Buried Bones Halloween Special: The Black Dahlia

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Speaker 5 I'm Kate Winkler Dawson. I'm a journalist who's spent the last 25 years writing about true crime.

Speaker 2 And I'm Paul Holes, a retired cold case investigator who's worked some of America's most complicated cases and solved them.

Speaker 5 Each week, I present Paul with one of history's most compelling true crimes.

Speaker 2 And I weigh in using modern forensic techniques to bring new insights to old mysteries.

Speaker 5 Together, using our individual expertise, we're examining historical true crime cases through a 21st-century lens.

Speaker 4 Some are solved, and some are cold.

Speaker 5 Very cold. This is Buried Bones.

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Speaker 5 Thank you all for being here.

Speaker 2 It's amazing.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and it's our first live show. We've never done anything like this before.

Speaker 2 Hey, Kate, how are you?

Speaker 5 Hey, Paul. I'm doing well.
How about you?

Speaker 2 I'm doing great. I'm here on this cruise.

Speaker 5 I can't believe I'm.

Speaker 2 You know, one of the things about this case that we're going to talk about,

Speaker 2 If you're true crime aficionados, you of course have heard about the black dahlia.

Speaker 2 One of the unusual aspects of this case from something from the 1940s is there's a lot of photographs because the media was allowed at the crime scene where the victim was found.

Speaker 2 As a result, I have material that I often don't have from cases at Kate Picks, right?

Speaker 2 However,

Speaker 2 I'm just giving you a warning up front that I'm going to be having to talk about some very graphic aspects to the injuries that the victim suffered, as well as some very disturbing behaviors about the offender.

Speaker 2 So just be aware of that. I will alert you before I start really getting into those details ahead of time in case you don't want to listen to that.

Speaker 5 Let me do a little disclaimer because Paul had his disclaimer, but mine is that this is such a massive case and you'll hear why in a little bit.

Speaker 5 This has been such a massive case, there's no way we can cram this into an hour and a half episode.

Speaker 5 So if you guys have really done a deep dive, which I know some of you probably have on this case, we haven't been able to include everything.

Speaker 5 There's more suspects than people in this room, I feel like,

Speaker 5 for Black Dahlia. So we kind of went with the highlights.
Everything, all of our sources are in the public domain and also, you know, from Paul's knowledge.

Speaker 5 But we do have some authors out there who have their own opinions. And so when we talk about those opinions, we'll make sure that we mention who the authors are, for sure.

Speaker 2 Sounds good.

Speaker 5 Okay. All right.
I'm going to do very famous quote-with thing I always do. Let's set the scene.

Speaker 5 Set the scene.

Speaker 5 Okay, so we are talking about Elizabeth Short. This is in LA in 1947.
Elizabeth Short is 22 and she is sometimes called Betty or Beth. And she's a recent transplant from Medford, Massachusetts.

Speaker 5 I mean, you can tell she is striking and she, according to her friends, is very, very outgoing.

Speaker 5 And everybody thought she was going to be a Hollywood star, essentially.

Speaker 5 So I'm going to give you guys some background, and there's a lot to kind of go through before, and I'll have Paul chime in on some stuff, but we need to know more about her.

Speaker 5 My experience with this case has been because it is such a difficult case, and I'm somebody who talks about murder every single day, I've kind of avoided it until now, looking at the details, but I was really interested in her as a person.

Speaker 5 And of of course, Paul will say, because of do your line. Now I want to hear your line.

Speaker 2 Yeah, victimology is huge. You have to understand who the victim is.

Speaker 5 We need to get that printed. That's his big line.
Get him the t-shirt.

Speaker 5 Victimology is huge.

Speaker 5 So, you know, we're going to talk a little bit about her and then we'll get into the circumstances and all of that. Okay.

Speaker 5 So she had dyed jet black hair in high school, and she has these beautiful pale green eyes. And she had a nickname I had not heard before, Medford's Deanna Durbin.

Speaker 5 I think you had to be there in the 1940s to get that immediately. So this was a very famous Canadian-American soprano and actress.

Speaker 5 She got the nickname Black Dahlia in an interesting way.

Speaker 5 So she used to hang out in Long Beach at Landers Drugstore, and she got the nickname Black Dahlia, which was a riff off of a movie from 1946, which now I'm going to see the more I read about it, which is about a woman who is married to a naval officer.

Speaker 5 He comes back from the South Pacific. He finds out that she has been having an affair, and she ends up dead.
And everybody's a suspect.

Speaker 5 And so, of course, we know the irony with that is that's her nickname. So, it's I've always wondered where that nickname came from.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I didn't realize that, actually.

Speaker 5 Yeah, okay.

Speaker 5 So, the people at the drugstore thought that Elizabeth had a very unusual look. She also liked to wear black and lacy garments and flowers, And she often pinned a flower behind one ear.

Speaker 5 And she had a rose tattoo on her left thigh, which I think we'll talk about.

Speaker 2 We will be talking about that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and so she would kind of cross her legs to show off this rose tattoo.

Speaker 2 Well, what you say, Kate, you know, we're talking 19, late 1940s, and you know, tattoos have become very accepted today. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But back in the 1940s, tattoos were often looked at as almost like a criminal type of mark or military.

Speaker 2 And now you have a 22-year-old woman that has a tattoo that she likes to show off.

Speaker 2 That tells me she's got a little bit of an edge to it. She does.

Speaker 5 Yeah, very much. I mean, I remember my grandmother talking about how she was horrified, and this must have been in the 70s, if I pierced earrings on women.

Speaker 5 She always had, I have a bunch of clip-ons, pearls clip-ons, so that's kind of where we're headed with this. Yes, I think she had a little bit of an edge.

Speaker 5 so there were some things that you know I didn't know about her childhood she had asthma bronchitis also

Speaker 5 she was moody they said despondent and these are from people who liked her you know who loved her I know people could say that about me I guess every once in a while She wore makeup, a lot of makeup, they say an inch thick, which I would have to say is kind of an exaggeration, I would hope, maybe not.

Speaker 5 So here's the thing about Elizabeth Short, and I think one of the things that makes this story a mystery, and one of the reasons why people are so fascinated by it, is that Elizabeth wasn't truthful about her life.

Speaker 5 She was about some things, oftentimes not about other things, or even her location, where she was heading, what she was going to do. And so I think that makes it a really fascinating case for people.

Speaker 5 So we kind of start here. She made up a bunch of different backstories for various reasons.
My kid is calling me inexplicably on FaceTime right now, but I don't can't see it.

Speaker 5 I mean, I'm not going to take this call, but I kind of want to go, DC, there's 400 people here.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 5 So she had a lot of different backstories. So she said she worked for Western Airlines.
She said she modeled for a shop specializing in hats in Hollywood. These are very specific claims.

Speaker 5 She told her mother that she worked at a San Diego naval hospital. And sometimes she said that she was a war widow who not only lost her husband, but also their son.
son.

Speaker 5 And so, you know, my first kind of question is: I know it seems obvious, but she's obviously a complicated victim already. Sure.

Speaker 2 Well, and when you said that she's claiming that she worked or at these various locations, is she being truthful about it? No.

Speaker 2 So she's trying to portray herself as something she's not.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 my question of why is she doing that? Is she ashamed of her background and what she's actually done?

Speaker 2 Or is she trying to,

Speaker 2 she's reading the person she's talking to and she's trying to become something that that person might be interested in, either as a friend, as a romantic partner.

Speaker 2 But she's wanting to manipulate how people perceive her.

Speaker 5 Well, before we approach the timeline of this case, we'll talk about one man who actually seemed very important to her. He was a guy named Matt Gordon, and that's him.
He's very handsome.

Speaker 5 And he was a World War II pilot. And they had dated.
I get the impression that they were going to get married, but he was killed in a plane crash in India.

Speaker 5 And so I had wondered if that was kind of what led her to the war widow claim. And I'll show you another picture while you talk.

Speaker 5 Like maybe she's trying to play, I mean, obviously, that's a traumatic thing for her if she's in love with this man and she loses him, but also she may be trying to take advantage of this war widow aspect whether it be for sympathy or whether you know are there benefits she could get as a result but were they married you said no they dated in miami beach okay five years before she died and he seemed very significant because later on they find some they get some of her belongings and there was an an obituary with him you know mentioned in it and everything so i think this was this was somebody who was very special and i don't see anybody else special in her life as we move forward Well and I believe offline you and I talked about her father.

Speaker 5 Yeah well that's a story coming out right here. Okay.

Speaker 2 Am I

Speaker 2 jumping ahead here?

Speaker 5 He does it sometimes but you know

Speaker 5 I'm usually polite about it. No, I like the way you're thinking though.
Okay. She told her Hollywood friends that she was an aspiring actress but she never signed up for any classes.

Speaker 5 She never auditioned anywhere. I had wondered if that was just the expectations that people had put on her because she was so, you know, different than the other kids in Medford, Massachusetts.

Speaker 2 I can believe her. She would be an aspiring actress.
She has the looks. She's in the Los Angeles region, so maybe she was hoping something would catch on.

Speaker 5 Let me tell you about a big lie that she told and then why it's significant and kind of getting into her background.

Speaker 5 So she told friends who asked, have you been, they said, have you ever been to California? And she said, no, she had been.

Speaker 5 I think right after Matt Gordon died and she went to visit her father in Vallejo

Speaker 5 and the thing about what happened with her father seems traumatizing to me right so his name was Cleo short he left Elizabeth and her mom and her four sisters in Massachusetts in 1930 and

Speaker 5 They were all led to believe that he had taken his own life. He parked his car right in front of a bridge over a river.
They never never found his body.

Speaker 5 He had faked it, faked his own death and moved to California. And

Speaker 5 then he ends up reaching out to Elizabeth and says, you know, why don't you come and visit me? And she was stunned, I have to assume. But he said, you know, he had a history of alcoholism.

