Viola was beaten savagely about the face and head, her skull was fractured with a tire iron, and the two men left her for dead in an isolated area just four blocks from where the body of Elizabeth Short had been found thirteen months earlier. A neighbor discovered the victim unconscious and summoned an ambulance. The information regarding any follow-up investigation was sketchy, but it is believed the victim, though in critical condition, survived. The Norton kidnapping occurred only six miles east of where the bodies of victims Mondragon and Winters were dumped.
This crime occurred just twelve hours before the two suspects would commit another murder in Hollywood. Their next victim would be the real estate agent Mrs. Gladys Kern, previously summarized.
Louise Margaret Springer (June 13, 1949)
On June 17, 1949, the
Four days earlier, on June 13, twenty-eight-year-old Louise Springer, married with a two-year-old son, had been reported kidnapped. Her frantic husband had called the police minutes after her disappearance.
Louise's husband, Laurence Springer, a hairstylist of wide reputation, worked at a salon on Wilshire Boulevard. His wife worked at a beauty parlor in a department store at Santa Barbara and Crenshaw, just two blocks from where the Black Dahlia's body had been found two and a half years earlier. The couple had been living in Hollywood for a year, after relocating to Los Angeles from the San Francisco Bay area.
On Monday evening, June 13, at 9:05 p.m., Springer had left his wife seated in the passenger seat of their brand-new 1949 green Studebaker convertible in the parking lot while he ran inside to retrieve her eyeglasses, which she had left at work. He returned within ten minutes, but both his wife and their car were missing. Springer desperately searched the parking lot, then summoned LAPD.
After a search of the area by University Division patrol officers, the police reluctantly documented the husband's account on a missing persons report, but told him she probably 'just decided to take off and would likely return in a day or two.'
On the morning of June 16, Mrs. Lois Harris, a resident of 102 West 38th Street, having observed a new green Studebaker parked across from her home for three days, called the police to report an 'abandoned vehicle.' Police ran a DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) check and, discovering the car was registered in the Springers' name, dispatched detectives to the location.
Louise Springer's body was found in the backseat, draped and covered with a white cape-type material, which belonged to the victim and which, as a beautician, she used to cover and protect her customers.
A later autopsy revealed that she had suffered blows to the head, possibly rendering her unconscious, after which she was strangled to death with a white sash cord that, the police said, the suspect had carried with him.
Robbery was not a motive, since the victim's purse and expensive jewelry and money were not taken. The autopsy surgeons and police detectives released two details relating to the condition of the body First, the suspect was unusually strong, because the sash cord he had placed around the victim's neck had been constricted so tightly as to leave only a two-and-a-half-inch-diameter space in the knotted noose.
The second piece of information, in the
BODY VIOLATED
And with a 14-inch length of finger-thick tree branch, ripped from some small tree, the killer had violated her body in such manner as to stamp this crime at once and indelibly in the same category as the killing of Elizabeth Short, 'the
Police located witnesses in the 38th Street neighborhood, who provided a limited description of the murder suspect and additional information relating to the time he drove to the location and parked the car. The Springer vehicle at 38th and Broadway was only a mile from where Georgette Bauerdorf's vehicle had been found, also abandoned, at 25th and San Pedro.
Four teenagers provided police with further information: on June 13, they were inside a residence at 126 West 38th Street. At approximately 10:00 p.m., hearing a loud squeal of brakes outside, they saw a green Studebaker convertible abruptly turn in and stop at the curb. The driver quickly turned off the car's headlights.
Seconds later, a black-and-white police vehicle stopped their friend Jack Putney, also a teenager, for a traffic violation. The officers exited their police vehicle and talked to Putney for five or ten minutes by their police vehicle, which was parked just three feet away from the Studebaker. Seated behind the driver's wheel, the murder suspect sat motionless in the dark until finally the police drove off. The teens then saw him turn toward the backseat, lean over, and reach for something. Because of the darkness, the only description they could provide police was that he 'was a white man with curly hair.'
After the police pulled away, the witnesses paid no further attention to the man or the parked car, nor did they see him emerge from the vehicle and leave the area on foot. The Studebaker, they told the police, remained there for the next three days.
On June 18, 1949, the
The
The two LAPD traffic cops were subsequently located and identified as 77th Street Division officers, who admitted being 'out of their area,' and acknowledged stopping and warning Putney, who appeared to be 'driving erratically.' Both denied seeing the green Studebaker, but they admitted, 'It could have been there.'
In the month following Louise Springer's murder, the usual suspects were questioned, none of whom proved to
