The Cases That Haunt Us (39 page)

In the case of the Zodiac, some hot buttons might be his need to taunt and express superiority over police, his need to seek credit for his crimes, and his overwhelming need to establish credibility.

I would suggest that this last point would be one of his greatest weaknesses, because it is unusual for this type of subject to seek credit for his crimes. Guys like this are paranoid; they don’t want all that attention. It strengthens the case for Cheri Jo Bates’s murder to be a focal point for the investigation. He didn’t want the recognition, then he did. There’s something there.

What he would have in common with other killers is that he’s always out looking for victims, as evidenced by all the reports of the suspect vehicle driving around the Lake Herman Road crime scene, and the witnesses who reported the strange man lurking around Lake Berryessa all afternoon on the day Cecelia Shepard and Bryan Hartnell were attacked. Like other subjects, the Zodiac could be influenced by his own press. Remember how quickly he responded to the challenge to provide details on the Ferrin/Mageau attacks? I think the Zodiac could be lured out to grave sites or memorial services on the anniversaries of the murders.

With the Zodiac, the signature element to his crimes is his taunting of the police. The murders themselves are merely symbolic of his superiority, designed to quash his overwhelming feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. Any technique that gave him the perception he was matching wits with the police would be a potentially good idea. So, for example, you could go back to the location of the first known case (Bates, Riverside) and announce a community meeting where the police would give a status update on the case presented by the lead investigator. To puff him up, you’d announce that the mayor and/or other community bigwigs would attend. The meeting should be held in a public arena such as a local school, but the site should be one people have to drive to. You want to videotape the audience, looking for the guy with the big smile on his face. You note license plate numbers for every car in the parking lot, knowing his is probably there. And you announce that you’re looking for community involvement. Anyone interested in volunteering to assist us please sign up and register before you leave tonight. You could even skew the list of respondents to target your subject without making it too obvious. Say volunteers must be over eighteen, must have their own car, and must be familiar with the area. Knowledge of simple police procedure is helpful but not necessary. If five hundred people sign up, at least you have a working list. You eliminate all the women and go from there.

There was one idea that I think was good, although it wasn’t designed to get enough, or the right kind of, information. When the movie
Zodiac
ran at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco, audience members were invited to fill in a slip with their guess as to why the Zodiac killer committed his crimes. A motorcycle was offered for the best entry. This would appeal to the killer’s desire to be strong and macho and it offered opportunity for him to show how much he knows, or at least to get in another veiled jab at the police. And as we know from his later letters, the Zodiac followed popular movies and yearned to see one about himself.

So who was the Zodiac? Or a better and more meaningful question might be, what kind of personality is, or was, he?

A man once described by San Francisco homicide detective Dave Toschi as “a very, very good suspect,” and who has been the subject of intense investigation by Robert Graysmith in his research, certainly fits the description I would put together: highly intelligent, IQ estimated around 135; spent much of his adult life living with his mother, with whom he had a difficult relationship at best; educated in chemistry and trained in codes; a hunter who once described man as the “most dangerous game” to a friend. And he could be placed in the different jurisdictions at the time each of the Zodiac crimes occurred. He had been a student at Riverside College, lived near other crime scenes, and received a speeding ticket near Lake Berryessa the very evening of the attacks there. He was also once observed by his sister-in-law to be holding a piece of paper upon which were written strange symbols. The day of the attack at Lake Berryessa, he was observed to have a bloody knife in his car, which he explained as having been used to kill chickens. And during one of the gaps in communication from the Zodiac, this man had been in prison serving time on a child molestation charge, although he told others he’d been arrested because he was the Zodiac. Despite these and many more circumstantially incriminating facts, the police had no direct evidence on which to arrest and formally charge him in connection with any of the Zodiac crimes. This suspect died of a heart attack in 1992 at age fifty-eight.

