Transcript of Episode 648: A Deeper Dive into the Murder of Elizabeth Short (Part 2)

Hey, weirdos. It's Ash here, ready to share a little secret. Have you heard of WNDYRI Plus? With ad-free episodes in one week, early access, it's like having an all-access pass to our light-hearted nightmare. So come join us on the dark side and try WNDYRI Plus today. You can join WNDYRI Plus in the WNDYRI app or an Apple podcast or Spotify.

You're listening to a Morbid Network podcast. I'm Raza Jeffrey, and in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on Vitold Pilecki, the spy who infiltrated Auschwitz. Resistance fighter, Vitold Pilecki, has heard dark rumors about an internment camp on his home soil of Poland. Hoping to expose its cruelty to the world, he leaves his family behind and deliberately gets himself imprisoned. The camp is called Auschwitz, a headish place where the unimaginable becomes routine. Poletski is determined. He needs to organize the prisoners, build a resistance and get the truth out. Except when the world hears about the horrors of the camp, nobody comes to the rescue. In the end, it's just him alone, with only one decision to make, accept death or escape. Follow The Spy Who on the Wondery app or wherever you listen to podcasts, or you can binge the full season of The Spy Who Infiltrated Auschwitz early and ad-free with Wondery Plus.

I'm Efau Harch. I'm Peter Frankerpern. In our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, Chingis Khan. Best known for his brutal campaigns, he was accused of causing millions of deaths, but he also gave his followers religious freedom and education. So is there more to his story than violence and bloodshed? I suspect that there might be, Peter, and since violence and bloodshed is basically all I ever I learned about Genghis Khan growing up, I'm actually really curious to find out what lies behind the legend. I can promise you are in for a treat because the Mongols were capable of exceptional acts of brutality. But all the stuff in the positive column either is never talked about or gets brushed to one side. So I'm really grateful to have the chance to speak up for Mongol history. Follow Legacy Now wherever you get your podcasts. Or binge entire seasons early and ad free on WNDYRI Plus.

Hey, weirdos, I'm Ash.

And I'm Elaina.

And this is Morbid.

This is morbid, and it's part two of a two-partta.

Oh my god, and it's morbid in the morning.

It is. That's why you might hear sleep in our voices.

I know. Honestly, probably not. I woke up with a talk and jolt this morning. Did you? Yeah. Well, because I woke up and I realized- Oh, yeah.

You were like, Oh.

Yeah. I was late. What else is new? But I made a good ass coffee. She did.

She made a great ass coffee.

I wasn't sure if it was good. I thought my beans over-extracted, but- No, I think they extracted the correct amount.

I think they might have.

Then we had fun girl talk this morning.

We did.

We lifted each other up. We did. It was women supporting women in the office this morning. It was.

We were like, You're a badass bitch. Tell yourself that every day.

Yeah.

And you know what? You guys out there, you're all badass bitches. You're a badass bitch. You're all badass bitches.

And you should tell yourselves that every day. Yeah, and don't compare yourself to anybody else.

No, don't, because you can do that until the end of time. And you'll always find someone that you're like, well, I didn't do this and that person did that. Yeah, okay. Do you like you?

Are you proud of your accomplishments? That's the thing. Then that's the only thing that matters. You like you.

You do. You're great. And if you don't like you, I'm sorry about that. And you got to get to a place where you do like you first before you can do anything else.

And this is not an ad.

No, it's really not. It's just the vibes of 2025, especially with all the mayhem- We got to fill our own cups. Surrounding us with fucking Elon Musk deciding that he's an elected official. Like, go fuck yourself. That's pretty wild. So with those vibes, you have to get to a place where you like yourself.

It's not for any other reason.

It's not for any other reason, but because we got to take care of that business. Truly. But yeah. So, yeah, It's just important. And I want everybody to feel that way. I'm not really... I think we've... This is the year of social media just being crumbling. Not the vibe.

You know what? I was listening. I'm not going to get everything completely correct because my memory is just a vast land, a vast land of nothing. But I was listening to Elisa Kelly's podcast. I love her, of course. Her Nevesco podcast is so fucking good. And she was talking about... It was at the beginning of 2025. I think it might have even been before 2025. It was like, here's how I think it's going to go, basically. And it's I think from when social media started, we've done a full circle, basically, a full rotation. Oh, absolutely. So it's almost being flipped on its head now. So there's going to be these massive shifts in social media, which could be them crumbling, which it does feel like. And I'm not mad about it. I have been off of Instagram for For probably two, three weeks now. My insides feel better. Yeah.

That's the thing. There was no inciting incident that really did this. Really, truly, there was no inciting incident. There's always shitheads in the comments everywhere, in every comment section.

And it wasn't even that. It was honestly just like... For honestly, my inciting incident was my account following somebody that I didn't follow, which I think we all knew who that is.

Yes, that happened to mine, too.

To support that orange man. I was like, I'm not going to stick around for this when my account's being manipulated. I follow a lot of news outlets and that thing. And I think it's good to have information. For sure. But I think there We are living in an age where there's too much fucking information, there's too much misinformation. And if you have any anxiety at all, it will eat you alive.

It will. And it's like, and please know that. I know it's hard and it's a very hard line. And we're not going to go too far into this, don't worry. We're going to get into that case.

Sometimes it feels good just to have a chat.

You guys are like our bro-ies, so we want to talk to you about it. It's important. And we care about your mental health. We do. Because you guys are a fucking rad ass community of awesome bitches, and we want you to be okay. But it's a hard line to straddle, to be informed, but not be bombarded. Yes.

That is the perfect way to say it.

There's a very fine line, and it is... I don't know if I have fully comprehensive that line yet. It's hard. It's very hard because, of course, you want to be informed, but you don't want to be over-informed to the point where you can't think of anything else or appreciate any happiness in your own life.

Well, there's never been a day and age where you have a fucking thing in your hand 24/7 that you can constantly be connected and constantly know what's going on. That is not how we're meant to live.

It is pretty fucked up when you think about it. And The Internet and social media can be this beautiful place where amazing people can connect.

I do miss connecting to you guys.

That's the thing. I miss reading your messages. I'm like, I love connecting to people. But then it's also the human species is an onion that has some rotten layers to it. And no matter what, it's an evil onion with a lot of rotten layers. But there's some great layers, some flavorful layers. It's delicious layers. It'll make you soup It's delicious.

You know what it is? There's shallots and there's onions. Exactly. There you go. Me? I prefer shallots.

I love a shallot.

Jean Shallet. I love shallots. I love a legume.

Oh, yeah. Speaking of that, let's take a quick little veer. Are we? Nothing's better than fucking Pearl Cuscus with shallots and veggies broth. Yes. And some herbs on it.

I like the idea of that, but I want chicken broth.

The veggies Veggie broth gives it some... One thing about me. Some something.

I fucking hate veggies broth. Really? When I tried my hand at vegetariism, that's what it's called, vegetarianism. I went hard and fast with the veggie broth, and I think now... You over did it. Yeah, it's not for me. So I always do... I always do bone broth. There you go.

All right. Well, there's our little tip for a new you.

Pearl couscous, though. You know, Drew doesn't like the perled couscous. He likes the regular couscous.

I like both.

So I made the perled couscous and he's like, what's this one? I'm like, it's just a bigger version. It's just pearls. He's like, I don't like it. You're strange. Drew. I love that, man.

Well, you know what?

We're all over the place. We're everywhere.

And we have some really awesome things coming up that we can't talk to you about yet. But bitches, you're going to know when they hit. I feel like after- They're hitting soon.

I feel like after this case, there's probably only one or two episodes before we can- Before it's like- Before it hits you in the face.

Before it's going to smack you in the face. So don't worry. You're not going to be waiting months for this.

No, we wouldn't tease. No. And we feel annoying, but we genuinely just cannot say.

But we're so fucking excited because two of these things are happening in real-time for us next week. And then they'll be coming out to you in a couple of weeks after that.

Who knows? 38 days later. I think.

You know Someday we'll know.

You know how it goes.

But we know that we know that can be annoying to be like, something's happening, but it's coming. And you're going to love it. And my God, I'm so excited about it.

