00:00:00
This is exactly right. Isn't some far off concept? It's already here. Next starts now.
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Hyundai, an official partner of FIFA. Goodbye. When a charming neurosurgeon rode into Frontier Town
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selling a persona of confidence and care, patients trusted him. He wore cowboy boots in the operating room
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and became sought after by patients. He promised to heal them. Instead, he left a trail of broken bodies.
00:00:51
This is a story of greed, betrayal, and a fight for justice. Listen to Dr. Death the Cowboy wherever you get your podcasts
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Find your summer escape today. Visit Pura.com to learn more. Goodbye. Hi everybody!
00:01:45
Hi! Fan cult! Oh, should I give it an official What's Up fan cult? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:01:50
What's up fan cult? I pushed that a little bit. It was kind of obnoxious. It was great.
00:01:58
I went nasal on it. Hi. Well, hi. Thanks for coming out in the rain. This is, right?
00:02:09
That's here for weather in Los Angeles. Can you believe it's happening? This is, I would say, the first official live, in-person Los Angeles fan cult meeting.
00:02:22
Welcome, everybody. Yeah. We're going to call your name from a list. That's right.
00:02:30
Please only say the word present. Yep. And then tell me if you've messaged with my dad on the fan cult.
00:02:35
Go on. Please. Is Marty here tonight? No, he's not. Oh. Maybe. I didn't invite him.
00:02:42
Maybe. I don't know. He's in the back wearing a weird mustache. Marty, we see you.
00:02:49
We feel you. No, that's Steven. Steven. Oh, Steven, you are here, right? No, not there.
00:03:01
Yeah, it's so weird doing this in our hometown and not being in another city and staying at a hotel tonight.
00:03:11
Oh, we're going to stay at a hotel. I forgot to tell you. I got us the bridal suite at Shudder's.
00:03:17
We're going to drive out. Yeah, it's going to be the most romantic night of the entire tour.
00:03:26
Well, so you probably all know this. You saw the amazing sign in front of the L.O.A. tonight,
00:03:31
but we are here because TNT invited us to screen the pilot of their new series, I Am The Night.
00:03:41
It's really fucking cool, obviously. it centers around the Black Dahlia murders, which is fucking fascinating. And then you all know,
00:03:50
like the back of your hand. Yeah. We're still going to go over it. We have to talk about it.
00:03:55
We have to lay it out for all the people that brought their mom or whatever weird choice they
00:04:00
decided to make tonight. Hey, I work with you. We've only talked twice. Do you want to come to
00:04:05
a murder comedy show with me? I bet you won't be offended at all. Is that a crucifix you're wearing?
00:04:10
Okay, let's see how our night goes. And you're fired. And why do I keep inviting my boss places?
00:04:20
It is really freaking cool to be at the El Rey, though, because I've seen so many concerts here.
00:04:26
Since I was super young. And this neighborhood, Miracle Mile, is my family's neighborhood.
00:04:32
You grew up rich? Since, no. Truly, no. That is a myth. That's a lie I'm floating. I mean go for it.
00:04:46
Here's the thing about Georgia is she's fucking from tons of money. Her parents own miracle money.
00:04:53
So my aunt Elaine, when she was in high school, I don't know, the 50s let's say?
00:05:02
Is this a real person? I swear to the air, I texted with her today. She went to high school at Fairfax, and she used to work here when it was a movie theater.
00:05:12
Really? Serving popcorn. Yeah. Isn't that neat? And I told her I'm going to be here tonight.
00:05:16
She said, break a leg. I asked my mom how long we'd live in Miracle Mile, and she didn't text me back.
00:05:23
Because she's too popular for me now. Because Janet started listening to some of the back episodes, and now she knows everything
00:05:31
you're saying about her. Yeah. Yeah. Probably. She got a hold of a copy of our book.
00:05:36
She was like, there's a chapter called I Hate My Mom by Georgia Hartstark. And so I don't love you anymore.
00:05:46
I'm not going to be texting with you until we discuss that. That's right. I actually one of my favorite concerts I ever seen was here was Yola Tango a couple years ago And here the hugest brag I got to be in that balcony somehow I don I not sure I definitely didn buy anything
00:06:06
So it was like I was with somebody or there was, I maybe knew the balcony guy, I'm not sure, but I got up into that balcony.
00:06:12
And then me and my friend Matt Price were eavesdropping on people at the bar's conversations.
00:06:17
And then we started yelling out nouns that they were saying like everyone at the bar was being so
00:06:25
Intensely Los Angeles like there was two dudes that kept on talking about Runyon and they were just like fucking
00:06:32
Runyon this and Runyon that I fucking what would they say? It was just like dude. I went out to Runyon the other day where I was like it isn't it's a dirt uphill with dog shit on it
00:06:43
Is what Runyon is. Truly. If you feel like working out and you love animal feces, get the fuck up Runyon.
00:06:49
Yep. Truly one of the worst places to hike in Los Angeles. It stinks the whole time.
00:06:57
And you're outside. So you're like, is there dog shit on my shoe? Oh no, the trail's made of dog shit.
00:07:04
I see. It's definitely one of those beautiful places that make you say to yourself, this is why
00:07:08
I take my shoes off before I go in my house and make everyone do so. It's the reason I say, oh, why did I ever think I would be an actor in Los Angeles?
00:07:19
That's crazy. I would never walk up running unless someone had a shotgun to my back.
00:07:26
And even then, I'd be like, could we go somewhere with less shit? But anywhere else.
00:07:32
Let's just get to the end of this. Can we? How about the oil derricks? They hardly have any shit around them.
00:07:39
Yeah, so we just sat up there yelling, run your own. I think M Cafe also got yelled at at some point.
00:07:48
Those two go hand in hand, though. Right? You walk Runyon, then you go get your fucking keto lunch at M Cafe.
00:07:56
Yeah. There's some people here that are like, look, I'm from Torrance. I don't know what the fuck you are talking about or why.
00:08:03
It sounds terrible, though. It's a celebration of Los Angeles. That's right. Your hands are ghost-like cold.
00:08:11
I know. Oh! Cold like a ghost! Oh, can we show you out there? Oh, yeah! Show that out, the girl!
00:08:19
Yes! Can you believe it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! Rockets! Yeah, this is from actually local Los Angeles designer, May 68th.
00:08:31
Mr. Fred Siegel. Oh, what? May 68th? Yeah. The girl who made the collar shirt that says SSG.
00:08:39
Yeah, she's good. And then that's it. It's a dress. It's a little tight. I had to take my bra off to zip it all the way up.
00:08:48
That's what we're all about. Sacrificing for show business. That's what we do. You have noticed that bras are just to fill out your outfit.
00:08:58
So when somebody doesn't zip, if you just take it off, you don't need a filling out anymore.
00:09:04
God, that hasn't been my experience in life. What so fucking ever. Tie it down. Oh, here's my fucking outfit.
00:09:17
It's called, yes, it's absolutely a show, but it's here in Los Angeles, and I like cashmere,
00:09:28
and I also couldn't find my tights. I have my show tights with the one pair that were made by the military.
00:09:39
And they're the Spanx that hold you in with nuclear fission. I couldn't find those.
00:09:48
Yes or no? You use an entire roll of a lint roller backstage. I brought so much George and Frank with me tonight.
00:09:56
My dogs are here in spirit and in hair. I swear to God, I was lint rolling this stupid fucking sweater for the entire time we were backstage.
00:10:06
The entire time. And it was almost like that thing, pet owners, back me up. It's the thing where you start rolling and then more comes up.
00:10:18
You're like, oh, I just wanted those three gone. Now there's seven. Where did they, where are they coming from?
00:10:24
And why haven't I come out with my own line of dog hair sweaters? Yeah, because it would just be so much easier.
00:10:31
You know what you got to do? Take your bra off and then everything fits. I do not think. Do you know that I have nightmares where I'm like at a party and I'm like, this is a pretty good prop.
00:10:40
I'm not wearing a bra. I've had that nightmare easily 50 times. Easily. Wait, hold on. Stephen, you are here, right?
00:10:48
Yeah. Okay. Let people admire you. Hey. Thank you. Let's see that Mustang! Did he get a folding chair? Oh, Vince!
00:11:06
If you're in folding chairs, thank you so much. There's really nice classy chairs up front, and then they're like,
00:11:14
we have to borrow some from the church down the street. We don't usually put people in the aisle. We're a rock fucking venue.
00:11:19
What are you doing? Usually, I'm standing back there, there, hopefully leaning against the thing, not seeing behind some tall fucking indie rockers.