Speaker 5 And he actually mailed her $200 to visit him. And she went, but I don't know what kind of a guest Elizabeth was, but she gets ejected from several different places.

Speaker 5 And this is one of the first places as her dad says after a few months, okay, you're going to have to move out at some point out of Vallejo.

Speaker 2 Sure. And so, you know, way back earlier in Elizabeth's life, she thinks her father has killed himself.
And then she loses this. boyfriend that she's very attached to.

Speaker 2 So she's suffered two traumatic losses. And then all of a sudden, her father comes back into her life.

Speaker 2 I mean, so you can imagine there's going to be a trust issue there, particularly with men and not necessarily with the pilot so much, but because of the father.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And, you know, this is obviously a man who

Speaker 5 was living some kind of a false life to make people believe his family, I mean, five kids. Yeah.
And his wife believed that he had taken his own life.

Speaker 5 So that just sets her up for right and security and everything else.

Speaker 2 No, absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Okay. So she does something interesting.
She worked at a post exchange as a clerk at Camp Cook, which was in Santa Barbara County. And so it was a training post for servicemen.

Speaker 5 It's called Something Different Now.

Speaker 5 She was named Camp Cutie, which is, I think,

Speaker 5 when she was attractive. And then she quit suddenly.
So Now we start getting into people who might have been involved, but we're not sure.

Speaker 5 She had gotten into what she described as an abusive relationship with a guy that she called Sergeant Chuck.

Speaker 5 There was a court-martial proceeding and she testified that he assaulted her and he was transferred overseas but she stayed in Santa Barbara.

Speaker 5 I don't think they ever tracked down Sergeant Chuck, but that just shows you, you know, she was at the beginning kind of gravitating towards

Speaker 5 this kind of relationship.

Speaker 2 Sure.

Speaker 2 And anytime you get involved in an investigation and you're starting to dig into the victim's background, of course, you're going to be taking a look at the men that were in her background, even years prior.

Speaker 2 Could somebody come back out of vengeance? They're vindictive. They've feel like they've been spurned and possibly cross paths with her again, tracked her down in order to exact that vengeance.

Speaker 2 And so here it sounds like at least from her perspective, this was an abusive relationship.

Speaker 2 So of course the investigators are going to kind of pay attention to this guy and figure out, well, where was he at at the time she was last seen.

Speaker 5 So, if we're catching up here, she's 19, 1943.

Speaker 5 She's been telling lies. We don't really know why.

Speaker 5 We've talked a little bit about the psychology, but there's no grifting or manipulation or law breaking until she's arrested at 19 for underage drinking.

Speaker 5 They, instead of putting her in jail, they shipped her back to Massachusetts, which didn't last very long.

Speaker 2 Sure. You know, and again, this, I think, starts going to

Speaker 2 Elizabeth's personality and maybe some of the lifestyle choices that she's wanting to make as she's getting older.

Speaker 2 I mean, obviously, underage drinking is not something that is what would be considered just a horrible thing to do, really. But at the same time, it again kind of speaks to maybe there's an edginess.

Speaker 2 to her, maybe a little bit more of a risk-taking aspect to her personality.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and I think it gets a little riskier too. So she bounced around between Medford, Miami Beach, Atlanta, and then June 1st, 1946, she gets on a Greyhound bus and goes west.

Speaker 5 She's drawn back to California.

Speaker 2 Extraordinarily independent.

Speaker 5 Yeah. She ended up in Indianapolis, then she went to Chicago, and then she landed in Long Beach.
So she had been to Vallejo to see her dad before. By early fall, though, she's in LA.

Speaker 5 And she wants to be, it sounds like, in LA. She's not there the whole time, but she'll go back and forth.
And ultimately, she ends up dying in LA.

Speaker 2 Right. And one of the things, as I didn't realize this about Elizabeth, was her familiarity with Los Angeles.
And I believe that comes into play a little bit later on here.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it does. Okay.

Speaker 5 Here's the first guy that we have to be concerned about. His name's Mark Hanson.
And her friends and acquaintances say that she was able to stay in LA, different parts of California.

Speaker 5 She was relying on friends, not just male friends, but female friends, and also on men. So she would meet men and she would date them.

Speaker 5 I'm not saying she's sleeping with all these people, but she would, you know, befriend them and date them. And then, you know, this is what complicates the case.

Speaker 5 This is one of those guys, he pops up later. So she would move between residences in Hollywood and downtown.

Speaker 5 and she seemed to gravitate toward servicemen like Matt Gordon and she was also attracted to businessmen. This would be one of them.
Mark Hansen was 55. He was Danish.
He was a businessman.

Speaker 5 He owned a theater and he was a silent partner in the Florentine Gardens Nightclub. Mover and shaker, I would say.
We don't know the real nature of their relationship.

Speaker 5 And I think people have said, oh, it has to be sexual. It didn't have to be sexual.

Speaker 5 And he becomes a suspect later on because one of the theories was that he tried to make it sexual and she rebuffed him. And this is what ended up happening.

Speaker 5 But we do know that she rented a room from him for a certain period of time right around when she was murdered in LA. She also had a boyfriend at the same time and she would stay with that guy.

Speaker 5 And I'll tell you about him in a little bit. So this is the first one.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so older gentlemen, well-resourced.

Speaker 2 You know, and this can come into play in terms of what happens the night that she disappears.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah. Okay.
We have another guy named Marvin Margolis.

Speaker 5 And we're going through these people now because they were significant in her life before she died.

Speaker 5 So when she wasn't staying at Mark Hansen's place where she was renting this room, she was living with her boyfriend. He was 20, Navy veteran.
And when they dated, he was also a medical student.

Speaker 5 And when you hear about the injuries, you'll understand why he was smack in the middle of the radar for LAPD.

Speaker 5 He was at USC. So we talked about this before.
She is in LA a lot and she's involved one way or the other in men who, you know, range from young to middle-aged.

Speaker 2 And connections based out of LA, somebody that she potentially could reach out to if she needed a favor or she needed a place to stay, possibly even cash for maybe Hanson.

Speaker 2 So, you know, she's pretty well established in the LA area. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And, you know, I know that we described her before as erratic and some, you know, kind of despondent, but she really had a lot of people who liked her for one reason or the other and people who wanted to help her.

Speaker 5 And then it sounded like,

Speaker 5 you know, she outgrew her welcome. What was the Benjamin Franklin? You're not going to know this.
The Benjamin Franklin quote, like,

Speaker 5 house guests are like fish. You should get rid of both of them within three days.
Isn't that what that quote is?

Speaker 2 I've never heard of that in my life. What are you talking about?

Speaker 5 Trust me, it's a quote.

Speaker 5 So I don't know what kind of house guest she was, but she was definitely complicated. Let's get to San Diego, and then we're quickly getting to LA, where a lot of this stuff happens, okay?

Speaker 5 So she goes down to San Diego, and winter approaches, and the holidays are coming up. And she had told her friends that she was going to visit her sister in Oakland.
She did not do that.

Speaker 5 She caught the bus to San Diego.

Speaker 5 That night before her trip, she had dinner with Mark Hansen, the older man, and then she saw a guy that she was friends with at Camp Cook, who was Carl Balsinger, and he took her to the Hollywood station, and then she goes to San Diego.

Speaker 5 So when she gets to San Diego, that's December 9th, and she ends up at this all-night Aztec theater in San Diego.

Speaker 5 And she secures a place to spend the holidays by befriending the cashier, who is a woman named Dorothy French. So, like I said, likable woman, it sounds like.

Speaker 5 But then, the fish thing, she outstayed her welcome because after the holidays, January 8th, the French family said, you got to hit the road. And so she does.
So, this is where she ultimately ends up.

Speaker 5 So, she ends up at the Biltmore.

Speaker 5 And this will be interesting to talk about. This is a very upscale hotel.
There is a man who we'll talk about in a little bit. His name is Robert Redd is his nickname, Manley.

Speaker 5 And this is a friend of hers. He was 25 years old and married, salesman.
He picks her up in San Diego and he drives her to the Biltmore Hotel in downtown LA. He drops her off at 6.30 p.m.

Speaker 5 So this is all we know about this last night. He drops her off the hotel.
He doesn't go in. He says she's in the hotel and she comes back out at 10 o'clock.

Speaker 5 She's wearing a black suit, white fluffy blouse, black suede high heels, white gloves. She heads south on Olive Street.
And then we don't know what happened after that.

Speaker 5 We know the state that she was found in, but she vanishes. We don't know what happened in the hotel.
Paul asked me, well, was she at the bar with anybody? Never reported any of that.

Speaker 5 So she went in the hotel, came out, and then that was that.

Speaker 2 Well, and so now here you have a 22-year-old woman who's she's flopping, right? She's She's down in San Diego. She's making friends.

Speaker 2 She's very comfortable, just kind of probably sleeping on a sofa is the way I'm imagining it to a point.

Speaker 2 And now she's up at the Biltmore.

Speaker 2 How is she affording the Biltmore? Did somebody give her cash? Did she steal cash from somebody? What are her actual financial resources? But she gets dropped off at the Biltmore at 6.30.

Speaker 2 She's last seen leaving at 10, and she's obviously made up. She's dressing nicely.
She's going out.

Speaker 2 Now, is she purposely, is she going out to meet up with somebody? Is she going out to have some fun? Local bar, nightclub, whatever.

Speaker 2 Downtown LA, we've already established she's very, very familiar with this area. She's very comfortable, 10 o'clock at night, walking out of the Biltmore.

Speaker 2 One of the things I want to know, which we don't have access to because the case file hasn't been released, is once she was found to have been last seen and had a room at the Biltmore, did the investigators go and confirm that?

Speaker 2 Did they talk to the front office staff? Did they check her room? Were there any phone calls made from the room or out of that room? Was there anything left at the front desk for Elizabeth?

Speaker 2 You know, your typical investigative steps to compile and maybe see: was there some prearrangement that happened after she was dropped off by Manley?

