The Black Dahlia Murder A Conversation with John Gilmore by Russell Miller

On a typically mild winter evening right before New Year's, 1996, I stood at the comer of 39th and Norton in Los Angeles. Nice looking middle-class houses stood shoulder to shoulder in a non-descript neighborhood not too far from Hollywood, through the smog I could see the famous HOLLYWOOD sign to the north. Despite the fact that Watts and Compton weren't too far away to the southeast, it seemed pleasant enough. Not a bad neighborhood if you have to live in L.A. Standing at the corner of 39th and Norton is not unlike standing next to the ground zero monument at Trinity Site; the area looks so normal, you'd never guess what kind of insane goings on went down on the same spot 50 years previously.

On 15 January 1947, in a lot to the southeast of the intersection, the body of a young woman, nude and severed in half at the waist was discovered. Both halves of her body had been drained of blood and washed clean. By the following morning, the LAPD learned that she was 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, who had come to Hollywood from Massachusetts to be a star. As a joking nod to the Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake movie The Blue Dahlia, and because her hair and clothes were always jet black, she was known to some acquaintances in L.A. as "The Black Dahlia." Not a shred of evidence surfaced which pointed to anybody who might have been involved with the murder. It remains officially unsolved to this day.

And so ended the seemingly unremarkable life of Elizabeth Short. Even so, as unremarkable as her life seemed on the surface, she grabbed - albeit in death -what so many who travel to Hollywood seek; immortality and infamy. It's an infamy which endures to this day in spades. The case quickly earned itself a place in true crime anthologies as an infamous unsolved murder case. But it goes beyond that with the Black Dahlia. You don't forget about Manson or Dahmer, but there don't necessarily become full-blown obsessions either, so many people who have even an accidental brush with Elizabeth Short's story become ensnared by her life and death and wind up, at best, fanatics.

So now, 50 years later, the Black Dahlia still refuses to fade away. In the summer of l991, 54 year-old woman in Southern California went to the police claiming her father killed the Black Dahlia in '47, and buried the evidence at her former home. Freaks with Black Dahlia tattoos are walking the streets of America. Goatee-sporting, wanna-be arty, cappucino-sippin' gothic-types sit in coffee houses rambling on about Elizabeth Short, practically deifying the girl. In 1947, Elizabeth Short was just a confused chick who ran with a bad crowd. In 1997, she's a legend, an archetype of sorts - the most spectacular unsolved murder America has to offer.

My own Black Dahlia initiation commenced when I picked up, by chance, a book by famed writer John Gilmore called SEVERED: The True Story of the Black Dahlia.  Years before that, I read Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon II and came away with the same story as everyone else: Elizabeth Short was a floozy prostitute who slept with every guy she met, finally angering one who butchered her in a fit of jealous rage. The murder was intriguing only in that it went unsolved. But then Gilmore, who researched the case on and off for well near 30 years, dropped several bombs with SEVERED, probably the biggest being that the LAPD had, years after the murder, found the man who killed the Black Dahlia.

One of Hollywood's most over-the-top stories had suddenly become more over-the-top. After reading this unfairly obscure book (not to worry; although the original publisher, Zanja Press, has gone belly up, some bigger houses are looking to reissue it), there was no turning back for me. The Black Dahlia wouldn't leave my head. I didn't get a tattoo or grow a goatee, but there I was right before New Year's Eve, standing at the comer of 39th and Norton like hundreds before me.

The second biggest bomb in Gilmore's book of new revelations is a fact the police knew all along - because her genitals were not really developed, Elizabeth Short was incapable of having sex. A startling release generated for the SEVERED book by Zanja Press focuses exclusively on this point, with the lead in: STRANGE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER VICTIM WAS NOT A BEAUTIFUL FEMME FATALE, BUT WAS A MAN." No, she wasn't really a transvestite, but she wasn't a whore either. In fact, discovering that Elizabeth Short not only wasn't a prostitute, but couldn't have been a prostitute, throws the story under an entirely different light. If a beautiful girl who apparently bounced from guy to guy wasn't sleeping with any of them, then what was she doing?

It was becoming clear why the Black Dahlia has addicted so many. The crime scene itself is impossible to ignore, for a single image which starkly and brutally sums up the state of affairs between men and women on this planet, look no further than any picture of Elizabeth Short at 39th and Norton. Her body is a sobering reminder that no matter how far feminists think or hope we've come since the 60's, it's still tens of thousands of years of revolution we're fighting, wherein women have always been the Black Dahlia in the eyes of the ruling patriarchy.