There are others, but my thought is that any good suspect in this case shares the qualities listed above, which is why I have not provided that man’s name. None of them is likely to be brought to trial now. The important consideration here is to move forward in our understanding so that we can be as proactive with this type of offender as he is with us.

T
here will always be cases that haunt us, the victims’ stories so compelling, the nature of the crimes so heinous, that they will never be forgotten. But we hope that as advances are made in the forensic and behavioral sciences, fewer and fewer cases will have the power to haunt strictly because they have gone unsolved or had questionable outcomes. In the previous chapter, we saw how the traditional, tried-and-true investigative approaches that worked in the “old days” were not enough to solve a series of murders committed by a modern serial criminal. The Zodiac thwarted investigators in large measure because his motive was not recognizable among the classical motives of greed, jealousy, anger, revenge, and the like—something clear or, at least, identifiable that determined victim selection, MO, and ultimately, the course of the investigation.

Now we’ll explore three cases that are particularly illustrative of how an offender’s motive—or apparent lack thereof—can be instrumental in understanding a crime and directing an investigation. And to further make the point, we’ll begin with a case from well before the days of criminal profiling or behavioral analysis: the murder of “the Black Dahlia.”

“
THE
BLACK
DAHLIA”

Elizabeth Short had big dreams, and her story is one of a young woman’s quest to break out of the mold expected universally of her sex at the time, swapping the promise of husband and family for career and fame and the glamour of Hollywood. Ironically, her brutal death won her the fame she longed for, as her tragic and pathetic existence was transformed by the press into the romantic image of a beautiful starlet-to-be.

And as Stuart Swezey wrote in his publisher’s preface to John Gilmore’s study of the case,
Severed
, “The Black Dahlia murder—unlike such earlier headline-grabbing cases as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and the Lindbergh kidnapping—was the first case to command the attention of postwar America with its stark carnality.”

Around 10 A.M. on January 15, 1947, Betty Bersinger was out for a walk with her three-year-old daughter when she saw what she thought was a broken department-store mannequin lying in an overgrown vacant lot on Thirty-ninth Street near Norton Avenue in the Leimert Park section of Los Angeles, south of Hollywood. When she got closer, she realized it was the nude and dismembered body of a woman.

Although several witnesses had seen various cars in the vicinity, passersby had seen no body as late as 8:30.

Officers Frank Perkins and Will Fitzgerald responded to the police call. From what they could tell, the dead woman had been sexually posed, lying on her back with her arms raised over her shoulders, elbows bent, legs spread wide apart. The lower torso was angled upward at the hips, leading police to believe she had been in a semirecumbent position at the time of death. After death, she had been cut in half at the waist, and the severed sections had been placed in line, about ten inches apart. The liver was exposed. Her face and breasts had been badly slashed, including deep slashes from both sides of her mouth as though her killer were fashioning a grotesque extension of her smile. Ligature marks were visible on her ankles, wrists, and neck, and police surmised that she had been suspended by her ankles and tortured. A vertical incision that looked like a hysterectomy scar was between her pubic area and navel. Her pubic hair had been shaved or plucked.

The scene was soon thick with reporters, photographers, and onlookers. The body was taken to the LA County Morgue for fingerprinting. With the help of the
Los Angeles Examiner’s
facilities, the prints were sent to the
FBI
. They were identified as belonging to Elizabeth Short, twenty-two years of age, who had been printed when she’d held a government job at a military post exchange. She had also been arrested as a juvenile delinquent while out with men at a bar one night near Camp Cooke in Santa Barbara.

Autopsy findings suggested that the victim’s body had initially been placed facedown in dew-wet grass, then turned over, and that she had been dead at least ten hours prior to disposal. There was some evidence though that she might have been refrigerated to aid preservation during that time. The cause of death was listed as “hemorrhage and shock due to concussion of the brain and lacerations of the face,” but because of evidence of bleeding out through a severed artery in the abdomen, she might actually have been cut in half before death. No evidence of semen was in or on her body, but examination of her stomach revealed that she had been forced to swallow feces as part of her torture. The body and hair had been carefully washed after death.