Speaker 2 So that's what is interesting to me: is do they have that information or not?

Speaker 5 And I think that Paul's bringing up a really good point: in that, because LAPD hasn't released everything, clearly, because they want to work on the case currently, too,

Speaker 5 what that leads to is so much speculation. I mean, we have to speculate too, because we don't have all of the information.

Speaker 5 I mean, Paul will tell you later on that they haven't released the official autopsy, right? From

Speaker 5 he knows a lot of details about it. But because of that, that's when you end up with all of these people who have all different kinds of theories because you have to speculate.

Speaker 5 And so that's one of the things that's frustrating.

Speaker 2 And anytime you have that speculation, that's where people, when there's gaps in knowledge, that's where people will fill those gaps in and conspiracy theories come up. Yep.

Speaker 5 Okay, so this case is very theatrical in a lot of ways. And I'm going to illustrate that right now.
So there is a woman who ends up finding her body. Okay, and I'm going to describe that in a second.

Speaker 5 But I do kind of want to get this out of the way. It's clear to me that the LA newspapers and magazines, when they found key witnesses, they were asking them to kind of reenact what happened.

Speaker 5 So this is Betty Berenzer.

Speaker 5 And this is a very dramatic photo. She ends up calling the police because she discovers the body.
But I just didn't want you guys to be startled because I saw, what is happening?

Speaker 5 She's in full makeup, and so clearly they are trying to reenact something. And I just thought, this is an odd thing.
I really wanted her to be in like a nightcoat or something.

Speaker 2 You know, but it also, with one photo, it illustrates that from the very beginning, the media started setting a narrative on this case because the media was out there at the crime scene from the very get-go.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 5 Huge case.

Speaker 5 Okay, I'm going to have two crime scene photos. I am way more squeamish than any of you out there, I promise.
And so I made sure that I only picked these two photos.

Speaker 5 You can't see anything, but I think it was important for Paul to be able to see, you know, where she was found before we talk about what happened. But we shouldn't be able to see her clearly here.

Speaker 5 Okay, let me tell you what happened. So Betty is out with her daughter, and they're on South Norton Avenue in Limert Park, which is seven miles southwest of downtown LA.

Speaker 5 And on Norton, there is a vacant lot between 39th and Coliseum, and she sees what appears to be a posed mannequin. So this is the beginning of the scene.

Speaker 5 She starts describing it, and it's this mannequin that she then figures out is a body is just eight inches from the sidewalk. And it is alabaster white skin body of a woman.

Speaker 5 She is posed face up with elbows bent at right angles and legs splayed. Just above the navel, her torso is cleanly, they think surgically cut so that her body is completely bisected.

Speaker 2 All right. You know, and I think, you know, this is not where I'm going to be getting into too much graphic detail, but this is one of those

Speaker 2 extrapolations. Here, Elizabeth's body has been cut in two through the waist.
And historically, people involved in this case have said, well, it must be done by somebody with medical knowledge.

Speaker 2 And I know on previous episodes where we've had dismemberments, there always seems to be, you know, that type of opinion. And the reality is,

Speaker 2 when I look at what happened to Elizabeth, there is nothing about the transsection of her body that indicates that anybody, this person had specialized medical knowledge.

Speaker 2 You know, this is somebody who could have medical knowledge this is somebody that could be involved as a butcher a hunter somebody if you're getting into certain types of predators as they grow up they kill torture and dismember animals and they learn animal anatomy as a result But it's also just common sense.

Speaker 2 If you're going to cut a body in half, the easiest place to do that is through the abdomen.

Speaker 2 And the easiest place to cut through the spine is between two of the vertebrae versus trying to cut through bone with a knife.

Speaker 2 So, from my perspective, there is nothing about what I am seeing with the transaction or any other aspect, and I'll get into that later on, that indicates you're dealing with somebody that had to have medical training or was a surgeon.

Speaker 2 I do think what's important, though, is that the cutting her body in half, when I take a look at the ends of the wounds,

Speaker 2 they are devoid of any hemorrhage. She is absolutely dead at the time she is cut in two.
The offender is cutting her in two for transport purposes.

Speaker 2 He didn't start this transaction in cutting her while she was still alive.

Speaker 5 And I think it's interesting because when I, before you and I started this show, I always thought about dismemberment cases, that this is just somebody who's, you know, kind of a sick person.

Speaker 5 How could somebody do that? And then Paul brings up the word packaging, which I had never really heard before, in that, how do I get rid of this person efficiently and carry them somewhere,

Speaker 5 which is why, how a woman could carry a very large man, and it's all about the packaging, which I thought was interesting.

Speaker 2 Well, and it also goes to, even though Elizabeth is

Speaker 2 not a real heavy woman, she's 115 pounds, I think 5'4, 115 pounds, right? But 115 pounds is still 115 pounds. If you've ever picked picked up a 90-pound bag of cement, you go, wow, that's heavy.

Speaker 2 Let alone a floppy body that's 115 pounds. So carrying two parts of a body that each are roughly 50 to 60 pounds is a lot easier.
Plus, you're able to hide those body parts.

Speaker 2 easier within, let's say, a vehicle. There's no question the offender drove out to this location in a vehicle.
And, you know, part of this aspect of looking at her,

Speaker 2 Kate talked about how her arms are, you know, bent at the elbows. Well, the reality is

Speaker 2 her hands are above her head on each side. She's laying face up.
Her lower body, her legs are spread very wide. The body is positioned anatomically correct.

Speaker 2 The upper part and the lower part are in the right spatial situations with the upper part slightly offset.

Speaker 2 This is what what we call posing. If this offender was just dumping the body out of the car and trying to get away as fast as possible, this is not how Elizabeth would be looking.

Speaker 2 She would just be a pile right on this sidewalk. He has taken the time to put her in this position.
He is in the process. He wants that shock.
And so he is now, she's completely nude.

Speaker 2 She's been extensively cleaned. He has purposefully moved the upper body away from the lower body, both in terms of distance away from each other as well as offsetting.

Speaker 2 So anybody looking at this body would go, she's been cut in half. Of course, the splaying of the legs, she's absolutely nude, no articles of clothing on her body.

Speaker 2 But the way that her legs are splayed is indicating the sexual intent of this offender. And then there's other injuries.
to her body. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Well, let me tell you, you know, a couple more little details. And Betty goes and calls, rightly, calls the police.
The two halves are about a foot apart, which is dramatic to me.

Speaker 5 I mean, there is a clear delineation between that. There are flies everywhere and no blood.

Speaker 2 People make a lot about this. There's no blood.
And, well, she's been cut in half. So the major reservoirs of blood inside the human body have been opened up.

Speaker 2 So the manipulation of this body after it's been cut in half, you're going to have a lot of blood loss.

Speaker 2 In addition, you've got extensive cleaning that's occurred from her. However, when I'm looking at the crime scene photos, I'm seeing blood smears on her right rib cage up into her armpit.

Speaker 2 That looks like a bloody hand,

Speaker 2 you know, the offender's hand as he's manipulating the body. There's actually blood staining on the right side of...
of her head, like she had laid face

Speaker 2 on the right side, probably during transport.

Speaker 2 this idea that there is absolutely no blood in her body is like, it doesn't mean anything to me.

Speaker 2 It's not like she was purposefully you know like hung up and you know like what you see with animals and her neck cut. That's not is what what is going on here.

Speaker 2 She's just lost the primary reservoirs of blood in her body and then as those body parts are manipulated some of the smaller reservoirs of blood of course will start seeping out.

Speaker 2 I'm pretty confident that the offender probably did have some blood staining inside his vehicle or whatever packaging material he used to get those body parts out to this location.

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Speaker 5 Let me give you some details about the timeline, and you can tell me what you think about this. Okay, so she leaves the Biltmore at 10 p.m.

Speaker 5 She's discovered by Betty the next day at 10:45 in the morning. This is what they say: post-mortem lividity is apparent on the top part of her entire body, especially on her upper right leg.

Speaker 5 But rigor mortis hasn't set in yet.

Speaker 2 So lividity is after you die, your heart stops pumping. The blood settles down to gravity.
When the body is turned over, that blood can then represition itself inside the body.

Speaker 2 But if the body is left in a position for a long enough period of time, the blood will kind of stick to where it settled with gravity. This is what we call lividity.

Speaker 2 So externally, externally, we can see this purplish hue on the body. Here, in this case, you're starting to see lividity, which is described on the upper side of, let's say, Elizabeth's thigh.

Speaker 2 Yet, her thigh is

Speaker 2 as if she were lying on her back. That lividity is inconsistent with the position that her lower body was found.

Speaker 2 That tells me that her body was in a different position with her thigh face down, the blood settling with gravity, and it was in that position for a long enough period of time to where now that blood has set, that lividity has set, and then her body was manipulated.

Speaker 2 So that's some sequence, some temporal information that I can use to help start reconstructing what happened to Elizabeth after she died. Can you go back one slide?

Speaker 2 Take a look at where her body has been dumped. And again, I use that term dump in terms of where it's been deposited.
The offender has has purposefully chosen this location.

Speaker 2 Everything the offender has done about where her body has been put is purposeful.

Speaker 2 If somebody's just trying to hide her body, is he going to be dumping it right off the side of the sidewalk in a neighborhood?

Speaker 2 It was a woman out pushing her baby in a stroller that found Elizabeth's body.

Speaker 2 He is purposely choosing this location because he wants it found and he wants it found in that shocking state that he posed her body in.

Speaker 2 For those that are involved in construction, you know, neighborhood construction, you know, obviously this is the same street.

Speaker 2 The neighborhood, the contractors have already laid the sidewalks, already formed the driveways and the street, and probably all the other stuff, as there's going to be a newer phase of construction happening in this neighborhood.

