I was interviewed over the summer for this four-part docuseries. The Hillside Strangler case was one of the worst in Los Angeles’ history.
One of the killers, Angelo Buono, died in prison in 2002. His cousin, and accomplice, Kenneth Bianchi, remains in prison. May he rot.
The most important names to remember are those of their victims:
Yolanda Washington Judity Miller Lissa Kastin Delores Cepeda and Sonja Johnson Kristina Weckler Evelyn Jame King Lauren Wagner Kimberly Martin Cindy Hudspeth
After hours of small talk in the Biltmore Hotel lobby, Robert “Red” Manley finally left Beth Short. He had been out of touch with his wife, Harriet, for a few days. It was time to go home.
Biltmore Hotel at 5th and Olive
She told him she’d be fine. Her sister was coming. A lie—one of many she’d told Red since December. At 6 p.m. on January 9, 1947, Beth left the Biltmore lobby, navigated her way through guests and luggage to Olive Street. She turned right. She turned right. Whatever money she had, none of it was going to public transit. Otherwise, she would have turned left and gone to the nearby Subway Terminal Building.
Darkness had settled. Streetlights spilled pale circles across the pavement. Streetcars clanged. Buses sighed. Snatches of conversation carried further in the chill winter air. For the first block, she walked against pedestrian traffic.
Office workers streamed out onto the sidewalk. Men with hats pulled low, coats buttoned tight, heading toward the Subway Terminal Building.
Subway terminal, Los Angeles
From 5th to 6th Streets, Beth encountered the usual post-war mix of bellmen, traveling salesmen, secretaries, and servicemen. The air smelled of diesel exhaust, coffee, diner food, damp concrete, and cigarette smoke.
Few women walked along. Those who did moved with purpose. Beth had a destination in mind. Hollywood would be the best place for her to find an acquaintance who could put her up for the night, or suggest a place where she could find a bunk bed for a dollar a night. If she didn’t have enough for more than a night or two, she could vanish down an exterior fire escape. She had done it before.
Continuing down Olive Street, between 6th and 7th, she would pass professional buildings, insurance offices, and small law firms. Several luncheon cafes offered sandwiches, pie, and weak coffee.
Foot traffic thinned out past 7th . The quiet edge of the street, with anonymous storefronts and upper-floor offices. Several bars dotted the street. None were rowdy. Just quiet places to grab an end-of-the-day cocktail.
Did Beth stop in at the Crown Grill at 8th and Olive? There have been no definitive sightings of her there on January 9th. She had lunched at the Grill with a friend and the friend’s married lover a few times.
Crown Grille at 8th & Olive
It isn’t unreasonable to assume she poked her head in, seeking a familiar face. One of the bartenders once drove Beth up to Mulholland, where they necked. Nothing more. If he had been behind the bar, she might have asked him for a dollar or two. Or a ride.
Beth didn’t walk eight miles to Hollywood. That much is certain.
AI generated image of woman walking on Olive Street.
Did her killer encounter her at the Crown Grill? Or did he stop and offer her a ride as she walked along Olive? Faced with a long cold walk, Beth would have accepted. She may have played it coy at first, just like she did with Red Manley when he approached her on a San Diego street corner. But in the end, if a man in uniform, or in a topcoat and tie, offered a warm ride to Hollywood—she would have gone.
That, I believe, is how the missing week began.
What followed, between January 9 and January 15, is the stuff of nightmares
NEXT TIME: After January 9, 1947, Elizabeth Short exists only in fragments. And fragments are where killers hide.
Two men and a woman came to the door of the French home on January 7, 1947. Elizabeth Short saw them, but didn’t open the door.
Their visit rattled her. Who were they? If she knew, she didn’t say. Instead, she contacted Robert “Red” Manley, the salesman she’d dated a couple of times, and asked him to come and get her.
Elizabeth Short
Red arrived at the French home at 7:30 p.m. He loaded Beth’s two suitcases in the car. Neighbors who saw them said they seemed in high spirits.
They headed north, hugging the coast, and checked into a motel a few hours later.
