Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

death.

Assuming for the moment that there was only one killer, the amount of time he had and the rage he felt toward his victim indicated to me that he doubtless knew her intimately. Everything about the crime pointed to an act of rage-driven revenge. What, specifically, was the relationship between victim and killer that would result in an explosion of such violence and brutality that even the police at the crime scene could not remember ever having seen anything so degrading and horrifying?

The answers lie in the dynamic of their relationship, and in their lives before they crossed each other's path. The records of those lives are still with us, because neither the victim nor the crime could simply disappear. Considering this, I was convinced that, somewhere buried within the official case records, the interviews with witnesses, and the newspaper coverage, or the memories of people associated with Elizabeth Short, there had to be some answers. That's where I would begin my search: to try and build a composite of Elizabeth Short from scratch — something, I believed, the police had not adequately done back in 1947. I began my search for clues to the real nature of the victim, starting with a complete and thorough review of all known witnesses.

The first group of witnesses would be those people who knew her when she was alive, who could help me reconstruct a chronology of her movements until the day of her murder. They would cover the period from 1943 until January 9, 1947. These people included her family, those who knew her before she came to Los Angeles, and those whom she met during her years in Los Angeles looking for work and a place to live.

Phoebe May Short

Phoebe Short, the victim's mother, learned that her daughter was found dead and mutilated in a vacant lot when two reporters from the L.A. Examiner called her in Medford, Massachusetts, after the paper had learned, from its Soundex transmission of fingerprints to the FBI, that the victim's name was Elizabeth Short. It was a gruesome phone call, because the reporters, in their effort to gain as much information as possible, initially told Mrs. Short that her daughter had won a beauty contest and they needed background information on her for a story. Excited and jubilant, Phoebe began to gush about her daughter, talking about her beauty, her hopes, her dreams, until the reporter finally revealed the awful truth. Crushed and distraught, Phoebe nonetheless answered the rest of their questions, and the reporters had their exclusive.

Information from the reporters' interview of Phoebe Short, and from Mrs. Short's testimony later at the coroner's inquest, revealed that on January 2, 1947, Mrs. Short received a letter from her daughter in which Elizabeth told her mother she 'was living in San Diego, California, with a girlfriend, Vera French, and was working at the Naval Hospital.' Mrs. Short said that her daughter 'was kind of movie struck, and that everyone in Medford had told her how beautiful she was.' Her daughter had left high school in her junior year.

'Elizabeth had asthma,' Mrs. Short told the reporters, 'and every winter Betty would go south, to Florida, and work as a waitress, then she would return home in the summers.' While she was living in Los Angeles, Elizabeth told her mother through letters, she had 'worked in some films in Hollywood as an extra and had played in some minor roles.' With the exception of Elizabeth's engagement to Matt Gordon, Phoebe Short was unaware of any serious relationships her daughter had had with men. 'Major Gordon,' Phoebe told police, 'was engaged to my daughter, but he was killed flying home after the war.'

At the coroner's inquest, held in Los Angeles on January 22, 1947, seven days after the discovery of her daughter's body, Mrs. Short identified Elizabeth at the coroner's office and testified that she 'was twenty-two years of age, a waitress by occupation, and to her knowledge had never been married.' Mrs. Short had last seen Elizabeth when she left home in Medford, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1946, for California. She told the inquest that while her daughter was at home with her, she never spoke of having any enemies, and said she was in love with a man named Gordon Fielding. She added that her daughter always wrote her on a weekly basis while she lived away from home.

Inez Keeling

Mrs. Keeling met Elizabeth Short in Santa Barbara during the war when she was manager at the post exchange at the Camp Cooke Army base in Santa Barbara, where Elizabeth, then eighteen, was employed in early 1943. Mrs. Keeling said, 'Elizabeth told me that she had come out to California because of her health. She told me that the doctors in the East were concerned she might contract tuberculosis if she remained in a colder climate, and that is why her parents allowed her to come to California alone. I was immediately won over by Elizabeth's charm and beauty. She was one of the loveliest girls I have ever seen and one of the most shy.' Mrs. Keeling told newspapers that Elizabeth 'never visited with the men over the counter at work, and she didn't date the men. She was a model employee; she didn't smoke and only occasionally took a drink.' Keeling last saw Elizabeth when she left the base early in 1943.

Cleo Short

The police discovered that Cleo Short, Elizabeth's fifty-three-year-old father, was living in Los Angeles, working as a refrigerator repairman. LAPD characterized him in its reports to the press as 'uncooperative.' Short explained that he wanted no contact with his daughter, who had traveled to California to live with him, and said he had paid for her bus fare back to her mother in Massachusetts. In 1930, according to Mrs. Short, Cleo had abandoned her and his five young daughters in Massachusetts, and simply 'disappeared.' Mrs. Short had raised the children on her own and had no desire to see or speak with Cleo at the time of the inquest.

Both police investigators and reporters interviewed Cleo Short at his Los Angeles apartment at 1020 South Kingsley Drive, only three miles from the vacant lot where his daughter's body had been discovered. Short told them that he couldn't provide any current information about his daughter or her activities. 'I last saw my daughter Elizabeth three years ago, in Vallejo, California. I gave her two hundred dollars and she came out from Massachusetts. She came to live with me in Vallejo, but she spent all her time running around when she was supposed to be keeping house for me, so I made her leave. I didn't want anything to do with her or any of the rest of the family then. I was through with all of them.' Cleo made it clear to the police that since he had no information about his daughter, he wanted nothing to do with the investigation of her death.

The interviews with Phoebe Short and her ex-husband, Cleo, revealed to police a mother who could not control her daughter's wanderlust, as innocent as that may have been, and a father who had abandoned his family and had no desire to be further involved with it. The interviews also revealed that Elizabeth was probably looking for a father figure, someone in authority, probably someone in uniform, who would stabilize her life. She thought she had found it in Matt Gordon, but his death had dashed her hopes and set her on a path to find a replacement. Whether she still lived in the fantasy of her engagement to Major Gordon during her stays in Hollywood and San Diego or was simply in denial about her own reality, she would drift from relationship to relationship until she met her killer.

When she met Arthur Curtis James in 1944, three years before her death, and agreed to model for him, she was already dancing very close to the edge.

Arthur Curtis James Jr. (aka Charles Smith)

Arthur James was a fifty-six-year-old artist and ex-convict, awaiting sentencing in a pending forgery charge, who first met Elizabeth in a Hollywood cocktail lounge in August 1944. 'She showed an interest in my drawings,' he told police, who interviewed him in 1947 after they discovered that James had known Elizabeth Short. James told