Chapter 13 ~ On the Road with Red & Beth
On December 5, 1946, Beth was visibly upset. She cried and told people she was scared. Juanitia Ringo, the manager of the Chancellor in Hollywood, said, “I felt sorry for her even when she got behind on the rent. She looked tired and worried.”
“When I went up for the rent last December 5 she didn’t have it. I don’t think she had a job. That night she got the money somewhere and left the next morning.”
That same evening, December 5, Beth returned to the Carlos Avenue house.
Mark Hansen said, “- she was sitting there one night when I came home, with Ann about 5:30, 6:00 o’clock – sitting and crying and saying she had to get out of there.” He also said, “She was talking about she was going to Oakland to visit her sister there and asked if she could come back to my house when she got back. I told her, ‘I don’t think so. Better find another place.’” Hansen said he took her back to the Chancellor that night and “left her off on the street.” She didn’t ask him for money. “She told me she was working in the cafe at the airport in Burbank.”
Hansen went home and later said, “I never saw her again.”
Soon after, Beth took the bus to San Diego.
* * *
The San Diego police did their own Black Dahlia investigation and came up with a time line for the last weeks of Beth’s life.
December 9
She went to the Aztec Theatre, watched the show and fell asleep in her seat. Dorothy French, who worked at the theater, woke her, and feeling sorry for her, invited her to her home that she shared with her mother and younger brother.
December 10
Beth went on her first date while living at the French home. The man was not identified.
December 11
“Loafed.”
December 12
“Loafed.”
December 13
Beth went on a date with “an unidentified Naval officer.”
December 14
“Loafed.”
December 15
“Washing and Preming.”
December 16
“Left house, saying she had interview with airline office job. Picked up by Manley outside bus depot.”
December 17
Date with Manley
December 18
Date with Manley
December 19
Date with Manley
December 20
Date with Manley
December 21
“Manley came for her saying she had failed to show for job interview he had arranged for her.”
December 22
Beth received a postal money order for $100 from Gordon Fickling.
December 23
“Loafed.”
December 24
Beth had dinner at the home of Frank Dominguez
December 25
“Dinner with the Frenches.”
December 26
Date with Manley
December 27
“Date with unidentified man who honked horn in street, after phoning she should be ready on time.”
December 28
“Loafed.”
December 29
“Loafed.”
December 30
“Loafed.”
December 31
“Second date with Dominguez. El Cajon bartender said he slapped or patted her face to sober her up.”
January 1
“New Year’s day with Frenches.”
January 2
Beth received two telephone calls, including one from Los Angeles.
January 3
“Loafed.”
January 4
“Went out to buy cosmetics and magazines.”
January 5
“Wrote several letters.”
January 6
“Loafed.”
January 7
Beth receives a wire from Manley in Huntington Park. Beth goes out with Sam Navarro.
January 8
“Left with Manley. Went to motel.”
January 9
Left with Manley for Los Angeles
* * *
The guest overstayed her welcome. Dorothy’s mother Elvera and her brother Cary tiptoed around their home while Beth slept late in the day and didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave. On January 7, two men and a woman showed up at the French’s door asking for her. This frightened Beth.
On January 8, Beth called Mark Hansen in Hollywood for help. She wanted to know if she could come back to his home on Carlos Avenue. Hansen recalled, “- she said that she was in trouble and she wanted to know if she could come up, if she could stay. I told her Ann wasn’t home, she could not stay there at all until Ann got home. That is what I told her. Ann was up visiting her parents.”
Ann said she contacted Mark and told him she would be back in Hollywood on January 10. Until then, he did not know when she would return. Ann later said, “Well, if he told her I was coming back on the 10th, as he says, then she would have called me between the 10th and the 14th, because after all, I helped her move before. I did an awful lot for that girl, I think she would come to me before she went to Mark.”
Soon after, Beth made arrangements to return to Los Angeles with her new acquaintance, Bob “Red” Manley.
Red
Robert “Red” Manley was a tall, good looking, 25 year old traveling salesman from South Gate with a beautiful wife and a young son at home. He had driven his Studebaker to San Diego and visited his accounts.
He met Elizabeth Short on the street in San Diego. She rebuffed him at first, he said, but she agreed to let him drive her to the French home. They went out that evening for dinner. He had a date with her again at an airline office where Beth said she worked. Manley showed up, but she wasn’t there. “I asked two or three people and they didn’t know her and I didn’t think she worked there then.”
