Or do you wanna go get some flowers and make me a vase?

00:56:05 Speaker_07
The officer ordered her to get dressed, which she did.

00:56:08 Speaker_05
All right, how about just, what way do you want me to get dressed? One sock? One glove?

00:56:15 Speaker_07
The whole, everything.

00:56:16 Speaker_05
Oh, you want me to cover my pussy, huh? Can you smell it? Yes.

00:56:20 Speaker_04
Quite fragrant. It's quite fragrant. You're welcome. I wasn't sure what it was, but once you said pussy, I knew exactly what it was.

00:56:30 Speaker_05
I also brought this pot of beef stroganoff from home.

00:56:34 Speaker_07
But after her picture was taken by court photographers, she got nude again. Remarking, my god, it's hot in here.

00:56:40 Speaker_01
I can't believe how hot it's in here. I gotta show my butt to the air conditioner. Bring me the ice machine.

00:56:47 Speaker_04
Hey son, your new name is air conditioner.

00:56:51 Speaker_07
But when it came time to finally make arguments, Lola's attorney said that according to Lola, Mark Hansen's game was to scoop up young girls and make a lot of promises about opening doors in Hollywood.

00:57:02 Speaker_07
If only they did a little something for him first.

00:57:04 Speaker_05
And that's fucking, honestly, what a fucking lie. I have never heard a producer say no.

00:57:09 Speaker_07
Anything like that to anybody I know. That's just like... That ploy has never been used in this city ever. Who do they think we are here?

00:57:20 Speaker_05
I am so sick of my cherished art form being slandered in this way. How fucking dare you? Because I was never given the opportunity. Yeah, you were. Yes, actually, the one time I was. But it wasn't how I wanted it.

00:57:36 Speaker_05
It was never some big, busty milf saying, well, you know, these tits aren't going to suck themselves. Or should I say, oh, what else? Mr. Babe Ruth. Like I'm auditioning for Babe Ruth. No, it was a man, yeah.

00:57:50 Speaker_07
Yeah. And you said no.

00:57:53 Speaker_05
Yep. And look where you are now. I made the error of having taste and pride. And I'll never do it again.

00:58:04 Speaker_05
Lola Titus was one of those girls, and in her exact words, she said, quote, I made up my mind that he was either gonna love me, marry me, or take care of me, or I was gonna kill him.

00:58:16 Speaker_07
And off that statement, amongst many others, Lola Titus was convicted of attempted murder and sent to the Patton State Hospital for the insane.

00:58:23 Speaker_05
What do you mean? I just thought I had moxie. I thought I was gonna go to the Southern California State Hospital for the big titted.

00:58:30 Speaker_07
She died there 10 years later at the age of 30.

00:58:33 Speaker_05
Oh, is that fucking something happened? That's also I feel like it's really weird.

00:58:38 Speaker_04
I don't just fucking shock their brains and give them crazy experimental drugs. I don't have any checks and balances on these.

00:58:45 Speaker_07
She was probably lobotomized.

00:58:46 Speaker_05
I would imagine they just put her away into it. It just really kind of I thought it's interesting that she went to a state hospital instead of jail.

00:58:53 Speaker_07
Yeah, specifically a state hospital where she could be shut the fuck up and never listened to ever again. Because she's legally crazy. Yep.

00:59:00 Speaker_07
And with Lola put away, even considering her unstable nature, a possible window into Mark Hansen and Elizabeth Short's relationship was closed. Although Lola's perspective was far from the last vantage point, as we'll soon see.

00:59:13 Speaker_07
Now, there have been many people who have made connections between Elizabeth Short's death and organized crime, chief among them, author Donald Wolfe.

00:59:21 Speaker_07
In his theory, Elizabeth Short was a high-end call girl who worked at a mob-owned brothel and had become pregnant by the owner of the Los Angeles Times, a man who also happened to be from one of the most powerful families in Los Angeles.

00:59:35 Speaker_07
This, some people say, is why the Los Angeles Times had relatively scant coverage on the Black Dahlia murder and had begrudgingly covered it only after seeing how well the story was doing in the other city papers.

00:59:47 Speaker_05
This story feels too much like the perfect arc to me. This feels like it's too much of a writerly version of what they wish kind of way that they could explain it.

00:59:59 Speaker_07
It's a very pulp fiction novel type way to tie all the story up.

01:00:03 Speaker_04
She was like, if I'm, what I'm catching here is she was like the hottest chick in town and she was being sold to the most powerful men in town and she probably slept with a lot of the most powerful men in town.

01:00:15 Speaker_04
And so a lot of people could have been connected to her when she found out, when she turned up dead, everyone just like, let's sweep this under the rug, whether it had something to do with it or not.

01:00:24 Speaker_05
I think that what you're saying is half right. I think that it's, the second half is right. I think that they would like to portray her as this interconnected, high-end call girl that was super sophisticated.

01:00:37 Speaker_07
Which I don't think she was a call girl at all.

01:00:39 Speaker_05
No, I don't think so either. I think that she never did it for money. I think she was just surviving. And I think that she really just had a taste for dangerous people. And it got her in quite a lot of trouble.

01:00:54 Speaker_04
You know, she could have been an escort, not a sex worker. Just someone to be seen with. I think she just liked guys. Yeah, I think she just liked guys and nice things.

01:01:02 Speaker_07
Yeah, she liked guys and nice things.

01:01:03 Speaker_05
She liked nice clothes. She wore her perfume. I think that she didn't have highfalutin ideas in that way. I think that she was literally just trying to survive.

01:01:11 Speaker_07
I think it's how Jimmy Richardson put it. Lost. Like, just not really know. She's in her early 20s. She doesn't know what the fuck she wants.

01:01:17 Speaker_07
All she knows is that she doesn't want the life that has been laid out for her, you know, as society demanded it. She's trying to find something, and she just keeps coming up with goose eggs every time.

01:01:29 Speaker_07
But as far as why Elizabeth was killed, it's theorized that she may have refused to get an abortion after being impregnated by such a high-powered client, which is why she was hiding out in San Diego and became disturbed anytime someone came looking for her.

01:01:41 Speaker_04
And why she had her body hollowed out.

01:01:44 Speaker_07
According to the theory, she was finally captured when she returned to Los Angeles and was killed brutally and publicly, so as to send a message to any other girls who may have been thinking of stepping out of line.

01:01:53 Speaker_07
But, while this theory has the right idea, I think it comes to the wrong conclusions. I do believe that Elizabeth Short's death was directly related to organized crime, but

01:02:06 Speaker_07
I think it had a lot more to do with her associating with dangerous people than it did with her participating in risky activities like sex work in a mob-owned brothel.

01:02:17 Speaker_07
I think that the organized crime figure responsible for Elizabeth Short's death was Mark Hanson, and he had a lot of help from the LAPD to make sure the Black Dahlia murder was never solved. But notice I said responsible for her death.

01:02:32 Speaker_07
I do not believe that Mark Hanson was the one who actually killed Elizabeth Short.