Speaker 2 He chose this location because he knew he would be able to spend the time to pose the body

Speaker 2 and not be seen. He didn't go up to where the houses are, but he knew probably from familiarity that in short order, once

Speaker 2 the sun comes up, her body was going to be found. Tells me he likely knew about this neighborhood ahead of time.
So he must have some familiarity with this particular part of LA.

Speaker 2 Now, does that mean he's a lifelong resident of LA? No, it's just like he is not just doing this

Speaker 2 kind of what I'd call it a dump and dash type of thing where he's just finding a somewhat of an isolated location, getting rid of the body. This is all purposeful.

Speaker 2 He has planned this and he is wanting attention and he is wanting to shock the people that are now going to get involved in the case.

Speaker 5 This will maybe change stuff for you. I just want to be very clear on the timeline.
So she leaves the French family in San Diego on the 8th of January. She goes the next day with Red Manly up to LA.

Speaker 5 He drops her off at the Biltmore. That's January 9th.
She is discovered by Betty five to six days later. So that's why there's a debate over her time of death.

Speaker 2 Okay. And then I would say she was probably kept alive for a period of time.

Speaker 5 That seems like a long time. for it to be a stranger, or is that not a long time? I mean, we've all heard the awful stories about about people being kept for years.

Speaker 5 I'm just wondering, what do you think?

Speaker 2 You know I think there's going to be some insight as to not necessarily specifically who, but the type of offender that killed Elizabeth and you'll see where there is

Speaker 2 a possibility that that offender could have kept Elizabeth alive for a period of time.

Speaker 5 Let me tell you one more detail.

Speaker 5 When they move her body to their vehicle, the deputies notice that the grass under the body is still wet with dew, and they think that that must mean that she was murdered somewhere else about 10 to 12 hours earlier and brought to the site earlier in the morning.

Speaker 2 Sure, so the dew has set and then the body is placed on it and by 1045 in the morning, the uncovered grass is dry, but the grass that's underneath her or the plant material is still wet.

Speaker 2 So I think that's actually a good observation. It doesn't necessarily, it shortens the window, but because

Speaker 2 when you start talking about estimating the

Speaker 2 time of death, you know, these are big windows we're talking about. So he's saying, you know, pathologists saying 10 or 12 hours, it could be hours on either side of that range.

Speaker 5 So at this point, do you want to get into more detail about what's on the scene or have you covered everything as far as the way that she's found?

Speaker 2 Well, I think, you know, in terms of the observations at the scene or just from initial observations at autopsy, and most people who are familiar with the case are aware that her mouth has been cut on both sides from the corner of the mouth extending towards each ear.

Speaker 2 And so that's a very visual aspect that even the you know the media and the the person that found Elizabeth notes. That that is a very startling looking injury that the offender inflicted.

Speaker 2 The other thing that's important to know at this point in time is that Elizabeth's both wrists showed evidence of binding marks. Both ankles showed that, as well as there appeared to have been

Speaker 2 some cordage of some type that had been wrapped around her neck. However, it had not been used to strangle her.

Speaker 5 Okay, so they found several fibers, which they concluded were bristles from a stiff brush, are found in her facial lacerations, her breast wounds, her pubic region.

Speaker 5 On a tire track found in a nearby driveway, there is a smear that might have been left by the heel of a bloody shoe.

Speaker 5 And other blood spots are found one inch from the driveway's curb and on a canvas bag emptied of cement.

Speaker 5 They eventually match Elizabeth's fingerprints to the ones once she got arrested, so that's how they were able to ID her.

Speaker 2 Right. You know, and so, you know, of course, the

Speaker 2 brush bristles, you know, there's no question Elizabeth's body was extensively cleaned. And it's more than just, you know, rinsing the body in a bathtub.

Speaker 2 The offender is actually taking a brush, it sounds like, in order to be able to more thoroughly scrub her body. Now, this is in the day well before DNA and ABO testing.
You know, so

Speaker 2 why is he spending so much effort to clean the body?

Speaker 2 You know, part of it I thought of, well, is he concerned about bloody fingerprints that he may be leaving behind on her body, which is a possibility.

Speaker 2 You know, but also there's just a practical aspect. He's wanting to transport Elizabeth's body.
And if it's very, very bloody,

Speaker 2 you know, now it's a little bit more care that he has to take not to get the blood in his vehicle or on other things. So he may just be,

Speaker 2 I need to clean this body up.

Speaker 2 I also think there may be other things going on, and I'll address that later.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I was going to ask if you've seen this situation in more modern cases where it's not any of that, it's like a fetish or something. Like they feel that need to cleanse the victim.

Speaker 2 Well, you know, when I've had cases in which victims, and sometimes there are sexual assault victims that are made to clean, they are made to go in the shower, and sometimes you have other bodies where, like, I've got one case in which bleach had been extensively used on this woman's body.

Speaker 2 You know, in this day and age, offenders are paying attention to how they can be identified. And of course, DNA is a huge thing.

Speaker 2 And so they're understanding, I need to get rid of the DNA containing evidence. That's where in the 1940s, what is the offender thinking could be used to get him caught?

Speaker 2 And it would be fingerprints back then.

Speaker 5 Okay. Now listen to this.
Woof. I don't understand people who think like this.
So we have a lot of suspects. In the 40s, there were, during the initial investigation, 60 people who confessed.

Speaker 5 Can you imagine? I mean, poor, I don't want to feel sorry for LAPD too much, but poor LAPD, and this is even worse, Paul.

Speaker 5 So early in the investigation, the detectives received more than 400 clues from amateur sleuths. And by the time 2021, just four years ago, comes about,

Speaker 5 the number of tips is so great that LAPD had to stop accepting calls about the case.

Speaker 5 You know, I mean, it's incredible. So 500 people confessed by 96.

Speaker 2 So, well, you know, this is where, you know, people will criticize law enforcement. Why doesn't law enforcement release more information about cases?

Speaker 2 It's because unless you have that identifying evidence, like DNA evidence that you know and can prove came from the killer, you need to be able to have details that during an interview, the actual killer would be the only one that would know those details.

Speaker 2 It's what we call holdbacks, because the reality is that law enforcement sees sees these nut jobs that are willing to confess to a homicide like this. This is not just in these high-profile cases.

Speaker 2 You have these types of individuals that will come forward in the most mundane case.

Speaker 2 Or you have other people out there in the general public that are sending in, you know, during the time of this case, handwritten letters.

Speaker 2 And they think they have some sort of knowledge that's going to help law enforcement solve the case. And they're all false leads.
And then now today, because of the internet and

Speaker 2 all these online sleuths, and some of them are, I'm not going to disparage them all. Some of them are really talented.

Speaker 5 Don't disparage them because some of them are probably here. Yes.

Speaker 5 Sorry.

Speaker 2 But I bore the brunt of the early online sleuthing community, both for the Zodiac and the Golden State Killer case.

Speaker 2 And I can tell you, it is overwhelming when you are a sole investigator and you have 30 people giving you tips and asking, Well, what have you done with my tip?

Speaker 2 I can tell you, San Francisco PD basically for Zodiac is going, we're done because we can't deal with the amount of stuff that's coming in.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Well, let's talk about our first viable suspect. It's our man, Red Manly, the 25-year-old married salesman, who was the last person beside the person who killed her to see Elizabeth Short.

Speaker 5 So he is arrested because of that, right? So they put him in custody, search him, question him,

Speaker 5 and then the beginning of more theatrical photos.

Speaker 5 He's taking a polygraph test.

Speaker 2 He looks suspicious, doesn't he?

Speaker 5 Even in the 40s, I mean, my second book was based in the 20s. Even in the 20s, they knew that polygraphs should not be admitted in court.
So he passed, just for the record, he passes two of them.

Speaker 2 So he passes two polygraphs.

Speaker 2 Does he have an alibi?

Speaker 5 He does have an alibi, and as we'll find out, he is trying to be helpful in the case, but we don't know how helpful. Okay.

Speaker 2 You know, so, I mean, this is, you know, the Investigation 101, the last person to see Elizabeth alive. You know, it's like, okay, what happened after you two parted ways?

Speaker 2 And did you guys reconvene at some point after she left the Biltmore?

Speaker 5 Carl Palsinger was the old friend, it doesn't even say boyfriend, old friend from Camp Cook.

Speaker 5 And he's the one that took her to the Hollywood bus station to go down to San Diego for the holidays to live with the Frenches. So he's interviewed the day that Red is released.

Speaker 5 Carl looks suspicious, the first of many.

Speaker 5 And in 41, Bausinger's schoolmate in Kansas City was murdered. Her name was Layla Adele Welsh.
She was a beauty pageant queen in the late 1930s. So she was beaten with a stonemason's hammer.

Speaker 5 Her throat was slashed with a sharp seven-inch long butcher knife. And then her killer fled with a piece of flesh cut from her buttocks.
These details are tame.

Speaker 5 compared to what we're going to be talking about. So this is, you know, another

Speaker 5 warning. So her brother was tried for the murder, but he was acquitted.
And then he moves to LA. Carl moves to LA

Speaker 5 and Detective Brown tries to get in touch with him, but learns that he's left the state, which is suspicious, I'll grant you. They track him down to St.

Speaker 5 Louis, Missouri, and he is forced to take a polygraph test and he passes.

Speaker 2 Sure. You know, and this is where

Speaker 2 In a case like this, and you're digging into Elizabeth's life and you run across somebody that has a connection to her that also is associated with another horrific crime, you're going to pay attention to that.

Speaker 2 However, I can't tell you how many times looking at suspects do I find weird circumstances that initially go, oh, that seems important.

Speaker 2 And then it turns out I end up eliminating that guy with DNA, and it was just a coincidence.

Speaker 2 One of the things I've experienced personally with Golden State Killer is that when you cast a wide enough net, let's say I were to go and investigate every single man in the audience, I can guarantee I will find some of you

Speaker 2 that have weird circumstances where I'm going to go, you know what, I better dig into him some more. That is just part of working these types of cases.
I can't say his name is Carl.

