Morgan recalled that his chief in the DA's Bureau of Investigation back then was I I. Leo Stanley. I asked him if he remembered an investigator by the name of Walter Sullivan (the DA investigator who picked up Joe Barrett and took him to their office in the spring of 1950) and Morgan said that of course he did.
Morgan offered that he retired from the DA's office in March 1970, but Lieutenant Jemison remained on the job for some years longer.
Two articles from the spring of 1950 corroborate what Morgan told me, namely that Lieutenant Jemison was about to make an arrest of a prime suspect. From our previous investigative summary we know that the suspect was Jemison's 'wealthv Hollywood Man,' Dr. George Hill Hodel.
In an AprilIarticle, the
MURDER CASES REOPENED
BY DISTRICT ATTORNEY
INVESTIGATORS START AGAIN ON SLAYING
OF NURSE AND 'BLACK DAHLIA' BRUTALITY
District Attorney's investigators are now searching for a man they believe to be a 'hot suspect' in the three- year-old murder of Mrs. Jeanne French.
The investigators, Frank Jemison and Walter Morgan, also have reopened the notorious Black Dahlia murder case and are completing a list of persons to be interviewed.
H. Leo Stanley, chief investigator for Dist. Atty. Simpson, said that his investigators remain unconvinced that a bloody shirt and trousers found in the home of an acquaintance of Mrs. French have been fully eliminated as a clue to the murder.
Suspect Not Named
Morgan and Jemison declined to name the man they are seeking as the prime suspect, but indicated that he is the owner of the mysterious bloody clothing which has disappeared from police evidence lockers.
The status of the Black Dahlia murder of twenty-year-old [sic] Elizabeth Short, whose nude, bisected body was found Feb. 15, 1947, in a vacant lot on Crenshaw Blvd., remained in the preparatory stage.
Jemison and Morgan were assigned to investigate the unsolved murder cases at the request of the 1949 grand jury.
The grand jury of last year, in its final report, indicated that jury members felt that a complete investigation had not been made by the Police Department and that important clues or evidence may have been overlooked.
A second article, from the
D.A. AIDE STALKS
MUTILATION KILLERS
Dist. Atty. William E. Simpson said today one of his investigators is making 'very good progress' in a renewed investigation of the unsolved mutilation murders of Jeanne French and Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia.
Simpson disclosed investigator Frank C. Jemison has been working several months on the cases, independent of the Policedepartment. Jemison was assigned to the task at the request of the 1949 County Grand Jury.
The district attorney added his aide will continue with his inquiry 'until he thinks he has sufficient evidence against a party or parties, and then will ask for formal murder complaints.'
The bisected body of Elizabeth Short, 22, was found Jan. 15, 1947, in a vacant lot in the southwest sector.
Exactly one month later the body of Mrs. French, 45, obscenely marked with lipstick, was discovered in a field in West Los Angeles.
Chief of Detectives Thad Brown meanwhile discounted reports that vital evidence in the French slaying, in the form of blood-stained clothing, had disappeared from the West Los Angeles detective bureau.
Brown said the clothing, belonging to a short-lived suspect in the case, never was recorded as evidence because its owner was absolved of any connection with the crime two weeks after it occurred.
Hidden in the last sentence of this 1950 article was the answer to a question I had been asking for three years. When was the bloody clothing found? What year? Thad Brown was quoted as saying, 'its [pants and shirt] owner was absolved of any connection with the crime two weeks after it occurred.' This supports my theory that LAPD had identified George Hodel, possibly as the 'mystery man sharing a P.O. Box with Jeanne French,' and interviewed him at the Franklin House, in February 1947.
The article clearly establishes Chief Brown's further complicity in the ongoing 1950 cover-up of George Hodel. Brown knew full well that George Hodel had, just two months earlier, finished a three-week incest and sexual molestation trial, was the surgeon boyfriend of Elizabeth Short, and was on intimate terms with Jeanne French, sharing her P.O. box. Brown also knew he had been named by the 1949 grand jury as the prime suspect in both murders; nevertheless, in the days immediately before Dr. Hodel fled the country, Brown informed the press and public that the wealthy Hollywood mystery man 'was a short-lived suspect and was absolved two weeks after the Red Lipstick Murder occurred.'
Incredibly, in what would normally be an impossible scenario, Lieutenant Jemison's surviving partner, now eighty-seven years old, has, fifty-two years later, stumbled into the family of the very man his partner was stalking, and given us information not only implicating but naming Dr. George Hodel as the prime suspect in both the Black Dahlia and Jeanne French murders. Moreover, he was present at the Franklin House with a number of 'ranking' LAPD officers, and Morgan himself personally 'shimmed' the locked door, after which an electronics specialist from the DA's crime lab entered the house and placed listening devices to monitor Dr. Hodel's conversations in the hope of incriminating him.
In 1950, Walter Morgan was a rookie investigator, with only one year on the job. As, in his own words, a 'sidekick' to Lieutenant Jemison, he would not have been privy to detailed specifics related to this highly sensitive investigation. But from what he told me we know that both the DA's office and LAPD were conducting a joint investigation and possessed surreptitiously taped conversations of my father from inside our home. Standard