Red contacted her again on January 7 and they agreed to meet. He told Frank Jemison, “She asked me to drive her to Los Angeles. I told her I had to make some business calls. But she put her baggage in my car and said she would take a bus that night.” He took her out for drinks that evening and later got a motel room for the night.
Jemison asked Red if he knew how she got to San Diego. He said, “No. I don’t remember her saying how she got down there.” He asked, “Did she talk about any murders you had been reading about in newspapers — anything about that?” Manley replied, “No, in fact,. she talked very little on the way in to Los Angeles and I wasn’t in a very talkative mood. I don’t know what was the matter with her. It didn’t make any difference to me. I was just glad to get rid of her.”
Red eventually did drive her. The Los Angeles Times quoted a witness saying, “Both Miss Short and her companion were in a ‘jolly mood,’ joking as the companion loaded the valises into the automobile.” Red dropped her off at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles on January 9 under the assumption that she was to see her sister, Virginia West, at the hotel. He waited briefly, and at about 6:30 pm, he drove off to resume his life.
Robert “Red” Manley’s fabled trip from San Diego to the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles with Beth Short has been told and retold over time, but years after the murder, Red added new touches to the story.
He said that, to his knowledge, Beth never made a telephone call after they departed the French home. “No, not one,” he said. It was Red that used the payphone just before leaving San Diego. “- I called my wife from San Diego,” he said. He agreed that it was possible that she did make calls while he was conducting business in Encinitas or Oceanside, but he never observed her using a telephone.
A newspaper reported days after the murder that Manley said of Beth, “She had bad scratches on both her arms above the elbows on the outside. She told me she had a boyfriend who was intensely jealous of her.” He said he was “an Italian with black hair,” and that he lived in San Diego. Jemison asked him if she complained of a toothache or a headache. He didn’t remember her saying one way or the other. He gave him a list of doctor’s names, including De Gaston, Ahrens, Scott and Brix, asking if she had mentioned any of them. Again, Red answered no.
She was sick in the Mecca Motel before they left. “Well, she didn’t even care to have me do much talking after we got back to the room, after we had been dancing. She just took a blanket off of the bed, propped her legs up against the wall by the heater and I asked her what was the matter with her and she said she just didn’t feel well and for me to leave her alone so I did, and she didn’t talk much more after that.”
“She said it was just that time of the month and she wanted to be left alone.” They had been at the Hacienda Club in Mission Valley, where she danced with him and with the band vocalist.
During the motor trip to Los Angeles, Red said she was constantly looking back at “Cars that passed on the right, and then, if I’m not mistaken, cars that would pass us, but I noticed mainly on cars I would pass. She would strain her neck and look, like this toward the rear of the car.”
Red drove his Studebaker from San Diego, with a stop in Encinitas, where he had a new account, and where they had hamburgers. The next stop was Laguna Beach, where Beth used the restroom and Red purchased gasoline.
From the beginning, before they left San Diego, Beth told Red that she would be meeting her sister, Mrs. Adrian West from Berkeley, at the Biltmore, but when they reached Los Angeles, she wanted to check her things at the Greyhound bus station first. According to newspaper reports, Beth’s luggage “consisted of a hat box, a suitcase and a small bag.”
She told Red he could leave her there. “She led me to believe she hadn’t been in Los Angeles before and I told her it was a bad part of town and I better take her to the Biltmore and I told her to stay away from that part of town.”
He dropped her off at the Biltmore, and she used the restroom while he checked at the desk for her sister. There was no record for a Mrs. Adrian West, so Red left soon after and never saw Beth Short again.
* * *
In late January, 1947, Detectives Harry Hansen and Jess Haskins questioned Red Manley and Elvera and Dorothy French for two hours. They compared notes and offered what help they could to the detectives. Red and Dorothy both found their names in Beth’s address book. Manley identified his own signature where he had signed his name “Red Morris,” his nickname and middle name. Manley further cleared up the confusion made by witnesses that saw them at Pacific and Balboa in San Diego. Two waitresses and a service station employee claimed they saw Red and Beth on January 14. He told detectives it was January 8.
Dorothy told them that Beth had only one dollar when she left with Red for Los Angeles. She had borrowed the dollar from Dorothy.
* * *
As late as 1954, when Red was 32 and a patient at the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in Brentwood, California, he was still being asked by authorities to submit to testing. Newspapers reported that he suffered from “paranoid schizophrenic” disorders while he was in the facility. Captain James Hamilton, of the Police Intelligence Division of the LAPD, said Manley volunteered to take a truth serum, which substantiated his claims of innocence in the Black Dahlia murder.
For Red, it must have seemed the interrogations would never end.
