Tag Archives: Robert Red Manley

Elizabeth Short: The French Connection–Conclusion

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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–The French Connection

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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.

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.