The Black Dahlia

It’s one of the most infamous crimes in American history: the gruesome murder of a young beauty, unsolved for decades. There’s a long line of suspects, each more mysterious than the next. Can the questions surrounding one of history’s most notorious unsolved cases finally be answered? Thank you to our experts who contributed to this episode: Cheryl Dorsey, Dr. Robert Schug, Glynn Martin, James Queally, Rachell Howzell Hall, Forrest Burgess, Miles Corwin, and Yvette Gentile. If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow History’s Greatest Mysteries to never miss an episode! History’s Greatest Mysteries is a History Channel Original Podcast, brought to you by Rewind Studios. 🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Rewind Studios Originals, Hidden History and Government That Doesn’t Suck, wherever you get your podcasts! Follow us on Social Instagram: @RewindStudios https://www.instagram.com/rewindstudiosTikTok: @RewindStudios https://www.tiktok.com/@rewindstudios See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  And now a History Channel original podcast presented by Rewind.

• 0:11Speaker 00

  Today, a mysterious and gruesome crime that's haunted the public for decades.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  The tragic story of Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia, is a murder mystery that just doesn't go away.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  The victim is a young beauty, and like Jack the Ripper or the Zodiac Killer, her murderer has never been caught or even identified.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  The police are definitely working off the idea that this is a personal vendetta.

• 0:37Speaker 03

  How many bad men does it take to kill one 22-year-old?

• 0:41Speaker 04

  A young wannabe starlet in Hollywood, contrasted with this very horrible death.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  Now we explore the top theories surrounding one of history's most notorious unsolved crimes.

• 0:53Speaker 05

  You've got this very violent, very vicious killer out there, and nobody knows when he's going to strike again.

• 0:59Speaker 03

  Back then, when you had power, you had money, you had prestige, you could get away with murder.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Who killed the infamous Black Dahlia and why?

• 1:12Speaker 00

  Welcome to History's Greatest Mysteries, a History Channel original podcast brought to you by Rewind Studios. Each episode, we take a deep dive into some of the greatest unanswered questions from history, backed by some of the foremost experts on the subject. Today, the murder of Elizabeth Short, also known as the Black Dahlia.

• 1:40Speaker 00

  For over seven decades, the Los Angeles Police Department has kept the Black Dahlia murder case open. Each new detective assigned to this legendary cold case must first review the evidence. Los Angeles, California, January 15, 1947. It's an uncharacteristically cool morning in La Merth Park.

• 2:02Speaker 05

  There's a local resident who's walking in the early morning hours, about 10 o'clock, with a toddler, and she sees something that looks like a mannequin in an open field.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  A mannequin that appears to be broken in half. She thinks it's a prank. She calls the police. The police come, and it ends up being anything but a mannequin.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  What they're really looking at is the bisected corpse of a young woman, naked, scrubbed, cleaned and drained of all her blood.

• 2:30Speaker 06

  This was a very brutal murder. The body had been severed at the waist, and it likewise been mutilated.

• 2:36Speaker 04

  One of her breasts has been removed. There is an incision or a gash above her genitals resembling a hysterectomy scar. The body was left in a position that is both shocking and sexual at the same time.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  This tattoo had been cut away from her thigh. It was a tattoo of a rose and inserted somewhere else that I'm not sure if you want me describing on camera. There were signs of torture. There were signs she had been beaten. And maybe most importantly, there was no blood at the scene of this homicide.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  Her face was severely beaten. Her mouth has been slashed from ear to ear in a grisly smile.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  The police initially believed that she had been killed sometime between 10 to 12 hours before her body was most likely dumped at that location.

• 3:17Speaker 05

  The medical examiner upon autopsy determined that the individual died from a concussion, hemorrhaging, and trauma to the body.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Mercifully, she was already dead when the killer carved up the rest of her.

• 3:32Speaker 04

  The way the body has been cut in half is very specific. The body has been cut between the second and third lumbar vertebrae. It's called a hemicorporectomy.

• 3:41Speaker 05

  This is the exact point where you would cut someone without having to go through bone.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  Investigators believe the killer has to be someone with medical training, or at least expertise in anatomy.

• 3:53Speaker 03

  There were people that the LAPD interviewed that were doctors. They actually investigated 300 medical students at USC to find out if one of them had done it.

• 4:03Speaker 05

  The very next day, officers run the victim's prints, and within a few hours, they have a name.

• 4:09Speaker 00

  She is 22-year-old Elizabeth Short from the Boston suburb of Medford, Massachusetts.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  Her fingerprints were on file with police and FBI databases because she had applied for a job at a California military camp in 1943. And she had also been arrested for underage drinking in Santa Barbara County. The prior arrest for underage drinking in Santa Barbara does become relevant here because the arresting officer knew that she had a rose tattoo on her left leg, and that was in the report.