01:02:37 Speaker_05
Thank you, Mr. Hanson's fake lawyer. Thank you for pointing this out. Yeah, it's because his cutting hand does this. Shakey, shakey, shakey, shakey, shakey. You know what? I think what you're saying is correct. The answer is in this

01:02:52 Speaker_05
situation yes that's where that where the answer is is here it's somewhere in this miasma of dudes that she met during her time around mark hansen the florentine gardens and all of this stuff that is connected around it and that's that's where i i think that we're stumbling into is that these places are just where a lot of guys that no one wants to talk about that that are in the same room and they don't want people to know that they're all in the same room

01:03:20 Speaker_05
And it's like she just was a big ol' like tying everybody together. She was the rug that tied the room together.

01:03:26 Speaker_07
Yeah. And I think that all of this happened within a span of months. I think Elizabeth Short's life fell apart very, very quickly.

01:03:34 Speaker_07
And I think she found herself involved in some really bad shit very fast, like faster than she even knew what was happening.

01:03:40 Speaker_04
When she turned down Hanson probably.

01:03:41 Speaker_05
Well, think about, you know, like the way the city opens up to the right star. You know, Scarlett Johansson arrived. I think about it in that way.

01:03:50 Speaker_05
We're like, these people, I mean, most of them were industry plants, but when someone just shows up, right, that's just a simply very beautiful, charismatic woman, especially in these businesses.

01:04:01 Speaker_05
things can go really far for you very quickly and I think that's kind of is what happened to her in a way too.

01:04:07 Speaker_05
I think because she was so hot and so desirable and to many men like that also just kind of fired up everything around everywhere she'd go it's like everywhere she went she started a fire.

01:04:16 Speaker_03
Yeah.

01:04:20 Speaker_07
Now, it's important to note that for almost two years, there was very little to no movement on the Black Dahlia murder investigation. A lot of people have been questioned, and a lot of theories have been put forth, and more clues had even been found.

01:04:33 Speaker_07
Elizabeth Short's purse and shoes, for example, had been found in a trash can outside of a cafe four miles from Leimert Park.

01:04:41 Speaker_07
But none of these clues had led anywhere meaningful, because Phineas and Hanson had made sure, especially after Mark Hanson's name came into play, that the investigation had stalled.

01:04:51 Speaker_04
See, now, they found the purse and stuff four miles away in a trash can outside of a diner. Someone had to have been tipped off. Like, because that shit's just getting picked up and thrown in the dump.

01:05:01 Speaker_04
No one's searching every trash can within four miles of her body.

01:05:04 Speaker_07
Yeah, it just happened. It just happened upon it. I mean, that's another just happened upon it. Fucking story here. Reporters later uncovered that Finnis was in debt to Hansen for $5,000. $70,000 in today's money.

01:05:18 Speaker_07
And it's speculated that Mark Hansen used Finnis Brown to shut down any lines of investigation that led towards him in exchange for forgiveness on his debt.

01:05:27 Speaker_07
Now that by itself is not proof that he killed Elizabeth Short or that he was responsible for the death of Elizabeth Short. But! A person was just about to be discovered that was going to lead towards Mark Hanson.

01:05:43 Speaker_07
The one man in the LAPD who just couldn't let it go, the man who tried to fight the tide of corruption and cover-ups, was the aforementioned Dr. Joseph Paul Deriver, which I mispronounced in the last episode as Deriver. Deriver!

01:05:57 Speaker_07
Now, as we said last week, Deriver was in charge of screening all the confessing Sams who either arrived at the police station claiming they'd killed Elizabeth Short or were sending weird shit through the mail.

01:06:07 Speaker_07
After a year and a half of sifting through the muck, however, Deriver finally decided to get proactive. I got a copy of his out-of-print book, The Sexual Criminal.

01:06:16 Speaker_05
It is very... It's dated!

01:06:18 Speaker_07
Yeah, but it is very, very interesting. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Dr. Driver is a fucking hero.

01:06:25 Speaker_05
No, no.

01:06:25 Speaker_07
He behaved like a monster much of the time.

01:06:29 Speaker_05
This next section of this whole story is so fascinating. I just find this all so fascinating. But the breakdown of Dr. Driver is because right now this is the rise and fall of Dr. Driver.

01:06:42 Speaker_07
Yes. See, Deriver had a theory that the killer both craved attention and was most likely a true crime fan. So he planted an article about the Black Dahlia murder in True Detective magazine to try and lure the killer out from hiding.

01:06:56 Speaker_05
And he did have some approval. but very little approval for what he was doing. So Deriver was hired by the LAPD, you know, he ran the sexual offenders unit, he was like putting- The registration, yeah.

01:07:09 Speaker_05
He was putting this all together, and eventually they just kind of like, he was just kind of off-road. And so eventually he was just like, I know exactly how to catch this criminal! And the first thing he did was like, we must beat him.

01:07:20 Speaker_05
We must encourage a tet-a-tet! Ah, you know that the Black Dahlia Avenger will have no, no way to not respond if we tell everybody we think he's a dum-dum. It's a trap.

01:07:33 Speaker_07
Well, the article described the Black Dahlia killer as a sadomasochistic type with at least half a dozen victims already. A cunning, studious, scientific type. who would be compelled to boast about the details of the crime.

01:07:45 Speaker_07
And sure enough, soon after the article was published, Deriver received a letter from Miami Beach, signed with the obviously fake name of Jack Sand.

01:07:56 Speaker_07
Jack Sand wrote that he'd read the article about the Black Dahlia murder, and he believed that a friend of his was the killer.

01:08:04 Speaker_07
Intrigued, the driver and the mysterious Jack Sand began exchanging letters, and Jack eventually said that his friend was a guy named Jeff. Jeff!

01:08:14 Speaker_05
Jeff!

01:08:15 Speaker_03
Jeff did it! He killed the Black Dahlia.

01:08:19 Speaker_05
You have never met a man as sinister as Jeff. Jeff! The worst man I've ever met. My best friend, Jeff. Jeff!

01:08:32 Speaker_07
Well, allegedly, this guy said that he'd spent six weeks in San Francisco with Jeff just after the Black Dahlia murder.

01:08:40 Speaker_07
Jeff, Jackson wrote, had bragged that he'd gone to the same bars as Elizabeth Short, but had fled Los Angeles before the cops could question him.

01:08:47 Speaker_05
He went to the same hot dog stand she frequented, my friend.

01:08:52 Speaker_07
Jeff. Jeff also liked to draw. Yes, he did.

01:08:58 Speaker_05
And in one letter... Dogs, horses, airplanes, octopus, anything you can draw, Jeff was addicted to it. Dangerously so.

01:09:10 Speaker_07
Well, in one letter, Jack included a sketch that he claimed to have been drawn by Jeff.

01:09:14 Speaker_05
As you can see here, these two round lobes might just be a butt. Drawn by my best friend and enemy, Jeff. Jeff!

01:09:29 Speaker_07
Now while the contents of the letters themselves were interesting, the sketch really was the sort of wow moment for Dr. DeRiver. Wow!