After an evening of dinner and dancing, they returned to the motel. Beth curled up in the chair. Red took the bed—alone.
The next morning, they left the motel and started north. What was said on that drive to Los Angeles? Red noticed some scratches on Beth’s arms and asked her about them. She spun a story about a jealous boyfriend. An Italian with a temper. He had scratched her. Maybe he never existed. Maybe she made the scratches herself. It wasn’t the last lie she told him that day.
Beth spent much of the drive in silence. She may have wondered what she would do once she hit L.A. She had calls to make. Maybe one of her Hollywood friends had a couch. But first—she needed to ditch Red.
Once they arrived in the city, Beth told Red that she needed to check her luggage at the bus depot. He took her there, but refused to leave her in that neighborhood on her own. She insisted she would be fine, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
Beth had a few minutes while she checked her bags to come up with a plan. When they returned to his car, she told him she needed to go to the Biltmore Hotel to wait for her sister. It was a lie. Her sister Virginia was in Oakland, hundreds of miles to the north.
Red drove her several blocks to the hotel. The main lobby was on Olive Street, directly opposite Pershing Square. She expected to be dropped off, but he wouldn’t leave her. He may have wanted to postpone seeing Harriet. He hadn’t spoken to her for days.
They sat in the Biltmore’s grand lobby, surrounded by velvet chairs and marble silence. They made small talk. Nothing important. Nothing honest. Red finally said he had to go. She assured him she would be fine.
Biltmore Hotel
At 6:30 p.m. Beth watched him go. She waited a few moments, eyes on the clock. Then she rose and walked out. She turned right onto Olive Street.
Did she stop at the Crown Grill at Eighth and Olive? She’d been there before. Maybe she’d find a familiar face—or a place to sleep. Some of the Grill’s patrons thought they saw her that night. None were certain.
Sometime after 6:30 p.m. on January 9, 1947, Elizabeth Short met her killer.
NEXT TIME: The missing week.
NOTE: For a glimpse into Los Angeles as Beth Short would have seen it, here is some amazing B-roll from shot for a Rita Hayworth film, Down to Earth, via the Internet Archive.
When Dorothy French brought Elizabeth Short home in early December, she never expected her to stake a claim to the family’s sofa. Dorothy had simply meant to offer a safer alternative to a seat in the Aztec all-night movie theater—a place to rest for a night or two. No more than that.
But Betty stayed.
She took advantage of the Frenches’ hospitality. They were too kind to put her out, but the tension in the home was growing. Betty (she used Beth and Betty interchangeably) must have felt it.
Elizabeth Short
There’s no record of how they spent Christmas. It would have been the perfect time for Betty to leave San Diego, return to Hollywood—where she had connections, where people at least knew her. But she remained, a guest among strangers. The question is why.
Was she waiting for money? A ride? A man?
Some accounts reduce her stay in San Diego to cliché: drifting, partying, mysterious. It was none of those things. It was stasis. A kind of limbo.
She spent her days writing letters—many of which she never mailed.
One of the most poignant was addressed to Gordon Fickling, dated December 13. She had lived with Fickling—a Navy lieutenant and flier—months earlier in Long Beach. Gordon Fickling.
She wrote:
“I do hope you find a nice girl to kiss at midnight on New Year’s Eve. It would have been wonderful if we belonged to each other now. I’ll never regret coming west to see you. You didn’t take me in your arms and keep me there. However, it was nice as long as it lasted.”
The unsent letter offers a glimpse into her state of mind. It is wistful—a quiet longing for something stable. A safe harbor. And the realization that safety, when it appears at all, is always temporary.
The Frenches’ home had become a kind of refuge. Temporary, but real.
Then, something strange happened.
Red Manley
On January 7, two men and a girl came to the door. They knocked, waited a few minutes, and then ran to a car parked outside.
Betty peeked through the window but refused to answer. She was visibly terrified. When Dorothy asked her about it, Betty was evasive—so much so that Dorothy eventually gave up trying to get answers.
Shortly after, Betty wired Red and asked him to come get her. She was ready to leave San Diego.