• 4:38Speaker 00

  Investigators begin looking into Elizabeth Short's background for more clues. She was raised by a single mother in a middle-class family.

• 4:48Speaker 04

  At a very early age, her father faked his suicide and left the family.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  She was a young woman who left her home to come find fame and fortune, maybe, in Los Angeles.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  A beautiful, young woman, cut down in the prime for life, by this, you know, shadowy creature. It's kind of the archetype of the kind of crime that captures the American public's attention.

• 5:12Speaker 00

  Police and reporters try to get a lead on Beth's life, but the more they dig in, the more of a mystery she becomes.

• 5:20Speaker 05

  She's a high school dropout, and she's kind of bouncing around from friend to friend, you know, what the youngsters call couch surfing now. So she was really trying to figure out what it is that she wants to do with herself. When she came to LA, Beth describes herself as an aspiring actress. However, there's no evidence that she ever auditioned for any roles.

• 5:39Speaker 00

  It's in Long Beach, California, in mid-1946, that Short picks up the nickname that will stick with her after her death.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Elizabeth Short, like, hanging out at this diner, and the customers there had actually named her Black Dahlia because she dyed her hair black. She liked wearing black clothing, and a movie called The Blue Dahlia had just come out. And so they named her the Black Dahlia.

• 6:08Speaker 05

  A month before Beth's murder, she told friends that she was going to the Bay Area to visit her sister. But in reality, she went to San Diego.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  And there, she sleeps in a movie theater. One of the women working at the movie theater lets Elizabeth Short live with her and her family for about a month. But eventually, they tire of her, and that's when she, you know, starts up with Red Manley.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  On the evening of January 9, six days before her dead body will be found in La Merth Park, Beth is given a ride back to Los Angeles by a traveling salesman named Red Manley.

• 6:47Speaker 05

  He said she was very fidgety. She couldn't sit still. She just seemed very uncomfortable. Red Manley tells police that he dropped Beth off at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, and then he heads home. Officers checked out his alibi, and everything rang true. And so the last time that Beth was seen by anyone was about 10:00 PM at the Biltmore. Doorman said he walked her out, and that was the last time anyone had seen her.

• 7:11Speaker 00

  Six days later, she'll be dead, and the biggest manhunt in LA history kicks off.

• 7:17Speaker 05

  One of the first witnesses that investigators talked to was her on-again, off-again friends, sometime housemate, roommate, Anne Toth. Toth is the one that points investigators in the direction of their first real suspect, Mark Hanson.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  Which brings us to theory number one. She was killed by a jealous nightclub owner.

• 7:37Speaker 06

  Mark Hanson was the operator of the Florentine Gardens on Hollywood Boulevard. It was a very popular dance club.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  He's this Danish millionaire. He has lots of very powerful friends. He's very influential, and he lives in this house on Carlos Avenue.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  This was kind of a haven for dancers at his club, for people who had just come to the city and wanted to be actresses, just people chasing the dream of Hollywood.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Anne Toth is one of the women who lives in the Carlos Avenue home. She tells police that Beth lived there too, off and on between May and November of 1946.

• 8:14Speaker 05

  One of the reasons that Toth directed officers to Mark in the first place is because she knew that he was completely obsessed and infatuated with Beth.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  He would forbid her to bring other men to the house, which sounds like, you know, the jealous boyfriend type.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Hanson was described as fixated on Elizabeth Short. He had this unrequited sexual interest in her. So she's trying to find a way to, you know, kind of shoo him off sexually without infuriating him. So she comes up with this fiction that she's a virgin.

• 8:45Speaker 05

  The fact that Beth rebuffed Mark Hanson with stories of, "I'm a virgin," probably only fueled his desire to want her all the more.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  The stormy relationship doesn't end there.

• 8:57Speaker 05

  To avoid any conflict with Mark, it's rumored that she was having her gentlemen friends drop her off about a block away from his house. Now, this just infuriates him. So Mark doesn't speak to Beth now for several days.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  Things allegedly come to a head in early November, 1946.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  Anne Toth had told the police that the final straw in this relationship between Mark Hanson and Elizabeth Short is that Hanson had told Elizabeth that it was only her, it was all about her, he was obsessed with or fixated on her. And then he brings another woman home, and she sees this and suddenly is now aggravated. And there is some kind of, I don't know if they come to blows, or at least just a verbal argument, but something happens between them, and that is kind of where things completely fall apart between Hanson and Short. The morning after this explosion, Hanson does evict her from the property where she's been staying.

