Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

There is one interesting aspect to Elizabeth Short's 'missing week' that may not have been apparent to the LAPD at the time but is now. In the statement made by Linda Rohr, a roommate of Elizabeth's at the Chancellor Hotel in Hollywood, she said that she last saw Elizabeth on December 6, 1946, confirming landlady Juanita Ringo's statements. Linda also said that when Elizabeth was packing to leave, she was very upset. She quoted Elizabeth as saying, 'He's waiting for me,' but added, 'None of us ever found out who 'he' was.'

The next known sighting of Elizabeth was on December 12, when she met Dorothy French at the San Diego moviehouse and was offered a place to stay at her home. So from December 6 to December 12 there is indeed a missing week for Elizabeth, but it is before she goes to San Diego and not after she leaves the Biltmore.

Since at the beginning of that week in early December we know Elizabeth was hurrying to meet her mysterious boyfriend, who that day was 'waiting' for her, we can fairly assume she spent part if not all of the missing week with him. It was here that she disappeared off the radar screen. Who was this man? Where did they stay? What happened to her? Five days later Elizabeth resurfaced in San Diego, huddling for warmth in an all-night moviehouse, lonely, destitute, and afraid.

19

The Final Connections: Man Ray Thoughtprints

THROUGHOUT THE COURSE OF MY INVESTIGATION, the more I researched, the more I became aware of how important Man Ray was to George Hodel, who clearly considered him a kindred spirit. However, it was some time before I realized just how close and influential that relationship had been. Did that profound influence, I wondered, have anything to do with the Black Dahlia?

It was the 'Black Dahlia Avenger' who told police that he'd murdered Elizabeth Short and, through his notes, that his sadistic torture and murder was justified. Perhaps, like the 'Ballad of Frankie and Johnny,' in which Frankie kills her lover 'cause he done her wrong,' in his mind Elizabeth had wronged him. I suspect he and Elizabeth were lovers and were going to be married. I also believe Elizabeth had made a promise to him — 'a promise is a promise to a person of the world,' the anonymous 1945 telegram from Washington, D.C., had said — but Elizabeth broke that promise. In breaking her word she 'done him wrong,' and like Johnny she would pay for it with her life.

Essential to the nature of a true 'avenger,' the killer had to inflict pain on the person, but it differs in that the acts were seen by the avenger as retribution and were, in the avenger's mind, therefore morally justified. The avenger likened himself to a state-sanctioned executioner, who takes the life of a prisoner in the name of the people, exacting retribution for a capital offense. As his pasted message to the press announced, 'Dahlia killing was justified.'

What distinguishes the crime of Elizabeth Short from the murder of many other lone women in L.A. in the 1940s is the manner of her execution, the horrible mutilation of her body, and the posing of her corpse.

Through the years, one of the most intriguing and frustrating questions the police had never been able to answer was: why had the killer gone to such extraordinary lengths to 'pose' his victim? Surely this was a thoughtprint, a message for the world to read, if only it could. It was surreal, fiendishly surreal.. . There was clearly a method to the killer's madness, a reason he posed the body the way he did. In his game of cat and mouse with the police and public, the 'avenger' was, by that bizarre pose, leaving a message, as if he was challenging police to pick it up — a riddle, a test of wits, with himself as the master criminal.

Given George Hodel's relationship to and love of Man Ray's work, I examined hundreds of photographs in all of Man Ray's books. Just as I was about to give up, I found what I was looking for: a painting, Les Amoureux (The Lovers) (1933-34), and a photograph, The Minotaur (1936), two of his most celebrated pieces. The former portrays a pair of lips as two bodies entwine and stretch across the horizon from end to end, the latter shows a victim of the mythological monster, which had the head of a bull and the body of a man. The Minotaur was kept imprisoned in the labyrinth on the island of Crete, where it was fed young maidens to satisfy it and keep it alive.

In Man Ray's Minotaur, we see a woman's naked body with her arms raised over her head, the right arm placed at a forty-five-degree angle away from the body and then bent at the elbow to form a ninety-degree angle. The left arm is similarly bent at the elbow to form a second ninety-degree angle. This positioning recreates the horns of the bull-headed beast. The body is bisected at the waist so that only the upper torso is in frame. One can easily imagine the two breasts as a creature's ghoulish eyes and the shadow above the stomach as the creature's mouth, as if the face of the carnivorous beast is superimposed on the body of its victim.

I pulled from my file the crime-scene photo of Elizabeth Short as she was discovered by police on the morning of January 15, 1947, in the vacant lot on Norton. The positioning of Elizabeth's arms precisely duplicates the position of the subject's arms in Man Ray's photograph! In this precise posing of the arms, the killer had replicated the horns just as Man Ray intended them in his original photograph. But there's more. The excised piece of flesh below Elizabeth's left breast imitates the shadow below the victim's breasts in the Man Ray photograph. I offer as evidence exhibits 35a and 35b.

Exhibits 35a and 35b

a) Elizabeth Short crime scene b) Man Ray's Les Amoureux and Minotaur

From the view in exhibit 35a we cannot see whether Elizabeth's right side was also excised in similar fashion. Perhaps most tellingly, the laceration the killer cut into Elizabeth's face extends her mouth from ear to ear, and her lips appear grotesquely identical to the lover's lips extending across the horizon in Man Ray's Les Amoureux.

The killer had to make her death extraordinary both in planning and execution. In his role as a surreal artist, he determined that his work would be a masterpiece of the macabre, a crime so shocking and horrible it would endure, be immortalized through the annals of crime lore. As avenger, he would use her body as his canvas, and his surgeon's scalpel as his paintbrush!

Much as I wanted to deny it to myself or to look for other possible explanations, I now realized the facts were undeniable: George Hodel, through the homage he consciously paid to Man Ray, was provocatively revealing himself to be the murderer of Elizabeth Short. Her body, and the way she was posed, was Dr. George signature — both artistic and psychological — on his own surreal masterpiece, in which he juxtaposed the unexpected in a 'still death' tribute to his master, using human body parts!