Speaker 2 I can't say Carl is Elizabeth's killer, or I can't eliminate him either.

Speaker 2 But it doesn't necessarily rise to a level to where I'm blown away based off the fact that he's just associated with another woman who was horrifically killed. He wasn't even convicted of that crime.

Speaker 5 So now we've insulted the audience who are the amateur sleuths and all the men, it looks like, in the audience. Okay, so to me, this is the most kind of tangible set of clues that we have.

Speaker 5 So there is a package of her belongings that arrives eight days after her body is found, and it's sent to the examiner newspaper.

Speaker 5 The envelope has a faint odor of gasoline, kerosene, or rubbing alcohol. There are, you can see, cut-out letters.
On the front, it reads, Here is Dahlia's belongings, letter to follow.

Speaker 5 Inside, there are 23 items belonging to Elizabeth, confirmed. I mean, including her social security card.

Speaker 5 So there's newspaper excerpts, photographs, business cards, birth certificate, social security card, and that obituary I told you about that she carried around.

Speaker 5 And there's also an address book from Mark Hansen, the Danish businessman, the 55-year-old. And so there's that detail too, and I could tell you about that, but you want to talk first?

Speaker 2 Well, you know, these belongings, to me, look like, you know, items that she likely would keep in her purse. She's moving around so much that she probably would keep those with her.

Speaker 2 So when she's setting out to go do whatever she was going to do that night, she's got her purse with her. The killer ends up acquiring these belongings.

Speaker 2 And then this is entirely consistent with the psychology of how her body is posed for the shock. He wants attention.
Now he's seeking attention. He could have sent these in to law enforcement.

Speaker 2 Do you think the law enforcement would have run to the newspaper and say, look what we got? No, he sent them purposefully to a media outlet. What does this sound like? Zodiac, right?

Speaker 2 In terms of the type of psychology, I want attention.

Speaker 2 And I'm going to tell you right now, whoever killed Elizabeth is not the Zodiac. But I'm just saying that there is this narcissist need to reach out.
We see this with BTK and Dennis Rader.

Speaker 2 This is very different than Joseph DiAngelo, the Golden State killer, who does not want any attention at all.

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Speaker 5 There's more stuff, as I had mentioned in this package that was sent.

Speaker 5 So there is in her belongings a brown imitation leather-bound book with gold letters 1937, as you can see, and Mark N. Hansen printed on the cover.

Speaker 5 Inside, the addresses for nearly 75 men are listed in Elizabeth's handwriting.

Speaker 5 Even though the envelope has been doused with something, gasoline, I think is what I had heard last, and handled by a lot of postal workers, the detective does for fingerprints, but he can't find anything.

Speaker 5 So, gasoline or any kind of solvent, would that just be a no-go for people pulling prints off off something like that?

Speaker 2 Well, what's interesting, if you go back to the last slide, you know, as I look at these, first, even though there's maybe an odor of kerosene or gasoline on these items, you know, there's actual ink on these items that with that type of solvent would start to run.

Speaker 2 I'm not seeing that. Plus, the here is Dahlia's belongings, that magazine article, words out of magazine that's been taped or glued onto there.
You can see these smudges.

Speaker 2 Well, that to me looks like it's been processed by a fingerprint processing technique called an anhydrin.

Speaker 2 So I'm questioning whether or not these items were truly doused in a solvent.

Speaker 2 There may have been an odor, but that may be more because maybe they were up against something in this guy's trunk, and some of that odor got onto these paper items.

Speaker 2 It's just like when you pump gas, you know, and and you get in your car and you can smell the gas on your hands.

Speaker 2 I have a feeling that's more like that because I'm not seeing evidence that these things were saturated with a solvent.

Speaker 5 If this was some kind of an effort by the killer to cover up something, does that mean between that and scrubbing her body, is that law enforcement or somebody out there who has knowledge like that?

Speaker 5 It has to be, right?

Speaker 2 Well, or as a reasonably intelligent person that is understanding that there are things that law enforcement does that could get him caught. And so he's taking steps.

Speaker 2 This is risk management by the offender.

Speaker 2 And so you see offenders that are, well, I'll say, sophisticated, intelligent, that will plan their crimes to be able to carry out the crimes so they can get away with them.

Speaker 2 And then there's the post-offense behavior in terms of how do I continue to do things to not get caught. But he is taking elevated risk by communicating.

Speaker 2 He's basically saying, look, I've got her belongings. And, you know, he's taking the time not to have his handwriting, but it's something where he is reaching out to law enforcement.
So

Speaker 2 there is a compulsion that he has. Part of his psychology is to need this attention.
He wants this case to blow up as big as possible.

Speaker 5 Well, there are an awful lot of things, people reaching out, writing letters at this point once this information comes out.

Speaker 5 There was a story that I told you that I think I'll just throw out there to the audience listeners here.

Speaker 5 The examiner says that they've got a phone call from a mysterious person saying, I'm going to send this package, you know, and it happened the day before the package arrived.

Speaker 5 And maybe this will be kind of the beginning of the investigation. But we talked about maybe dismissing that kind of a phone call.

Speaker 2 Well, this is where if the killer is calling into a reporter, is that reporter immediately calling up law enforcement and said, I just got a phone call from this guy? That's what I would want to know.

Speaker 2 How early was this documented before a package actually arrived?

Speaker 2 I kind of suspect that once the package arrived, the reporter said, Oh, I remember receiving a phone call. Then I question,

Speaker 2 is that reporter telling the truth or is he looking for attention himself?

Speaker 5 Well, they get a bunch of letters to different newspaper outlets, and nothing can be attributed directly to the killer except for the package of her stuff.

Speaker 5 And the police suspect that the journalists are actually writing the letters themselves to get attention for the newspapers.

Speaker 5 And so, any letter that came that could have really been from the killer was pretty much immediately dismissed because there was no information that was unique.

Speaker 5 And I know how important you say that is.

Speaker 2 Well, and again, here's now you have people who are wanting to insert themselves into the investigation.

Speaker 2 Either they genuinely think that they are helping, or they get some level of satisfaction from the fact that they are part of the investigation, even if it's so small as sending in a letter saying, Hey, you need to look at so-and-so.

Speaker 5 I think the LA Police Museum has a great display, which is all they call them crank letters. That's literally what the display is: crank letters and black dahlia.
So, I wanted to put that one up.

Speaker 5 Okay, another big break comes with the dumpster, what I refer to as the dumpster discovery.

Speaker 5 So, January 25th, Elizabeth's black patent leather purse and one of her suede high-heel shoes are recovered.

Speaker 5 And they had been reported the previous day by a cafe owner who found it, you know, in the dumpster. He had spotted the items.

Speaker 5 And this was about 15 blocks, about two miles from where Elizabeth's body had been found. He says they were not there.
the night before, Thursday night, the two days before.

Speaker 5 And he said that by the time the police acted, the trash had been collected and dumped at a nearby byproducts plant. And it's, you know, eight miles away from the cafe at this point.

Speaker 5 And they find the purse and the shoes.

Speaker 5 I'll tell you in a second the rest of the story about who identifies these things, but it's a big question mark whether this purse and this shoe belong to Elizabeth.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 You know, and that becomes a question because if that is her purse, and then he had the killer actually mailing or, yeah, sending in her belongings, you know, the purse is the source of that type of material.

Speaker 2 You know, but the question is, is that truly her purse? In this day and age, we might be able to do that with DNA or fingerprint technology.

Speaker 2 There isn't enough unique markings on this purse, at least on the outside, to be able to say, well, that just matches exactly. You know, it has to be Elizabeth's purse.

Speaker 5 So Red is back in the picture, the one who dropped her off in LA to begin with, and he identifies the purse and the shoe as hers.

Speaker 5 The issue is that friends that she had said, we've never seen that purse. That is not her purse.
And that's when the question is: is this even this woman's purse? Nobody knows for sure.

Speaker 5 Red says, in dramatic fashion, I can still smell her perfume on it, even though it's been in a dumpster for however many days. So I don't know if Red's a reliable source here.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 you know, here you first

Speaker 2 have this suspect handling evidence while he's smoking a cigarette.

Speaker 5 No gloves.

Speaker 2 So there's a problem there. And second, this looks like it.

Speaker 5 He's lit, though. I don't think he's lit that cigarette yet.

Speaker 2 But there's a photographer

Speaker 2 capturing a photo of this. Is this the media a reporter doing? I mean, this is just showing the media contamination in this particular case.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean.

Speaker 2 And other types of contamination.

Speaker 5 And, you know, the cafe owner says, I have no idea. They took this away, this stuff away before after he had reported it, so he he doesn't know whether it's hers or not anyway.
Okay,

Speaker 5 so now we return to Mark Hansen. Now, this is another angle of him.
So they start to focus on Mark Hansen, and I cannot understate enough how

Speaker 5 important it was for them to solve this case. I mean, the pressure was really incredible on LAPD, and I think in some ways still is, probably otherwise they'd be looking for all kinds of help.

Speaker 5 And so they are looking, again, they go back to every man that they could find in her life and they end up finding some more but they look at Mark Hansen because they start talking to mutual friends and they said that apparently Mark had a yin for Elizabeth and he treated her differently than other women that he had had in his life he had two dresses tailored for her.

Speaker 5 He was ticked off when she would bring her boyfriend around.

Speaker 5 When they questioned him, he was giving contradictory statements, but not about, you know, anything that really had to do. It was more of like their relationship.
It wasn't details about the case.

Speaker 5 But they search his house and bug it also, and they can't find any evidence. What do you think about that?

Speaker 5 He's directly in her life, and

Speaker 2 he liked her. Sure.

Speaker 2 But at the same time, this is where...

Speaker 2 As I evaluate this case, up front, I can't necessarily say, you know, of like the names of the men in her life, anybody stands out above anybody else.

Speaker 2 I need to have a better understanding of the type of offender I'm looking for, as well as what kind of physical evidence might be present that I could use to either corroborate or refute statements that Hansen is saying.

