 See you in the funny papers
"[I] found the body on the west side of Norton. From Coliseum to 39 on the property line is 1200 feet, it's all vacant property. There is a fire plug in the center of that which would be 600 feet from Coliseum or 600 feet from 39 the other way. The body was 54 feet north of the fire plug toward Coliseum. --Det. Lt. Jesse W. Haskins, LAPD
Out of University Division, Haskins' testimony to the coroner's inquest is a textbook example of how to give out the sort of information which can be of persistant use in cold cases, the result of it's clairity. The phrase;"The body was 54 feet north of the fire plug..." is perfectly concise, though he goes on to add "...toward Coliseum", which is redundant.
This then, would be the critical factite that allowed me to locate the correct address of the house that stands on the S. Norton Av. dumpsite today. Which in it's turn, gave me the data I needed to determine the exact map coordinates of the dumpsite, and using Google Maps function, place it down to within a tolerance of two feet. All of this was done with absolutely no assistance on the ground in Los Angeles, (though I begged and pleaded for someone in the jurisdiction to help). An internet first.
Location, location, location. This fucker knew the city of Los Angeles like a taxi driver. He knew it better than the cops, themselves. Certainly he knew it better than successive LAPD detectives from Hansen, thru Hodel, and onto Carr. So well, in fact, that he just couldn't help himself. He had to posit his great riddle twelve miles deep in the alluvial sand of the cracked L.A. Basin. X marked the beginning, Y gives you when, where, how and who. Z? That stands for Zorro, fool. This would, sixty years and some six months later, finally trip him up, and expose the whole truth about the murder of Bette Short, and the suicide in March of 1947, of the murderer himself. Her lover, Edwin F. Burns out in the cold Pacific Ocean somewhere off Venice Beach
The concept of purgatory is a familiar one to most Catholics. It's sort of a waiting room for souls, usually special cases, that merely need time to expiate whatever few sins they committed in their lives. Suicides? Sure. Time heals all wounds.Elizabeth Short was only twenty-two when she died, never knowing the exquisite pleasure of foreclosing on a mortgage, or framing a black suspect. Just an innocent kid with a broken heart. She got a mere sixty years.And yet there is something still so real and vital about her mute appeals for truth, justice and closure that even nature itself must now bend it's will to that end. So it was that yesterday afternoon, on what should have been her 82nd. birthday, the inspiration struck me.
I drew a new line[black upper spike] on the map bearing southwest from the entrance Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills Memorial Park [red north spike]straight to the Santa Monica Municipal[red west spike] Airport and then continued it until it hit sand, which it did, at the foot of Breeze Ct. in Venice, right where the alleged "I am Ed Burns" suicide note was found.
I couldn't believe it. Surely, I had looked at that back in March? Nope, I checked it again...
And then suddenly it was falling on me like a ton of bricks...I marked the Venice location and then drew another line from there east by northeast to the Norton Av. dumpsite and continued on that line, which connects all of the dots at 300 E. Washington Blvd. The Hirsh Apartments[black lowerspike]. Where Mr.& Mrs. Ed Barnes, late of Hollywood and environs, were last seen alive checking into the Hirsh on the morning of Sunday the 12th. of January, by the manager and wife, Mr.and Mrs. Johnson who knew them both as regulars, and positively indentified them to the LAPD as the photobooth couple. The Black Dahlia solution in map form. Amazing!
The Black Dahlia was identified by the fingerprints from her NAF gig as a Camp Cooke canteen cutie. Not, as legend has it, from her Santa Barbara underage liquor pinch. The FBI had them on file, along with her record. Photos of the prints were sent along by an early wire facimilie transfer system, bad weather having decended into the District the January. A big coup for the Hearst papers and the Bureau. Hoover is hooked. He begins by showing his arms length. No juristiction, murder is LA's problem. But the case itself wasn't going anywhere soon.
FBI Director Hoover, LAPD Chief Horrel, and Harry the Hat are all dead. Joe Friday is an off-color joke, today. They didn't deliver on time but the case refuses to die as long as there is someone still trying to make a buck off of it,or bust a nut, there will always be suckers out there willing to shell out $30 bucks or more for Hodel's salacious paterotic fantasies, or the ghoulish attraction of a coffee table pean the fine art of mutilated corpses.
 Batgirl vs. The Joker
10:03:50 AM 
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