John Gilmore: So, you have a copy of the script?

Rev. Randail Tin-ear: No, actually, I have a copy of the Amok edition book.

Oh, ok, the new version.

Correct. Amok came out with it about two weeks ago, Actually, I have never seen the first printing, and I only learned upon reading this one that there was another one... in 1995 ... correct?

Yes, and then it kind of went out of press about a year and a half ago. It petered out slowly, and I was not fully aware that they were going out with it, but it did go out [of press], and Stuart [at Amok Books] was really interested in doing it again.

I am surprised that the first printing seemed to have garnered not too much attention. I had never heard of it, nor read of any mention of it in the many magazines and zincs that I receive that are related to such matters; I am surprised that it did not make some big waves.

Well, the problem was that the distribution was almost exclusively in California. It was terrible. It was a smaller press that went ahead and did it; it was a mixed-up deal from the start. I had two or three people in New York interested, but at the last minute... Well, Water Books was one. They said the classic remark: "(My) work and (my) style are too peculiar and idiosyncratic." That's the classic New York phrase. Then Little Brown turns around and publishes it in London, as a paperback, under the Water Books imprint.

So, it sold close to 7,000 copies in the first edition. They went through two printings. The British edition sold around 8,000. I didn't like that type of British deal, at least with that situation. Most everything I now do with Amok has the British sale price, so that it is a British book as it is. That's fine with me; it's too screwed up the other way. It's not in favor with the writer. And I have a very good relationship with Stuart. I love the way the book looks, the way Stuart has put it out; it's first class. In 1995, only Last Gasp and a few others were carrying it, it never got out east, and people had to basically order it if they wanted it. But I wanted the book to come out immediately. Then Edward Pressman bought it; he saw the book and bought it as a movie. I just re-signed with him, so I'm actually going into my fourth year of options.

I was going to ask you about the movie, in the book you mentioned that the movie deal had fallen through, that it had never materialized-

No, it never... OH- you're talking about when I first started working on the book. That was back in 1963.

I didn't realize that.

That was in '63, when Tom Neal wanted to do it. He claimed to have the money - I don't know how much it was, but it was not as much as he thought he needed! - and that was how I started the book, as a movie script. That deal fell apart two years later, when Tom murdered his wife. She was really beautiful, too, and had a lot of money, was from Palm Springs, was a lot younger than Tom. That was where Tom felt that he had kind of a goose laying golden eggs, that he could get the money from her and have her Palm Springs friends push the picture. He would have produced it, and played the star as one of the major detectives. Instead, he killed the goose that was laying the golden eggs. He blew her brains out with a .45, went to prison, and that was the end of Tom. And certainly the end of my movie deal with him. But it was not the end of my pursuit into the situation.

That you have pursued it for so long is nearly as frightening as the deed disclosed.

There was no way for me to not continue; I went too far, I'd gone too far, I was in too deep; I was too involved with too many kinds of weirdos and goings-ons.

When the movie first came out, Scripps Howard wanted to make a TV movie. I wasn't happy with it, but I went ahead with it and what happened was Pressman saw the book, wanted it, and got it away from Scripps Howard. So they have had it ever since. The third option expired in July, and I didn't re-sign one until August because I had other things going on. But it was just far, far too tied for nothing to happen. I mean, they already have a script that is completely developed. Actually, what occurred was they did one script to begin with - this was about a year and a half ago - and I was not really... I mean, I don't have any say-so in the script; I'm not involved in it. I'm a consultant and that's how it is. It would be different if I was co-writing or something. And I have no qualms with it; as far as I'm concerned, I just want my money out of them.

And as you have the book out, yet have the record as you want it.

