Episode 602: The Black Dahlia Murder Part III - Blood and Brown

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That's when the cannibalism started. Who's that? I'm coming in hot this week.
I solved the murder by myself in my office over the break. I know everything that's happened.
I know

everything that will happen. Just in time.

But, honestly,

the key

is now I'm deleting it.

So I'm going to forget the man I was.

I was a private detective for about eight days.

Okay. Because I had nothing but time.

I had nothing but weed.

Baldur's Gate. You were following people.

I was going to go everywhere asking them, you know Elizabeth Short? Yeah? Do you know Deborah Tull? But no, this is the, oh man, I'm dragging Marcus down fucking with me, man. Yeah? I'm dragging his fucking ass down in the fucking hole with me, bro.
He keeps saying it so much that he thinks it's going to come true one day. I'm bringing him down with me, man with me man i'm making him worse well it doesn't matter what your theory is because even if you're right it all the evidence has been destroyed and there's no way to prove it some of it might be hidden welcome to the last podcast on the left ladies and gentlemen my name is marcus parks i'm here with true detective henry zabrowski yeah yeah time to Give me six beers.
Honestly, that's how I should have started the show with a six-pack, like Matthew McConaughey in there. When he's in the interrogation room.
And just keep opening up and then cutting them into little men, you know, like cutting the little men in half. And the equally inquisitive Ed Larson.
I'm curious, but at the end of the day, I don't care. Eddie, you should care.
You know why? Because if I was a highly artistic, motivated, full of himself serial killer, and I mean this with all love because of how much I love you and how close we are, the fun of playing with your guts and Oh. And how thick and meaty would be to like, because that's the thing, serial killers, they always do with these skinny minis.
Yeah. Where it's like the idea of coming at you, like how much fun playing with your tits.
I'd be easy to drug and poison too. You'd just take anything.
Yeah, I love to eat and drink. Especially if you meet him at a concert.
Yeah. Oh my God, yeah.
You can put it on the weed that you give me. Dude, just fucking the idea of playing with your big fat cheeks and playing with your cut off body parts.
It does take a lot to take me down though. Yeah.
Yeah, I know. You need an elephant gun, man.
I'm ready. That is true.
I still feel like I can hit you with a cast iron. Yeah, I know.
Maybe, but at the same time, I could take more than one hit and usually I'll fall on top of you.

That's the problem.

When I fight,

I fall on top of you

and then I just smother your head

into the ground a bunch of times

until it becomes spaghetti.

Oh, wow.

Well, here we are

at Black Dahlia Part 3.

Now, to recap our story thus far,

let's start with the main suspect

in the case, Leslie Dillon,

and the reasons why he makes a compelling, if admittedly flawed candidate in the murder of Elizabeth Short. Interesting hesitation for Marcus Parks.
You said that the crime was solved at the beginning of the very series, Marcus. Uh, yes, that is true, and I shall address that statement later on in this episode.
Bringing him down with me to the bottom of the well. He didn't do anything.
I came upon the conclusion by myself. I'm bringing him down with me.
I sent him stuff. He read it.
We talked about it. No, you're wrong.
All right. Well, you know.
Leslie Dillon, 25 years old when the murder took place, was a small-time crook who was suspected to have worked with the same underworld figures in Los Angeles that Elizabeth Short was associating with in the months before her murder. Two years after Elizabeth was killed, Leslie Dillon wrote to Dr.
Joseph Paul DeRiver of the LAPD under the pseudonym Jack Sand, responding to an article Dr. DeRiver had planted about the Black Dahlia murder in True Detective magazine.
Dillon later said that the only reason why he he contacted Dr. Deriver was because he had an interest in true crime and wanted to get into the business and had expressed in his letter a desire to collaborate with Dr.
Deriver in writing a book about psychopathic cases like the Black Dahlia Murder. And also, there was some lying on Dr.
Deriver's part where he then, in order... He's getting the job done.
Which is, you know, Eddie, sometimes you gotta lie a little bit. I have truly no problems with Dr.
Deriva's ideas. I have no problem.
If I was allowed, if I was an unofficial fake doctor that arrived at the police and convinced the gangster sprites... Thank you.
Thank you, Eddie. If I arrived and I was this forensics guy, I'm just making shit up as I go, this is exactly how we would do this.
The worst part is the guy who has the most information is the one who's filled with the most shit. How often have we talked about this? Alistair Crowley, Madame Blavatsky, LRH.
But there is truth in that.

Except in LRH. But in the other two, yeah, there is a little...
He was like, this is a boat, and it was a boat. It's true.
Later on. And Dr.
DeRiver, what he did was he lied to Leslie Dillon. The way he got him on the hook was saying, how about I offer you a job as my assistant? Yes, there was many unconstitutional, unethical things going on when it came to Dr.
Driver and Leslie Dillon. Dr.
Driver soon became convinced that Leslie Dillon was himself the Black Dahlia killer. So he and the other investigative body helping out with the case, the gangster squad, they lured Dillon out west where they unconstitutionally detained and interrogated him.
During six weeks of, let's say, extra legal interviews. I like this term, man.
I like extra legal. Did he have teeth when they were done with him? Yeah, he did, but he definitely had a couple of burn marks from the radiator.
And they also, they took him on road trips around Southern California to various Black Dahlia sites. What did he get at? What did he get think of this? Does it make you think of this? How about this? How about this? We're going over here.
How about this? Look, that's literally all they did. They just drove him in front of the Aster Motel.
We're like, eh? Yeah. Or they drove him to the Black Dahlia murder site and just like, he looks a little ill.
Are you confused? Now, when you say the Black Dahlia murder site, are you saying the Astor Hotel?

The dump site.

The dump site.

Thank you, Eddie's learning. Yeah, you're learning because the Astor Motel had not been discovered just yet.

But they also took him to places in San Francisco where Dylan had worked as a bellhop during the time of the murder.

And by the end of it, the men representing the LAPD discovered some interesting details about Leslie Dylan.

Dylan had the same soft, modulated voice used when the Black Dahlia killer called the Los Angeles Examiner. He had experienced draining bodies of blood from working as a mortuary assistant, and he knew methods of mutilation concerning Short's corpse that were not public at the time.
When they were forced to arrest Dillon after the press discovered they were holding him, authorities searched the suitcase he had brought with him on the trip and discovered even more evidence that pointed towards his possible involvement. Even if it didn't, you'd say, hey, I don't know if it necessarily points towards his involvement as much as it points towards this guy's a fucking weirdo.
Which is kind of what they were looking for, which is, you know, it's a flawed way to look for a candidate because you can't just say, oh, you're fucking weird. You got a long Frankenstein looking head.
Like you must be the Black Dahlia killer. You asked to be involved in this investigation.
When they don't realize, like at the time, now we know, now we definitely know that all of these types of cases involve many different hoaxers and con artists that want to get up involved with something,

anything that will give them attention.

And plus, he always wanted to make a Russian nesting doll out of a person.

And we all do.

And the hardest part is the littlest one because you got to get a hold of a preemie.

And it's hard because you ever take one right out of the oven?

That's why the doctors wear gloves. Contained within Leslie Dillon's suitcase were 700 phenobarbital pills and a well-worn leather dog leash that appeared as if it had been used to hang something that was comparable in weight to a human body.
It was three Rottweilers.

There is so much phenobarbital at my house right now.

It always freaks me out when you bring this up.

Yeah, because of the dog.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

My dog loves phenobarbital.

She could use more sleep.

She's always waking me up in the middle of the night,

so maybe I should start jamming more down her throat.

That's what I'm learning.

Tootsie, actually, it was really sweet of her.

She offered me a bump

the other night.

And I was just like,

no, I'm sorry,

I'm driving.

I can't.

It's on a key.

Well, investigating Dylan further,

they also found

that his aunt lived

two blocks from the diner

where Elizabeth Short's

purse and shoes were found

and that Dylan drove

a black sedan

like the one seen

twice at the dump site in the wee hours of the morn just before Short's body was discovered. Wrap it up.
Yeah. That seems like a case closed.
You would be wrong, my friend. There was also the fact that the letter D had been carved into Elizabeth's flesh and Dylan was the type of person to obsessively leave his initials wherever he went.
Again, just a fucking weirdo. Yes.
This is just a weirdo.

The idea of drawing, I draw my initials on things because I'm asked to for legal documents.

Oh, yeah.

Keep it on the LD.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No one found out.

Nope.

