Less than a month after housewife Betty Bersinger discovered Elizabeth Short’s bisected body in a Leimert Park vacant lot, another horror surfaced. On this day, Hugh C. Shelby, a bulldozer operator, found the nude, brutally beaten body of a woman dumped in a field near the Santa Monica Airport.

The Herald rushed out an extra edition:

“WEREWOLF STRIKES AGAIN! KILLS L.A. WOMAN, WRITES B.D. ON BODY.”

Within hours, LAPD identified the victim as 45-year-old Jeanne French.

She had suffered blows to the head from a blunt instrument. But those weren’t the fatal wounds. Her killer stomped on her chest, crushing ribs and inflicting internal injuries that caused her to die slowly from hemorrhage and shock. Heel prints were left on her body.

Mercifully, investigators believed Jeanne was unconscious after the initial head trauma. She likely never saw her killer reach into her purse for her lipstick—never felt the pressure as he scrawled on her lifeless body in crude, angry letters:

“FUCK YOU, B.D.”
“TEX.”

Detectives immediately looked for links between Jeanne’s murder and Elizabeth Short’s. The initials. The mutilation. The proximity in time. But nothing solid connected them. Just another woman dead in the City of Angels.

The night before her death, Jeanne visited her estranged husband, Frank, at his apartment. They fought. Frank claimed she was drunk, struck him with her purse, then left. Jeanne’s 25-year-old son, David, was questioned. Upon leaving the station, he confronted Frank:

“I’ve told them the truth. If you’re guilty, there’s a God in heaven who will take care of you.”

Frank replied:
“I swear to God; I didn’t kill her.”

Police arrested him. But his alibi held—his landlady saw him at home during the time of the murder, and his shoe prints didn’t match those on Jeanne’s body. He was released.

Witnesses last saw Jeanne at the Pan American Bar on West Washington Place, sitting at the first stool by the door. The bartender noted she was with a small, dark-complexioned man. They left together at closing.

Her stripped-down 1929 Ford roadster was found parked at the Piccadilly Drive-In at Washington Place and Sepulveda. It had been there since at least 3:15 a.m. A night watchman saw a man leave it there. But Jeanne wasn’t found until hours later. Her time of death was estimated at 6 a.m.—what happened in those three missing hours remains unknown.

Police, ever industrious in the way that gets women nowhere, rounded up the usual suspects—“sex degenerates”—and checked Chinese restaurants after the autopsy revealed Jeanne had eaten Chinese food before she died. None of it led anywhere.

The case, dubbed the Red Lipstick Murder, went cold.

Three years later, amid public outrage and a grand jury probe into the mounting pile of unsolved women’s murders, the D.A. assigned two investigators—Frank Jemison and Walter Morgan—to reopen Jeanne’s case. They worked it for eight months. One painter who had done work for the Frenches and had dated Jeanne emerged as a promising suspect. He wore the same shoe size as the killer and had conveniently burned several pairs. But in the end, he too was cleared.

Like Elizabeth Short, Jeanne French faded into the backlog of cold cases.

Their names are part of a long list: Elizabeth Murray, Georgette Bauerdorf, Dorothy Montgomery, Laura Trelstad, Rosenda Mondragon, Lillian Dominguez, Gladys Kern, Louise Springer, Jean Spangler, Mimi Boomhower.

Some were murdered. Others vanished without a trace. They became headlines, case numbers, toe tags.

We remember them here—not as victims, but as women who once lived, with hopes and dreams they had every right to pursue.

Once Beth was identified, investigators raked through the ashes of her life, searching for clues to her killer.

Their search led them to Pacific Beach and the French family, where Beth had overstayed her welcome. It was from them that detectives first heard about a redhead who had dated her a few times.

They knew him only as Red—25 years old, 175 pounds, blue eyes, fair complexion. He drove a tan Studebaker coupe with a “Huntington Park” sticker on the rear window.

This was their first solid lead.

Police, and hordes of reporters, followed each tip they received. It was exhausting and fruitless.

On Sunday, January 19, 1947, Robert “Red” Manley, a salesman for a pipe clamp company, surrendered to police after returning from a sales trip to San Francisco. Until he returned to Los Angeles, he was unaware that police were looking for him.

He willingly submitted to a lie detector test, but the results were “confused.” Manley was so exhausted from the trip and the stress that it made it impossible to get a reliable reading. Captain Donohoe said, “We’ll try again later. He’s tired out now and so are we.”

Manley’s wife, Harriet, met him at the jail before he was booked. Heads together, they spoke quietly. He had a lot of explaining to do, and not just to the police.

Because of her police connections, Evening Herald & Express reporter, Agness Aggie Underwood, scored an exclusive interview with Manley.

Underwood was known to police as a reporter with the instincts of a veteran investigator. She had a reputation for “solving” cases. Police respected and trusted her.