• 9:47Speaker 00

  But Anne tells police it isn't the end of Mark and Beth's tumultuous relationship.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  The night before the murder, Anne said that Elizabeth had called and that Mr. Hanson had been acting nervous and restless. She also said that Elizabeth was going to come over, but she didn't show up.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  So the last night that anybody sees Elizabeth Short, she does make a phone call to Mark Hanson, and he tells her everything's fine, you still have a place to stay.

• 10:13Speaker 05

  But according to Mark, Beth never came back.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  Police question the well-connected nightclub owner, but he downplays his relationship with Elizabeth.

• 10:23Speaker 05

  He says that he was never interested in Beth. He never tried to have sex with her. He found Beth to be fair-looking, average.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Hanson does himself no favors with the police. He tells easily disprovable lies. He says he didn't speak to her after he evicted her.

• 10:37Speaker 05

  According to Anne, Mark Hanson told her Beth could come and stay there if she needed a place to stay. But when questioned by investigators, Mark Hanson said he turned Beth away and never saw her again.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  On January 21st, six days after Beth Short's body is discovered, an envelope containing the contents of her purse arrives at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.

• 11:01Speaker 06

  Among the materials submitted were Elizabeth Short's social security card, an address book that bore the name of Mark Hanson on its cover. At first blush, it looks like somebody's trying to set this guy up. Because you just don't send incriminating materials to the police. If you want to do that, you might as well go to the front downs and turn yourself in.

• 11:21Speaker 05

  It's quite believable and reasonable to suspect Mark Hanson as the perpetrator of this crime because we know that he was obsessed with Elizabeth.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  But Mark Hanson has an alibi and witnesses to back him up.

• 11:35Speaker 04

  He said that when the murder occurred, he was at a movie theater opening in Long Beach. And he also had a business associate testify that he was at his home in Redondo Beach until 3:00 a.m. This would not give him enough time to kill Elizabeth and then dispose of the body in the way it had been and be able to get away.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  Hanson's alibi knocks him down the suspect list. Police never search his properties or vehicles for blood or evidence. And the case moves on.

• 12:05Speaker 05

  You've got this very violent, very vicious killer out there. And nobody knows who he is. Nobody knows when he's going to strike again.

• 12:14Speaker 00

  It's January of 1947, and Los Angeles is in the grips of a tabloid frenzy. Everyone wants to know who killed the Black Dahlia.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Media were all over this case. At that time, there were four major dailies in the city of Los Angeles competing. This is the 40s, so you're pre-internet, you're pre-Twitter. But you are also at a time when the papers are putting out two editions each day. They're putting out mornings and evenings, trying to just edge each other out and get at least one exclusive per day, twice per day.

• 12:43Speaker 05

  This story had everything that you would relate to a film noir. You've got the seedy underbelly of Hollywood. You've got the gruesomeness of the killing. And then the great unknown is who did it?

• 12:57Speaker 00

  The Black Dahlia case even becomes headline news around the country.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Everyone was watching. Everyone was reading papers. This was a hot story. And the cops were pressured to find out who done it.

• 13:13Speaker 05

  You had, at one point, 150 suspects that investigators were looking at, wanting to talk to, had talked to. You had people who were calling in with tips. And you even had people who were confessing.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  There were certain things that would only be known to the killer. One of the details that police kept from the media was the fact that Elizabeth Short had a tattoo on her leg. It was a rose. Having information that others don't have is one way of helping eliminate folks from being a potential suspect.

• 13:44Speaker 05

  So after the initial excitement of this young woman found in the field and the several editions a day of newspaper and all this coverage, a month passes, and the cops are still at a loss of who killed Elizabeth Short.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  As their investigation continues, the L.A. police make a connection to similar grisly murders that occurred a decade earlier and over 2,000 miles away. Cleveland, iron and steel center of the Middle West.

• 14:14Speaker 06

  The nature and manner of death of Elizabeth Short tends to lend itself to a belief that there might be other murders that are related to this. A dismemberment murder, a brutal, probably sexual murder of a woman.

• 14:27Speaker 05

  Cleveland, Ohio investigators are beginning to wonder if the Black Dahlia killer is someone they've hunted before.

• 14:34Speaker 03

  Investigators in Cleveland are looking at all that's happening around this young woman found in the field, and they are wondering, is their killer the same as our killer?

• 14:45Speaker 00

  Giving us theory number two: she was murdered by a Cleveland serial killer.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  About a decade before, in 1930, Cleveland also had a killer who seemed to delight in killing folks and dissecting the bodies.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  It all starts in September of 1934, when a beachcomber on the shores of Lake Erie makes a gruesome discovery.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  They discover a female who's headless, with her legs amputated at the knees, partially covered in sand.