He responded the next day:
“Wait and I’ll be down for you.”
NEXT TIME: Elizabeth Short’s life is measured in days.
Archival Note: Little contemporaneous documentation exists regarding Elizabeth Short’s daily life during her stay with the French family in Pacific Beach. Beyond later statements attributed to Dorothy French, and the surviving unsent correspondence, no police reports, diaries, or third-party accounts place Short at any specific location in San Diego between December 8, 1946, and her departure in early January 1947.
Elizabeth Short stepped off the bus in San Diego in early December 1946—alone, broke, and fading into the shadows of the chilly evening.
She walked a few blocks to the Aztec, a 24-hour movie theater. The price of a ticket gave her a quiet and warm place to rest. She dozed off, only to be awakened by the cashier, a woman about her age, Dorothy French.
Elvera & Dorothy French
Dorothy could tell the woman, who introduced herself as Betty Short, was at loose ends. She felt sorry for her, and she knew that a woman sleeping alone in the theater was easy prey. Dorothy invited Betty to come with her to Pacific Beach, where she lived with her mother, Elvera, and her teenage brother, Cory. Betty was welcome to spend the night and get a fresh start the next day.
Nearly two weeks had passed since her arrival on December 8. As the days crawled toward Christmas, the Frenches began to regret their kindness. Like many post-war families, they struggled to make ends meet. Betty hadn’t contributed a cent to the household, and the family was tired of tip-toeing around the sofa as she slept.
She showed no interest in finding a job and spent much of her time writing letters. She had one visitor, a man she introduced only as Red. She told the Frenches he was an airline employee in San Diego who lived in Huntington Park, but stayed at a nearby motel.
The sofa in the Frenches’ modest home was a far cry from the glamorous Hollywood backdrop Betty spoke of, but it provided a measure of stability. According to Elvera, Betty was polite but withdrawn. She offered few details about her past and rarely ventured out during the day. She claimed to have worked at a naval hospital but made no effort to find another job. Over time, Elvera grew uneasy. She had a “premonition” that something was wrong. She described Betty’s presence as moody and unsettled.
She was more shadow than guest.
Dorothy said, “Betty seemed constantly in fear of something. Whenever someone came to the door, she would act frightened.”
Despite the undercurrent of discomfort, the family allowed her to stay through the holidays.
NEXT TIME: Elizabeth Short leaves San Diego.
Archival Note: Details of Elizabeth Short’s (Black Dahlia) stay with the French family in Pacific Beach are based primarily on contemporaneous police interviews and subsequent press reports. Key accounts include statements attributed to Dorothy and Elvera French following Short’s disappearance and murder.
For more than forty years, Agness “Aggie” Underwood covered the crimes that terrified—and fascinated—Los Angeles. Murderers, mobsters, and corrupt officials all crossed her path. But the moment that set her career in motion wasn’t a gunshot or a headline. It was a pair of silk stockings she couldn’t afford.
In 1926, money was tight. Aggie and her husband, Harry, had a daughter, Evelyn, and a son, George. Her younger sister Leona lived with them and helped with expenses. Still, Aggie wore Leona’s hand-me-down silk stockings. One day, she asked Harry for money to buy a new pair. He said no. Aggie told him that if he wouldn’t give her money for stockings, she’d earn it herself.
She was bluffing. She hadn’t worked outside the home since 1920.
Harry, Aggie, Evelyn, George
The next day, out of nowhere, her best friend Evelyn offered her a temporary switchboard job at the Daily Record. Aggie grabbed it. The stockings would be hers.
She described her first impression of the newsroom:
“I looked out on a weird wonderland… Shirt-sleeved men attacked beaten-up typewriters, which snarled and balked. Sheets of paper snowed on a central point called the city desk, whatever that meant. Men gyrated through the crazy quilt of splintered desks and tables. It was a jumble.”
The job was supposed to be temporary. But Gertrude Price, the women’s editor (writing as Cynthia Grey), saw something in Aggie and became her mentor. Aggie helped with the annual Cynthia Grey Christmas baskets, and Gertrude encouraged her to learn the business.