But the story's biggest mystery has always been the murderer's identity - a mystery that SEVERED claimed to have solved. Many, like Sherry Mazingo (USC's associate professor of Journalism), would argue that the case's endless momentum and noir mood was built around the fact that Elizabeth Short's murderer was never found. A couple of years ago, Mazingo wrongfully observed...should the (Black Dahlia) murder have been solved, it would take some of the dramatic sheen off this beautifully dramatic story." Not so with the Black Dahlia murder; in fact, the story which once seemed almost too crazed to be true only becomes more crazed when the true killer is finally exposed.

In a murder as blatant as the Black Dahlia's, and with repercussions as far reaching, it seems almost impossible that while L.A's finest turned up absolutely nothing on the case, while dozens of false confessions poured into the LAPD and a bogus package from the ..killer" was found in the mail with letters cut out from different newspapers reading HERE ARE DAHLIA'S BE-LONGINGS - LETTER TO FOLLOW" while the main detective on the case doctored the coroner's reports, and while press and cops battled and a grand jury convened to savage the LAPD for misconduct, Elizabeth Short's real killer - Arnold Smith - slipped easily through the cracks.

In the enormous and enormously old world of homicide, Arnold Smith ranks as one of its most unique characters, if only because he came tailor-made for the Black Dahlia story. Shedding light on Smith - a thin alcoholic who stood around 6'4", walked with a limp, had a five-page rap sheet and a dozen different aliases, imbues the Black Dahlia story with even more intensity than it already possessed. Smith is the mysterious shadow who lurks throughout the SEVERED book, whom police could never quite pinpoint. While Elizabeth Short was still alive, rich socialite Georgette Bauerdorf(an acquaintance of Short's) was murdered and left in her bathtub; police investigated all leads except one. A man whom Bauerdorf had dated - a tall man who walked with a limp - couldn't be found. Bauerdor's murderer fled in her car, which was abandoned near 25th and San Pedro (see map). A week after the murder, Herald Express newspaper reporter Aggie Underwood received a tip that a tall, thin man walking with a limp was seen walking away from 25th and San Pedro. Many, many years later, Arnold Smith emerged as a suspect in the Black Dahlia case only because he related the story to an informant who in turn gave him enough money to stay loaded. However, Smith explained that he wasn't responsible for the murder; an acquaintance of his - one Al Morrison (who never existed) - had murdered Short in a house on East 31st by San Pedro and Trinity, and later told Smith.

In a taped interview given to the LAPD by the informant, Smith related details about the murder that only the murderer could have known. Interestingly, just like with Georgette Bauerdorf, a bathtub had been used in Elizabeth Short's murder - in this case to drain away her blood. Hot to nail him (and certain that Al Morrison was just a decoy to protect the real killer - Smith himself) the LAPD and Detective Badge Number One, John St. John, managed to arrange another meeting between the informant and Smith, at which time they would finally have their man.

In the case's most astonishing twist, Smith nodded off while smoking only days before the meeting, and died in a fire in his tiny room in the Holland Hotel near downtown L.A.

So the enigmatic specter who was probably responsible for the enigmatic Black Dahlia's murder - and at least one other - reared his head years after the murder and then was suddenly gone. And it wasn't, as so many had assumed, a jealous doctor, a physician with the skill to surgically cut Elizabeth Short into two. It was just a drunken loser, one of countless zeros wandering around Los Angeles.

After his death, police learned that when he was younger, Smith had lived for a time with his mother near 31st and San Pedro. With all of these bombs dropped and their dust cleared, the Dahlia's story still lacked a sense of closure. As good as SEVERED was, its latter third was devoid of dates. The crucial (to me, anyway) year of Smith's death was still as big a question mark as Smith himself.

But at least I had a grip on why I'd joined the legions of Black Dahlia fanatics who journey to 39th and Norton seeking spiritual clarity. In its uniquely haunting way, Elizabeth Short's story is a play about randomness- the Black Dahlia case embodies the consequences of Chance in a rather stark nutshell. By naive, dumb chance, Elizabeth Short's path crossed that of a murderer. And from that point on, a shortly-wound clock was ticking towards her macabre murder. It's a microcosm of the worn-out Creation vs. Evolution argument: was all of this created, or did it happen by chance? The craziest things happen by chance, and Elizabeth Short - who may never have seen the end hurling towards her like a freight train on January 14/15, 1947 - is Chance personified.