His interactions with Dr. Driver, reaching out after the article and such, they suggested

that he also had narcissistic and exhibitionist tendencies, which spoke to the highly theatrical

way in which the Black Dahlia's body was displayed. This is all in the pro-Leslie Dillon did it category.
Sure. After Dillon was arrested, however, he denied knowing or even meeting Elizabeth Short, and the LAPD backed away from him completely soon after, saying that they had discovered, after further investigation, that he was actually in San Francisco at the time of the murder.
He was subsequently released without being charged. And then he'd go on to sue the LAPD.
For $100,000. As he should.
Until the LAPD said, hey, we kind of have evidence of you robbing a safe in Santa Monica, so unless you want to go to jail for that, drop the case. And he dropped the case.
Let's just call bygongs. Bygongs.
So he got away with that. Yeah, he got away with it.
Another bellhop cry. Now all of this is admittedly thin, and if this was all we had, then I would agree with you.
If you said that Leslie Dillon was a man tangentially connected to the case who took Dr. Deriver and the gangster squad for a ride.
But after Dillon was arrested and released, the gangster squad discovered the Aster Motel. Now this is another fun, which is now what I've learned about Black Dahlia.
Upon deep into my investigation, you know, hours upon hours putting a note to you, what you discover is that every single big point in Black Dahlia is an awesome and complicated point of contention. Yes.
And that there is somebody had just written something that it's completely debunked. Every single thing that you say, no matter what you say, no matter what you say, it's almost like there is no reality at the very center of this case.
So the Astro Motel is the next big moment that you're like, what the fuck is this? What is happening here? Yes. Now, around the time that Leslie Dillon was arrested, his mother gave an interview to the Los Angeles Examiner in which she gave as much information as she could about her son in an effort to exonerate him.
Look at how good of a boy my boy Leslie is. They always end up saying something wrong.
Yeah, they're being like, he never did anything unless you pushed him easily. Yeah.
And he was never prone to violence unless he was inside. You're gonna slip up, ma! No, no, no.
You only stabbed the chicken in front of us once. God damn it! It's mostly just because I get with the chicken! Every time we get together, you always gotta bring up the story of the fucking chicken, ma! You cut its tits off and you stuffed it up the cavity.
We eat chicken breasts! Chicken breasts are a common meal! I just, Leslie's innocent. He's a good boy, no matter what he does to anyone.
Well, as we all know, the more you talk, the more trouble you're likely to get. And Dylan's mother mentioned that when he lived in L.A., he sometimes stayed at a place called the Astor Motel, which was just a 15-minute drive from the vacant lot in Leimert Park where Elizabeth Short's body was found.
Now, the Astor Motel was a ground-level strip of 10 concrete cabins. It was gross.
Very thick walls. It's still there, by the way.
Oh, really? It's now called the new Astor Motel. Well, the Aster back then had a reputation not necessarily for where sex workers did their business, but for a place where sex workers live.
Hey, I don't suck dick, kid! This is where I wash my pussy. You don't come to my house and get your dick sucked.
A shittier hotel. Honestly, we come here to pray.
Well, the Astster was owned by a syphilitic ex-con named Henry Hoffman, who'd done time for mail fraud involving an oil scam in Texas. When you say syphilitic, that means he had syphilis? Yeah.
Okay, cool. I just wanted to make sure.
Yeah, syphilitic. It's like, you know how syphilis took like 20 years to take Al Capone down? Yeah.
It's kind of like this. At this point, Henry Hoffman was about 60 years old.
And, you know, the syphilis hadn't took his brain. But, you know, there was some floating around there.
The doctor said I'm throwing it towards Zoccalander. You want to stay in the master suite? You're going to have to sit in my lap while I go to sleep.
You know, you're not a great man with a hundred years later you're remembered by that adjective that's aphilitic put it on my gravestone i was horny to death well he'd been in trouble with the law on a domestic violence charge just weeks before the Black Dahlia murder. This colorful

past, Hoffman and his wife said, was why they didn't report what they found in cabin number three of the Aster on the very morning that Elizabeth Short's body was found 15 minutes away. Okay.
Motel owner Henry Hoffman said that when he opened the door to cabin number three that morning. He found a room covered

in feces and blood.

Not feces. Feces.

That's so... said that when he opened the door to cabin number three that morning, he found a room covered in feces and blood.

Not feces.

Feces.

That seems like something that seems like evidence.

Dirty feces.

Soaking.

Dirty feces.

Brown.

Brown everywhere.

Brown and red.

Brown.

It soaked the bedsheets and blankets.

It was smeared on the bathroom walls.

It was fucking everywhere.

And after cleaning the room from top to bottom, again... Brown! Again? Brown! Again? Not reporting it because Henry Hoffman had just been arrested, the Astor Motel sent out what laundry they could salvage and they burned the rest.
Yeah. And it is documented that just after January 15th, the Astor Motel did indeed have a large laundry bill.
The only large bill in its history. I just gotta confess, it's the only time we've ever done it.
It's true, we waited until the 10-year anniversary. And the next thing I know, that's not the only place that had brown.
Number three had brown. Number nine had brown.
Number 12 had yellow. You know what? We're going to wash the sheets this year.
That's why that's such a big bill. They're like, this is the year we wash the sheets.
Everybody gather around. Burn the ones we can't keep.
I know. I know.
I know. It was a fun Los Angeles ritual.
So I think that's how you got to start looking at the laundromats and the drag cleaners. That's who knows, because you want me to cover up this murder.
Now he's thinking like a fucking detective. Extra money.
Yeah, exactly. Super complicated.
Makes things harder than they need to be. But cabin number three was not the only room with the Astra that was in suspicious condition on January 15th.
The motel owner's wife, Cora Hoffman, found a pile of clothes neatly tied in a bundle on the bed in cabin number nine. I mostly consider myself a roommate to my husband's syphilis.
That's me. I kind of share him with the syphilis.

Well, the clothes were wrapped in brown paper and a cord, as if the intention was to mail them,

much like Elizabeth's documents were mailed to the Los Angeles Examiner.

Inside the package was a woman's skirt, a blouse, and a pair of men's shorts with blood spatter on them. Okay.

Motel owner Henry Hoffman said that he told his wife to burn the clothes along with the blood-soaked towels and linens in the incinerator out back. And just after, they scrubbed down what may have been the Black Dahlia murder kill room before the story even broke.
See, but who kills somebody in shorts in January? That is my biggest issue with this whole thing. Oh my God, it's January in Los Angeles.
I see shorts every single fucking day here.

I think Rob's wearing shorts.

No, he's not.

It's for the delusional.

It is for the delusional.

That's for an out-of-towner.

Our friend Adam Wirtz, he wears shorts every single day no matter what fucking...

But he's from Wisconsin.

But I know he's cold.

He's lying to everyone.

He always got his feet out.

I know he's cold. I know you're cold.
Wisconsinites, I know a lot of you like that. You wear shorty degrees, washing your car like you're some kind of hero.
I know you're cold. You're lying to yourself.
You're lying to us. Now, it's important to note that the Hoffmans only owned the Astor Motel for six months.
And these interviews were done two years after the murder.

Two years in which none of these people said anything to anyone

about what they'd seen on January 15th.

You know, when do you want me to jump in?

Do you want to wait to the end?

Do you want to wait to the end before I start?

Don't just pick it apart piece by piece.

That's not fun.

I'm not going to do this to us, Marcus. I just am sitting here because this is...
That's great. So you're going to be silent for the rest of the show.
That's amazing. That's great.
I'm really excited about it, you know. Not get interrupted, just be able to go through the narrative.
As a co-host of the show. It was meant to be written.
I think what's most important in an audio medium is to reflect. And I sit and I listen.
And I'm just, I'm holding space for whatever it is that you do. Sure, sure.
Actually, let me interrupt you there. That's just fun.
That's a fun bit. Well, this gap in the interviews, between the interviews and the actual murder itself, that's why I think the interview of the maid is so interesting.
When the gangster squad tracked her down, she was a person who had no further connections to the Hoffmans. She said, you want extra pillow? And a hotel is this? So is my way.
It doesn't ever end. But she also remembered the bloody room and the bundle of clothes quite well.
The clothes, she said, were a white blouse with ruffles and a black skirt, which was the same outfit Elizabeth Short had been wearing the last time she'd been seen alive at the Biltmore Hotel. Eventually, that same maid admitted that she'd seen a person that she thought was Elizabeth Short at the motel during the so-called missing week before Short's body was dumped, and she wasn't the only one.
A man who lived across the street also said that he saw a woman who looked like Elizabeth Short at Astor that same week. According to him and other witnesses, this girl seemed trapped, possibly drugged, and desperate to escape.
But the problem, admittedly, is that all these people described a black-haired girl. And as we know, Short's hair was dyed a reddish light brown when her body was found.
And part of the reason why they said a black-haired girl is because the pictures of Elizabeth Short that were in the newspaper, they had black hair, which shows that they probably didn't see her because they saw the old picture of her. And then now they're thinking about the old picture of her when they think about Elizabeth Short and now they are blowing that out to think about every diminutive, bow-lipped, black-haired girl that would be.
Well, also, escorts are known to wear wigs when they work. Yeah, correct.
So they don't get found out when they're out being a normal person. You're correct.
So she could have been wearing a wig whenever they saw her. I don't believe Elizabeth Short was an escort.
She was not. She was not a call girl.
We'll get to the sex worker angle in a bit. Escort, not a sex worker.
They just enjoy a good time with you. So that's what we did together in Nosferatu? Yeah.
I was your escort? Oh, I was just some prostitute enjoying popcorn with you? No, no. I would like to be seen with you and and I paid you for it.
Thank you. And honestly, just go to henryzbrowski.com and have me escort you to your own.
Like, you know, I'm ready. I can escort a lot of this.
Escort Ferratu. Let's keep it.
Well, I mean, it might be that these people misremembered Short's hair color because, like you said, all the pictures they saw of her over and over again showed a young woman with black hair. Or it could be that they were remembering somebody else entirely.
But either way, these people were sure that the person they saw at the Aster that week was Elizabeth Short. What we do know for sure, though, is that the bloody room did exist.
Yes. Clara Hoffman's brother-in-law, who also lived at the motel at the same time, confirmed that the blankets in cabin number three were soaked in so much blood that it looked like someone had taken gallons of red paint and poured it over the bed.
This brother-in-law had also worked at a mortuary in the past and said that the amount of blood he saw in that room was just about equivalent to the total amount of fluid in a human body. Okay.
Lest we forget, Elizabeth Short's corpse was found completely drained of blood. No one's been known to exaggerate anything.
I mean, there's a shitload of blood. It's a lot of blood.
There's a lot of... Well, wait.
Well, I mean, whether you... Are you just going to sit and snipe this whole time with these, like, shitty comments? No.
When you think it Dylan, if you do it, it doesn't mean that she wasn't killed in that room by a different person. I don't know.
Someone was killed in the room unless someone had a fucking hell of a period. You know what's funny? They do believe that the blood was not as spread all over the bed, and it was period blood.
Really? Yes. Who is they? The police.
Oh, the police. We're going to get to the grand jury.
We're going to get to the grand jury. But the police never saw the room.
We're going to get there. Lastly, Henry and Clara Hoffman's daughter was interviewed by author Pugh Eatwell years later, and she distinctly remembered the bloody room incident as well.
I have made a few bloody rooms myself. Yes, because my name is Pew! Pew! So, unless another woman was brutally murdered and drained of her blood the same night as Elizabeth Short, just 15 minutes from Short's dump site, which is entirely possible because L.A.
was a fucked up place at this time. Oh yeah, dude, we didn't talk about the werewolf murders.
We didn't talk about all the kind of other stuff. There was a bunch of unsolved lady murders that happened.
It seems like, though, everyone's like 15 minutes from here, 20 minutes from there. Traffic was great back then.
It really was, dude. What do you think about? But I think it's just the coverage that Black Holly had.
We'll call it a freeway. And that's the thing.
So we actually looked at, I mean, this was 1947. We're sure a toon didn't do this.
Oh, no, because it's so funny, because they're like, you look at how she got all around. She went from downtown to the valley to Hollywood.
I was like, how the fuck could she even get there? She didn't have a car. Yeah, well, they had the red car.
Yeah. My God, it'll be beautiful.
It'll be beautiful. But I think at the end of the day, it's likely that this was the room where Elizabeth Short was killed.

