HOLLYWOOD MURDER Ep. 4 | Black Dahlia, Part 2

which now includes a murder mystery comedy production at a theater here in Phoenix, Arizona.

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Your detective journey awaits.

On the final day of December,

1944, the world was in its fifth year of war.

In Europe, Allied forces had stormed the beaches of France six months earlier and had steadily pushed

German forces back since then.

In the Pacific,

American forces had taken the island of Saipan and were starting to look toward the Japanese home islands.

Though, the brutal campaign for Iwo Jima still loomed in the future.

In Miami, Florida, Elizabeth Short was at a nightclub for a New Year's Eve party.

She had been raised in Massachusetts.

But the cold weather gave her health problems.

She started spending her winters in Miami, but she dreamed of being a movie star in Hollywood.

She'd had brief and unpleasant experiences in Southern California the previous year,

but she still dreamed of going back. Though, that dream was about to be put on the back burner.

That night, at the New Year's Eve party, she met Major Matt Gordon.

Major Gordon was 26 years old and a handsome, decorated fighter pilot with a famous squadron

known as the Flying Tigers, who operated in the China-Burma-India Theater.

Gordon, looking dapper in his dress uniform, saw Elizabeth across the crowded dance floor.

He walked over to her and asked her to dance.

Apparently, it was love at first sight, though the romance was brief.

Major Gordon was only home on leave. He was scheduled to go back to the war soon.

But Elizabeth wrote to her mother and sisters back in Medford, Massachusetts,

and told them she was in love and planning to get married.

When Matt returned to his squadron, Elizabeth told her family that Matt had written to her

and asked her to marry him. She wrote back and said yes.

He promised they would get married when he came back to Miami on his next leave.

But Matt never came back.

Eight months later, on August 10, 1945, Major Matt Gordon was killed in a plane crash in India.

It was four days after America dropped the world's first atomic bomb,

and just three weeks before the war officially ended on September 2, 1945.

After receiving the horrible news, Elizabeth's world collapsed,

though details of her life after Gordon's death are somewhat fuzzy.

She had already returned to her family home in Medford, and, according to family and friends,

she began to emotionally unravel.

Her mother called it a nervous breakdown.

Elizabeth had just turned 21 years old.

She had been let down by nearly everyone she met, and now she had lost the love of her life.

As she grappled with yet another round of heartbreak and tried to figure out what she would do with her life,

she latched on to the one thing that remained constant, her Hollywood dream.

From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America.

I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season

we're telling two murder mystery stories from the golden era of Hollywood.

The case of director William Desmond Taylor and the notorious Black Dahlia case.

This is Episode 4, The Black Dahlia, Part 2 of 4,

Hollywood Dream.

Elizabeth eventually worked her way through the trauma of losing Matt Gordon.

She probably hadn't recovered in the clinical sense of the word,

but she slowly came to terms with his death to the point where she could think about restarting her life.

During that time, throughout the fall and winter of 1945 and the spring of 1946,

Elizabeth resurrected the dream of becoming a Hollywood movie star.

In July of 1946, she turned 22 years old, and if she wanted to make it happen,

there was still plenty of time.

Sometime during that summer, she bought a train ticket to Los Angeles.

She took what little money she had, she packed a suitcase, and headed west for the second time in four years.

The first trip had been under one of the most bizarre

circumstances imaginable. When Elizabeth was six, her father had staged his suicide.

He secretly moved to California and lived there for 12 years, while his wife and five daughters back in Medford, Massachusetts

thought he was dead.

When Elizabeth was 18, he decided he wanted to rejoin the family.

He announced that he was still alive, and

Elizabeth's mother, to no one's surprise, told him to go to hell.

But Elizabeth gave him a chance.

She traveled to California, and then learned he had become an angry alcoholic.

Their relationship ended badly, and Elizabeth had some tough times during her short stay in the Los Angeles area,

but they didn't dampen her desire to go back.

So, in the summer of

1946, she went back to Hollywood,

with about six months to live.

For the first few weeks, she shared accommodations with other young women in a series of residential hotels.

Most of her new roommates were aspiring actresses, singers, and dancers, and she became decent friends with a few of them.

She even ran into a girl in one of the hotels whom she knew from Medford,

and it was probably nice to see a familiar face from back home.

She began dating again, but to at least some extent, it was a survival tactic.

Her money was almost gone, and she became desperate to find ways to stay in LA.

She was almost broke, and could barely afford to pay her rent.

Eating became a luxury.

One of the women who lived with her during this time remembered that if Elizabeth didn't have a date in the evening,

she didn't eat dinner.

Like many single girls her age, she went out to bars and nightclubs to find dates.

