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

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That's when the cannibalism started. Who's that?

Oh, those murky, murky waters.

Murky, murky Black Dahlia waters.

I have been up to my nipples.

That's deep.

Yeah.

Black Dahlia, man.

That's like three feet deep. Eddie, I'll allow it because it's almost Christmas.
It is funny because I've never, I never did the Black Dahlia deep dive. Yeah, I didn't either.
That was like one of those true crime things that I kind of thought, I think it's because as we were getting deeper into true crime as a person, first of all, I was like more serial killers. Then I found the Zodiac and I had seen pictures of the Black Dahlia corpse and it wasn't until now that it's kind of been the last podcast got going and I started thinking like, you know, we'll get there.
Yeah, eventually. So I don't need to look into it now.
And now I realize like, why it's like this. It's very confusing.
I am so deep in. I'm losing my fucking mind.
I'm doing the thing where I'm seeing her face everywhere. I'm talking about hacking tits off everywhere all the time.
It's getting a bit of a verbal tick of mine. And then what I did last night.
A verbal tit? Last night what I did is that I wanted to really get in the headspace so just started waving knives around the kitchen i was just like trying to measure natalie of where i'd cut her directly in half um but i went in i looked up the top songs of 1947 just to kind of get in the mood and i listened to a bunch of old pop songs and i was just sitting there and Natalie came back. She had a dinner with a bunch of her girlfriends.
She came in and she just saw like me, no shirt, in my underwear, watching, drinking a fucking Three Fingers of Scotch, listening to, I wish we had those little belts that hold your socks up.

I'm sitting there drinking about it being like,

we'll never know who killed Elizabeth Short, wife.

We never will know because every mystery unlocks another mystery.

And you're like, oh, and then it kind of feels nice to be here again.

Yeah, it does.

Welcome to the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen.

My name is Marcus Parks.

I'm here with the in too deep Henry Zebrowski. Oh, just a little couch ride with my sweetheart.
Let's go smile. So I like my baby.
And the newly traumatized Ed Larson, who just saw the Elizabeth short crime scene photos for the first time just before walking in here. Yeah, you just sent them to me.
I asked you to. Yes, you asked me.
I never send them to people without permission or direct request. I was like, while we're doing the show, I might as well see it.
And I did not finish my lunch. It was very upsetting.
Hey, though, Eddie, you got through most of it. I have? Oh, yo.
I definitely had a couple more bites. But I officially, I think I have a good theory before we get started on who it was.
World's worst magician. He's right.
He cut the box in half and then he's just like, oh no. I just, honestly, I looked at all the manuals, and I just thought if I believed deep enough in my heart that the magic would be real.
Oh, no. Oh, hot water.
Now, in many ways, Los Angeles is the promise of the American West. It's a place of reinvention.
The farthest you can run before you hit ocean. A place where there's ample opportunity to become somebody else entirely if that's what you so choose.
But within that rebirth lies great vulnerability. And LA has always been host to parasites constantly on the search for a cocoon to suck dry and throw away without a second thought.
Tell us how you really feel. He's right, though.
It's pretty close, but that's kind of why I like it. One might even say that much of the entertainment industry has been built on this very principle since day one.
I feel nothing. The key is to have a subs inclination to be embarrassed and then the lack of shame to hold anything back.
That's the key is that you got to be able to come to Los Angeles, eat shit and like it. Yeah.
But since Los Angeles is known to attract desperate people. Not me! Not me! Or at least people who are apt to become more desperate the longer they're here.
It's also attracted criminals of every kind, from gangsters to rapists to murderers. And that was never more true of Los Angeles than it was during the time of the Black Dahlia murder.
Because we've been obviously kind of going over all the theories about the murder. Last week, we talked a little bit about the Black Dahlia Avenger.
We brought them in. We know that at this point in the case, when everyone arrives and they are shocked by the body of Elizabeth Short, the conspiracy and the cover-up kicks in immediately.
Now, what we want to do is, like, we don't know necessarily. Marcus is short.
Marcus, he likes his suspects. I like my suspect

a lot. I really do.
The magician.

The magician. I went deeper

into Marcus's eyes. Bingo the okay.

Yeah, yeah. I wasn't

supposed to do this. I was supposed to be a dentist.

But

I cast a little doubt

on my own mind, but really what we're trying to set

up in this episode is

the atmosphere

that caused the Black Dahlia

murder. Without the

Thank you. out of my own mind, but really what we're trying to set up in this episode is the atmosphere that caused the Black Dahlia murder.
Like, without the corruption of Los Angeles, the police department and show business and all of it put together, this doesn't happen. Yeah.
Well, as one mob lawyer put it, in places like Chicago, the gangsters paid off the police, but the gangsters committed the crimes. In Los Angeles, the police were the gangsters.
And since the police were so corrupt, Los Angeles was an attractive place for organized crime figures who were either on the run for the law or looking for new opportunities. This moral ambivalence trickled down into the very fabric of this city and gave all sorts of people tacit permission to be horrible.
Because when you mix a virtually untouchable group of powerful individuals with a never-ending stream of desperate, naive people, shit's going to get real ugly and real weird real fast. But right before you get your face turned into a hideous clown, you know, macabre display and get sliced in half.

It's a lot of fun.

Like, right in those moments before.

That's where it was fun. I think more than more.

I think, like, days before it was fun.

It was fun.

No, it's a razor's edge.

That's the thing about Los Angeles.

It's a town where you can walk this razor's edge of danger, and you never know when you're

going to fucking fall off.

Because you could either end up Charlie Chaplin, or you could end up Donnie Chaplin. And you don't want to know what happened to Donnie Chaplin.
And so on today's episode, we're going to be talking about the disreputable, disgusting men who thrived in the underbelly of Los Angeles during the time of the Black Dahlia murder. Along the way, we'll also explain how these men gained enough power to possibly cover up their involvement in one of the most high-profile murders in America's history.
Now, while organized crime was certainly a problem, it operated hand-in-hand with the LAPD. And in the time period we're talking about here, the 1930s to the 1950s, it's been said that the LAPD had absolute disregard for both the Constitution and the law itself.
What if instead we posited, like, this is very harsh language, right? And we love the LAPD. We're not trying to remotely criticize the LAPD in any way, right, Eddie? No, this is a very long time ago.
Yes, yes. But I think that more, a way to kind of put this more gently is that the LAPD came and were taught improv classes by mafia men and then when that was in that play acting in that yes and like scenario they then ended up committing quite a bit of crimes at the time but it really was about staying in character yes.
Yes. There wasn't many checks and balances out here.
No. You're right.
There absolutely weren't. There really weren't.
Now, that's not to say that law enforcement during this time period was a paragon of virtue across America, but the LAPD were especially renowned for their lawlessness and brutality. They struck deals with anyone who could line their pockets, from lawyers to snitches to bail bondsmen, and they created a grift in which the criminals, the cops, and the lawyers were all on the same side trying to squeeze as much money as they could out of the city of Los Angeles.
And how long do you think this lasted? Like 15 years? No. About 2024.
I mean, there's always going to be police corruption, but obviously... At its worst, it was a decades-long thing that lasted from the 20s up until around the 50s.
Okay. Where there was no law.
Yeah, none. Lots of good movies and lots of bad movies made about it.
Yes. Well, all this only got worse in 1933 when a man with an actual Hitler mustache named Frank Shaw was elected mayor.
It was still in. It was still in.
Yeah. Is it a Hitler mustache in 1933? Because I don't think it is.
I think you'd call it a Lincoln mustache. No, you call it a chaplain.
Lincoln didn't have that mustache. The hat.
What? The mustache looks like a hat for the lip. No, because there's no brim.
The lip. It's a chaplain mustache at this point.
But in 1933 though, Hitler was a world-renowned figure so you do know that you have the same mustache as a... It's kind of like now having the same haircut as Elon Musk.
Okay. I mean, that's easy to do.
You just go to Turkey and you spend $8,000 to get it. Well, Frank Shaw was essentially bought and paid for by organized crime.
And his first action in office was to appoint his brother, Sailor Joe Shaw, as a secretary whose sole purpose was to organize and collect bribes. By making an under-the-table payment to Sailor Joe,

a police officer or even a firefighter could easily...

Yarrie, give me how you want to be up there.

Let me tell you something funny there, Jack.

I can't swim.

Through him, a police officer or even a firefighter

could easily buy a promotion,

and Joe is even known to sell the answers to local civil service exams to anyone who wanted them. As one person put it, everything in City Hall from the furniture to the toilet paper was up for sale just so long as you paid cash.
What kind of asshole's buying the toilet paper? Hey, how much fun would it be? I mean, this is all bad, though, but at the same time it'd kind of be fun to go in as a businessman. You were mad at the cops.
Buy all the toilet paper. Now they all got to get shit dry.
Man, imagine 1940s toilet paper. I'm pretty certain it was made out of hemp.
When Shaw was in office, he was able to flip the tables on organized crime by forcing them to pay him protection. And as long as you stayed up to date on your payments, you never had to worry about a raid on your brothels or your casinos by the biggest gang in town.
That was the LAPD. Nah, see? Nah.
We'll come for you. We'll come for you.
We'll die, see? Listen, nothing Hitler about my mustache. All right? This is American mustache.
This is Frank's mustache. That's what it needs to be called.
The Frankstache. You know that Hitler apparently shaved the mustache down in order to fit into a gas mask.
Really? That's what they said according to him. That's what Hitler said.
If you can, you know, and if you want to trust him, which I do, why not just shave the whole mustache? Because you need a little bit of something. Yeah.
Yeah. A little something to make him...
Fun. Hitler.
Yeah. Hitler! Shaw's entire operation, however, came crashing down when he got involved with the attempted murder of a private investigator in 1938.
The investigator was working with a concerned private citizen to expose the LAPD as essentially a legalized mafia. I just happened to notice.
I do know. I feel like the, excuse me, police, you're being naughty.
And I feel that you all should be ashamed for your behavior. Ah! Blah, blah, blah.
Don't stick with your mouth. Well, this private investigator got car bombed for his trouble.
The entire operation had been orchestrated by the head of the LAPD intelligence squad. And interestingly, that officer was convicted for his crime partly due to testimony from Jack Parsons.
That's wow. Holy fucking shit.
Another connection. Yeah, that's actually this.
This case is actually how Jack Parsons made his name. That's how Jack Parsons got famous was by being an expert witness in this case.
Wow. Fascinating.
I didn't even realize that that's where he shows up. And wow.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Because when I was reading about it, I know this case from somewhere.
Yeah, it was Jack Parsons. And after the intelligence officer was convicted, Mayor Frank Shaw resigned along with the LAPD chief,

James Tugan Davis, and dozens of LAPD officers, quote unquote, retired to Mexico soon after

to escape further scrutiny.

Yeah, Frank's going down to the south, see?

He's going to take his mustache to Mexico, see?

Going to get my mustache to take his mouth to store, see?

Come on now, I'm going down there, come on, buddy.

Soon after, another 200 cops were demoted or fired, and the administration that

Thank you. from Stacey Valparaisen.
Come on now, I'm going down there. Come on, buddy.
Soon after,

another 200 cops were demoted or fired

and the administration

that followed

Mayor Shaw's corrupt regime

appointed an elite group of cops

dedicated to removing mobsters

and the corrupt officials

from within.

That group was called

the Gangsta Squad.

And the Gangsta Squad is interesting Because a lot of them, pretty fat Which actually, I like a fat cop I think a fat cop is great because it means they think a lot Yeah, and you can get away from them Oh yeah, but these guys weren't the runners They weren't first responders They were like third and fourth responders They were call me when you get them responders Yeah, we respond from the office and my toilet. These guys were very going to get deep into the murky worlds because these were now supposed to be the new good guys.
These are the new good guys. These are handpicked recruits.
This is like Gotham City. This is Commissioner Gordon combing the ranks of the fucking police department to find the few guys who aren't paying Oswald Cobblepot.