Yes. Initially, in '95, John Thomas Anderson was going to write and direct, and the guy was 24 at the time. But they had some kind of blow-up, or some deal fell apart with him and he went ahead and made Boogie Nights. And then David Lynch was involved, and the second draft had what I could see was David's input. They re-wrote it twice based on his input, what he wanted to look for in the script. And it was like listening to a song and thinking, "That whole passage was very familiar," and it was David Lynch's point of view about things. But as it stands right now, I don't know what they're going to do with it. Thus I 've got 'til January and they have a renewal - it's the first renewal I've done with them - and then they go another six months. And I hope they make it, 'cause I would like it to be made and [laughingly] I'd like to get the money!

If David Lynch were to have a hand in it, that would probably be a really good interpretation. I think he would do it rather well.

It would be beautiful. But one of the problems facing David is... because Lost Highways really didn't do anything.

Yes, I went to see that film, and I wouldn't say it was so much esoteric as it was merely vague.

Yeah, right; that's an excellent description. Bobby Blake was certainly wonderful in it though.

Yes.

But that was what occurred, and he was afraid, supposedly, to do something as stark as this again right on top of that, because everybody's going to say, 0h, who's going to go see anything more by him? It's all bullshit!" And so he's facing that problem, a typical Hollywood problem. Last I heard, he was trying to get some deal with Wamer Bros where he was going to do a comedy for them.

Oh, jeez; it sounds like he's just trying to get some money or reestablish himself. I think this would have been a much better project for him to do.

Oh, it would have been a wonderful marriage; it would have been a combination of The Elephant Man and Blue Velvet.

Yes! He could have gotten back into the way he used to be, but would have done it in such a way that people would realise he just had a bad day with Lost Highway. Now, regarding the book, the one thing that really impressed me - and I did not understand my own appreciation for it until I got to the end of the book-was the true crime approach. The style that you used, the deliberately tacky analogies you used to heighten the tension, seemed a bit kitschy, but when, towards the end, you began to drop single lines of disclosure of how [Elizabeth Short] actually died and why her body was placed where it was, it was incredibly chilling. I fought it was very finely crafted.

Well, thank you.

And then, in the afterword, you take on a whole other approach which, should anyone doubt that you can write because of the story's style, definitely proves that you can actually write. Also, what you disclosed during the afterword corroborated what I had already divined regarding the suddenly introduced anonymous albeit major character - the informant - after you had been so meticulous in the design of all the other characters and incidents: that it was you. It seemed to scream out that it was you, and it was.

Yes, that was what we did different. The Afterword was the thing that was not in the first book, and there were always questions as to who was the informant. I didn't originally get myself laid out in the picture for... well, it was just like in The Garbage People, when I didn't talk about my involvement - well, I did in the frontispiece -but I didn't get into it in the book itself. But... I didn't choose the [noir] style; it was just pretty organic. But since '95 to now, there probably is a change in what I'm writing. I didn't select any kind of style, I just pursued whatever worked and made it work. When I was doing the readings for the CD that were from Severed, I made some corrections and changes for the reading itself. And I saw a lot of places where I probably would have made some changes were I to do it again, but, it has to go as it is. As long as something feels right and works for me, I let it be.

Well, a work is never really completed; it is merely abandoned, someone once said; I forget who. Otherwise it would be revised forever until the author died.

Yes, Paul Valery. And I am having that problem with Fetish Blonde. I keep re-writing and re-writing it. But I know I'm honing it down to an important view that I want to convey regarding the psycho-sexual type of death, and murder, and sex and the linking of those things that seem very, very close to me, personally. I guess they've always been there with me.

Well, they're all very intimate acts. They tend to be done where other people are not supposed to see them being done, just the results: the body, or the baby, or whatever may have consummated of the act.

That's very interesting; no one's ever said, but it is true, though. That was what [LAPD detective] Harry Hansen was saying [in Severed] about murder; that once you commit it, you are eternally linked with that person.

Exactly. That was what inspired me to think of such acts that way; once they are done, there is no turning back. I am also curious if you have been bothered or harassed by the LAPD or anyone else involved [with the Black Dahlia case] whose blunders you disclosed in the book.