01:09:37 Speaker_07
It featured a fair amount of cross-hatching that was very similar to some of the extensive mutilation inflicted on Elizabeth Short's body, namely the criss-cross lacerations that have been found on her pubic bone and right hip.

01:09:51 Speaker_01
Only a serial killer could shade in this way. I've never seen shading like this before. Truly nefarious. I must investigate.

01:10:00 Speaker_07
Jack Sand also wrote a letter that speculated on the motive behind the killing, saying that Elizabeth may have threatened exposure of something, an affair not considered proper, as he put it.

01:10:11 Speaker_05
With a horse.

01:10:13 Speaker_02
With a fish. Many things can be made love to that are inappropriate, depending on where you're from.

01:10:22 Speaker_07
Where are you from?

01:10:23 Speaker_05
Downtown. Downtown where? Jephton. You've never been to Jephton? My best friend was from there. His name was Jeff. Josh!

01:10:39 Speaker_07
Jack Sand also said that the killer may have experienced a new sensation by accident during the murder, thus leading to the Black Dahlia's complete annihilation.

01:10:49 Speaker_07
The letter also showed many of the same spelling, grammar, and syntax peculiarities as the letter sent to Jimmy Richardson at the examiner.

01:10:57 Speaker_07
And Jack Sand also referred to the victim as simply Elizabeth, rather than Elizabeth Short or the Black Dahlia, inferring that this person may have known or felt Like he had known Elizabeth short intimately in the beginning of this was just letters.

01:11:12 Speaker_05
Yeah, so he opened this up and he started Writing back and forth with Jackson and he's like literally is like yes, we are we all report it. This is I have been looking for

01:11:24 Speaker_07
I can hear him saying the game is afoot over and over again.

01:11:28 Speaker_04
He had that perfect mustache for it. Now, when he was calling her Elizabeth, was she known as Elizabeth? Because you called her Beth earlier. She was Beth to her friends. Okay.

01:11:36 Speaker_07
Yeah. Now, since Finnis Brown and Harry the Hat Hanson had all but given up on the case, the aforementioned gangster squad was tapped to pick up where they left off. Because not everyone at the LAPD, nor everyone in the mayor's office was on the take.

01:11:50 Speaker_07
There were some people who wanted this fucking thing solved.

01:11:52 Speaker_05
I do kind of believe, it's kind of a funny idea of being like, Texas squad, and you go out there and solve this case. And they're all like, yes sir, yes sir, yes sir. And they're all just like trying to get in the elevator at the same time.

01:12:05 Speaker_05
I'm making the siren we need to get organized

01:12:29 Speaker_07
So, Deriver told the gangster squad all about this Jack Sands character in Miami Beach, which prompted the squad to send one of their officers to Florida, undercover, to track Sands down.

01:12:41 Speaker_05
Which they denied. They denied they ever sent a cop to go look at them, but you know, it's all who's saying what.

01:12:47 Speaker_07
Before long, they discovered that Jack Sands was a pseudonym for a career criminal named Leslie Dwayne Dillon. 27 at the time, Dillon was described as tall, lanky, and sloop-shouldered, with a habit of dyeing his hair different colors.

01:13:02 Speaker_07
Originally from Oklahoma, Dillon had served less than a year in the Navy during World War II before he was dishonorably discharged for stealing watches. Remember that! A few years later, Dylan was arrested for pimping in San Francisco.

01:13:16 Speaker_07
Then, after marrying and fathering a child, he became, much like Elizabeth Short, just another drifter in post-World War II America. He was free.

01:13:25 Speaker_07
Using the aliases of Jack Diamond, Jack Maxim, and Jack San, Dylan wandered between California, Florida, and Oklahoma,

01:13:33 Speaker_07
with his family in tow, working alternately as a bellhop, a rumrunner, a bootlegger, a pimp, a professional gambler, a taxi driver, and, for a short period of time, a dance instructor.

01:13:44 Speaker_05
Yeah, take a look at my hips. A one, and a two, and a three, and a four, and a... I'm just buying time to the end of class. No refunds! No refunds! I view him as the um he's Rob Schneider from Home Alone 2.

01:14:01 Speaker_05
He's got the bellhop we're gonna be discovering the bellhop mafia there's a lot of these things flying around here but it is funny because they all like kind of talk about as soon as the word bellhop comes up and all of these they're like

01:14:13 Speaker_06
you know he was a bellhop.

01:14:15 Speaker_05
And you're like- That's who's got all the information. Yeah. And so it's the idea of like, are every bellhop just like somebody who's like stealing out of bags and like looking through people's purses?

01:14:23 Speaker_07
I mean, out of all the professions that he had, the one that he returned to again and again was bellhop. He just liked it.

01:14:28 Speaker_04
And pimp. Lots of cash, both jobs.

01:14:31 Speaker_07
I tell you what I like. It's the little hat. I mean, bellhop and pimp, that goes hand in hand. You're dropping off a guy, you say like, hey- Looking for some fun tonight? Exactly.

01:14:41 Speaker_04
Yeah. And then you think the bellhop's getting the lady?

01:14:43 Speaker_07
No, the bellhop's the one who's telling you, like, hey, I got some girls. You looking for some fun tonight here in San Francisco?

01:14:48 Speaker_05
He knows the pimp. I would never say the bellhop's the pimp.

01:14:52 Speaker_07
Well, in this case, it was. Yes. Wow.

01:14:54 Speaker_05
And that's what's nice about a one-stop shop.

01:14:56 Speaker_07
Yeah, the head bellhop's the pimp. Now, Leslie Dillon... You wanna fuck, Greg?

01:15:02 Speaker_01
I need a home. I lost my home in the fire. I had to become a bellhop at 65, cum in my ass so hard my hat pops off. If you would, please, please use me as a toilet, whatever you need. All right, I'll take your bags up. I'll suck your dick.

01:15:21 Speaker_01
I'll play with your balls.

01:15:24 Speaker_05
That was the difference about 1946 parties, I think. They played with balls, though.

01:15:29 Speaker_07
Yeah, it was part of the turndown service.

01:15:31 Speaker_05
But think about, I think that's why they were like, because Mark Hanson got all into the world of like 1940s sex parties and I really feel like the main difference is just like, it's where they learned about sucking balls.

01:15:41 Speaker_07
Well, concerning 1940s sex parties, There is a whole other line of investigation here involving the real Los Angeles sex parties. I think Mark Hanson was just taking a girl here and taking a girl there.

01:15:58 Speaker_07
There's a whole other line of questioning that involves a man named Hodel, who was actually having horrific orgies at his house all the time. But George Hodel doesn't really fit into this world.

01:16:14 Speaker_05
Well, we're gonna, we are, you know, this is a breakout of the story. We're going to come back to Leslie Dillon right now, but just know that we are going to touch upon some of the other subjects.

01:16:22 Speaker_05
But George Hordel was so fully covered in the Root of Evil podcast. It's kind of hard for us to shoehorn him in here, but we'll figure it out.

