 Hollywood hyperbole: Towards a new profile.
The murder of the Black Dahlia in 1947 predated the modern concept of a criminal "profile". The FBI practice of the scientific logical typing of a suspect in order to give local law enforcement aid in the form of expert analysis of the psychological traits associated with the increasing skill and sophistication and success in eluding capture of modern serial sexual murderers.
Always as a last resort. If you need the FBI in a murder case you're playing catch-up, 48 hours, and all that. Larry Harnish tapped John Douglas for his great coup, discovering that Dr. Bayley once lived one block from the dumpsite on Norton Av.
I took that same profile one step further when I began to look at the dumpsite myself, using Google maps and GPS conversions to determine the exact global position of the body and true signifigance of the dumpsite...but I digress.
People didn't really talk about mental illness in the same terms we use today, their language was couched and fearful, and as these stories played into their head they tended to the lurid and serio-comical.
That's why the frantic teletype conference of the afternoon Jan. 23 is so shockingly forthright in it's characterizations of, "...a psychoneurotic patient who's wife drowned their 2 year-old daughter and then committed suicide while he was overseas with the U.S. Army... A mental case...went to pieces...placed in psycho ward...discharged from the Army with a section eight...psycho neurosis".
The weirder thing is that legendary FBI profiler Douglas seems to have been unaware of any of this stuff, or at least didn't reference to it if he did. That's the Director's hand once again. An early use of compartmentalization. He kept the really juicy stuff to himself. Hoover loved horse racing. I love taking a good FOIA dump, and the Elizabeth Ann Short dump is the best ever. It contains the solution to the murder, the only one that fits the profile.
Long time readers include Marty Heldt of Ethanol, Iowa. It was he who got the last clean dump of AWOL documents on the warmonger Bush. That one was an hoot. Two hundred pages, also. Martin figured out the IBM Selectric stuff was forged a year before the story broke, and who did it. He was absolutely right. George magazine bit, and died. Poor old Dan Rather was fooled, not my readers...but I digress, yet again.
 Greetings from San Diego!
9:53:33 AM 
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