Bayley's daughter was a friend of Elizabeth Short's sister Virginia and brother-in-law Adrian and had been the matron of honor at their wedding. Walter Bayley. Hes a journalist, he lets the facts guide him, and he doesnt have any agenda other than the truth. Harnisch removes from his files a 1948 Examiner article on the dispute over Bayleys will and shows it to me. Intimidation by a young woman colleague caused Dr. Walter A. Bayley, physician, to disinherit his wife, the widow Mrs. Ruth A. Bayley, she claimed yesterday in a will contest suit, filed in Superior Court. She agreed to serve as the matron of honor at Shorts sisters wedding, she told Harnisch, because there wasnt anybody else., Harnisch adds one more variable to his hypothesis. After the article ran and Harnisch began researching the book he intended to write, he was haunted by Douglas supposition, so he embarked on a search to find out everything he could about the 3800 block of Norton Avenue and the surrounding neighborhood. According to Knowlton, Short was a sex worker and a procurer of children for a child trafficking ring. Dr. Walter Alonzo Bayley was a Los Angeles surgeon who lived in a house one block south of the vacant lot in which Elizabeth Short's body was found, until he left his wife in October 1946. Douglas asked Harnisch what he knew about the neighborhood. Was this secret a murder? A self-published book by a former LAPD Vice detective wrote in 1950 that an abortion doctors office was located in a building on West 6th Streetthe same building as Bayleys office. With neither the energy nor motivation to finish his book, he put it aside. They were unable to obtain fingerprints from the envelope because it had been brushed with gasoline. Tamars mother, however, testified that a psychiatrist had told her that her daughter was addicted to telling fantastic stories. Black Dahlia Elizabeth Short Murder Suspect Dr. Walter Bayley Home House Near Body Discovery Los Angeles CA USA 2021. She also claimed that nineteen other people, including many of her classmates, had molested her. So, then she might have called Walter Bayley, who was listed in the phone book, and they could have ended up in his office, which was a short walk from the Biltmore.. Once there, Dillon and De River traveled to San Francisco to unsuccessfully look for Connors. He also met with a retired LAPD captain who gave him access to material that had belonged to the head of the Homicide Division at the time of Shorts murder, and obtained the recorded interviews of two Dahlia detectives, neither of which has ever been made public. After three drafts, engaging in countless online battles with people writing about the case whom he constantly fact-checks, and struggling to find a publisher, there are days, he says, when he wished he never heard of the case. Steve had seen two pictures in his father's photo album that he claims resemble Short, although her family insists they are not of her and many other observers have failed to see the resemblance. I base that conclusion on the way the body was bisected.It is unusual in the sense that the point at which the body was bisected is, according the eminent medical men, the easiest point in the spinal column to severhe hit it exactly.. Harnisch attended a reunion of Gordons unit, the 2nd Air Commandos, in Florida and interviewed a number of his fellow pilots. For decades, the gruesome death of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short remained a mystery. The report, from which the above excerpt was taken, was submitted at the completion of the D.A. New England has the Boston Strangler. [16] Popular accounts of the Black Dahlia case often portray Hansen as having connections to organized crime, but there is no evidence of this. The expertise of Dr. Bayley in medical field was a surgeon which means he had a lot of knowledge about how our body works. If the autopsy had been conducted by the Los Angeles County Coroner, Harnisch says, he could have obtained a copy because its a public record, but a pathologist at the Veterans Administration conducted the postmortem. At the time of the murder, Bayley's estranged wife still lived in the home. According to Pacios, witnesses she had interviewed state that Welles and the victim both frequented Brittingham's restaurant in Los Angeles during the same time period and waitresses believed Short was going out with someone at Columbia Pictures. In the final report to the grand jury, dated February 20, 1951, Lt. Frank Jemison of the Los Angeles County D.A. After conducting some initial research at a local library, he realized that the fiftieth anniversary was coming up in January. Dr. Walter Bayley - former chief of staff at LA County Hospital, fit the profile of who the police were looking for. She is found cut in half in a vacant lot. So, the pathology lines up., The probate records revealed, Harnisch says, even more significant clues. They deserve to have somebody tell the story accurately. Brian's Website "The things that she is saying are not consistent with the facts of the case. Short was face up, her gray-blue eyes were open, and she had been posed with elbows bent at right angles, her hands over her head, and her legs were spread with her knees straight. He discovered that two years after the Short murder, George Hodel was tried for molesting his 14-year-old daughter, Tamar. Short might have called Barbara Lindgren, but she had recently moved to the Midwest. See supplemental reports, long sheets and hear recordings, all of which tend to eliminate this suspect. He was in no shape to carry a fully intact body around. Ill just say it was very helpful.. As a result of wide-spread corruption in the LAPD, Hodel claimed, the murders were covered up and never solved. After fingering his father for the two murders, Hodel later claimed he was one of the Twentieth Centurys most prolific serial killers. Multiply getting details like that with a thousand other details and youll see why its taking me so long to finish the book.. Keller also said that Hansen held elaborate parties at his Hollywood boarding house and members of the Los Angeles Police Department along with the Chief of Detectives Thad Brown and his brother Finis Brown attended and later aided Hansen in a cover up. Some speculated that Dillon's ex-wife Georgie Stevenson was related to former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, who contacted the Oklahoma governor on Dillon's behalf, although none of these relations have been verified. As quoted in Newton, 2009, p. 46. Detectives in the LAPDs Cold Case Unit said the photos bore no resemblance to Short. He never imagined that he would unearth a murder scenario and a suspect who would intrigue LAPD detectives. Dumais, a 29-year-old soldier stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey, confessed to Short's murder a few weeks after it occurred. He hoped to discover the link between