A nightclub Elizabeth frequented regularly was called Florentine Gardens, which still stands today on Hollywood Boulevard.

The entertainment there was top-of-the-line, with big bands, singers, dancers, comedians,

circus acts, and an assortment of aspiring performers hoping to be discovered.

Movie stars and other celebrities were fixtures there as well.

Florentine Gardens had the reputation for being one of Hollywood's premiere hotspots,

but on the business side of things, its reputation was sketchy at best.

The owner was a man named Mark Hansen, who owned a few other clubs in town.

Hansen was known to do business with the mafia, and had sold part of his operation to known mobsters.

On any given night,

Florentine Gardens hosted a mixed crowd.

Soldiers who had risked their lives in war,

established Hollywood movie stars,

up-and-coming entertainers, and low-life gangsters who'd never made an honest buck in their lives and

murdered people on a fairly regular basis.

And moving through the throng were young women like Elizabeth and her friends.

They mingled and socialized and danced, and caught the attention of Mark Hansen.

Because Elizabeth had become a popular regular at Florentine Gardens,

Hansen hired her to be a liaison of sorts.

Her job was to flirt with the male customers, engage them in conversation, and then encourage them to order more drinks.

It was a fairly common practice at clubs in those days.

But Elizabeth didn't like alcohol, so she sipped Coca-Colas while the men rang up expensive bar tabs,

which made more money for Mark Hansen and his mob associates.

Even though the setup was shady, it was on the mild side of shady.

Hansen's other setup was deeper in the shady category.

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Mark Hansen was a married man with two daughters and known for having a wandering eye,

and had often wandered to the young women at Florentine Gardens.

Conveniently, he owned a boarding house behind the club, which housed a steady stream of women

who either worked at the club or hung out there.

Hansen was well into his 40s, and many of the girls at his club were so desperate to break

into show business, they believed him when he told them he would help them launch their careers.

But naturally, they had to do something for him in return.

And it didn't take much imagination to figure out what that was.

And they all learned that Mark Hansen couldn't or wouldn't do anything to help them.

Elizabeth caught Hansen's eye the very first time she walked into Florentine Gardens,

which was why he hired her.

Soon, he offered her a room in his boarding house.

She was still fairly naive, and she accepted.

Elizabeth lived in the house for a while, but she wouldn't give Hansen what he wanted.

Eventually, he kicked her out, and she was on her own once again.

In an extraordinary stroke of luck and perfect timing, an old friend came to Elizabeth's rescue.

Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Fickling, a pilot whom she'd briefly dated in Miami before she met Major

Matt Gordon, had been transferred to Long Beach, south of Los Angeles, in the summer of 1946.

The odds against Joseph and Elizabeth finding each other in L.A. must have been huge.

But it was a great example of a line from a movie that has now become one of the most famous

and repeated and parodied of all time.

Three years earlier, the film Casablanca was a modestly successful film at the box office,

but it surprisingly grabbed Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Its popularity grew and cemented its two stars, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman,

as screen legends.

Bogart played Rick Blaine, a jaded, cynical cafe owner in Casablanca on the Moroccan coast.

Bergman played his former love interest, though it's clear they still have strong feelings for

each other.

Their characters had fallen in love in Paris a year earlier, but then Bergman's character

abandoned Bogart's character with no warning or explanation.

A year later, she shows up at Bogart's cafe with a husband that they both thought was dead.

And as Bogart sits alone in his cafe and thinks about their improbable reunion, he utters the

line,

In Los Angeles, 1946, there was no romance, but the reunion was just as improbable.

Elizabeth was 22 years old, struggling mightily and in desperate need of help.

And somehow, Joseph Fickling heard about her situation.

He offered her a place to stay in his furnished apartment in Long Beach,

but it would be very short-term for both of them.

There's no definitive timeline for this period of Elizabeth's life,

but Joseph had to give up the apartment at the end of the summer when he was discharged.

When that happened, they moved out and went their separate ways.

So, probably sometime in September of 1946, Elizabeth was homeless again.

For whatever reason, she decided on a change of scenery and drifted down to San Diego.

On December 8, 1946, a young woman named Dorothy French, who worked at the Aztec

Movie Theater in San Diego, found Elizabeth asleep in one of the theater seats when she

opened up. Elizabeth had gone to see a movie the night before and must have decided the

Aztec Theater was as good a place as any to spend the night. Dorothy described Elizabeth

as looking sorrowful and lost, so she invited Elizabeth to come back to the home she shared

with her mother and younger brother. Elizabeth could have a bath, a hot meal, and a good night's

sleep before moving on. But Elizabeth ended up staying for a month, and by early January 1947,

she was testing the patience of the very considerate French family. Of course, they felt

sorry for her, especially after she shared the depressing details of the last two years of her

life, but she couldn't stay forever. At the same time, the French family didn't have the heart to

throw her out on the street, so Elizabeth contacted Joseph Fickling one final time.