01:16:29 Speaker_07
Now, Leslie Dillon soon caught on that someone was following him. So he turned himself over to the FBI, suspiciously telling the authorities that the cops were after him for, quote, some offense in Los Angeles.

01:16:40 Speaker_05
Also remember his voice, one of the big things too was that his voice sounded just like, that's why I'm doing the voice like that, he's the caller.

01:16:48 Speaker_05
That's what they said, he sounded the smooth modulated tones that are called as the Black Dolly Avenger that have talked to Jimmy Richardson.

01:16:56 Speaker_07
But since the gangster squad operated totally in secret to protect themselves and to honestly take a shit on the Constitution whenever they wanted. Dental dam!

01:17:07 Speaker_07
The FBI had no idea who Dillon was or what he was talking about, so they told him to get lost. Now later, one of the gangster squad members said that they would have been indicted many times over for the shit they did back then.

01:17:19 Speaker_01
Simpler times.

01:17:20 Speaker_07
Yeah, which meant that the guy who had traveled to Miami Beach to investigate Leslie Dillon had no problem breaking into his house without a warrant to search for clues.

01:17:29 Speaker_07
Amongst violently torn clothes and piles of books, magazines, and newspapers, the officers found numerous true crime articles cut out and saved. Stories about prison guards being killed in riots. Lot of stories about girls getting shot in the face.

01:17:44 Speaker_05
Yeah, there was the one story he was obsessed with apparently that he collected all the articles on of a girl that had gotten her tooth shot out of her mouth from a BB gun. Yeah.

01:17:53 Speaker_04
But he's just into the occult, you know, he's in a crime.

01:17:56 Speaker_07
He's not into the occult.

01:17:57 Speaker_04
He's in true crime He's in the true crime, but like, you know back then there weren't like many books on it So I wanted to read it again.

01:18:03 Speaker_05
The magazines were everywhere Crime was is like this is a joke like true crime has been a massive genre forever

01:18:11 Speaker_07
Yeah, back then there were so many detectives, like they called them detective magazines.

01:18:15 Speaker_05
And with the rise of the American gangster, like the entire, like when we covered Bonnie and Clyde, you find out that like, you know, it had made a whole like sex-filled industry of true crime where people, they were viewed as stars and people loved watching, like paying attention to them.

01:18:29 Speaker_07
Yeah, they'd read anything about these people. The officers also found a treasure trove of short stories that Dylan had written involving situations that usually ended with a woman being raped and murdered.

01:18:41 Speaker_07
Finally, though, the cop came across the copy of True Detective magazine that featured the article that Dr. Joseph Deriver had planted.

01:18:48 Speaker_07
On a picture of a telegram Red Manley had sent to Elizabeth Short, Dylan had signed the page with the name Jack Sand using a ballpoint pen, which appeared to be similar to the pen used to write the printed postcard in which the so-called Black Dahlia Avenger had said he's going to turn himself in.

01:19:06 Speaker_07
Now, this may not seem like a big sticking point here, but in 1947, ballpoint pens were relatively new, rare, and expensive. They cost about $175 in today's money.

01:19:17 Speaker_07
Now, none of this is, of course, concrete proof of murder, but it was enough for the undercover officer to call his superiors in LA to say, quote, This is the man. And thus began the effort to lure Dylan back to California.

01:19:30 Speaker_07
Deriver contacted Dylan and asked him to meet. Which is also so stupid.

01:19:35 Speaker_05
This whole thing is like, like, this is the thing. It's like on one half, it's like this tête-à-tête between investigator and criminal. And the other half, it amounts to one of the dumbest series of interactions I've ever seen between two humans.

01:19:49 Speaker_04
Everything the cops do is illegal, except they try to get this guy legally back. Why don't you just hit him over the head and fucking throw him in a train car?

01:19:56 Speaker_07
Well, that's kind of what Deriver said they did. But this is the other side of that story. Deriver contacted Dylan and asked him to meet so he could give him more information about this Jeff character.

01:20:07 Speaker_01
Yes, Jeff! I would love to talk about Jeff.

01:20:10 Speaker_07
Jeff. Jeff. That had supposedly killed Elizabeth Short. But while Dylan had been all too ready to help before, he was reluctant to return to California. I get sunburned. So Deriver and Dylan agreed to meet in Las Vegas.

01:20:23 Speaker_05
Yeah, very different than California.

01:20:25 Speaker_07
Yeah, where the gangster squad planned to set up wiretaps to record everything Dylan said. When they got there, though, Dylan was too nervous to talk and suggested they go to Palm Springs instead. Much nicer. It is.

01:20:36 Speaker_07
But during that drive, Dylan began to talk more about himself. He told the driver and the gangster squad member driving them that one of his many jobs had been as a mortuary assistant, where he'd learn the proper way to bleed a corpse.

01:20:52 Speaker_05
You want to do it all the way, because if you leave some blood in it, it gets stinky.

01:20:58 Speaker_02
The key is to make her entirely empty.

01:21:01 Speaker_04
That's so crazy. Mum's the word from Florida to Vegas. But from Vegas to Palm Springs is an open book. I actually spent many years

01:21:12 Speaker_02
Doing time-tested trials to see how quickly it would take for me to saw a woman in half surgically incredibly That's fascinating

01:21:21 Speaker_07
Well, Dylan also spoke in the same soft, modulated voice that had been used when the alleged Black Dahlia killer had called Jimmy Richardson at the Los Angeles examiner offices.

01:21:31 Speaker_07
Now, once they got to a lodge in Palm Springs, the gangster squad wired up a cabin and listened in as Dylan and Deriver talked about his mysterious friend Jeff, the one who had supposedly killed Elizabeth Short.

01:21:42 Speaker_02
Yes, Jeff is the worst bastard I've ever met. Do you mind? Running a bath for me, Dr. Deriver?

01:21:51 Speaker_05
Absolutely! I would love to run the bobbliest bath you've ever had. Would you like me to first help you undress?

01:21:59 Speaker_07
Dylan told them that the perpetrator's full name was Jeff Connors. Yes, Connors. And soon after began to pontificate about Elizabeth Short's murder, starting with speculation on why her body had been cut in half. Just sort of thanking out loud.

01:22:15 Speaker_05
Dylan. Yeah, you're sitting in a hotel room together, hanging out, and there's like moment of silence. It's like, why do you think the Black Dahlia was cut in half?

01:22:24 Speaker_07
Well, Dylan said that the killer might have wanted to physically see how far his penis went into the body of a woman when it was inserted into her vagina. Fascinating. Yes!

01:22:36 Speaker_01
Yes! Me too! Yes! I swear, I wish I could know!

01:22:40 Speaker_04
Alright, so I'm gonna have sex with her, you peek in the time... Yes!

01:22:47 Speaker_01
It is called the old-fashioned prairie dog! Where you see the little head of the dog peek its way out of the bush, which is the inside of a dead woman.