No... they have this attitude that... well, the Black Dahlia has always been their Crown Jewels. And no one really has any real connection to it anymore; nobody even knows what's going on. They have a pat line, "Let me pull this card out," in expectation to when someone asks me about this. There's a detective in charge of the case, but it's like putting on a hat, and Tuesday is the day he wears his hat with the flowers on it; that's about what it amounts to. There is no real follow-up, no one is sitting on a pile of papers there and knowing the whole case. They have, for years, had very little backup, and there's just been hand-to-mouth information that has been passed on. It amazes a lot of people that there is really nothing going on. You would think that open homicides, no matter how old they are, are worked. I was working on [a case] that involved a murder in Indianapolis from way back, the Woman in Black, and even though it was a rather high-profile and the only person they knew who might have done it was a female impersonator who had been in the room drinking with this girl that was all cut up. And I was rather amazed, because as I was getting involved with this case, I discovered that they had absolutely nothing. There was no paperwork. They sent me that typical thing that comes out of a morgue book. They always have to have a log-in for any corpse that comes in, and it usually says how they died, but it doesn't get into any detail- You can't find autopsy reports in most of these situations. In these older cases, even in high-profile homicides, the paperwork is really scant. I've found this again and again and again. It was just like with the British guy who wrote the book. The Complete Jack The Ripper; he faced the same thing. Scotland Yard simply said, "Here's the file." You would think that with Jack the Ripper, that you would go in there and they would hand you three boxes of material. And that is kind of where the LAPD is.

But no, I have never had any flak of any kind from them, or any problems with them. I had a very close working relationship for a while with [LAPD officer] John St. John. Even after the whole thing came to pass, and he [Jack Wilson, aka Arnold Smith, the highly suspected murderer.died] had burned to death, he continued to try and push it to find any link he could before he retired. He wanted to be the one that broke the case. But he lost that; he couldn't do it. He couldn't make the link. Also, the tapes and material I had presented them, seemed to have been swallowed up within LAPD. But it's okay; as far as I'm concerned, it's four books back, now. I don't have any research to be done, and I did everything humanly possible that I could to add to the case. The biggest problem, I always felt, was the entire lack of police work that had been done on the case. They simply sat back and said, "Okay, someone's coming in, and we'll talk to them, and if they give us some vital information, or even two names, we'll try and contact these people." For some of the names and things, there would be no follow-up on, but then they might call someone and that person would say, "Well, I don't know anything." And the investigator would say, "Well, okay, scratch that." They never got off their asses and walked outside and did any police work!

But I'm not saying, "Those rats' They never did this!" They had bearings, but they had nothing to go on. They were going to entrap and set up [Wilson] at the end there, so they could talk to him and get some information. I believe he would have cooperated with them and gone along with it, because he was always going to be able to say, "Well, um, I told Gilmore this information, and I'm telling you the same information, and this is just what someone told me." But there was no one of the name that [Wilson] said told him. Louise Sheffeild, who had been a friend of mine for many, many years - who was with the sheriff's department, and finally became the organized crime person working directly under Robert Kennedy - went through all the organized crime files, and her files, and through all law enforcement files to find the suspect that [Wilson] was talking about, and there was no creature to the name or description. I also went through a number of really strange individuals to track this person down, and I began to think that there was a person that he knew at some time who was a female impersonator, and he was making this story up about this person. The person was a real person at one time, and I did find little seeds of him in Indiana and in the L.A. area - but there was no way to pin anything on that person, nor was there any trail of that person. So I thought he was merely blaming someone for this act so that he could get it out in the open.

So that he could absolve himself?