Now, motel owner Henry Hoppett...

Goddammit, stop doing that shit.

I did nothing.

I said nothing.

Fly from your grave.

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Now, motel owner Henry Hoffman said he also encountered the Black Dahlia, but it took months for him to come clean,

although he had a good reason for keeping it quiet.

When I saw her, she was already in two, but it was crazy,

but the top half was kissing me.

He finally admitted to a Gangster Squad member

after months of establishing rapport

that the woman he believed was Elizabeth Short

was at the Astor Motel for two days, although she could have been there longer in another room without his knowledge. Hoffman said that Short was in cabin number nine.
Number nine? Number nine? That was the cabin where the clothes matching the description of Elizabeth's last outfit had been found bundled, and on January 9th and 10th, Hoffman had seen her numerous times. One time, he said, he came into the room and she was naked under a bedsheet, appearing as if she had been drugged with something like, say, I don't know, phenobarbital pills.
You sick or you flirt with me? You sick? You seem cold? You lady? Well, Hoffman had run his fingers through Short's hair and tried taking advantage of her. But even in her drug state, she refused and he left without further incident.

No one will ever love me.

Why do they gotta sleep for me to kiss?

Why can't I get a live one except that one sick girl?

Made me sick.

Gave me this lover's disease. Well, time to go pile laundry for the next year.
Well, this Hoffman knew his creep behavior. He believed that the cops would think that he was the killer if he told him about this incident, which is why it took him months to admit it.
Hoffman's most valuable contribution to the case, however, concerned who else was at the Astor Motel during Elizabeth Short's so-called missing week.

Hoffman said that a, quote, fellow from Batavia stayed at the motel for four or five days at the same time that Elizabeth Short had stayed there.

Now, there are a number of cities called Batavia, many of which are here in America.

It must have been something different because he had wooden shoes.

I could tell the way he was clubbing around. At first, I thought he was one of those live, huge nutcrackers.
And my wife told me again and again, those are not real. But when it comes to the Astor Motels man from Batavia, it's most likely that Henry Hoffman was talking about the Batavia in Indonesia, which has been called Jakarta since the Indonesians won their independence from the Dutch after World War II.
So the man we're talking about here would most likely be Dutch or something similar. And while we don't have a Dutchman in our story, we certainly have a Dane.
After Henry Hoffman gave a physical description of the man from Batavia, it matched who else but Danish nightclub owner Mark Hansen. Ooh.
Well, he says it does. This all came out after the fact, though.
And we all know that he's a shady-ass dude. Everybody's shady.
Well, they gave it. Everybody in the circle is shady.
Henry Hoffman was not shown a picture of Mark Hansen and said, is this the guy? Henry Hoffman gave a description of the man from Batavia in a match of Mark Hansen. He had a bunch of curly soup on his head.
I think it's called hair. He had a, oh yeah, he definitely had a shirt on.
Oh my. My nose is falling off.
My lips. Well, to recap Mark Hansen, his legitimate business was running and owning a chain of movie theaters, but he also ran a club called the Florentine Gardens, which was a known mob operation that had connections to corrupt LAPD officers.
For example, LAPD homicide detective Finnis Brown was said by numerous people to have worked as a bag man for Mark Hansen's operation, And it was said that Finnis Brown was in deep debt to Mark Hansen at the time of the Black Dahlia murder. Finnis Brown, if you'll remember, was also the homicide detective in charge of investigating the Black Dahlia murder.
And it's speculated that Finnis Brown drove the investigation away from Mark Hansen any time the clues led in that direction as a way to repay his debt. As far as why the investigation pointed towards Hansen in the first place, an address book with his name printed on the cover showed up at the offices of the Los Angeles Examiner along with a trove of Short's personal documents, things that could have only come from someone who was with Elizabeth in the last hours or days of her life.
Elizabeth Short also lived at Mark Hansen's house for a period of time just before her murder. And the two of them had a strained relationship, rife with jealousy, that ended in a nasty fight.
Soon after, Elizabeth fled to San Diego by bus and was found sleeping in the Aztec theater by the kindly Dorothy French. For the short time that Elizabeth stayed with Dorothy French, a number of people came by to try and speak with Elizabeth, although we have no idea who these people were or why they wanted to speak with her.
All we know is that the visits caused Elizabeth a lot of anxiety. Then on January 9th, 1947, Elizabeth Short returned to Los Angeles and was dropped off at the Biltmore Hotel.
Over a period of hours, she made a number of calls, the last of which was to who else but Mark Hansen. Elizabeth then left, and no one knew where she went until motel owner Henry Hoffman came forward.
But that's only if you believe Henry Hoffman, his wife, her sister, their brother-in-law,

the maid, and several other people.

Okay, this is...

Why do you love Mark Hansen so much?

What did he do for you?

He finally gave me a shot at being

the number one girl at this wonderful place. Have you been to the mayonnaise balcony? He said that I could sing any song I want.
So the first song I sang was Hey, get me some beer or I'm gonna shit on the floor. And then I got fired.
That's a 12 minute song. It is.
So I got fired. So I'll always thank him for giving me my shot.
But Henry Hoffman wasn't the only person to put Mark Hansen at the Astro Motel that week. The man who commented that there was enough blood in cabin number three to fill a human body also identified Hansen as being at the motel during that week.
I see buckets of blood every day. I know what buckets of blood look like.
I see them every day. I have them in my home.
I have them in my garden. I just have cups of blood.
That's because you're a pussy. You're not a real man like me.
I'm a doctor. I look at blood.
I look at blood. I read blood.
I know blood. Can I work for you? First of all, let's take a look at that blood.
Well, his wife also put Mark Hansen at the hotel that week. The man they identified as Mark Hansen, by the way, stayed at the Astor Motel in room number eight, the room right next to the one where the clothes were found bundled and where Henry Hoffman said that he saw Elizabeth Short naked and drugged.
But Mark Hansen did not kill Elizabeth Short. The most likely suspect for that was Leslie Dillon, and he had connections to the Astor Motel as well.
The registration record showed that Dillon stayed there definitively in April of 1947, four months after the Black Dahlia murder. After! This to me makes a lot of sense, that Dillon would return to the Astor to relive the memory, because it's proven that process killers, the ones who were there for the brutality of the murder itself, they sometimes return to the scene of the crime for this express purpose.
Also, the room was on discount for all the blood and shit. That's the key.
It's going to be like, I know I got one place that'll fit my budget. Unfortunately, mysteriously, and suspiciously, though, Henry Hoffman's wife had burned all the registration records that may have shown exactly who stayed at the Astor Motel in January of 1947.
No one knows why she burned him, but she burned him. Obviously, she was trying to hide something.
Probably had nothing to do with this, but it was a shady fucking place. It was already a shady place because that was the thing.
It's where, to be honest, in a way, it sounds actually sort of in a madam style way that Clara Hoffman was looking after some of the sex workers that were living in there and that she was burning that as you burn the evidence that they were there, which is because they were constantly going after. there was so many different vice things.
They were constantly looking up, which is still like the heart of the corruption of the LAPD.

I think a lot of it was getting into racketeering

and sex work, human trafficking.

And that's, so they were actually maybe kind of helping that that way. And if that's true, then that means that the corruption of the Los Angeles Police Department once again cut off a possible end to this line of questioning.
Very much so. But that's the thing is if there was, you know, those records and they could have seen them like, OK, well, no, none of these people were here during this time.

None of these people use these aliases.

But no, we don't have that.

And now at last we come to what may have happened to Elizabeth Short and how all of these people come together.