It's so exciting because also it's such a variety with these two things.

It's such a variety.

It's going to fill your cup in so many different ways.

In so many different ways. It's going to overflow it. It's going to different ways. And the vibes are going to be fucking immaculate.

Chef's kiss.

Fucking immaculate. So just keep Have an eye out for that. I promise you, you'll know it's going to literally punch you in the jaw when it happens.

We'll say it in the intro, too, whatever we end up talking about.

I mean, you're going to know. You'll know. Just by the title. Ick, yick, baby. Ick, yick.

All right. Well, we chatted.

So we chatted. This was a good chat, guys. Remember the moral of the story? Just make sure you like yourself. It's really hard. I get that. Took me long time. I'm still working on it. It took me past the age of 30 to really get to the place.

That's what everybody says.

It was really past 30 that I got to the place where I was like, no bitch, I'm me and I like me and that's okay.

I'm nearing it. And I hope you are, too.

I hope you are, too. If you need help, we'll just keep telling you to do it. Don't worry. Exactly. Just think of me patting you on the back and being like, You're fucking great, bitch.

Sometimes she genuinely actually does that to me. It's great. It's great.

So I guess we have to keep talking about this horrific case, which is very fascinating and one that needs to be talked about because it is technically still unsolved. Involved. We're talking about the Black Dahlia case, the murder of Elizabeth Short. One thing I find interesting with this case is that the general consensus of the whole thing was like she was going out to Hollywood to become a star and blah, blah, blah, and that was her only... But in reality, it's like, yeah, she wanted to be an actress, all that good stuff. But people make it seem like she was, that's it, and that was all that was and blah, blah. It's like, So she literally was just looking for a new start. Yeah, in general. She was genuinely looking to just start a new. And obviously she had dreams of being an actress and all that, and she was doing extra work and all that modeling. But I think that emphasis gets put too much on that, not enough on like, she was really going through a lot of shit, and she really just was looking for a place where she felt like she belonged.

I think that happens a lot with these stories. Like the stories where a young girl goes out to Hollywood and she wants to be an actress. But it's like, that's never the only thing going on in somebody's life. Exactly. And in fact, usually when a young girl is escaping to California to Hollywood, it's for a whole bunch of other reasons.

Yeah, there's a myriad of reasons that are coming with it. And on top of it, she needed that weather. That climate was her ideal climate because of her lungs. So it's like there was many layers to this, and I just think it doesn't get talked about enough when it gets brought up. I agree. I see what you mean. It just hits on like this. She wanted to be a star. And it's like, yeah, she did.

It's like that's an overarching.

She wanted to breathe, too. That was part of it. She thought it was pretty sick to have full lung capacity. It was pretty awesome. So when we last talked about this case, we were talking about several of the suspects that seemed like good suspects, and then we fall apart at the seams. Robert Manley was a really big suspect, and he was the one... He was the red haired man. No soul. That was testing whether he loved his wife. Yeah. That whole thing. Yeah. Remember that guy? He looked like a good suspect, but he was also very forthcoming with the information. He never pushed away the investigators or tried to... His story stayed consistent. He took a polygraph but fell asleep.

You know, as one does.

Sleepy's going to sleep. I don't know. But he was released from custody. Okay. Because Because we did also find out that two people who said they saw him with her- And one said, literally- Backed off.

Well, they literally were like, Yeah, she said her name.

And then it ended up not being that at all. Yeah. So at this point, they were looking only into her love life as a source of where this could be coming from, this killer. They were now realizing, you know what, the boyfriend angle might not be a good angle. Not panning out. Maybe we got to start widening our net here. With their best lead, the red-haired man, having turned out to be a dead end, investigators on one of the nation's now most closely watched news stories found themselves in a bad place, which is desperate. That's not where we want to find our investigators on a case like this. No. Because that's when things get messy. Yeah. Yeah. So Detective Harry Hansen told reporters on January 23rd, We're right back where we started, which is also not a good place to be. Nearly 200 officers fanned out across the city looking for new clues, many following up on a lot of false confessions that were happening as well. That was like a wave.

It's such a weird thing.

The amount of men that came forward to be like, me, I did it.

I feel like back then, too. Yeah.

I'm like, Were you all just bored? What is going on here? What is the pathology there that makes somebody do that?

The pipeline from boredom to false confession.

Yeah. Like, what is that? But they be following up on these many false confessions, just wasting their time and resources, but they had to. They don't know which one is false and which isn't. Or they were conducting house-to-house searches in hopes of finding any new witnesses. So they really were going hard. Meanwhile, the coroner's inquest confirmed the details of the murder, but offered really little else in a way of answers, especially when it came to the gap in time between her disappearance on January ninth and her murder. That was the hard thing to pinpoint. Investigators finally caught a lucky break on January 25th when a postal clerk spotted a package addressed simply to Los Angeles newspapers. He looked at it and he said, Huh.

That's weird.

That's weird That's suspicious. So he immediately turned it over to the police. Inside, detectives found Elizabeth's birth certificate. What? Her address book, a baggage check ticket, and other personal papers that belonged to her. Yeah, of course. As well as a note from the sender. The note was in letters cut from magazines and newspapers, like the classic ransom note. I hate that. And the letter wrote, Here is Dahlia's belongings, letter to follow.

Oh, that's fucking haunting. Yeah.

Like that. And they were really her things. So this was absolutely from the killer. Now, during his interview with detectives, Robert Manley claimed to have seen Elizabeth's address book her purse when he dropped her at the Baltimore. So that was a big thing.

That's huge.

We can at least follow that. And he'd seen the baggage check ticket from the Greyhound station. So given that, detectives concluded that the sender of the package must have seen Elizabeth after she left the Biltmore and could possibly be her killer. One detective told reporters, We have so many leads. We don't know which to choose first at this point, which is a good place to be. Yeah. But also a scary place.

It's a good place, but like a hairy place.

A hairy place, exactly. Investigators theorized that the killer, sensing the case was going cold, had done this, sent the materials to the press to keep his to up the ante.

To up the ante.

To work on the front page. He saw that things were cooling off and they weren't getting anywhere. And he said, Why don't I help you out? Which is so scary and very BTK.

Very BTK. What if I send you a floppy disk?

Exactly. He's BTK before BTK. He probably looked at this and was like, There it is. And I do wonder if he looked at this and said, Well, he never got caught.

Yeah.

But he didn't put into any thought that technology had grown.

That was a big part of it.

While several detectives started running down the names in her address book, other officers started combing area dumps, looking for Elizabeth's missing clothes and purse. The day before the package was received, someone reported having seen a bag matching the description of her purse in a trash can on Crenshaw Boulevard, not far from a lot where the was actually discovered. On January 26th, officers finally located the bag at the trash dump on East 26th Street, which is crazy. I was going to say. They found the bag. Alongside one of the shoes Elizabeth had been wearing on the night she disappeared, appeared. Oh, wow. Both were positively identified by Robert Manley as belonging to Elizabeth.

When you genuinely think of the work that had to have gone into that, think of how LA is a pretty big place.

Look at any dump.

Yeah.

Tell me how hard that would be to find one Just piles and piles of random shit.

Yeah.

That really is- That's detective work.

Detective work right there. Which not as a detective work, I would not want to have to do.

No, that's definitely not it. The bag was later identified by the cafe owner on Crenshaw Boulevard, who'd initially reported it to police. So the cafe owner was like, Yeah, that's the bag I saw. Now, although there was still a possibility that the killer had followed Elizabeth to Los Angeles from San Diego, where she had been before. The receipt of the package and the discovery of the purse strongly indicated that the killer was local. Okay. Because he was sending it from a local place. He's still around. Makes sense. He's around. Detective Hair Fremont said, I'm still convinced the killer is still in town, and I'm almost certain it is who has mailed us Elizabeth Shorts' belongings. I agree. Which I think is pretty safe to say.

I'm like, yeah, I'd say so.

Having run down all the names in the address book now, investigators ruled out all the men in the book, which is wild. It began hoping the sender would follow another letter just to help them out at this point.

