Tag Archives: Robert Red Manley

The Black Dahlia–January 9, 1947

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About 12:20 p.m. on January 9, 1947, Elizabeth Short and Robert “Red” Manley left the motel where they had spent the night. Beth met Red, a traveling salesman, in San Diego. She decided to return to Los Angeles, and contacted him for a ride. .

He picked her up at the home of the French family where she had worn out her welcome. They offered her a place to stay for a few days. She lounged on their sofa for a month.

Robert “Red” Manley.

What did Beth and Red talk about during the couple of hours that it took them to drive back to Los Angeles from San Diego? Red noticed some scratches on her arms and asked her about them. She concocted a story about a jealous boyfriend—an Italian with black hair living in San Diego—who she alleged had scratched her. Beth probably made the scratches herself. Maybe insect bites? Beth lied to Red a few times more before their day together ended.

Harriet forgave Red

Following a platonic night in the motel room–Red passed his self-administered love test. Lucky Harriette. He still had a problem; he’d been out of touch with his wife for a couple of days. How would he explain his silence? Any guy capable of devising a ridiculous love test could come up with an excuse for being incommunicado for a couple of days.

In my mind’s eye, I see Beth and Red seated across from each other on the bench seat in his Studebaker, each lost in thought. Beth may have wondered what she’d do once she hit L.A. Maybe she’d go to friends in Hollywood. If she was lucky, someone would have an empty bed for her. Her immediate difficulty was Red. How would she get away from the well-meaning guy for whom she felt nothing?

Once they arrived in the city, Beth told Red that she needed to check her luggage at the bus depot. He took her there and Beth was ready to wave goodbye to him and be on her way–but he wouldn’t leave. He told her he couldn’t 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 make a plan to ditch her red-headed shadow. When they returned to his car, she told him she needed to go to the Biltmore Hotel to wait for her sister, Virginia. It was a lie. Virginia was in Oakland, hundreds of miles to the north.

Red drove her several blocks back to the Biltmore Hotel. The main lobby was on Olive Street, opposite Pershing Square. Beth thanked Red. He had been a gentleman. He’d paid to have taps put on the heels and toes of her pumps, and of course he’d paid for meals and the motel room. She thought he would drive off and leave her, but once again, he said that he didn’t feel comfortable putting her out of the car on her own.

Biltmore Hotel

He parked, and the two of them waited in the Biltmore’s lobby for a couple of hours. Finally, Red realized he couldn’t wait any longer. He said he had to go. She told him she would be fine, and that she expected her sister to arrive at any moment.

Red left her at 6:30 p.m. Beth watched him go–gave him a few minutes, and then she exited the hotel and turned south down Olive Street.

She may have been going to the Crown Grill at Eighth and Olive. She’d been there before and perhaps she hoped to bump into someone she knew; after all, she needed a place to stay.

This is a frame from B-roll of downtown Los Angeles. Do you see the crown? Doesn’t it look like a skull?

When asked if they’d seen Beth, most of the patrons were reluctant to talk to the police because the bar led a double life. By day, it catered to the lunch crowd. Dark enough to be cozy for cocktails for a man escorting a woman, not his wife. By night, the clientele changed to gay men. Because homosexuality was illegal, there were only a few places where men could meet.

No one could say for sure that Beth was in the bar on the 9th—and if she was there, no one saw her leave.

I find it sad that no one missed Beth. She had no family here, and no close friends. She was the perfect prey. With no any credible sightings of her, it is likely that Beth’s killer kept her captive from January 9th until the morning of January 15th, when he murdered her. What did he say to her? Did she plead for her life? It is terrifying to contemplate.

Black Dahlia: January 26, 1947 to February 15, 1947

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Beth Short’s family buried her at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California. The cemetery is located 375 miles north of the vacant lot in Leimert Park, where Betty Bersinger found her, and 3,000 miles away from Medford, Massachusetts, where her journey began.

Law enforcement worked around the clock to find the killer. On January 25th, as Beth’s family laid her to rest, a police search of a trash dump at 1819 East 25th Street in Vernon turned up one of her shoes and her handbag. Police carefully handled the items to preserve possible fingerprints. Because he saw her last, detectives called on Red Manley to identify the items.

Robert Manley identifies Beth’s purse and shoe

Without hesitation, Red told them the handbag smelled of the perfume Beth wore when he drove her from San Diego to the Biltmore on January 9th. He recognized the shoe from a pile of shoes presented to him by police. Feeling the heel of each shoe, Red stopped at a black right pump. He held it up and said, “This is it! I’m sure of it.” The shoe was the only one with double taps—heel and toe. Red paid to have an additional pair of new taps put on the heels of Beth’s shoes when they left San Diego. Beth loved hearing the tap, tap, of her toe and heel hitting the pavement as she walked.

Detectives thought the shoe and purse might be the same as those reported by Robert Hyman. He said he saw them in a trash can in front of his café at 1136 Crenshaw Blvd, about two miles from 39th and Norton. Trash collectors took the can before police arrived; but they traced the load to the Vernon dump. Hyman could not identify the bag and shoe.

Meanwhile, LAPD Capt. Jack Donahoe ordered extra officers to sift through the contents of a cryptic envelope mailed to the Examiner. On January 22, James Richardson, the paper’s editor, received an anonymous call. The man told Richardson he had items belonging to Beth. He thought they would “spice up” the case. Two days later, the Examiner received a call from the post office regarding a peculiar package. Someone, likely the killer, soaked the package in gasoline and addressed it “To The Los Angeles Examiner and other newspapers.” The package contained personal documents, pictures, Beth’s birth certificate, and a 75-page address book in brown leather.