Now, I will admit that I did get a little ahead of myself when it came to fingering Leslie Dillon as definitely the guy without question.

Stop pointing to me like you're a fucking child.

That's the closest we ever got. Yeah.
It's the closest we ever got. I just can't believe Marcus fingered him.
Well, his name was Leslie. And when you're already there, by the time you get there, if you're not going to finger him, you're filled with hate.
So you might as well do it because you don't want to be a homophobe. Like if he brings you there, I want to make sure I'm making them feel, again, creating space.

Yes.

Well, in the jumble of names, dates, and places that I was swimming in during our preliminary research,

I thought that I had read that Leslie Dillon had definitely worked for Mark Hansen as a pimp in Los Angeles.

To me, this tied it all together in a neat little package.

That claim, however, was just speculation on the part of Dr. Joseph Paul DeRiver.
See, Leslie Dillon had been arrested for pimping in San Francisco. And while he did work as a bellhop and a pimp in the same territory as Mark Hansen's operation, there is no definitive link between the two men.
The closest we come to a connection was through Jeff Connors. Jeff! Oh, I forgot about you!

Oh, Jeff! You did it again!

Jeff, the 40-year-old

busboy, pulp fiction writer, and failed

actor-turned-cosmetic salesman

who had the misfortune of being the stand-in

for Leslie Dillon when Leslie talked about the

Black Dahlia murder to the Gangster Squad.

And nothing says full-grown adult like a tiny hat!

It's like, these bellhops!

These bellhops, man! These guys are corrupt as fuck! Oh're a little like, I thought, I don't know why, again, we talked about this before how Leslie Dillon is Rob Schneider from Home Alone 2, but they all are. Every one of these bellhops are like a little, it's like a criminal syndicate.
They always linger in, always taking down mental notes. They know everything.
They know where you sleep. Yeah.
They know where your stuff is. They know what your bags look like.
I read an article about how bellhops were really big into blackmail back in the day. It was blackmail and pimping.
Those were the two. And theft, of course.
Ladies, don't let yourself get pimped by a bellhop. No.
No, no, no. Now, Jeff Connors wasn't the Black Dahlia killer, but he was friends with Leslie Dillon.
The connection here is that after Jeff divorced from his wife, she went to live with Mark Hanson. And Leslie Dillon had gone to Jeff's ex-wife's door after he was released by the LAPD to tell her that she better keep her mouth shut about what she knew.
There's no way that Leslie Dillon and Mark Hanson did not know and work together. There are two pimps that are working out of the same fucking building.
But pimp is a word that is, like, it is a spectrum. So there's a spectrum.
There's, like, there are people that have taken money, right, for, like, there's a low-level version. It's kind of like when you're talking about human trafficking.
All human trafficking is not a bunch of Indonesian women in a U-Haul being trucked across state lines. Like, human trafficking is as simple as buying a lady that is underage a fucking plane ticket to come to you to have sex, right? So pimping has also got a spectrum.
Yeah, and pimping has territories as well. But you can't really cross them.
Eddie, you're talking about high-level. Again, this is high high level.
These are not professional pimps. These are people that have taken money very casually from sex workers at the time that they have set up.
They've brokered little things for them. But these are nowhere near professional pimps.
Leslie Dillon and Mark Hansen, he's an L.A. pimp, which is a casting director.
And so that's what he was.

But so was Dylan.

Even though he was in San Francisco, he was also in L.A. He was a light pimp.

He was more so an across-the-spectrum small-time criminal.

If you're at a 10-room hotel and there are two pimps, they know each other.

Well, that's the reason why it's probable that Mark Hansen wasn't there.

And it's probable that Leslie Dylan isn't as big of a pimp as they made him out to be. Now, what Jeff Connors ex-wife knew, we have no idea.
But I do still believe that there is a compelling story to be told when it comes to these two men and Elizabeth Short. See, Mark Hansen had become obsessive and possessive over Elizabeth Short in the time she'd lived in his home, and they had parted on acrimonious terms.
The people who came to visit Elizabeth in San Diego may have been other girls who lived at Mark Hansen's house who were trying to convince her to come back on Mark's behalf. But it's possible that Elizabeth was scared of Hansen, either because of something he said or did, or because of his connections to the criminal underworld.
Well, they were definitely on the outs because, and it really, honestly, I can't believe that because the conflict wasn't with Mark Hanson in the house. It was with the other ladies.
I know that's why she got kicked out of the house. Yes.
But there was also much acrimony between Hanson and Elizabeth Short as well, because of the jealousy and all the boys, like all the day she was going on. I don't think the ladies are trying to bring her back.
But then who were those people? I think that they were the other people she pissed off. The ladies could have killed her.
I think that we're also trying to, I don't think we're, I think we're slightly minimizing how many people Elizabeth Short can piss off in a very short period of time. That is true.
I do think that she was, as she got more desperate, and this is not victim blaming, her behavior got worse. Yeah.
That as she got more desperate, she was calling more and more people that did not want her around. And eventually what she was doing, which would, to me, which would lead to her eventual death, is burn so many bridges with her lies lies because it was the lies.
It was telling one people she's going someplace and then not going there and then going and then stealing money and like being very, you know, she was a she was a homeless woman. Desperation will put you in some really fucking awful situations.
And then you have to make awful decisions in order to survive. And so I think that's what she was doing.
And it did lead to her death. I think desperation is exactly what led to it.
Because Elizabeth Short was also in the habit of pestering Hansen for money. Yes.
And it was clear that Short was dead broke when she arrived back in Los Angeles on January 9th. No matter how afraid she might have been, it's possible that Mark Hansen was a last resort.
As she'd already called everyone she could think of help before calling him. Spent three hours on the phone trying to find somebody who would wire her money, help her out, nothing doing.
If that's true, there's a whole story about that also. But you can't say if that's true to every single thing that happened.
If we do that though, then there's no story. We're just're just talking.
We just have a fucking bowl of fucking crime pudding that we're trying to shove into people's mouths. I'm trying to serve a fucking meal here, and you're trying to serve oatmeal.
I work good pudding. Literally, it's not oatmeal.
It's just understanding that this is the one theory. Oatmeal is a great breakfast.
It is. In oatmeal's defense.
Did you get the yogurt? I'm doing yogurt. I know, but I'll do oatmeal too.
Because of Wilford Brimley. Well, we know that Elizabeth Short left the Biltmore just after talking to Hanson on the phone.
And possibly by Hanson's direction, she may have ended up at the Astor Motel because Hoffman said that Short showed up on January 9th. See, Mark Hansen did tell the DA's office that he had two rooms in Los Angeles that he used for prostitution, although he did not say exactly where.
While the Astor wasn't used specifically for sex work, it was where sex workers lived. So it's possible that Mark Hansen knew about this place through the grapevine.
As far as why he didn't just bring her home, as you said, Elizabeth had gotten to a fight with one of the other girls at Hansen's house just before she left. So he probably wasn't too keen on bringing her back.
But Hansen had an obsession with Elizabeth. So the Astor was as good a place as any to keep her until he could figure out what to do with her.
Now, once Elizabeth arrived at the Astor, she was given room number nine. But after a couple of days there, she could have moved to Mark Hansen's room next door when he showed up as the man from Batavia, which is what Hoffman might've been talking about when he said she could have stayed there without his knowledge.
Or he just dumped her there and left. Yeah, it's possible that some sort of argument between Elizabeth and Mark could have erupted in the few days that Hanson was in and out of the Astor.
And it's possible that Hanson was simply tired of dealing with this situation altogether. Could also be that Elizabeth Short knew something she shouldn't have and threatened Hanson with exposure during the argument.
Reportedly, in regards to Elizabeth Short, Hanson told an associate, someone get rid of that girl. And this could be where Leslie Dillon comes into the picture.
According to motel owner Henry Hoffman and three other witnesses, Leslie Dillon was also at the Astor Motel during Elizabeth Short's so-called lost week. So, if Leslie Dillon was given the task of getting rid of Elizabeth Short, it's possible that after moving her to room number three, he decided to have his way with her before getting rid of her.
Remember, Leslie Dillon was an admitted rapist, and it's possible that he may have tried drugging and raping Elizabeth Short before killing her. And that's when the micropenis came out.
Always. Even just the lead up I could tell a micropenis was coming.
Just from the guy's attitude. We know he had a micropenis.
He definitely had a micropenis. Absolutely.
Wow. Yeah.
Going off the fact that it's never a wow. But we said this last time and it is, remember, when you do see a micropenis, always say wow.
Put it in a crescent roll. If you see a micropenis, you go, nice.
Yeah. I always wanted to fuck one of these.
Yes. That's what you say.
Stay inside. Wow.
Or just be nice. Be nice.
Be nice. Never.
You know what you don't do? Aw. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No. More of a, if you feel aww, go yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum.
Can't we get that in me? Always be nice. Well, going off the fact that Dylan...
I didn't know you had a clitoris. You know what I mean? That's how you become the black doll.
Well, going off the fact that Dylan was obsessed with vengeance murders, it could be that Elizabeth Short laughed at the sight of Dylan's eight-year-old boy penis. I mean, that's kind of the sort of girl that Elizabeth Short was.
I could see her, from what I know about her, laughing at the sight of it. Never knew it.
And he knocked her cold as a result. He then bound her wrists and suspended her from the ceiling somehow using the oversized leather dog leash that was found in his luggage after his arrest.
At least that, by the way, was found to have a blood spot when it was examined by somebody outside of the LAPD. Because if you, I know what you're going to get to.
Everything we're going to hear about the Astor Motel is all stuff that the LAPD is saying. Yeah, and you know

all of my leashes are covered in blood.

