Black Dahlia Days

Louise Springer sat alone in a parked car for thirty minutes, two blocks from where Elizabeth Short had been left two years earlier — and then she disappeared.

New Aster Motel

2901 S. Flower St, Los Angeles 90007

A man who may have been Leslie Dillon was seen here with a dark-haired woman who begged passers-by for quarters, as Beth Short did in Long Beach. Afterward a bed was found stained with blood, together with bloody men’s shorts and a small blood-spattered black skirt and white blouse rolled into a ball. The owner had Henry Hubert Hoffman burn them, which put Hoffman on the suspect list. Dillon was a Miami bellhop who read the case in True Detective and wrote to the LAPD psychiatrist J. Paul De River until detectives seized him and handcuffed him to a radiator at a resort in Banning. Everything he knew — the details the press called secrets only the killer could know — had come out of detective magazines.

The sign reads ASTER, not Astor.

The body dump site

3900 block S. Norton Ave · 50 feet north of the fire hydrant

On the morning of 15 January 1947 Betty Bersinger was walking down this street with her young child when she saw the remains, feet from the sidewalk. She took them at first for a discarded store mannequin: the skin was drained of blood and had turned porcelain-white. She walked to a neighbour’s house to telephone, and later re-enacted that call for the Herald-Express.

The hydrant is the only fixed thing on the block to sight from.

Walter Bailey’s house

3959 S. Norton Ave, Los Angeles 90008

Larry Harnisch noticed a Norton Avenue address on the 1945 marriage licence of Beth’s sister Virginia. The house belonged to Dr Walter Alonzo Bailey — former chief of staff at County Hospital, associate professor of surgery at USC, with offices five blocks from the Biltmore — who had begun showing signs of Alzheimer’s disease. In October 1946 he left his wife Ruth for a colleague, Dr Alexandra Partyka. In late 1947 he cut Ruth out of his will. Partyka claimed to know a terrible secret about him and threatened to reveal it when he spoke of returning to his family. He died on 4 January 1948.

Two blocks from the body dump.

The house Jack Dragna built

3927 Hubert Ave, Los Angeles 90008

A Herald Examiner caption dated 30 July 1950 reads: “This is the house that Jack Dragna built, a Spanish type mansion at 3927 Hubert Avenue.” A newspaper photographer stood on this street while Dragna lived in the house, and the Assessor’s 1941 build date corroborates the word built. The proximity to Norton is a fact and it connects Dragna to nothing.

The reason we stop here is a story about collateral damage from the Dahlia case — one we tell on the sidewalk and do not put in writing.

1,118 feet from where Elizabeth Short was found.

The Green Twig Murder

Frontage-road lot, east side of Crenshaw at Martin Luther King · 100 ft north of the Krispy Kreme · body found at 136 W. 38th St

At 9:20 on the evening of 13 June 1949 Louise Springer, 28, was collected from work by her hair-stylist husband Laurence. She had forgotten her glasses. He went back for them, bought a magazine and cigarettes, stopped to talk with a friend — and left her sitting alone in a parked convertible for half an hour. When he returned, his wife and the car were gone. She was found two days later at 136 W. 38th Street by officers investigating a parking violation: garroted, her manicure perfect, hidden beneath her own beautician’s smock with a green scarf arranged around her neck. Cash and jewellery untouched. Despite the largest manhunt since Beth Short’s killing, it was never solved.

Botanists traced the twig to a bottle tree in Exposition Park, on the route the killer is thought to have driven.

Where the car was found

136 W. 38th St, Los Angeles

Two days after Louise Springer vanished from Crenshaw, officers checking a parking violation on 38th Street found her in the back of her husband’s own convertible — a car neighbours later said had been standing on their street within an hour of her disappearance. The press caption under the photograph of it reads: “MURDER CAR — This is the auto in which the body of Mrs. Louise Springer was found slain. The car was parked at 136 W 38th St. The discovery has touched off the widest man hunt since the slaying of the Black Dahlia.”

The newspapers made the connection to Beth Short in 1949, two days after, in print.

Signmakers — the Beryl Wallace neon

3652 S. Main St, Los Angeles 90007

The last stop is the one where something is being put back. Inside this working sign shop, neon craftsman and historian Paul Greenstein is restoring the great neon head of Beryl Wallace — the showgirl whose glowing face hung over Sunset Boulevard at the Earl Carroll Theatre, ringed by the legend “thru these portals pass the most beautiful girls in the world.” Greenstein and Dydia DeLyser did the research that established how the Earl Carroll’s neon sculptures were actually built.

The restoration is not a gift. It is an official Community Benefit owed by the developer Essex, whose apartment building next door — named, without apparent irony, The Wallace on Sunset — has stood for years while the facade waited. Esotouric has been asking the Cultural Heritage Commission to set deadlines on it since 2020.

Hollywood’s most spectacular lost sign is currently in a shop on South Main Street.