00:11:28
Oh, wait. The tallest guys like music. Truly. And being bored out of my mind. Have you ever,
00:11:37
I've poked people in the back when they stand in front of me. They're truly tall. Yeah. Fuck you.
00:11:41
You know what you're doing. Yeah. You know? Yo, yeah. Yeah. Because you can always poke and run
00:11:47
or just slightly shift. And then it looks like the dude standing next to you poked him and they're
00:11:51
Oh no a fight Everybody get away Get away a fight Yes I want to see a good fucking fight tonight you guys If there anybody out there that not feeling it with their neighbor
00:12:06
go ahead and express that through your fists. I would love it. TNT's like, edit that part.
00:12:12
She can don't violence, she can encourage violence. So anyway, thank you so much for being here tonight.
00:12:19
We are so stoked. Honestly. Thank you guys, especially because it's raining. You guys are heroes.
00:12:27
Yeah, you really are. We appreciate it. Because it wasn't just like sprinkles, sprinkles, the ground gets wet, that cool smell comes up,
00:12:33
and then you walk around, which is what Los Angeles thinks rain is. In a really cute jacket.
00:12:38
You're like, I have a raincoat. Oh, well, I guess I'll wear my jacket from the 70s.
00:12:42
Nope. This was like... Is that me? You're making fun of me. I'm celebrating you.
00:12:47
You don't do this. I don't swing my leg like that. You don't. Yeah, no, I was just going to say tonight is ugly.
00:12:57
It's ugly rain gear weather. And that is a huge sacrifice for our audience to come out.
00:13:03
We know. It's hard to come out at all, like when it's not raining. And you have to be around other people.
00:13:09
The grossest. You're just like, every time I go out now, especially, I'm just like,
00:13:14
I want to go to that party, but if one person talks about Runyon in front of me,
00:13:18
I swear to God. I swear to God, I can't do it. Not again, Anne Cafe. No. Alright, let's sit down.
00:13:26
Alright. You guys. We're like, this show's about Black Dahlia. We do a show about it.
00:13:34
And I covered like three, like very early in the podcast. A long time ago. It was like two, 18 months ago.
00:13:44
Podcasts around here. some suspects, but we haven't done the Black Dahlia, so it's kind of perfect.
00:13:50
Did I just step on you trying to say there hasn't been a Black Dahlia around here for 25 years?
00:13:54
I was going to say podcast around here. No. Edit it to make it sound good, Stephen.
00:14:00
Stephen, put the private show filter on this, because we're just, it's so intimate.
00:14:05
Loosey-goosey. Yeah. We're going to cover, I'm going to cover the Elizabeth Short aspect,
00:14:11
so that by the time we show you so what's exciting is we get to show you the show
00:14:16
and before anybody else gets to see it because that's like one of the many benefits
00:14:22
of being in the fan cult is like now we're going to try to make you all our plus ones
00:14:28
for all this shit that we get and when people are like hey here's our thing and then we're like you guys
00:14:32
come in here so maybe we should do like we should do a thing where we should be watching TV
00:14:36
with everybody in public that would be really good just like okay does your show
00:14:40
have a knife in it, we'll all watch it. That sounds good. Only if you have a smattering of folding chairs, though.
00:14:46
That's the only way. We should do BYO folding chairs. Absolutely. There's those people that have the ones
00:14:52
with the big pads. Oh, yeah. They come with. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just a big, gorgeous, kind of sometimes
00:14:57
plaid pad. You lost me. Plaid. Come on! Did you never play bingo in your life? You're so not Catholic, I'm sick of it.
00:15:07
Sick of it. Miracle Mile. I'm sorry, I was forced to play bingo on a farm. Are you?
00:15:17
No, I'm not. You shouldn't be, because that sounds amazing. It's the best kind. That's the one where the cow shits on the number, and then that's...
00:15:24
That's real. Nuh-uh. Yes, you don't know about this? Shut up. It's stuff they do at high school football games, where it's like, everybody gets a...
00:15:34
They put out a big grid on the football field with numbers. No. Yeah, and then the cow walks around, and whatever number it shits on, you win.
00:15:42
No! 26? Oh my god! Are you fucking with me? Because you're the first time in my life making me glad I grew up in suburbia.
00:15:49
It's fully real. Okay. Yeah, so I'm going to introduce you to the case itself. It's so funny, too, because probably everybody in this room,
00:15:59
this case is one of the most famous cold cases probably of the century. It's been talked about, it's been theorized about, there's been so many books written,
00:16:11
and there's so much kind of like espionage around it of like, was someone crooked, did
00:16:19
people get bought off, or people, whatever. Espionage? Was it Russian spies? What is the word I was trying to think of?
00:16:27
Rumors? No? Espionage. I think it was espionage. It was certainly not espionage.
00:16:33
No, what? It's too late. Tell me the word. Tell me the word. Speculation? Speculation, no.
00:16:46
What if we spend a half an hour just having every person guess? Let's go in order.
00:16:50
Shit on the right word. Let us just quickly lay down 25 large words. Now come pick what you...
00:17:03
I know what words are- okay, we'll think of it. Shit on the right word. Okay, starting now.
00:17:11
Okay, I got a lot of this research from, of course, as you would assume, blackdahlia.web.
00:17:19
And also, there's a website by a guy named Larry Harnish, and his website is imharnish.com,
00:17:27
And he's the guy, he is the beloved actually guy that I went to after I wrote everything up.
00:17:35
And it was like all the myths about this case that are not true, which you have to do these days because everybody knows these stories so well, knows the myths so well.
00:17:44
It's the reason I freaked out when I did Jack the Ripper in London, because as I was talking, I was like, but that's probably not true.
00:17:51
And like the entire time I was like, I bet that's not true. So thank God for Larry Harness she put up this website and it like That is a myth It is simply unproven It like a dude that so pissed that gossip has kicked up around a 70 cold case
00:18:10
God bless you, Larry. So, here's the piece that I was trying to, that I said I was so excited about, and I hoped you didn't know.
00:18:19
Okay. It is 72 years to this night. Wait. That the body of Elizabeth Short was found in Leimert Park.
00:18:31
Are you fucking kidding me? Back in January 15, 1947 is when she was found. It was the morning.
00:18:37
Sorry, it was the morning. Okay. That makes me feel a little less creepy. Does it?
00:18:42
No. How the fuck did I not know that? There's a possibility that some Sharpie at TNT is like, I know when we should do it.
00:18:49
And then as I'm typing it up, I'm like, oh my God. That would make sense. Yeah. Okay.
00:18:53
Now I'm glad it's raining. Right? It's so creepy. So crazy. 72 years ago is when this all kicked off.
00:19:04
Crazy. Now I should go into one of those lists that you would find at like a farmer's market where it's like,
00:19:12
here's all the things that happened on this day in 1947. But I don't know. Bobby Darin had a knife.
00:19:19
It's like that kind of shit. I don't have that for you at all. Oh, okay. Elizabeth Short is born on July 29th, 1924 in Boston, Massachusetts.
00:19:32
Her parents moved to Medford, Massachusetts. Right? It's so gorgeous. Just a little burg.
00:19:42
With her parents and her four sisters, her father Cleo, what he does for a living, he builds miniature golf courses.
00:19:49
Oh, that's fun. What a joyous life. Until the horrible stock market crash of 1929
00:19:56
when he loses everything and overnight they become poor. You'd think that a miniature golf course wouldn't have gotten tangled up in the crash.
00:20:06
Oh, you wouldn't believe the dark money in miniature golf courses. That's the next episode.
00:20:13
All the dirty mafia money that goes into building a huge dinosaur. door. So they go broke overnight. A year later, the father's, his name's Cleo, but I feel like I
00:20:25
need to say the father. His car is found abandoned on the Charleston Bridge. The body is never
00:20:30
recovered, but everyone believes that it was a suicide. Elizabeth is six years old when this
00:20:35
happens. So yeah, so her mom, Phoebe May, has to get a job as a bookkeeper, and then they move into
00:20:43
a smaller apartment and she basically it's her and uh her five daughters and she has to basically
00:20:50
keep everybody afloat by herself holy crap yeah now on top of that elizabeth starts to develop
00:20:56
lung problems so she has bad asthma and then she gets bronchitis then she has to have lung surgery
00:21:01
she ends up dropping out of high school sophomore years so the doctor recommends
00:21:06
that elizabeth gets out of massachusetts during the winter which is good any doctor would recommend
00:21:12
for anyone, and go down to Miami for a warmer climate. So she does that. She goes and stays with family friends.