Well, it's different. Your dogs openly

bleed. That's what they like to do.

And you're supporting them. Now, once

Elizabeth was tied up, it's possible

that Leslie Dillon decided to take out

all the rage he felt about his small

penis on Elizabeth Short,

beating her mercilessly, forcing

her to eat feces, and carving that

ghoulish smile on her face. If you'll remember,

Dillon told the River that he liked girls with, quote, big mouths. After Elizabeth finally succumbed to her injuries, Dylan may have cut the body in two, and I'm kind of coming around to this idea, so he could more easily transport it.
That makes sense. Yes.
Then he drained it in the bathtub, which all of this would account

for the ungodly amount of blood

found all over that room.

But I thought it was in the,

all the blood was on the bed.

It was on the bed.

It was in the bathroom.

It was everywhere.

As for the feces,

there's a large amount of debate

as to whether or not

that's what was actually

in Elizabeth's short stomach.

This is one of the most important points

in this entire story

is one of these,

is this question. Well, because there's a lot of people, if you read Severed, right? Like that's the big book.
Severed is the one. Well, Severed is where this comes from.
Yes. So the idea that she had that she was force fed shit in her torture is this big thing which connects it to the Astro Motel.
I'm in the John Douglas camp that believes what you had was that you do have someone with surgical experience that did cut somebody in half in order to transport them. But the reason why is that because the proper medical actual procedure to cut someone in half and have them live was not invented for another 20 years.
So that was like a thing for a while. People thought maybe this doctor knew how to do that.
But that was not around until the 1960s. So whatever they did, they did expertly cut through the spine, but they did not expertly cut through the gastrointestinal system.
So what that then led was to a backload of shit from her duodenum up into her upper half. You know the saying, you want to make an omelet, you break some eggs.
She could be the first person on this surgery. So if you want to make a shit-filled woman,

you cut her in half.

Great advice, Eddie.

I'm so glad you said that.

I'm so glad Ed said that.

Well, some say it's entirely a myth,

the whole feces thing, but the coroner

did intimate in private conversations

that he thought that she was fed human feces.

And room number three was covered with

the stuff, along with all the blood.

It was brown!

But even if we wanted to definitively

Thank you. He thought that she was fed human feces, and room number three was covered with the stuff along with all the blood.
It was brown! But even if we wanted to definitively test for feces, or say, phenobarbital, which was the drug Dylan would have likely used to drug Elizabeth Short, they wouldn't be able to, because the contents of Short's stomach were lost along with so much else. But really, the big question mark with the Leslie Dylan theory theory concerns why he would dump the body in that particular vacant lot on that particular street in Leimert Park.
I still believe it's the single most important point in the entire case. Of course, where they found the body.
Yes. Well, the reason I could come up with is that after driving around the vicinity of the motel to find a dump site, Dillon came across a neighborhood that was empty enough where he could dispose of the body in two trips without being seen, but still had enough people where his display would quickly be found.
See, I think Dylan, if he is the killer, he was proud of what he'd done, evidenced by the D for Dylan carved into Elizabeth's skin. That's my name.
He was proud enough to write to Dr. DeRiver under the name Jack Sand and proud enough to talk details just so long as he could say Jeff Connors did it.
Dylan was not, however, proud enough to go to jail for the rest of his life for this crime. If you ask why he played the game of talking about it but had an about face after he was arrested, you might as well ask why Dennis Rader came out of hiding to restart communication with the media as the BTK killer after he'd all but gotten away with killing 10 people.
Dennis Rader wanted to cultivate the notoriety and fear surrounding the legend of the BTK killer by sending missives to the press and police. But I'd imagine if you asked Dennis, he would have far preferred to have spent the rest of his life catching dogs in Wichita as opposed to dying in prison.
You know what's funny? I really, I think this proves the opposite. I do.
How? I think it proves the opposite. How? How? Tell me how.
You can't just do that thing where you say, I think it's the opposite, and then you don't say anything. I can, though.
But what if I did? Well, just because BTK, in the very, very end, his action said, I did want everybody to know about it. And that if I did want to go and live independently as a dog catcher, I absolutely could have, and I could have laughed my way all over the bank and no one would have known.
And I think that that's the reason why if Leslie Dillon did this as an extra overkill for a mob boss and then made it one of the most famous crime scenes in the face of the planet, I think that he would then get whacked himself.

I don't think that someone, like, how does that, I just think those things just don't

mesh together for me.

I think it is the same thing where these guys do want to up the notoriety of the killing.

They do want to kind of, they want to play with the police.

They like this idea of like, I'm smarter than the police.

I can pull one over on them and I can still get some notoriety for it,

but I'm not going to go to jail for it.

But BTK, exactly.

But Leslie Dillon, because all he wanted was notoriety,

BTK was an actual serial killer.

How did they find anyone else with the letter D carved in them?

Well, then we'll get into the world if you want to,

which I don't want to, which is the werewolf kills,

which is a whole other fucking setup. Because what because what's her name? John, what's the next? There was a crime that eclipsed the Black Dahlia right after this.
What do you believe is Jean Strait? Yeah, we talked about it in the first episode. Yes, and that had another initial carved in that was like a whole other copycat thing they tried to put together, but we don't know.
That's one of those we just don't fucking know. Are we positive it was a D and not like a sloppy O? That's also a question.
That is absolutely a question. Yeah.
But the thing is that Dennis Rader slipped and fell flat on his face during his dance with Destiny, and he only copped to everything because the evidence against him from the communications to the trophies he kept from all his victims was overwhelming. Leslie Dillon, on the other hand, was able to skate the charges completely.
And setting aside the question of his innocence or guilt, what we can say is that for some reason, the LAPD had a vested interest in making sure Leslie Dillon never even went to trial. And that, I think, is the biggest point here.
Not necessarily that, you know, this man is, you know, they had somebody in custody that was, you know, that was definitively the killer and it was definitely solved. At the very least, the LAPD wanted to make sure that this man never saw the lie today and that the spotlight never came on Leslie Dillon in any meaningful way.
Because they had him on the Santa Monica vault robbery, right?

Yeah.

And then they had him on rape.

Yeah.

Yeah, they had him on rape.

Well, they didn't have him on rape.

He just had a bunch of phenobarbital pills.

Oh, and how did we know he was a rapist?

He admitted it?

He said, I drug and rape women,

but that was not something that they could prove.

Yeah, and it was also at the time one of those fun things

where it wasn't necessarily the hugest crime necessarily.

It was a whole, like, he was considered a romance guy.

He was an extreme romance man.

Make America great again.

Finally.

And we're finally going to get the chance.

See, on the same day that a Gangster Squad member was supposed to take an official statement from Astro Motel owner Henry Hoffman so they could start building their case in that direction, the officer was transferred out of the gangster squad without explanation. What's more, when another officer tried picking up at the Astro Motel where the gangster squad left off, his request for the files was denied without any explanation either.
Things only got worse when a corruption scandal in the LAPD turned into a full-scale investigation that went all the way to the mayor. Dude, they cocked it up to the fucking stratosphere.
Like, that's like, that's the main point of this entire theory, is that I think not even just they didn't want Leslie Dillon to see the light of day, they didn't want anything to see the light of day, because as soon as you lift that lid, you're going to see they just let some fake doctor go with their uncontrollable police squad, the gangster squad. These guys that are allowed to do whatever they want.
They're not checking in with the police chief. They are literally completely, they are a gang unto themselves.
And they're letting them run wild and no one wants anything to come out because they're like, oh my God, everyone's going to see that we're a bunch of criminals well oh no because that's the thing at the time what i'm talking about here is i don't think they gave a shit about everybody knowing about all the unconstitutional stuff because they did it they did it all the time oh yeah once you got to the grand jury didn't matter yeah like i don't think they cared at all what they were most concerned about was this type of investigation yes this type the vice squad in particular they were the gang unto themselves. They would beat up nightclub owners who didn't sell out to their organized crime friends.
They'd raid gambling houses that didn't pay protection. And this is all while they let million dollar bingo parlors operate with impunity just so long as the cops got their share.
Can you imagine playing bingo for millions of dollars? It's kind of fun. I like it.
The whole thing, this entire scandal, culminated in the resignation of the police chief, and the guy who replaced him reshuffled the whole department to avoid further scandal. That reshuffle, unfortunately, included the gangster squad and its leadership.
The man put in charge of the squad after the reshuffle

was who else but Finnis Brown's brother, Thaddeus Brown,

who, if you'll remember, had come to Mark Hansen's side

after Hansen was shot by the dancer Lola Titus.

Every gangster squad member still left on the Black Dahlia murder

were given new assignments after Thaddeus Brown took over,

and the investigation into the Astor Motel was handed to new officers who dropped the ball completely. It makes sense though in a weird way because they should have solved the fucking murder by now.
You haven't done it. I'm going to give the case to someone else.
But they were right in the middle of a new line of investigation. Like they had leads.
Like I mean with all the problems of the Astor Motel, say what you will, it's leads like for the first time in two years they've got leads and then all of a sudden this guy comes in whose brother is directly connected to not only his brother he himself that is brown is directly connected to one of the men that they're investigating and he's like get out of here go get it get off it Get off it. Forget about it.
You're on something else.

