possibility of releasing any portion of the case files while he's assigned to the case is non-existent.'
The second interview with Carr appeared in an article on the APBnews.com website, under Celebrity News, written by staff writer Valerie Kalfrin, and entided 'Writer Reopens Black Dahlia Murder Case.' In the article, Ms. Kalfrin revealed
Detective Carr has made it clear that as lead investigator with sole access to the Elizabeth Short files, neither he nor his department has the time or resources to investigate even a single suspect, in this case Dr. Walter Bayley. Though not connected to the murder of Elizabeth Short, Bayley was, as Sergeant Stoker had revealed, a member of the Gangster Squad's abortion ring and possibly one of my father's associates.
In addition to Kirk Mellecker, I discovered a second LAPD officer who had been intimately connected with the Dahlia investigation, retired policewoman Myrl McBride, a critical original witness who, one will recall, had an encounter with Elizabeth Short just hours before she was murdered. McBride, I learned, was living only an hour or so from Los Angeles. I called, introduced myself, and met her for an interview.
While Myrl McBride has little present memory of the facts as she originally reported them to detectives two days after the murder occurred, nevertheless, the facts themselves are not in dispute. My interview with Myrl confirmed two very important points. First, she was never unsure of her original identification of Elizabeth Short as the woman who came up to her and with whom she returned to the Main Street bar. Second, she was never shown any pictures of a potential suspect by detectives in the weeks, months, or years that followed.
Though she cannot today recall the original descriptions of the 'two men and a woman' who were with Elizabeth Short as she exited the bar at 5th and Main streets, those descriptions, like McBride's original reporting of the victim's actions, would have been recorded, and unless they, like the George Hodel connections, have been destroyed, they would still be in the case file as an accurate record of her description of the suspects who were known to be with Elizabeth just hours before her murder.
Officer McBride, unlike her civilian counterparts, the downtown motel owners Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, could not be as easily dismissed by the Gangster Squad detectives as 'being mistaken' in her identification of Elizabeth Short. The cat was out of the bag and into print on the front pages of the Los Angeles newspapers too quickly.
McBride's original identification of the victim did not stand alone. It was also strongly corroborated by what Elizabeth had told McBride and was later found to be entirely consistent with personal facts of the victim's life. McBride's positive identification of the victim on January 17 was supported by McBride's reporting to police that Elizabeth Short had told her she was terrorized by a jealous suitor who 'had threatened to kill her if he saw her with another man.' These were the same threats that had caused her to flee to San Diego in fear for her life and the same story she told Robert Manley and the Frenches while she was in hiding at their home.
LAPD detectives could not discredit or refute one of their own. Too much information had already been released to the press. The likely scenario back in January 1947 would have been for the detectives to approach McBride and 'suggest' she take a moment to rethink her statement and positive identification of Elizabeth Short, and while she was rethinking it, consider what kind of light she was placing LAPD in with regards to the public! In all likelihood, the detectives asked, 'Are you
After she had become a witness who could place Elizabeth Short with a possible suspect or suspects during her 'missing week,' Myrl McBride was ultimately transferred to the Harbor Division, where she quietly and inconspicuously finished her career in a 'Sleepy Hollow.' Fifty-four years later, Myrl McBride reestablished unequivocally that the woman she saw exit the Main Street bar was Elizabeth Short.
This interview with Myrl was the strangest of my career. On the surface, we were sitting together in her home, sharing a cup of coffee, linked as we were, 'fellow retired LAPD' discussing the facts of an ice-cold murder case. Below the surface, the link was surreal. The last known witness to see and speak with Elizabeth Short — and that in the presence of her killers — was, five decades later, seated next to that killer's son, now an ex-homicide detective, who was putting the final pieces in place to solve the murder.
Fifty-plus years after the Black Dahlia case was put into cold storage, at least three basic points remain clear.
First, the victim herself has been obscured and vilified over time so that to the uninitiated she has been made to appear complicit in her own death.
Second, profilers, detectives, and writers have relied on the myth of the Black Dahlia, instead of the facts, to come up with their own theories behind the murder. Simply stated: the facts about the case still speak for themselves. Elizabeth consistently reported to anyone who would listen that she was deathly afraid of a certain person. She told that chilling story to the Frenches, to Manley, and to police officer Myrl McBride.
Finally, it's clear that the Black Dahlia file, which was handed down from case manager to case manager, had been sanitized or destroyed, probably by Thad Brown's brother Finis. None of the officers, from Galindo to Carr, probably ever saw the real file or even knew that the DA's investigators had considered my father to be the prime murder suspect.
We know that, after discovering my father's connection to the Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French murders as the 'wealthy Hollywood man,' the DA's office had launched a separate investigation into LAPD corruption that they presented to the 1949 grand jury, based on their own 'codified files' from their own two-year investigation. This meant that a DA case file existed on the case, separate and apart from LAPD's.
Lieutenant Frank Jemison of the L.A. DA's Bureau of Investigation and his detectives knew that George Hodel was a prime suspect for the Black Dahlia and Red Lipstick murders. They had multiple witnesses who had independently connected him to both victims. They probably also suspected him of the brutal stabbing murder of Gladys Kern in 1948.
The DA knew that LAPD had a dozen more kidnappings and lust-murders, most of which had occurred after the Dahlia murder, up until Dr. Hodel's departure to the territory of Hawaii in the spring of 1950, when they suddenly stopped. Many of the bodies were found within sight of the DA's downtown office. From the grand jury revelations, we now know why LAPD was not solving these obviously serial, connected rape-murders, and the DA's investigators also knew why. That is why they took the drastic measure of going around LAPD and submitting their own investigation to the grand jury in secret, in an effort to reveal the cover-up and try to stop the killing.
Desperate to survive, LAPD's top brass orchestrated a cover-up that they hoped would prevent these victims' brutal murders from ever being solved, with the expectation that their own crimes would be buried with them.