Yeah, who's not on the take?

But then it turns out a lot of those guys, what is it terms?

You have to be careful when fighting monsters to not become one yourself.

Of course.

And so the Gangster Squad would then go to bend quite a bit of the rules to do this very honest work.

They had that horrible movie that came out like 10 years ago called Gangster Squad. Oh, is there like Jeremy Renner in it? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He plays like the flute in it or something? Yeah, and I think Sean Penn plays Mickey Cohen or something like that. Yeah.
But then they had to halt the release of it because they had this scene where it was in the preview. Yeah, I remember.
Where they came out and they just shot everyone in a movie theater and then the Batman thing happened. And so they were like, okay, I guess this movie's coming out in winter instead of summer.
And they had to go reshoot a bunch of shit. It's just them handing out gum to a bunch of people in the theater being like, don't say we didn't give them anything, you see.
Enjoy some sugar-free gum, man. I won't hurt your teeth, see.
No, Mickey Cohen hated the gangster squad. He called them more like the stupidity squad.
The mobsters aren't super clever when it comes to names. Especially not them.
Yeah. Working deep undercover, the seven-man gangster squad operated solely out of two unmarked sedans.
They had no offices, and they began making a name for themselves as crack investigators who were just as unconcerned with the Constitution as the men they were hunting. As such, the gangster squad was sometimes given special assignments outside of their purview, which is how they came to be involved in the investigation into the Black Dahlia murder.
It's kind of like using a dental dam, right? You know, you want to get at that pussy, man. You brought it back up into my mind.

You brought it back. That's all the Constitution is.
Yeah. Right?

Because the pussy is crime, right?

Yeah, in America is the pussy. Yeah, America

is the pussy and the crime is the clit.

The tongue, the mouth of the police.

A dental dam is the Constitution.

Get it between them and

the crime. We have to remove

the Constitution. Remember to get right up inside of the pussy hole of America and at the clit of criminality.
Perfect. Perfect analogy.
Thank you. Now, the seven men of the gangster squad could only do so much to root out police corruption.
Because they kept arresting themselves. So in 1947, when the Black Dahlia murder occurred, there were still plenty of LAPD officers on the take at every level.
Unfortunately for Elizabeth Short, it just so happened that the two homicide detectives in charge of her case, Finnis Brown and Harry the Hat Hanson, were just about as corrupt as they come. Oh, we may think.
Around the offices of Los Angeles Held Express, Finnis and Hansen were called the Ego Stoops, which was a portmanteau, meaning they were a combination of egotistical, arrogant, and stupid. Hey! I'm not arrogant! Lieutenant Harry Hansen was described by author Pugh Eatwell as a tall, balding redhead with a basset-hound face, Mickey Mouse ears, and sleepy eyes.
Sorry about that, y'all. I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know.
I'm sorry. Along with his pinstripe suit and loud ties, Hanson also never took off his fedora for anything, which is why they called him the hat.
You don't want me to take my hat off, because then, unfortunately, you would see my brain. I lost the top of my eyebrows and moved my water.
So the hat is unfortunately my head. Yeah, medicinal hat.
It's my medicinal hat. It keeps my brain away from the wind.
It's like when some people get half a face, you know, given after they get blown off in the war. He got a hat.
I got a scalp that I have to screw on. A nearly 20-year veteran of the LAPD by the time of the Black Dahlia murder, Hansen was known as a brute who beat suspects mercilessly and would pressure newspaper photographers to edit photos of suspects' faces to remove the blood produced by his enhanced interrogation techniques.
Hansen was particularly proud of what he called his Third Street Bridge confessions, where he'd dangle suspects over the Third Street Bridge if they didn't cooperate. Hansen was also known to call a suspect's bluff, often dropping them to the concrete below if they didn't tell him what he wanted to hear.
I'm sorry I got slipped. I had dish soap on my hands from earlier today.
So he's like a serial killer. A mass murderer kind of we don't know how many people Harry the Hat killed or if he killed anybody in particular.
He just said he dropped people off the fucking bridge all the time. It wasn't that tall of a bridge.
Oh, so they lived. Cops also, we know, they don't ever tell fishermen's tales of the things that they've done in the past and have exaggerated how powerful and masculine they are they never do that harry hansen's partner though finnish brown was hansen's polar opposite in both looks and demeanor while handsome was a smooth talker finnish brown was and strange, a squat and swarthy cop with heavy jowls and rumpled suits.
That picture of the two of them looking at the bodies like so, they're just like, why are you even, why are you crouching like that? You obviously can't crouch. On a hill, it's a sloped hill.
You're gonna fall over. They both look like rumpty dumpties.
While Harry Hanson got the relatively flattering nickname of The Hat, Finnis Brown, the other guy in charge of investigating Elizabeth Short's murder, was called F.A. or Fat Ass.
I don't think he approved of the nickname, and I don't know if people said it out loud. It might have been more accepting to be called Fat Pack then.
Oh, sure, it was. I think it was considered...
It's almost a compliment. It was a compliment because it meant you were rich, charismatic, you were healthy, you were safe.
Charismatic. Yeah.
In addition to being corrupt, Phinness Brown also moonlit as a bookie and a bag man for the mob, collecting money from shakedowns and protection rackets throughout Los Angeles. Phineas's brother Thaddeus, however, was known as a cop's cop.
Thaddeus was a beloved figure in the department who didn't have much regard for the Constitution either due to his obsessive hatred of communists and his obsessive love for cops. It's just a very, it's like a combo of like, Thaddeus is the good son,? Thaddeus is the son that got the- Well, quote unquote good, I mean, he's like lawful evil.
That's how I view him. I view him as the, he's the face, he's the front facing one.
He's the one that is- He's like quieter murdering cowboys. Yes, he is the political sweetheart of the LAPD.
That's why they like him is because politically he makes, he looks good. He is much more handsome than his brother.
and because of the LAPD. That's why they like him.
It's because politically he looks good. He is much more handsome than his brother.
And because of his rapport with all the police and the fact that he's here to firmly establish what he believes is a lawful boys club. And I think that Thaddeus Brown had a problem with Phinness Brown because Phinness Brown is, to be honest, he's a fucking mystery.

This man is an

unfathomable mystery. He's a piece of shit.

His name is Finnis Brown. It's very interesting

but he's a fucking...

We don't know really

what this man's agenda

was and what he had

to gain from jamming up

the process of the Black Dahlia murder.

We also know that he might

have been on the take. He also might have been

deeply undercover. He was definitely on the take.
But they're also saying that he was undercover, telling people who he was taking the take from. And this is this game.
This is what happened in JFK. This is why JFK is like the way it is.
Because once assets become an asset, once a cop becomes an informant for themselves, once they are corrupt and then double teaming and everybody's on two separate teams, they're on their own team and somebody else's team, it doesn't begin to muddy the waters very significantly. They get paid twice.
Yeah. That's what he did.
And that's what makes Black Dahlia so interesting and so confusing confusing is because every person in this story is running a game within a game within a game because it is so corrupt. And there is so much crime going on here from the top to the bottom.
There are a million games being played at all times and nobody trusts each other. Next episode, we are going to go into this idea of what I think truly what's going is, like, there's, like, seven mafias of different industries all fighting at once.
Yeah. Well, because if you weren't committing crimes, you weren't able to get anything done.
Exactly. It's like Lance Armstrong.
He wasn't cheating. He was competing.
Now, who did their mother love more, though? That's what I want to know. Thaddeus.
Thaddeus. No, the mother always loves the fuck up more.
Always. I guess they're forced to.
They're forced to. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Thaddeus Brown, he was such a looming figure in Los Angeles that on the radio version of Dragnet, Joe Friday referenced Tad Brown as his boss. And Orson Welles based the character of Hank Quinlan in the film noir classic Touch of Evil off Tad Brown as well.
Which is not a compliment. No, it's not.
And so with Finnis Brown working directly with organized crime and Tad Brown working solely for the interests of the cops, they made an extremely powerful pair that were difficult to stand against if you thought they might not be doing their job correctly. And it's probably not a coincidence that they were tossed on one of the most high-profile cases to ever hit the city.
Or at least finnis was tossed on thaddeus was doing his own thing yeah that's what i mean he was tossed because of his connection to thaddeus was he was tossed on the case but why and and who's involved and now that's were they the first people to show up they were the cops to show up yeah they were told to go take care of this body we put there well they don't know they yeah we don't know. It might have just been their turn in the rotation, and it just so happened.
That's the thing is that the room for coincidence in this case is astronomical. There really is so much room for coincidence.
Because the world was kind of small. Yeah, it was much smaller.
LA at this point was half the size that it is now. It's half the population that it is now.
Yeah, and it's just a bunch of vacant lots. At least in places like Leimert Park.
Yeah. Right from your grave.
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Now to the press, it seemed like the cops really weren't trying all that hard when it came to investigating the Black Dahlia murder. Because as we established last episode, all the most important aspects of the case had been uncovered by journalists like Jimmy Richardson and Aggie Underwood.
Jimmy's people had discovered all the weird shit that had gone down in San Diego just before Elizabeth's death, for example. And Aggie Underwood had put together a clear timeline of Elizabeth's last days during her interview with Red Manley.
The cops hadn't done any of this shit. Therefore, rumors that the Black Dahlia investigation was being shut down and covered up were being spread as early as late January 1947, about a week or two after the murder.
Well, it sounds like also partially was the issue of all the confessing Sams, is that they got this influx, we We talked about last week of all of these people wanting to jump in and insert themselves into this case. Because, again, I think that where Los Angeles comes into play is that you have the because everybody's an actor in the population.
There's a lot of people looking to be like, I put my mark on this case. Oh, I get my picture on the paper, which I do think is true.
I think there's a little bit of the beginnings of this idea of like any publicity is good publicity. No, everyone thinks they're living in Chicago.
The play, you know, the musical. Yes.
You know, like that. And so now they're calling in.
And so everything got gummed up. They have no specific forensics because at the time it was a backward science.
The body was completely washed clean. They can't figure out what to do.
And so now it's, I think that's where we're at. Also, when a murder is this elaborate, it's probably easier to solve.
And so I imagine that when you go two weeks without no fucking clues or no answers, people can definitely ask questions. You think it'd be easier to solve.
But what we've talked about on the show time and time again, if it's not somebody that knows

the persons directly, it's

extremely difficult to figure out.

Which is most murder, right? Most murder is done

by somebody that you know. Yeah.

Like 95% of the time.