Speaker 2 As of right now, he's just a man in her life. There needs to be something more

Speaker 2 that says, okay, there's something about him that potentially could indicate that he is her killer. Right now, anything that you've told me is just, it's just not, not, it's just facts about him.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and I mean, they're not going to let go of him just yet, but they're becoming very frustrated.

Speaker 5 So now we're back to the surgical precision and how they're convinced that all the way back to Jack the Ripper times, we know that with profiling, if there's something that looks even remotely like a doctor did it, poor physicians were under fire for it.

Speaker 5 So given the precision of her body, the way it was cut, medical professionals become the early suspects. So, Marvin Margulis, he was the one who was her boyfriend.
He was a medical student at USC.

Speaker 5 She would live with him off and on, but she was also living at Mark Hansen's at the same time.

Speaker 5 He had gone through part of the war and was very traumatized, PTSD. And people said that it changed his personality pretty directly.

Speaker 5 In one psychiatric report, it said that Marvin had time and training where he had ample evidence of open aggression, being resentful over not granted instruction in operating technique, which it sounds like was probably a good idea to give him instruction on that.

Speaker 5 There was no physical evidence, though.

Speaker 2 There's nothing there, to be frank. You know,

Speaker 2 this is often what I see, because I have fallen into traps myself where I start taking a look at certain circumstances about a suspect and then go, oh,

Speaker 2 there's significance in the case to these circumstances. Where I have failed, and where I often see other investigators, or even, and especially in the online community, is that people are missing.

Speaker 2 You have to establish a nexus to the crime.

Speaker 2 You're looking for the person who actually committed the crime, not somebody who had some sort of geographic location to the general proximity of where the crime occurred.

Speaker 2 You need more, you know, and this is where you really, if you start getting somebody that you're really digging into, you start narrowing the scope, if you will, starting to focus in to where now all of a sudden this man is showing a nexus to the crime, one way or another.

Speaker 2 There's something that is now popping where you go, okay,

Speaker 2 now I've got something real versus meh, he might have been in the area. Okay.

Speaker 5 So now we're going to go to a mysterious location where police wonder if this is where she was killed. Okay, so we're at the Astor Hotel, and in 1949 there's a new investigator named Frank Jimison.

Speaker 5 He takes the lead.

Speaker 5 He learned, now this is two years after this happens, he learned that there were bloody clothes that had been found in a room at the Astor Hotel, which was about four miles from where Elizabeth Short's body was found.

Speaker 5 It was described by people at the hotel, hotel workers that found it. So it was blood-soaked mattress and blankets.

Speaker 5 There were men's shoe prints that had been smeared and tracked, and human feces was all over the apartment. The Astro had an unusual guest, according to people who were there.

Speaker 5 He was a man from Europe. That was unusual for them.
And he stayed at the motel around the same time. I think they thought he was creepy.
And now they go back to Mark Hansen because he's Danish.

Speaker 5 So this is where we're going here is, you know, they find this creepy guy.

Speaker 5 They have absolutely no physical evidence from this blood-soaked scene because it happened, you know, a year and a half or two years earlier.

Speaker 2 Sure. And of course, you know, the blood-soaked mattress, the human feces, and I'll be talking about that in a little bit.

Speaker 2 You know, there is some significant aspects to that because, of course, we know Elizabeth has bled significantly. There's also aspects related to feces

Speaker 2 associated with her.

Speaker 2 Take a look at this motel. This is a motel in L.A.
Is there a chance that there was another crime that was committed that had nothing to do with Elizabeth?

Speaker 2 In law enforcement, I've been in hotel rooms and where now you have, there's a lot of blood in here. It happens.

Speaker 5 Wait, is that your phone?

Speaker 2 This is my Google assistant who just started answering a question for me.

Speaker 5 I need you, not that guy.

Speaker 2 So, you know, I think it would have been nice that somebody had reported that earlier and then they could actually have that evidence. But now

Speaker 2 you're still talking about the 1940s.

Speaker 2 You know, at best, maybe ABO testing, similar type. Now, I think you had mentioned to me offline that she was type AB.
Yep. Yeah, you know, and that's a rare blood type.

Speaker 2 So that would have been something that I would raise my eyebrows about.

Speaker 2 But two years later, and, you know, the lead now is, well, who is the creepy guy? And then now, is there a way to associate him with Elizabeth's death?

Speaker 5 So far, you know, this guy is not Mark Hansen is not directly connected except that he was in her circle so far and he had feelings for her. We don't understand the relationship.

Speaker 5 Okay, now we're going to get into, I would say, two of the most publicized because they were in books, theories that are out here. There's a doctor.
who sounds like an awful person.

Speaker 5 His name is George Hodell.

Speaker 5 Oh, see, I heard it. Somebody knows about this name.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 5 So Detective Jimison, who had taken over. Now, again, you guys, this is a year and a half to two years after this happened.
He's taken over. He is starting to look at George because

Speaker 5 this guy is, number one, a venereal disease specialist and a sex offender.

Speaker 5 So he first comes to the detective's attention in 49 because his 14-year-old daughter, this is him, 14-year-old daughter accused him of hosting orgies, sexually assaulting her, impregnating her, and then forcing her to terminate the pregnancy.

Speaker 5 This is what the doctor said. And he goes to trial, and he says she's a pathological liar.

Speaker 5 So to prove their point, the defense asks the daughter if she had told one of the male boarders that her father was a murderer of Black Dahlia, and she said she doesn't remember.

Speaker 5 And so they're trying to prove, you know, that she's a liar, and he is acquitted.

Speaker 5 And they bug his residence now in 1950 because Black Dahlia, anytime anybody mentions Black Dahlia connected to a man, this is, at this point, they're a suspect in the case. So they bug his residence.

Speaker 5 They record him saying, supposing I did kill the Black Dahlia. They couldn't prove it now.

Speaker 5 But when they try to link him to Elizabeth, the evidence doesn't hold up, but his son will circle back to it decades later.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, and I think the interesting thing about, you know, on at least what is really known about George Hodell is he was an incestuous child molester.

Speaker 2 So he's a sex offender, and part of an investigation into a sexually motivated homicide is to start taking a look at, well, who are all the sex offenders at any particular area and start digging down on them, even if there is no known connection between that sex offender and the victim, like with Elizabeth.

Speaker 2 All I can really say at this point, I can't tell you one way or another if he's the one that is Elizabeth's killer or not.

Speaker 2 I know that I have read his son's book, and I'm unconvinced about the evidence that he has put there linking his father to Elizabeth's case.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and so when we talk about that theory, so as Paul mentioned, his son has written I think several books.

Speaker 5 In 99 when George Hodell dies, his son, who is a former LAPD detective, becomes convinced that George was a sadosexual serial killer. I think sadosexual part is probably pretty accurate.

Speaker 5 I don't know about the serial killer part. And he believes that not only was his dad the killer of Elizabeth Short, but also the red lipstick killer, the green twig killer, and the Zodiac killer.

Speaker 5 Two out of three, I think we should probably do on the show, obviously, you know, because they sound really interesting. And I know you've looked into this sort of thing, this accusation.

Speaker 2 You know, I am intimately familiar with the Zodiac case.

Speaker 2 I did some work on that, and that was a case that occurred, you know, literally where in my backyard where I did my entire law enforcement career.

Speaker 2 I do not, I think what happened to Elizabeth Short is a completely different type of offender than who the Zodiac is, even though there is this narcissistic want for attention.

Speaker 2 But as I get into shortly, you will see that the types of crimes that these two offenders committed are so diametrically opposite from each other that I don't see where there is a connection.

Speaker 2 Now, these other things, the lipstick killer out of Chicago or the green twig killer, I don't know anything about those crimes at all.

Speaker 2 But I often will see where people will start to what I call overlink cases that they think, oh, the same offender committed these different series.

Speaker 2 And that's just a real phenomenon.

Speaker 2 I've seen the opposite, where now everybody talks about linkage blindness.

Speaker 2 It really does come down to evaluating the core of what happened to Elizabeth Short.

Speaker 2 And then that is where I would probably

Speaker 2 say,

Speaker 2 I'm thinking there might be over linkage with George O'Dell being these other serial killers, particularly with Zodiac. I can't really speak about the other series.

Speaker 5 Okay, the other theory that I've read about is from Larry Harnish, who was a writer for the LA Times for 27 years.

Speaker 5 He was a feature story writer, and he believes that it was Walter Alonzo Bailey, who was a surgeon who specialized in hysterectomies and mastectomies.

Speaker 5 He has been proposed as a suspect because even, well, Bailey wasn't even on the radar at the time for LAPD, anybody else, or the FBI, but his office was just a couple of blocks from the Biltmore where Elizabeth was.

Speaker 5 His estranged wife, Ruth, lived on Norton Avenue, just a block from where her body was found.

Speaker 5 And there is, and this is what I thought was most interesting, there is evidence that Bailey and the Short families knew each other, that Bailey's daughter, whose name was Barbara, was the maid of honor at Elizabeth's sister's wedding.

Speaker 5 So there's at least that connection. I think what ends up happening and what, you know, Harnish says, is that Bailey's life was in shambles when she was murdered at this point.

Speaker 5 He had not held a professional position for several years. He never recovered from the death of his son, who was 11.
He deserted his wife for a younger woman. He had a big change in personality.

Speaker 5 He died of natural causes a year later, okay, after

Speaker 5 Elizabeth died. But the cause was a lesion on the brain that can cause personality changes, as well as dementia and urges for bizarre behaviors, the way they described it.

Speaker 5 But there's still nothing, no conclusive anything with him either.

Speaker 2 No, and this is, again, we get into where there's some circumstantial aspect. His office is near downtown LA, where she was last seen.
His ex-wife is living on the actual road where her body is.

