Red Scare
The very heavily redacted FBI file on the Dahlia case is entitiled, "Elizabeth Ann Short", as presumably the victim of an horrible sex crime somewhere in Los Angeles on the morning of Fifteenth of January, 1947. That is incorrect. Elizabeth Short had no middle name. The FOIA release also gives her date of death as the Fourteenth, also incorrect
No law enforcement authority performed flawlessly or even very well, in the sensational, and still-unsolved murder. This hasn't changed. J. Edgar Hoover's vaunted G-men couldn't solve it, though they were very close. The Director knew a cesspool when he smelled one, and repeatedly noted warnings to keep the case at arms length from the Bureau, and he was largely successful, but as we shall see, not entirely.
The first exhibit is a memo recalling a tip from the DC scribbler for the L.A. Times to the Washington Field Office recieved over cocktails, the evening of Jan.19, that a likely suspect was, or would soon be, arrested. The asking price was anything the FBI had on the suspect,[REDACTED] exclusively for the Times, who were losing badly to the Examiner just then in the ghoulish circulation war that the killing sparked.This was their moment, their high water mark in the gruesome story for many years, until a Times reporter, Larry Harnish, would develop new evidence while investigating the story for the 50th.anniversary issue of the last of the LA newspapers in 1997.
This information was dutifully passed to an assistant Director, who stated that the blah, blah, blah and the jusridiction, and the Bureau being hesitiant to do something that thay may have gone and done anyway, because that's how things were being done in the Black Dahlia horror.
Whether the price was too high for the FBI, the tip was solid gold. The next day, Jan. 20, one Robert Manley, 25. of 8010 Mountain View Ave., South Gate. A traveling salesman was arrested in Eagle Rock by LAPD detectives, He was the was driven to Hollenbeck and booked for the murder of Elizabeth Short.
The Times placed the story on the the top of page 2. The only real scoop in the case so far for the Times, unless Wolfe has it right, and in which Norman Chandler knocks Betty up in the California Club, while Dagwood eats a sandwitch with Mickey Cohen, or something, something, murmur....
L.A. Times original coverage
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4:45:46 PM 
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