01:22:56 Speaker_07
Cutting her in half, Dylan opined, would enable the murderer to stick his penis inside the severed bottom half of Elizabeth Short's body and see it poke out the other end.

01:23:07 Speaker_01
Oh yes, absolutely, of course. Oh, wonderful.

01:23:11 Speaker_07
More details you'd like to know?

01:23:12 Speaker_01
Yes, more and more, please! How pink it is.

01:23:16 Speaker_04
Oh, is your- Your penis could poke her that long. You know what's interesting is when you can do this, you can also shake her hand.

01:23:25 Speaker_05
Have you thought about a ruler, my friend? Before we get too far, because I do appreciate your curiosity, but have you even thought about maybe putting a banana for sizing reference? That's how you'd know how shallow or deep your penis can be.

01:23:40 Speaker_03
Or perhaps you want to try my ass.

01:23:44 Speaker_05
I'm only a doctor.

01:23:46 Speaker_01
All I can do is tell you what I feel. Oh, feeling some pressure.

01:23:50 Speaker_05
Oh, a bit of pressure.

01:23:52 Speaker_07
There it is. Well, as far as where the bisection took place, Dylan said she was probably cut in half in a bed, a bath, or on a floor. And the blood was probably drained by hanging the two halves in a shower.

01:24:07 Speaker_07
Jeff Connors, Dylan said, would have done all of this on the ground floor of a motel so he wouldn't have to lug the body down any stairs. Now, as Deriver listened to Dylan, he began to get a hunch. So he asked Dylan to strip naked.

01:24:21 Speaker_05
Now listen, this might sound like a total non sequitur. We've been talking for a period of time. But I'm just looking at you, and I wonder, and I'm a doctor. Would you pretty please get naked for me?

01:24:36 Speaker_04
It's just us, it's Palm Springs.

01:24:39 Speaker_05
We've had a seven-hour trip. You've taken a 19-hour two-plane, two-propeller plane flight to Las Vegas. We have now driven to Palm Springs for no reason. Can I see them dangles? Can I see you show me them nipples?

01:24:56 Speaker_05
My good sir, we gotta get naked together.

01:24:59 Speaker_07
I'll do two! Well, hesitatingly, Dylan did as he was asked. Or, so DeRiver says. I think it's more likely that a gangster squad member forced Dylan's pants down.

01:25:07 Speaker_05
See, there's some stories, but then there's the other idea of, like, weirdly... which I do actually think is true of him going like, yeah, sure. Like he was like, we have to remember. So right now we're playing this.

01:25:19 Speaker_05
We are going to go through this whole- Dylan's playing a game here. Dylan's a fucking weirdo. Yes. Okay. So the idea of going into this weird lodge with this doctor man, and then him just saying like, would you please remove your clothes?

01:25:35 Speaker_05
And then him just going like, yeah, right. Oh, he is a doctor.

01:25:38 Speaker_00
Yeah. All right. Yeah. Why not?

01:25:40 Speaker_07
But either way, Deriver's hunch was correct. He had suspected that Dylan had a micropenis. And sure enough... Don't tell me why. I don't know how it was.

01:25:49 Speaker_05
I think it was a choice in music on the way we were driving.

01:25:52 Speaker_07
And sure enough, when Dylan's dingle was exposed, Deriver, with disturbing accuracy, compared the size of Dylan's penis to one belonging to a boy of exactly eight years of age.

01:26:04 Speaker_05
I'm not a pedophile, but I have seen many boy corpses. Many, many, many, many boy corpses, and sometimes I do seek them out.

01:26:13 Speaker_04
His penis was larger than a seven-year-old's, boy.

01:26:16 Speaker_03
How do I know? It's smaller than a nine!

01:26:17 Speaker_01
You know how I know that? The differences are subtle, but present! Flap, flap, flap, flap, flap, flap, flap, flap, that's all I tell him.

01:26:27 Speaker_05
Flap, flap, flap, flap, flap, little sugar packet. Flap back and forth. Tiny penis. The key is, you know how he's a doctor, and this is a big, this is a lesson to all my people out there that want to interact with penises.

01:26:38 Speaker_05
The thing about a micropenis is that if it's slightly small, you know, whatever, a micropenis, you want to treat that thing with respect because if you don't, that thing that's attached to that thing, it's gonna fucking kill you.

01:26:55 Speaker_07
The small penis survivor hypothesized was why there was a vertical cut in Elizabeth's pubic region just above her vagina. Yeah?

01:27:03 Speaker_07
The micro penis would not be long enough to reach the bisection, but if the killer did want to see how far his penis went in, he would have to mutilate the body further if his penis was particularly small.

01:27:15 Speaker_07
For the next time you do this app, what I recommend to you, to use an orange.

01:27:22 Speaker_07
Just guessing, Deriver thought that it was possible that Elizabeth Short may have mocked or threatened to expose Dylan's micropenis to his friends, and he had reacted in the most brutal way possible.

01:27:34 Speaker_05
Which is why the only way I can reveal it is through the newspaper.

01:27:42 Speaker_05
Well, that's why I think his pants were probably pulled down because it didn't seem like Dylan was super pleased with his micropenis Yeah, well, it's weird, but I but he's posturing he is acting to the driver that he is the person who killed black Dahlia and

01:28:00 Speaker_07
Like he's saying, I didn't do it, Jeff did it.

01:28:03 Speaker_05
Jeff! And so he's saying, but I think, weirdly though, I think, well it depends on if you want to go with my theory or not.

01:28:13 Speaker_05
It depends, because in my theory, if he's innocent, if Leslie Dillon's innocent, this is just all because he's a fucking freak-a-leak fucking guy that you just, you know, that just happened to be just curious enough to be in a Palm Springs lodge with a criminologist that he just met over a letter and he's just now here.

01:28:33 Speaker_05
I can see you just arriving here to be personally investigated as the Black Dahlia murder. I don't know if it's that far, beyond the pale that you'd just show him your micro penis and go, what do you think of that?

01:28:43 Speaker_07
What do you think of that? Pretty small, huh?

01:28:46 Speaker_04
He's very unforgiving.

01:28:47 Speaker_07
Yeah.

01:28:47 Speaker_07
Well, to bolster this theory, Deriver noticed that out of the many true crime articles Dylan kept at his home, many were stories in which the perpetrator had taken revenge on the victim for some slight, meaning that the Black Dahlia Avenger moniker may have held some element of truth.

01:29:03 Speaker_07
Additionally, Dylan knew far more about the exact details of the mutilation than what was made public. And here's where we're gonna get into some of the really fucking horrible shit.

01:29:12 Speaker_05
Well, this is also deciding whether or not they did have control questions. We don't know whether or not these control questions actually existed.

01:29:19 Speaker_07
Yes. Dylan knew that Elizabeth Short's pubic hair had been cut off and shoved in her rectum, while the skin on her left thigh, featuring her rose tattoo, had been carved out and shoved in her vagina.

01:29:31 Speaker_07
There was also the little matter of one of the final indignations bestowed upon Elizabeth's corpse, the carving of a single letter on her skin.

