I normally give scant heed to folks carrying on about “the good old days.” About one matter, however, they may be onto something. Our crimes of yesteryear seemed weightier, more intriguing than those making headlines today. Some have proved more enduring, too. As witness:
“In Theaters September 15 – The Black Dahlia – Inspired by the Most Notorious Unsolved Murder in California History.”
So say the full-page advance notices, and anyone old enough to remember must wonder. Are we in for still another box-office smash exalting a particularly gory episode of 60 years ago? Universal Pictures is touting an R-rated production with “strong violence, some grisly images, sexual content and language.”
Well, I should think so. For it revives once again the surgically precise mutilation of comely Elizabeth Short, immortalized in death as the Black Dahlia. Though she wasn't black, the bright raiments she had always favored – including hats – caused an imaginative newsman covering the case to depict her as a flower in bloom.
The money this film will generate doubtless reflects a public fascination with some of the truly riveting crimes of past years. Indeed, certain aspects of the Black Dahlia case reminded criminologists of East London's 19th century Jack the Ripper. And the Perfect Crime.
Although her dismembered body was to be found in a Los Angeles vacant lot, Elizabeth Short had spent the last month of her life in San Diego, making this a local story in a town still served by competing newspapers and no television. Along with the Union and Evening Tribune, San Diego's now defunct Daily Journal waged an unrelenting contest to be first with information gleaned about Short's obvious attraction for men.
Having wandered from the East Coast, Short was befriended, and given shelter through the 1946 Christmas season, by a young woman who sold tickets at the old Aztec Theater on lower Fifth Avenue. In what seemed an excessive spirit of seasonal goodwill, the short-term house guest had at least a half-dozen dates, mostly bar habitués – whose recollections matched. Put adroitly, Short offered encouragement to each, but usually terminated an evening with what her date almost certainly deemed unfinished business.
Last in line was a traveling salesman with whom Short shared a Pacific Beach motel room near old Highway 101 on the last night anyone else remembers seeing her alive. The man told detectives he then drove her to Los Angeles, letting her off in front of the Biltmore Hotel downtown.
Early on the second morning, Short's dismembered body was spotted by a horrified young mother pushing a pram in Los Angeles' Leimert Park area, not far from where the city had housed visiting athletes during the 1932 Olympics.
The Black Dahlia's murder has baffled police ever since, despite more than 40 false “confessions.” For San Diegans, it was one of several “quality” criminal cases marking the early postwar years, and supporting my current contention that evil has known better times.
Consider that a federal court here tried what may have been America's last slavery case. An elderly Coronado couple, fresh from Boston's tony Beacon Hill, were adjudged to have held their unpaid maid as a slave for 37 years.
A principal witness in their 1947 trial was a daughter of the accused Mira Ingalls. She testified that Dora Jones, when only 17, had been caught in “an illicit relationship” with Ingalls' first husband. The girl thereafter was induced to believe her subsequent service – as a slave, yes, in 20th century America – was her only alternative to prison.
The Ingalls were fined $2,500 and ordered to establish an annuity sufficient to support Dora Jones for the rest of her life.
We didn't lack variety. Competing for attention with poor Elizabeth Short and the slave trial, a month-long San Diego court martial in September 1947 probed one of the most dastardly offenses a man in uniform could be charged with. Lt.(jg) Richard F. Gascoigne, an ex-war prisoner in the Pacific, stood accused of following orders by the Japanese to join them in mistreating fellow captives – his own buddies, no less.
Nearly 50 witnesses testified to Gascoigne's alleged offenses. The lieutenant was said to have assaulted a fellow inmate whose broken arm was in a sling. An Army corporal recalled being beaten by Japanese guards after Gascoigne reported his theft of salt from a warehouse. A seven-member naval court, however, found evidence insufficient to convict.
Sex-stirred passion, mayhem and grim hints of man's inhumanity to man. Say, those were stirring times, wouldn't you agree?
Van Deerlin represented a San Diego County district in Congress for 18 years.
