Real Crime Stories/Paranormal Hauntings

The Black Dahlia (Part II)

Crime authors such as Steve Hodel (son of George Hill Hodel) and William Rasmussen have suggested a link between the Short murder and the 1946 murder and dismemberment of six-year-old Suzanne Degnan in Chicago, Illinois. Captain Donahoe of the LAPD stated publicly that he believed the Black Dahlia and the Chicago Lipstick Murders were "likely connected". Among the evidence cited is the fact that Short's body was found on Norton Avenue, three blocks west of Degnan Boulevard, Degnan being the last name of the girl from Chicago. There were also striking similarities between the handwriting on the Degnan ransom note and that of the "Black Dahlia Avenger". Both texts used a combination of capitals and small letters (the Degnan note read in part "BuRN This FoR heR SAfTY" [sic,]), and both notes contain a similar misshapen letter P and have one word that matches exactly. Convicted serial killer William Heirens served life in prison for Degnan's murder. Initially arrested at 17 for breaking into a residence close to that of Degnan, Heirens claimed he was tortured by police, forced to confess, and made a scapegoat for the murder. After being taken from the medical infirmary at the Dixon Correctional Center on February 26, 2012, for health problems, Heirens died at the University of Illinois Medical Center on March 5, 2012, at 83.

Additionally, Steve Hodel has implicated his father, George Hodel, as Short's killer, citing his father's training as a surgeon as circumstantial evidence. In 2003, it was revealed in notes from the 1949 grand jury report that investigators had wiretapped Hodel's home, and obtained recorded conversation of him with an unidentified visitor, saying: "Supposin' I did kill the Black Dahlia. They couldn't prove it now. They can't talk to my secretary because she's dead."

In 1991, Janice Knowlton, a woman who was ten years old at the time of Short's murder, claimed that she witnessed her father, George Knowlton, beat Short to death with a clawhammer in the detached garage of her family's home in Westminster. She also published a book titled Daddy was the Black Dahlia Killer in 1995, in which she made additional claims that her father sexually molested her. The book was condemned as "trash" by Knowlton's stepsister Jolane Emerson in 2004, who stated: "She believed it, but it wasn't reality. I know, because I lived with her father for sixteen years." Additionally, Detective St. John told the Times that Knowlton's claims were "not consistent with the facts of the case".

John Gilmore's 1994 book Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder, suggests a possible connection between Short's murder and that of Georgette Bauerdorf, a socialite who was strangled to death in her West Hollywood home in 1944. Gilmore suggests that Short's employment at the Hollywood Canteen, where Bauerdorf also worked as a hostess, could be a potential connection between the two women. However, the claim that Short ever worked at the Hollywood Canteen has been disputed by others, such as the retired Times copyeditor Larry Harnisch.

The 2017 book Black Dahlia, Red Rose by Piu Eatwell focuses on Leslie Dillon, a bellhop who was a former mortician's assistant; his associates Mark Hansen and Jeff Connors; and Sergeant Finis Brown, a lead detective who had links to Hansen and was allegedly corrupt. Eatwell posits that Short was murdered because she knew too much about the men's involvement in a scheme for robbing hotels. She further suggests that Short was killed at the Aster Motel in Los Angeles, where the owners reported finding one of their rooms "covered in blood and fecal matter" on the morning Short's body was found. The Examiner stated in 1949 that LA Police Chief William A. Worton denied that the Flower Street [Aster] Motel had anything to do with the case, although its rival newspaper, the Los Angeles Herald, claimed that the murder took place there. Eatwell is working on a television documentary, and a revised edition of her book is due to be released in the autumn of 2018.

In 2000, Buz Williams, a retired detective with the Long Beach Police Department, wrote an article for the LBPD newsletter The Rap Sheet on Short's murder. Williams' father, Richard F. Williams, and his friend, Con Keller, were both members of LA's Gangster Squad investigating the case. Williams, Sr. believed that Dillon was the killer, and that when Dillon returned to his home state of Oklahoma, he was able to avoid extradition to California because his ex-wife Georgia Stevenson was second cousins with Governor Adlai Stevenson II of Illinois, who contacted the governor of Oklahoma on Dillon's behalf. Keller believed Hansen was the killer, as he had studied at a surgical school in Sweden and had thrown elaborate parties attended by prominent LAPD officials. Williams' article says that Dillon sued the LAPD for $3 million, but that the suit was dropped. Harnisch disputes this, claiming that Dillon was cleared by police after an exhaustive investigation, and that the District Attorney's files positively placed him in San Francisco when Short was killed. Harnisch claims that there was no LAPD coverup, and that Dillon did in fact receive a financial settlement from the City of Los Angeles, but has not produced concrete evidence to prove this.