• 15:18Speaker 04

  This body was essentially a torso with the upper leg still intact, but the rest of the body was missing. Investigators eventually find her legs but not the head, and this woman becomes known as the Lady of the Lake.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  Exactly one year later, two teenagers discover the decapitated corpse of a white male in a vacant lot.

• 15:38Speaker 04

  The body was found decapitated with his genitals removed. While searching the crime scene, police find the body of another man, 40 years old, who had also been decapitated and castrated.

• 15:51Speaker 00

  Every few months, more butchered bodies turn up.

• 15:55Speaker 05

  The Cleveland killer seems to target men and women who are down on their luck, folks who maybe a perpetrator might think they won't be missed and were probably vulnerable in the moment.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  So we can already see specific parallels between the Cleveland torso killer and the Black Dahlia case. We see bodies that are turning up dismembered and disfigured in a way that involves a certain amount of anatomical and/or medical skill and knowledge.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  Like the Black Dahlia's killer, who sent taunting letters to the newspaper, Cleveland's mad butcher seems to enjoy goading the authorities.

• 16:32Speaker 04

  A very significant parallel between the two cases is the fact that the killers communicated with police after the murders were done.

• 16:40Speaker 05

  In the case of the Cleveland torso killer, that killer was taunting the investigator, who at that time was Elliot Ness. Elliot Ness was the investigator who took down Al Capone in Chicago.

• 16:53Speaker 00

  The Cleveland torso killer is believed to be responsible for the murders of seven men and five women.

• 17:00Speaker 05

  In 1938, Cleveland's racked up about 12 bodies now as a result of this torso killer. And then it just stops. And so the question is, why? What happened? The belief was is that Elliot Ness, during his investigation of the torso killer, had honed in on a guy who was only known as Dr. X.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  This person has received medical training. And Elliot Ness coaxes this person, who he calls Dr. X, to talk with him. This Dr. X receives two polygraph tests and fails both.

• 17:34Speaker 05

  There was never enough evidence to charge him. But Elliot Ness manages to coax him into an insane asylum, and the torso murders stop.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  But some believe the suspect known as Dr. X wasn't actually the torso killer, and that the only reason the murders stopped is because the real killer moved to a new hunting ground.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Perhaps the killer actually left the area because a letter had been received by the police department. In this letter, he's kind of cheeky, and he says, "You can relax now. I've left the area. I've gone to sunny California, and I'll be engaging in my surgical endeavors there." The suspect also says that he's buried his most recent victim in Los Angeles, between Crenshaw and Western Avenue, which is really only about five miles from La Mertre Park.

• 18:23Speaker 00

  Did Cleveland's mad butcher set his sights on Elizabeth Short?

• 18:28Speaker 03

  The Cleveland torso killer and the killer of Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, had some type of anatomical training. They knew where to cut, where to avoid bone.

• 18:40Speaker 04

  There are also a number of differences between the two cases. We see with the Cleveland torso killings, there are decapitations. Elizabeth Short was not decapitated. The Cleveland torso killings, the bodies weren't necessarily posed. Also, the Cleveland torso killings involved men, which is a different victimology than the Elizabeth Short case. The Cleveland torso killer's mutilations might have been more defensively motivated, designed to keep him from being caught, versus the Elizabeth Short case, which may have been more in the service of sexual gratification.

• 19:14Speaker 03

  There was no hard proof that the killer of Elizabeth Short was the Cleveland torso killer.

• 19:21Speaker 05

  The MOs feel totally different, too.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  Most old unsolved murders slip into obscurity. Not so with the Black Dahlia. As the decades go by and the leads grow colder, the search for answers only seems to be heating up. In 1997, on the 50th anniversary of the murder, The Los Angeles Times hires renowned criminal profiler, John Douglas, to take his own look at the case.

• 19:49Speaker 05

  Douglas believes that the killer of the Black Dahlia was a male, someone who's familiar with surgical equipment. He believes that the killer was motivated by personal stress, alcoholism, and romantic rejection.

• 20:03Speaker 00

  One of Douglas's biggest questions is why Limerick Park?

• 20:07Speaker 07

  The fact that the killer dumps the body in a residential area, right in the middle of LA, was notable to John Douglas. Because there's so many other places in Southern California to dump a body if you don't want it to be found, John Douglas feels that the perpetrator would have a connection to this neighborhood and to this spot. Well, who would possibly have a connection to this neighborhood that could have the means and the opportunity to commit this murder?