When he said one was to follow.

I was going to say the note did indicate that another one would come, and at this point they're like, we need the other one to come. Unfortunately, the news of the package prompted another flood of new anonymous correspondence, most of which were hoaxes. Because, again, people are going to people.

Rotten evil onions.

It's not great. One One letter read, A certain girl is going to get same as E. S. Got if she squiels on us.

Okay.

Get it together, people. Get it to fucking gather.

Get a life.

Come on. Another letter said, E Short Got It, Carole Marshall is next.

Okay.

Other notes and letters suggested the killer was going to give themselves up. One of them said, Dahlia Teller Cracking, Wants Terms. That was a postcard from Pasadena.

Fuck off.

All of them were just bullshit. Yeah.

Just people with absolutely no fucking lives.

But among all of these, there was one postcard written in plain block letters that caught investigators's attention among all of them. Okay. It said, Here it is. It said, Turning in Wednesday, January 29th, 10: 00 AM. Had my fun at police, Black Dahlia Avenger. Unlike the other very obviously false claims, the postcard from the Black Dahlia Avenger seemed as though it could have come from the killer because not only did it lack the grandiosity of the other ones, the silliness and ridiculousness of the other ones. The investigators thought the phrase, Here it is, was referencing the killer's earlier claim that a letter was going to follow the package.

Which makes sense. And the other ones didn't say that.

The other ones didn't because they didn't know that's what it said. But this one says, Here it is.

It was also just like, Had fun fucking with you. Bye. But like, bye. It wasn't really saying, This person's next, or I'm going to turn myself in soon.

Yeah, like something really stupid.

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Just as the letter indicated, on Wednesday, January 29th, a man came forward to LAPD and confessed that he had killed Elizabeth Short. It was 33-year-old Daniel Voorheys. Hilarious last name. Yes, truly. Told detectives that he had met Elizabeth Short two weeks earlier in downtown Los Angeles and took her for a ride on a Wilshire Boulevard bus, and he stopped short of providing any other details about the murder itself.

Wait, so he took her for a bus ride? Is that what he told me?

Yeah, he said he took her for a ride on the bus.

Is that a thing people did?

Who knows?

Imagine a man's asking you, do you want to go on a Peter Pan with me?

Do you want to go on a bus with me?

What do you think of Greyhound?

Yeah, I guess back then it was like, you want to take her on the bus?

That's adorable in a way. Yeah. Not in this scenario.

Not with Mr. Voorheys. No. But according to Mr. Voorheys, the two first met in 1941, and he'd taken her on several dates before they lost touch. But when asked for more details about that meeting, he again refused to say anything else. But nevertheless, Voorheys insisted, I'm sick. I did kill Beth Short. Okay. And he was willing to sign any documents confessing to it. Daniel Voorheys was booked into the county jail that evening on obviously suspicion of murder. There was going to be a polygraph exam planned for the following day because they wanted him to... They wanted to wait to have him recover from his bewildered and befuddled state he was at the time of his arrest. Okay. Which tells you a little bit about what you need to know about like...

The state he was in and his frame of mind.

Bewildered and befuddled? I don't know about this.

I don't know if I want to believe a confession from somebody bewildered or befuddled. Exactly.

And while this may have seemed at the time, it did seem at the time, a major break in the case, there were several things about his confession that made detectives, unfortunately, a little skeptical. They didn't want to be, but they were. Yeah. In addition to his refusal to provide virtually any details about the murder or how he'd come to no short at all. Investigators also described his story as, quote, generally incoherent.

Yeah.

We're teetering off the edge here, folks. And It was also full of contradictions. Also, when they contacted police in Phoenix, LAPD detectives learned that Borheys had a long record of petty offenses, and at the time of his arrest, he was not really living anywhere there and appeared very confused. Apparently, he was from Phoenix.

It sounds like he was very mentally ill.

It sounds like he was going through it, for sure. The next day, Voorheys changed his story, telling detectives he, quote, might have killed Short. But he couldn't lead police to the scene of the murder. Okay. Didn't know where that was. Borheys was held for a few more days while police looked further into his story, but eventually it became very clear that this was a completely bullshit false confession, and he was let go.

Because this isn't the thing, again, I think we touched on it in the first part. Somebody was like, I forgot what the... I think it was a newspaper article said something and it was like the killer snapped and they were in a crazy frame of mind. It's like, this isn't the murder that you would just snap and commit and be like, oh, I don't have any recollection of what happened.

It's like this was hours and hours.

Hours long. Like she was tortured, she was bisected, she fought you off. You were then set on. You drained her blood for hours.

That takes a while. It's like At some point you would have come to and remember, had some recollection of part of it.

You don't commit that whatever that bissection thing was called in a state of mind where you're not going to remember doing it.

Exactly. Now, like their theory about a spurned lover, an ex of some sort, detectives had expressed a great deal of confidence that the letters from the Black Dahlia Avenger would lead them to Elizabeth Shorts killer. But after Daniel Voorheys' confession turned out to be false and the communication with the Avenger stopped, they once again found themselves at a dead end. After two weeks of intense investigation involving hundreds of LAPD officers, they had combed through all the leads and clues they had, and they had yet to find the murder weapon. They didn't find the crime scene. They didn't find a single suspect that was even remotely viable at this point. The LA Times declared, It appeared almost certain the elusive killer was a stranger to Ms. Short. They wrote, as even her closest associates have given not the slightest inkling to police of the identity of the murderer. Chief of Police, Jack Donahoe, agreed, telling reporters that most likely, the Black Dahlia's nemesis was a pickup whom she did not previously know. In the earlier days of February, tips continued to come into the LAPD, and each one they ran down. They didn't ignore any of them.

They didn't just assume they were stupid. They ran down and pursued all of them. A Among them was a woman in Long Beach who claimed to have heard, quote, unearthly screams coming from a, quote, long, expensive car on the night Elizabeth disappeared. . Did you call someone? Did you call anyone when that was going on? This informant told police she'd been waiting at a bus stop that evening when she saw a man, quote, holding a woman down in the rear seat of the car with a man and a woman on the front seat. And she didn't call anyone. Why are you waiting until now to say anything. Then there was a tip from Elizabeth's friends where they were just trying to, like... They were trying to think of anything. They were trying to think of anything that could help. So they said she had recently, quote, plugged cavities in her teeth with wax from candies, which sent investigators back to potential witnesses to ask whether they'd seen anyone caring for their teeth in such a way.

Wait, what?

She would plug the cavities in her teeth with wax candies. Yeah. And so they were saying, Did you see her buying wax candies? Did you see anybody? Because who knows? Did you see somebody fiddling with their teeth, with sticking something in their teeth on a bus, anywhere? They're literally trying anything. Anything. Literally anything. Because these are like, Unique traits.

You'd remember that.

That they're like, okay, maybe that's something.

You might be able to go somewhere with that.

Yeah. Maybe that's something. If somebody says, oh, weird, I did see a girl sitting there sticking something in her tooth on the bus or something like that, that can at least help them figure something out. Right. While most of the tips came from the Los Angeles area, they did receive calls and letters from other parts of the country, too, which very unnecessarily taxed agency resources. It just made it even worse. In early February, for example, investigators received a call from officials at Fort Dix in New Jersey, reporting that one of their soldiers, Joseph Dumaze, had disclosed to army investigators that he'd been on a date with Elizabeth Short the night she disappeared. Now, he's in New Jersey. Yeah. According to Dumaze, he had gone on a date with Short on the evening of January ninth, but, quote, after the date, his mind went blank. And the next thing he remembered, he was in Pennsylvania Station, New York.

Across the country from where she was. Yeah. Totally.

Fort Dix investigators analyzed the uniform Dumaze had been wearing that night and found what turned out to be blood stains on one of the pockets of his pants. Creopy. Now, when they began digging into his background, investigators learned that the 29-year-old soldier had been married three times And on at least one occasion, he had been examined by a psychiatrist who recommended he be hospitalized for psychological reasons. Also, while Dumaze claimed to have been in Los Angeles the previous month, there was no record of him having traveled to California recently. It was eventually determined that he had nothing to do with Elizabeth's murder, and the blood stains in his pockets could have, quote, come from a bloody handkerchief. But by then, investigators had already wasted several days and precious in this completely false bullshit lead.

