The file also contains extensive memorandums between LAPD and the FBI verifying that they were in fact looking for a suspect with surgical knowledge. LAPD obtained the names of three hundred students from the University of Southern California Medical School, and requested they all be compared by the FBI against the lifts obtained from Avenger notes. LAPD further advised the Bureau that their own experts were in the process of conducting handwriting comparisons of some of these students to Avenger notes. Additional memorandums from J. Edgar Hoover show that he was attempting to utilize the high-profile status of the Black Dahlia case as a means of accessing Social Security Administration files on private citizens. His request to SSA to obtain information on Elizabeth Short's associates was denied. The director of SSA reminded Hoover that the files on private citizens were sacrosanct, the only exception being wartime, where the national security was at risk.
The Voice
After the intense interest in the Dahlia case had faded away, Richardson said it was still his dream and hope that one day the Dahlia killer would pick up the telephone, dial his city desk number, and again ask for him.
That never happened, but from the description of other people who heard a voice that matched Richardson's description, I believe it is one that I know very well — my father's educated and professionally trained voice.
Various witnesses in separate crimes have described the killer's voice as 'suave and cultured.' Even in his youth, his colleagues and friends had mentioned the distinctiveness of his voice when they were describing him to the drama critic Ted Le Berthon, who wrote the 1925 'Clouded Past of a Poet' article in the
'It's not George's gloom, his preference for Huysmanns, De Gourmont, Poe, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Hecht that pains us,' these friends said, 'but his stilted elegance, his meticulous speech!' Le Berthon himself commented on 'the voice' later in the same article, a voice that due to its distinctiveness, allowed him to recognize the speaker even before he turned and saw Father in his taxi uniform.
Knowing my father's voice, from its resonance at the Franklin House dinner table, from his authoritative manner in his executive offices in Manila, and even during his final years in San Francisco, I can recognize both Le Berthon's and Richardson's descriptions as being more than just reminiscent of how my father sounded. They and I heard the same voice.
22
Handwriting Analysis
DURING THE COURSE OF MY INVESTIGATION I recognized my father's unique handwriting on two separate occasions, the first being on the promise-to-surrender note. The original note mailed to the press from downtown Los Angeles on January 26, 1947, by the Black Dahlia Avenger (as seen on page0 169 as exhibit 18) was confirmed by LAPD as having been written using a new, expensive, and at the time, relatively uncommon writing instrument, a ballpoint pen. In that note, the suspect promised he would surrender to the police three days later.
I recognized this undisguised handwriting as my father's unique style of printing, and I here formally and unequivocally identify that printing as his.
Unlike some of the other notes mailed to the police and the press, in this note the killer made no attempt to distort or conceal his handwriting. I suspect that, at the time he wrote it, he fully intended to turn himself in, until at the last moment he reversed his decision. In the later notes, where he attempted to barter and 'make a deal' with the police, he disguised his handwriting.
Returning to his early days as a journalist, he sent several headline-like messages to the papers such as: 'Dahlia's Killer Cracking, Wants Terms.'
The second time I recognized Father's handwriting was when I saw it written in lipstick across the naked body of Jeanne French, in a photo published for the first time in LAPD homicide detective Huddleston's morbid collection,
As an associate member of the Washington Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in Seattle, I contacted them for a referral to a handwriting expert. They recommended Ms. Hannah McFarland, a member of both the National Association of Document Examiners and the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation. I learned she was highly skilled in both questioned-document examination relating to authenticity and authorship, and graphology relating to personality evaluation. Her experience included the analysis of hundreds of handwriting documents, and she had testified and was an accepted, certified expert before Washington state courts.
In engaging Ms. McFarland, I did not reveal to her, nor did she know, the connections between, or the names of, any victims. Nor did she know the name of the suspect or his connection to me. All she knew was that the crime had occurred during the mid-1940s somewhere in California and that it involved the suspect writing on the body of the victim using lipstick. I did not inform her that the samples were from two separate crimes. I did not tell her that some of the documents had been previously analyzed by questioned-document experts at the time of the crimes. I wanted her opinions to stand alone.
I asked Ms. McFarland to compare and analyze some known handwriting documents to the questioned documents. These included several of the notes mailed to the press, as well as a portion of the death-scene photograph showing the printed letters on the body: 'FUCK YOU, B.D.'
In the samples I submitted to her, all the 'Black Dahlia Avenger' signatures were excluded, to avoid identifying the specific crime. There were enough writing samples on the many notes to make a comparison to known samples without having to identify the actual cases. The known samples came from a range of Father's handwriting/handprinting spanning almost seventy-five years, including examples from the years 1924, 1943, 1949, 1953, 1974, 1997, and 1998.1 also asked Ms. McFarland to simplify the terminology of her technical analysis and present her information and findings in layman's language.
I presented her with nine 'knowns' (K) and nine 'questioned documents' (Q), all of which she examined and microscopically compared. The questioned documents were first compared to each other in an attempt to determine if the same writer wrote them. Then they were cross-compared to all the known documents. Sample K- 10 is also included, and will be discussed after the analysis is presented.