• 20:33Speaker 00

  Following up on that theory, an LA Times reporter finds a suspect that has flown under the radar for half a century. His name is Dr. Walter Bailey. That's theory number three. The killer was a grieving surgeon.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Walter Bailey is born in 1880. He's a World War I veteran. He is a surgeon at the University of Southern California. And maybe most importantly, he has an office not far from the Biltmore, where Elizabeth Short was last seen.

• 21:01Speaker 07

  Dr. Bailey had a young son, who was riding his bicycle and was killed by a driver. And it was a very traumatic incident in his life.

• 21:10Speaker 04

  It's been said that at this point, he sort of threw himself into his career.

• 21:14Speaker 05

  He had a private practice, where he specialized in mastectomies and hysterectomies.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Given the injuries she suffered, given the specific areas of her body that were mutilated, there's a line of thinking that Bailey would have known exactly how to cut, move, otherwise dismember those parts of a human being.

• 21:32Speaker 00

  Dr. Bailey and his wife lived in Limerick Park in a house just a block away from where Elizabeth Short will be found murdered. But in the months before the murder, Dr. Bailey's marriage and his life were coming apart.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  He becomes estranged from his wife about four months before Elizabeth Short is killed and kind of shacks up with this younger physician.

• 21:54Speaker 07

  He had a successful medical practice. And then he sort of broke bad in a certain way. His personality changed dramatically. He left his wife. He took up with this younger woman. He would have these bizarre kind of habits, like watching surgery films at night while he ate dinner with this younger woman. And that sort of fits the profile of somebody who might commit this murder.

• 22:17Speaker 00

  One researcher investigating the Black Dahlia case found evidence of a connection between Dr. Bailey and Elizabeth Short.

• 22:24Speaker 07

  And he obtained Elizabeth Short's older sister's marriage certificate. And on the marriage certificate, one of the witnesses was Dr. Bailey's daughter. And the address that Dr. Bailey's daughter listed was only one block from the crime scene. And that's where Walter Bailey's ex-wife lived. So there's now a connection between Elizabeth Short and Walter Bailey, and the residence, and the crime scene.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  Adding to the case against Dr. Bailey is his own medical condition.

• 23:00Speaker 04

  Dr. Bailey had a very specific brain condition, known as encephalo-melasseum.

• 23:06Speaker 07

  The neurobiologist said that this kind of dimension, this could lead to a dramatic change in personality later in life. It could lead to a certain kind of violence and hypersexuality that might be consistent with somebody who would commit this kind of crime.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Some theorists contend that Bailey, elderly and weakened by his disease, severed the body to make it easier to transport and purposely dumped it just a half a block from the house in which his ex-wife still lived.

• 23:34Speaker 05

  If he's the suspect and he left this body within proximity to his wife, it would have been maybe to perhaps unsettle her and make her feel that, you know, this place that, you know, she calls home and feels safe is no longer safe based on the fact that a nude woman, cut in half, was found a block or two away.

• 23:54Speaker 00

  Dr. Bailey dies on January 4, 1948, not even one year after the Black Dahlia murder. But his death doesn't stop speculation that he's the killer.

• 24:06Speaker 07

  Bailey wasn't a suspect at the time, but to a number of LAPD homicide detectives, of all the theories that had been going around for many, many decades, they felt his was the most plausible.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  There is this thought process that basically this man is going mad, not far from the Biltmore, with the means, motive, and opportunity to commit a crime like this. And then Elizabeth Short wanders into his path. Walter Bailey's death is critical here because if this was to become a pattern of behavior, he didn't live long enough to find another victim.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  Walter Bailey isn't the only person who raises suspicions long after Elizabeth Short's murder.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  In 2006, Don Wolfe publishes a book in which he advances the theory, what if somebody with a hair-trigger temper, some infamous violent mobster, killed Elizabeth Short? And not only that he killed her, but he did it at the behest of a famous and powerful person.

• 25:01Speaker 00

  Leading to theory number four. She was murdered by Bugsy Siegel.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  Bugsy Siegel is infamous mafia figure, one of the people associated with the Foundation of Murder, Inc. in New York, which is not a reputation you develop unless you have heard people.

• 25:17Speaker 00

  Siegel moves to California in the mid-1930s to set up a West Coast criminal empire. Despite his track record as a merciless hitman, he soon finds himself hobnobbing with celebrities.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  One of the power players that Bugsy Siegel is known to associate with is Norman Chandler, who is at the time, the publisher of The Los Angeles Times. Chandler is the civic leader in the second-largest city in the US.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  The rumor is that Norman Chandler got Elizabeth Short pregnant. And that could not be.