Joseph wired her $100, which was incredibly generous. That's the equivalent of more than $1,300 today.

Elizabeth made a phone call, thanked the French family for their hospitality,

and told them a friend was coming to pick her up that evening. That friend was Robert Manley,

who, due to the color of his hair, went by Red. He was a 25-year-old salesman,

and he happened to be in San Diego on business. It's not clear when Elizabeth and Red met,

or if she knew Red was a married man with a new baby. It's also not clear if the relationship

between Elizabeth and Red was intimate, but that wouldn't stop the press from speculating in the

8th, 1947. She had no more than a week to live. That night, they started the drive back to Los

Angeles, but they didn't make it very far. It was already late. Red was tired,

and Elizabeth wasn't feeling well, so they stopped at a motel in Mission Valley.

Mission Valley is just a few miles north of downtown San Diego, and is now one of

dozens of communities that make up the San Diego metro area. At the motel, according to Manley,

nothing romantic happened between them. Elizabeth's asthma was acting up, and she slept

sitting upright in a chair so she could breathe better, while Red slept alone in the bed.

The next morning, January 9th, after they got on the road, Elizabeth asked Red to stop at a phone

booth so she could make a call. After making the call, Elizabeth told him she was going to meet her

sister Virginia at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. At that time, the Biltmore was the

epitome of luxury, and a far cry from the low-rent apartments and hotels she had been staying in

since coming to California. After arriving at the Biltmore, Red escorted Elizabeth inside.

She went to the ladies' restroom, and he went to the front desk to see if Virginia had checked in.

She had not. Red didn't know at the time that Virginia had no plans to stay at the Biltmore.

Virginia had recently moved to the San Francisco area and married a wealthy man, but she wasn't

coming down to LA. Red didn't know he'd been lied to, so he wasn't suspicious. He sat in the lobby

with Elizabeth and waited for Virginia to arrive. But around 6.30 p.m., he had to go home to his

wife and baby, so he and Elizabeth said their goodbyes. It was the last time he saw Elizabeth

short. Employees at the Biltmore said Elizabeth waited in the lobby for another two to three hours

and made a few phone calls while she was there. One of the bellmen remembered seeing her finally

leave through the back entrance of the hotel sometime between 9.00 p.m. and 10.00 p.m.

Other than the killer, the bellman was the last verified person to see Elizabeth alive.

Eight months before Elizabeth Short disappeared from the Biltmore Hotel on the night of January

9, 1947, Paramount Pictures, the company that evolved out of the old famous Players' Lasky

Corporation, which employed director William Desmond Taylor, released a dark murder mystery

movie called The Blue Dahlia, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. The screenplay for the film

noir classic was written by Raymond Chandler, one of the most talented and prolific writers of the

1930s and 40s. He wrote the novels The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely, and The Long Goodbye,

all of which were adapted to film several times over. He co-wrote the adaptations of the noir

classic Double Indemnity and the Alfred Hitchcock classic Strangers on a Train.

And in the early 1940s, he wrote his only original screenplay, The Blue Dahlia. The

name of the movie referenced the name of a fictional nightclub on the Sunset Strip in

Hollywood. The movie was released in April of 1946, and when Elizabeth Short arrived in Los Angeles

sometime in the summer of 1946, she was gifted her infamous nickname.

Elizabeth was known for dressing in black, maybe to complement her jet black hair. In addition to

a job at the Florentine Gardens Club, she occasionally worked as a waitress. A group of

regulars at a Hollywood diner where Elizabeth worked thought it might be clever to start

calling her the Black Dahlia as a play off of the Blue Dahlia. It didn't make much sense because the

Blue Dahlia was a nightclub, and Elizabeth obviously was not, but they thought it was funny

and apparently Elizabeth didn't mind. And that nickname would be known to the world in just a

few days. As of January 10th, Elizabeth Short was gone. Unfortunately, no one noticed, and no one

went looking. But five days later, on January 15th, Mrs. Betty Bersinger found Elizabeth's body,

posed in its disgusting display in a vacant lot in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Mrs. Bersinger called the police from a nearby house, and the first officers arrived within

minutes. Sadly, a newspaper reporter with a camera was there first. Elizabeth's body was

discovered at around 10 a.m., which gave the press plenty of time to write salacious articles

under big, bold headlines for their evening editions of their newspapers. For two days,

the identity of the victim of the brutal murder was unknown. Then the LAPD, with the help of the FBI,

located copies of Elizabeth's fingerprints from the brief time that she had worked at a military

base called Camp Cook in Santa Barbara, north of Los Angeles. Now, investigators and reporters

knew her name, and it was a race to see who could piece together her life story faster.