I take it back.

But also, I actually, Eddie,

I don't think you're necessarily wrong.

I also think that the concept of Dr. Deriver

fucking shit up really fucked things up for them.

Like, I think that they allowed it all,

like the corruption was just,

it goes past just active corruption into laziness

where you're watching them all like,

this whole thing becomes this big crime oatmeal bowl because of this. Because you got some cops that are just straight up taking bribes.
You got the hat squad, the gangster squad. They're like just beating people up for no fucking reason.
Yeah, you got the bellhops. You can't just a goddamn bellhop.
And Mark, everybody nightclub owners are fingering you in the butthole everybody is a fucking suspect and no one's nice yeah well as far as the press went during all this aggie underwood the reporter from the los angeles held herald express who'd done so much work on the case she heavily suspected that the investigation was intentionally killed because of its connections to mark hansen and the lapd she even ran two articles about the Astor Motel in September of 1949, respectively titled Black Dahlia Murder Room Located and Link LA Motel Murder with Dahlia Murder. And she did all this to try to keep the investigative line alive.
I mean, she's a hero. Aggie Underwood's like something else.
She is the coolest person in this whole story. And Aggie Underwood believed wholeheartedly that this case, the heart of this case was Leslie Dillon, Mark Hansen, and the LAPD.
Jimmy Richardson, however, the last of the terrible men, he decided to stay cozy with the cops and reported that the new clues regarding the Black Dahlia murder, all the stuff about the Astor Motel, had been investigated and disregarded by, you guessed it, Thaddeus Brown. Now, even though most everyone else had given up on the Black Dahlia murder, fucking Dr.
DeRiver could not let it go. Working with a private investigator, DeRiver was able to get a grand jury investigation started to see if they could indict Leslie Dillon for the murder of Elizabeth Short.
Now, Dr. DeRiver's private investigator had discovered that the bellhop, who claimed that Dillon was in San Francisco on the day of Elizabeth Short's murder, had only said so after he had been approached by an officer from the LAPD.
See, apparently bellhop was a bit of a roaming profession in those days, because both Leslie Dillon and his bellhop friend ping-ponged between jobs in Los and San Francisco. Quick, I need you to get this hat to Los Angeles.
You got it, absolutely. I'll ride my suitcase.
I don't understand here. How many syndicates are we looking at? We've got the regular mafia.
We've got show business. We've got the police, the LAPD.
We have got bellhops. I'm trying to think all the other various criminal organizations the service industry the prohibition you've got the people coming in but in terms of just gangsters you've got Bubsy Siegel straight up the normal, the big time you've got the Jewish mafia you've got multiple branches of the mafia so everybody's scheming something it's like Los Angeles is a sea of various syndicates all competing to be the biggest criminal organizations.
Well, because no one was running this town back then. Nah, man.
True freedom. It's just scams upon scams, and everybody's got something to hide.
And when everybody's got something to hide, nobody wants to talk, and everybody's gonna try to protect their guy. Because the key is,'s got if you got three scams going on and then you have something as atomic as the black dahlia murder land into this into everybody's world right it becomes this thing i like to uh someone put this i want to say james elroy talked about how elizabeth short is one of the most influential people in los angeles And she was only there for six months, which is like one of the most.
That's so L.A. as it is.
And like, but there, there, it's fascinating. Well, I mean, the bellhop had originally said that he'd seen Dylan in Los Angeles during the time of the Black Dahlia murder.
Yeah, we were working bellhops at a hotel together. But after the police officer convinced him maybe he wasn't remembering things correctly, the bellhop changed his story to say, actually, no, no, no, Dylan was definitely in San Francisco when the murder occurred.
Regarding cabin number three at the Aster, the supposed kill room, the LAPD had supposedly tested it for blood and came up with nothing. But DeRiver's PI sent in his own chemist, and their tests came back positive for blood.
The LAPD, however, dismissed the PI's findings because, quote, certain other substances were also found to be there. Let me just, okay.
Marcus, listen, we know, it could be. Fertilizer, maybe.
But have we thought about jelly? No one's talked about jelly. No one's talked about it.
They didn't run any tests. They didn't run no tests.
We have no idea if an elf exploded. Did somebody lick it? Guess what? This is after Christmas.
Santa is in LA hanging out. This is where he ends his run.
He's got, you know, he's off the bit. Man from Batavia.
Shows up, drops off. And we all know the Dutch have sweet tooth.
They do. They do.
You go, I could just see. They do love their jellies.
I could see Santa maybe getting a little too crazy at the Astromartel. Yeah, he's like mad.
He's like, where are my cookies? Why'd you leave out these danishes? Yeah, exactly. You know, I don't know.
So I could also say it could be raspberry. It could be raspberry.
Poisonberry. Fly from your grave.
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Do you say data or data?

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That's 5Gs, or as I like to call them, gees. All Mint Mobile is gonna save you money data, data, dita anything you want, whatever it is you need, talking wise Mint Mobile, it does it no matter how you say it, don't overpay for it shop data plans at mintmobile.com slash lpotl, that's mintmobile.com slash lpotl, upfront payment of $45 dollars for three month five gigabyte plan required equivalent to fifteen dollars a month new customer offer for first three months only then full price plan options available taxes and fees extra see mint mobile for details now as the grand jury prepared the new crooked head of the gangster squad thaddeus brown had sent one of his officers to secretly meet with Leslie Dillon, who'd since moved back to Oklahoma.
The purpose of this meeting was to make sure that Dillon knew that he was supposed to say that he was definitely in San Francisco during the Black Dahlia murder, which is not really something that cops usually do with a murder suspect under investigation by a grand jury. It's very fishy.
Admittedly, there was one detail that came out when the investigation began that discredits Leslie Dillon in one respect. Yeah.
Dylan got what the killer did with those parts wrong. He said that the killer would have probably thrown those pieces down the toilet and flushed them.

Whereas in reality, those pieces were shoved up Elizabeth Short's most private orifices.

What are those?

Her anus and vagina.

Oh, yes.

Oh, okay.

I thought it was something like in a room.

I thought it was like a drawers up in a room.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, wow. That's different.
Maybe he said something like that to prove his innocence in a weird way. To throw him off? I don't know.
I mean, a lot of people point to that as like, ah, Leslie Dillon didn't know what he was talking about. Someone else cleaned up the body after he had killed them and done that.
And then when they were cleaning up the body, they were like, we can't leave this flesh around. Now he's getting it.
And they's getting it! It gets complicated! As soon as you start looking into the quantum facts, if you get on a quantum level, it begins to fall apart. I mean, there's definitely more than one person involved.
Oh, yeah. Well, according to...
I don't know. I've been thinking this.
This whole time, it was more than one person. But I do think that John Douglas makes a point.
Two people can keep a secret if one of them's dead. Yeah.
So maybe whoever did it killed the other one. There's no way.
I feel like the same way about the JFK assassination. There's no fucking way.
That secret's too juicy for someone to not give in. Someone would give in.
There could be people we've never even heard of that were killed the same day as Elizabeth Short,

ditched in a different place, and we have no fucking idea.

I made a joke about Debra Tall, but yes.

She was there.

And honestly, one of the craziest things I've ever seen, split down the middle.

That's insane.

But vertical.

Yes, vertical.

It's fucking crazy.

Flayed inside.

Crazy. Like a fucking beautiful piece of Branzino.
God, I love Branzino. Me too.
But when it came time for the original Gangster Squad investigators to testify for the grand jury, they said that they believed that Leslie Dillon and Mark Hansen were involved on at least some level. But every time they were on the verge of a breakthrough, they were taken off the case without explanation.
But the gangster squad weren't the only cops who testified, and they weren't the only ones to talk about Mark Hanson. In particular, Finnis Brown muddied the waters as badly as he could and went to bat specifically for Mark Hansen one more time by telling a story that absolutely no one believed.
Phinness Brown testified that his connection to Mark Hansen was only through Lola Titus, the dancer who'd shot Hansen in the back. If you'll remember, Hansen had said, get me, Brown, from his hospital bed after Lola had shot him.
and how unfortunately brown is a different context after this episode so yeah get me brown from his hospital bed after Lola had shot him. Now, unfortunately, brown is a different context after this episode.
So, yeah. Get me brown.
You mean like paint him brown, get him a bowl of brown. Get me a bowl of brown.
Yeah, get me a bowl of brown. Well, the reason behind that request, Finnis Brown was now saying, was because Hanson was a snitch.
Finnis went on to say that Lola Titus was actually at the center of an underground pornography ring, and Finnis had actually flipped Hansen to help take this pornography ring down. None of this was true, and fucking nobody believed it.
Because she was so young, right? Yeah, she was in her early 20s. She was a very erratic human being.
She was sexy. She was kind of, she was kind of, she was kind of a vibe about her.
But yeah, I think that, yeah, I think that, you know, no, not this theory. Not this theory.
No, I don't believe it. Well, that's the thing is that that's, this isn't a theory.
And that's what, this is a grand jury testimony. Yeah.
But this is some, you're saying stuff. Yeah.
But that's, but that's part of the, like, that's part of the fishiness here is how far Finnis Brown goes to try to make Mark Hansen a hero. To try to take Mark Hansen as far away from this case as humanly possible at every turn.
It's also good just straight up because he really did believe he was innocent. And that he felt that Mark Hansen was getting pulled in and maybe it's because he does other shit.
And it's all the side gigs. Oh no, he did do side gigs.
He was a bag man. He worked specifically for Mark Hansen was getting pulled in and maybe it's because he does other shit and it's all the side gigs.
I mean, he does side gigs. He was a bag man for he worked specifically for Mark Hansen.
He was in debt to Mark Hansen. What do you think it's a part of paying back the debt? Absolutely.
But what if he not the fucking he just did all these other crimes? This is the problem. If you do every other crime but the Black Dahlia murder, they can still cover up for you.
But it doesn't necessarily have to be for the Black Dahlia murder.