• 25:49Speaker 02

  I don't know if either she refused an abortion or he never asked, but to cover up the affair and the baby, Chandler reaches out to Bugsy Siegel.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  And so Bugsy Siegel gets two of his henchmen to take care of the problem. And the problem is, of course, Elizabeth Short.

• 26:06Speaker 00

  But most investigators point to one flaw in this theory. Her autopsy report states that Beth wasn't pregnant.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Elizabeth's autopsy did not show that she was pregnant, that this would have, the detail would have been changed by a medical examiner, somebody that Siegel could reach or somebody that Chandler could reach.

• 26:25Speaker 00

  There's other circumstantial evidence supporting the Black Dahlia murder as a mob hit.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Norman Chandler had a condo right near the Biltmore Hotel. So maybe on January 9, when Red Manley drops Elizabeth Short off at the Biltmore Hotel, maybe she's going to see Norman Chandler at his condo nearby. Maybe she was walking into a trap.

• 26:48Speaker 00

  Siegel's movement around the time of the Black Dahlia killing raises even more questions.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  It's believed that Bugsy Siegel was in Los Angeles during the time that Elizabeth Short was killed. But on the day her body is found in Limerick Park, Bugsy Siegel leaves town and he goes to Palm Springs.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  Coming up, a Hollywood detective goes digging into his own past and thinks he's finally solved the Black Dahlia murder. The LAPD has kept its most famous cold case open since 1947. And the detective assigned to the Black Dahlia murder must evaluate all the new leads and theories that continue to come in, like the one that comes from a former homicide detective who believes he's tracked the elusive killer right to his own front door. Steve Hodel is a 24-year veteran of the LAPD, but he never investigated the Black Dahlia case himself until the death of his beloved father,

• 27:50Speaker 00

  Dr. George Hodel, in 1999.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  When his father passed away, you know, he started going through all of his father's things. And he came across this little black book and saw a picture that looked like Elizabeth Short.

• 28:09Speaker 05

  During some family conversation with his older stepsister, as he's looking at these photos, the older sister tells Steve that at some point, their dad had been identified as a potential suspect in the Black Dahlia murder.

• 28:24Speaker 00

  Which is theory number five. The killer was a notorious Hollywood doctor.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  In the very beginning, Steve Hodel set out to prove that his father had no involvement in Elizabeth Short's murder.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  But over time, Steve Hodel's investigation would lead him to a horrifying conclusion and cast his father in a very different light.

• 28:48Speaker 03

  George Hodel was very wealthy, very charismatic.

• 28:52Speaker 04

  He was actually a genius, if you will. He's in college at Caltech when he's 16, and he falls in love with his professor.

• 29:00Speaker 03

  He had an affair with one of his teachers and got her pregnant. And she didn't want... Anything to do with him because obviously, you know, she's a teacher and he's 16 years old. But it just kind of goes to show like that personality that he had, you know, because as he got older, you know, he married several times.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  He'll go on to have 11 children by five different women.

• 29:25Speaker 04

  He grows up in the Los Angeles area and eventually becomes a medical doctor and even the head of the LA Department of Health, where he treated STDs and performed abortions for the rich and famous and elite around the Los Angeles area.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  He had every political, every police in his pocket. You could say he was taken care of.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  By the 1940s, Hodel is swinging amongst an elite LA crowd, including surrealist photographer Man Ray and movie director John Huston. Then in 1945, he's accused by his daughter, Tamar, of sexual abuse. During the trial, Tamar accuses Hodel of murdering the Black Dahlia.

• 30:09Speaker 04

  Despite the fact that there are eyewitnesses to the incest events, is acquitted. But Los Angeles police then monitor his home, planting microphones in the house to see if they can get evidence related to the Black Dahlia murder.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  Investigators spend the next 40 days and nights monitoring and recording conversations inside the Hodel home.

• 30:31Speaker 04

  At some point, he is heard saying, "Well, even if I did do the Black Dahlia murder, they would never catch me."

• 30:38Speaker 00

  The deeper Steve digs into the Black Dahlia evidence, the more convinced he becomes that his dad is the monster who tortured and mutilated Elizabeth Short.

• 30:49Speaker 04

  Witnesses at the time report seeing Elizabeth Short in the presence and company of Dr. Hodel, and that she may have been a patient of his or perhaps even a dating partner.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  Another clue for Steve Hodel is the concrete bag found at the Black Dahlia crime scene.

• 31:05Speaker 05

  One of the other reasons that Steve thought maybe his dad had been involved is that this concrete bag that was found at the scene where Elizabeth Short's body had been dumped, Steve said he found a very similar concrete bag at his dad's home because there was some construction being done there.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  Steve Hodel found the receipts and he matched the receipts to the cement bags that were found at the crime scene.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  Studying the crime scene photos, Steve also believes he's established a motive.