When she entered the interview room, she intuitively knew how to begin. She said to him, “You look as though you’ve been on a drunk.” Manley replied, “This is worse than any drunk I’ve ever been on. I’ll never pick up another dame as long as I live.”

Good news for Harriet, but not enough to convince police. Underwood continued the interview. Manley told her about picking Beth up on the street in San Diego. And then he made the most surprising admission. He said, “I decided to pick her up and make a test for myself and see if I loved my wife or not.”

The test was simple. If he didn’t succumb to the charms of the dark-haired beauty, then his marriage was meant to be. It was a crackpot idea—one that suggests a man already searching for an exit.

At 25, his life was not what he had planned. He was a musician. He played in an Army band and stayed in the U.S. for the duration. He would rather have pursued music, but instead found himself a married salesman with a four-month-old child.

He told Underwood about their uneventful night at a Pacific Beach motel. He described their arrival in downtown Los Angeles on January 9^th. He said Beth asked him to take her to the Greyhound Bus Station so she could check her bags before meeting her sister.  

He asked where she was going to meet her, and without waiting for an answer, he said, “The Biltmore?” She said yes.

It was a lie. Her nearest sister, Virginia, lived with her husband hundreds of miles north in Oakland. It seems likely Beth was eager to rid herself of her traveling companion and hustle a place to spend the night.

Manley waited with her in the lobby of the Biltmore for a long time before he finally said he had to leave. Beth told him she had to wait. He told Underwood, “That is the last time I saw Betty Short. I’ll take the truth serum or anything they want to give me. And, I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles and tell my minister, too, that was the last time I ever saw Betty Short.”

“I did not kill her.”

The LAPD was frustrated in its attempt to send Jane Doe #1’s fingerprints to the FBI in D.C. A massive snowstorm had grounded aircraft, and it would take days for the affected areas to clear.

The Hearst-owned Examiner offered LAPD a workaround. The paper had a Soundphoto, an early facsimile (fax) machine. They had never used it to transmit fingerprints, but felt it could be done. They agreed to send the victim’s fingerprints to the FBI in exchange for exclusives in the case. Knowing the investigation could not formally begin without an identification, LAPD Captain Jack Donohoe agreed to the arrangement.

The FBI identified the prints as belonging to Elizabeth Short, a 22-year-old Massachusetts native. Santa Barbara police arrested her for underage drinking at a local restaurant in 1943 when she worked at the Camp Cooke PX. And there was a mugshot.

By January 17, the hauntingly beautiful mugshot was on the front page of newspapers across the country.

Her mother, Phoebe Short, and three of her sisters, who still lived in Massachusetts, arrived in Los Angeles to attend the inquest. Her sister Virginia, and Virginia’s husband, came from Oakland. It was a grim reunion.

Beth’s father, Cleo, refused to identify his daughter. He wanted nothing to do with her, the family, or the murder.

To spare Phoebe and Beth’s sisters, Virginia’s husband confirmed Beth’s identity at the morgue.

A murder victim, especially a beautiful young woman, dies twice. First at the hands of her killer. Next, in the newspapers.

The Daily News reported that homicide detectives were probing Beth’s “reckless career that ended under a sadist’s knife.” The judgement was unmistakable. Beth’s “reckless career” made her complicit. No one beat, slaughtered, and dumped nice girls like garbage.

Described as popular, Beth and her girlfriends were often seen in Hollywood night spots in the company of servicemen. It wasn’t an explicit condemnation of her lifestyle. It didn’t have to be.  

Round-ups of sex offenders and other shady characters police believed might be responsible for the murder yielded nothing of value. However, they got information that Beth was last seen with a handsome red-headed man. The man had picked her up at the French home in Pacific Beach on January 8^th. He had dated her a few times while she stayed there.. He answered to Bill or Red. No one knew anything more.

To detectives, he may have been the last person to see Beth alive.

They had Beth’s name, and they also had a nickname: “The Black Dahlia.” During the summer of 1946, a movie starring Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, and William Bendix, titled The Blue Dahlia, played around town. She got the nickname from acquaintances in Long Beach. She frequently wore black and sometimes tucked a large flower behind her ear.

Los Angeles has a history of murders named after flowers: Gardenia, Orchid, Red Rose. Now it added Black Dahlia to the deadly bouquet.

For background on Beth, detectives talked to former roommates and others who knew her and might be familiar with her habits.

Lynn Martin, 16 going on 30, and Marjorie Graham, 24, lived with Beth in Hollywood. They may have lived with her, but they knew little about her private life.

Tracking Beth’s movements in post-war Los Angeles presented a unique challenge. The war had ended almost 18 months earlier, but the housing shortage remained critical. If you didn’t have a fixed address, you could stay in a hotel for only 5 days. People were constantly on the move.

The population skewed young and transient. Veterans, mentally broken by their war experiences, drank in the same clubs as Beth and her friends.

The city was more dangerous than they knew. It could have been any of them who ended up dead in a vacant lot. But a monster chose Beth.

NEXT TIME: The red-haired man surrenders.