00:21:21
Okay, so here is the first picture we have of Elizabeth Short, and this is her in high
00:21:25
school. Oh, my goodness. Look at this cutie. In 1942, ready for this twist-a-roo?
00:21:31
Yes. Phoebe's mother gets an apology letter from her, what she thought was dead husband.
00:21:36
But it turned out old Cleo just staged the suicide and moved on out to California to start over after the crash of 29.
00:21:45
What a dick. I mean, he's like, you know what? This stock market crash has hit me really hard.
00:21:52
So what I'm going to do is leave my five daughters and wife and go ahead and make it on my own.
00:21:58
Yeah. I'm going to make it easy on them by making them think I killed myself. Yes.
00:22:01
I'm just going to put a layer of intense tragedy on the top of it. and then good luck this winter.
00:22:08
Oh, also the one has consumption. Okay. So, he had gone out to California. He moved to
00:22:16
Mare Island, or he moved to Vallejo and worked at Mare Island Shipyard, which is NorCal.
00:22:24
Vallejo, a lot of Zodiac activity around Vallejo, that's why you might know that city.
00:22:30
I know it because it's about a half an hour away from my hometown, and it's basically the part
00:22:35
of the North Bay that is one big marsh. If you like marshlands, gnats, mosquitoes, short
00:22:44
puddles of still water, Vallejo, your next vacation needs to be at Vallejo. You need
00:22:50
to head on over. There's also a marine world with many trapped marine animals. Oh, it sounds beautiful.
00:22:56
It is the place where all dreams die. So, Elizabeth Short, who is a person who probably
00:23:03
has some of the worst luck of anyone I've ever read about. She decides, she tells her mom, I'm
00:23:08
going to go live with dad. She's 18. She's like, I'm going to California. So she goes to live with
00:23:14
her father who the last time she saw him, she was six. So she's like, it's going to be so great.
00:23:19
He's a longshoreman. We'll get along fine. For one second, I really, I was stoked because my
00:23:25
grandfather was a longshoreman, but he was a longshoreman in Oakland, but it was roughly the
00:23:30
at the same time. I bet they were friends. That's what I was like having total Liz Short's dad and my grandpa fantasies.
00:23:38
And then I was like, okay, first of all, what the fuck is wrong with you? Like, take a walk.
00:23:46
And also my grandpa did it in the 30s, so it was a different time anyway. So within a year she moves out of his house.
00:23:56
So it doesn't work out great. She moves in with some friends in Lawn Park. two and a half hours north of LA here, and she gets a job at the base exchange at Camp
00:24:06
Cook, which is now Vandenberg Air Force. Vandenberg, sorry. Yes, it's here for the Air Force.
00:24:14
They're here tonight, they're all up in the balcony. Wouldn't that be amazing if you turn around and they're all over your uniforms on?
00:24:20
Hey, everyone. Okay, that doesn't last long. Soon she decides to move to Santa Barbara.
00:24:31
That's a nice place. It's nice if you breed golden retrievers. But I think for a 19-year-old who keeps getting kicked out everywhere and has bad lungs,
00:24:44
it's not a great starter city, I would think. Fair, especially in the 30s. It's the 40s because, and here's how we know,
00:24:55
This is one of the more famous pictures of Elizabeth Short. While she's in Santa Barbara, she gets arrested on September 23, 1943, for underage drinking.
00:25:06
And that's when this picture of her was taken. Yes. Get it, girl. Right? Every time I see a picture of her, I want to get a perm.
00:25:20
Because she has insanely amazing hair. Yeah. Yeah. And also eyes that say, why don't you go fuck yourself? It's a suggestion. You don't have to take it. And that's my that's what I'm into.
00:25:34
OK, so she gets sent back to Medford, but to live with her mom. But she's like, here's the thing, though. I think I'm just going to go to Miami.
00:25:42
So she skips out on Medford and goes to Miami, and there she meets Major Matthew Gordon, Jr.
00:25:49
So he's a decorated Army Air Force officer in the 2nd Air Commando Group. And while they're dating, she knows him for a couple years, actually,
00:25:58
and while they're dating, he gets deployed to the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations in World War II.
00:26:04
So Major, somebody from the military, like, God damn this. I hate this respect. I hate that theater. That was one of the worst.
00:26:15
So he gets deployed to major military action, the end of World War II. She tells her friends that he's written our letter and proposed to her while he's over there.
00:26:25
She writes back and accepts. Oh, he wrote the letter while he was recovering from his injuries from a crash that he survived in India.
00:26:35
She accepts this proposal, and then on August 10th, 1945, Major Borden is killed in a second plane crash.
00:26:45
Oh, man. Less than a week before the war ends. God. That's rough. Sadder still. Here they are together, happy, young, and free.
00:26:58
He's hot. Yeah. And his amazing vision. He could see everything. Okay. So she's like, kind of like a widow.
00:27:15
So young, brokenhearted. So she does what all the brokenhearted people in the world do.
00:27:20
She moves to Los Angeles. Run young, run young. Now my heart is broken, run young.
00:27:30
Solve it. Pick up the shit and make it work for me. So sorry. We didn't sound check that. Please don't clap for that. No, no, I, God damn you.
00:27:46
So July 1946, she moves to Los Angeles to visit Army Air Force Lieutenant Joseph Gordon Thickling.
00:27:56
So she's found a new guy. He's stationed at the Naval Reserve Air Base in Long Beach.
00:28:00
she's going to do the Long Beach commute romance. So many great romances have happened up and down that highway.
00:28:10
It's a rough one. You just want to keep your eyes on that oil refinery out in the distance.
00:28:19
You better be worth this drive. You better have so many tattoos when I get there.
00:28:26
She already knew him. She had dated him when she lived in Florida, so she knew him and was into it.
00:28:39
She's like, great, let's try this again. Yes, I'm out here. L.A. sucks. I better go visit someone I know.
00:28:46
Here's a hot tip, though. Ladies, do not move around the country for a man whose job it is to move around the country.
00:28:56
If you're already married, God bless. That's great. Move all the fuck around. Get new dishes everywhere you go.
00:29:03
Not in a dating... Don't do a dating style. It doesn't make sense. Now you're like, I better go to Santa Barbara.
00:29:10
No. Okay. Good to know. All right. Here's just a fun picture of Elizabeth Short on the beach with her friends.
00:29:18
That's the hair I'm talking about. That's a fucking good hair. Yeah. Good head of hair.
00:29:24
So, Betty gets a job as a waitress. when she gets to LA, she gets an apartment behind the Florentine Gardens nightclub,
00:29:31
which is on Hollywood Boulevard. Oh, yeah. Right? A classic. There are rumors that she had dreams of becoming an actor,
00:29:39
but she had no known credits, which is meaningless. She could have wanted to be an actor really bad and just never gotten a job,
00:29:47
like most of us here in Los Angeles. Why are we basing anything on credits? You can put anything on IMDb.
00:29:54
That how the internet works They also said and this is something that happened after the fact and obviously it reflects how awful and vicious the press was back then I mean it was especially horrifying
00:30:09
in the 30s and 40s where, and it was of course the time we talk about all the time where
00:30:13
like the press shows up at crime scenes at the same time as the police. So they're like,
00:30:18
hey, I just took a picture of this if you want to get over here and get this taken care
00:30:23
of. There's a lot of that kind of action. So the story of the Black Dahlia, she's often
00:30:29
referred to as a non-working actress. They say she dated a lot, she went out with a lot
00:30:36
of men, they talk about her going out with married men, that she drank at bars a lot,
00:30:41
that she had a lot of sex. To that I say, fucking good. Good. At least she got to have
00:30:49
some fun, truly. I mean, Jesus Christ. So, okay, so now we're up to the night she disappeared.
00:30:57
It's January 9th, 1947, and she's just back from, she'd just gone on a quick trip to San Diego
00:31:04
with a 25-year-old married salesman named Robert Red Manley. He claims that he dropped Elizabeth
00:31:13
off at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown LA, where she was planning to meet one of her sisters who
00:31:19
had just flown in from Boston. And members of the staff of the Biltmore did recall seeing her there
00:31:24
on the lobby phone. She was also reportedly seen at the nearby Crown Grill cocktail lounge soon
00:31:33
after. Six days later, on the morning of January 15, 1947, a young housewife named Betty Bursinger
00:31:42
is walking her three-year-old daughter up to the shoe repair shop in Leimert Park.
00:31:50
When she crosses the street, she's going up, and there's a bunch of empty lots because there was a big housing boom, and then it all slowed down during the war.
