Chapter 16 ~ Witnesses
Lynn Martin, one of Beth’s roommates told investigators to check into a photographer that she knew named George Price. According to Lynn, Price, 43 years old, took Lynn to his apartment once and shot nude photographs of her. She said that he knew Beth, too. George Price was also said to have been seen driving his car on Hollywood Boulevard with Elizabeth Short before she left for San Diego in December. It was also said that he knew Marjorie Graham, another of Beth’s Roommates. Investigators said his name was found in Beth’s address book. Upon questioning, George Price denied knowing her or knowing how his name got into her address book.
Lynn was hiding from authorities after the discovery of Beth’s body. She was underage and trying to avoid attention. Investigators found her almost a week after Beth’s body was discovered. She had been living with Edward P. “Duke” Wellington. Lynn was actually 15 year old Norma Lee Myer.
She was interrogated by authorities after they found her living in the M & M Motel, a North Hollywood auto court on Ventura Boulevard. She claimed to have last seen Beth on September 20 after she left the Chancellor. Lynn, who posed as an older girl, had been arrested eight times under juvenile charges, according to Detective Lt. William Cummings.
A Los Angeles Times article written shortly after the murder, stated “witnesses said Miss Martin arrived at the motel first on Jan. 5, departed, and returned Jan. 12 to remain two days.” The article also said, “she was seen as late as midnight Jan. 14, the day before Miss Short’s severed body was found in a vacant lot near busy Crenshaw Blvd.”
A Long Beach newspaper article, published not longer after the murder, stated, “- Los Angeles juvenile authorities and officials are preparing to start court action against 10 male adults with whom the girl told police she had been intimate.”
“The thorough investigation made by the department disclosed the girl’s earliest recollections were of living with a half sister in Minnesota. The half sister was living with a drunken common-law husband. She believes she was 4 years of age then.” The newspaper reported that Lynn’s half sister was suicidal and that her maternal aunt, who lived on a farm in Washington brought Lynn to her home for about three years. The aunt said she was placed in a detention home in Washington because, “the family was unable to support her any longer,” the article stated. “She was adopted from this home by the Meyer family and brought to Long Beach,” the article said.
The newspaper account further reported, “Lynn Martin, as the girl herself prefers to be known, first came to the attention of juvenile authorities in July 1943, when neighbors reported that she was the victim of ‘an unfit home.’ ”
Eventually, Lynn Martin vanished from the Hollywood scene.
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Two men who went out with Beth in Hollywood contacted LAPD detectives hours after she had been identified. Donald Leyes, 22, and Harold Costa, 31, both lived at the Hawthorne at 1611 North Orange Drive, behind the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. They reported to Hollyood detectives D.W. Grant and G. L. Smith and confirmed that Beth had lived at the same hotel.
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Of all Beth’s acquaintances in Hollywood, Connie Starr and Ann Toth were two young women actually working in the film business. Ann had been in Temptation with Merle Oberon and George Brent. She also was credited in the Charles Chaplin movie, Monsieur Verdoux. She and Connie worked together in Arch of Triumph with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. Connie was quoted in newspaper advertisements for a new Ronald Reagan movie The Voice of the Turtle in 1948, saying, “The Voice of the Turtle is the year’s big fun.”
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At the Chancellor, Beth stayed, according to newspaper accounts, with roommates Linda Rohr, Sherryl Maylond, Cheryll Haughlamb, Beverly Don’e, Pat Goff, Marion Schmidt, Dorothy Saffron and Mary Louise Pappe. They shared room 501 on the top floor, overlooking Cherokee Avenue and the Hollywood Hills.
Three days after Beth’s body was found, newspapers were telling the story of the Chancellor roommates. Only three of the original eight young women were still living in the cramped apartment with double-decked bunk beds. Linda Rohr was a 22 year old employee of Max Factor’s rouge-room. She said Beth “was always going out and she loved to prowl the boulevard.” Roommate Sherryl Maylond was a cocktail lounge employee who remembered “a tall, sinister elderly man who inquired about Beth after January 15. Marion Schmidt, another roommate, was a telephone operator. District Attorney notes indicate she had a roommate there named Edna, “-that slept in upper bunk with Short at 501-.” Edna worked at Steve Boardner’s, two blocks south on Cherokee, just below Hollywood Boulevard.
The roommates were interviewed, but could not offer a good lead to the murder. One of the young women said Beth discussed working in a military base in San Bernardino. Another remembered Beth asking her to accompany her to a Beverly Hills address, “where a man would pay the rent,” a Los Angeles Times newspaper article reported. All of the roommates “agreed she worked nowhere in Los Angeles although she seemed to have periodic funds for rent, clothing and groceries,” the Times said.
When Beth lived at the Chancellor on Cherokee Avenue, her landlady, Juanita Ringo, said “She came here for a room last November 13. That’s a bad day, isn’t it? She wasn’t sociable like the other girls who lived in apartment 501 with her – more the sophisticated type.”
Linda Rohr recalled, “Elizabeth was odd. She had pretty blue eyes, but sometimes I think she overdid it with makeup an inch thick. Elizabeth dyed her brown hair black, then red again.”