Which is really fucking annoying.

As the first week of February came to an end, investigators had become so desperate for any new leads and eventually returned to what the press described as, quote, twice cold clues. So there was doubling back on things. While some members of the team went back to old suspects and witnesses hoping to find anything that could point them in a new direction, several other detectives started following anything that even resembled a lead, no matter how insignificant, like the cavity thing. Right. This included a report from a young woman in Culver City who told police she'd been waiting for a bus when a man in a 1940 sedan approached her. Isabel Foster said, The man asked me if I wanted a ride. I refused. He then took out a long butcher knife and ordered me into his car. Jesus. She started to panic and started to cry, and the man told her, Shut up or he would give me what he gave the Black Dahlia. Okay. Which Here's the thing. I don't think he's out here. I could be wrong because he's a fucking asshole, whoever did this. So it's like, whatever. It would be weird to me if he was just out on the street being like, Shut up or I'll do to you like I did the Black Dahlia.

I don't think he's just going to be like the Black Dahlia. I don't think I'm going to be out. I don't think he's going to be running around saying it to everybody out on the streets. Maybe he's saying it to people in his life, for sure. I could see this guy being an idiot and who we think it might be. I think he was talking about with people in his life. I don't think he's had a random bus stop trying to kidnap somebody and being like, If you don't get in my car, I'm going to do the same thing I did to the Black Dahlia to you.

It's also like, If I do get in your car, that's when you'll probably do it.

Exactly. It's like, Now this girl is going to fight even more. You kidding. That doesn't make sense. Yeah. Reports like that of Daniel Voorheys, Joseph Dumaze, Isabel Foster's report of this man with the butcher knife, and all the others, they didn't pan out. And they were so common. They kept coming in. From the moment the body was discovered, the front pages of every major newspaper in the LA area were dominated by the case of the Black Dahlia, so it just kept on coming. Such intense public interest drove equally intense press coverage and led to so many hoaxes, so many false confessions, tons of mistaken identities, complete lies, just people inserting themselves. While these stories may have been great to read in the paper, very interesting, and they honestly made the appear very complex and very fast-paced and very like, we're running down leads and we're doing this. The truth was this whole thing was indicative of just how little information detectives had to work with. It soon became apparent to the press and the readers of these papers that the case was growing cold. Because every time these things came out, it was like, no.

And we don't have anything now. By the end of February, investigators were literally grasping at straws at this point, looking for any Any detail or any clue that could just give a little spark to this case. But they were coming up empty, which is crazy with how this woman... It kills me because they had clues at the crime scene, and they failed to get them.

Yeah, that partial footprint and tire tracks. Massive clues.

So to be honest, they fucked themselves from the beginning. It's real cool that they're running down leads now. You fucked yourself over. You had clues.

Which I will never understand why they didn't photograph that. That footprint and the tire treads. Yeah.

Why would you not take photographs, take a mold of it? Do whatever you can. To let that crime scene become so contaminated. So contaminated and congest.

I just, yeah.

Yeah.

I'm like, did they ever come out and say, we didn't take the photograph because blah, blah, blah?

No, I think they just... It's the same thing as it got lost. And they just don't explain it. A few weeks later, investigators acknowledged that they had no leads and that this police was cold. Now, the story of the Black Dahlia murder had dominated the papers for weeks, with stories informed very heavily by people just theorizing and speculating and whatever bits of information the LAPD was willing to parcel out to the public. The latter of these included information about certain arrests and potential suspects who were inevitably and very quickly ruled out. But behind the scenes, there were other suspects whose names weren't immediately released to the press and who were considered way more seriously than the people they were releasing to the press. Also, in the year since Elizabeth Short's death, a large number of authors and journalists, they published books and articles naming many suspects, ranging from famous people like Orson Welles and Woody Guthrie and even notorious gangster Bugsy Siegel. Damn. Lots of people have been fingered for this. The suspect list contained more than 20 names, including many doctors and a few women, which I don't know if I... Just the pathology of this one, I don't see it, but I could obviously be wrong.

Yeah. Well, some of these theories have been very debunked over the years, like very easily. There remains a small list of names that many believe contains the killer's identity in there.

This girl, I believe it.

I definitely think so. This one is interesting. In John Gilmore's 1994 book, Severed: The True story of the Black Delia murder, the author strongly suspects Jack Anderson Wilson, a. K. Arnold Smith, as the killer based largely on circumstantial evidence, which is evidence. Yeah, no matter what. No matter what. That's really all we got at this point, and he bases it on an interview he conducted with Wilson before his death. In the interview, Wilson claimed to have been driven to kill by some supernatural force. He told Gilmore, he had to do that when the spirit overtook him. Wilson went on to hint at his participation in the murder saying, You understand the trouble I could get into because of what he did. If he could somehow make it seem like that he didn't do it, you know what I mean? It's like we're talking about litigation and that thing. Everyone is entitled to go nuts.

What?

Everyone is entitled to go nuts? No. This is like that investigator being like, she probably teased him and he went bezerk. And again. Babes, we're not entitled to that. It separates us from the animals. You need to like, what are you talking about? We're not entitled to do so. We're not entitled to lose our minds and kill someone.

This isn't like the spirit overtook me and I became frenzied. No. This is not a frenzied murder. That's the thing.

This is not a disorganized, frenzied, passionate moment of crazy anger moment murder.

This is meticulous. This is murder.

This is hours and hours.

And I think it was planned. Of controlling holds torture. And I think it was planned. Yes.

It's like, are we forgetting that the blood was drained from her body, everyone? That requires a lot.

And the bissection. The bissection is so clean. You're not going to convince me that somebody who was overtaken by a spirit and lost their mind was like, no, I just figured out how to bisect her.

I just figured it out. I will not encourage you to look at the crime scene photos because I'll never encourage you to do that. And these have been shared so many times that, unfortunately, they're everywhere. If you're familiar with this case, you've probably seen them. If you are familiar with them, I looked at them because we were going into this case. It is a remarkably clean bisect. Section. Yeah. This is not... I'm sorry to get graphic here, but you're here. It is not like a tearing through somebody- No. Kind of thing. This is not a ragged cut. It's a cut that is so fucking clean. It's clinical, is what it is. That is a clinical cut if I ever saw one. I think somebody- You will never convince me that this person is not a doctor or a surgeon. Exactly. It's the same thing as Jack the River. You're just not going to convince me. I agree. It's just the way it is for it, and we will get into that. Don't worry. In the years since the publication of that book, Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia murder, Severed has come under a lot of scrutiny for a lot of inaccuracies, mistakes, a lot of that stuff.

Among other things, the author Gilmore paid Wilson for the interview.

Okay. Which does happen.

For sure. But in these cases, that makes your eyebrow raise a little. And the transcript indicates the conversation occurred over the course of many rounds of drinks. Oh, well, that's not great. It has also been pointed out that years after Severd was released, Gilmore had advanced to an entirely different theory about the killing. So it taints this original one because you're like, right? In a 1982 interview with the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Gilmore described a suspect he refers to only as Mr. Jones. According to Gilmore, Mr. Jones had confessed the murder to one of Gilmore's contacts.

Okay.

Now, in this version of events, Gilmore claims that Mr. Jones picked Short up at the Biltmore and, She and Jones traveled from an apartment in Hollywood to the Roosevelt Hotel, where he picked up a key to the house at 33rd in Trinity. Jones was angered Elizabeth Shorts behavior and her refusal to give in to his advances. The two quarreled about a phone call she wanted to make, and when she insisted on leaving the wooden house, an incensed Jones beat her, raped her, and then losing all control No. Tortured her and ultimately killed her. No. In his frenzy to cut the body up for disposal purposes. No. That was not why she was cut.

No, that was not for disposal purposes. No. She was posed.

She was posed. It wasn't like he just dumped her. If you are trying to dispose of a body, you cut off the limbs. I know this sounds horrible. No, but it's just what it is. But if you're doing it for disposal purposes, you are putting it into bags so it isn't found or that it is found in several different places. You are not putting her next to a sidewalk where she has found posed.