Well, not so much as to absolve himself, but to take the credit, to be able to be important. Although he was in a bad state - and had been for forty or fifty years! - he was very cunning. He wasn't an intelligent man, and he wasn't terribly bright, but he was very cunning and very careful. But when I went down there, it was a very simple thing when I initially told them about the boards, about putting the person in the bathtub, and going through the body. I knew they had information that had to do with the act. If you cut a body in half on a surface, you'll have a problem - unless you roll the body, do the front, the back, and then the sides - that shows up in the corpse. You will see where there was stopping, starting, and where the blade - or whatever instrument was used - was meeting resistance other than the body itself. It was very early on -back in the late '40s - that they let leak something about how the body had been severed in a particular manner that aroused curiosity. So people were speculating that it was a mad doctor that had all these weird surgical instruments and he strung her up, and did her this way and that way... It was the same thing with Jack the Ripper, where they were saying it had to have been a surgeon. You have probably seen the pictures of Jack the Ripper's victims; a twelve-year-old could go in with an axe and do the job just as easily. But the finesse - if you want to call it finesse - in the Black Dahlia case was that the body had been severed cleanly through. But not completely, as if a giant paper cutter had been used; you can see places where there was effort and motion made. It took effort to do this, but the blade met no resistance other than going through the body and backbone. And it was so simple that somebody would lay a body on the boards and cut right through it so that there was no other resistance whatsoever. And that was the thing that made St. John realize, after all those years, that that was how it had been done. He had one glass eye, and the other one got real intense as I told him about it. The original perception, which has always been inaccurate, was that she died of a concussion to her head. Wilson thought she was dead after having strangled her, but she was not. There was no blood in her throat, from the cutting of her mouth. And it was clear that she had shit in her stomach, and the police wanted to know whose shit it was. There was no blood, but there was that, and so it was always an interesting point for them.

After that, however, the LAPD screwed up in so many different ways, that they will only say that they have "no comment" on the case. They can't comment on the case because they don't have anything to say! Especially the new guys on the force these days. But my friend, Danny Galindo, he was one of my main people, and he actually was one of the people, well... let me just say that he, uh, made it possible, or was instrumental, in making police people talk, because they have a code where they don't say anything about other police officers. It took some time for me to get through that. But when I was in Louisiana, dealing with [LAPD Detective Finis] Brown, that was when it all started coming out. He was very ill, and he was ready to talk about the whole thing. He had been long gone, and he had nothing to lose. See, there was this thing in the police department where you had the Masons and the Catholics, and they always had these problems, these frictions, and they would band together. It was one side against the other, and it was inside the police department. My father [Robert T. Gilmore, an LAPD officer from 1942 to 1973. -ed.] had always been this big guy in the Masons, so be was responsible for a lot of stuff to do with that. He's still alive, and ten times has been president of the police credit union, and he is still involved in all of this- Through him, in the early sixties, before there was any real huge explosion on the Black Dahlia situation, Hugh Brown - who was not related to the other Browns - was the Captain of Homicide at the time, and I got very involved on his side of the fence, which was the Masonic side of the fence. I know it sounds absurd, but it's true. Hansen was on the other side of the fence - not that he was Catholic, but he was a loner, and he hated everyone - and he was opposed to anyone that got involved in cases that he was in charge of, because he kept everything top secret. Then you had that madman, Paul de River, the police "psychologist." He had no business ever being there in the first place. But in those days, everything was all political, and the detectives ran the show, and people worked 24 hours, and in essence they did a lot of work, but it is completely different now.

Let me ask about your father's opinion regarding this book; what does he think about this particular book?

Oh, he loves it. but he hasn't seen the new one yet [the Amok Books edition -ed.], with the picture of him in the front. He's great with it. The first issue wasn't dedicated to him [the new one is -ed.], but I haven't received any of the new books, so I haven't sent him any of those yet.

Let me also ask you about the initial meeting with the murderer, Wilson/Smith. When you first encountered him and realised, that he had a very close connection to the murder, was it he whom had sought you or did you happen arrange that first meeting?