Publicity-seekers, and sad mental cases, contacted police. Police received many communications through the mail. The first, the gasoline-soaked package, was almost certainly authentic. The others included a letter intercepted in Pasadena. Enclosed in the improvised envelope, a note cut and pasted from newspaper headlines, read, “Dahlia killer cracking. Wants terms.” Another letter, not considered authentic, read, “We’re going to Mexico City—catch us if you can.”

One note had a message scrawled in ink. In bold, capital letters, it read, “Here it is. Turning in Wednesday, Jan. 29, 10 a.m. Had my fun at police.” The note was signed “Black Dahlia Avenger.” The Avenger was a no-show. He sent a follow-up note to the Los Angeles Times. The note read, “Have changed my mind. You would not give me a square deal. Dahlia killing was justified.”

Daniel Vorhees, a transient in his thirties, surrendered to the police at Fourth and Hill Streets. He said he “couldn’t stand it anymore.” Detective Charles King and Dr. Paul De River, a police psychiatrist, agreed to wait until Voorhees recovered from his “bewildered and befuddled state” before giving him a lie detector test. Police cleared Voorhees.

By February 1st, police said they were giving up trying to contact Beth’s killer through letters and appeals. Sick pranksters sent anonymous notes, some from as far away as the Bronx, and signed them “Black Dahlia Avenger.” 

A local newspaper received half a dozen Black Dahlia messages in one mail delivery—one with postage due. An exhausting number of fortune tellers, spiritualists, mediums, and even clergymen wrote to police with their own solutions of the crime.

In the two weeks since the murder, hundreds of police door-knocked thousands of doors in a futile search for the crime scene. Several false confessors were detained and released.

The women of Los Angeles lived in fear.

NEXT TIME: A suspect and another murder.

Black Dahlia Investigation: January 17–January 25, 1947

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On January 17, 1947, newspapers stopped using the werewolf murder headlines and started calling Elizabeth Short the Black Dahlia. Aggie Underwood chased down leads until, out-of-the-blue, her editor benched her. Sitting on the sidelines while the biggest murder case in decades unfolded drove Aggie crazy. She needed to be in the field, not sitting in the newsroom working on an embroidery project.

Then, without warning, Aggie was once back on the case. They gave her no explanation, but she didn’t care. She had just a minute to get back up to speed when they called her into the manager’s office. They benched her again, but this time, they gave her a reason. They promoted her to city editor of the Evening Herald and Express.

Aggie Underwood–City Editor

Some people believe Aggie’s promotion was a conspiracy to remove her from the case. Why? Because she knew too much. That is nonsense. Whatever she knew, she reported; and while she was no longer in the field, she oversaw the city room and all its reporters.

Police interviewed anyone acquainted with Beth. Harold Frank Costa 31, Donald Leyes 22, Marvin Margolis 27, and William Robinson, 25, admitted to knowing her in Hollywood–living, but they had nothing of substance to offer, and none of them was a suspect.

On January 18, Edward Glen Thorpe became a suspect when George Bennett claimed to have overheard him say, “I forgot to cut the scar off her leg,” while they traveled on a northbound bus in Merced. Police cleared Thorpe.

Also on the 18th, Beth’s mother, Phoebe Short, and her daughters, Eleanore, Dorthea, and Muriel, arrived in Los Angeles. They stayed for a few days, then took a United Air Lines flight to Berkeley to join Virginia West; the sister Beth told Red Manley she was going to meet at the Biltmore. She had not seen Virginia in several years.  

Reporters and police interviewed the Frenches in San Diego, where Beth spent the last month of her life. According to them, Beth spent most of her time writing letters. She claimed to look for work, but there is no evidence she did.

When detectives searched Beth’s suitcases, they found a telegram from Mrs. Matt Gordon, Sr. of Pueblo, Colorado. Dated August 22, 1945, it read, “Just received word from War Department that Matt killed in crash. Our deepest sympathy is with you.”

Matt, a major, served with the 1st Fighter Squadron 2nd Air Command. During his time in the service, Matt received the Silver Star Medal, Air Medal, Distinguished Flying Cross, and Bronze Star. He died a few weeks before the official end of WWII.

Beth told many lies, but her feelings about Matt were real. He clearly felt something for her, too, or his mother would never have sent her such a personal telegram. Unfortunately, Beth wore out her welcome with Matt’s family by asking for money.

Major Matt Gordon

Police identified a photo of Joseph Gordon Fickling they found in Beth’s belongings. They located him in Charlotte, NC. In a phone call, Fickling told investigators an airline employed him since Nov 9, 1946 and knew nothing about Beth during her last few weeks. Like several other people in her life, Fickling sought to distance himself from the high-profile murder.

When police called on Beth’s father, Cleo Short, he said he hadn’t seen her in four years. “I want nothing to do with this. I broke off with the mother and the family several years ago. My wife wanted it that way. I provided a trust fund for their support when I left. Five years ago, Elizabeth wrote to me. I sent her some money, and she came out here. We set up housekeeping in Vallejo. But she wouldn’t stay home. In 1943, I told her to go her way, I’d go mine.” Cleo never provided for his family. He fled when his miniature golf business went belly-up, and he never looked back. He was a miserable man, bitter and uncaring. His family deserved better.

Heartbroken and exhausted, Phoebe appeared fragile as she testified at the inquest. When asked when she was first notified that her daughter died, Phoebe blurted, “She was murdered.”

On January 25, the Los Angeles Times reported on Beth’s funeral in Oakland, CA. “Fog swirled about her hillside grave as Elizabeth Short was buried today with only her relatives to mourn the 22-year-old victim of a mutiliation slaying.”

On the day of the funeral, a local newspaper summed up the status of the investigation. “Nine days of intensive investigation still left police detectives today without any tangible clues in the mutilation killing of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short.”

NEXT TIME: Beth’s purse is found, and the Black Dahlia Avenger sends a postcard.