00:32:00
And so there was empty lots around. They hadn't built the houses yet. And so she sees what she believes to be a mannequin laying in the grass
00:32:10
in the empty lot in front of her. But the more steps she takes toward it, the more she realizes it is not a mannequin.
00:32:17
It is the naked, bisected, exsanguinated, mutilated, and explicitly posed body of a 22-year-old woman.
00:32:28
Betty Bursinger screams, grabs her daughter, runs to a nearby house, and calls the police.
00:32:33
And we have a picture of Betty Bursinger right there. Wow. Isn't that amazing? Yeah.
00:32:38
Now, this is not when she called the police. This is not January 15, 1947. I mean, she looks really calm for doing it.
00:32:48
She screamed it all out on the street. Yeah. And now she is with it. Hello? Hello? Is this the police?
00:32:53
Murray Hill 25703? The two responding officers arrive. They see what Betty said was there.
00:33:03
They confirm that that is actually what's happening and immediately call for backup,
00:33:07
up, which doesn't surprise me at all. So when detectives arrive, they actually start screaming, because now all these people, you
00:33:17
know, from the screaming and the hubbub, all these people have started gathering around.
00:33:22
And of course, the press is there. The second the police know, the press knows. So when the detectives come, they have to actually get everybody out of the crime scene.
00:33:31
People are walking around that vacant lot, walking all around near the body. and they have to clear the entire area so that they can look at it.
00:33:41
What's the word? Look at it. They can look at it. Investigate? Thank you. Okay, so Detective Lieutenant Jesse Haskins, who was one of those responding detectives,
00:33:54
he describes the condition of the body when he first arrived at the crime scene.
00:33:58
Quote, the body was lying with the head towards the north, the feet towards the south,
00:34:02
The left leg was five inches west of the sidewalk. The body was lying face up, and the severed part was jogged over about ten inches.
00:34:11
The upper half of the body from the lower half. There was a tire track right up against the curbing,
00:34:18
and there was what appeared to be a possible bloody heel mark in the tire track.
00:34:23
And on the curbing, which is very low, there was one spot of blood. And there was an empty paper cement sack laying in the driveway,
00:34:30
and it also had a spot of blood on it. It had been brought there from another location.
00:34:36
The body was clean and appeared to have been washed. Okay, so I'm going to show you the least bad crime scene photo from this murder.
00:34:46
If you choose to go online and look at Black Dahlia crime scene photos, don't do that.
00:34:53
Yeah, yeah. Many of you already have. You're like, it's too late. It's burned into my brain.
00:34:58
I can see it when I close my eyes. They're some of the worst, most horrifying pictures and also most, um, uh, like debasing pictures I've ever seen.
00:35:09
And so this one is, if you are squeamish in any way, staff, anybody, people that don't want to be here tonight, please look away.
00:35:19
So this is one of the more famous pictures. And the problem with this picture is the longer you look at it, you realize that's too long of a body.
00:35:28
and you start to kind of be able to put together what's happening underneath that blanket.
00:35:32
So from the side, this doesn't look too crazy, but on the top, you would see that the top of the body is all the way next to the bottom of the body.
00:35:42
So it looks, it's very upsetting. It's definitely the one I saw as a kid and was like, what the fuck?
00:35:48
This one or that bad one? This one. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Where it the kind of like what wrong with this picture where you like it I get it it a murder scene and then you kind of the more you look at it you like this is bad Okay Thank you Can I take it down There also it a bummer because there a lot of people that just for you know the horror comparison have done side by sides with a picture of her beautiful face when she was alive
00:36:13
And then the picture of her from the autopsy of the way her face, because her face was terribly mutilated, as many people know.
00:36:20
And that also, just be careful. Please be careful with these pictures out there.
00:36:25
They're awful. So the body went to the morgue for the coroner to examine. He reports the body's five feet, five inches tall.
00:36:31
She weighs 115 pounds. She has light blue eyes, brown hair, and badly decayed teeth.
00:36:37
Woop woop! There are ligature marks on her ankles, wrists, and neck, and an irregular laceration with superficial tissue loss on her right breast.
00:36:47
She has superficial lacerations on the right forearm, the left upper arm, and the lower left side of the chest.
00:36:54
She has multiple lacerations on the face and head, including, and this is the very infamous part,
00:37:00
he cut a three inch long gash on the right side of her face and a two and a half inch long gash on the left side of her face
00:37:10
so as to cut a big smile into her face. And there's also noted bruising on the front and right side of her scalp
00:37:20
with a small amount of bleeding in the subarachnoid space on the right side which is consistent to blows on the head.
00:37:28
So contrary to popular belief, and this is something I thought was total like...
00:37:34
Fact. Thank you, fact. Oh man, the most basic words. I'm here for you. Espionage, fact, can't do any of it.
00:37:45
Her hair had not been washed and set, which is something I heard and always believed.
00:37:50
It had been washed though and it was still wet, I read. That's not true? No. Her body had been washed.
00:37:56
And I think that's how that got, because also this was that time where it was like the press was so exploitive.
00:38:04
They would write anything, and they say that a lot of those stories got started by basically the facts getting spun out.
00:38:12
So the body had been washed clean, so they couldn't find any fluids. There's no sperm found on the body.
00:38:20
Her pubic hair had been removed. There were numerous cuts in crisscross patterns across her pubic area.
00:38:25
and most luckily and thank god most of her injuries are believed to have been sustained
00:38:30
post-mortem although because of the ligature marks they do know that she was tortured for days
00:38:35
the official cause of death was hemorrhage and shock and it didn't go unnoticed that the
00:38:44
bisection of the body was a clean professional job in sworn testimony before the los angeles
00:38:50
County Grand Jury, Detective Harry Hansen, said he believed the bisection was done by, quote,
00:38:56
a very fine surgeon. So it was, it was a, the cut was not, you know, vicious. It didn't, it was all
00:39:05
very clean and precise and done like a medical procedure. So they basically have to, because
00:39:12
they don't, she's an unknown person. There's nothing on her person at all. So they have to
00:39:17
take fingerprints off her hand, they send them to the FBI in Washington, and that's when they
00:39:25
identify her as Elizabeth Short of Medford, Massachusetts. So there are rumors, there's a lot
00:39:32
of different rumors about how the Black Dahlia got named. Some people say that there were people
00:39:38
in a soda shop, and it was basically just they made it up in a soda shop. There are people,
00:39:43
certain reporters of the time claimed to have named her. The one I like to believe is because
00:39:50
I really love Aggie Underwood, who is the, she was the City Desk editor and one of the first
00:39:57
newspaper, you know, like City Desk editors in the country. And she was one of the first
00:40:04
crime reporters on the scene. And they say that she had her photographer run out and go buy a
00:40:11
flower so she could leave it there and then be like, it's the Black Dahlia. Like she basically saw the body, knew it was going to be this huge story that wasn't going
00:40:20
to go away and knew that like a nickname should be coined. You know, there's not proof for any of those, but I vote for the third.
00:40:29
There were other newspapers, though, that named it the werewolf murder because she was
00:40:34
attacked so viciously and terribly. And that act didn't stick. It's in a couple articles that I saw that described it that way.
00:40:45
So then once she's identified, the police go around and they start talking to all the possible eyewitnesses from the night that she disappeared.
00:40:55
And they then release this special police bulletin. And so this is basically to find out anything else, any other information that they can get on Elizabeth Short.
00:41:04
And then it reads, Seriously. Leaving the car, she went into the lobby of the Biltmore and was last seen there.
00:41:40
In conversation, subject readily identified herself as Elizabeth or Beth Short. Okay, so when the press then hit, the stories got crazier and worse.
00:41:53
News items would describe her as a con artist a drifter a tease a party girl and a prostitute But the final report given at the Los Angeles grand jury stated explicitly that she was not a sex worker of any kind
00:42:07
Or an actor. Same death. Of the eight or so, four actors were like, come on, my auditions!
00:42:20
Of the eight or so headlines that I looked at. Only one of them did not mention her sexuality
00:42:29
or her sexual... It was always party girl, or they talked about her dating married men.
00:42:37
In the picture, it would be like 22-year-old girl murdered, but then the little writing under the picture
00:42:44
was just basically like... She left to party. Exactly. The slut-shaming opportunity.
00:42:49
It's super crazy to read that now. The only one that didn't do that was a newspaper from the Boston area, and they called her their hometown girl, which is, yeah, very sad and what she deserved.