01:29:39 Speaker_07
The letter was D. And it was quite possible that the D was a sort of signature carved by who else but Leslie Dylan. Actually, no, not Jeff.

01:29:52 Speaker_02
Unfortunately, that was supposed to be the smile.

01:29:58 Speaker_07
Now, as we know from the last episode, some of the details had already been leaked to certain individuals connected to the LAPD. So it's not impossible to think that Leslie Dillon could have heard about them from someone.

01:30:09 Speaker_07
It is, however, extremely unlikely.

01:30:11 Speaker_05
There's also one side of the story that says, well, according to Leslie Dillon, I never said that. And there's supposed to be a recording saying that he never said it. But then there's another thing saying, oh, no, it just changed.

01:30:21 Speaker_05
He changed his answers after the fact.

01:30:24 Speaker_07
Leslie Dillon changed many of his answers after the fact. Yes. Now after five days of conversation that only made Dylan look more guilty, conversations where he said he liked girls with big mouths, you get it?

01:30:36 Speaker_04
Jesus, he was trying to get caught.

01:30:39 Speaker_07
He also just straight up said like, yeah, I drug and rape girls all the time. It's my thing, it's my hobby.

01:30:45 Speaker_04
We should have just killed him for fun then.

01:30:48 Speaker_07
He was finally driven to San Francisco to track down the mysterious Jeff Connors. Jeff could be behind any corner. But, after driving around San Francisco for a full week to no avail, visiting- No Jeff. Nothing. No Jeff. No Jeff nowhere.

01:31:02 Speaker_07
Visiting dozens of hotels and haunts where this Jeff Connors might have been. Jeff?

01:31:06 Speaker_01
Jeff? Jeff, where are you? Jeff?

01:31:10 Speaker_07
No, not you. Not you.

01:31:12 Speaker_05
Not you.

01:31:13 Speaker_07
I'm Jeff. Let me see your license. Not with a G. Idiot. Well, Dylan was taken back to Los Angeles. There, he began to realize he had basically been kidnapped by Dr. Deriver and the gangster squad, and he had no way to free himself.

01:31:27 Speaker_05
Well, this is the thing. He freaked his way into this situation, and then he couldn't seem to figure out how to freak his way out. No.

01:31:33 Speaker_05
in there and now they're like you've told them a bunch of really cryptic shit that you are playing some psychological game trying to insert yourself into either you are the Black Dahlia murderer or you're trying to insert yourself into the story for some reason but now you're just like you're just allowing them to just own you and it's like all of a sudden you realize he's like oh shit yeah this is starting to get more and more serious.

01:31:55 Speaker_03
Okay good thanks glad I gave you all this information I'll see you later back to Miami why is this door locked?

01:32:04 Speaker_07
So, Dylan threw a postcard out of his hotel window in L.A. that said he was being... To Jeff.

01:32:10 Speaker_01
Yeah. Damned Jeff. Please come to my rescue.

01:32:13 Speaker_07
He like plays like a conch shell, like... The postcard said that he was being held in room 219 by Dr. J. Paul DeRiver in connection with the Black Dahlia murder, and he was requesting legal counsel.

01:32:26 Speaker_07
Interestingly, especially for a man of such little means as Leslie Dillon, the postcard was addressed to a high-powered attorney, a man who had represented Errol Flynn on statutory rape charges, a man who had represented Robert Mitchum for marijuana possession, and most importantly, had represented mobsters Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen on a number of criminal charges.

01:32:49 Speaker_07
The incredible coincidence here, though, was that the person who found the postcard was none other than one of Aggie Underwood's reporters for the Herald Express. You can't write this in a movie.

01:32:59 Speaker_05
If you saw this in a movie, you'd be like, that's the corniest shit that doesn't happen. But it literally happened.

01:33:05 Speaker_07
Yeah. They called their contact at the gangster squad and asked them what was going on here with this Leslie Dillon guy. That forced the LAPD to either arrest Leslie or set him free. And they chose arrest.

01:33:16 Speaker_07
Now when Dylan was taken downtown and his belongings were searched for the first time, cops found that Dylan had packed a number of harrowing yet ridiculous items for his trip out west to speak with the police.

01:33:32 Speaker_05
He's a total absolute madman murderer, and then there's the other side of it being like this man is chaos itself. This is a desk lamp.

01:33:42 Speaker_01
I brought my ping pong paddle. I brought my enema bags. I brought my chess set. I brought my dogs too.

01:33:56 Speaker_07
Well, along with 700 phenobarbital pills. I just like to be awake.

01:34:01 Speaker_01
I just like to enjoy myself. No, phenobarbital is a downer. Yeah, Tootsie's on phenobarbital.

01:34:07 Speaker_04
Oh, nice.

01:34:07 Speaker_07
Yeah, it's what you use to roofie women.

01:34:09 Speaker_04
Oh, really?

01:34:10 Speaker_07
Yeah. Oh, I thought it was to roofie yourself.

01:34:12 Speaker_04
That's why Tootsie sleeps so much.

01:34:14 Speaker_07
Yeah, phenobarbital is bad. If you're found with a lot of phenobarbital pills, it's a bad person.

01:34:19 Speaker_04
Really? Yeah. Honestly. I'm blown away right now.

01:34:22 Speaker_05
Yeah. That's why they call me The nap, man.

01:34:26 Speaker_04
Be-ba-da-ba-da-boop. Ba-ba-ba-da-boop. But they also could have epilepsy.

01:34:33 Speaker_07
He does not have epilepsy.

01:34:34 Speaker_04
All right, get the nap.

01:34:36 Speaker_07
Dylan had also brought seven razor blades and a dog leash with a massive leather strap that had appeared as if it had been thoroughly scrubbed and scraped.

01:34:46 Speaker_04
It's for the dog. I mean, I'm going with the dog theory now. You got a dog leash, phenobarbital.

01:34:52 Speaker_07
The scrap also showed signs of strain, as if a heavy weight had been suspended from it. If you'll remember, the way Elizabeth Short's arms had been placed made it look as if she'd been hung from something for a very long period of time.

01:35:13 Speaker_05
I heard one theory, but it kind of makes sense. It's for autoerotic asphyxiation. He might have. That's a possibility.

01:35:19 Speaker_04
You can use a belt for lots of stuff.

01:35:21 Speaker_07
It's my choking belt. All right, this is just so I can relax.

01:35:24 Speaker_07
Now, when it was announced that a suspect had been arrested in conjunction with the Black Dahlia murder almost two years after it had occurred, the press started looking into Leslie Dillon, and they found that his aunt lived on Crenshaw Boulevard.

01:35:36 Speaker_07
This location was less than four miles from Le Merit Park. Not super close, but not super far away. But, It was only two blocks away from the cafe where Elizabeth Short's purse and shoes have been found in the trash can.

01:35:51 Speaker_07
At another one of Dylan's Los Angeles addresses, his landlady said that he'd driven a black Ford sedan when he'd lived there, which was the same type of car seen by eyewitnesses on the night that Elizabeth Short's body was dumped in the vacant lot.