In one way or another, like you're associated with

them or a lot of times it is someone

you know personally that kills you. That's why

it's always the husband. It's always the wife.
They always do. That's what they look for.
But when it's a problem, which is in this case probably true, close to a complete stranger, it's hard to figure it out. Well, Jimmy Richardson in particular began to believe that the investigation was being purposefully stalled.
And it was his theory that the LAPD wanted it gone because of its possible connections to organized crime and the Los Angeles political elite. Furthermore, the LAPD were trying their best to distance themselves from even putting work into the investigation, going so far as to say that the murder had probably taken place outside the LA city limits and was therefore none of their business.
The chief homicide detective in the city, Captain Jack Donahoe, was likewise drawing criticism because of his ridiculous public statements, like his assertion that Elizabeth Short was cut in half solely so the body could be carried more easily, despite the fact that Elizabeth Short only weighed 123 pounds. But I do think that there's a theory that holds of that she was cut for transport because of where she was dumped, specifically because she was in a high populous area.
There were people lived around. Yes, there were vacant lots, but she was discovered by people just walking through.
People walk through Limerick Park all the time. So there is, I do think that there might actually be reason that she was cut in half.
And that's why my main theory is that it was done by several people, but we'll get there. We'll get, we'll get there.
But carry her. That's what I do at Rambo.
Rambo's at 70 pounds, and I put these straps on her. But how does Julie get you into the bag? Oh, my God, that's a pulley system.
But the problem with that, though, is the clean surgical nature of the cut, is that if they're just cutting her in half solely to transport her body, why did they take so much care in cutting the body? Because of the guy they brought her to. But that doesn't make sense because why are they bringing her to a guy to cut her in half so they can transport her somewhere else? They're transporting her to transport her? Guy went to her.
It was, yeah, like a doctor. I think that one connection could be to the legal abortion circuit and that they have a guy, if this is a mafia hit, which I do think that is correct, I think that it is involving the mafia on some level, is that they bring in an abortion doctor to essentially, who's also in the cut, to being like, how the fuck do we get, the psychopath did this to her, we need to get rid of this right now, we need to do it right now

and his first thing is like, we put her in

two burlap sacks and we

go drop her off somewhere. Sure, but let's not

get too hard. No, of course not, I'm just saying

now I'm here. This is just what

days of this. Yeah, so you think

it's an evil doctor. Yeah.
No, I think

he's Dr. Giggles.
It wouldn't be so

straight if it was Dr. Giggles.
Dr. Serious.

Yeah, Dr. Rulers.
But yeah. It wouldn't be so straight if it was Dr.
Giggles. Dr.
Serious. Dr.
Rulers.

Was the spine cut cleanly?

Yes, it was.

The spine was cut very cleanly and very deliberately.

Specifically cut very nicely.

But yeah, and that's the thing.

We're going to try really hard in this episode.

There's so many different lines of questioning.

I'm doing my best.

We really have to stay fucking laser focused. All right.
And the investigative lines that Donahoe pushed were even more ludicrous. The Hawaiian guy? Donahoe? No! Are you not listening? Jack! Donahoe! Not Donahoe! Was Donahoe, he had become a big proponent of the homicidal lesbian angle.
This was a line of investigation that was sure to go nowhere except to the harassment of LA's LGBT community, which was at the time a target of the LAPD anyway. Now, you may ask why the head of homicide would be so invested in derailing the murder investigation of one young woman, especially when leaving the case unsolved made his department look that much more incompetent because people were getting killed every fucking day in Los Angeles.
It was a bloodbath out here. Fucking innocent citizens were getting caught in the crossfire of all these fucking gang wars.
Women were getting killed. Hell, we talked about two murders last week that occurred just after Elizabeth Short that also went unsolved.
Oh, yeah, because we all say, what, the werewolf murders, which we haven't even really factored into any of this. That's a whole book about the Black Dahlia that we're not even going to get to about the werewolf murders and then how it's connected back to the three...
Frankenstein murders? Oh, Eddie, they were the Dr. Frankenstein murders.
Well, the answer is that Captain Jack Donahoe was one of the men who arranged bribes for the organized crime syndicate that had Los Angeles in a stranglehold in the late 1940s. And the more that investigators looked into Elizabeth Short's death, the more it led them to organized crime figures.
Now, organized crime was such a fact of life in Los Angeles during the time of the Black Dahlia murder

that mobsters were hired as consultants on noir movies for accuracy. And in some cases, they even got producer credits.
That's kind of amazing. I mean, it still happens, especially with military movies.
Yeah, I mean, we had a deal on Wolf of Wall Street where they had to keep Jordan Belford off set because he kept trying to show up. Mobster Johnny Roselli, for example, produced a prison break movie called Cannon City.
And this was in addition to Johnny being responsible for getting Marilyn Monroe some of her first roles, as well as Johnny being involved in CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. And he was also quite possibly the man in the sewer at Dilly Plaza when JFK was killed.
Hey, hey, hey, hey. That's just where I was.
Okay? I had nothing to do. I love JFK Maron.
You know, I love Jesus Christ. It's the only Catholic president.
I would never kill a Catholic president. I'd never do that, okay? I was down there because I like slime.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that is true.
Johnny Rosselli, he was responsible for getting Marilyn Monroe some of her first roles. He was in the business.
And he was heavily involved in a CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. In other words, people like Johnny Rosselli, the ones involved in both organized crime and the movies, they had connections to the government on both a local and national level.
And they had the power to pull strings if they wanted something

covered up. Remember, I just always want to say this.
These, what we consider to be big coverups, my belief will always be that they're small and that the, what we're looking at as human. It's like, this makes me wonder whether or not Meryl Monroe was actually killed just because of the fact that she was connected to, like, it's human.
It's a lady that is a famous, kind of like a mess at this point. Like, she seems to be kind of like an out-of-pocket person that you'd want to get whacked, just like Elizabeth Short.
And then she's been shipping to President and his brother, and she may be probably been around a bunch of different shit, and probably was popping off saying all the stuff that she was going to say about the time when she was fucking the president and fucking his brother at the same time but she's out of pocket because they were filling her full of drugs it's not her fault you're right but still you get whacked for it yeah that it really is and and the things about these uh these conspiracies is that i think it really does start with like one guy telling another guy take care of it yeah and it. Yeah, get rid of it.
And it's like, and then another guy tells another guy,

why don't you take care of it?

And then just, like, it's just, and it gets...

And then the first guy's like, I didn't say kill her!

That's the problem!

He's like, you didn't want it,

then you were gonna get her a fucking bus ticket!

Now, bombings, shootings, and murder of all stripes

were committed by the mob with near impunity

during this time period,

giving Los Angeles the reputation

as the gang capital of the nation, in addition to being the center of the world's entertainment industry. Such was the prominence of mob violence in Los Angeles that coverage of the Black Dahlia murder shared headlines with a gang war that ultimately culminated in the assassination of infamous gangster Bugsy Siegel just five months after Elizabeth Short's body was found.
Have you ever heard about how Bugsy Siegel was fucking assassinated? We have to do all, we gotta do the series, buddy. God, he was sitting in his house and some guy from outside shot him in the head with such accuracy that the bullet ricocheted off his nose and blew Bugsy Siegel's eye across the room.
Whoa. This is like, you say you don't like mafia stuff, but then some of these things are really fun.
I like the mafia murders. I just don't like the, hey, we got to go check out the numbers.
Yeah, it's also like, go check out the numbers games. He's got a guy who's going to do things.
Well, they invented the numbers. It's the lottery.
There's too many names. I know, but Bugsy Siegel's fascinating because this is the- You just like him because he invented Vegas.
Dude, these are our real forefathers. You know what I mean? Out west.
Yeah. Well, Los Angeles was one of America's newest cities.
And a lot of mafiosi came to California to escape either the law or previous associations with crime families, mainly on the East Coast. Now, the other big crime cities, New York and Chicago, thought of the L.A.
mob as a bunch of country bumpkins. And that's if they thought of them at all.
And you're not wrong. That is a, they basically, a lot of these guys came out to L.A.
really because they couldn't hack it in New York and Chicago. Or because they'd gotten into trouble or they, you know, some, a lot of them came out because they were too hotheaded to be out there.
And they had done something, like they'd beaten the shit out of the wrong guy. And it's like, okay, you got to go to fucking California now.
Yeah, and it's an open territory. Yes, and then you come out here too.
It's like, and they were also, they would also send people out. They'd be like, all right, oh, you know, like old sloppy Fred.
No, Mickey Cohen. Mickey Cohen was the guy they sent out.
I was like, okay, now you got to deal with Mickey Cohen. And then he ended up becoming one of the biggest gangsters in the city's history.
And that shows that anything's possible in this town. Yeah.
But what Los Angeles had that no one else did was Hollywood with all the new opportunities that the movie business brought. See, the motion picture industry was essentially contained within a 20 square mile grid with supply chains that could be manipulated and squeezed at any point.
And its workforce was almost fully controlled by unions. Yeah.
At one point, gangster Bugsy Siegel had complete control of the Screen Extras Union, of all things. Well, I think Screen Extras Union is a really good way to hire people very quickly.
And then you get people that are in dire straits under your control. Also, it's a good way to go make sure

people are on set taking a look at the director

and having informants getting back to you

and what's going on on set.

And it's also a good way to get hot, new, desperate ladies.

Also, you think about this,

because when you said-

It's actually served a lot of great-

It really is a very good part.

LA had Hollywood, New York had Broadway,

and that's why LA and New York are better than Chicago,

because Chicago just got the Cubs. It just got Cubs and heart disease.
You also out here had a lot of rich and famous people with, shall we say, predilections. And we talked about predilections.
And those predilections could be exploited and used for extortion should a movie star or producer or director need some help getting rid of a dirty little secret. And movie stars and directors haven't changed all that much.
No. And I've had them all over the world! And when it comes to dirty little secrets, Elizabeth Short may have gotten herself involved with a shady, publicity-phobic Hollywood businessman

heavily involved with both organized crime and the LAPD, a man named Mark Hanson,

and she just may have gotten killed as a result.

The man from Batavia.

Hanson's great-grandfather.

Oh, wow.

I love those little girls.

God damn, I just want to break off a piece of some of them handsome women. Everyone was always talking about the Olsen twins when we were growing up.
I was thinking about the Hanson sisters. Oh, you tell me, friend.
Now, if you'll remember, when the LAPD received the package from the man who had claimed to have murdered Elizabeth Short, included with that package was an address book with the name Mark Hansen printed on the front. I believe whoever sent the package is the only person who knows who killed Elizabeth Short.
Hansen claimed that he barely knew Elizabeth and that she'd stolen this book from him to use herself. She was always trying.
She was jealous of my contacts. And that was the extent of their relationship.

It is, however, almost positive that Elizabeth Short and Mark Hansen were involved in an affair shortly before the Black Dahlia murder.

Or did he want to be in an affair with Elizabeth Short?

Yes. When I say affair, I use that term loosely.