00:43:00
Of course, the story's huge, and there's so many reporters on it. William Randolph Hearst had so many reporters.
00:43:06
He was just, like, paying anybody to get any information that they could. And so he then sets up a deal with the LAPD where he's saying, I will share the information they find with you if you let us break all the stories.
00:43:21
So you have to give us information you find out back, and then we get to break these stories.
00:43:25
So there was a lot of press and a lot of police-directed press along the way because of that deal.
00:43:32
And I'm sure a lot of people got paid off, too. A lot of the, like, everyone. Everyone's getting paid.
00:43:38
Sure. Okay, this is horrible. So there was a reporter at the Herald Express who it was his job to find Elizabeth Short's mother in Medford.
00:43:49
Oh, I know this one. Yeah, it's so awful. And he finds her and he goes to call her,
00:43:54
but he wants a scoop about what the family's like and what she was like when she was growing up
00:43:59
and what her life is like. And he knows that if he leads that phone call by saying your daughter has been terribly murdered,
00:44:06
that the mother's going to start crying and not get off the phone. So instead, he says,
00:44:11
your daughter has won a beauty contest. And then Mrs. Short goes on to hold forth
00:44:18
about how lovely her daughter is and how she's like asking her questions and shit yeah like he
00:44:23
milked her for information got the story and then told her and she was so shocked and so in disbelief
00:44:32
that they actually had to call um the medford police and send police to her apartment so that
00:44:39
she would believe that the news was true because she was just like this can't be true um yeah and
00:44:46
And maybe she was just like, I can't believe a fucking reporter would do something that
00:44:50
gross. That's the worst thing ever. Really? Yeah. So, on January 23rd, eight days after the body has been found, a man claiming to be the
00:45:04
killer calls the editor of the examiner and he says that he's going to mail them Elizabeth
00:45:10
Short's belongings. So the next day a package arrives and it contains her birth certificate, business cards, an
00:45:18
address book, photos, and a letter that the killer, supposed killer wrote with the individual
00:45:26
cut out letters and words like this. Like our logo. Like our logo. And it says, here are Dahlia's belongings.
00:45:35
And then here are Dahlia's belongings. So that's the letter. and then those are personal pictures over there.
00:45:43
That's a telegram that she got. There's like postcards in there. That's her birth certificate.
00:45:47
So it's almost like as if someone stole her purse and just sent all that, or like maybe her suitcase or something?
00:45:53
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Holy crap. So whoever sent it, you know, clearly either was the killer
00:46:02
or was right there in it. And also they couldn't get any fingerprints off of any of this stuff
00:46:06
because it was all coated in gasoline. So they couldn't trace it at all. So essentially there are over 150 suspects questioned and many more false confessions
00:46:20
were made. There's a bunch of letters sent like that. You can see them online too where people are just sending in words cut out that say like
00:46:28
don't try to find me I killed her and all the stuff. It's like then don't fucking send the letter.
00:46:34
But there was a $10,000 reward for information that would lead to the killer, so everybody,
00:46:39
you know, a lot of people are trying to get in the mix. And the case essentially goes cold.
00:46:45
In 1950, there was a radio show called Somebody Knows, which now I just read about it, and
00:46:51
now I want to listen to this show so bad. Because it was basically like the earliest version of Unsolved Mysteries, like a radio
00:46:58
version of it. And they basically told the entire case, and they were like, if you know anything, call
00:47:04
this number. Holy shit. To this day, 72 years later, this case is still unsolved and it is one of the
00:47:11
most famous, talked about, and theorized murders of this century. And that is the Elizabeth Short
00:47:18
side of this. Wow. I'm glad that it's awful. You had to say all the fucked up things. I mean. And I didn't.
00:47:28
Okay, well, so I'm going to talk to you guys about one of the main, the suspect.
00:47:34
And when I first heard about this a long time ago, I was like, bullshit, he's not the fucking,
00:47:40
and now I kind of think he totally did it. You really? After researching this, I'm like, this is him.
00:47:45
Really? Yes. So this is, and okay, let me, here we go. I got a lot of information from the Guardian.
00:47:50
A woman named Alexis Sobel Fitz wrote this great article about it. A lot of good info.
00:47:55
So let's go to 1999. Here we are. a former I have really thin eyebrows. Oh my god.
00:48:03
Just like speed-plucked eyebrows like you wouldn't believe. A pierced fucking lip that's gonna be a scar for the rest of my life.
00:48:10
And I'm standing here at an old 97's concert crying because of beer. Yeah. For me it was at the drive-in because I was emo.
00:48:21
Okay. Okay. Where were we? Oh yes. 99. Former LAPD homicide detective named Steve Hodel.
00:48:28
He finds himself sorting through his late father's belongings. His dad is Dr. George Hodel.
00:48:36
Stephen had never been close with his father. That's not true. That's not true at all.
00:48:42
His dad had abandoned the family shortly after Steve's 9th birthday. And he'd been married 5 times, had 11 children between all those fucking wives.
00:48:53
Oh wow. Truly. So we probably didn't have a lot of private time to spend with each of those kids, I'm guessing.
00:49:00
So Steve was one of the ones that he, whatever. Every two weeks you got to go to the park with him.
00:49:05
Yeah, for five minutes. Yeah. So Steve, ex-LAPD, homicide detective, is going through his damn shit.
00:49:13
He finds an old photo album tucked away in a box, and in the back of the album there's two pictures of a young woman that catches his eye,
00:49:20
And the photos are portraits of a beautiful woman with really dark black curly hair, really fair skin.
00:49:27
And when Steve saw the photos, having no understanding of what's to come, just immediately was like, that looks like the Black Dahlia immediately.
00:49:37
So he starts to look into his father's dark past and becomes convinced that he killed Elizabeth Short.
00:49:45
So he writes a book called The Black Dahlia Avenger, A Genius for Murder. in which he studies the case from scratch,
00:49:52
reading witness interviews, reading news. He's a homicide detective. Any homicide detectives this case.
00:49:59
All over it. He just goes to town. He's like, here are my skills. I'm going to use them.
00:50:06
He files a Freedom of Information Act to retrieve the FBI files on the murder, which I just want to sit there and read forever.
00:50:13
And all this other information that was collected on his fucking shady dad. That would be insane to read an FBI file about your dad.
00:50:23
Marty! What do you think? Ah! Grass, grass, grass. Yeah, that's about it. Urban camping and weed.
00:50:33
This is shit. Sorry, Dad. My dad's just like, he's drank the whole country's worth of Budweiser.
00:50:42
Just so much Budweiser. Oh, sorry, really quick. We've already said this, but we're showing you the pilot of the show, but we also have a special guest that's coming out after the pilot
00:50:55
that we're very, very excited to talk to. So that just popped into my head. I wanted to make sure you knew.
00:51:01
Good idea. Okay. Good call. Right. Okay, so here he is, the homicide detective. He files freedom, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:51:09
Okay. When the book is complete in the early 2000s, like 2003, he sends a copy of the book to a columnist at the LA Times named Steve Lopez.
00:51:17
Steve Lopez is like, okay, I'm gonna write a column about this, but I don't want to be lying, so I'm gonna fact check it.
00:51:22
And he asked the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office for more information on the murder.
00:51:29
And the DA's office gives Lopez access to a file that Lieutenant Frank Jemison, one of the original officers
00:51:36
investigating the murder, had left behind in a safe in the basement of the district's attorney's office.
00:51:42
So this fucking thing had been hidden since like 1950. Yes. And in 2003 or 4, Steve Lopez is the luckiest murderino alive when he gets fucking past this thing.
00:51:53
He's like, 16 left. Would your heart just be racing as you open that safe? Amazing.
00:52:01
I guess he might have a key. I'm thinking of a high school locker. I'm sorry. They probably have a more advanced system there.
00:52:09
I didn't know what you were counting. I was just agreeing. I thought you meant like files, 16 files.
00:52:13
Okay. You couldn't tell from my space work that that was an up and down high school locker
00:52:19
safe? Okay, it was like a whatever. The file contains photographs, newspaper clippings, and several hundred pages of typed interview
00:52:30
notes on the case compiled by this Jemison fellow. In the notes, Steve Lopez finds something that he's not expecting.
00:52:38
It's the Los Angeles Police Department was focused on six suspects, six main suspects.
00:52:44
They whittled it down in the Black Dali investigation. And on the top of the fucking list is Steve's dad, George Hodel.
00:52:50
Could you imagine? What if you saw that picture of dad's name on the top of the fucking...
00:52:57
Shit. Marty Hartstark? No! Here's a picture of Marty Hartstark. No. Here's a picture of George Hodel.
