found at the scene — also helped to eliminate Frank as the suspect.
After they had initially linked the Lipstick murder to the Dahlia murder, police detectives theorized that whoever killed Elizabeth Short may have been infuriated by Corporal Joseph Dumais's 'confession' and murdered Jeanne French to disprove his claim. This, police told the press, would also account for the 'taunting obscene phrase written on her chest.' One police official was quoted as saying, 'For two days before Mrs. French was kicked to death, the newspapers had been full of Dumais' confessions that it was he who had killed Beth Short. We know that the killer is egotistical, and it's possible that the real killer resented the claims of Dumais and wanted to show that the real killer was still here.' Thus, in a tragic and unintended way, Steve Fisher's strategy of smoking out the Black Dahlia Avenger with a false confession had proved to be chillingly effective.
On February 12, 1947, the
In the course of my investigation, I came across a reference to a book,
The scrapbook was a compilation of Detective Huddleston's own photo collection of suicides, murders, and accidental deaths, clearly his own personal macabre fetish. Its pages contained pictures of tattooed men, nude drag queens, child homicides, murdered prostitutes, and even a decapitation caused by a train wreck, all packaged into an album of horrors. Next to many of the photographs the detective had written his personal observations and locker-room dark humor.
In her introduction to the book, Katherine Dunn says that the collection of photographs, found at an estate sale after Huddleston's death, was eventually made into a video called
'THE RED LIPSTICK MURDER.'
Mrs. Jeanne Axford French Age 40. (Nurse) of 3535 Military Ave, Sawtelle L.A. Killed by ???? Her body was found in a field near Grand View Ave, & National Blvd. L.A.
She was stomped to death by a fiend who crudely printed an obscene phrase (FUCK YOU) on her chest.
The three photographs were obviously from the 1947 LAPD investigation. One of them, a close-up, showed the victim lying supine in the vacant lot, completely nude, with the lettering clearly visible on her body. In large block printed lettering, the killer had written in red lipstick the following words across the midsection of her body: 'FUCK YOU, B.D.' What the LAPD had not revealed to the press, Detective Huddleston unintentionally revealed to the public through the bits and pieces of his own obsession years after his death.
Simultaneous and parallel to the 'Red Lipstick' murder, the Dahlia investigation remained ongoing, as Captain Donahoe told the public that in his opinion the Dahlia and Lipstick murders were likely connected. In the month of February 1947, leads and additional evidence continued to pour in.
Tuesday, February 11, 1947
Imagine the surprise of downtown Los Angeles cab driver Charles Schneider when he discovered a mysterious note in his cab, possibly written by the Black Dahlia Avenger. Schneider told police and reporters that he had gone to a restaurant in the 500 block of Columbia Street — ten blocks from the Biltmore — and when he returned to his parked cab he found a note in the glove compartment. Addressed to the
Take it to Examiner at once. I've got the number of your cab.
$20,000 and I'll give B.D. up. Is it a go?
B.D.
Police quickly lifted fingerprints from the glove compartment of Schneider's cab, which did not belong to him. They also checked similarities between the letter and the original envelope sent to the
Wednesday, February 12, 1947
lca Mabel M'Grew, a twenty-seven-year-old resident of Los Angeles, reported a kidnapping and forcible rape that occurred in the early-morning hours of February 12 as she was leaving a South Main Street cafe in downtown Los Angeles. She reported that two men had forced her into their car and driven her to an isolated spot on East Road in Los Angeles, where both had raped her. After the attack one of the assailants had warned, 'Don't tell the police, or I'll do to you the same as I did to the Black Dahlia.' They then drove her close to her home in Culver City, only three miles away from where Jeanne French had been murdered. The only descriptions of the assailants released in the news article were 'two swarthy men.'
Sunday, February 16, 1947
By the middle of February, the LAPD said that it had 'hit a stone wall' in its investigation of the murders of both Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French, announcing that the one remaining lead, a key to the two mysterious homicides, was their search for a dark haired man with a small mustache, who was known to have had dinner with Jeanne French just two hours before she was murdered.
Police indicated they had a close watch on their important witness, Mrs. Antonia Manalatos, the waitress who had seen the dark-haired suspect dining with the victim.
That same day, Otto Parzyjegla, a thirty-six-year-old linotype operator at a Los Angeles printing shop, was arrested for the bludgeoning murder of his seventy-year-old employer, Swedish newspaper publisher Alfred Haij. After confessing to police that he had 'hacked the torso into six pieces and then crammed them into three boxes at the rear of the print shop,' Parzyjegla told authorities that 'the whole thing was like a dream,' insisting to his interrogators that 'he must be dreaming and was waiting to wake up.'