Like, there was definitely some sort of relationship between the two of them, although it's very murky as to what that relationship really was. I'm sure it was completely innocent.
Well, Mark Hansen, his story is quite interesting. Yeah.
Mark Hansen was involved in motion pictures, but his business was on the distribution side. He owned movie theaters, and he'd gotten his start in Minneapolis, where he opened a chain of theaters that were successful enough to necessitate a move to Hollywood.
Once in Los Angeles, Hansen opened a nightclub called the Florentine Gardens, where you could find an aging Errol Flynn or a young Marilyn Monroe hanging out if you went on the right night. But the big secret at Florentine Gardens was that it was also a mob casino, and a big part of the reason why Hansen and his mob associates were able to operate Florentine Gardens so successfully was because they worked hand in hand with the LAPD.
Mark Hansen, his whole storyline is that he was an immigrant. He was Danish.
Yeah, he came in. He was desperate to get in the movies.
The way he got in the movies was by distribution, which happens a lot. He got in, and what he found, according to people who knew Mercanson, he was a family man.
He had wife and kids, and when he started, he considered himself a very honest businessman. Like he was trying to set up a way for him in LAPD in L.A.
that would be successful for forever. And what then happened is that he ran into what happens to anybody that tried to run into any one of these businesses in Los Angeles at the time.
You had to speak with various mafia members that would also be members of the police force and all this kind of stuff. And it just seems kind of perfunctory in the scene to be a part of business.
A lot of people mark the Florentine Gardens gambling group as to actually be kind of small, kind of low level. And it was considered just to be sort of like casual in terms of what they were doing there.
He was really trying to get into show business. That's what he wanted.
And make money in show business. And then what happened is that he got addicted to ladies.
Yep. And there was also actual mobsters involved.
Oh, very much so. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jimmy the little giant Utley was his mob contact. The little giant.
But remember, you know, these guys, like, no matter how, like, there are these huge syndicates that are operating out of Los Angeles that involve Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen. But then there are also these small ones that work directly with the police.
Because Mickey Cohen and Bugsy Siegel fucking hated the cops. They hated anyone who worked with the cops.
Yeah, they were New York guys. But these guys, guys like Mark Hansen and the mob associates he had, they worked directly with the police.
because if you'll remember, I mentioned earlier that one of the homicide detectives in charge of the Black Dahlia murder, Finnis Brown, was a bag man for an organized crime figure. What the organized crime figure Finnis Brown worked for was Mark Hanson.
And one has to ask how much of a coincidence it is that while Finnis Brown was investigating Elizabeth Short's murder, a package should arrive from the killer that has an address book with his boss's name on it and the investigation stalls soon after. I think that's quite possible.
But also, why would he be incriminating himself? He's not incriminating. He's saying by receiving the package that he's eliminating himself as a suspect.
But it's Mark Hansen. Mark Hansen didn't send the package.
No. Mark Hansen had no idea that the package was being sent.
All of this was happening outside of Mark Hansen's purview, and that's the problem here. Now, as far as how Mark Hansen came to be involved with Elizabeth Short, we really are looking at a very Laura Palmer-esque plot straight out of David Lynch's creative universe.
Just go and turn on some Count Basie. Go get some, I love this, the new song, the song I like was Near You.
This is like, it's a very kind of, like when we talked about how every song for the 1940s in the right context is truly frightening because it's just, I was just looking at these and just like, I was looking at pictures of Elizabeth Short over and over again. Just remember that.
It's all like, I want to sing like the morning, the joy and the spring. But it's like filled with serial rapists.
Yeah. And all the songs are about trains.
See, in the 1940s, Mark Hansen had a sort of casting couch situation going on in which he would recruit young girls for his nightclubs. And these girls were found and recruited by a man named Nils Thor Granlund.
And they called him Granny for short in NTG. Mm-hmm.
Nils Thor had actually pioneered the New York City nightclub scene in the 1920s. Hearing about the Charleston, I invented the Louisville.
So his name is Thor and they called him Granny? Yeah. Nils Thor last name is, that's true.
Because his last name is Granlund.

Yeah.

Well, he was the one who kind of pioneered the concept of the girl in the G-string wearing high heels. Thank you.
Yeah, seriously? Can we hold a moment of silence and say, thank you, Granny? Well, he was a very particular flavor of piece of shit. He would travel to rodeo shows across the country where he would find jailbait that he could lure to L.A.
for Mark Hansen. But from the girls that worked for him, Mark Hansen would choose a sort of harem for his own home, which was located just behind the Florentine Gardens Club.
Not all the girls who stayed at his home, however, worked for Mark Hansen. According to well-placed sources, one of the girls that came in and out of Hansen's home who fit that bill, didn't work for him, was Elizabeth Short.
So he was married, the wife left him. So now he is...
Why? I don't know. It seems that like, and we have a lot of friends that have run nightclubs, but it seems that when you run a nightclub.

We do?

I mean, back in the day, we've known people that I know people that have.

I have.

Yeah.

And we it does seem to hurt your relationships because what happened was is that he fell in love again with the biz, which is always like the worst thing for a business owner, especially in show business where he became really into this idea of, oh, I can control all of these young women. They have to, they're being really nice to me and they're flirting with me because I have something to give them.
And then what happened, he started renting his own apartment right behind the place and his wife had left him. And then eventually, because they were there with him and when the family left, he's like, oh, I'll just bring the chicks in here.
Yeah. So they started hanging around, and now what we know, because what about we know about Elizabeth Short? She pretended to want to be an actress.
Yeah. She did not actually- She talked about it a lot.
She talked about it, but she didn't actually want to be one. So Mark Hansen was sold originally on this idea that, well, this is Beth.
She's here.

She wants to be a dancer.

And Mark Hansen fell so butt deep in love with her.

Yep.

Now, Elizabeth had been introduced to Mark Hansen's world through a friend named Marjorie Graham.

Graham, a heavyset girl who was also from Massachusetts, like Elizabeth, she had a weakness for the sauce and often found herself... Naranara? Yeah.
You beat me. You beat me.
And she often found herself in bad situations as a result. Oh, well, Elizabeth and Marjorie...
Terrible, you know, Olive Garden. Well, Elizabeth and Marjorie had been staying together at the Hawthorne Hotel in Los Angeles during the summer of 1946.
This was shortly after Elizabeth's relationship with Major Matt Gordon had ended. Remember him? He was the guy that supposedly had died over India and that she had supposedly married him and she had supposedly had a kid with him that had supposedly died and all that.
No matter what happened, this is around the time that that whole thing ended. And Elizabeth and Marjorie were running out of money.
But they could, according to Marjorie, stay for free at the home of a club owner named Mark Hansen. Although it's unclear if Marjorie told Elizabeth what was expected of her if she did choose to stay at Hansen's home.
Technically, Mark Hanson was doing the more of the Romeo,

what they call Romeo grift or

Romeo con for pimps versus

coercive.

Come on, baby.

Do this for me.

It's more like, of all the

girls, which seemed to happen to

Beth Short quite a bit,

is that he

chose her specially.

Like, the other girls, he was

just trying to fuck. But then

I'm going to go ahead and get some more. Beth Short quite a bit is that he chose her specially.
Like, the other girls, he was just trying to fuck. Yeah.
And turn out. Yes, but when he met Elizabeth Short, he fell in love.
Yes. Like, it was something else.
Like, he became obsessed with her. Yeah, but guys like that, it probably happens to him, like, once a month.
Yes, but then they don't turn into the Black Dahlia, which is always the kind of issue with all of the stories in this episode. Yeah, but Mark, again, Mark Hansen didn't turn into the Black Dahlia.
Now, while Mark Hansen did have sex with the young women who stayed at his home, Elizabeth was said to be different from all the other girls. According to a friend of Elizabeth's who lived there, Mark tried having sex with Elizabeth on many occasions, but she was always able to get out of it, which only made him want her more.
Because remember, there was also one of a theory it's because Elizabeth Short said that her pussy was destroyed. Well, that was disproven.
Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah.
But it was one of the weird lines that she gave. One was that she was a virgin and the other one was just like, my vagina doesn't work.
Yes. Well, this yearning was only made stronger by the steady stream of dates Elizabeth would go on while staying at Mark's house.
Now, Elizabeth was well aware of Hanson's jealousy, so she would always make sure her dates picked her up and dropped her off on a corner a block away so Hanson would never see her with another man. But in early December 1946, about a month and a half before Elizabeth was found dead, Elizabeth and Mark Hansen had some sort of disagreement and he kicked her out of the house.

Briefly, Elizabeth lived in an apartment

where each room had eight young women

crammed together in bunk beds,

costing just a dollar a night.

But since Elizabeth didn't even have a dollar,

she skipped out on paying the landlady and disappeared.

A few days later,

she reappeared in the Aztec Theater in San Diego, where she was found by the aforementioned Dorothy French. Soon after, you had the mysterious couple knocking on the French's door looking for Elizabeth.
You had the ride back to L.A. with Red Manley.
The disappearance that night and her body being found six days later. So this is the final run.
This is the story of Fire Walk With Me. Like literally.
So she... And right now we just have flashes.
There are so many fucking characters. Yes.
Well it's because she really was... She was hitting the town! She was homeless.
She basically was homeless. And at this point what they truly say is like once the soldier storyline for her ended she really was kind of left to the winds.
So that's a part of what they say that she was probably doing when she was making all the phone calls in the hotel. Was that she was calling every old soldier that she had known from back in the day.
Can you send me money? Can we do this? And she was really kind of speed running toward the end of her life. But it sounds like the conflict that got her kicked out of the house was also kind of indicative of why Beth Short was considered to be an intense, sometimes people would say difficult person because she kind of wanted it both ways a little bit.
So she wanted Mark Hansen to be in love with her. So she'd play that angle up for a while and then hold out, which is, is her right? She's allowed to do it.
Made Mark Hansen angry. Eventually he's like, all right, fuck it.
He tried to move on. New girl comes in.
New object of Mark Hansen's affections. She flips out saying all of the stuff, being like, she's going through my bags.
She's trying to steal my stuff. And he's all like, why don't you just go? And then that's when she, that is like apparently when it started a bunch of of drama because that's what happens when you put all of the showgirls that you're having sex with in one apartment yeah and that's just like i'm just gonna say this as a producer don't do that well there's also i mean half of the houses that are like a million five in hollywood right now would just hold actresses for producers oh dude if you go up you go up and down, I always think about on Rampart, when you go up to like, they used to have these furnished housing, and that's like where all of this shit kind of happened.
They used to have actors' housing, where they used to kind of put them weirdly like in tenements, where they were just all hanging out. Because they owned you.
You'd be on like a three or five picture deal, and you'd live there, and as soon as your deal was up, or they fired you, you would lose your home and your clothes. Just very Three Amigos.
It was real. But it's also kind of got, though, in a way, though, that contract system must have been kind of fun.
Like you hear like all those Ernest Borg nine types because you show up. You have no idea what part you're playing.
You're like, oh, I guess I'm a farmer today. And like, oh, I guess I'm a coal miner today.
That kind of stuff is funnier. Then you're an alien and then you're something else.
It's kind of, you know, it's like improv class. Now, Mark Hansen was able to evade investigation for a long time after his former address book showed up at the Los Angeles examiner offices, along with Elizabeth Short's other belongings.
But that was because he was in cahoots with one of the homicide detectives. Hanson, however, almost got a dose of street justice in July of 1949, a year and a half after Elizabeth's murder.
That month, a dancer at his club named Lola Titus shot him in the back after an argument, accusing him of being, quote, A goddamn cop lover! Yeah. Yeah, a goddamn cop lover! Lola Titus, did you research into her at all? Mm-hmm.
Bucks a woman. She was a, she was his Rubenesque affair.
Like, he was, like, super into this lady, and she was known for, like, she'd get naked at the drop of a hat, and she was like, she's a fun lady. Yeah.
A lot of energy. Hanson, however, survived the gunshot to the back.
And when he arrived at the hospital, the first thing he said was, Get me, Brown! Get me, Brown! He did not, however, mean Finnis Brown. He wanted Finnis' brother, Thaddeus Brown, the cop's cop.
And Thaddeus Brown quickly rushed to Hanson's side, I suppose, to make sure that Lola Titus got what was coming to her. No one really knows what went on between Thaddeus Brown and Mark Hanson during that conversation.
All they know is he said, get me Brown and Thaddeus Brown fucking jumped. Just understand that this is why this case is so difficult because it's just everybody's a villain.
Yeah. No one's telling the truth.
It is the it's like dealing with the CIA. No one is, you don't know what anybody's actual story is.
So was Hanson dying and he just wanted to give Thaddeus some information? I don't know. I think what he wanted to do is bring Thaddeus and say, get the bitch who did this to me.
Get her. It was Lola Titus.
Get her. Make sure she goes down.
This really probably has nothing to do with the Black

Dahlia directly. It's more just showing that

Mark Hansen had definitely had

a relationship with the police, which means

that he was more than

probably an informant, which would mean

that if Finnis Brown worked for

Mark Hansen or was like a bag

man for Mark Hansen, it's like he

was then conversely working

for a gangster that was also working for the police.

Yes. You're making things

purposefully confusing for people.

It's the truth. This is what we're in the middle of.

This is what I'm trying to explain.