00:53:06
I mean, immediately he did it, right? Stephen. Stephen, do you see? This is an intervention for Steven's mustache.
00:53:19
What I'm saying is you gotta bring it in on the sides a little bit. I mean, talk about creepy.
00:53:26
He also looks like he could own a great Italian restaurant. Oh, yeah. Like, I want to say he has dead eyes and the thing I always like to say about killers,
00:53:35
but there is something about him that's like, uh, we, we, Clams Casino. There's a real Clams Casino feeling about this guy.
00:53:45
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Alright. Okay. So that's him. And then, okay, so dude, who is this dude?
00:53:52
I wrote. Who is this dude So Dr George Hill Hodel Jr was born in October 1900 Look I know He was raised in South Pasadena
00:54:07
Where all the bad ones come from. Yeah, upscale family. I don't remember the word for it.
00:54:15
He's super smart. Yes. There are no Miracle Mile family. Well, the word's espionage.
00:54:22
That's right. Right. He scores 186 on an IQ test when he's young, which is fucking high, you guys.
00:54:31
Is it? What's the highest? I think that's pretty close. I think it's like Einstein.
00:54:38
I don't know. I think it's up there. Average is like 105. Really fucking smart is 130.
00:54:44
Oh. Right? We've all taken them at boring desk jobs, right, and been really disappointed by our number.
00:54:50
Anyone? I could have sworn I was a genius. I really thought I was smart. When you realize you're an average person, it's a really disappointing moment in your life.
00:54:58
Not for me, I got 150, but... There's nothing, and also there's nothing sadder for a person who lived before the internet existed
00:55:06
and told lie upon lie everywhere they went, and then the internet came out, people were like, no, that's not true.
00:55:11
Like, I looked it up right there, and you're like, oh, I'm just trying to pass some stuff along.
00:55:18
Oh, he's also a musical prodigy. He's a smarty pants. He graduates high school at 15, goes to Caltech in Pasadena, but is forced to leave the university after a year due to a fucking sex scandal involving a professor's wife who he gets pregnant.
00:55:34
Whoa. Yeah. As a student. Yeah. And he's, remember, graduated at 15. So he's 16?
00:55:40
Yeah. So he's always... Not really. What? No. No. Not really. That's illegal. So, um, wow, he's got right to it. Yeah. So he gets out of that job. Eventually he, uh, he does
00:55:57
become a reporter and he becomes one of those reporters going to crime scenes with cops that
00:56:02
we talked about. What? Yeah. He's like one of those for a while. Eventually he goes, um, and gets a
00:56:08
pre-med degree at, um, the university of California, Berkeley, and his later, um, the highly acclaimed
00:56:15
University of California San Francisco School of Medicine he becomes a surgeon you almost said that like people would fall for it that that was really happening in the room
00:56:28
calm down everybody it's not that scary they got really into that part he eventually he's a surgeon
00:56:39
eventually specializing in sexually transmitted diseases and he actually did that for the city
00:56:45
so he was really into inner circles in the city. Okay, okay, we'll get to why that's important.
00:56:53
In 1945, George, his name is, comes under suspicion for the murder of his secretary, Ruth Spalding.
00:57:02
She had died of a drug overdose, but George was suspected of having murdered her in order to cover up his financial fraud.
00:57:08
But it isn't until October 1949 that he comes under police scrutiny for the Black Dahlia murder.
00:57:15
So he had this crazy, insane, awful sex scandal and trial, which it's a spoiler alert in the show, so I'm not going to go into it.
00:57:25
It's a fucking story of its own, and he's a monster. And this is when the LAPD starts investigating.
00:57:32
So they're investigating all known suspected or suspected sex criminals at this time for the murder.
00:57:37
So he's in on that because of this trial. Okay, so they're like what's up with him?
00:57:42
Well, his medical degree made him a good suspect of course because it was hypothesized that whoever bisected Elizabeth Short's body had some degree of surgical skill and it shows that
00:57:53
She had been given a did you say it? Hepicorectomy. Yes, I did. I said it a couple times. I just kept saying it.
00:58:01
Oh, I wasn't paying attention. Is that the thing about the ovaries? No, this is the thing where...
00:58:07
That's a myth. Oh, the ovaries is a myth. It's a procedure that slices the body beneath the lumbar spine,
00:58:13
the only spot where the body can be severed in half without breaking a bone. Oh, right, so that's the name of the way he bisected her.
00:58:20
Exactly. There's an actual medical procedure that is taught that's called whatever the fuck you just said.
00:58:26
Or refuse to say it again. Which is why people initially thought it was a surgeon, because it's like something that is taught.
00:58:32
Right, and it was taught in the 1930s when George had been in medical school. All right.
00:58:37
So he lives in the John Soden house, which is also known as the Franklin house. You guys, since you're from L.A., you fucking know this insane house.
00:58:48
When you're driving up Franklin towards Los Feliz, there's suddenly this Mayan temple happening
00:58:54
in those really expensive houses on the left. And you're like, what the fuck is that?
00:58:58
Well, it's actually, it was, it was built in 1926 in Los Feliz by Lloyd Wright, who was the eldest son of Frank Lloyd Wright.
00:59:10
That's got to be a bummer to be named that and then become an architect. I don't like these blueprints that much. Do you have any of your dad's stuff around?
00:59:20
Oh, I didn't want that Lloyd Wright. I didn't want this Mayan temple. I know. So, yeah.
00:59:26
Okay. Here's it. You know. You've seen it. Creepy. Amazing. So good. Dying to go in there.
00:59:34
Yes. We've got to. And it's right by the Los Feliz murder mansion, too. Creepy. Okay.
00:59:41
We just knock on every door in Los Feliz and be like, this is also a creepy house.
00:59:45
What's going on in here? Yeah. Light meth? Anyone? Anything light meth? Just some light meth.
00:59:51
Don't worry about it. Everyone knows that's south of Franklin. North of Franklin is just the old suspicious murders Okay so George the Dr George is friends with a lot of celebrities and he throws these crazy extravagant drug parties
01:00:07
like always happened in the 40s that you read about. Sex parties, you know, swing or shit.
01:00:13
And then a lot of elite Angelenos and Hollywood stars. I wrote that. No, I didn't. Happy to taste it.
01:00:20
So friends like John Houston. and he was good friends with artist Man Ray, who was also the family's photographer.
01:00:28
So they all hung out at the house all the time. Wow. Yeah. So the task force bugs his house in February 1950 for a month.
01:00:39
They just, I think probably pretty illegally, just fucking wired that house up and listened to it down the street in the basement.
01:00:45
Truly. and then so what the buggings revealed among other things was that he is doing illegal abortions
01:00:55
which were a felony at the time and giving payoffs to law enforcement officials I think because of that and
01:01:02
also they get some suspected talkings of his possible involvement in the death of his secretary and Elizabeth
01:01:12
Short. So here's what He says, suppose I did kill the black Dahlia. They can't prove it now.
01:01:19
They can't talk to my secretary anymore because she's dead. They thought there was something fishy.
01:01:24
Anyway, now they may have figured it out. Killed her. Maybe I did kill my secretary.
01:01:29
It's like straight up. Who is he talking to? Who is on the other side of that monologue?
01:01:36
I don't know. There's just like a maid like, uh-huh. Well, I'm done here, doctor.
01:01:45
I'm just going to back out slowly like a crab. I'm just going to crab walk the fuck out of here.
01:01:52
I'm just going to crab walk out of this Mayan temple and never come back. So his secretary, Ruth Spalding, we've talked about.
01:02:03
So police had suspected him, George, of murdering her in 1945. and because he was present when she fucking overdosed and then right after had burned some
01:02:12
of her papers before the police were called red fucking flag do you know was sorry to ask this
01:02:19
was that also in that house i think yeah he lived there in 1945 to 1950 so i think so well i mean
01:02:24
her death happened there i it might have been at his office i don't know haunted as fuck yes for
01:02:31
So the case has dropped due to lack of evidence or does he pay it off? But documents are later found that indicate that she
01:02:41
That his secretary got to publicly accused George Hodel of intentionally misdiagnosing patients and billing them for
01:02:50
laboratory tests medical treatments and prescriptions not needed. So he was a shady doctor. Wow our friend Steve his son
01:02:59
believes that Short may have been one of his father's patients and he did run a venereal
01:03:04
disease clinic in downtown Los Angeles where she, where the Biltmore Hotel was. I don't know if it was anywhere near that. I'm not trying to say it within the Biltmore Hotel.