And honestly, if it was simply only 100% for disposal purposes, this is awful. But you would assume she would be in more pieces.

Exactly. Her limbs are easier disposable. You don't leave limbs on if you're to dispose of a body easily. And again, this is a horrible discussion to have, but it's just this doesn't make sense. It's based on fact. Yeah. You can't tell me this was for disposal purposes.

No.

And then- It was for shock factor. She was posed like she was getting a photo taken. Right. That's not what that was. Don't tell me that was disposal. If it was, she would be in bags. She would not be laid out on the grass. No. Like, come on. So it says, Jones cut the body in half, then panicked at the prospect of discovery, and he wrapped each part of Elizabeth's short. There was two. Two. In curtains from the house. No, there was cement bags found. Wrapped the entire bundle in an oil skin tablecloth and loaded the body in his car.

No. At what point did he decide to drain her of all her blood?

Exactly. You didn't mention that. Yeah. We're always skipping that one in these confessions. Where'd you do that? Where'd you do that? How long did it take? How'd you know how to do it? Yeah. Come on. I'm John Robbins, and joining me on How Do You Coke this week is the musician, writer, and presenter, Jordan grievance. I didn't tell my therapist that I had cheated. That was one of the things that she was most confused about. I think, honestly, before that point, I might have been lying a little bit in therapy. I might not have really been understanding what it was that I could do in there. I definitely didn't think it was a safe space because I didn't tell my therapist what I'd done. That's How Do You Cope with me, Jon Robbins. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.

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Gilmore claimed to of that tracked Mr. Jones down in 1978 and found him living in Indianapolis. The author went to see the man, however, and when he arrived, he just decided not to talk to him. Gilmore said, I just looked at him. Now, I'm sorry I didn't talk to him about Elizabeth Short because I didn't know at the time that he had killed her. I didn't have that part of the story. I didn't know there was a situation between my contact and Jones, that there was always an antagonism.

What?

So it just gets a little messy. It gets pretty Yeah, see. It's a little weird. So there's that.

I don't know about any of that.

Those were big suspects that people talked about for a little while. But then in 1991, and there's a big issue with this one to me. Okay. In 1991, another suspect was put forward when 54-year-old Westminster resident, Janice Nolton, went to the press claiming her father, George Nolton, was Shorts killer. Janice had been undergoing psychiatric treatment at the time and claimed she had uncovered repressed memories of witnessing her father kill Elizabeth in their garage. Now, that was in January 1947 that she claimed it happened. She claimed that her father, who died in a car accident in 1962, had been dating Elizabeth in 1947, and that short had been staying, quote, in a makeshift sleeping room in their garage where she had a miscarriage.

For me already, I have like a ding, ding, ding where his name would have been in her address book if she was dating him.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, precisely.

At least in my opinion.

There's that, but then there's another big one that to me, I was like, Nope. Now, according to Nolton, she, quote, remembers the woman, Elizabeth Short, sitting in a chair under a bright light and her father hitting the woman in the face and head with a claw hammer. Now that's horrible. And she did have lacerations and many wounds to her head.

But did she have like, skull fractures?

I'm not sure if she had skull fractures, but she had a lot of lacerations to her face and her head.

I feel like if you're beaten with a claw hammer, a lot of times you have skull fractures.

Here's the thing, because Janice said she witnessed this while hiding in the family's garage. Okay. I think Janice went through some horrible shit in her childhood, very clearly. And I feel for her. Absolutely. Because to be coming out with this thing, a lot of stuff has happened. And she was going through psychiatric treatment. So she was obviously trying to work through some stuff. So I'm not saying that I don't believe this because I think she's just straight up lying about anything. I just don't think it was a little bit short. I think she's gone through a lot, and I think this is a manifestation of some of that. And I can't imagine what she did see with her own father.

She probably did see this happen to somebody. I just don't think that person was a little bit short.

Was a little bit Short. She said, In the garage, she witnessed her father use a power saw to cut the body in half. No. No. That cut is not a power saw cut.

A power saw It's going to leave those jagged marks. It is a clean cut.

There would be some ragged. Unfortunately, again, I'm going to get graphic. There's going to be some ragged edges and some tearing. There's going to be... I mean, she had... There's full organs right at the edge of that cut that are fully intact. They are not touched, they are not nicked, they are not ragged, they are not destroyed and mangled. They are intact, which means there was something very meticulous used to do this.

One think of a power saw, it's going to be vibrating. Yeah, it's going to mangle organs. An organ could slip very easily and exactly get mangled.

Where she was found, the top half of Elizabeth's short, when she has found there is very clearly a large organ protruding from the top of her body. That would have been falling there, and it would have been nicked and mangled and destroyed. And it wasn't. With a power saw. A power saw was, I will die on the hill. A power saw was not used to cut her in half. No. It just wasn't. No. It was a surgical situation.

Instrument, yeah.

100 %. So immediately when I heard a power saw in a garage, I said, Absolutely not. The following day, she says Janice said her father, took the body to a utility room next to the pier and gutded and cleaned the victim's body. She She was not gutded.

She was cleaned. Maybe she meant the blood part. Maybe that was her version of being gutded.

Her version of saying it. But this one just doesn't get for me.

And why would he? It just doesn't. But I do feel for her.

I do. I feel for Janice a lot because obviously there's some stuff going on there and hopefully she was able to work through that. Clearly her dad was not a great dude. No, he sounds like he was awful. And the thing is in the mid to late 1980s, there was repressed memories had a moment. It was like that was the concept of that. It gained a lot of traction. A lot of practitioners in mental health fields were very focused on it for a little while. I believe they exist for sure. They absolutely do. I do believe too much was placed on them in the 1980s. It actually there was a lot of that being the drivers of a lot of the Satanic panic in the later '80s and early '90s.

I don't think it's something that you can rely on too heavily because memories are already faulty.

Yeah, you can't hang your hat on.

And I'm not saying repressed memories don't exist. I literally have them. No, they absolutely do. I've experienced repressed memory. But again, it can...

They can be wily.

And a lot of times with repressed memories, even in my own experience, there's missing pieces still within those memories.

Exactly.

It's not always a full picture.

Exactly. And it- Our brains are meant.

They, by design, fill in details.

Exactly.

Based on experiences, based on what we're consuming based on so many different feelings, emotions, how you feel that day, what you ate, what you did, what you watched, what you read.

And it's like, again, repressed memories? Absolutely. I believe they exist. I believe they can be very helpful. I believe they can be very helpful moving through things and dealing with things. That's the thing.

Wholeheartedly.

I think to hang your hat on a repressed memory is like hanging your hat on an eyewitness.

There's got to be more.

There's going to be some human error here. Repressed memories can be like a mismash of different memories that are all smushed into one. So it's like you might be, that might have happened. She might have saw that. But again, like you said, I don't think it was Elizabeth's she saw. I think she's seen Elizabeth short. She's seen the story.

And your brain can marry those two pieces of information.

And they can marry those two. The details don't fit for me. But again, feel for Janice. Big time. Because, holy shit, to even think that about your own father, this is some bad shit.

He's capable of a lot of shit, nefarious shit. Yeah.

It was around the mid '90s, people did start to realize that hanging your hat on repressed memories was not the best course of action. And that, like we said, indeed they exist, but they are fuzzy. And a lot of people, when it was all really heightened in the late '80s, early '90s, when Satanic Panic was starting to to explode. A lot of members of law enforcement took reports of repressed press memories very serious. Even if they were out of this world, strange and unrealistic, they would take them as fact. It was almost like- Not great. Yeah. It It was almost... Which is not... It's just not fact. It's in someone's mind. You can't rely on that.

It's one. It's just as much as circumstantial evidence is real, reverse memories are real, but they are circumstantial evidence.

You got to have them along with some really concrete shit. Exactly. In this, however, with the LAPD trying to chase anything down, they even had a hard time believing this particular story. Detective John St. John said, We have a lot of people offering up their fathers and various relatives as the Black Dahlia murder. Which is so sad. Which means there's a lot of shitty dads out there, which is like, I mean, get it together.