But Mark Hansen's close relationship with the

police wasn't the only reason

why she shot him. Allegedly,

Lola Titus and Elizabeth

Short were friends, and Lola

had accused Hansen of being involved in Elizabeth Short's murder. I knew you were trying to cut me in half.
I knew what you were trying to do. You drew that line above my belly button, and you said you were trying to make measurements for the new pool.
And I know that that's not what was happening. Hocus pocus yourself.
Oh, Mr. Magic Man, you're not kidding me.
Because I'm a free lady. I'm gonna I'm going to be.
I'm going to go take my dancers out. I'm going to put a banana up her pussy.
What did the guy say who killed Elizabeth Short after he killed her? What? Abracadabra. Marcus liked it.
I won't give it to you. I won't give it to you because it's mean.
And again, the magician theory has that proven out. Did you think it was crocus pocus? That I enjoyed.
There we go. That got me.
Unfortunately, though, Lola was not the most stable witness. After she was arrested and taken to the Hall of Justice, the officer in charge of taking her to the courtroom opened the door to the room where she was being held to find her nude and spread-eagled lying on the floor.
Want to check me for a gun? Hey! Or do you want to go get some flowers and make me a bath? The officer ordered her to get dressed, which she did. Alright, how about just, what way do you want me to get dressed? One sock? One glove? The whole, everything.
Oh, you want me to cover my pussy, huh? Can you smell it? Yes. Quite fragrant.
It's quite fragrant. You're welcome.
I wasn't sure what it was, but once you said pussy, I knew exactly what it was. I also brought this pot.
I also brought this pot of beef stroganoff from home. But after her picture was taken by court photographer, she got nude again, remarking, my God, it's hot in here.
I can't believe our hearts in here. I got to show my butt to the air conditioner.
Bring me to the ice machine. Hey, son, your new name is Air Conditioner.
But when it came time to finally make arguments, Lola's attorney said that according to Lola, Mark Hansen's game was to scoop up young girls and make a lot of promises about opening doors in Hollywood. If only they did a little something for him first.
And that's fucking honestly, what a fucking lie. I have never heard a producer say anything like that to anybody I know.
Like, that's just like. That's never that ploy has never been used in this city in this city ever.
Who do they think we are here? I am so sick of my cherished art form being slandered in this way. How fucking dare you? Because I was never given the opportunity.
Yeah, you were. Yes, actually.
The one time I was. But it wasn't how I wanted it.
It was never some big busty milf Saying well you know these tits Aren't gonna suck themselves Or should I say Mr. Babe Ruth No it was a man Yeah And you said no And look where you are.
I made the error of having taste and pride. And I'll never do it again.
Lolititus was one of those girls. And in her exact words, she said, quote, I made up my mind that he was either going to love me, marry me, or take care of me, or I was going to kill him And off that statement, amongst many others, Lola Titus was convicted of attempted murder and sent to the Patton State Hospital for the insane...
What do you mean? I just thought I had moxie. I thought I was gonna go to Southern California State Hospital for the big tittin.
Nope. She died there 10 years later at the age of 30.
Oh. Isn't that fucking...
Something happened. That's also...
I feel like it's really weird. I don't.
They would just fucking shock their brains and give them crazy experimental drugs. No one had any checks and balances on these places.
She was probably lobotomized, I would imagine. They just put her away into it.
It just really kind of, I thought it's interesting that she went to a state hospital instead of jail. Yeah, specifically a state hospital where she could be shut the fuck up

and never listen to ever again.

Because she's legally crazy.

Yep, and with Lola put away,

even considering her unstable nature,

a possible window into Mark Hansen

and Elizabeth Short's relationship was closed,

although Lola's perspective

was far from the last vantage point,

as we'll soon see.

Now, there have been many people

who have made connections

between Elizabeth Short's death and organized crime, chief among them author Donald Wolfe. In his theory, Elizabeth Short was a high-end call girl who worked at a mob-owned brothel and had become pregnant by the owner of the Los Angeles Times, a man who also happened to be from one of the most powerful families in Los Angeles.
This, some people say, is why the Los Angeles Times had relatively scant coverage on the Black Dahlia murder and had begrudgingly covered it only after seeing how well the story was doing in the other city papers. This story feels too much like the perfect arc to me.
This feels like it's too much of a writerly version of what they wish kind of the way that they could explain it. It's a very Pulp Fiction novel type way to tie all the story up.
She was like, what I'm catching here is she was like the hottest chick in town and she was being sold to the most powerful men in town and she probably slept with a lot of the most powerful men in town. A actually a lot of people could have been connected to her when she found out when she turned up dead everyone just like let's sweep this under the rug whether it had something to do with it or not i think that what you're saying is half right i think that it's the second half is right i think that they would like to portray her as this interconnected high-end call girl that was super sophisticated i don't't think she was a call girl at all.
No, I don't think so either. I think that she never did it for money.
I think she was just surviving. And I think that she really just had a taste for dangerous people and it got her in quite a lot of trouble.
You know, she could have been an escort, not a sex worker. Just someone to be seen with.
I think she just liked guys. Yeah, I think she just liked...
And nice things. Yeah, she liked guys and nice things.
She liked nice clothes. She wore her perfume.
She... I think that it wasn't...
She didn't have highfalutin ideas in that way. I think that she was literally just trying to survive.
I think it's how Jimmy Richardson put it. It lost.
Like, just not really knowing. She's in her early 20 twenties.
She doesn't know what the fuck she wants. All she knows is that she doesn't want the life that has been laid out for her, you know, as society demanded it.
She's trying to find something and she just keeps coming up with goose eggs every time. But as far as why Elizabeth was killed, it's theorized that she may have refused to get an abortion after being impregnated by such a high powered client which is why she was hiding out in san diego and became disturbed anytime someone came looking for her and why she had her body hollowed out yes she was killed according to the theory she was finally captured when she returned to los angeles and was killed brutally and publicly so as to send a message to any other girls who may have been thinking of stepping out of line But while this theory has the right idea, I think it comes to the wrong conclusions.
I do believe that Elizabeth Short's death was directly related to organized crime. Yes.
But I think it had a lot more to do with her associating with dangerous people than it did with her participating in risky activities like sex work in a mob-owned brothel. I think that the organized crime figure responsible for Elizabeth Short's death was Mark Hansen, and he had a lot of help from the LAPD to make sure the Black Dahlia murder was never solved.
But notice I said responsible for her death. I do not believe that Mark Hansen was the one who actually killed Elizabeth Short.
Thank you, Mr. Hansen's fake lawyer.
Thank you for pointing this out. Yeah, it's because his cutting hand does this.
Shaky, shaky, shaky, shaky, shaky. You know what, I think what you're saying is correct.
The answer is in this situation. Yes.
That's where the answer is is here. It's somewhere in this

miasma of dudes that she

met during her time

around Mark Hansen, the

Florentine Gardens, and all of

this stuff that is connected around it.

And that's where I think

that we're stumbling into is that

these places are just where a lot of

guys that no one wants to

talk about that are in the same room

and they don't want people to know that they're all

in the same room. And it't want people to know that they're all in the same room and it's like she's just was a big old like tying everybody together she was the rug that tied the room together yeah and i think that all of this happened within a span of months like i think elizabeth short's life fell apart very very quickly and i think she found herself involved in some really bad shit.
Very fast, like faster than she even knew what was happening. She turned down Hanson, probably.
Well, think about, you know, like they're the way the city opens up to the right star. You know, Scarlett Johansson arrived.
I think about it in that way. We're like these people.
I mean, most of them were industry plants. But when someone just shows up, right, that's just a simply very beautiful, charismatic woman, especially in these businesses, things can go really far for you very quickly.
And I think that's kind of is what happened to her in a way, too. I think because she was so hot and so desirable and to many men like that also just kind of fired up everything around everywhere she go.
It's like everywhere she went, she started a fire. Yeah.
Right from your grave. Hey, this is Will Arnett, host of Smartless.
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Terms and conditions apply. Now it's important to note that for almost two years, there was very little to no movement on the Black Dahlia murder investigation.
A lot of people have been questioned and a lot of theories have been put forth, and more clues had even been found. Elizabeth Short's purse and shoes, for example, had been found in a trash can outside of a cafe four miles from LeMert Park.

But none of these clues had led anywhere meaningful because Finnis and Hansen had made sure,

especially after Mark Hansen's name came into play, that the investigation had stalled.

See, now, if they found the purse and stuff four miles away in a trash can outside of a diner,

someone had to have been tipped off.

Like, because that shit's just getting picked up and thrown in the dump. No one's searching every trash can within four miles of her body.
Yeah, it just happened. It just happened upon it.
I mean, that's another just happened upon it fucking story here. Reporters later uncovered that Finnis was in debt to Hansen for $5,000, 70 grand in today's money.
And it's speculated that Mark Hansen used Finnis Brown to shut down any lines of investigation that led towards him in exchange for forgiveness on his debt. Now that by itself is not proof that he killed Elizabeth Short or that he was responsible for the death of Elizabeth Short.
But a person was just about to be discovered that was going to lead towards Mark Hansen. The one man in the LAPD who just couldn't let it go, the man who tried to fight the tide of corruption and cover-ups was the aforementioned Dr.
Joseph Paul DeRiver, which I mispronounced in the last episode as DeRiver. DeRiver! Now, as we said last week, DeRiver was in charge of screening all the confessing Sams who either arrived at the police station claiming they'd killed Elizabeth Short or were sending weird shit through the mail.
After a year and a half of sifting through the muck, however, Deriver finally decided to get proactive. I got a copy of his out-of-print book, The Sexual Criminal.
It is very, it's dated. Yeah.
But it is very, very interesting. Don't get me wrong.
I'm not saying that Dr. Deriver is a fucking hero.
No, no. He behaved like a monster much of the time.
This next section of this whole story is so fascinating. I just find this all so fascinating.
But the breakdown of Dr. Deriver is, because right now this is the rise and fall

of Dr. Deriver.
Yes. See, Deriver had a theory that the killer both craved attention and was most likely a true crime fan.
So he planted an article about the Black Dahlia murder in True Detective magazine to try and lure the killer out from hiding. And he did have some approval, but very little approval for what he was doing.

So Deriver was hired by the LAPD. You know, he ran the sexual offenders unit.
He was like putting... The registration.
Yeah. He was putting this all together.
And eventually they just kind of like, he was just kind of off-road. And so eventually he was just like, I know exactly how it catches this criminal.
And the first thing he did was like, we must beat him. We must encourage a tete-a-tete that the Black Dahlia Avenger will have no way to not respond if we tell everybody we think he's a dum-dum.
It's a trap. Well, the article described the Black Dahlia killer as a sadomasochistic type with at least half a dozen victims already, a cunning, studious, scientific type who would be compelled to boast about the details of the crime.
And sure enough, soon after the article was published, Deriver received a letter from Miami Beach signed with the obviously fake name of Jack Sand. Jack Sand wrote that he'd read the article about the Black Dahlia murder,

and he believed that a friend of his was the killer.

Well, intrigued, Deriver and the mysterious Jack Sand began exchanging letters,

and Jack eventually said that his friend was a guy named Jeff.

Jeff!

Jeff!

Jeff did it!

He killed the Black Dahlia.

You have never met a man as sinister as Jeff. Jeff! Jeff did it! He killed the Black Dahlia.
You have never met a man as sinister as Jeff. Jeff! The worst man I've ever met, my best friend.
Jeff. Jeff! Allegedly, this guy said that he'd spent six weeks in San Francisco with Jeff just after the Black Dahlia murder.