It's because you're fucking fully in bed with a bunch

of other criminals, and now you're all trying

to save your ass. Yeah, because maybe

if Mark Hansen didn't do it, if they looked

into Mark Hansen deep enough, all of them

would go down for other shit. Of course!

And that might be a bit

of my point later on. That is my big thing.

But to really drive home his

loyalty, Finnis said that Hansen had actually been very helpful to the police during the Black Dolly investigation. He gave him money.
He was super helpful. I love this guy.
It's like him sitting on a jet ski. This jet ski is so important to my investigative process.
But they said the reason why he was helpful is because he gave him photos of Elizabeth Short. Now, of course, the center of this grand jury investigation was supposed to be the Astor Motel.
It was hoped that Mark Hansen could be linked to the case through the testimony of motel owner Henry Hoffman, who had been quite sure prior to the grand jury about the identity of the man from Batavia. But when it came time to testify, Henry Hoffman and his wife changed their tune.
See, in the Black Dahlia case, statements had a habit of becoming confusing and contradictory after witnesses spoke with Finnis Brown in particular. And by the time of the grand jury, Henry and Clara Hoffman were now saying that there was no man from Batavia at the motel when Elizabeth Short was supposedly there.
Now, obviously, the Astor Motel was a shady operation run by shady people, and there's no telling what all the Hoffmans were involved with while they were running the motel or what they did after they sold it. So there's no telling what, if anything, the cops had over them.
Do you have any idea how hard it is to run an establishment while you're actively melting? I live in an Alice in Wonderland reality. Syphilis has occupied most of my brain.
I don't know what's happening. I'm a floating grin.
I look in the mirror. I wish I knew who I was.
Mr. Hoffman, there's blood in cabin three again.
No, I went and looked at it. It was jelly.
Santa. I'm coming after him.
Did he leave his credit card? Is that why the blood was delicious? Yes. Yes, I know, right? And how about that brown? I like a dark brown for certain.
But it is telling that Clara Hoffman's sister and her brother-in-law, the oh my God, there's enough blood in here to fill a human body guy, they both stuck to their original story about the man from Batavia in totality. I say that every time I go in a room.
Oh my God, there's a blood in here to fill a human body. In mine.
See you soon, right? Hopefully, right? But in the end, this wasn't anywhere near enough. Now, when the grand jury issued its report, they did declare that the investigation into the Black Dahlia murder was a part of a systematic corruption of the justice system that ultimately led to an increasing number of unsolved homicides in Los Angeles.
Absolutely. Yes.
Like that is the I feel like that's the main main note because I do think you have a grand jury looking at this mess. Well, that's the thing.
They also noted in their report that the police officers who were supposed to be solving the Black Dahlia murder were evasive, corrupt, and prone to misconduct. Yes, so like everything was a fucking mess.
Yes, and there was lots of murder in Los Angeles at this point. And high profile murders.
You remember right before this it was the three little girls and that fucking rape murder series that was horrible. There was a series again the werewolf murders.
There was the this was a. All the gangland murders like Bugsy Siegel was killed five months.
It's gotta be almost impossible to solve a murder in Los Angeles in this time even if you're not corrupt. That's the issue.
Wait to, I'm waiting to my point. I gotta get to my point.
I gotta wait for the air. But in the end, the LAPD had introduced enough doubt to make the grand jury declare that there was insufficient evidence to investigate Leslie Dillon or Mark Hansen any further.
Afterward, the new LAPD chief fired Dr. Deriver and abolished the position of police psychiatrist.
In retaliation for going against the LAPD, cops harassed Dr. Deriver for years.
They followed him, they broke into his house, they would shoot at him, like, just in his general direction, just bang, bang. Every once in a while, they'd leave dead fish on his doorstep.
And this isn't just Dr. Deriver being, like, being paranoid.
Like, his daughter came out and said, like,, yes, for years we were harassed by the LAP.

Back in the day you could shoot at somebody

and it was funny.

That guy's crazy.

I owe him five dollars.

America.

Oh, gracious guys.

But Dr. Driver, it is, I remember

reading an article, one of the last things I had read about him was that they'd found him right before his death this like reporter wanted to hear about all this and dr deriver he answered it's just like a fucking film noir it was like in the late 80s and then he went to this like hollywood mansion and he went up there and he knocked on the door and the door opens and dr deriver's in in his ascot and his robe and he has a gun and he comes out and he's just like, are you the man that I'm supposed to see? And he's just like, yeah, buddy. Yeah.
And he's just being like, I never know who's coming to kill me. I never know who's on the other side of the storm.
And it's crazy. Jesus fucking Christ, buddy.
All right, guys, I think maybe it's a decaf.

Reporter Aggie Underwood also got harassed by the cops for continually insisting on more investigation into Leslie Dillon and Mark Hansen. Enough, and she got harassed enough where she started carrying a gun everywhere she went, just in case.
Eventually she backed down But author Pugh Eatwell discovered something interesting

In the California State University journalism archives. This is about the most black Dahlia fucking thing that could possibly happen.
It was an interview with Aggie Underwood from 1974, but just as it appears as if she's about to talk about the black Dahlia case, the film mysteriously cuts.

So we have no idea what she may have said. I think her waist

just did that.

I think she's a fucking suspect,

man. Dylan? Well, no!

Poo Eatwell.

Poo Eatwell?

Yes, Poo!

He's writing the name!

Finally,

the whole world will receive my pool. World of information.
Well, as far as what Leslie Dillon did with the rest of his life, he remarried quite a few times and eventually, this is weird even if he didn't do it, he had a daughter named Elizabeth. Weird.
That is fucked up. It's real fucked up.
Someone should just beat the shit out of him for that. Yeah, well, he died in san francisco in 1988 still accusingly even if you're 25 in 1947 there's not a good chance that you're still around in 2025 yeah now there are certainly holes in the leslie dillon case there was no firm connection established between him and mark hansen no it was never incontrovertibly proven that he was in L.A.
during the time of the murders. Why would the bellhops cover for him when they got other crimes going on? They would gladly give up the Black Dahlia murder so that they could get, they could be absolved of other things.
Because all the bellhops work together and Dillon's got information on the other bellhop, so if he takes him down, he's going to take him down to some other shit. But if that's stealing hats of the Black Dahlia murdering, but I think that one bellhop, I think the cop did have something on him.
Either say that he was in San Francisco at the time of the murder, or you're going to jail. Or you don't get to keep that diamond necklace you stole from that lady.
But it fits me so well, doesn't it? And Leslie Dillon also got some of the mutilation details wrong in one of his interviews. And even the Astor Motel itself has its problems.
I mean, witnesses got the color of Elizabeth's hair wrong. The shuffling of the rooms from nine to eight to three doesn't make a lot of sense.
The interviews were all done two years later. And it's possible that the gangster squad, just like all the rest of the fucking cops, just simply leaned on these people until they told a story that the squad wanted to hear.
And now I also say our next hero, a man by the, one of the most grumpy men to ever live. Walter Maffo.
No, no, no. You seem very sweet, actually.
I think he actually was very nice. I think it was a character he played.
Oh, no, he was big on the track. He would always lose all his money at the track.
He gambled away millions. I'd actually put Jack Lemmon as the grumpy old man.
I've heard he was, and that just makes me like him more. Wow.
I like somebody who loses all their money. Everyone loves Meredith Burgess, though.
I think it's cute. So one of the grumpiest men that we're ever going to meet, honestly, Larry Harnish.
He's going to come in, spoiler, next episode. He says one of the most poignant statements I have heard about this whole case, which is that you'll find that the people with some of the least to do with this are so excited to get themselves involved in this case and that they show up and they are excited.
I think that when you first go to the Astor Motel and you ask all these questions about Elizabeth Short, I think that you're first, like, you want to give the cop a good answer. You do.
You want to get him out of there. But no, no, no.
The problem with that is that it actually took the cops quite a long time to get the information out of these people. Probably because you're also showing up and leaning on them.
Yeah. Until they do give you something.
But I think that it's very exciting at very first blush to be a part of this story. But then what Larry Harnish says, but you notice when I talked to the family members, anyone that this case has actually touched,

it destroyed their lives so thoroughly

that they never want to have anything to do with this ever again.

They don't want to talk about it.

And so-

But that's family members.

Yeah.

But it's not just family members.

It's like the people that actually knew her,

the people that like,

the people who are around these people.

So this story,

like these are looky-loos.

Like that's how I view it.

They are looky-loos that at first were super excited

I'm not kidding. The people that like the people around these people.
So the, this story, like these are looky loose. Like that's how I view it.
They are looky loose that at first were super excited about being involved in the case. But the problem with dumb, impulsive people is they don't understand the consequences of their actions.
And then once the finally, they're like, Oh wow, it's a big deal. You go down to the courthouse, you got the cops everywhere.
The judge is staring you. Now it it's real.
Now this isn't just me standing on the street telling you kind of what I thought

sort of happened. Now it's like, oh,

I better...