01:36:05 Speaker_07
But when police began interrogating Leslie Dillon directly, he denied ever knowing or even meeting Elizabeth Short. But what the LAPD and the press did discover was that Leslie Dillon had been involved in organized crime when he lived in Los Angeles.

01:36:21 Speaker_05
Some of it was disorganized. How so? Bad scheduling. Poor catering.

01:36:30 Speaker_04
I forgot my pants once. I didn't know. It's so hard. You're just rushing because of the deadlines.

01:36:37 Speaker_07
Now, Dylan was decidedly small time. He worked as a pimp and a bootlegger. But the kicker was that he had done so in the same territory covered by associates of Elizabeth Short.

01:36:47 Speaker_07
Namely, he worked in the same territory as Mark Hanson, whose address book was still a big question mark for a lot of people when it came to the murder.

01:36:57 Speaker_07
Now, Dylan had been arrested, but not charged, and time was running out before they had to let him go. Deriver was convinced that Dylan was the killer, but not just because of what Dylan had told him.

01:37:07 Speaker_07
See, Dylan was still saying that his friend Jeff Connors was the killer. Jeff did it. And Jeff was the one who had told him all the mutilation details. He loves details.

01:37:17 Speaker_07
But at one of the hotels where Dylan had worked in San Francisco, the driver had showed the manager a picture of Leslie Dillon. The manager said, sure, that guy worked here, I know him. But the manager did not call him Leslie Dillon.

01:37:31 Speaker_07
Rather, the manager identified the man in the picture as Jeff Connors.

01:37:36 Speaker_04
Fuck! Oh my God, Jeff did do it! It's been me!

01:37:42 Speaker_05
Obviously Leslie was using Jeff as his alter ego, and this is where driver was like he got so hard Yeah, he was just like yes Oh, I just came in my wool

01:38:01 Speaker_04
I cannot believe how good I am. Leslie is just one of the man's name. Yeah, for once, Jeff, the most masculine of names.

01:38:14 Speaker_07
But since there was no hard evidence linking Dylan to the murder just yet, and since there was little evidence linking him directly to Elizabeth Short, the LAPD was forced to let him go free.

01:38:24 Speaker_04
But concerning the LAPD... There's so much evidence!

01:38:27 Speaker_07
All circumstantial, and it's all just shit he said. And they did take the strap, and they sent it off to the lab, and they're like, nothing here, it's been scrubbed clean. It's all circumstantial, it's all just weird shit.

01:38:41 Speaker_05
There are no pictures of Leslie Dillon with Elizabeth Short. There's no evidence. There's no physical evidence that connects him to the scene of the crime. Driver destroyed all ways of making a legitimate investigation by doing this this way.

01:38:59 Speaker_05
It is why, unfortunately, even though I love that he's a maverick and I love his style and I like the fact that he decided to beg for forgiveness instead of ask for permission. That's my style. I enjoy that. But he legitimately fucked up everything.

01:39:14 Speaker_05
Yeah. And so this guy, he also was, I'm going to be fair and say Deriver was also going like, well, you sure you didn't kill the black dolly up?

01:39:24 Speaker_05
Like he was like pressuring this other psychopath that was like, while it was just Deriver and the gangster squad, it kind of felt like maybe a game. And then they tortured him a bunch.

01:39:36 Speaker_07
Yeah, but concerning the LAPD, there was a confluence of events around this time that left a bad taste in a lot of mouths. See, as it turned out, Jeff Connors did actually exist.

01:39:47 Speaker_07
He was found in the town of Gilroy at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. As it turned out, Jeff Connors was a 40-year-old busboy, pulp fiction writer, and failed actor turned cosmetic salesman.

01:39:58 Speaker_05
Yeah, I'm Jeff. Yeah, I'm a 40-year-old busboy, pulp fiction writer, and I'm a failed actor turned cosmetic salesman. What's going on? And he actually was a friend of Leslie Dillon. But he was questioned at length while Dillon walked free.

01:40:21 Speaker_07
The LAPD police chief had also made a total reversal on Dylan. Where he's just days prior to Dylan's release, it had been publicly said that they had incontrovertible evidence that Dylan was in LA at the time of the murder.

01:40:33 Speaker_07
The chief now said that Dylan had actually been in San Francisco at the time.

01:40:37 Speaker_05
Is my buddy Leslie in trouble or something? Is something going on? Did he take like the wrong hors d'oeuvres or something from a restaurant? What's going on here? I'm Jeff. I'm just, I wanted to be an actor, but now I'm a cosmetic salesman.

01:40:47 Speaker_05
So I don't really know what the big deal is. He didn't cut a woman in half, did he?

01:40:51 Speaker_07
He's been talking about that for years. I was hoping he didn't do it.

01:40:53 Speaker_05
I just thought it was kind of like a funny story or whatever.

01:40:56 Speaker_07
Mom Jeffs though. The cops also stopped making the point that Dylan knew secret facts about the murder, the mutilation details. So the media was left once again with suspicions that something in the Black Dahlia case was being covered up by the cops.

01:41:10 Speaker_07
Dylan, however, began talking himself to the press, and he had a very different story to tell about the treatment he'd received at the hands of Dr. Joseph Paul Deriver and the LAPD, much of which could very well be true.

01:41:22 Speaker_07
Dylan claimed that Deriver lured him in with the promise of a job as a doctor's secretary.

01:41:27 Speaker_05
That is true, though. That was a part of the hook to get him to come to Vegas, was him being like, yes, of course I'll hire the suspect for the Black Dahlia murder.

01:41:38 Speaker_01
To be my receptionist.

01:41:40 Speaker_07
Yeah, no, Deriver did all kinds of horrible, weird, illegal shit.

01:41:46 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:41:46 Speaker_07
Yeah, but then Dillon said that Deriver handcuffed him and kept him in custody for weeks. Dillon said he'd never claimed that his friend Jeff Connors was the murderer, nor that he'd ever even known who the killer actually was.

01:41:57 Speaker_07
But that also doesn't explain why the cops went and talked to Jeff Connors. Yeah, especially if he's all the way in fucking Gilroy. Yeah.

01:42:03 Speaker_07
Dylan also said, and this part I believe, that the LAPD handcuffed him to a radiator with the heat turned all the way up during their interrogation.

01:42:12 Speaker_07
The driver, meanwhile, played good cop, saying that if Dylan confessed, they'd treat him well, like a sick boy instead of a common criminal.

01:42:19 Speaker_05
You want some ice cream? You want a popsicle? Might be hard next to your fucking heater. Listen though, I'll get you a little bit of ice cream if you just admit to the murder, if you did the Black Dahlia murder, okay? You want some Dippin' Dots?

01:42:32 Speaker_05
You feeling okay there, buddy?

01:42:34 Speaker_07
It was also uncovered that Dr. Deriver may or may not have been completely upfront about his background.

