The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (34 page)

As the LAPD worked feverishly to solve the Black Dahlia murder, Smith’s presence was felt here and there, fleetingly, but never long enough to come into focus. While Elizabeth Short was still alive, rich LA socialite Georgette Bauerdorf (an acquaintance of Short’s) was murdered and left in her bathtub; police investigated all leads except one. A man who Bauerdorf had dated—a tall man who walked with a limp—couldn’t be found.

Bauerdorf’s murderer fled in her car, which was abandoned near 25th and San Pedro, right around the corner from 31st and Trinity. A week after the murder,
Herald
Express
newspaper reporter Aggie Underwood received a tip that a tall, thin man walking with a limp was seen walking away from 25th and San Pedro.

Many, many years later (in late 1981), Arnold Smith emerged as a suspect in the Black Dahlia case only because he related the story to an informant (that’s how it reads in the book; incredibly, Gilmore himself is the one who brought Smith to the LAPD’s attention), who in turn gave him money to stay loaded. However, Smith explained that
he
wasn’t responsible for the murder. An acquaintance of his—one Al Morrison (extensive investigations by the LAPD didn’t turn up any proof that Morrison ever existed)—murdered Short in a house on East 31st near Trinity, and later related the events to Smith.

After Gilmore took taped interviews of him to the LAPD, Smith—who until that point was always available for a drink—became “cagy” and impossible to track down. However, the LAPD and Detective Badge Number One, John St John, were hot to nail him. St John was sure that Al Morrison was just a “smoke screen” to keep the police off the trail of the real murderer—Smith himself. On the tapes Gilmore provided, Smith related details about the murder that only the murderer could have known; details that the hordes of confessed Black Dahlia murderers who had been turning themselves in over the years knew nothing about.

The LAPD felt sure they had their man. Now they had to catch him. With much difficulty, a meeting was finally arranged with Smith.

In the case’s most astonishing twist, Smith nodded off while smoking only days before the meeting, and died in a fire in his tiny room in the Holland Hotel near downtown LA Carelessness, or suicide? Hard to say.

So the enigmatic spectre who was probably responsible for the enigmatic Black Dahlia’s murder—and at least one other—reared his head years after the murder and then was suddenly gone. And it wasn’t, as so many had assumed, a jealous doctor, a physician with the skill to cut Elizabeth Short surgically into two. It was just a drunken loser, one of countless zeros wandering around Los Angeles.

After his death, police learned that when he was younger, Smith had lived for a time with his mother near—surprise, surprise—31st and San Pedro. The whole area is Mr Smith’s neighbourhood.

Unanswered questions. Dark, impenetrenable shadows hiding crucial pieces of the puzzle. “I’m not going to say I solved the murder,” Gilmore told me. “It’s absurd. My research carried me to a certain point.
This
was the guy St John wanted to nail, so I handed everything over to the LAPD. But I’ll never stand up and say, ‘I solved the Black Dahlia murder!’ No one can ever
solve
the Black Dahlia murder.”

Despite Gilmore’s disclaimer, the thin man who walked with a limp has become a permanent part of the Dahlia tapestry, and cannot be ignored. Arnold Smith is the biggest mystery in a story whose edges and borders are forever blurred by personal agendas (Smith’s prints were lifted from Georgette Bauerdorf’s apartment, but William Randolph Hearst—a friend to the Bauerdorfs—shut the investigation down, wanting to keep the Bauerdorfs and himself out of unflattering news) and shoddy police work (innocent suspect Leslie Dillon was grilled mercilessly by an incompetent LAPD “psychiatrist” and returned the favour by filing a $100,000 damage claim against the city), but there are many more myths and mysteries that distort the Black Dahlia case to this day. Most writers continue to report that the letters “BD” were carved into her thigh, that there were cigarette burns all over her body, and that her hair had been shampooed. Non-facts made up by hack writers through the years. Yet, they cause the haze that surrounds the case to grow thicker and more intriguing. It’s as if the case’s inertia attracts these myths like a magnet as it rolls on through time.