We've been knew.

He said the things that she, meaning Janice, is saying are not consistent with the facts of the case. And they It's not. Regardless of whether, you know, Detective St. John believed her, Janice remained convinced her father was involved. She told a reporter he was a very sadistic man, which again, breaks my heart for her. She claimed that He didn't just kill Elizabeth Short either. She also said she recalled two other murders committed by her father, and she believes one of the victims was mutilated and buried in the family's yard in Westminster. Oh, damn. So when she said this, investigators in Los Angeles, although they were suspicious of the claims, members of the Westminster Police Department were like, well, we should fucking look into this. We didn't just let it go. Westminster Lieutenant Larry Wosner said, repress memories like these do check out sometimes. It's not unusual. Which is exactly how I feel. It's like, you can't ignore them. No, can go either way. You can just hang your hat on them. In the summer of 1991, investigators in Westminster received approval to excavate the empty lot where Nolton's house once stood. Yeah. Just on the chance that Janice's memories were accurate.

He told a report of the lieutenant, he said, She seems to think that we may find a purse or some other belongings of Elizabeth Short. A few days later, when the site was excavated, technicians found, quote, a rusty knife, animal bone fragments, and costume jewelry. Which is fucking weird. But found no conclusive evidence of a murder. That said, was a little strange because they said the items did appear to be buried on purpose. Yeah. And they did find that unusual. So they said, We don't know how significant this is, but it's definitely interesting. Why would anyone put such things that far underground? Right. So it is strange. It is. And it sounds like her father was a sadistic fuck. And maybe he did do some shit. Yeah. But they didn't find anything connected to Elizabeth. Yeah. Now, despite the strangeness of the items found under the house, there was nothing indicating a crime even had occurred, just that it was weird. So Westminister police did decline to open an investigation because they were like, Yeah, I don't- We can't do that based on a rusty knife and costume jewelry. It's like there's nothing here that says somebody was even hurt.

It's just not. Nevertheless, Janice maintained her belief that her father had killed Elizabeth and actually went on some high profile talk shows like Larry King Live, Sally Jessie Raphael, and promoted her story. Okay. In 1995, she co-published a book with Michael Newton titled Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer. Damn. Yeah. Even after her story and the popularity of her book had passed, Janice remained on that story and convinced that her father was responsible. A Los Angeles Times reporter, Harry Harnish said, quote, She'd leave long, rambling voice messages on my answering machine at the times. So it sounds like she really... She was going through some stuff. She died, unfortunately, by an intentional drug overdose on March fifth, 2004. Oh, man. So I feel bad for Janice.

That's a tough life.

Because I don't... Judging by that story, I don't believe that her father was the killer of Elizabeth Shore, but I feel her dad was a bad man. Yeah. And a sadistic man by her account. Yeah. And that she went through a lot. Clearly. I just feel bad. Yeah, that's really sad. I feel like that's a lot. And then to die by suicide. It's like, obviously, she was...

Psychologically going through a lot.

… hunted by a lot. Yeah. You know? And it's really that. Again, it's very unlikely that her father was Elizabeth Shorts' killer. But in 2003, another person stepped forward to offer up his father as a potential suspect in the case. And this story is the one. Is the story, in my opinion. Same. In his 2003 book, Black Dahlia Avenger: A genius for murder, former LAPD Homicide Detective Steve Hodel, who was a good motherfucking guy. A good motherfucking guy. Yeah. You've heard his name.

We talked about him on the Rodney Alcala case. I think we've talked about him even before that on other cases.

We've talked about him a few times. He is known by his colleagues as a good cop and a good guy. He offers a very compelling case for who he believes is the killer. His father, Dr. George Hauetel. Doctor.

Dr. George Hauetel. He was a surgeon, right?

Yep, he sure was. He He believes he killed Elizabeth Short, and so do I. At the time of Elizabeth Short's disappearance and murder, Dr. Haudel was a well-known and highly respected physician and the one-time head of the country's Social Hygiene Bureau. According Hodel, quote, he was a hard and cold individual with a huge ego whose demeanor bordered on tyrannical. Wow. He said, also, he was an experienced physician. He had the skills, tools, and the space necessary to commit this murder without detection. Because that's the other thing.

You need the space for this murder.

That is something that, in my opinion, none of the other suspects have. They don't have the skills, they don't have the tools, and they do not have the space. You need a lot of space, and it needs to be hidden space. She was alive. When her mouth was cut, she was alive. There's going to be as fucking macabre that is, there's a lot of noise that was going to be happening here. Absolutely. And he needed somewhere he could do this where no one was going to find him and no one was going to hear him.

And to me, because you might be thinking like, okay, well, that other guy had a garage. That's a garage. That's a garage. That's one, not enough space. Two, people are going to hear screaming. They're going to hear those tools mixed with the screaming. If that's the way it happened. It just doesn't make sense for me.

No, it doesn't make sense. It really does. He had George Hodel. I want you to look it up because I know you're all like a I'm immediately going to Google because I also did this. Oh, yeah. Get on it. Look at his house at the time. It's a huge house.

Didn't you have a huge basement?

Huge basement. Basement. Huge basement.

Correct me if I'm wrong, was there tunnels and shit?

I think it was a labyrinhean basement. There was a lot of space. A lot of space, a lot of space away from the rest of the house. A lot of offshoots. There was a lot of people in that house that were willing to do a lot of fucked up shit to save their own shit to make money, to save their reputation, to get people.

And a lot of times when it's wrapped up in money, the craziest, nastiest, out of this world shit happens.

He was also... He made sure to hire people in his house because he was very rich. He had a maid, he had all kinds of shit.

He had a maid, he was a fucking surgeon.

He made sure those were people that he was also fucking, by the way. Yeah. So he made sure that everyone was on his side. That none of them were going to talk and he had shit on all of them.

This guy relied on blackmail. He relied on it and there was so much dirty shit, and we're going to get into it.

But I encourage you to read the book by Steve Hotel. I know. Anything He's convinced me. It is captivating. It's a very captivating case. It's one that has too many coincidences for me.

And for me, I'm not a big coincidence person when there's that many It's two on the nose.

Now, George Hodel Jr. Was born and raised in Los Angeles in the first decade of the 20th century, which was a very big and exciting time for expansion for the city. As a child, he was incredibly intelligent. He consistently scored the highest on every test. He was very, very smart. And ultimately, he graduated high school early and enrolled in the California Institute of Technology at 15 years old. Wow. One result of his obvious intelligence was that George was treated very differently than his peers his whole life, and given the impression that he was special and deserving of special treatment at a very young age.

But on a bit of a pedestal. It can be great.

Yeah, but not great for the ego here. Just one year into his education at Caltech, George was expelled.

Yikes.

According to Steve Hodell, his expulsion was either for being kicked out for engaging in a sexual relationship with a faculty member's wife.

Meanwhile, he was 15, right? Yeah.

Or for repeatedly gambling on campus, which was against the school's rules. Maybe both. Yeah. In the years that followed, George drifted from job to job, including working as a crime reporter with the Los Angeles record during the Prohibition era. Wow. Before finally enrolling in pre-med at Berkeley in 1929.

Which is insane.

Insane. From there, he went on to pursue a medical degree at the University of California, and he graduated with a medical degree in 1936. He also went to school at the time where that specific bissection method was being taught.

Coincidence number one.

Following his graduation, George worked his way up through the state health system, also making very high society friends along the way, friends with lots of Hollywood elites along the way. I think we're learning now that that means something.

Connections.

Yeah, I think we're learning that that has something. It was through this social network that he met his first wife, Dorothy Harvey, who was the former wife of director John Houston, with whom Hodel had one child, a daughter named Tamar. Hodel's marriage to Dorothy Harvey didn't last long, but his relationship with his daughter, Tamar, would prove pivotal. Not only to his life, but in Steve's case against his father. On October first, 1949, Tamar disappeared from the couple's home on Franklin Street and was nowhere to be seen. I believe at this point, she was about 14-ish. Yeah. After several hours of contacting friends and neighbors, George Hauetel did contact the LAPD and reported her missing. Two days later, she was found to be staying at a friend's house, and she was taken into custody by the LAPD. While she talked with a police officer, she explained that she'd run away because, My home life is too depressing because of all those sex parties at the Franklin house. Now, coming from someone so young, the statement was very shocking to the police officer. More shocking, though, was Tamar's confession that not only had she seen the parties, but also, quote, took part in them.