Christmas baskets
Aggie loved the chaos of the newsroom, and she loved being close to a breaking story. In December 1927, the city was horrified by the murder of twelve-year-old Marian Parker by William Edward Hickman, who called himself “The Fox.”
When news of Hickman’s capture in Oregon broke, Aggie couldn’t contain herself:
“As the bulletins pumped in and the city-side worked furiously at localizing, I couldn’t keep myself in my niche. I committed the unpardonable sin of looking over shoulders of reporters as they wrote. I got underfoot. In what I thought was exasperation, Rod Brink, the city editor, said: ‘All right, if you’re so interested, take this dictation.’
I typed the dictation—part of the main running story.
I was sunk.
I wanted to be a reporter.”
William Edward Hickman [Photo courtesy of LAPL]
She began writing human interest stories, covering fashion and women’s clubs. In May 1931, her first major break came when Charles H. Crawford (a.k.a. the Grey Fox) and reporter Herbert F. Spencer were shot and killed.
Crawford was a former saloon keeper turned vice king. Spencer had worked with a political crusading weekly, the Critic of Critics. They were both involved in the shadowy network known as “The Combination”—a marriage of City Hall and organized crime.
After the murders, David H. Clark, a former deputy DA and candidate for judge, surrendered. But no one had interviewed Clark’s parents. Aggie called every Clark in the phonebook until she found them in Highland Park.
She got the interview. The result: a front-page, above-the-fold story titled Mrs. Clark Says Son is Innocent. Her first double-column byline.
Later, she scored another exclusive with Spencer’s widow. Aggie admitted she was inexperienced—and that honesty earned her the story.
Clark was acquitted. But he drifted. In 1953, he killed a friend’s wife in a drunken fight and died in Chino prison in 1954.
Aggie had found her niche—finding the doors no one else knocked on.
In 1935, she joined the Evening Herald and Express, owned by William Randolph Hearst. She stayed with Hearst the rest of her career.
By 1936, Aggie had a reputation as a reporter who could crack a case. During the Samuel Whittaker case, she interviewed the grieving husband, a retired organist, after his wife Ethel was killed during an apparent hotel robbery.
She staged a dramatic photo of Whittaker pointing his cane at the alleged killer, James Fagan Culver. But as she posed the shot, she noticed something odd: Whittaker winked at Culver.
Culver & Whittaker
Was it a tic? No. She waited. Nothing. She discreetly pulled Detective Thad Brown aside:
“Thad, ask that kid why Whittaker winked at him. Don’t let the kid wriggle out of it. Whittaker did wink at him. There’s no mistake about it.”
Brown humored her. Culver cracked. He confessed: Whittaker had staged the robbery, armed Culver with a .38, and planned to kill his wife himself. He did—then turned his gun on Culver. Culver escaped, wounded.
Whittaker was convicted and given life for his wife’s murder. On his way to San Quentin, he said:
“I hope God may strike me dead before I get to my cell if I am guilty of this horrible crime.”
He dropped dead of a heart attack.
Aggie on Norton, January 15, 1947.
In January 1947, Aggie began reporting on the body of an unknown woman found bisected in Leimert Park. She would become known as the Black Dahlia.
Many claim to have coined the name. Aggie said she got it from LAPD Lt. Ray Giese:
“This is something you might like, Agness. I’ve found out they called her the ‘Black Dahlia’ around that drugstore where she hung out down in Long Beach.”
Like it? She LOVED it.
The Jane Doe was soon identified as 22-year-old Elizabeth Short of Medford, MA. Aggie interviewed the first serious suspect, Robert “Red” Manley. Then she was pulled from the case.
She brought in her embroidery hoop while she cooled her heels in the office. Snickers followed. One reporter said:
“What do you think of that? Here’s the best reporter on the Herald, on the biggest day of one of the best stories in years—sitting in the office doing fancy work!”
She was reassigned, then yanked again. And then—she was promoted to city editor.
Dahlia conspiracy theorists say Aggie was close to solving the case. Some believe she was silenced. But promoting her to city editor—the boss of all the Dahlia reporters—was a strange way to shut her up.