Still craving information and answers about the Black Dahlia murder, I decided to talk to John Gilmore himself - the man responsible for not only the SEVERED book, but oodles of projects, including The Garbage People, his 1971 book about the Manson family. Cold Blooded, his in-depth look at Tucson serial killer Charles Schmid, and The Real James Dean.  He's even directed a movie, 1961 's Impression, and the autobiographical Laid Bare, chronicling relationships and run-ins with, among others, James Dean, Lenny Bruce, and Ed Wood, Jr. Gilmore's own fixation with the Black Dahlia case is understandable - as a child, he briefly met Elizabeth Short at his grandmother's boarding house. Despite his being labelled a "Devil-spawned, literary Oliver Stone" by at least one well-respected magazine, he was nothing but exceedingly gracious to me.

Because Gilmore, by his own admission "digresses a lot" and because this interview was so long, I've abridged our chat just a bit for space purposes.

Russell Miller: Even though this case, compared to something like Manson, is more of an underground, not-too-famous murder case, it still seems to strike a chord in a big way with people who read about it. And it certainly seems to have struck a chord with you...

John Gilmore: Well, what do you mean, "not-too-famous" a case?

RM: I mean, if you ask people about Manson, or Gacy, they know exactly what you're talking about, but if you mention the Black Dahlia, at least around here I've noticed a lot of people aren't sure what you're talking about. And yet, the people who do become familiar with it are really taken with it.

JG: Yeah, they have to have some connection with Los Angeles. And then of course, that book that came out, by (James) Ellroy (It's called The Black Dahlia, and calls itself a novel based on Hollywood's most notorious murder case'*), which has absolutely nothing to do with the case, brought it kind of into (prominence). It had nothing to do with the case... Ellroy talked to one newsman- an old timer - and that was his only source. He may have mentioned (the newsman) by name in the book, but that was his only source, and be pieced together a story. It did, I think, bring the name once again into prominence, but the Black Dahlia's known all over the world internationally. The British are always writing about it, and making terrible mistakes when they do. I worked on it on and off for many years... I was always interested in the case. I lived with my grandmother, and she had a perpetual on-and-off boarder there - his name was Jack McCormick... he was a very strange character, an alcoholic, and he was also a movie extra. He was very interested in crime and bathtub murders, and that was kind of a local topic. It got a lot of the conversation. So the Black Dahlia case was very prominent. My father (who became an LAPD cop in 1942) was involved in it, and then Jack McCormick - his friend brought this girl to the house. So, looking back at that, and actually having met the victim, was very bizarre. My grandmother didn't want my father to know that she had been to my house after the girl was murdered, because (it might have affected) his career in some way. So, it wasn't until a number of years later - it was in the very early 1960s, I had been an actor, and directed one movie, but then drifted into basically screenwriting I had a couple of deals going, and Tom Neal... he mostly did B-films and Westerns at Republic Studios. Anyway, he had gotten hooked up with some kooky private detective who supposedly had some information on the Black Dahlia case. So Tom wanted to do a movie out of it. He sent me... financing people. There was one guy, one weird guy in Barstow, and this guy was supposedly financing. And he wanted to touch my hands, because my hands had touched the field where the body had been (A great bit on all this appears in Gilmore's forth-coming book, Laid Bare. But he didn't want Tom Neal to be in on the movie. This dragged on and on until Tom Neal married a giri in Palm Springs who had a lot of money. Tom was living in Palm Springs for two years... and then he blew his wife's brains out with a .45, and that was the end of Tom's movies.

But I kind of continued with this in the sixties, and had an awful lot of people coming to me with information. I suppose over the years I've had all the major Black Dahlia crackpots... I didn't want to compromise a lot of people. I did wind up compromising a lot of cops. They don't hate me or anything, but I did compromise...

RM: For the Severed book?

JG: Yeah, because I told things that no one ever had... In those days, detectives ran the show. It was their domain. When you had high-profile murders, it really became competitive. And in the Black Dahlia case, they knew there was a crossover between a suspect, between the Black Dahlia murder and the Georgette Bauerdorf murder, who was one of the leading socialites in Los Angeles.

RM: The LAPD knew about the crossover early on? It sounded in the book like Aggie Underwood was the first one to make the connection.

JG: Yeah, but when LAPD found out about it, there was not going to be any surrendering or giving over of the case. In other words, the LAPD have to work their case, and the press have to work their case, and there wasn't going to be any meeting along the way whatsoever. Harry Hansen (the Detective Sergeant in charge of the Black Dahlia case) felt he was above everybody, and he would coerce and badger people. He was a very interesting and intelligent man - top class on homicide - but I think he went completely bananas with that case, and just couldn't shake it. I think he got hooked into that case like a lot of people have, like I probably did. It took me years and years and years to understand what it really was about the case, and it was actually the body. It is the body.

RM: You think it's the body?