(The haze thickens considerably with a story Gilmore told me—that he’s never written about—whereby he travelled to Indianapolis many years ago on a wild goose chase to find the apocryphal Al Morrison, actually found the man in a rough-nik bar, and then lost the nerve to talk to him. “This guy didn’t look like a female impersonator to me,” Gilmore explained after my jaw dropped open. “I asked the bartender, and he pointed to this guy—‘That’s Al Morrison’. I had a drink, but I didn’t talk to him. I admit, it’s one of the regrets of my life I didn’t talk to this guy. It just wasn’t right. I felt like I already knew all there was to know.”)

Leaving 31st and Trinity, I wondered, as I had many times before, why on earth pretty Elizabeth Short had ever given Arnold Smith the time of day.

“With them, I think it was a very strange connection of the cripple,” Gilmore told me. “She
was
crippled. She was a defective individual, and
he
was a defective individual. And you have a tense situation with people whose nerves are on the surface, where the antennas are very clear with one another. Very clear. I think he was a man who just overrode all boundaries. I don’t think he even
recognized
boundaries in life . . . plus, he was stalking her, so it was simply a matter of
time
.”

I took San Pedro north to 8th, and navigated my way through downtown L.A, finally spilling onto 7th street east of MacArthur park. There stood the run-down, decrepit Holland Hotel, where Arnold Smith, the man who could have answered everybody’s questions about the Black Dahlia murder, burned to death after eluding police for thirty-five years.
Thirty
-
five
years
. Who would have thought that closure for the Black Dahlia story, such as it was, would be found in a dump like the Holland so long after her death?

How sad that Elizabeth Short’s insecurities landed her, as they seem to do with so many women, in the wrong part of town with the wrong people, at precisely the wrong time. Gilmore had remarked that she was a driven girl, but afraid of running into herself.

“. . . .She played these games out with men, and reached a point where . . . it was time to get up and do the act. And she
couldn’t
do the act—I think it was a moment of great anxiety for her, which might have been all along leading up to a point where she fled. She left and ran. I think [Smith] was there at the right time, at the right place, as if to say, take my hand—the spider and the fly. And I think she was a willing fly. She was willing herself into the crime, as weird as that might sound.

“So you could look at him as an incidental thing, an appendage to her success or something, as a
noir
star, a dark star.”

For a few minutes, I stood across the street from the rundown hotel where Arnold Smith bid adieu to planet Earth. A more perfect building couldn’t have been dreamed up for the final chapter in the Black Dahlia saga; the Holland Hotel looked about as inviting as Norman Bates’s house.

To my way of thinking, Smith was more than just an “incidental thing” in the Black Dahlia story. If it really had been a rich surgeon behind the murder, the story’s ending would have been most un-
noir
-like, and boring at that. Throw Smith into the mix, and you have a paralysingly perfect tale—one that Hollywood’s best writers
wish
they could’ve thought up. What were the odds that such a slippery, spooky guy was behind the whole damn mystery? How many things could Elizabeth Short have done differently after she arrived in LA to avoid her run-in with Arnold Smith on 14 January 1947? Standing there in the shadow of the Holland Hotel, I finally realized what it was about the Black Dahlia murder.

In its uniquely haunting way, Elizabeth Short’s story is a play about randomness—the most profoundly disturbing and frightening play ever written about the consequences of Chance. By naïve, dumb chance, Elizabeth Short’s path crossed that of a murderer. And from that point on, a shortly wound clock was ticking towards her macabre murder. It’s a harrowing,
noir
-take on the worn-out Creation vs Evolution argument: was all this
created
, or did it happen by
chance?
The craziest things happen by chance, and Elizabeth Short—who may never have seen the end hurtling towards her like a freight train on 14/15 January 1947—is Chance personified.

(Bob Crane, 1978)

John Austin

Bob Crane was the handsome star of the 1960s TV series
Hogan’s Heroes
, set in a Second World War prison camp. The show was a hit and everyone was surprised when it was cancelled after its sixth season. Crane tried to revive his career by touring the dinner theatre circuit, and in 1978 he was starring at The Windmill Dinner Theatre in Scottsdale, Arizona. It was his last appearance. His body was found in the apartment where he was staying. Police also discovered video equipment and a library of videotapes showing Crane engaged in group sex with various women. The tapes also featured Crane’s long-standing friend John Carpenter (not the film director of the same name), who became the prime suspect in Crane’s murder. This account appeared in 1990, when the authorities were taking steps to reopen the case. Author John Austin (b. 1932) has written eight books on Hollywood as well as a biography of comedy actor George Jessel, and three books on Hollywood’s unsolved mysteries. From 1978 until 1982 he was Hollywood editor for
Screen International,
a film trade magazine based in London, and is a former International Editor of
The Hollywood Reporter
. He is also a frequent broadcaster on the Hollywood scene on radio stations in Australia and South Africa.