Still… what if she was onto something?
When asked later if she knew who killed Elizabeth Short, she said yes—but never named him.
Mercy? Resignation? Maybe both.
Aggie understood something this city still struggles with: some crimes don’t end in arrests. They end in silence.
She covered L.A.’s most deranged crimes. As city editor, she won dozens of awards and the respect of her newsroom. On her 10th anniversary, her crew gave her a giant novelty baseball bat—like the one she kept on her desk to scare off pesky Hollywood types. It read:
“To Aggie, Keep Swinging.”
Aggie keeps swinging. Photo courtesy of LAPL.
Reporter Will Fowler said in his autobiography:
“The last thing I remember Aggie saying to her friends who came to celebrate at her retirement party was: ‘Please don’t forget me.’”
She had a bat on her desk and a city full of secrets.
The holidays aren’t joyful for everyone. Family gatherings, liquor, and year-long grudges can combust over anything—from the TV remote to the last slice of pie. Holiday homicides often boil down to too much booze and too much togetherness.
For the Thorpes, the trigger wasn’t a turkey leg or a slice of pie—it was the uninvited arrival of an ex-husband.
On Thanksgiving evening, November 27, 1952, Seal Beach officers rolled to 131 6th Street after a call from Frances Conant Thorpe. She told police that her ex-husband, Al McNutt, had stopped by to offer holiday greetings to her and her current husband of eight months, Herman. Frances and Herman had been drinking and arguing all day. McNutt’s appearance pushed things over the edge. A struggle followed, and Herman wound up dead.
Frances offered three incompatible versions of the shooting. First, she told Officer William Dowdy that Herman had committed suicide. Then, she told Deputy Coroner Walter Fox that she shot him twice during a scuffle. Finally, she told District Attorney Investigator M.D. Williams that Herman had tried to shoot her; she fell, hit her head on a case of root beer, blacked out for hours, and awoke to find him dead on the bedroom floor.
The facts shredded all three stories.
Herman’s autopsy revealed nothing consistent with suicide. The position of the weapon beneath his body and the trajectory of the fatal chest wound made self-infliction impossible. There was no gunshot residue on his hands and no powder burns on his skin. But there were traces of gunpowder on Frances’ bathrobe and on her left hand.
Investigator Williams noted that Frances’ attitude was evasive, and her stories “didn’t hold together.”
Dr. Raymond Brandt’s autopsy established Herman’s time of death as 1:30 p.m.—a full hour earlier than Frances claimed. Doctors dismissed her blackout story outright. One said it would be “medically impossible to be blacked out so long, even if she was intoxicated.”
The jury rejected her stories, too. After six hours and twenty-eight minutes of deliberation, they found Frances guilty of manslaughter. She was sentenced to up to ten years in prison.
Thanksgiving in Seal Beach didn’t end with dessert—it ended with a revolver, a bad lie, and a dead husband.
Delora Mae Campbell didn’t cry, tremble, or ask for her parents when accused of strangling six-year-old Donna Isbell. She just stood there.
Pending her hearing, authorities held her in isolation in the County Jail rather than Juvenile Hall. Sgt. Frances Cardiff, a jail matron, reported that Delora slept eight hours straight and woke at 5 a.m. on December 31st, quiet and indifferent to both her surroundings and the killing.
When reporters pressed her, Delora couldn’t—or wouldn’t—explain the impulse she claimed had driven her. Maybe it was a vision. Maybe she acted knowingly. “I could have been awake and actually aware of what I was doing,” she said. “I’m not sure.” Asked if she would strangle Donna again, she answered the same way: “I’m not sure.” She said she liked Donna and her older brother, Roy.
What, then, made her do it?
Donna’s parents struggled with their loss, and with a smaller heartbreak of their own. They couldn’t afford the doll Donna wanted so badly for Christmas, but they’d told her Santa would bring it for her February birthday. After the murder, a Marine, Sgt. William Thornton, and his wife, Paula, read about the unfulfilled promise and bought the doll themselves. The Isbells buried it with Donna.