I gotta say something. And maybe

that's where the truth comes. I don't know.
I have no idea.

Yeah, I mean, you could technically say that about

any witness in any crime ever.

No, because I find that they're brave witnesses.

But that's why they're different. There are brave

witnesses. This is somebody that wanted to tell this version of the story instead.
Maybe. But there's also the question as to why the LAPD or Mark Hansen's Underworld Connections didn't just disappear Leslie Dillon.
But I think Dillon might have had a dead man switch set up that could have exposed everyone should something suspicious happen to him. It's a stretch, but it's certainly a possibility.
Also, he went to Oklahoma. Get out of this town.
I don't want to ever see you again. He did.
He did. Yeah.
Having said all that, though, I do think that out of all the suspects I've looked into so far, the story of Leslie Dillon and Mark Hansen makes the most sense. That Dillon was supposed to simply kill and dispose of Elizabeth Short, but got carried away.
In my view, there are just too many coincidences to let this story go unexamined.

Definitely.

This is a pillar of the Black Dahlia story, because this is also, this whole storyline

is the natural timeline that happened at the time.

Everything else now is going to be after the grand jury.

Admittedly, though, I can also absolutely see Leslie Dillon being just some guy who liked to be creepy, a manipulator who just wanted to see how far he could take a story. But I do wholeheartedly believe that the LAPD had an interest in keeping this case unsolved, either because they were connected or somebody paying them was connected.
Really, what this story shows is just how much damage police corruption and cover-ups can do to an investigation. Even if Mark Hansen had nothing to do with it, the meddling that took place to protect him at all costs stymied the investigation again and again.
Instead of searching for the killer, Finnis Brown was often more concerned with derailing any line of investigation that led to Mark Hansen, organized crime, or the LAPD, and in the end was left with only a vague theory that the killer might have been an illegal abortion doctor. Mark Hansen may have even just been a rung on the ladder, someone tangentially related to the murders who had to take a small amount of heat on behalf of someone

more powerful.

But if that's the case,

we'll never know

because the police

made sure

we'll never know.

That, however,

does not mean

that we're at the end

of our series

just yet.

Yeah!

Yeah, you fucking idiots!

You fucking...

I saw y'all,

you pieces of shit!

How many people were like,

oh, they're only going

to do three episodes?

Oh, definitely not.

I knew that.

Yeah.

I had an idea of that.

That that was the thing

I'm that. I had an idea of that, that that was the things we're going to change.
As soon as we got into it, dude. Because, man, I think everybody's guilty.
Next week, we're going to return with two more suspects. The one you've all been waiting for.
And another lesser known suspect that just so happens to be Henry's top pick as the likely perpetrator of the Black Dahlia murder. Dwight D.
Eisenhower. Where was he? Where was he? The war was over.
Was he done with killing? I don't think so. He wasn't president yet.
And as we know now, presidents are immune of all crimes. So actually, good for him.
Was it Dewey? Marcus, I'm so excited that we're doing this because obviously we're going to go into a little bit of the, I'm going to say the man who should not be named. Yeah.
Because everybody fucking has covered this guy, but we're going to cover exactly why it's stupid that people think that this guy is the guy. I think personally.
I mean, at the very least, this man is a fantastic Los Angeles character, He's just a fascinating person in and of himself. And a Los Angeles character means pedophile.

And then we're going to the other one is Walter.

Well, the other one's my favorite.

The other one's my favorite, which is, again, but I will say, Marcus, I'm agnostic.

You're agnostic?

You don't seem agnostic.

You seem very passionate.

Very passionate and very sure. The whole episode, the last thing I would say is agnostic.
You're agnostic? You don't seem agnostic. You seem very passionate.
Very passionate and very sure. The whole episode, you seem...
The last thing I would say is agnostic. You know what I know? Because you know what I've known now? You know what I know now? What? It's how little I know.
That Dylan did it? No, it's how little I know. That's what I know now.
Now I'm aware of how little I actually know. I like how heated it gets during a mystery.
We gotta do more mysteries. I hate mysteries.
Because he doesn't like it when I come from behind. No, I just like...
He works, and then I go down in the shadows, and I come up with new things, and surprise and delight him, and make him angry. That's why I love doing the SeaWorld.
Telecom did it. Absolutely.
We have it on camera. I like stories where you tell me what happens, and then we find out what happens happens and then the whole thing's over and done with.
It doesn't work like that, does it, Marcus? No, it doesn't work like that. But this has still been a fascinating series.
And the thing is about the Black Dahlia murder is that, yeah, it's, you know, that's one of the drawbacks of the show is that we have a limited amount of time to spend on all of these. Everything that we do, we have a limited amount of time because we always have to get to the next thing and we're always finishing up with the last thing.
But the more you look into the Black Dahlia murder and the more you look into any single subject concerning the Black Dahlia murder, all you have is more questions. Because there were things that I would, even while I was writing this, I came up with more questions about like Mark Hansen as I was writing and be like, well, yeah, actually shit.
Well, the people, she did she did have brown hair when all these people said that she had black hair. And it's just like these holes start showing up and you start asking all these questions.
And this case drives people insane. It drives people absolutely insane.
It has ruined Larry Harnish's life. We'll talk about this.
I love you, Larry. I'm going to say this to you right now.
This is a message directly to Larry Harnish. I know you don't like true crime podcasts, right? I know you don't like them, but I'm going to let you know.
We're going to tell your side of the story. We're going to tell your side of the story, and you're going to be mad about it.
You're going to be angry. I'm probably going to get a thing or two incorrect.
And we might even be slightly flippant. You're going to be angry.
But I want you to know. I'm hearing you.
Hearing you. Yeah.
I'm hearing you. I think the reason why this story drives people insane is because it's like, it is just out of reach from modern day.
Like, it's like, it's just that you can go to the locations, you can see all the pictures, you can feel it, but fucking everybody's dead. It's like you're just out of reach.

You know, like everybody's dead.

Everything's already been muddled up and fucked up.

Or burned and the evidence has been destroyed.

Yeah.

Because back in the day, it was so much easier to get away with murder than it is today.

And this story is what gets people into true crime ever since.

This is one of those introductory stories that brings people in, which is also shows here. And I feel like I like to show a little bit of our dynamic.
You can see that this is how people yell about mysteries. And you can see us physically do it on our patreon.com slash last podcast on the left.
You can see us flap. You can see my tits go back and forth.
Twitch.tv slash LPN TV. We are back.
It is the year 2025. Woo! Wow! Isn't it the future? Oh, isn't it now? Yeah.
Yeah, 2025. It is the year 2025.
What did you think you were going to be doing in 2025? Like, say when you were 15. Do you know, I was one of those who was like, I'm going to die early.
Yeah. Because I was into Chris Farley and John Belushi and stuff like that.
So I thought I was going to die.

I imagine I thought I was going to coach football

or something. I thought you wanted to be

governor. No.

I never wanted to be

governor. Why would I want to be governor?

I didn't want to be governor of

fucking Florida. That's great because it's thinking.

You have less faith to deal with.

You know what? You know where we should be talking

about is this Saturday. Yeah.

Yeah. A week from

Saturday. A is this Saturday.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We're going to be in Atlanta.

A week from Saturday.

A week from Saturday.

Next week, we are in Atlanta at the Coca-Cola Roxy.

I can't fucking wait to be back in town.

Yeah.

It's going to be great.

Huge.

Huge.

Yeah.

And then we're doing Side Stories Live at Dad's Garage.

But that's already sold out.

So you got to go see the last podcast on a left show at the Coca-Cola Roxy on January 11th. And you can't make that? Fly to Dallas.
Fly to Dallas. Fucking get in a cabin, get in a covered wagon to fucking Nashville.
Take a moped to Detroit. Don't take a moped to Detroit.
It's going to be cold. Fly a pterodactyl to Toronto.
That's on May 3rd. But yeah, February, March, April, May, that's Dallas, Nashville, Detroit, Toronto, and of course, Atlanta a week from tomorrow on January 11th.
Go to lastpodcastontheleft.com to find ticket links for all of those shows and make sure to follow us on all of these socials at LP on the left on TikTok and Instagram.

Thank you,

Mike is good work.

Thank you.

I'm sure everyone's yelling about how wrong I am about everything. Yeah.

You are presenting all of the information.

I presented all the information.

The information exists and you are presenting it.

And if you didn't do that,

then you wouldn't be doing your fucking job.

You're right.

That's right.

But this,

guess what?

It's not going to stop here. We already have our next couple series lined up.
We know what we're doing. I'm very, very excited for 2025.
Yeah, super excited about the shit that we got coming up. Some history, some new shit.
We've got some current shit coming up. We've got some old conspiracies we've been waiting to get to for a very long time.
By conspiracies, I mean like the dumbest shit in the world. It's my favorite.
And we're finally going to find out who killed Nicole Brown Simpson. Honestly, that's my main goal.
And what happened to the waiter? What happened to the waiter? Talk about fucking... There wasn't even delivery back then.
That's service. Taking it all the way to the house? Crazy.
That's crazy. It's a great waiter.
And apparently the only tip he got was a knife tip. All right, guys, let's go.
Hey, hail Satan. I'll get you to see you soon.
Oh, how great. Hail Black Daly Murder, the band.
Sure. Yeah, they're friends.
Hey, Black Daly Murder. How you doing? Hey.
Good work, guys. Yeah.
Is irresponsible the name of your band? Maybe they're fucking dead. See you, fuckers.
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