By the time the interview ended a few hours later, Tamar had implicated her father and three other adults in a conspiracy of abuse, as well as confessing to having engaged in various sex acts with several of her male classmates at Hollywood high school. She was being abused on a galactic level.

Yep, that is the only way to describe that.

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Given the severity of these accusations and the notoriety of the men at the center of the scandal, the authorities moved very quickly, and George Hauetel was arrested a few days later and held on $5,000 bail.

Guys, get it together.

By the time he posted bail a few hours later, the story had reached the press and the once prestigious doctor was now being associated with sex parties and incest. Not great. In interviews with police and reporters, Tamar claimed that Dr. Hodel had been molesting her since she was 11 years old. This is her father. And that she had been encouraged to participate in sex acts with other adults at various house parties. To which she obviously couldn't consent. What that means was she was raped. That's what that means. That's the clearer way to say that. Not that she was encouraged to participate. She was raped. She was raped. In early December 1949, George Hodel went on trial for the abuse of his daughter, and the DA presented several witnesses who claimed to have been at the sex parties and verified what she alleged. Wow. Even Hodel himself, and this should not be understated, because even Hodel himself stated in depositions that he had been, quote, delving into the mystery of love and the universe with his daughter.

Yeah, no, there's no mystery about fucking your own child.

It's wrong. And later, he will claim like, No, I didn't do anything. It's like, Nope, you said it. You said it because he also suggested that his memory of the events was, quote, unclear like a dream.

He's fucked. He's disgusting.

Fuck that guy. The case It could have been an easy prosecution for the DA.

Close and shut. Open and shut.

Had it not been close and shut.

Don't even open it.

Just shut it. Just shut it.

Throw him behind bars.

But there was one statement made by Tamar during questioning from the defense that made it change it a little. Before ending his questioning, defense attorney Robert Nieb asked one last question. He said, Tamar, do you recall a conversation you had with a roommate at the Franklin house by the name of Joe Barrett? And do you recall in that conversation making the following statement to him, quote, This house has secret passages. My father is the murderer of the Black Dahlia. My father is going to kill me and all the rest of the members of this household because he has a lust for blood. He is insane. The courtroom was fucking stunned by this. I would think. And Tamar tried to explain that she had no recollection of having said that.

I mean, of course. She's scared for her fucking life. Yeah.

Despite the strength of the case going into the trial, it soon became clear that the defense had intended to make her seem like a petty, vindictive daughter who was willing to lie in order to get revenge on her father. I don't think she was lying. Who she felt ignored her. That's what they were trying to go with.

I think she wished that he ignored her.

Honestly, she'd be better off. One defense witness, after another, took to the stand to call Taemar a liar, or worse, to recant their previous statements, corroborating her initial accusations. They had said she was a... And then they would come back and be like, just kidding. Real nice. She's a child. Steve Hodel later learned that several of those fucking witnesses had been offered large sums of money by his father to lie on the stand.

I think they call that hush money.

I hope you are having the life you deserve or you are having the afterlife that you deserve to all those people.

I fully believe in karma.

At the end of the trial, George Hodel was found innocent of the charges. Absolutely insane. Even after he said- Money, he can get you out of anything. He said he had been exploring the dream world, whatever the fuck it was, with his child.

Yeah, you're fucking gross, dude.

Several months later, George relocated to Hawaii, where he remarried and cut off communication with all of his children.

Wow. He's a piece of shit. That's good.

But they're better off without him. Yeah. Steve Hodel hadn't given that statement about the Black Dahlia during the trial, much thought, really, until he was going through his father's belongings after he died in 1999.

I hope he got a horrible death.

I do, too. He came across a small photo album that not only contained a photo of Steve's ex wife taken before he'd ever met her, but also a photo of Elizabeth Short.

That is insane. Coincidence number two, everyone. Yeah.

The photos caught Steve off guard, and he started going through his father's history more closely, hoping to find out why he had a photo of a notorious murder victim. He also found other photos that he believes could be Elizabeth Sharp, but they have not been confirmed. Okay. Over the course of several years, Steve Hodel combed through old police files in City Archives. Remember, he is an LAPD Homicide Detective. He's a detective. And he talked to anyone who knew his father and could provide any insight into his history. Through that process, he learned that his father's close relationships with many celebrities including the artist Man Ray, who is a surrealist artist, would figure prominently in his theory. According to Steve, in the mid-1940s, Dr. George Hauetel had become known as a reliable and discrete provider of abortions. Whose client list included Elizabeth Short.

Meaning he had even more blackmail on people.

Exactly. In his interview, Steve claims to have spoken with at least eight people who, quote, asserted that they knew firsthand that Hodel had some relationship with Short. At least eight people have said that.

That's a lot of people. Yeah.

Based on... And that artist, Man Ray, he does a painting. A couple of his paintings are very reminiscent of the crime scene. Yeah. Based on all the pieces he uncovered while writing his book, Steve Hodel concluded that his father coaxed Elizabeth Short to a party at his house where she was subjected to sexual assault, torture, and eventually murdered. He offers a large amount of circumstantial evidence to support this claim. Again, like I said, circumstantial evidence is evidence, including the fact that Short's body was found to be positioned in a way that, like I said, recalled two of Man Ray's more famous works of art, which Dr. George Hodel was very interested in. Yeah. Now, you can also... He was like, very into surrealist dream shit. Clearly. You can hear it when he says, Oh, I was all a dream, and I He's exploring the dream of the universe and blah, blah, blah. He's very into that shit, so that does figure prominently. Despite the circumstantial nature of the evidence, Steve wasn't alone in his suspicions either. Following Hauetel's acquittal for assaulting his daughter, LAPD detectives started looking closer at him as a suspect in the Elizabeth Short case.

Oh, shit. During that time, they were like, whoa, whoa. What about this guy? Wait a second. The other officers outside of Steve Hodel. This included Dr. Hodel being followed by investigators for several weeks and having his phones tapped for a period of time.

Which when you hear about the phone tapping of it all, I'm like, I don't know how you could think of anything else. How did you not continue going into this? How did you not even build more against him?

Because I think people got paid off. Hush money. Yeah. During this period, George Hodel had been heard on more than one occasion to vaguely allude to his participation in Elizabeth Shorts' murder. In one phone conversation, on the first day of being tapped, George tells a friend, Suppose an I did kill the Black Dahlia. They can't prove it now because my secretary is dead. Coincidence number three. Who says that?

Not me.

And ultimately, the investigation into George Hauetel went nowhere and was ended when he moved to Hawaii in 1950. But let me tell you a little more about why that's insane. Yeah. So on the very first day after he said that, supposing I killed the Black Dahlia, they can't prove it now because my secretary's dead.

And it's also like, why do those two things correlate to each other, George.

Exactly. On that same, those first few days, he said that they also got the statement of... They got that statement. They got him bragging about paying off law enforcement.

Wow.

Having officers demoted. That's good. Who were peaking too much into his shit. And anybody who was looking further into the case that his daughter had against him, anybody who was on that, that he was getting demoted paying off people to get to turn on the stand, which they have proof of.

Which is how he was ultimately acquitted. Yeah.

And his physician friends were also part of all these conversations. Apparently, so there was a Lieutenant Jemmison, who was working Hodel's case. One of his physician friends that he talked to, this Lieutenant Jemmison, he was quoted in a report as saying to this Lieutenant, Someday I'm going to fix Tamar. I'm going to cut a chunk out of her calf of her leg and fry it and eat it in front of her eyes and then puke it up in front of her face.

What?

