Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

As if writing a fictional ending to his story, Goodis concocted a strange scenario in which LAPD would try to lure the killer using a Dahlia lookalike as bait. She could be 'wired,' and the police could pounce on the killer just as he was about to strike.

That day, the Evening Herald Express ran a front-page story on a new suspect in the murder, a twenty-nine-year-old Army corporal named Joseph Dumais, who was purportedly in police custody at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Over the next four days, as more and more revelations were reported in the papers, particularly Corporal Dumais's own confessions, he became an even stronger suspect in the eyes of the public. Los Angeles readers were riveted by the unfolding story of the Dumais confessions that played across each day's newspaper editions like a serialized novel.

February 6, Herald Express:.

GRILL G.I. ON L.A. DAHLIA DATE IN TRY TO SOLVE LOST WEEK

February 6, Examiner:

SUSPECT IN DAHLIA SLAYING JAILED BY ARMY AT FORT DIX

February 8, Daily News:

'BLACKOUT' MURDER OF BETH SHORT CONFESSED SOLDIER ADMITS CRIME BUT HOLDS BACK HORROR DETAILS CORPORAL DUMAIS SIGNS 50 PAGE CONFESSION

February 8, Herald Express, in four-inch bold headlines:

CORPORAL DUMAIS IS BLACK DAHLIA KILLER

Identifies Marks on Girl's Body in Long Confession

February 9, Examiner:

MILITARY CAPTAIN CONVINCED THEY HAVE THE DAHLIA KILLER

February 9, Examiner:

NEW DAHLIA CONFESSION

Monday, February 10, 1947

After all the week's stories about Dumais, whom newspapers now dubbed 'the real Dahlia killer,' since he had confessed to the crime, readers were jolted on February 10 by a sudden and startling turn of events. Dumais, it was revealed, was not the killer! The story was a complete hoax, a ruse foisted on the Black Dahlia Avenger by the newspapers, in which they 'manufactured' a suspect to confess to the crime, a tactic not unlike Steve Fisher's suggestion that the police trick the real murderer by 'rigging a phony killer' to bring the real culprit in. Here, however, it wasn't the police putting out a false story, but the media.

Despite the Dumais 'confessions,' the public was never told, either by the police or the press, that LAPD detectives were almost certain from the outset that Dumais was not the Black Dahlia Avenger: four of his Army buddies had testified he was at Fort Dix, New Jersey, on January 15. The newspapers knew this too, but played up the story in the hope that, if Fisher was correct in his psychological assessment of the Black Dahlia Avenger, the killer's ego would force him to turn himself in to police, if only to expose Dumais as a false confessor. Unfortunately, the newspapers' hoax did entice the killer to make himself known — not by turning himself in but by striking again.

^*I don't pretend to be an expert on London's notorious nineteenth-century serial killer, 'Jack the Ripper.' However, on the surface, it would appear that the Dahlia killer had more than a passing knowledge of the famous case, and demonstrated that knowledge after his murder of Elizabeth Short. Like their modern-day counterparts, the newspapers of the 1880s published the handwritten, taunting Ripper letters, which included very similar wording, phrases, and drawings used by the 1947 Avenger. Jack the Ripper wrote, 'Catch me when you can.' In many of his letters he included the taunting phrase, 'Ha ha!' and drew childlike drawings of a knife blade. In addition, the Ripper mailed items connected to his victims, such as a partial kidney, to the police, leading some authorities to suspect the killer might well have been a surgeon.

14

The 'Red Lipstick' Murder

A SCANT TWO DAYS AFTER the Herald Express announced that the Black Dahlia killer, Corporal Joseph Dumais, had confessed and the Black Dahlia case was solved, the Herald Express put out a special edition on Monday, February 10, 1947, with the headline:

WEREWOLF STRIKES AGAIN! KILLS L.A.

WOMAN, WRITES 'B.D.' ON BODY

This time the victim's nude body was found in an isolated vacant lot, on a direct parallel line some seven miles west of where Elizabeth Short's body had been found three weeks earlier. According to crime-scene descriptions, the victim had been 'kicked and stomped to death.' Like the Black Dahlia, her mouth had also been slashed, and the killer had used lipstick from her purse to write obscenities on the naked body, signing his now infamous initials, 'B.D.,' to let the police know — or think — he was the same person who had sent the notes in the Dahlia case. The local press quickly dubbed this second crime with two names: 'Jeanne French: The Flying Nurse' and 'the Red Lipstick murder.'

In the early 1930s, Jeanne French had gained a measure of fame and notoriety in the Los Angeles area as a socialite and starlet. She had worked as a studio-contract actress under the name Jeanne Thomas, had become a registered nurse, and had gotten her license as one of America's first female airplane pilots. The papers loved her and had nicknamed her 'the Flying Nurse.' Said to be one of the most promising candidates for screen fame in the early days of talking pictures, but dogged by a host of suitors, she finally married and gave up her career.

Jeanne French had also been well-known in European social circles as the nurse and traveling companion of Millicent Rogers, the famed oil heiress of the 1920s. French was also the nurse of Marion Wilson, known to the public as 'the Woman in Black,' who for many years after the death of Rudolph Valentino returned on the anniversary of his death as the mysterious veiled woman seen placing flowers on his grave.

Just after eight in the morning on Monday, February 10, 1947 — less than four weeks after the murder of