the killer, the crime scene, and the neighborhood. At the time of the murder, Bayley's estranged wife still lived in the home. On October 26, 1946, the doctor left his wife for his mistress . Some of those elements, he said, have never been revealed by detectives in order to weed out the false confessors. We started calling all our supervisors, telling them this was something big.. After his death, Bayley's widow alleged that his mistress knew a "terrible secret" about Bayley and claimed this was the reason the mistress was the main beneficiary upon his death. I feel a responsibility. My goodnessit was so white. Hes a surgeon with mental problems who underwent a drastic personality shift. At times, he felt as if he was chasing a shadow. After reviewing the information presented in Steve's book, Head Deputy D.A. He was checking her out. Dr. Walter Alonzo Bayley. She said that she was with Doctor Hodel sometime prior to the murder and that she knew nothing about his being associated with the victim. I have a little pet theory of my own. This is what he theorized: Lindgren was the matron of honor at the marriage of Virginia Short and Adrian West, who Harnisch learned quite a lot about from interviewing their son, Elizabeth Shorts nephew. He described her as a pathological liar. The jury acquitted the doctor. The real killer, he believed, only killed once. He had so much additional material that when the story ran, he decided to write a book. Hundreds of people were considered suspects and thousands were interviewed by police. She claimed her infant son had died, yet she never had a child. There have been countless bizarre unsolved murders in Los Angeles and most of them have been forgotten. Detective Frank Jemison. [27] She frequently alleged that she was sexually abused by a long list of dead movie stars and other notables, including Norman Chandler, Gene Autry (whose name she continually misspelled as Autrey), Arthur Freed, and Walt Disney. Author James Ellroy endorsed Harnisch's theory in the 2001 film James Ellroy's Feast of Death. John Jigsaw John St. John was assigned the Dahlia file after Hansen retired and he kept control of the case until he pulled the pin in 1993. Harnischs theory makes a lot of senseI really like it, she says. While other Los Angeles murder victims had been brutalized and their bodies mutilated, Harnisch acknowledges there was something sui generis about what the killer had done to Elizabeth Short. But it wouldnt necessarily affect his sensory or motor skills and he could still do surgeries. Walter Bayley. Bayley was 67 years old at the time of the murder, had no known history of violence or criminal activity of any kind, and is not known to have met Short, even though his daughter was a friend of Short's oldest sister. This interview and the Examiner article galvanized Harnisch. Welles left the country for an extended stay in Europe 10 months after the murder without completing the editing of Macbeth, the film he was both directing and starring in. There are people with this lesion without any psychological pathology, and there are others who have significant pathology which may include bizarre violence, On a recent evening, Harnisch visits Dr. James Fallon, a professor emeritus of neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine, tells him about Bayleys shift of personality and presents the psychiatrists assessment. Virginia, had married soldier Adrian West in 1945 at the home of Dr. Walter Alonzo Bayley at 3959 S. Norton one block from where the bride's sister's corpse would be found years later. They might have said if youre ever down and out in L.A. and need help, call the Bayley family. Prior to Wilson's death, however, Gilmore made an entirely different claim to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in a story appearing January 17, 1982. The murder of Elizabeth Short has never been solved, despite the work of many detectives and law enforcement officers. Some researchers argue that the Sowden house is where Short was held and killed. In reality, by the time Short arrived in Los Angeles in 1946, Bauerdorf had been dead for two years and the nightclub had been closed for a year. The Short family and the Bayley families know each other. The envelope included Shorts birth certificate, Social Security card, newspaper clippings, and a ten-year-old address book, which listed seventy-five men. This was post-World War II Los Angeles and the whole noir thing is very big now. Walter Bayley [ edit] Bayley was a Los Angeles surgeon who lived one block south of the vacant lot in which Short's body was found, until he left his wife in October 1946. In December 1948, Dillon agreed to meet with De River and was given the choice of one of three cities: Los Angeles; Phoenix, Arizona; or Las Vegas, Nevada. Larry Harnisch's Site on Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia. Ill never say Im a hundred percent sure. The late Pulitzer Prize-winning sports columnist Jim Murray was a rewrite man for the Examiner at the time and sat next to Sutton. It turns out that T.J.s wife wouldnt write to him, so Charlie got Short to write him and send him the photo., After her body was found in the South Los Angeles lot, a savannah of-ankle high weeds and yard clippings, the afternoon, Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window), Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window), a co-publication with The Delacorte Review, The Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2020: Fall Preview, Five Crime and Mystery Novels Featuring Deaf Characters, The Invention of the Polygraph, and Law Enforcement's Long Search for a 'Lie Detector', Graphic Content: Talking Comics, Crime, and Craft with Benjamin Percy, The Expatriates: Spy Fictions Hapless Unfortunates, The Many Levels of Mystery: Whodunnit? to Whydunnit? and Beyond, But Wheres Its Anus? On How We Imagine Alien Lifeforms, How Lower-Class Innovation, Like, Changes the Langwage, A Shed of Ones Own (in Upstate New York), Katy Simpson Smith on Writing a Southern Woman Louder Than Herself, Girls to the Front: A Reading List of Provocative Feminist History. The drive for violence and sexuality can come up and get worse and worse. Manley was the leading suspect at one time, and Harnisch interviewed a detective who investigated him. Steve Hodel, many years later, brought a . [35] Pacios bases this theory on such factors as Welles's volatile temperament and his creation of mannequins three months before Short's death that supposedly featured lacerations virtually identical to those inflicted on Short. Dillon offered up one of his friends, Jeff Connors, as a likely suspect. I happened to be working on the rewrite desk of the, Once Short was identified, reporters scurried to find out as much about her as possibleon deadline. And he wasnt just a cop with the Long Beach P.D. 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