Newspapers began a fierce competition to see who could gather true information faster,

as well as print the most extreme speculation that would sell more newspapers.

In probably the lowest moment, a reporter for the Los Angeles Examiner

called Elizabeth's mother, Phoebe, at home in Medford, Massachusetts. Phoebe knew nothing of

her daughter's murder. The police had not yet been able to contact her. In a jaw-dropping act

of cruelty, the reporter, at his editor's instruction, told Phoebe that he had good news.

Elizabeth had won a Hollywood beauty contest. Phoebe was delighted. The reporter then asked

for as many details about Elizabeth's life as Phoebe could provide. Phoebe happily complied,

and volunteered some of the life story you've just heard. When the reporter had everything he needed,

he thanked Phoebe and informed her that her daughter was the victim of one of the most

sensational crimes in Los Angeles in recent memory. And he said goodbye.

That was how Phoebe Short learned of the murder of her middle child.

While the press was in the earliest stages of its race to the bottom, LAPD homicide detectives

worked back through Elizabeth's movements and interactions in the days before her murder.

They learned that she was last seen by a bellman at the glamorous Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los

Angeles on the night of January 9th. She had walked out of the hotel sometime between 9 and

10 p.m. and was never seen again. That left a five-and-a-half-day gap in her whereabouts between

the time she was last seen and the time her body was discovered. Detectives contacted Elizabeth's

Virginia, who confirmed that she had no plans to meet her sister. They tracked down Robert

Redd Manley, who was thought to be the last person to have had substantial contact with Elizabeth.

He explained that he had driven her from San Diego to Los Angeles. They had stayed at a motel,

but nothing intimate had happened. He took her to the Biltmore, waited while she played out the lie

of her sister's arrival, and then he went home to his wife and child. Investigators soon learned

Redd had a history of mental instability, and he had been discharged from the Army on what was

called at the time a Section 8. It was the discharge clause that was used for people who

were deemed mentally unfit to serve, and Redd Manley immediately became the LAPD's prime suspect.

He was intensely interrogated by the police. Polygraph tests were in use at the time,

and Redd sat for two. He passed both times. The police injected him with sodium pentothal,

believed to be a truth serum at the time. They hoped for a confession, but nothing came of it.

Detectives traced his movements from January 9th, when he left the Biltmore, to January 15th,

when Elizabeth's body was discovered. His alibis checked out. Redd Manley was not the killer,

and he was cleared as a suspect, at least by the police. The press, of course, learned that

Redd Manley was a suspect, and the media coverage ruined his life. Endless newspaper attention that

associated him with an attractive, brutally murdered young woman caused him to have a series

of nervous breakdowns. He never escaped the stigma of having been a suspect in the Black Dahlia

murder or having been associated with Elizabeth Short in any way as a married man. Robert Redd

Manley was eventually committed to a sanitarium. For detectives, they were back to square one.

They didn't know where Elizabeth went after she left the Biltmore. They didn't know if she met

someone she knew or if she was snatched off the street by a stranger. They didn't know if she was

killed the first night or tortured for days. Sadly, according to the coroner's findings,

the latter was likely the case. They would obviously continue to interview all of Elizabeth's

friends and associates, but the world was now wide open for possibilities. It's been estimated

that as many as 750 lawmen worked the case at various times in the early stages. LAPD,

L.A. County Sheriff's deputies, and California Highway Patrol officers spread out across the

L.A. basin looking for clues and rounding up potential suspects, namely anyone who had been

arrested or convicted for sexual offenses or violent crimes. The killer was out there somewhere,

but if he was connected to Elizabeth, he was doing a masterful job of hiding it.

And if he wasn't connected to Elizabeth, then that produced nothing but unanswerable questions.

The detectives needed what all detectives wanted, a break in the case, whether it was the result of

dogged hard work or a miracle that dropped out of the clear blue sky. About a week after

Elizabeth's body was discovered, detectives thought it happened. The killer made contact.

Next time on Infamous America, a Los Angeles newspaper receives a care package and a letter

from the killer. The police interview dozens of suspects, from club owners to Hollywood movie

stars to Hollywood gangsters, and they also begin to wonder if the Black Dahlia case was an isolated

incident. There are other brutal murders of young women that remain unsolved. That's next time on

Infamous America.

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or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. This series was researched and written by Michael

Byrne and myself. Original music by Rob Valliere. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us

at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com, or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media

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