Those are his friends, physician friends, saying that about his daughter who he is accused and most definitely assaulted. Yeah. Oh, just of note, there is a large portion of flesh removed violently from Elizabeth Shorts' thigh. By the way, and her right breast was sawed off. So hearing some of his friends say, I would cut a piece of her calf out and fry it and eat it in front of her, is pretty noteworthy when you look that there are pieces of Elizabeth Shorts' flesh that have been very obviously and very intentionally removed from her body in fatty parts of her body as well. Yeah. Her thigh and one whole breast. Wow. You're telling me that's coincidence? We just happen to have a guy that's saying he's going to do that?

I think that's coincidence number four now. Wow. Holy shit.

Yeah. In February, when they were tapping his phone, there was one day where they hear George Hauetel speaking of his secretary Ruth Spaulding, who he was speaking of before, my secretary's dead. And he said he died. She died. She died under suspicious overdose in 1945. And this time he's saying, quote, They thought there was something fishy. Anyways, now they may have figured it out. Killed her. Maybe I did kill my secretary.

So he literally just said it. He killed her. Maybe I did.

He's the jinks. You have it. Of course, I killed them. You literally have it. Apparently, if he had any relationship with Elizabeth Shore, But that secretary would have known about it. Of course she would have. Obviously.

She organized all this shit.

According to Steve Hauetel, the LAPD at the time acknowledged that they suspected and investigated Hauetel of intentionally overdosing his secretary with secanol, which is a habituate and a sedative. They said they looked into him. They thought he did it. They investigated it at the time. There is a lot on these tapes, and I urge you to check them out because holy shit, he was a shady dude.

It's literally proven that he was paying law enforcement officers off. Yes, he was talking about it.

And oftentimes, he would talk in German to his friends saying these things. What the fuck? Yeah, it's insane. The transcripts of these tapes are bonkers. They're bananas. I don't know how we just fluffed away and we're like, I don't know, maybe he's a suspect. What?

You almost wonder if he did know that they had a firetapped him.

Oh, he absolutely did at one point.

And he was like, fucking with them.

He absolutely did at one point. It's insane. Now, in the early 2000s, Listen, Steve Hodel presented all his materials to the Los Angeles district attorney. They reviewed the material and ultimately decided not to pursue the case.

For what?

Mistake. For what? Mistake, in my opinion. Big mistake. What the fuck, you guys? I think it's such a big mistake they didn't pursue it. It was like, Dude, he's dead.

The least you could do is say, look into it and see if it's for real.

Steve's done all the fucking legwork. He might as well give it a shot.

When it's like, you're not getting any more money from this guy. He's dead. Yeah.

Fucking convict him. Yeah, convict him. He can't hurt anymore. Let's go. And also the people that were at that time being paid off by him and all that shit, that's the older LAPD. This is supposed to be a new crop of people that are supposed to be going through this. Prove that you're better. Prove that you're not those people. And it's like, look Listen to it, man. There's enough here.

Yeah, absolutely. In my opinion, he is absolutely without a doubt the killer.

Yes. If you look at the transcripts of these tapes, there's also a time where they caught a woman screaming on the tape, and then they hear George Hodel talking to another person on the tape saying, Leave no trace. That's good. And a woman is screaming.

And they didn't go check that out.

And even Steve Hodel is like, I don't understand how nobody listening to those at the time. They were tapping him like, live. Why nobody made the five-minute trip from the department to go check on what was happening because he was like, At the very least, there was like, At the very least, there was a felonious assault of a woman happening. Clearly. And they didn't do anything. So that, to me, tells me everything. It's Like, you didn't want to intervene on that? What the fuck were you going to intervene on?

Nothing if it cost them money.

It's crazy. I very much encourage you to look into that whole part of it because it's wild.

Or Steve Houdal. Imagine coming to that realization and imagine what his fucking childhood was. Exactly. Like, my God.

It must be frustrating that nobody's fucking listening to you. Yeah. Now, since Elizabeth Shortsbody was found in that vacant lot in 1947, her murder has fascinated And I'm one of those people, fascinated the public and generated no small amount of myths, legends, lore, everything associated with it. By this point, it's entirely likely what's known about the victim in the case is a lot of legend, in fact. We've given you all the facts we can, but a lot of things you'll hear. We were talking about how she went to Hollywood to become a star. That was true.

It's a very small piece of it.

Yeah. It's like she had a lot more that she wanted to accomplish out there, like getting her life together and starting over, being healthy, being able to breathe, meeting someone. She had all kinds of aspirations. So it's like a lot of this became, and there's things you'll hear that you can easily debunk. On one hand, the notoriety of the case, it's surprising because there was very little evidence that they had. It's not like Elizabeth Short was a famous actress at the time. She was a civilian walking around, trying to get job. But when you look at how she was found, what she endured, and the mystery surrounding her, it's easier to understand why this has become such a fascination for everybody.

And the pool of suspects.

That pool of suspects. And just like that crime scene, there's no way this wasn't going to fascinate people.

Going back to the manoré of it all, you guys got to look at some of those photos.

It's interesting, to say the least.

To even just like, don't look at the crime scene photos if you don't to, but even just to hear them described the way that her body was positioned off center. Yeah.

Go look at Manreys' art. Just go look at it. This also is the intersection between Hollywood and murder, which is something that always is going to get everybody's attention. It gets my attention. It's a fascinating place. It's a dark place. It's a scary place. It's a beautiful place. It's a chimery place. It's like all- It's layered. It is so layered. Since her death, Elizabeth Short has become a symbol for anyone hoping to moralize in one direction or the other, because a lot is placed on how many boyfriends she had and what she was doing with her life. It doesn't matter. Whatever the facts, it seems unlikely that anyone's going to be really satisfied with an ending to this case because people have so many different theories. But I think people... I almost think it's like the Jack the Ripper case, where you don't even know anymore if people want it solved. If they just want to keep talking about it. That are not part of the case. You know what I mean? That they just want to keep talking about it and keep theorizing. A former LA Times reporter, Larry Harnish, who we mentioned earlier, said People don't want the record set straight.

People want this grab bag of noir tropes, which is not great.

Honestly, you said it perfectly. It's a bunch of noir tropes.

A grab bag of noir tropes. When you really look at the reality of the case, and this is just our opinion that I think Steve Hodel is onto something here. Absolutely. I think he's a very interesting person to listen to.

And a trusted source.

A trusted source. Somebody who has a long history of not being a dickhead that I can tell. I think it's an interesting one, and I think it can be solved. I really do. I think it can. I think we just need to keep pushing for it.

You never know. We said, a cold case is never cold.

It's never cold. It's never It just gets a little chilly, and we just got to give it a blanket. So I think we can do it. Steve, let's go. Steve's like, I tried. Steve's like, But I've done everything.

He's like, I literally went to everybody I could.

Steve, I don't know. I want to help you.

I just got to re-approach when there's new people.

Exactly. They just got to reignite it, reinvigorate it, keep it in people's ears, keep talking about it, keep bringing new things forward. And eventually it's going to happen. I know it. So that is the case of the Black Dahlia, the murder of Elizabeth Short. It's a crazy one. It is. And I'm glad we revisited it. Yes, same. I wanted to give it a little more space. You definitely gave it more. And time and attention. Yeah. So more details. So more details. Yeah, for sure.

Very interesting case. I think we could probably revisit it again in even five more years. Absolutely.

And we would have more. And thanks to Dave for doing such a good job with this one, too.

Dave is one of the smartest people I know. He is.

He's lovely.

You guys should all have a friend like Dave. You should. So we hope that you keep listening.

And we hope you keep it weird.

I... Honey. Honey. We don't got to say it. That's where they don't fill your own cup, bringing it full circle.

Steve, let's talk. Steve.

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A few miles from the glass spires of Midtown, Atlanta, lies the South River Forest. In 2021 and 2022, the woods became a home to activists from all over the country who gathered to stop the nearby construction of a massive new police training facility nicknamed Cop City.

At approximately nine o'clock this morning, as law enforcement was moving through various sectors of the property, an individual without warning shot a Georgia State Patrol trooper.

This is We Came to the Forest, a story about resistance. The abolitionist mission isn't done until every prison is empty and shut down. Love and fellowship.

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