Jeff, Jack San wrote, had bragged that he'd gone to the same bars as Elizabeth Short, but had fled Los Angeles before the cop could question him. He went to the same hot dog stand she frequented, my friend, Jeff.
Jeff! Jeff also liked to draw. Yes, he did.
And in one letter... Dogs, horses, airplanes, octopoles, anything you can draw, Jeff was addicted to it.
Dangerously so. Well, in one letter, Jack included a sketch that he claimed had been drawn by Jeff.
As you can see here, these two round lobes might just be a butt drawn by my best friend and enemy, Jeff. Jeff! Now, while the contents of the letters themselves were interesting, the sketch really was the sort of wow moment for Dr.
Derivar. Wow! It featured a fair amount of cross-hatching that was very similar to some of the extensive mutilation inflicted on Elizabeth Short's body, namely the crisscross lacerations that have been found on her pubic bone and right hip.
Only a serial killer could shade in this way. I've never seen shading like this before.
Truly nefarious. I must investigate.
Jack Sand also wrote a letter that speculated on the motive behind the killing, saying that Elizabeth may have threatened exposure of something, an affair not considered proper, as he put it. With a horse.
With a fish. Many things can be made love to that are inappropriate, depending on where you're from.

Where are you from? Downtown. Downtown where? Jephton.
You ever been to Jephton? My best friend was from there. His name was Jephton.
Jack Sand also said that the killer may have experienced a new sensation by accident during the murder, thus leading to the Black Dahlia's complete annihilation. The letter also showed many of the same spelling, grammar, and syntax peculiarities as the letter sent to Jimmy Richardson at the Examiner.
And Jack Sand also referred to the victim as simply Elizabeth rather than Elizabeth Short or the Black Dahlia, inferring that this person may have known or felt like he had known Elizabeth Short intimately. And the beginning of this was just letters.
Yeah. So he opened this up and he started writing back and forth with Jack Sand.
And he's like, literally is like, yes, we are to put it. This is the answer I have been looking for.
I can hear him saying the game is afoot over and over again. He had that perfect little mustache.
He had that perfect mustache for it. Now, when he was calling her Elizabeth, was she known as Elizabeth? Because you called her Beth earlier.
She was Beth to her friends. Okay.
Yeah. Now, since Phinis Brown and Harry the Hat Hanson had all but given up on the case,

the aforementioned gangster squad was tapped to pick up where they left off.

Because not everyone at the LAPD, nor everyone in the mayor's office, was on the take.

There were some people who wanted this fucking thing solved.

I do kind of believe, it's kind of a funny idea of being like, gangster squad, and you go out there and solve this case.

And they're all like, yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, oh. And they're all just like trying to get in the elevator at the same time.
They're all trying to get in the same car. Yeah, yeah.
Tommy got shit in the ground. Oh, I don't know.
Who's driving? I don't know. Who's sitting in the ground? I'm just sitting in the ground.
Oh, I want to be in the trunk. I'm riding on the top of my hood.
I'm makingwoo-woo-woo-woo-woo-woo. I'm making the siren.
We need to get organized. Gangster squad's on it.
So, Deriver told the gangster squad all about this Jack Sands character in Miami Beach, which prompted the squad to send one of their officers to Florida undercover to track Sands down. Which they denied.
They denied they ever sent a cop to go look at them, but, you know, it's all who's saying what. Before long, they discovered that Jack Sands was a pseudonym for a career criminal named Leslie Dwayne Dillon.
27 at the time, Dillon was described as tall, lanky, and sloop-shoulderedered with a habit of dyeing his hair different colors. Originally from Oklahoma, Dylan had served less than a year in the Navy during World War II before he was dishonorably discharged for stealing watches.
Remember that. A few years later, Dylan was arrested for pimping in San Francisco.
Then, after marrying and fathering a child, he became, much like Elizabeth Short, just another drifter in post-World War II America. He was free.
Using the aliases of Jack Diamond, Jack Maxim, and Jack San, Dylan wandered between California, Florida, and Oklahoma with his family in tow, working alternately as a bellhop, a rum runner, a bootlegger, a pimp, a professional gambler, a taxi driver, and for a short period of time, a dance instructor. Yeah, take a look at my hips.
A one and a two and a three and a four and a... I'm just buying time to the end of class.
I view him... No refunds! No refunds! I view him as the...
He's Rob Schneider from Home Alone 2. He's got the bellhop.
We're going to be discovering the bellhop mafia. There's a lot of these things flying around here.
But it is funny because they all kind of talk about, as soon as the word bellhop comes up in all of these, they're all like, do you know he was a bellhop? That's who's got all the information. Yeah.
It's also the idea of every bellhop just like somebody who's stealing out of bags and looking through people's purses. I mean, out of all the professions that he had, the one that he returned to again and again was bellhop.
He just liked it. And pimp.
Lots of cash. I tell you what I like.
It's the little hat. I mean, bellhop and pimp, that goes hand in hand.
You're dropping off a guy, you say like, Hey, looking for some fun tonight? Exactly. Yeah.
And then you think the bellhop's getting the lady? No, the bellhop's the one who's telling you, like, hey, I got some girls, you looking for some fun tonight here in San Francisco? He knows the pimp. I would never say the bellhop's the pimp.
Well, in this case, it was. Yes.
Wow. And that's what's nice about it.
One-stop shop. Yeah, the head bellhop.
Now Leslie Dillon... You want to fuck Greg? I need a home.
I lost my home in the fire. I had to become a bellhop in 65.
Cove in my ass so hard my hat pops off. If you would, please.
Please use me as a toilet. Whatever you need.
Alright, I'll take your bags up. I'll suck your dick.
I'll play with your balls. That was the difference about 1946 parties, I think.
They played with balls, though. Yeah.
Yeah, it was part of the turndown service. But think about that.
I think that's why they were like, because Mark Hansen got all into the world of like 1946 parties. And I really feel like the main difference is just like,'s where they learned about sucking balls well concerning 1940 sex parties there is a whole other line of investigation here involving the real los angeles sex parties i think mark hansen was just having fun he was just taking a girl here and taking a girl there There's a whole other line of questioning that involves a man named Hodel who was actually having horrific orgies at his house all the time.
But George Hodel doesn't really fit into this world. Well, we're going to, we are, you know, this is a break out of the story.
We're going to come back to Leslie Dillon right now, but just know that we are going to touch upon some of the other subjects. But George Hordell was so fully covered in the Root of Evil podcast, it's kind of hard for us to shoehorn him in here, but we will figure it out.
Now, Leslie Dillon soon caught on that someone was following him. So he turned himself over to the FBI, suspiciously telling the authorities that the cops were after him for, quote, some offense in Los Angeles.
Also remember his voice. One of the big things, too, was that his voice sounded just like, that's why I'm doing the voice like that.
He's the caller. That's what they said.
He sounded the smooth, modulated tones that had called as the Black Dahlia Avenger that had talked to Jimmy Richardson. But since the gangster squad operated totally in secret to protect themselves and to honestly take a shit on the Constitution whenever they wanted, Dental Dam, written by Ben Franklin, the FBI had no idea who Dylan was or what he was talking about, so they told him to get lost.
Now later, one of the gangster squad members said that they would have been indicted many times over for the shit they did back then. Simpler times.
Yeah, which meant that the guy who had traveled to Miami Beach to investigate Leslie Dillon had no problem breaking into his house without a warrant to search for clues. Amongst violently torn clothes and piles of books, magazines, and newspapers, the officers found numerous true crime articles cut out and saved.
Stories about prison guards being killed in riots. A lot of stories about girls getting shot in the face.
Yeah, there was the one story he was obsessed with, apparently, that he collected all the articles on of a girl that had gotten her tooth shot out of her mouth from a BB gun. Yeah.
But he's just into the occult, you know. He's in a crime.
He's not into the occult. He's in a true crime.
He's in a true crime, but like, you know, back back then, there weren't many books on it. There were.
The magazines were everywhere. True crime was...
This is a joke. True crime has been a massive genre forever.
Yeah, back then, there were so many... They called them detective magazines.
And with the rise of the American Gangster, when we covered Bonnie and Clyde, you find out that it had made a whole sex-filled industry of true crime. They were viewed as stars and people loved paying attention to that.
Yeah, they'd read anything about these people. The officers also found a treasure trove of short stories that Dylan had written involving situations that usually ended with a woman being raped and murdered.
Finally, though, the cop came across the copy of True Detective magazine that featured the article that Dr. Joseph DeRiver had planted.
On a picture of a telegram Red Manly had sent to Elizabeth Short, Dylan had signed the page with the name Jack Sand using a ballpoint pen, which appeared to be similar to the pen used to write the printed postcard in which the so-called Black Dahlia Avenger had said he's going to turn himself in. Now, this may not seem like a big sticking point here, but in 1947, ballpoint pens were relatively new, rare, and expensive that cost about $175 in today's money.
Whoa, yeah. Now, none of this is, of course, concrete proof of murder, but it was enough for the undercover officer to call his superiors in L.A.
to say, quote, This is the man. And thus began the effort to lure Dylan back to California.
Deriver contacted Dylan and asked him to meet. Which is also so stupid.
This whole thing is like, this is the thing. It's like on one half, it's like this tête-à-tête between investigator and criminal.
On the other half, it amounts to one of the dumbest series of interactions I've ever seen between two humans. It's like everything the cops do is illegal, except they try to get this guy legally back.
Why don't you just hit him over the head and fucking throw him in a train car? Well, that's kind of what Deriver said they did. But this is the other side of that story.
Deriver contacted Dylan and asked him to meet so he could give him more information about this Jeff character. Jeff! Jeff! I would love to talk about Jeff.
Jeff! Jeff! That had supposedly killed Elizabeth Short. But while Dylan had been all too ready to help before, he was reluctant to return to California.
I get sunburned. So Deriver and Dylan agreed to meet in Las Vegas.
Yeah, very different than California. Yeah, where the gangster squad planned to set up wiretaps to record everything Dylan said.
When they got there, though, Dylan was too nervous to talk and suggested they go to Palm Springs instead. Much nicer.
It is. But during that drive, Dylan began to talk more about himself.
He told the driver and the gangster squad member driving them that one of his many jobs had been as a mortuary assistant where he'd learned the proper way to bleed a corpse. You want to do it all the way because if you leave some blood in it, it gets stinky.
The key is to make her entirely empty. It's so crazy.
Mum's the word from Florida to Vegas. But from Vegas to Palm Springs is an open book.
I actually spent many years doing time-tested trials to see how quickly it would take for me to saw a woman in half, surgically incredibly. That's fascinating.
Well, Dylan also spoke in the same soft modulated voice that had been used when the alleged Black Dahlia killer had called Jimmy Richardson at the Los Angeles Examiner offices. Now, once they got to a lodge in Palm Springs, the gangster squad wired up a cabin and listened in as Dylan and DeRiver talked about his mysterious friend Jeff, the one who had supposedly killed Elizabeth Short.
Yes, Jeff is the worst bastard I've ever met. Do you mind running a bath for me, Dr.
DeRiver? Absolutely. I would love to run the bubbliest bath you've ever had.
Would you like me to first help you undress? Dylan told them that the perpetrator's full name was Jeff Connors. Yes, Connors.
And soon after began to pontificate about Elizabeth Short's murder, starting with speculation on why her body had been cut in half. Just sort of thinking out loud.
Dylan, yeah, you're sitting in a hotel room together, hanging out in this moment of silence. it's like, why do you think the Black Dahlia was cut in half? Well, Dylan said that the killer might have wanted to physically see how far his penis went into the body of a woman when it was inserted into her vagina.
Fascinating. Cutting.
Yes. Yes.
Me too. Yes.
I as well. I wish I could know.

Oh, I'm so curious.