As for victimology, Elizabeth Short had been born in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, on July 29, 1924, the third of five daughters of Cleo and Phoebe Short, moving at an early age to Medford, near Boston. Cleo abandoned the family when Elizabeth was young, faking suicide and leaving Phoebe on her own. When Cleo contacted Phoebe years later from California to seek reconciliation, she refused.

Young Elizabeth was often ill with asthma and tuberculosis and had to undergo serious lung surgery, so Phoebe sent her to Miami, Florida, in 1940 when she was sixteen. This allowed her to drop out of school and wait on tables. She stayed in Florida until she moved to California.

She was called Betty by her family and friends but changed that to Beth as a young adult. At five feet five and 115 pounds, with blue eyes and dark hair, she was described as a sweet, romantic, vulnerable girl who wanted to marry a handsome serviceman, preferably a pilot. Some people thought she resembled the actress Deanna Durbin, who was a role model for teenaged girls and often appeared dressed in black. Beth began to dress that way to create an image for herself.

In early 1943, while working at Camp Cooke, she had become involved with “a jealous marine,” of whom she continued to be afraid. She repeated this story often and it became part of her personal myth. That summer, she found her father living in Vallejo, working at the Mare Island Naval Base. He allowed her to move in, but the relationship was strained. Cleo disapproved of what he considered Beth’s obsession with men and her lazy and untidy ways. After her arrest at the bar near Camp Cooke, she was sent home to Medford. Her goal remained, however, to end up in Hollywood and become an actress.

She visited relatives in Miami Beach and on New Year’s Eve, 1945, fell in love with a pilot named Matt Gordon, who was then sent overseas. One story has it that they became engaged, another that Gordon was already married and their engagement was only Beth’s fantasy. At any rate, she confided to a friend that she was still a virgin when, back in Medford, she received a telegram from Gordon’s mother saying he had been killed. The newspaper article announcing his death was in her belongings when she died less than two years later.

She went to Long Beach, California, to visit an old boyfriend, Gordon Fickling, also a serviceman. He put her up in a hotel miles from his base, but the relationship didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

Just about that time, the Raymond Chandler movie
The Blue Dahlia
, came out, starring Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd. Some of her servicemen friends started calling Beth the Black Dahlia because of her shiny black hair and propensity for dressing in black, down to her sheer black underwear and black ring on her finger. Her red lipstick and nail polish and her constant talk about becoming an actress and movie star lent her a glamorous persona.

Beth liked the Hollywood nightlife and tried to be seen at the right places to be recognized and “discovered.” Most of her hangouts were near the mythic intersection of Hollywood and Vine. But despite her glamorous dream, her life seemed aimless and somewhat tawdry, living on the edge, doing or saying whatever she needed to get people to take her in or do what she wanted. When she couldn’t pay her share of the rent on an apartment she occupied with seven other young women, she went down to San Diego, where she was taken in by sympathetic Dorothy French, who found her sleeping in the movie theater where she worked. Beth lived with the Frenches without working or contributing to her upkeep until she was offered a ride back to Los Angeles by a pipe-clamp salesman named Robert Manley, nicknamed Red. They stayed together the night of January 8, 1947, then he dropped her off the next day at the Biltmore Hotel, where she said she was meeting her sister.

Red Manley became the chief suspect in her murder.
LAPD
put him through a grueling interrogation, twice administering polygraphs. Two days later he was released, but he collapsed in exhaustion and, sometime later, was given shock treatments for depression. When he was a psychiatric patient at Patton State Hospital in 1954, he rambled on about having committed a murder. But an administration of sodium pentothal revealed he knew nothing of the crime. He died in 1986, exactly thirty-nine years to the day from the date he had dropped off Beth at the Biltmore.