JG: It's the body. I know it is. It's the body that's like this tremendous, bizarre magnet. It gets to our unconsciousness, and it gets to us on a real subliminal level. A number of years later, I tried to figure it out after I had written the book. I wrote the book, I finished, I wrote the book -I went on and off, on and off.. and the shoe salesman (known in the book as Martin Lewis, a married man who had a short fling with Elizabeth Short), I was still, in 1990, talking to that man, I had mountains of stuff, and it kept shifting, kept changing into something - it wouldn't hold in one piece, finally everything pretty much came together, and it was clear to me what it was. After I wrote the book, I had to sit back and ask myself, why? What is it? What is this bizarre attraction people have to this case that they just can't - many people don't even know it. But it is the body... it was the murder itself. So much hidden agenda went into that murder that it was inherent in the scene of the murder. There was such a mystery to it, and such a haunting quality, that it snags, and you can't - it can never be let go.

RM: USC's Sherry Mazingo said that if the murder were ever solved, it would take some of the "dramatic sheen" off the story. With what you discovered (about Arnold Smith) I think it becomes, if anything, more dramatic than it already was.

JG: It's an American phenomenon It's the epitome - epitome is not the right word. It*s kind of the optimum of whatever - of sex and violence that you can probably have in our culture.

RM: For me, one of the more maddening aspects of the book was the lack of dates toward the end. When did Arnold Smith die in that fire?

JG: '82. Did you by chance read that article? The article about me on the case? It was front-page stuff, in the Herald Examiner in '82. (Note: the aforementioned article. headlined "BLACK DAHLIA: Author claims to have found 1947 murderer," appeared on the front page of the Herald Examiner, January 17,1982, before Arnold Smith died, understandably freaking out Detective John St. John. The strange article claims that Gilmore himself took the story of Arnold Smith to homicide, which contradicts the SEVERED book, wherein an informant brings the story to homicide, which then leaks to the press.)

RM: I didn't see it.

JG: This is before Arnold Smith died. St. John got involved in the case, and then Smith died. A very bizarre story. Strange fire. I've been in that room since then.

RM: He fell asleep while smoking, right? St. John mentioned suicide, saying you can't tell with someone as down and out as Smith was.

JG: He had a 3-point something blood alcohol level. But he stayed that way pretty much all the time. Undoubtedly, he lit himself on fire smoking in bed. The coroner wanted to investigate it as a possible homicide, you know. They kept Smith's body, which I found to be most interesting. They don't want to say that now. But it's totally shut. The case is totally shut.

RM: So you are convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that it was Arnold Smith.

JG: Oh, absolutely.

RM: I guess there's still factions of people who don't believe that at all.

JG; Some people don't want to think that it's solved. Or that this is an explanation. I personally am convinced and a lot of other people are- the police, the sheriff's department. A lot of skeptics out in the world might very well not be, but it doesn't really matter... If you look at the autopsy report, and see things that happened, there's no two ways about it. She did not die as the world always believed she died.

RM: What about a guy like Smith? Why, in the eariy 80s, did he start talking? He must have known he was going to get nailed.

JG: St. John wanted to meet him very badly, of course, but there was no way that they were going to meet together. Smith was a little too crazy for that. But...it was time, I guess. He'd been worked on for a long time.

RM: Isn't it incredible that a loser like Smith could get away with a murder like this? It's not like the gny was a genius.

JG: No, it's not incredible. Because it happens all the time. When so many different ingredients come in to play, then it becomes a big deal. Extremely high profile. But homicide... a friend of mine, who works unsolved, they can't keep up. It's not unusual that homicides occur without any link to the killer whatsoever. It happens a great deal of the time.

RM: Even with something this blatant? Where he actually drives the body to a field and arranges it?

JG: But these other victims are not glamorous, they weren't actors in Hollywood, they weren't mysterious; they weren't called the Black Dahlia. How can you beat that, you know.? All those ingredients came together to make this enormous, American phenomenon. This noir phenomenon.

RM: And now Pressman Films is making a movie out of your book. I hope that the movie follows the structure of the book--starting off with January 15, 1947, then moving backwards to tell Elizabeth Short's story, then picking back up in the present (1947). I'm not it'll work if they do it differently.

JG: I think they will do it. Because everybody knows she's dead - you can't surprise anybody. But telling her story is very, very interesting. My own meeting with her aroused my sexual feelings for her. I was 11 or 12. She related to me as a child, not as an adult...of coarse, she wasn't even 20. She didn't treat me as a child, like I was beneath her, or she had any authority over me in any way, but later on, I thought maybe later on in some weird way she allowed that to occur in her own life, to where there was no sense of boundaries - she didn't have boundaries. You could trespass into her world without much difficulty.