• 31:39Speaker 04

  There's literally some of Man Ray's work that almost exactly resembles the way her body was laid out. And some believe that if this was George Hodel, who perpetrated this murder, that he was trying to imitate or perhaps even supersede the work of Man Ray due to his close relationship and perhaps jealousy of Man Ray.

• 32:02Speaker 00

  In 1950, just when it seems the case against George Hodel is heating up, the doctor abruptly moves to the Philippines, which at the time has no extradition treaty with the US.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  He goes there and he creates a whole new family. And he came back many years later, lived in San Francisco, and then he passed. Steve went on to write several books and still believes to this day that his father actually killed Elizabeth Short.

• 32:35Speaker 00

  In 2017, the 70-year anniversary of Elizabeth Short's murder, a fresh look at the unredacted records breathes new life into an investigation that has never officially been closed.

• 32:48Speaker 06

  The fact of the matter is, LAPD still has a very talented detective assigned to this investigation with the hopes that a solution still remains.

• 32:57Speaker 00

  Some believe that solution may involve a man who made headlines in the months after the murder.

• 33:03Speaker 05

  This is someone who investigators had looked at from the very start.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  It's the fall of 1948, and LAPD's chief police psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Paul Deriver, is still determined to find the Black Dahlia's killer.

• 33:18Speaker 06

  The LAPD, years on from the murder, starts to get a little desperate. They're trying to bait out the killer any way they can.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  So Dr. Deriver is interviewed for a true crime magazine, where he basically makes some flattering statements about who the Black Dahlia killer may be, talking about the intelligence of the individual who did this and perhaps that person's need to brag or boast about it.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  Within days, the letter that Deriver's been waiting for arrives at police headquarters, giving us theory number six, a sadistic drifter.

• 33:51Speaker 06

  A man named Jack Sands contacted Deriver, saying that he had information about the Elizabeth Short murder.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  And the main thing that is posited in this letter is that someone named Jeff Connors has committed the homicide.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Sands proposes that the murderer, Jeff Connors, could have been Elizabeth Short's ex-lover, and perhaps she mocked him by insulting his manhood, therefore the murder would have been motivated by revenge. Jack Sands proposes this as the hypothetical motive of Jeff Connors. But Dr. Deriver says, oh no, Sands himself is the guy.

• 34:26Speaker 00

  By now, police psychiatrist Dr. Deriver is convinced he's writing to the actual killer and that Jack Sands is not his real name.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  So to track down this Jack Sands, the LAPD dispatches an officer to Florida to monitor his mailbox, and they soon discover that this Jack Sands is actually a man named Leslie Dillon. Dillon is a married man who bounced between residences and also between jobs. He'd once worked as a mortician's assistant, which intrigues police, given the way that Elizabeth Short's body was cut up.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  Deriver has an undercover LAPD officer bring Dillon to a bugged hotel in Almonte, California, so Deriver can talk to him about the murder.

• 35:10Speaker 05

  They spent three days in a hotel room that's bugged to have a conversation about the details of this killing.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Dillon tells the police that he believes Connor had a motive to kill Elizabeth Short.

• 35:21Speaker 04

  Playing on a hunch, Dr. Deriver asks Dillon to take off his clothes, and he's shocked. Dillon has the genitals of a child. This is important because it might have been the reason that Elizabeth Short may have been mocking him and thus his reason for feeling humiliated and wanting to retaliate and kill her.

• 35:40Speaker 06

  Deriver is seeking to establish the credibility of Leslie Dillon, so he tests him. He inquires about the damage to Elizabeth Short's body.

• 35:49Speaker 05

  One of the things that we know that police held back was the fact that the suspect had actually cut a portion of Elizabeth Short's leg, which contained a tattoo of a rose.

• 36:01Speaker 04

  When asked about the rose tattoo and its location on Elizabeth Short's body, without hesitation, Leslie Dillon states that it was removed from her left thigh and placed in her pelvis.

• 36:12Speaker 05

  This was something only the killer and the police knew, and he just answered the question affirmatively.

• 36:17Speaker 00

  After four days of questioning, Dr. Deriver is convinced he's finally solved the Black Dahlia murder. On January 10, 1949, Leslie Dillon is booked on suspicion of killing Elizabeth Short.

• 36:32Speaker 06

  Upon inspection of Leslie Dillon's suitcase, investigators find 700 phenobarbital pills along with 70 razor blades and a dog leash.