01:03:14
I think the Biltmore had a VD clinic right next to that famous bar. Yes. The idea that they're just going to connect a VD clinic to it is the
01:03:23
thing that sells the most people right well but this but it I think it went away well I don't know let's fight about it I just wish we could fight about it
01:03:34
oh this is the fight you want to see so bad yeah this is it this is the fist fight it's just I start crying and then you start crying and then we
01:03:42
I'm gonna do John L. Sullivan style just stand over here for 20 minutes So in the recordings there's also audio of a
01:03:53
It's quiet quiet quiet, then a woman screams loudly twice and then it's and it sounds like it's coming from the basement
01:04:00
The end of this fucking screaming is on the Cox audio recording. Yeah I know So for his book see Steve sent sent the photographs that he was like I found these in my dad's shit
01:04:16
is this the black dahlia to a facial recognition expert um so one of them the facial recognition
01:04:22
expert was like it's not her and the other one it's inconclusive so here are those i think that's
01:04:28
the one that's inconclusive because it looks i could see that one but i might be that it's not
01:04:33
her i know i know that's not that's why i was like it's not him initially i mean i think it's
01:04:40
two different women. Well, yes, also I think he had a women issue. Yes. No, that he
01:04:45
fucking totally did. Yeah. So he could have pictures of anybody. It doesn't disprove that he didn't kill a little short.
01:04:52
Yeah. Not to slut shame him, but he was a perverted sex bait. He fucking fucked everybody.
01:04:57
Alright. So, that's probably not her, but there's other shit. The letters sent to the press
01:05:03
and police from the Black Dahlia Avenger, which is what he called himself, a man claiming to be the killer,
01:05:10
had a resemblance to his dad's handwriting. And handwriting expert determined that there was a strong likelihood
01:05:15
that his father's handwriting matched the script on some of the notes. And in the archives of UCLA,
01:05:22
Steve found a folder containing receipts for contracting work on his childhood home,
01:05:27
the fucking Mayan temple. Okay, the receipt showed that a purchase was made a few days
01:05:31
before Elizabeth Short's murder of ten five-pound bags of cement, the same size and brand found near her body that you just mentioned.
01:05:39
Yes, there was a cement bag in the driveway next to the body. With a drop of blood on it.
01:05:45
With one drop of blood on it. That's right. So they think that the killer used...
01:05:48
I'm restating that like I'm the one that discovered this. It was cool. 72 years later Karen killed Garrett Oh my God I put it together You said cement and I also said cement therefore I solve this crime Thank you good job So Steve also had a report from the grand jury from 1951 where Lieutenant Frank Jemison
01:06:11
says that one of George's so-called rumors, so he had like people stay at his house all the time because it's amazing,
01:06:17
identified Elizabeth Short as one of his girlfriends, but it's sketchy. This woman Lillian said that George spent time around the Biltmore Hotel as well
01:06:27
Whatever. Okay, then he's friends with this dude Man Ray our fucking friend who In 1934 this is just a tidbit, but this is one of his paintings or
01:06:43
Okay, and that's like his good friend, but doesn't it look like it's posed the way the top of her?
01:06:47
yes okay because her arms were yeah yeah you're not buying it okay well no sorry because the way
01:06:54
you set that up i thought it was going to be body that had the top half here and the bottom
01:06:57
oh no that would be amazing i was going to scream directly into this my thumb i mean there's another painting too of his that they're like it's the same and i it didn't it was
01:07:08
so not that i didn't post it but whatever i mean i bet you though at this point steve hodell that's
01:07:14
looking into his own father, who already probably knows his dad's a creep just by first-hand
01:07:20
experience. Every single thing he's picking up is like, holy shit. Just to be connected.
01:07:24
Yeah. You would be that way because there's enough, there's plenty there anyway.
01:07:28
There is. Yeah. So by 1950, Lieutenant Jemison believed that he had gathered enough evidence to charge Dr.
01:07:35
Hodel. He was allegedly about to arrest him for Elizabeth Short's murder when fucking Hodel skipped
01:07:41
town without his family abandoning Steve here where he moved to the Philippines and he lived
01:07:49
there for the next 40 years. No extradition from the old Philippines? They didn't have enough
01:07:55
evidence. Oh, right. So investigators did think that they believed that the case was solved and
01:08:04
that he was the killer. A lot of them did. But they didn't have enough evidence to go to trial.
01:08:07
But Steve doesn't think his father was ever going to be arrested since he had protection in the form of insider knowledge and dirt on higher-ups
01:08:16
Since he reportedly ran a high-end abortion business, which was a felony back then
01:08:21
So he was privy to all these sexual disease Histories as well of the rich and powerful and lots like he knew that he knew every dirty secret
01:08:29
He had a lot of shit on a lot of people. Yeah, including cops, prosecutors, celebrities
01:08:34
So he could have used that as blackmail. Yeah and he also thinks that the Soden house is where Elizabeth was killed and her body
01:08:44
surgically bisected there. He thinks it's at that house and I think they found like a secret room
01:08:48
or they think it's in the basement. A police cadaver dog and soil analysis test conducted in
01:08:54
2014 by a forensic anthropologist confirms that the soil samples from the rear of the residence
01:09:01
were, quote, specific for human remains. Oh. But it was, like, recorded for a ghost hunting TV show.
01:09:09
So take that as you will. If you wear big necklaces, you'll believe this. Those guys love a big necklace.
01:09:19
They love the dark. That's right. And big necklaces. Another mysterious case. Okay, wait.
01:09:25
But that is huge in and of itself. That human remains in your backyard is not common.
01:09:30
Right. I guess it wasn't big enough for the LAP to actually excavate or anything like that, so who knows.
01:09:37
They would have to find something. Right, right. So there's another mysterious case, that of Jean Spangler.
01:09:44
She was an actress who disappeared on the evening of October 7th, 1949. The night of her disappearance, she told her sister-in-law that she was going to meet with her ex
01:09:53
before going to work as an extra on a film set. Been there. It's very depressing.
01:09:58
Two days later, her tattered purse is discovered near the Ferndale entrance of Griffith Park,
01:10:05
which I Google map for you guys, and it's less than a mile from the Snowden house.
01:10:12
And inside her purse was a letter that read, Kirk can't wait any longer going to see Dr. Scott.
01:10:18
So they think that she had gone to get an abortion possibly. and people who think that he killed Elizabeth Short think that he killed her too.
01:10:29
And it would make sense that he went under a false name, probably. Right, right.
01:10:33
So, okay, all right. So then, recently on October 20, no, wait, in October 2018, which just happened,
01:10:41
there was a handwritten letter found by a dead undercover informant for the LAPD during the 1940s.
01:10:49
His name was W. Glenn Martin. His granddaughter finds this letter that he wrote that was that said don't open unless something bad happens to my teenage daughters
01:10:58
Essentially and then when she opens it the letter that had been written on October 25th 1948
01:11:04
Said that this someone with the initials G H George Hodel or Georgia Hardstark Was that was the murderer and that he had been a
01:11:18
a undercover informant who was friends with George. Sorry, that was a sealed letter?
01:11:25
Uh-huh. Wow. And so... Although you can steam open and reseal letters. Truly. Yeah.
01:11:33
I still love it. If it's true, it's fucking fascinating. Yes, it is. So he was so scared that George had found out that he was an informant that he wrote this
01:11:41
letter that said, if anything happens to my daughters, because he was thinking that his
01:11:45
get killed in, you know, as a... Griffith Park? Retribution. Yes. Yeah, open it and I'll tell everything.
01:11:55
Anyways, everyone thinks he did it. Or nobody. He did it, depending on what article you read.
01:12:04
Let's see. Okay. And so basically this show that we're about to watch, I didn't realize this until I was doing research,
01:12:14
it's based on the memoir called One Day She'll Darken, and it's written by the real granddaughter of this fucking psychopath.
01:12:23
And she also is credited as a writer for all six episodes. So this is just this crazy fucking story and it's all kind of true and real, you know,
01:12:33
in Hollywood ways. And it's really fascinating. Yeah, so the people that we're about to show you this episode now, and you guys probably
01:12:43
know most of this, but the young girl that this episode is basically based on is actually,
01:12:54
is it Flora? Fauna. Fauna. Damn it. You had two lessons. You were so close. Damn it.
01:13:04
So that's George Hodel. Yes. And then so we're going to watch the show now that like kind of delves right into it.
01:13:10
So excited. We're really excited. And just for general information, this show is directed by Patty Jenkins, who directed Wonder Woman.