RM: Do you think that came about with her because she was insecure?

JG: No, I think it came about because she knew that she couldn't ever possibly become a full-blown woman is any size, shape or form. And she decided she was going to do the role anyway Because she did. It was just a series of games, a series of encounters with people that would lead to the romance-type situation, and then she would disappear. I think she overlapped relationships, so she always had a place to go, and a place to be transported to.

RM: In Lyncll George's 1994 L.A Times article, there's the great line where she says Short fell into the same orbit as a killer."

JG: I think he knew who she was from the USO club (where Short and Smith apparently hung out), and for him it became at that point a case of stalking her. I absolutely, firmly know that he was a killer who stalked. He stalked and cultivated a relationship -I don't know exactly what type it was. With them, I think it was a very strange connection of the cripple. She was crippled. She was a defective individual, and he was a defective individual. And you have a tense situation with people whose nerves are on the surface, where the antennas are very clear with one another. Very clear. I think he was a man who just overrode all boundaries. I don't think he even recognized boundaries in life. And she was the first one who said, I don't have boundaries. Plus he was stalking her, so it was simply a matter of time. I believe it was an inevitable occurrence, and an inevitable place, which she would go. as well. I don't fault the idea that she became a huge star, in her own way, in death. Elizabeth Short could have been a very beautiful girl, and been in movies, and everything else. I think she was also very driven- not even knowing she was as driven as she was, desperately afraid of running into herself. So she played these games out with men, and reached a point where she was getting close to running into herself - it was time to get up and do the act. And she couldn't do the act - I think it was a moment of great anxiety for her, which might have been all along leading up to a point where she fled. She left and ran. I think (Smith) was there at the right time, at the right place, as if to say, take my hand - the spider and the fly. And I think she was a willing fly. She was willing herself into the crime, as weird as that might sound. So you could look at him as an incidental thing, an appendage to her success or something, as a noir star. A dark star.

During a trip to L.A. in July of '96, I did the trendy thing and went on a Black Dahlia tour. Yup, ol' White Boy Me braved shitty neighborhoods and smog-induced 50-yard visibility on a horridly hot L.A. summer day, just so I could see the areas which took center stage in the murder of the Black Dahlia. Aware that residents at 39th and Norton had put up with scores of morbid tourists like myself for 50 years, I hopped out of my car at the first stop, took a photograph and quickly took in as much as possible so as not to inspire the wrath of one of the locals. L.A. is the Rome of North America, its layers deep in history. The excitement and glamour of Golden Age Hollywood is now buried under tons of garbage and endless miles of clogged freeways. Likewise, the infamous lot where Elizabeth Short achieved world-wide fame has been obliterated by dozens of houses. With nothing to see there. I took Martin Luther King east and made my way up to 31st and Trinity, where the house, in which Elizabeth Short was murdered, used to be. I had no idea which side of the damn street the house used to be on, but it didn't matter, because the neighborhood was for shit, and some ugly losers in tank tops were watching me like a hawk. I stopped just long enough to snap two pictures of the intersection and sped away. Finally there was the Holland Hotel, the building where Arnold Smith, the man who could have answered everybody's questions about the Black Dahlia murder, burned to death after eluding the LAPD for 35 years. 35 years. At the time of this visit I still didn't know when Arnold Smith died and figured, the hotel management has to know: They probably have guys like me asking them questions all the time. I found the Holland Hotel's address in a phone book and drove by at about one in the morning. Lovely place - the neighborhood was a little better than 31st and Trinity - but the Holland itself looked about as inviting as Norman Bates' house. Rather than go in and risk getting killed, I went back to my room in Silverlake and called the hotel's front desk. A thick middle-eastern accent picked up.

"Holland... (unintelligible)."

"Hi! May I speak with the manager? "

"Thees ees the manager. "

"Great. Look, I'm doing some research, and was wondering if yon remember a big fire there. "

"(Excitedly) Oh yes, I remeembeer a beegfire. "

"Really! Can you tell me when it was? Do you remember the date? "

"Oh... about two months ago... "

"Uh, actually, the one I'm talking about would have been before that. Do you remember one before that? "

"No... (Distractedly) I've only been heer for... a yeer. "

"Thanks'"

I went back the next day. There it was, the run-down dung heap where Arnold Smith bid adieu to planet Earth. Cars sped by, their drivers oblivious to the hotel's significance. Or maybe the Holland isn't significant. It's not like Elizabeth Short was Greta Garbo or anything. In the end, the Holland Hotel is just one more place where a broken-down loser kicked off, right?