Speaker 2 So you could see, okay,

Speaker 2 he's really upset with his ex-wife. He goes out, does this horrific murder on this younger woman, and deposits her body as sort of a message to

Speaker 2 his ex. Okay, you know, that I could see a set of circumstances where maybe.

Speaker 2 But at the same time, it's just now sort of loose circumstantial stuff.

Speaker 2 And it sounds like, you know, the

Speaker 2 fact that Bailey was a surgeon that specialized in mastectomies and hysterectomies, well, this is going to play into some of the wounds that Elizabeth's body exhibited.

Speaker 2 However, I will tell you, those wounds are for different reasons

Speaker 2 and do not

Speaker 2 show

Speaker 2 somebody having

Speaker 2 a level of surgical expertise in how they were inflicted. Doesn't mean Bailey couldn't be the one who committed this crime and inflicted those wounds.

Speaker 2 You just can't draw the conclusion that it must be somebody who has advanced medical training.

Speaker 5 Okay. I want to make sure we have enough time for you to be able to go through everything you want to go through with the details of what we learned about what was probably in the autopsy.

Speaker 5 I will shorthand very quickly what happens next. We don't know if there's any DNA.
evidence that had been collected. It looks like they wanted to try to get a toxicology test.

Speaker 5 They lost her her organs in 1947.

Speaker 5 The speculation is they were thrown away after the autopsy. Post-mortem report, as we talked about before, is not available.
And

Speaker 5 it's been, I think, very, very frustrating. People have cried out that this is a cover-up from the LAPD because they screwed up.
Of course, they deny it. And they were able to analyze

Speaker 5 the blood from the fibers on her body.

Speaker 5 She's an AB, which, as you said, was

Speaker 5 a rare blood type. And they think that the bristles that were found on Elizabeth's body were made of a plant material like palm tree fibers, which are used in cheap brushes, essentially.

Speaker 5 And they're trying to settle on time of death and the kill site, which they cannot conclude anyway. So at this point, you can kind of get into your details.

Speaker 5 Paul's got the stuff that I don't even want to look at, which is on his laptop. Let's just go through some of the more disturbing stuff, I think.
Sure.

Speaker 2 So, this, like I mentioned at the beginning, this is where I am going to be talking in graphic detail about her injuries, and I am going to be talking about some offender behaviors that will be disturbing.

Speaker 2 This is a disturbing case to me.

Speaker 2 So, just recognize that.

Speaker 2 I am not showing any of the images at all.

Speaker 2 We actually talked about it because if I were in front of law enforcement, I'd be showing and saying, this is why I am forming this opinion.

Speaker 2 I have to verbally describe it, so just kind of be patient as I go through this. And I'm going to kind of step backwards.

Speaker 2 I'm going to start with the post-mortem aspects, which we've already talked about. She was cut in half, and I've already expressed my opinion.
This happened post-mortem.

Speaker 2 Even the pathologist who did the autopsy reportedly also formed that opinion.

Speaker 2 She was also stabbed three times in the center of her chest post-mortem. This is now the offender is targeting her heart, right? He is ensuring that she is dead probably before she transects her body.

Speaker 2 That rose tattoo, that of course, Elizabeth, was very special, it was very special to her. Well, that was excised out.

Speaker 2 There is almost a perfect-looking square, maybe three or four inches on each side.

Speaker 2 The margins of where that tattoo, the wound margins, are indicating this was done post-mortem.

Speaker 2 That tattoo was found in her vagina. It had been shoved up inside of her.

Speaker 2 When we see tattoos being excised nowadays, you know, typically I've got cases going back several decades in which oftentimes bodies are dumped, but the identifying features of the body are removed.

Speaker 2 And usually what we'll see is the head is gone, the hands are gone. Why? Because the teeth can be used to identify the person, the facial characteristics can, fingerprints can.

Speaker 2 The offender sometimes will excise tattoos because the tattoos are being recognized as a way that that body can be identified. So the offenders will take these steps to delay identification.

Speaker 2 I'm not sure this is what

Speaker 2 Elizabeth's killer is trying to do because he's leaving the tattoo within the body.

Speaker 2 And only he can really answer the question of what that means, whether that was, he knows that was important to her, and he's just having

Speaker 2 a thought on how he can just further, you know, desecrate her.

Speaker 2 But that's where he is modifying her body post-mortem.

Speaker 2 The

Speaker 2 marks on her wrists, her ankles, and her neck.

Speaker 2 As I mentioned before,

Speaker 2 these marks are not deep. What we call furrows, and a pathologist can say, hey, I've got, you know, the skin will stay indented if somebody had been tied up.
None of these are deep.

Speaker 2 I first can say she was not hung up to be bled out. No question about it.

Speaker 2 I will also say that the marks around her wrists and ankles are so light that if they were used to bind her,

Speaker 2 she wasn't resisting against that, nor were they tied very tight. The important thing to me is the neck, is that that also is not deep at all.
It was not used to strangle her.

Speaker 2 The death certificate is not listing strangulation as cause of death. The neck is all soft tissue up front.

Speaker 2 When somebody has had you know cordage wrapped around the neck and pulled tightly, even if they're not killed, you sometimes see some significant furrows. That's not what's happening here.

Speaker 2 One feature that really stands out to me is there's a series, a linear series of circular marks on the backside of her neck. These marks, almost all of them, look like they're the same size.

Speaker 2 They're evenly spaced, and they're in a linear distribution. Some have attributed these marks as cigarette burns.
They do not look like cigarette burns to me at all.

Speaker 2 This looks like a feature of something that was pressed up against the backside of her neck.

Speaker 2 And I believe that it's very possible that that was the underside of a restraint that the offender was using to tie her down. She is in a five-point restraint system.

Speaker 2 And I use the term system loosely.

Speaker 2 In my opinion, she is spread eagle, and she is bound at the neck.

Speaker 2 The

Speaker 2 first thing I'm going to address is her right

Speaker 2 nipple and surrounding skin have been excised, and that was never recovered. When I take a look at the margins of the wound to her right breast, it's showing that this occurred while she was alive.

Speaker 2 There is bleeding in the margins. As I further look at this, I can see where practically all the underlying breast tissue is present.

Speaker 2 Other cases that I've worked in which breasts have been excised, oftentimes the entire breast is removed. In this particular case, it is the nipple and the skin.

Speaker 2 On the sternal side, the inside chest part, it is a nice, clean, straight margin. But then, as you get to the outer side of this wound, it's scalloped.

Speaker 2 Well, this happens when you see the skin being pulled very tightly. And then, once the skin on one side is cut through, then the remaining skin forms like that, what do you want to call it, fluting.

Speaker 2 And when it's cut through as it's stretched, the remaining thing is going to be in this scalloped thing. This is hugely significant.

Speaker 2 This is the offender who is purposely removing removing her right nipple while she's alive.

Speaker 2 This is a sadistic act,

Speaker 2 and we see this in certain subcultures. And I'm going to kind of go into some more aspects of her injuries and then talk about what I think is going on here.

Speaker 2 In addition, Her pubic hair had been shaved and it was found inside her rectum. Her rectum had been dilated almost two inches and there was abrasions on the outside of the rectum.

Speaker 2 This isn't an act of sodomy. This is foreign object penetration.
Possibly that foreign object was used to stuff the pubic hair up her rectum and probably doing other things at the same time.

Speaker 2 After the pubic hair had been shaved, the offender took a knife and started cutting into her pubic region.

Speaker 2 And he's doing it in a cross-hatch method where he's doing parallel lines one direction and then parallel lines going down the opposite direction.

Speaker 5 And is that she's still alive?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 these have hemorrhaging in the margins. She is still alive when the offender is doing this.

Speaker 2 So he is now inflicting pain on sensitive areas of Elizabeth's body. The smile, what people will call the smile.
This is not a smile.

Speaker 2 What he has done is he has cut from both corners of her mouth going straight back. He's not carving in to make it look like she's smiling.
This is a functional thing that he is doing.

Speaker 2 He initially is cutting into her upper right lip in that same cross-hatch manner. What is he doing? He's inflicting pain around her mouth.
Why? He wants her to open her mouth.

Speaker 2 If you don't want somebody to get inside your mouth, what do you do? You clench down.

Speaker 2 you close your lips. What he has effectively done by doing these incisions almost all the way back to the ear is he has cut through the muscles that the victim had to use to keep her mouth shut.

Speaker 2 Once he has inflicted these incisions, he can now open her mouth at will. The pathologist notes that inside her stomach was feces.

Speaker 2 This is where it becomes, I mean, this is dark. This is where I teach law enforcement a serial predator course, and I start out by saying, know thy enemy.

Speaker 2 Predators, these sexual deviants, they do things that the average person would never, ever consider.

Speaker 2 And you have to understand the various paraphilias that these guys fantasize about.

Speaker 2 And one of those paraphilias is coprophilia or scatophilia. This is sexual arousal by feces.
Either you're interacting with it yourself or you're watching somebody else interact with it.

Speaker 2 Some think that the transection of her body is why there is feces in her stomach. No, her intestine was cut up at the duodenal level.

Speaker 2 This is the top of the intestine where stomach contents are first entered into for the liver and the pancreas to start feeding their digestive fluids to help do it.

Speaker 2 A pathologist will never ever misidentify that as fully formed feces.

Speaker 2 So if the pathologist was correct and she has feces in her stomach, she ingested it. Do you think she did that voluntarily? No.

Speaker 2 She is fighting against this offender by keeping her mouth locked while she is in this five-point restraint system.

Speaker 2 And he ends up going,

Speaker 2 nope. I can do this to you and he does it.
And so now he's putting, my opinion, he's putting feces

Speaker 2 into her oral cavity and making her swallow. If she wants to breathe, she's going to have to swallow.

Speaker 2 It's also possible, based on the subculture that I think this offender is likely out of, that there could have been a ball gig placed in her mouth as part of this restraint system.

Speaker 2 What was done to Elizabeth is done by a sexual sadist.

Speaker 2 This is the worst type of offender that you can run into.