Delora’s father, Clem Campbell, a truck driver from Fort Lupton, Colorado, visited her in County Jail. “We could hardly believe it,” he said. “I guess it was one of those things that just had to happen.” A strange remark from a father whose child had killed another. Not just a strange remark, but a potential window into a family culture of emotional dislocation, which may echo in Delora’s flat affect and her own comment: “I’m not sure.”
Dr. Marcus Crahan submitted a psychiatric report declaring Delora legally sane. Had he found her insane, she might have avoided adult prosecution; instead, she was nudged toward it.
At the coroner’s inquest, Delora took the stand only long enough to say that, on advice of counsel, she would not testify. She didn’t need to. During her isolation, she took a bobby pin and scratched a confession into the enamel of her face-powder compact. No one heard the faint scrape of metal on metal as she wrote:
“DELORA MAE CAMPBELL KILLED DONNA JOYCE ISBELL SATURDAY NIGHT, DEC. 29, 1951.”
Sheriff’s Capt. William Barron asked what prompted her to carve the inscription. “Things got to bothering me a lot,” she said. “I couldn’t talk to anyone, and I felt satisfied about writing—the same as if I talked about it to someone.”
A coroner’s jury found Donna’s death homicidal and Delora probably criminally responsible. The court ordered her to Camarillo State Hospital for a 90-day observation. Afterward, Clem petitioned to have her declared insane and in need of continued care. Two court psychiatrists agreed she was mentally depressed and showed signs of a “disturbed family relationship” and “emotional illness,” but believed she might improve with treatment.
Delora’s father, Clem, visits her after her arrest.
In the early 1950s, psychiatric care for juvenile girls leaned heavily on Freudian interpretation and moral rehabilitation, supported by sedatives and occupational therapy. Whatever treatment Delora received, she followed the rules, and was rewarded with small perks.
Nobody heard anything more about her until April 1954, when she walked away from the hospital. She’d been trusted with grounds privileges for months. With about $70 earned from hospital work, she traveled by bus to Bakersfield, wandered for a few days, then grew tired of “being a fugitive.” She contacted her aunt and uncle in Long Beach—the same relatives she lived with at the time of the murder. They offered to pick her up. When she stepped off the bus at the designated spot, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies were waiting. They returned her to Camarillo.
Delora returned to Camarillo after running away.
Sometime in 1956, Delora was quietly released. She returned to Colorado, married twice, had two children, and—so far as anyone can tell—never reoffended. She led a normal life.
Her case leaves behind more questions than answers. No one ever determined what tipped her into violence that December night. In photos, she often appears older than her years—haunted, guarded, carrying something she never named. It’s only an impression, but sometimes an impression is all a case like this leaves.
In the 1940s and 1950s, adolescent girls who committed serious violence often came from chaotic or emotionally barren homes, or from environments marked by humiliation, neglect, or unspoken harm. Whether Delora carried any of that with her is impossible to say. The official record confirms no abuse. It doesn’t rule it out.
Whatever drove her—trauma, dissociation, rage with no safe outlet—remains locked in the silence she maintained after her confession on the compact.
Donna was buried with the doll she longed for. Delora carried only her compact. Between them lies a single moment she called an impulse—irresistible or otherwise—and the truth of it went with her.
NOTE: This narrative draws on newspaper archives, court transcripts, and mid-century psychiatric evaluations. The official record of Delora Campbell is thin, fractured, and filtered through the lens of 1950s ideas about girls, crime, and mental disturbance. I’ve followed the trail where it leads and respected the silences where it stops. In a case built on impulse and uncertainty, the gaps are part of the truth.
Photographs are from the USC Digital Library. Los Angeles Examiner Photographs Collection
Welcome! The lobby of the Deranged L.A. Crimes theater is open! Grab a bucket of popcorn, some Milk Duds and a Coke and find a seat. Before William Powell was Nick Charles in the THIN MAN series, he was Philo Vance. Tonight’s feature is THE GREENE MURDER CASE, starring William Powell, Jean Arthur, and Florence Eldridge.