Bob Crane was on the verge of a reconciliation with his wife, at least on the surface, and of a dramatic television comeback. The star of television’s
Hogan’s Heroes
, the brash, wisecracking prisoner of war in Hitler’s Germany, had met with no success in seeking a new television show except for one which was cancelled after one season.

Crane also thought he was in a shaky financial position and this was the main reason he kept on working in dinner theatres across the country. In this way he could earn upwards of $200,000 per year for about 30 weeks a year.

The reconciliation with his wife, Patricia, and the new television show were not to be. And he was in a shaky financial condition—but not of his own doing. He did not live long enough to find out why. Before these things could be resolved or discovered, Crane was killed by two severe blows to the head, which caused massive skull fractures and brain damage. The blows were inflicted by a blunt instrument such as a tire iron, a lug wrench from an automobile, or a piece of iron pipe. For the
coup
de
grace
the killer tied a length of cord from a video camera in the room around Crane’s neck to make sure the actor was dead.

The Maricopa County Medical Examiner, Dr Heinz Karnitschnig, said Crane was struck on the left side of the head as he slept, “and never knew what hit him.” His death was placed “in the early morning” of 29 June 1978. It occurred in the Winfield Apartment-Hotel in an apartment leased by the Windmill Theatre (where Crane was appearing) for visiting performers. Karnitschnig said he felt, on a cursory examination, that it was a well-planned murder and not a crime of passion.

The Medical Examiner added later that the killer was “probably a man and not a woman.” A track of blood spots on the ceiling was missing. According to Karnitschnig, the killer’s first blow laid open Crane’s scalp, covering the weapon in blood. The second blow was delivered with a short arc, slinging only a couple of droplets onto the ceiling and table lamp near the bed.

Investigators theorized that if the killer had been a woman, she would have had to swing the heavy weapon with a wider arc, which would have thrown more blood onto the ceiling. The wounds, according to the ME, were deep, and the skull was crushed, indicating a very strong person. The killer, the police felt at the time, was probably a man who knew Crane, and he took his time. There were no signs of haste or frenzy. He even took the time to wipe the blood off his weapon on the bed sheet and take it with him. Apart from the cord around his neck—which did not kill Crane—the weapon was never found, in spite of an exhaustive search around the Winfield.

According to Bob Crane’s biography, published by CBS-TV while he was starring in
Hogan’s
Heroes
, he was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, on 13 July 1937. While in high school, from which he dropped out, Crane’s ambition was to be a drummer in one of the big bands of the post-war era. Ultimately, he drummed his way to a seat with the Connecticut Symphony Orchestra.

A relic of this phase of Crane’s career always sat on or near the set of the World War II comedy at the Desilu Studios in Hollywood—a set of drums which he had owned since his high school days.

In 1959, Crane put aside the sticks because he married his high school sweetheart, Ann Terzian. When they had one child, with another on the way, Crane felt that life on the road was no life for a married man with children. Instead, he turned to radio announcing and became a popular disc jockey. He started on WLEA in Hornell, New York, then WBIS in Bristol, Connecticut. Crane’s big break came when he signed on with WICC in Bridgeport and remained there for six years. Word of his brashness, acumen with a mike and quick wit, reached the ears of the program director of KNX, the CBS Radio owned and operated station in Los Angeles. When the station was searching for a strong entry for the morning drive time show to combat the popularity of Dick Whittinghill on the Gene Autry-owned KMPC down the street on Sunset Bouleyard, it reached into Bridgeport and signed Crane. Word of mouth had reached Los Angeles about his popularity—just what KNX needed. After one year, the gamble paid off in the ratings for KNX and Crane soon became the number one disc jockey in Los Angeles in morning drive-time listening.