All right. So I'm going to have sex with her.
You peek in the top. Yes.
It is called the old fashioned prairie dog where you see the little head of the dog peek its way out of the bush, which is the inside of a dead woman. Well cutting her in half

Dylan opined

Would enable the murderer

To stick his penis

Inside the severed bottom half

Of Elizabeth Short's body I'm a dead woman. Well, cutting her in half, Dylan opined, would enable the murderer to stick his penis

inside the severed bottom half of Elizabeth Short's body

and see it poke out the other end.

Oh, yes, absolutely, of course.

Oh, wonderful.

More details you'd like to know?

Yes, more and more, please.

How pink it is.

Oh, your penis could poke her that long.

You know what's interesting is when you can do this, you can also shake her hand. Have you thought about a ruler, my friend? Before we get too far, because I do appreciate your curiosity, but have you even thought about maybe putting a banana for sizing reference? And that's how you would know how shallow or deep your penis can be.
Or perhaps you want to try my ass. I'm only a doctor.
All I can do is tell you what I feel. Huh, feelings of pressure.
Ah, a bit of pressure. Lemonades! Well, as far as where the bisection took place, Dylan said she was probably cut in half in a bed, a bath, or on a floor.
And the blood was probably drained by hanging the two halves in a shower. Jeff Connors, Dylan said, would have done all of this on the ground floor of a motel, so he wouldn't have to lug the body down any stairs.
Now, as the driver listened to Dylan, he began to get a hunch. So he asked Dylan to strip naked.
Now listen, this might sound like a total non sequitur. We've been talking a period of time.
But I'm just looking at you and I wonder. Now I'm a doctor.
Would you pretty please get naked for me? It's just us, it's Palm Springs. Listen, we've had seven-hour trip.
You've taken a 19-hour two-plane flight to Las Vegas. We have now driven to Palm Springs for no reason.
Can I see them dangles? Can I see you? Show me them nipples. My good sir.
We gotta get naked together. I'll do too.
Well, hesitatingly, Dylan did as he was asked. Or so DeRiver says.
I think it's more likely that a gangster squad member forced Dylan's pants down. See, there's some stories, but then there's the other idea of, like, weirdly, which I do actually think is true, of him going like, yeah, sure.
Like, he was like, we have to remember. So right now we're playing this.
We are going to go through this whole... Dylan's playing a game here.
Dylan's a fucking weirdo. Yes.
Okay, so the idea of going into this weird lodge with this doctor man and then him just saying like, would you please remove your clothes? And then him just going like, yeah, right? Well, he's a doctor. Yeah, all right, yeah, why not? But either way, Deriver's hunch was correct.
He had suspected that Dylan had a micropenis. And sure enough...
Don't tell me why. I don't know how it was.
I think it was his choice in music on the way we were driving. And sure enough, when Dylan's dingle was exposed, Deriver, with disturbing accuracy, compared the size of Dylan's penis

to one belonging to a boy of exactly

eight years of age. I'm not a pedophile,

but I have seen

many boy corpses.

Many, many, many,

many boy corpses,

and sometimes I do seek them out. His penis was larger

than a seven-year-old's boy.

It was smaller than a nine.

You know how I know that?

The differences are subtle, I know. Larger than a nine.
You know how I know that? The differences are subtle but present. Flap, flap, flap, flap, flap, flap, flap, flap.
That's how I tell them. Flap, flap, flap, flap, flap.
Little sugar packet. Flap, back and forth.
Tiny penis. But the key is, you know how he's a doctor.
And this is a big, this is a lesson to all my people out there that want to interact with penises. I think a lot of is that if it's slightly small, you know, whatever, a micro penis, you want to treat that thing with respect.
Because if you don't, that thing that's attached to that thing, it's going to fucking kill you. The small penis, Deriver hypothesized, was why there was a vertical cut in Elizabeth's pubic region just above her vagina.
Yeah? The micro-penis would not be long enough to reach the bisection, but if the killer did want to see how far his penis went in, he would have to mutilate the body further if his penis was particularly small. For the next time you do this, sir, what I recommend to you is to use an orange.
Well, just guessing, Deriver thought that it was possible that Elizabeth Short may have mocked or threatened to expose Dylan's micropenis to his friends, and he had reacted in the most brutal way possible. Which is why the only way I can reveal it is through the newspaper.

See what happens then.

Gotta tell the whole world and see what he does then.

Well, that's why I think

his pants were probably pulled down

because it didn't seem like

Dylan was super pleased

with his micropenis.

Yeah.

Well, it's weird,

but he's posturing.

He is acting to the deriver

that he is the person

who killed Black Dahlia.

He is playing.

He's saying, I didn't do it.

Jeff did it.

Jeff.

Yeah.

And so he's saying, but I think, weirdly though, I think, well, it depends on if you want to go with my theory or not. It depends.
because if, in my theory, if he's innocent, if Leslie Dillon's innocent, this is your

soul because he's a fucking freak-a-leek fucking guy that you just you know that just happened to be just curious enough to be in a Palm Springs lodge with a criminologist that he just met over a letter and he's just now here I can see you just arrived here to be personally investigated as the Black Dahlia murder. I don't know if it's that far

beyond the pale that you'd just show him your micro penis and go, what do you think of that?

What do you think of that? Pretty small, huh? He's very unforgiving. Yeah.
Well, to bolster this

theory, Deriver noticed that out of the many true crime articles Dylan kept at his home,

many were stories in which the perpetrator had taken revenge on the victim for some slight,

meaning that the Black Dahlia Avenger

moniker may have held some element of truth. Additionally, Dylan knew far more about the

exact details of the mutilation than what was made public. And here's where we're going to get

into some of the really fucking horrible shit. Well, this is also deciding whether or not they

did have control questions. We don't know whether or not these control questions actually existed.

Yes. Dylan knew that Elizabeth Short's pubic hair had been cut off and shoved in her rectum, while the skin on her left thigh featuring her rose tattoo had been carved out and shoved in her vagina.
There was also the little matter of one of the final indignations bestowed upon Elizabeth's corpse, the carving of a single letter on her skin. The letter

was D.

And it was quite possible that the D

was a sort of signature carved

by who else but Leslie

Dillon. Not Jeff.

Not Jeff. No, not Jeff.

Not Jeff. Unfortunately,

that was supposed to be the smile.

Oh, gee.

Now, as we know from the last episode, some of the details had already been leaked to certain individuals connected to the LAPD. So it's not impossible to think that Leslie Dillon could have heard about them from someone.
It is, however, extremely unlikely. There's also one side of the story that says, according to Leslie Dillon, I never said that.
And there's supposed to be a recording saying that he never said it. But then there's another thing saying, oh, no, it just changed.

After the, he changed his answers after the fact.

Leslie Dylan changed many of his answers after the fact.

Now, after five days of conversation that only made Dylan look more guilty,

conversations where he said he liked girls with big mouths.

You get it?

Jesus.

Yeah.

He was trying to get caught.

Yeah.

He also said that, he also just straight up said like, yeah, I drug and rape girls all the time. It's my thing.
It's my hobby. Yeah.
We should have just killed him for fun then. He was finally driven to San Francisco to track down the mysterious Jeff Connors.
Jeff could be behind any corner. But after driving around San Francisco for a full week to no avail.
No Jeff. Nothing.
No Jeff. No Jeff nowhere.
Visiting dozens of hotels and haunts where this Jeff Connors might have been. Jeff? Jeff? Jeff, where are you? Jeff? No, not you.
Not you. Not you.
I'm Jeff. Let me see your license.
Not with a G. Idiot.
Well, Dylan was taken back to Los Angeles. There, he began to realize he had basically been kidnapped by Dr.
Deriver and the Gangster Squad. Oh, yeah.
And he had no way to free himself. Well, this is the thing.
He freaked his way into this situation, and then he couldn't seem to figure out how to freak his way out. No.
So he's now in there, and now they're like, you've told them a bunch of really cryptic shit that you are playing some psychological game, trying to insert yourself into either you are the Black Dolly a murderer, or you're trying to insert yourself into the story for some reason. But now you're just like, you're just allowing them to just own you.
And it's like, oh, suddenly realize he's like, oh, shit. Yeah, this is starting to get more and more serious.
Okay, good. Thanks.
Glad I gave you all this information. I'll see you later.
Back to Miami. Why is this door locked? Yeah.
So Dylan threw a postcard out of his hotel window in LA that said he was being- To Jeff. Yeah.
Dear Jeff, please come to my rescue. He like plays like a conch shell, like, whoa.
The postcard said that he was being held in room 219 by Dr. paul de river in connection with the black dahlia murder and he was requesting legal counsel interestingly especially for a man of such little means as leslie dillon the postcard was addressed to a high-powered attorney a man who had represented errol flynn on statutory rape charges a man who had represented represented Robert Mitchum for marijuana possession.
And most importantly, had represented mobsters Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen on a number of criminal charges. The incredible coincidence here, though, was that the person who found the postcard was none other than one of Aggie Underwood's reporters for the Herald Express.
You can't write this in a movie. If you saw this in a movie, you'd be like, that's the corniest shit that doesn't happen, but it literally happens.
Yeah. They called their contact at the gangster squad and asked them what was going on here with this Leslie Dillon guy.
That forced the LAPD to either arrest Leslie or set him free, and they chose arrest. Now, when Dillon was taken downtown and his belongings were searched for the the first time, cops found that Dylan had packed a number of harrowing yet ridiculous items for his trip out west to speak with the police.
Can't wait for this one. On one side of it, it's like he's a total absolute madman murderer, and then there's the other side of it being like, this man is chaos itself.
This is a desk lamp. I brought my ping pong paddle.
I brought my enema bags. I brought my chest set.
I brought my dog's toothbrush. Get for the dog.
Well, along with 700 phenobarbital pills. I just like to be awake.
I just like to enjoy myself. No, phenobarbital is a downer.
Yeah, Tootsie's on phenobarbital. Oh, nice.
Yeah, it's what you use to roofie women. Oh, really? Yeah.
Oh, I thought it was to roofie yourself. That's why Tootsie sleeps so much.
Yeah, phenobarbital is bad. If you're found with a lot of phenobarbital pills, it's a bad person.
Really? Yeah. I'm blown away right now.
Yeah. That's why they call me the nap man.
But they also could have epilepsy. He does not have epilepsy.
All right. Good enough.
Dylan had also brought seven razor blades and a dog leash with a massive leather strap that had appeared as if it had been thoroughly scrubbed and scraped. It's for the dog.
I mean, I'm going with a dog theory now. You got a dog leash, phenobarbital.
The scrap also showed signs of strain, as if a heavy weight had been suspended from it. If you'll remember, the way Elizabeth Short's arms had been placed made it look as if she'd been hung from something for a very long period of time.
And he also said that's the best way to drain the blood out of the body is hanging out in the shower. Yes.
But also, he could be using it I heard one theory, but it kind of makes sense for auto-erotic asphyxiation. He might have.
That's a possibility. You could use a belt for lots of stuff.
It's my choking belt. Yeah.
All right, this is just so I can relax. Now, when it was announced that a suspect had been arrested in conjunction with a Black Dahlia murder almost two years after it had occurred, the press started looking into Leslie Dillon, and they found that his aunt lived on Crenshaw Boulevard.
This location was less than four miles from Le Merit Park. Not super close, but not super far away.
But it was only two blocks away from the cafe where Elizabeth Short's purse and shoes had been found in the trash can. At another one of Dylan's Los Angeles addresses, his landlady said that he'd driven a black Ford sedan when he'd lived there, which was the same type of car seen by eyewitnesses

on the night that Elizabeth Short's body

was dumped in the vacant lot.

But when police began interrogating Leslie Dillon directly,

he denied ever knowing or even meeting Elizabeth Short.