Linda also remembered, “She was out nearly every night. She had a lot of telephone calls, mostly from her favorite boy friend, Maurice.”
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Acquaintances interviewed after her death said that she never seemed to have money and relied on others for help. One newspaper article reported that, “She found work occasionally as a waitress, but it was her ambition to break into the movies.”
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On January 18, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner reported that a cab driver, Glen Chanslor, told newspaper reporters that Elizabeth Short “came to my hack stand last December 29. Her clothes were torn. She told me a man she worked with had tried to attack her. It was about 7 pm when some people dropped her off at my stand. She looked wild-eyed and hysterical. Blood came from her knees. I didn’t know if she was cut or bruised.” He said he drove her in a cab to a hotel at 512 South Wall Street.
She told Chanslor, according to the newspaper account, “that a well-dressed man she worked with wanted to take her to Long Beach and cash her weekly pay check for her. Instead, the girl said, he parked his car on a lonely road south of Garvey boulevard near Garfield avenue and tried to attack her.”
The article said that after the taxi driver dropped her at the hotel, he “waited for her to come back down and pay her fare, but, “When she came down she was all dolled up. She said she didn’t have the money and I figured then that I wouldn’t get it.”
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C.G. Williams, the barman at the Dugout Cafe at 634 South Main Street, told police that Beth had frequented his place and that he recalled seeing her last on the afternoon of January 11, 1947. Williams said she came in with an attractive blonde female.
“I remember that a fracas started when two men tried to move in at their table. The blonde went into a rage, and we had quite a time calming her down.”
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Sgt. Finis Brown was interviewed during the grand jury investigation about photographs of Elizabeth Short that were in Mark Hansen’s home. According to Brown, Hansen said he got the photos from an officer when a girl told him that she knew Beth. He said the girl told him that she “knew Elizabeth Short and gave him some information about her being at the Hal Browning Hotel -.” Hansen wanted the photos to show the girl “to see if she could identify her,” he said.
The Browning Apartments were located about two blocks from Normandie Avenue and Santa Barbara Boulevard. The building was 2 1/2 miles from the South Norton Avenue site. Sgt. Brown confirmed Hansen’s story to the jury. He did not state the address of the Hal Browning Hotel.
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Beth’s friend from Boston, Marjorie Graham, 24, was a waitress at the Pig Stand in Hollywood. Margie lived with Beth at the Hawthorne Apartments south of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood boulevard and briefly at Mark Hansen’s home behind the Florentine Gardens on Hollywood Boulevard.
When she was interviewed after the murder, Margie said that Beth planned to marry an Army Air Force lieutenant after he was released from the hospital in Los Angeles.
“She said she was worried about the man and that she hoped he would get well and out of the hospital in time for a wedding they planned for November 1.”
Margie also said, “I left the West Coast October 23 and came home to Cambridge. I had one letter from her afterward. Betty didn’t say whether or not the wedding had taken place.”
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Dorothy French, the 22 year old woman who brought Beth to her home in San Diego in the days before she left for Los Angeles and the Biltmore Hotel, said, “her manner was shy and somewhat mysterious.” Dorothy had taken her in, “as a friendly act when the girl was down and out.”
Dorothy said, “There was something so sorrowful about her ~ she seemed lost and a stranger to the area, and I felt I wanted to help her. I wasn’t sure how. She apparently had no place to stay. I suggested she come home with me and get a good night’s sleep, if that would help. She said she was thankful for my generosity.”
Elvera French, Dorothy’s mother, said, “her manner was shy and somewhat mysterious.” “Elizabeth was constantly in fear of someone, and was very frightened when anyone came to the door.” And, “I had a premonition Miss Short was in trouble. She was unwilling to discuss her past other than to say she came from Hollywood.”
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Red Manley, who drove her back from San Diego to Los Angeles and dropped her off at the Biltmore Hotel, couldn’t figure her. When police interrogated him repeatedly, he said, “I was infatuated, that’s all. I couldn’t tell if Betty was a gold digger or a nice girl.”
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When Beth’s mother, Phoebe Short, traveled to California, her mother, Ella Leighton, left her home in Portland, Maine to stay with Beth’s three sisters still living at home in Medford. Beth’s married sister, Mrs. Adrian West, living with her husband in Northern California, talked to reporters about Beth before the funeral: “She was always being told how pretty she was and I guess it went to her head. We just can’t understand the things they say about her in the papers. She was never like that. We just can’t believe it.”
Mrs. Short told reporters at the airport in Los Angeles that, “It was only 10 days ago when she wrote me from San Diego telling me she had a job in the naval hospital there. I never dreamed that she was having financial difficulties. Her letters were always so cheerful.” Unfortunately, she mislead her mother and lied to her about having a job.
Mrs. Short also told of her daughter’s aspirations: “Elizabeth always wanted to be an actress. She was ambitious and beautiful and full of life, but she had her moments of despondency. ”
“Betty always loved California so, so I think we’ll have the funeral in Berkeley. That is, as soon as the body is released.”