Speaker 2 And I would not dismiss the possibility that this offender has a purpose-built space to do this to women.

Speaker 2 How many times across the nation have there been men who have these torture rooms or dungeons found, sometimes because they have committed homicide, sometimes they're

Speaker 2 fantasizing about doing it, other times they're enslaving women, and that's a different type of offender. This is a sexual sadist.

Speaker 2 And so, in my opinion, I think the most likely scenario is Elizabeth went out for a social night.

Speaker 2 She went to a bar, she went to a nightclub, and she ran across a guy that somehow isolated her away and got her, whether it be in a bed and spread eagle. And now he is getting

Speaker 2 sexual gratification from inflicting pain.

Speaker 2 Once she is dead, everything he's doing at that point is just matter of fact because because sexual sadists get off on hearing the screams, hearing the writhing that their victims are doing.

Speaker 2 There are case examples that victims who are being attacked by a sexual sadist, they play dead. They're like, I'm done.

Speaker 2 And these guys will push off and walk away because their sexual gratification comes from the torture that they are doing.

Speaker 2 When you look at like the right nipple, you'll see if you watch part of what I've had to do, and this is because my mentor in the behavioral space, Sharon Hagin, says, Paul, you have to see what these guys are looking at to develop their fantasies.

Speaker 2 Sharon would go into the adult bookstores and look at, you know, pull the books off the shelf and start taking a look at what these guys are consuming. And of course, now it's all online.

Speaker 2 If you pay attention to the hardcore BDSM porn, What do they do? They put clamps on these women's nipples and pull them super hard.

Speaker 2 If that were to be cut while it's being pulled like that, it is going to be exactly what happened to Elizabeth. The crosshatching in the pubic area.

Speaker 2 You know, the fact that I'm going to force you to open your mouth, in my opinion, is what's happening there. This is all part of this type of fantasy.
The cross-hatching technique with the knife.

Speaker 2 I mean, I know there's got to be artists and drawers in here. Cross-hatching is a drawing technique.
I would not be surprised if this guy had fantasy drawings.

Speaker 2 And part of what he's doing when he's doing this crosshatch in her pubic region is somewhat replicating some drawings that he's done. These offenders will do those types of drawings.

Speaker 2 Dennis Rader is a prime example of that.

Speaker 2 So Elizabeth's last moments of life were horrific. Now, how long could he have kept her alive? You know, was she alive four days and bound in this situation? I don't think so.

Speaker 2 I think there's some issues with the time estimates going on

Speaker 2 But when I look at what happened to Elizabeth, I'm going, this is a predator.

Speaker 2 And I start evaluating these suspects and I'm going, you know,

Speaker 2 I can't eliminate them, but I'm going, no, you know, I think if I were to invest my resources, I'm thinking this guy has done other types of crimes. In fact, I found

Speaker 2 a photo. If you think this is somewhat, you know,

Speaker 2 what happened to Elizabeth is like completely unique? No, No, I had a Michelle McNamara's researcher who's an amazing digital space person.

Speaker 2 He found me a mutilated woman, mouth cut just like Elizabeth's, right breast almost completely excised, and the abdominal region cut wide open. This is what these types of guys do.

Speaker 2 So as an investigator, I'm taking a look at Hansen and Mann and hearing the details, and I'm going, you know what?

Speaker 2 With what happened to Elizabeth, I'm just not seeing somebody doing that unless they have that secret life and just decided to go after somebody that they had an association with.

Speaker 2 But one of the series of cases that I ran across was a series of

Speaker 2 seven women, teenage girl up into

Speaker 2 more mature women, if you will, that in the years prior to Elizabeth's case, had been killed by what was being described as this sadistic slayer.

Speaker 2 And I know Kate has some background information on that series.

Speaker 5 Yep. So this is the case that Paul was talking about.
So this is from 1947, January 19th.

Speaker 5 So journalists from the LA Daily News and the Ventura County Star speculated that Elizabeth was the victim of what they called a mad killer or a sadist who had terrorized San Diego for 15 years.

Speaker 5 So they called him the West Coast Fiend.

Speaker 5 And he was believed to have sexually assaulted and murdered at least seven women in San Diego between 1931 and 1936.

Speaker 5 So here are five of them. So it's Virginia Brooks, Louise Troiber, W.B.
Dolly Bibens, who is also known as Diamond Dolly, Hazel Bradshaw, Maude Detwire,

Speaker 5 and

Speaker 5 Mrs. Wesley Adams, and one other person, Florella Qualik.

Speaker 5 So what

Speaker 5 they say happened was that they were sexually assaulted, savagely slashed, sometimes as many as 17 times, and dismembered in one case, strangled, and the murderer transported their bodies to well-trafficked areas where they were certain to be found.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 when I hear, you know, sadistically slain, you know, for me, when I use the term sadistic, that is a very specific term.

Speaker 2 This is where this person is getting sexual gratification by inflicting pain upon somebody else. The press uses the term and the general public will use the term different.

Speaker 2 So this is where I'm going, okay, I have somebody that is committing

Speaker 2 crimes that potentially could be done by a sexual sadist. I want to know more details about this crime.

Speaker 2 But then there's certain behaviors, at least in the newspaper article I'm looking at, where I I go, oh, hold on, there is something significant here.

Speaker 2 One of the women, I think it was Louise Tauber, you know,

Speaker 2 she's raped, killed, and then moved to a different location where she is now strung up between two branches of two different trees on display. He's posed her.
Elizabeth was posed.

Speaker 2 Whoever killed Louise Tauber down in San Diego, he is wanting that shock and awe.

Speaker 2 Just like Elizabeth's killer. So now I'm going, there is enough going on here where I want to know more about the San Diego cases.

Speaker 2 I personally think even though Elizabeth had a connection to, she had just come from San Diego, has that connection to San Diego, I think that's likely coincidental.

Speaker 2 I think if this is the same guy, he's operating down in San Diego and then possibly relocates up to LA and then somehow some way crosses pass with Elizabeth.

Speaker 2 You know, and that's just my kind of working investigative theory right now. But it's just based upon I'm interpreting what was done to Elizabeth going,

Speaker 2 this isn't Robert Hansen.

Speaker 2 This isn't, you know, these other guys, you know, can't eliminate it, but they are lower down on my priority list than, let's say, the guy that was responsible for the San Diego series.

Speaker 5 Okay, I have a question that I hadn't thought of before. Were you talking about the bindings on her feet and her wrists and her throat?

Speaker 5 They weren't cut into the skin in a way where it looked like she was fighting really really hard. Is that right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it does not look like somebody that is like really fighting and abrading,

Speaker 2 you know, but she is restrained at those five points. I'm absolutely confident of that.

Speaker 5 Well, what I'm wondering is, since they didn't get toxicology results because they threw away her organs, is there a chance that it's like that, the lighter marks because she was drugged really heavily when this was happening?

Speaker 2 I think there's a really strong chance of that. Plus, she also has blows to the head significant enough to cause some bleeding in what's called the subarachnoid space.

Speaker 2 The pathologist didn't think it was sufficient to have caused death in and of itself. But she also may not be fully cognizant.
And that may be where she's overpowered.

Speaker 2 The offender gets her to a location, whether it be to his vehicle or inside his residence or a hotel room and now he's overpowering her.

Speaker 2 She's not completely cognizant and now he's able to get her restrained and then start doing the sadistic acts to her.

Speaker 5 So now you know why I had so much anxiety about the Black Dahlia case.

Speaker 5 But we wanted to end, of course, with Elizabeth Short, because, you know, I have kids, and Paul does too. And my kids and his

Speaker 5 two youngest kids are basically, you know, within a few-year range of her. And, you know, we don't talk about her mom or her siblings.
She had four siblings or her dad for that matter.

Speaker 5 But so much has been focused on who did this that we know that the victims get lost sometimes.

Speaker 5 No matter how much she lied, no matter who she had in this black book, no matter what she did, you know, this was an illustration of just how terrible things can go.

Speaker 5 But, you know, at the same time, the fact that we're still talking about this case, I am hoping LAPD will reach out to Paul or somebody who can help, right? Right?

Speaker 5 And, you know, he has a good relationship with them, but it's a situation where there's a lot of resources out there. And, you know, certainly we're hoping to get a resolution to this.

Speaker 5 But regardless, I mean, what a life she could have had. She was 22,

Speaker 5 and things could have changed for her pretty dramatically. So this is one of the sadder stories.
I'm sorry to leave it with you guys like this, but this is the reason why we do the show.

Speaker 5 So that we remember victims. Thank you.
This is why we do it.

Speaker 2 Yep.

Speaker 2 You know, and I just want to thank everybody for, you know, sitting through this, and hopefully, you have a better understanding of this case.

Speaker 5 And thanks so much to iHeart and Divergent. And you got to get started on that true crime-only cruise, just like

Speaker 5 the murderous lady or something. I don't know.
Thank you all for joining us. We're very bones.
Thank you so much. Thank you, Barbara.
Thank you.

Speaker 5 This has been an Exactly Right Right Production.

Speaker 2 For our sources and show notes, go to exactlyrightmedia.com/slash buried bones sources.

Speaker 5 Our senior producer is Alexis Emorosi.

Speaker 2 Research by Allison Trouble and Kate Winkler-Dawson.

Speaker 5 Our mixing engineer is Ben Tolliday.

Speaker 2 Our theme song is by Tom Breifogel.

Speaker 5 Our artwork is by Vanessa Lilac.

Speaker 2 Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer.

Speaker 5 You can follow Buried Bones on Instagram and Facebook at Buried Bones Pod.

Speaker 2 Kate's most recent book, All That Is Wicked, A Gilded Age Story of Murder and the Race to Decoat the Criminal Mind, is available now.

Speaker 5 And Paul's best-selling memoir, Unmasked, My Life Solving America's Cold Cases, is also available now.

Speaker 2 Listen to Buried Bones on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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