01:13:22
It has got an all-star cast, including, for all you pine nuts out there, Chris Pine is the star.
01:13:29
And we're super excited that we get to show it to you tonight, so please enjoy. And afterwards, we're going to come out real quick and have a Q&A with someone from...
01:13:37
Not a Q&A, we're going to interview. Right. It's going to be fun. We'll be back.
01:13:42
Have fun. We're going to watch this with you guys. Yes. I Am The Night. Episode 1, I am the Knight on TNT.
01:13:53
And it's a secret, only you guys have seen it. Don't tell people word for word exactly what happened in that episode on the internet.
01:14:00
So we're very excited because we have the actor who played Dr. George Hodel. Yes, the creep at the bus station.
01:14:11
the amazingly talented Mr. Jefferson Mays is here with us tonight Should we sit?
01:14:27
Yes, you sit in the middle Thanks for being here Should we move forward and find our light?
01:14:32
Yeah, let's find our light Come on, you're a Broadway guy You know that stuff So that was incredible, and you played George Hodel. How much did you know about him before?
01:14:48
I knew very little. Alas, I had seen the crime scene photos of the hemicorporectomy.
01:14:56
Oh, you know how to pronounce that. And so that was it. And then I delved into Stephen Hotel's memoir of his father.
01:15:09
But it was very odd, because we never had the entire series at our disposal. We were just given one script at a time So I never knew what was going to happen next It was kind of like life I guess It is a lot like that So you basically were just responsible for Dr Hodel and the scenes that were happening
01:15:28
Right, just the scenes that were immediately before me. So I had no idea what twists and turns the series would take.
01:15:35
Amazing. And what would you say, this is like a cheesy talk show question, but what was like, was there a creepy aspect to playing him?
01:15:44
Or was there a part of it that bothered you? Strangely, no. You're right. Because when you're playing a villain, they don't think they're villainous.
01:15:53
They think they're behaving reasonably and with a sense of entitlement. And it's everyone else who has the problem.
01:16:01
Yeah. So there's a wonderful feeling of liberation by being sort of evil all day.
01:16:06
And it makes you a much nicer person in life, I think. And did you guys shoot in the Soden House?
01:16:13
We did. And that was a revelation. I mean, to be in the house where your character lived and did all sorts of things, that never happens, very rarely.
01:16:25
And that house is an extraordinary place. As you said, it's based on a Mayan temple, but it's like approaching a monster.
01:16:34
The doorway is like this gaping maw, and it's utterly eyeless. There are no windows in it, and it's soundproof.
01:16:42
You can't hear anything. Nobody can hear you scream. That's not a good sign. No.
01:16:47
That's not a good sign. And then you're literally swallowed up into it and then taken suddenly to the right in this dark passage.
01:16:54
It's like being swallowed by a whale. And then you're disgorged into the middle of it where there's this big courtyard.
01:17:01
And all of the rooms of the house are arranged like cells. It's like a cell block.
01:17:07
What? And it is the house of a control freak. And that was the biggest revelation.
01:17:12
And there are places you can stand in the house and see everything. You can see out onto Franklin Street and be utterly invisible behind a parapet.
01:17:19
And so I did feel like I was in one of those 18th century panopticons, you know, all these prisoners.
01:17:28
And were there any, I mean, I always like to ask questions like this, but did you get bad vibes in any certain areas?
01:17:35
I expected to, but I felt strangely comfortable. No, it felt like, I don't know what it had to do with the character or anything, but it felt kind of peaceful and lovely.
01:17:43
But there was a beautiful little shrine to Elizabeth Short in the back and some rather scary pictures with pentagrams and things around them, which the current occupants had put up.
01:17:57
Like a victim-positive Satanist lived there. Exactly. Awesome. So they were charming people.
01:18:04
Some witchy shit going on back there. Wow, that's so creepy. So I asked you actually earlier today, we got to talk, and I asked you if you had a hometown murder.
01:18:15
And then he told me about seven amazing stories. But the one that I think really qualified you as a very early murderino was you told me one of your favorite, or a book you read.
01:18:27
Yes. It was a formative text. Wisconsin Death Trip. Do you know of that? Thank you.
01:18:34
It an amazing book but it a collection of it a treasure trove of photographs taken in and around Black Falls Wisconsin I think in the 19th century undeveloped prints negatives they found
01:18:50
And they're very odd. I remember as a child being utterly gripped by funerary portraiture of all these dead babies in christening dresses crammed into their coffins, you know, standing upright with their little eyes, you know, half open.
01:19:04
and that I can't I still can't get those images out of my mind but coupled with it were these
01:19:10
wonderful like true crime haikus which were newspaper clippings from the local paper with
01:19:17
various you know murders madnesses and mayhems you know in chronicled locally yeah but wonderfully
01:19:25
terse and dispassionate sort of Scandinavian hired girl murders all the children of the fire
01:19:33
burns the house with the horses down and the parents discover her laughing and her nightie in the snow.
01:19:38
Wow, just the basics. Yeah, just the basics. But then to a child's imagination you sort of go from there.
01:19:45
How old were you? I was seven. Wisconsin death trip. There was Dr. Seuss's Hop on Pop.
01:19:56
Wisconsin death trip. That's incredible. And how was it to work with Patty Jenkins?
01:20:03
Oh, she's a dream. And oddly, I mean, given the seriousness and morbid nature of this subject matter,
01:20:09
it was just a joyful experience. There was lots of laughter and shenanigans. And I guess when you're doing something like that, you have to laugh.
01:20:18
We do. You got to lighten the mood somehow. It's like you want to talk about it, but you also have to release the pressure a little bit
01:20:28
because it's the worst of humanity. I mean, this man you played is probably one of the worst people that's ever existed.
01:20:35
I guess I sat upstairs listening to you and I'm just feeling so bad about myself.
01:20:40
Because you try to detach yourself from that while you're doing it. Yeah. Oh, you had a good story about when you guys were shooting at a different location in L.A.
01:20:49
Oh, that's right. We were at the Greystone Mansion, which you've done a piece on.
01:20:54
Yes. Doheny murder up there. And that is an unclean place. Truly. And I'm not given to, you know, getting spooky, but that was, and we had an actual haunting happen, in which during one of the scenes, this inexplicable little white light appeared on the monitor and then on the film.
01:21:15
But it wasn't like a moat of dust, and it wasn't some irregularity in the apparatus.
01:21:21
It had its own independent trajectory, and it would sort of angularly float around the scene and behind a character's head.
01:21:27
And it happened twice, and we'd watch it again and again. But then the sound man, who had done There Would Be Blood there, had left a microphone on all night in an upstairs hallway.
01:21:41
and around 1.15 in the morning, the audio wave display, when he was looking at it the next morning,
01:21:49
started stiking wildly, and he listened to it, and let me listen to it, and you can hear the sort of...
01:21:57
of the hard drive of the machine and then all of a sudden there this explosive cacophony of superhuman slams and bangs and crashes
01:22:12
And then he went up the next morning, and of course, nothing had stirred. There was a layer of dust over everything.
01:22:18
Nothing had happened, but there was this audio effect. It was truly, it was chilling.
01:22:23
Murder energy. And you can feel it palpably there. I think I would have quit the whole show at that point.
01:22:30
I'm out. Can we check my contracts? I need to get out of here. Is there a haunting clause in there?
01:22:37
Well, thank you so much for being here with us tonight. It was a pleasure. I hope you enjoy the rest.
01:22:43
It's so exciting. Thank you very much. I can't wait to see what your character...
01:22:46
Oh my god. My character gets busier later on. I was going to ask, was it your personal choice when we first saw you at the bus
01:22:57
stop, to pronounce it Los Angeles. Because when the first time I watched it, I laughed out loud alone in my house.
01:23:06
Well, they did. There was this sort of movement back then to say it that way. Oh, really?
01:23:10
Yeah, sort of short-lived. But I thought I would resurrect it, you know. I thought you were kind of trying to indicate this guy's kind of a dick.
01:23:18
Yes. And there was a certain dickishness in the city. And we're going to start using that from now on, I think.
01:23:25
Yes. And here in L'Handali. That's right. Yes. Well, amazing. Thank you so much, so much.
01:23:32
Thank you, guys, all for being here with us tonight. This has been an amazing, such amazing show.
01:23:38
Thank you so much, TNT, for asking us to do this with you. And we're so excited to see the rest of the series.
01:23:44
We hope you guys are, too. So thank you for being here. And as we like to say at the end of every show, stay sexy.
01:23:51
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