I was living in the Silverlake area at the time, and I knew some people up the street from me, and one of them was this real shady guy who knew some really odd people; he lived with this younger girl. We had talked, and gotten together a few times. At that time, I had published a very long piece in the Free Press about Charles Schmidt, and this was before Schmidt's second trial, when he brought in F. Lee Baily to defend him. He had been found guilty and received two death sentences, but I had said, "Is he guilty?" It was a very bizarre case, and I had written this very long piece, at the end asking for any questions or responses and then putting a contact address after that. A lot of people contacted me, and this guy, who a neighbor knew - and that neighbor knew all about the work I was doing at the time he had the get-together; this was around late 1966. I had talked to him about the Black Dahlia case, and he told me that he knew someone that he thought had known the victim. So when we did get together, this Arnold Smith wanted to talk to me. He was originally interested in the Charles Schmidt case, and had read the article. He kept linking his name to Schmidt by saying how it was "Smith" in German. When we first talked, he was very cagey, he was not very open. He was cautious about what he was saying, but he did tell me some things early on, and when I mentioned some names to him, I was surprised that he knew who they were. They were people involved with the McCombo robbery [that took place shortly before Short was murdered, in Hollywood, -ed], and these were all people from Al Green's coffee shop, around the corner from what back then was Pickwick Bookshop, on Las Palmas. And this was the gang that Elizabeth Short ran around with; she was always in Al Green's shop. And I was surprised that he knew intimate details about these people; that was when I knew he had been a part of that scene at that time. During our first meetings, we would talk about other people, that time period, and things like that, but it was not until after a very long time when he actually started talking about the murder itself. When we did finally get around to the murder, I told him that, while the information he was giving me was great, there was nothing I could do with it unless I were to have some kind of cooperation, or if it was confirmed by the police, that I have to give it to the police because you're telling me about the possibility of a murderer who's running loose out there. He was telling me the name of somebody, so I was obligated to tell the police. It was not that I was ratting on him, because I cannot write something about such an incident without telling the police, because of the trouble I would get in.

Then our relationship got extremely cagey at that point; he was backtracking, and changing his mind, and I kind of knew where he was, and I wasn't going to rat on him until I thought I knew where he was. I had to place calls to him through this Chinese coffee shop. I was eager to have him tell his story to the police. And then there was this one thing that he told me to tell John St. John: "Tell St. John to 'eat shit' and see what he says." I didn't at the time fully understand what he meant by that.

I am surprised that you didn't include that in the book; that would have been another hell of a bomb.

Yeah, well, there were a few little things that I didn't include. One of them was a photo of Short's rectum. They had also experimented with color shots, which I have yet to see; there were not a lot. And the reason I didn't give the publishers' the rectum shot to put in was because it would have been tacky. The headshot of her laying there with her mouth unstitched was grotesque enough.

I was also curious about that profile photograph of the body, which is so bad that it looks like a drawing.

That photo has been so passed down and re-generated. The one used for the book was actually reproduced from a laser printer, thus the poor quality. But it is not a drawing, it's just a terrible shot.

Even with the photos and the discovery of the murderer, there is still a great air of mystery to the case.

Well, that's questionable. I never said, "I found the murderer." I only said that I went as far as I could go, that this was the information that I had, and I turned it over to the police. I worked diligently with them in developing this for whatever they could and bringing a case together with the possibility that [Wilson] could be a very viable suspect. I did my investigative work; they could take it from there. All I can say is that the facts point to him certainly knowing things that nobody else has ever known, There was no way that he could have fabricated a lot of the stuff he knew; he had to have been present at the event, or performed it himself. It was too bizarre. Understanding the minds of murderers as I have over the years. I knew where he was going and what he was doing. I'm sure that, over the years, he has probably embellished his story, such as the placement of the body. I am sure it was some kind of subconscious thing he was dealing with, but to believe that he had it all worked out before hand was a bit much. But I understand that, in the psychopathic mind, these things are very important. To him that was something very symbolic and important.

Well, I am personally convinced that he was the murderer.