But what the LAPD and the press did discover

was that Leslie Dillon had been involved in organized crime when he lived in Los Angeles. Some of it was disorganized.
How so? Bad scheduling. Poor catering.
I forgot my pants once. I didn't know.
It's so hard. You're just rushing because of the deadlines.
Now, Dillon was decidedly small-time. He worked as a pimp and a bootlegger.
But the kicker was that he had done so in the same territory covered by associates of Elizabeth Short. Namely, he worked in the same territory as Mark Hansen, whose address book was still a big question mark for a lot of people when it came to the murder.
Now, Dylan had been arrested but not charged, and time was running out before they had to let him go. Deriver was convinced that Dylan was the killer, but not just because of what Dylan had told him.
See, Dylan was still saying that his friend Jeff Connors was the killer. Jeff did it.
And Jeff was the one who had told him all the mutilation details. He loves details.
But at one of the hotels where Dylan had worked in San Francisco, the driver had showed the manager a picture of Leslie Dylan. The manager said, sure.
That guy worked here. I know him.
But the manager did not call him Leslie Dylan. Rather, the manager identified the man in the picture as Jeff Connors.
Fuck! Oh my God, Jeff did do it! It's been me! Obviously, Leslie was using Jeff as his alter ego. And this is where Deriver was like, he got so hard.
He was just like, yes, multiple personalities. Oh, the mystery increases.
Oh, I just came in my wool. I cannot believe how good I am.
Leslie is just one of the man's name. Yeah, for once.
Jeff, the most masculine of names. But since there was no hard evidence linking Dylan to the murder just yet, and since there was little evidence linking him directly to Elizabeth Short, the LAPD was forced to let him go free.

But concerning the LAPD.

There's so much evidence.

All circumstantial, and it's all just shit that he shit.

It's all shit he said.

And, like, they did take the strap, and they sent it off to the lab, and they're like, nothing here.

It's been scrubbed clean.

You know, like, it's all circumstantial.

It's all just, like, weird shit. There are no pictures of Leslie Dillon with Elizabeth Short.
There's no evidence. There's no physical evidence that connects them to the scene of the crime.
Deriver destroyed all ways of making a legitimate investigation by doing this way. It is why, unfortunately, even though I love that he's a maverick, and I love his style, and I like the fact that he decided to beg for forgiveness instead of ask for permission.
That's my style. I enjoy that.
But he legitimately fucked up everything. And so, this guy he also was, I'm gonna be fair and say, Deriver was also going like, well, you sure you didn't kill the Black Dolly? Like he was like pressuring this other psychopath that was like, while it was just Deriver and the gangster squad, it kind of felt like maybe a game.
And then they tortured him a bunch. Yeah.
But concerning the LAPD, there was a confluence of events around this time that left a bad taste in a lot of mouths.

See, as it turned out, Jeff Connors did actually exist.

He was found in the town of Gilroy at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

As it turned out, Jeff Connors was a 40-year-old busboy, pulp fiction writer, and failed actor turned cosmetic salesman.

Yeah, I'm Jeff.

Yeah, I'm a 40-year-old busboy, pulp fiction writer, and I'm a failed actor turned cosmetic salesman. What's going on? You guys got a problem? What's the big deal here? Why's everybody so angry? And he actually was a friend of Leslie Dillon.
Oh, yeah, I know Leslie. Yeah, yeah.
He wishes it was me. Half the time, because I'm awesome.
I'm Jeff. But he was questioned at length while D Dylan walked free.
The LAPD police chief had also made a total reversal on Dylan. Where he's just days prior to Dylan's release, it had been publicly said that they had incontrovertible evidence that Dylan was in L.A.
at the time of the murder. The chief now said that Dylan had actually been in San Francisco at the time.
Is my buddy Leslie in trouble or something? Is something going on? Did he take like the wrong hors d'oeuvres or something from a restaurant? What's going on here? I'm Jeff. I wanted to be an actor, but now I'm a cosmetic salesman.
So I don't really know what the big deal is. He didn't cut a woman in half, did he? Did he? He's been talking about that for years.
I was hoping he didn't do it. I just thought it was kind of like a funny story or whatever.
But I'm Jeff, so. The cops also stopped making the point

that Dylan knew secret facts about the murder,

the mutilation details.

So the media was left once again with suspicions

that something in the Black Dahlia case

was being covered up by the cops.

Dylan, however, began talking himself to the press,

and he had a very different story to tell

about the treatment he'd received

at the hands of Dr. Joseph Paul DeRiver

and the LAPD,

much of which could very well be true.

Dylan claimed that DeRiver lured him in with the promise of a job as a doctor's secretary. That is true, though.
That was a part of the hook to get him to come to Vegas. Oh, yeah.
Was him being like, yes, of course I'll hire the suspect for the Black Dahlia murder to be my receptionist. Yeah, no, Deriver did all kinds of horrible, weird, illegal shit.
Yeah. Yeah, but then Dylan said the Deriver handcuffed him and kept him in custody for weeks.
Dylan said he'd never claimed that his friend Jeff Connors was the murderer, nor that he'd ever even known who the killer actually was. But that also doesn't explain why the cops went and talked to Jeff Connors.
Yeah, especially if he's all the way in fucking Gilroy. Yeah.
Dylan also said, and this part I believe, that the LAPD handcuffed him to a radiator with the heat turned all the way up during their interrogation. Deriver, meanwhile, played good cop, saying that if Dylan confessed, they'd treat him well, like a sick boy, instead of a common criminal.
You want some ice cream? Getting hot, you want a popsicle? It might be hard next to your fucking heater. Listen, though, I'll get you a little bit of ice cream if you just admit to the murder, if you did the Black Dahlia murder, okay? Want some Dippin' Dots? You feeling okay there, buddy? It was also uncovered that Dr.
DeRiver may or may not have been completely upfront about his background. Yeah.
The Los Angeles Daily News discovered that DeRiver's real name was Joseph Israel. So a city councilman called for a public hearing to investigate DeRiver's credentials.
Now, this is often pointed to as something that discredits everything DeRiver ever said or did, notwithstanding all the unconstitutional and legal shit that he did. But the hearing did not discuss the Black Dahlia case at all, and Deriver was allowed to keep his job at the end of the hearing.
So that's something. Hey, he won.
He still won. They're like, you're bad at it, and you're a bad person, but I can't fire you.
God damn it, you're attractive. Thank you.
But even though the arrest of Leslie Dillon had been a fiasco that resulted in a $100,000 false arrest lawsuit that was later dropped, some interesting information did come to light as a result. Through Leslie Dillon, the cops did find and question Jeff Connors.
And while it was obvious that Leslie Dillon was using the name Jeff Connors as an alter ego, Connors was not a dead end. See, Connors himself was full of shit.
He told police that he'd hung out with Elizabeth Short the night before she'd been murdered. Oh, yeah.
He was kind of, he was described. He's also a busboy.
They never tell the truth. Yeah, man.
What are you talking about? You worked in the restaurant industry for a while. You know busboys.
No, no, no. I'm fucking out with everybody.
You know, Liz, she came over. We were hanging out.
It was us, John Wayne. We were hanging out, and we were just having a blast.
We took to Hindenburg, and we took it to Lenny Dykstra's house, who's soon going to be a Mets player about 40 years from now. Yeah, can you cash a check for me? Well, Connors was known.
He was a Walter Mitty type of character. You know, he would tell people that he acted in movies when he never did.
And he was just known to make up stories to make himself more interesting. And him and Leslie were very similar.
They were like two buddies. Yeah.
They're very similar in that way. Yeah.
But Jeff Connors was like sort of the fun part of that. He was like, he was the fun guy that, you know, made up like fun stories.
And Leslie Dillon was the guy, the very dark side of that, who says horrible things like, supposing you did cut a woman in half that you could maybe stick your penis inside of her and see it stick out at the bottom. Is it bad to say that I feel like these guys are my two wolves? Like inside of me, that I have a Leslie Dillon in me, and I have a Jeff Connors in me.
I really enjoy your lies. Your lies are fun.
Your lies are gross. But in checking out Connors' alibi, they came across his ex-wife who had some very interesting actual connections to the case.
Jeff's ex-wife knew nightclub owner Mark Hanson. And she had lived with Mark Hanson after her divorce from Jeff.
Leslie Dillon had also showed up to Jeff's ex-wife's house after he was arrested and set free, shouting through a closed door that she better not say shit to the police about anything she knew or else. So, another connection between Leslie Dillon and Mark Hansen, however faint, was made, and the gangster squad was slowly connecting the dots as far as what may have really happened to Elizabeth Short.
The entire scenario, however, began to come into sharp focus when the gangster squad discovered reports of a motel room in Los Angeles that had been found covered in blood and feces just after Elizabeth Short's murder. And it's with that disgusting little room that we'll return next week for Black Dahlia Part 3.
Part 3! We're gonna, I still wonder, can the killer of Elizabeth Short be both the same man that impetuously tortured her, beat her to death in disorganized fashion, right? Ragged face cuts, all of the weird sexual play, all this like the marks of a disorganized killer. And can they also be the same person that will surgically put them in half, like literally cut them in half and dispose of them? And I still don't know if it can be just one man.
Well, it seems hard. It does.
You need helping hands. I just put together a bench.
You know what I mean? I need another piece, another pair of hands. I bleed when I put together an Ikea-like chair's a lot left to cover here.
We got this like... Right now, to me, it seems like it's clearly fucking Leslie.
But there is... It's cloudy.
It's murky. Well, there's three parts for a reason.
Yes, it's cloudy. It is very murky.
And we're going to come through some couple... I've got a couple other suspects under my belt that I want to talk about eventually too because there's a lot of fucking guys out there because we didn't even get to the butchers.
We haven't talked about the werewolf murders. We haven't talked about, like, it's kind of crazy, dude.
It's getting, it just, this is one of those things that just keeps going. Yeah, it's a massive story and there are a million different theories.
I also feel like, you know, as someone who likes like older movies, I feel like there's like things taken from this story that's in like several different movies. Oh, yeah, dude.
Just like little pieces here and there. And so it's very interesting.
Yeah, very much so. And also, I really want to thank our team on this one who's done a fantastic job.
I want to thank Shaw. I want to thank Joel.
I want to thank Carolina for her help in editing the script on these last couple episodes. Hell yeah.
It's really been a nice team LPN effort here for the Black Dahlia series. And I'm loving this.
I love this story about this dead woman. Go to patreon.com slash last podcast on the lab.
To watch us scream, we can flop around. Go to twitch.tv slash LPN TV because we are, it gets it's already past it.
We did the LPN Funhouse last night. Yeah night and I'm upset with my choices.
I don't even know what I'm doing yet because we're about to go in to do it. Because it's in the future but it's in the past.
Yeah, indeed. And also don't forget to go to lastpodcastontheleft.com to check out where we're going to be playing a show near you.
We're going to be coming to all kinds of fucking places this coming year. The show's hot right now, by the way, guys.
We just, that New York show was fucking nuts. It was incredible.
No, no, no. We're fucking, we're rolling on, we're firing on all fucking cylinders with this one.
We've got Atlanta, Georgia on January 11th. Dallas, Texas, February 22nd.
Nashville, Tennessee, March 14th. Detroit, Michigan, April 18th.
Cannot fucking wait to go to the record stores in Detroit

and Toronto, Ontario

on May 3rd. Also can't wait

to check out the record stores there. Just fantastic

record store towns, both of them. Can't wait

to see all of you.

And hail Switzerland.

Hail, um,

who's cool today? Count

Basie. Yeah!

Yeah, that's still on Basie. That's good.
Hey, this is Jeff Lewis from Radio Andy. Live and uncensored, catch me talking with my friends about my latest obsessions, relationship issues, and bodily ailments.
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