Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

THE MORNING AFTER A PARTY

The splashes of red about the rooms are beginning to change into brown . . .

Lying in the dust of the floor and bestrewn with the fallen ashes and stubs of innumerable cigarettes are scraps, scraps of paper — rubbish. There are letters — diaries of forgotten years — prayer books — playing cards — ...

Lying face up on the floor is a card — the ace of diamonds. Over it has fallen a large drop of blood that converts the printed figure of the red diamond to a shapeless and blurred blotch of red.

Sheets Bloody

Blood-smeared sheets lie crumpled and torn on the littered floor of the bungalow.

A pair of dice have fallen from the smashed dressing table. One of the cubes has on it a splashed red stain.

Rising above the unmistakable odor of spilled and drying blood are mingling those of liquor, of Jamaica gin, of tobacco.

Forgotten Advice

'Give up every friend that is sinful and learn the 'Truth that makes . . .''

Hopeful, pathetically hopeful, words written last December, one day before Christmas, to Margaret Donovan — cabaret girl who was killed in a drunken brawl. ..

'Give up every friend that is sinful. ..' 'Find the Truth.'

'I confess to Thee, O Lord Jesus Christ, all the sins that I have committed even unto this hour. May the Almighty Lord grant to me pardon, absolution and remission of all my sins. Amen.'

These words are underlined in a little blue book of 'Prayers for Daily Use' 'Read this some time for Mother's sake,' is inscribed on the title page . . .

Wisps of dark brown hair — long and silken — are strewn about the floor. They are blood-clotted, torn. Torn stockings of sheer silk.

Detectives Aghast

In the adjoining room detectives are muttering. 'Good God, Archie, those-kicked her to death about three in the morning and then went and slept till nine!'

Between the pillow and pillow-slip of the overturned cot in which Peggy Donovan was found dead was an age- yellowed newspaper clipping, its sentences underlined:

'In the GARDEN OF LIFE WOMEN are the FLOWERS, some are gorgeous, gay and yet Have NO PERFUME.'

A few months later, in another crime-scene story in the Record, George turns the description into a literary piece by punning in Latin on the last name of victim Teresa Mors. Mors — her name means 'death' in Latin — was shot and killed by her jealous lover, the famous welterweight boxing champ Norman 'Kid McCoy' Selby, who was immortalized by the sobriquet 'the Real McCoy' when he decked with a single punch a drunk who had challenged his identity in a downtown L.A. bar. Legendary criminal attorney Jerry Giesler would jump-start his career with this famous early Los Angeles murder case by obtaining a manslaughter verdict for his client rather than the death sentence the state wanted.

In his description of the murder scene George Hodel writes:

Los Angeles Record

Thursday, August 14, 1924

Two Cents

WORDS OF DEATH

Death.

Mors, mortis, morti — glibly the schoolboy declines it. Thoughtlessly.

Like a cage in which the canary has been stifled, this apartment on the second floor of the Nottingham — the tall, expensive building with a front of blazing white tiles.

While the yellow bird was alive — flitting and singing —

The cage seemed a pretty thing. Now with the canary dead it is a dirty cage, tawdry and crusted with birdlime.

The canary is dead on the floor of this soft room that seems so close — impinging with walls and ceiling — close like a cage . . .

She lies dead in an unpleasant disarray that is not art but death. And the two batiks of Larry Darwin, monsters of the new niode, bulge with immensity just as the ordered vision of Rubens shrinks into insignificance before the monstrosity on the floor. Larry Darwin's nudes are phantasms — succubi. One smokes a cigarette, perched cross- legged on the devil's head. The other, with stuffed limbs, prances through a garden of exotic lotus flowers. Both leer at the figure on the floor.

The figure on the floor. Hair waved and hennaed, perhaps. Redly, dankly — plume for a face disfigured by a bullet hole. Eyes purpled. Blood on the bare white arms. And this photograph — of 'the Kid.' Clasped like a rosary to the breast, flat now, and hard; retreated as a woman's breast retreats when she is on her back.

The Kid placed the photograph in the white hand.

A gesture of drama, a futile touch of the romantic school that heightens the grotesquerie; that causes the naked batik succubi to leer the more it seems.