01:42:40 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:42:40 Speaker_07
The Los Angeles Daily News discovered that Deriver's real name was Joseph Israel, so a city councilman called for a public hearing to investigate Deriver's credentials.

01:42:50 Speaker_07
Now, this is often pointed to as something that discredits everything Deriver ever said or did, notwithstanding all the unconstitutional and illegal shit that he did.

01:42:58 Speaker_07
But the hearing did not discuss the Black Dahlia case at all, and Deriver was allowed to keep his job at the end of the hearing.

01:43:08 Speaker_05
You're bad at it, and you're a bad person, but I can't fire you. Goddammit you're attractive.

01:43:16 Speaker_07
Thank you. But even though the arrest of Leslie Dillon had been a fiasco that resulted in a $100,000 false arrest lawsuit that was later dropped, some interesting information did come to light as a result.

01:43:28 Speaker_07
Through Leslie Dillon, the cops did find and question Jeff Connors. And while it was obvious that Leslie Dillon was using the name Jeff Connors as an alter ego, Connors was not a dead end. See, Connors himself was full of shit.

01:43:43 Speaker_07
He told police that he'd hung out with Elizabeth Shore at the night before she'd been murdered.

01:43:57 Speaker_05
You know, Liz, she came over, we were hanging out. It was us, John Wayne, we were hanging out and we were just having a blast.

01:44:02 Speaker_05
We took the Hindenburg and we took it to Lenny Dykstra's house, who's soon going to be a Mets player about 40 years from now.

01:44:09 Speaker_04
Yeah, can you cash a check for me?

01:44:13 Speaker_07
Well, Connors was known, he was a Walter Mitty type of character. You know, he would tell people that he'd acted in movies when he never did. And he was just known to make up stories to make himself more interesting.

01:44:22 Speaker_05
And him and Leslie were very similar. They were like two buddies. Yeah. They're very similar in that way.

01:44:28 Speaker_07
Yeah, but Jeff Connors was sort of the fun part of that.

01:44:33 Speaker_07
He was the fun guy that made up fun stories and Leslie Dillon was the guy, the very dark side of that, who says horrible things like, supposing you did cut a woman in half that you could maybe stick your penis inside of her and see it stick out of the bottom.

01:44:45 Speaker_05
Is it bad to say that I feel like these guys are my two wolves? Like, inside of me, that I have a Leslie Dillon in me, and I have a Jeff Connors in me.

01:44:56 Speaker_04
I really enjoy your lies.

01:44:59 Speaker_07
Your lies are fun. Your lies are gross. But in checking out Connors' alibi, they came across his ex-wife, who had some very interesting actual connections to the case.

01:45:11 Speaker_07
Jeff's ex-wife knew nightclub owner Mark Hansen, and she had lived with Mark Hansen after her divorce from Jeff.

01:45:22 Speaker_07
Leslie Dillon had also showed up to Jeff's ex-wife's house after he was arrested and set free, shouting through a closed door that she better not say shit to the police about anything she knew or else.

01:45:37 Speaker_07
So, another connection between Leslie Dillon and Mark Hansen, however faint, was made. And the Gangster Squad was slowly connecting the dots as far as what may have really happened to Elizabeth Short.

01:45:50 Speaker_07
The entire scenario, however, began to come into sharp focus when the Gangster Squad discovered reports of a motel room in Los Angeles that had been found covered in blood and feces just after Elizabeth Short's murder.

01:46:05 Speaker_07
And it's with that disgusting little room that we'll return next week for Black Dahlia Part 3.

01:46:13 Speaker_05
Part 3! We're gonna- I still wonder, can the killer of Elizabeth Short be both the same man? that impetuously tortured her, beat her to death in disorganized fashion, right?

01:46:27 Speaker_05
Ragged face cuts, all of the weird sexual play, all this like the kind of what the marks of a disorganized killer. And can they also be the same person that will surgically put them in half, like literally cut them in half and dispose of them?

01:46:43 Speaker_05
And I still don't know if it can be just one man. Well, it seems hard. It does.

01:46:48 Speaker_04
You need helping hands. I just put together a bench, you know, and I was just like, I need another pair of hands.

01:46:55 Speaker_05
I bleed when I put together an Ikea-like chair. But there's a lot left to cover here. Yeah. We got this ... Right now, to me, it seems like it's clearly fucking Leslie. But there is ... It's cloudy. It's murky.

01:47:14 Speaker_07
Well, there's three parts for a reason. Yes.

01:47:16 Speaker_05
It's cloudy.

01:47:16 Speaker_07
It is very murky.

01:47:17 Speaker_05
And we're going to come through some couple, I've got a couple other suspects under my belt that I want to talk about eventually too, because there's a lot of fucking guys out there because we didn't even get to the butchers.

01:47:26 Speaker_08
Yeah.

01:47:27 Speaker_05
We haven't talked about the werewolf murders. We haven't talked about like, it's kind of crazy, dude. It's getting, it just, this is one of those things that just keeps going.

01:47:34 Speaker_07
Yeah. It's a massive story and there are a million different theories.

01:47:36 Speaker_04
I also feel like, you know, as someone who likes like older movies, I feel like there's like things taken from this story that's in like several different movies. Oh yeah dude! Just like little pieces here and there and stuff. It's very interesting.

01:47:49 Speaker_07
Yeah, very much so. And also I really want to thank our team on this one who's done a fantastic job. I want to thank Shaw, I want to thank Joel, I want to thank Carolina for her help in editing the script on these last couple episodes.

01:47:59 Speaker_07
It's really been like a nice team LPN effort here for the Black Dahlia series.

01:48:03 Speaker_05
And I'm loving this, you know, I love this story about this dead woman. Go to patreon.com slash lastpodcast on the left to watch us scream. We can flop around. Go to twitch.tv slash lpntv because we are, I guess it's already past it.

01:48:18 Speaker_05
We did the LPN Funhaus last night. Yeah. And I'm upset with my choices. I don't even know what I'm doing yet. Because we're about to go in to do it. Because it's in the future but it's in the past. Yes.

01:48:28 Speaker_07
Yeah. Indeed. And also don't forget to go to lastpodcastontheleft.com to check out where we're going to be playing a show near you. We're going to be coming to all kinds of fucking places this coming year.

01:48:40 Speaker_04
The show's hot right now by the way guys. We just, that New York show was fucking nuts. It was incredible.

01:48:45 Speaker_07
No, no, no. We're fucking, we're rolling on, we're firing on all fucking cylinders with this one. We've got Atlanta, Georgia on January 11th, Dallas, Texas, February 22nd, Nashville, Tennessee, March 14th, Detroit, Michigan, April 18th.

01:48:58 Speaker_07
Cannot fucking wait to go to the record stores in Detroit and Toronto, Ontario on May 3rd. Also can't wait to check out the record stores there. Just fantastic record store towns, both of them.

01:49:08 Speaker_02
Can't wait to see all of you. And hail Sweet Satan. And Hakeem.

01:49:13 Speaker_04
Hail, um, who's cool today? Count Basie. Yeah, that's good.