Had he not burned to death, he probably would have gone down for it! But he felt secure in the sense that they would have needed direct evidence, which they didn't have. In the [Georgette] Bauerdorf, it was a lot clearer, because they had his fingerprints from the light-bulb and the bathtub. It was really touchy because of the ties to the Hearst family, and they could have done something about that, but the [L.A.j sheriff's department was resistant and reluctant to do anything about it. I found that very strange. Their attitude, as an inside view, is, "Who gives a fuck? There are 340 open homicides here, unsolved, that we're working on, and as I process three or four or throw them in the garbage, six more come in the door. So why should we give a shit about a murder that happened fifty years ago?"

And a lot of them probably were not even alive then.

Correct, And they were reluctant to open some doors in [the Bauerdorf case], because so much of the file was destroyed and ruined at the request of Hearst. It's just like in the army, where the lower echelon is not going to contradict a decision made by a general. There is no "what's the point?" It is simply done.

What ever happened to the cigar box that had the photos and items of Short's clothing the one that Wilson brought to that one meeting? Was it consumed by the fire at his Holland Hotel room, or recovered?

Oh, there was nothing left. The walls and the ceiling caved in from the intense heat. Everything was gone. That box was very strange, especially the photograph. The photo of her was very old, and there had to have been something on the back of it that he didn't want me to see, because he wouldn't let me touch it, and he wouldn't turn it over. There must have been something that was a connection between the two of them.

When did you realise that it may well have been 'Wilson who murdered Short? Did it dawn on you when you were with him or was it between meetings?

We were sitting and drinking, with him talking, and it began to dawn on me that I was in the presence... that I was receiving...

A first-hand account?

...something else here; I was getting a real sense of... hmm... I don't know. I can only think back to one of my last meetings with Charles Schmidt: he never really came out and said, "I did it," but we were playing this game. We were talking about all these different things, and it came to a point where I looked at him and believed and felt that I wasn't dealing with a human, that there wasn't a human sitting across from me. It was a sense of evil, and I had the same sense with Wilson. His hands, and everything he was saying, the things he would say... over all those years, Wilson never said her name; it was only "her." I began to get a leaden feeling inside of me. After I did the Charles Manson thing, I got involved with a publisher that wanted me to do a novel version on the Zodiak Killer, and I was involved with the San Francisco Police. At that very same time, Bobby Beausoleil was going up to San Quentin, and I spent a lot of time with him. And after I really started looking into this and assuming the role of the murderer in the process of tracking the events, I started bleeding internally. I began to experience the same symptoms that I would be bleeding inside again, once I was associated with Wilson. I don't have such problems anymore, but when I did, it began to wear on me, like the smell of stale blood. I began to have a bit of an olfactory hallucination of blood emanating from a particular person. Of course, this is a subjective thing; this is not evidence that I would supply someone with. Wilson was also always referring back to the Tucson murders book, saying, "just like when that boy, Richie, ratted on [Charles] Smitty, who was the killer, this is basically what I'm doing, because this other person was responsible for all these things." I felt that he was indicating to me that, in the event that he died, he wouldn't be implicated, but he was implicating himself beyond repair. Wilson had no remorse; he was worse than the murderers I had talked to in prison. He was older, uglier, and more devious...

And he had gotten away with it for so long that he thought he could do anything.

Yes, it was easy for him to lay out this whole thing, but he had no remorse. He would indicate that, when the murderer, this "other person," had stuffed the panties into her mouth, there had been a situation where she had tried to bite the hand. I don't think that was in the book.

No, no it was not.

He had said that "she had tried to bite the hand, the son of a bitch." In essence, I knew I was dealing with a psychopathic personality, and it made me sick after a while. I got ill from dealing with psychopathic people. I haven't dealt with them in a long time now, and I don't want to. I have had a couple of opportunities; some serial killer in Colorado wanted to get in touch with me, because he wanted to tell the story of how he murdered not three but 31 people. I said, "Fuck that! I don't want to hear about it; I'm not interested. I wrote three true crime books; I'm done with that. I did my thing, and now I'm moving on."

Copyright 1997 Randail Tin Ear/Angry Thoreauan. All rights reserved.