Chapter 15 ~ The Lady Vanishes
Porté Disparu
When Robert Manley drove Elizabeth Short to Los Angeles on January 9, 1947, he noticed that she frequently turned around in her seat and looked back at cars they passed or that passed them on the road, but she said nothing. He dropped her off at the Biltmore Hotel that evening. It was cool and she was wearing a coat she had borrowed from Ann Toth. Elizabeth used the pay phones and the ladies room. Manley checked at the desk to see if her sister had left word. After awhile, he said good bye and made his way home.
Elizabeth stayed at the hotel for several more hours and then she walked out to Olive Street and headed south. As far as the police were concerned, that was the last verifiable time she was seen by any known witness. However, a number of people came forward over time and claimed to have seen her around town.
When interviewed by Frank Jemison, Mark Hansen said he received a telephone call from her, but he wasn’t sure of the date. Jemison said, “We do have information now and evidence that would establish that you haven’t told us exactly the truth in connection with what conversation you did have with Beth Short, and our information is that you received a telephone call from Beth Short from the Biltmore Hotel on the evening of the 9th of January 1947.”
Hansen was also questioned about a telegram. He told Jemison he had no recollection. “I received a phone call. I don’t recall any telegram. There may have been a telegram. I don’t recall, but I know this phone call, I remember that very distinctly because Ann wasn’t home. She was visiting her folks.”
Ann had expected to see Beth in northern California when they were both supposed to be in the Bay area, but she lost track of her. “Gee, the funny part of it, I was thinking of her all the time I was gone, wondering what did become of her, because she didn’t say goodbye to me.”
Ann said Beth told her about three weeks before Christmas that she was going to Berkeley to see her sister. “But instead,” Ann said, “she went to San Diego. Why, I don’t know. Just before Christmas, she wired me saying she needed $20. She had been gone about three weeks when I received another wire, saying she was coming back and stating that a letter would follow. That was the last I ever heard of her. The letter never came.”
Ann had returned from Richmond, California to Hansen’s Hollywood home on the evening of January 10, and Hansen told her the story of how Elizabeth had called from San Diego. Ann was surprised. “Well, that is like wrong way Corrigan. Headed for Berkeley and went to San Diego.”
A few days later, on January 12, between midnight and one in the morning, the telephone at Hansen’s house began ringing about every five minutes. When Mark answered, there was silence. The calls were annoying Ann in the other room, who said “Let me answer the phone.” Ann said she, “took it into my bedroom and then the same thing continued for about another half hour, so finally I was disgusted with it, I took it off the hook for a little bit and then I put it back again and it did [the same thing] again, and I picked it up and I said, ‘You so and so, whoever is on the other end of the line, I am going to report this to the superintendant of the telephone company and I will have this call traced immediately,’ so I took it off the hook, pretending I had been calling in the meantime, so they would get a busy signal and after I, oh I left it off about three minutes, I would say. So, when I put it back on the hook again I couldn’t hear a word after that. I either scared them or what, but there was no more.”
But where was Elizabeth Short?
In the days that followed January 9, witnesses claimed to have seen Beth around town in bars, in automobiles and on the street.
Bartender Robert “Buddy” La Gore said she was a regular at the Four Star Grill at 6818 Hollywood Boulevard. He described an encounter different than the others to police, saying, “when she came in on January 10, she looked like she had slept in her clothes for days.” “Her black sheer dress was stained, soiled, and otherwise crumpled.” He went on to say, “I’d seen her many times before and always she wore the best nylons, but this time she had no stocking on.” He said, “Her hair was straggly and some lipstick had been smeared hit-and-miss on her lips. The powder on her face was caked.”
Waitress Gloria Hattenberg, of the Four Star Grill, remembered seeing Beth there many times, but she never came in with a man. La Gore said he had seen her many times, too, but accompanied by other women.
That same evening, Christenia Salisbury testified to police that she had seen Elizabeth Short and two other women in a black coupe along the curb at the 7200 block of Sunset Boulevard, the block where the Tabu of Hollywood club was located. The witness, an acquaintance from Miami Beach, said she “ran into Elizabeth as she and two other women were coming out of the Tabu Club on Sunset Strip in Hollywood.” Beth told her, “I’m living with these two girls in a motel in San Fernando Valley.” The Tabu of Hollywood was located at 7290 Sunset Boulevard.
Another witness, Paul Simone, a painter working at the Chancellor hotel said that he ran into Beth at the Chancellor on January 11. She was in a heated argument with another woman who was yelling at her. After Simone approached, the two women separated and Beth asked if there was a rear door to the hotel. When Simone said no, he walked her out the front door to a taxi.
On the evening of January 11, a taxi driver named I. A. Jorgenson said he drove her and a male companion from the Rosslyn Hotel in downtown Los Angeles to a Hollywood motel.
Also on January 11, another witness, a gas station attendant working at the Beverly Hills Hotel said he saw Beth about 2:30 am in Beverly Hills in a car with a male driver and another woman. He identified her to detectives, based on photographs shown to him. “She seemed very upset and frightened,” he reported.
John Jiroudek, described as a “one-time jockey,” knew Beth from her days at Camp Cooke. According to newspaper articles, Jiroudek said, “On January 13, I met Beth with this bossy blonde at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue. They were in a 1937 Ford sedan. The blonde kept insisting they drive off, and finally they did. She seemed jealous because Beth talked to me.”
The police were interested in finding the “bossy blonde,” and were encouraged when a taxi cab driver, Charles Beckham, told a similar story. He “reported he picked up a ‘big blonde’ and a girl he is certain was the ‘Black Dahlia’,” according to newspaper articles. He said he “drove the two girls to separate hotels in Hollywood.”
Another newspaper article reported that a Greyhound bus driver named Stagg recalled Beth boarding his bus in Riverside at 1 am on January 14. He said that she got off in Los Angeles at 4:15 am.
William “Sully” Sullivan, a Railway Express Agency clerk working at Union Station, told investigators that he talked with a young woman who identified herself as Elizabeth Short. On January 14, just before noon, she inquired about sending a trunk and suitcases to Ketchikan Hospital in Alaska. She said they would be sent to her and she gave her name. She was accompanied by a red haired man. She did not have the baggage with her, saying she was only interested in the rates at that time. Sully later recanted his story when another young woman, who resembled Beth, proved to be the customer who visited the R.E.A. office on January 14.
* * *
Perhaps the last known sighting of Elizabeth Short was made by policewoman Myrl McBride at a downtown Los Angeles bus station on January 14. Newspaper articles quoted McBride as saying the young woman, whom she later identified as Elizabeth Short, was “sobbing with terror” when she first saw her. The officer said that Beth asked for protection from “her marine boy friend who once threatened to kill me if he ever found me with another man.”
Newspapers reported that McBride took her back into the bar. According to the articles, Beth “talked with a woman and a tall man for a few seconds, then emerged. When cautioned to go home, the girl was quoted as having refused and returned to the station saying, ‘My daddy’s coming in two hours from now.’”
The articles said the encounter took place “some four hours before the murder.”