• 36:43Speaker 04

  The dog leash itself had been damaged or worn, perhaps as if it had been bearing a significant weight, as in the weight of the body of Elizabeth Short.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  Strengthening the case against Dillon, it's discovered that a relative who gave him a place to stay at the time of the Dahlia murder lived just two blocks from where Beth's purse and shoes were dumped.

• 37:06Speaker 05

  They found her handbag and her shoes just maybe two miles from where she was left.

• 37:12Speaker 00

  Leslie Dillon has suggested a man named Jeff Connors is the Black Dahlia murderer and that he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, but the cops believe Jeff Connors is merely Dillon's alter ego.

• 37:25Speaker 06

  And as things turn out, there is a real Jeff Connors, and he really is in the San Francisco Bay Area.

• 37:31Speaker 04

  Interestingly enough, police learn that Jeff Connors, in addition to knowing Leslie Dillon, he also knows Mark Hanson, one of our suspects from a previous theory, as well as Elizabeth Short, and that all of these paths might have crossed at some time previously.

• 37:47Speaker 00

  Investigators suspect that those paths might have crossed when a jealous and spurned Mark Hanson may have enlisted their help in killing Beth Short. But when Jeff Connors' ex-wife gives him an alibi for the presumed time of the murder, he's allowed to walk free.

• 38:04Speaker 05

  Mark Hanson was very powerful, and he had a lot of money, and he had a lot of connections. What if he used all of that to make this case disappear? Leslie Dillon had plenty of reason to want to get rid of Elizabeth Short. There's a theory that she mocked his manhood or lacked thereof.

• 38:25Speaker 04

  Leslie Dillon may have the motivation with humiliation and revenge. Mark Hanson may have the means and the ability to get Elizabeth Short to him, and also the means to get it all cleaned up afterwards.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  All these years later, newly uncovered witness statements may finally explain how that happened.

• 38:43Speaker 05

  In 2018, the son of one of the Florentine Garden showgirls reaches out to investigators and says that his mom, Nanette, had said to him that she knew exactly who had killed the Black Dahlia. Nanette also, according to her son, said to him that she had seen someone who resembled Elizabeth Short in Mark Hanson's home behind the Florentine Gardens, known as the Carlos Avenue House.

• 39:13Speaker 00

  According to Nanette's son, she asked Hanson who the girl was, and he said it was Elizabeth Short.

• 39:19Speaker 04

  So a week after the Black Dahlia murder, when the story was all over the news, Mark Hanson apparently called Nanette and said she shouldn't mention this to anyone or her career would be over.

• 39:30Speaker 00

  But Beth was out of Hanson's Carlos Avenue House by the 10th, so where did she go after that?

• 39:36Speaker 04

  According to unredacted District Attorney's Office documents, Mark Hanson, Leslie Dillon, and Elizabeth Short were all seen at the Astor Motel together.

• 39:48Speaker 05

  Theory has it that Leslie Dillon and her old friend Mark Hanson kidnapped her and tortured her in one of the rooms at the Astor Hotel. Witnesses saw Mark Hanson leave Room 3 at the Astor Hotel in Los Angeles. The hotel owner's wife walked into Room 3 after everyone had left it, and she found blood and gore everywhere.

• 40:16Speaker 00

  These witness accounts, buried for decades, point to the possibility that the Astor Motel was where Elizabeth Short was tortured, murdered, and mutilated. However, by the time the LAPD examined the Astor Motel, there is no evidence of a bloody murder. And though the Astor Motel is ruled out as a crime scene, the detectives assigned to investigate are quickly removed.

• 40:40Speaker 05

  The two detectives who were working this case, who were working the Astor Hotel scene, are suddenly excused. Why would they be kicked off this case? Is it because of Mark Hanson's pull?

• 40:55Speaker 00

  Is it possible that multimillionaire Mark Hanson had the clout to bury evidence and squelch an investigation into his possible guilt? It's yet another unanswered question in LA's most compelling murder mystery.

• 41:09Speaker 06

  The Elizabeth Short mystery carries on to this day because nobody's been caught.

• 41:14Speaker 05

  Given the nature of the crime, we want an answer. We want to know why. We want to know who. And until we do, I think there will always be an interest.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  The Black Dahlia murder has a long, unsavory suspect list, but without solid evidence, there's still no way to rule anyone in or out. The file remains open. A detective is still on the case. Maybe one day, a newfound clue will finally lead to the identity of Elizabeth Short's killer and justice at last for the Black Dahlia. Thanks so much for listening to History's Greatest Mysteries, a History Channel original podcast brought to you by Rewind Studios. Join us next time for a deep dive into another mystery and all the theories behind it.