LArry Watch

While recently working on establishing a definitive investigation timeline, I happened upon this interesting tale; Larry Harnisch's rather disjointed telling of the mystery of the Army style wristwatch. Well it turns out it's true, and a real doozy of a clue as well. Both the Times and the Examiner reported it, the LAPD are silent on the matter, so it's okey with me. The press did their job, this time, anyhow. The overmatched cops, predictably failed.

Harnish's blog is a couple of years old and the bulk of the entries are devoted to a rather tedious debunking of Donald Wolfe's The Black Dahlia Files. He really hadn't wasted so much of his time , and while I agree with Larry's basically negative reaction to the book's conclusions, the careful reader would have already been there and back, again, and who else would know?

I'm no expert in watches, but the timepiece Larry has a photo of is a Croton (something)medico with a brown strap and an analog second hand sweep overlay of the sort which could be used by army officers, doctors, nurses, medical corpsmen, but also, pilots, bombardiers, navigators, artillery spotters, even drill instructors. The photo could be the real deal, but there's no way of knowing it, the reader is left to presume that this watch is the legit or not. I'll take a flyer...it's the time on the watch face, of course, ten minutes to two, one fifty, or 0150 hours in Army time. We have seen those numbers before. (Note: The given time is exactly six seconds before 0150 hours, which would perfectly describe it's own latitude exactly 600 feet south of the dumpsite at 34.014+-, the longitude would be identical presuming it's bearing is true south. Ed's dead on the mark).

Big problems with that? Sure, firstly as I said, no bona fides to accompany the snappy color photo or ever knowing that if it's the real watch the time may have been tampered with. Thereby draining any discernible meaning from it. Larry? I don't get it. There are also problems with exactly when the watch was found by sixteen year old Danny Wright Jr. When is given as being, "about four days' after the body was discovered on Norton Av. (presumably Jan. 19 or 20). Yet another very interesting clue in the offically open and unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, January 15, 1947. This looks like a job for sniggy.

Gene Lyons

The Peckers

The Magnetic Declination

The magnetic declination is the angular difference between magnetic north and true north.
The agonic line, or the line of zero declination has been measured in the United States. It cuts through the heartland Midwest from Minneapolis south to Pensacola. Along this line, magnetic north is exactly the same as true north.
To the West of this line, a compass will give a reading that is progressively east of true north reaching it's limits in the far southwestern corner of the continental U.S.

The angle of declination varies with the Earth's magnetic field and has varied between ten and twenty degrees in Los Angeles over the last century, but the rate of change was regular and in the mid-to-late forties it was about fifteen degrees.

Now, we will recall the dump site at (N34.015/W118.333) 3825 S. Norton Ave. in L.A's. North Leimert Park area, where the ghastly severed remains of Elizabeth Short were discovered and reported to police by passerby Betty Bersinger late in the morning of January 15, 1947.

Is the lower torso aligned to true north? Has the upper torso been angled somewhat to the east? Obviously. Did the killer raise her arms akimbo to signify the arrowhead of the needle of some gruesome compass, laid out in an awful parody of sexual declination? Does she point the way back to her killer? Yes, maybe and yes. There's way more science here than art, more objectification than insight, and more sheer madness than anything else.

Edwin F. Burns was very good with machines and gadgets, he'd been a camera repairman in L.A. before he got drafted. The Army taught him how to kill, if not dismember, and like it. Chances are he'd learned how to use a map and a compass at a relatively young age, in the proto-fascist Boy Scouts perhaps? They may have taught him to use a knife, too...But using the grid magnetic angle is a way more advanced military concept.

So there can now be little doubt that the choice of Norton Ave. for the placement of the nude severed body was nothing if not carefully considered and in advance. It was a calculated risk to move the body at all, a traffic stop could put him in the gas chamber. The numbers with regard to this aspect of the murder are really beginning to pile up, and numbers simply do not lie. The sequence is a demonstrably convergent one. Now we know the real secret of the sacred site.

The Warbirds

One Edwin F. Burns murdered Elizabeth Short and placed the savagely debauched, disfigured and finally, if not mercifully, thoroughly severed body at N34.015/W118.333, and I can prove it.

The exact placement of the body at those coordinates virtually eliminates any other possible suspect from consideration. The odds that this gruesome tableau was somehow just a random point, a vacant lot in space is utterly belied by the fact of it's rather uncanny mathematical relationships with certain Los Angeles landmarks which raise the odds against it even further...approaching infinity, of the savage sex killer being anyone but Ed Burns.

The Google map at your right contains all the necessary information you'll need to help you get your own bearings but your long search for the truth of the matter is over. I know what a long search it was. It goes with the terrorised. Hilly and difficult to survey. Not impossible. Of the rest only The Black Dahlia Solution comes close, but I can't reproduce his results. However, he leans heavily on the FBI for a primary source. On the other hand, he can and probably has reproduced my results. Anybody could. What no one has been able to do thus far is refute them. For that I guess, I'll have to wait. But how long. For two years now it's been the flame wars followed by the filter. What the heck are you people afraid of?

To know that you have reached your aesthetic destination is to embrace the overarching tragedy of even a good war and it's ability to continue killing and maiming, gaining victims for years after the guns have been spiked. In this case we have, out of of the five people directly deceased from the Short/Burns murder/suicide and it's antecedents, only two saw action in the Pacific, but three never fired a shot in anger in their lives. Behind the lines, if not in the gaps between them. But their story was far more dangerous than any of them could know, they had become a threat to morale on the home front. Something had to be done and they hid it. The rest is rubbish. The moral of the story is they also serve who only lie and wait.

Gene Lyons

The Voyeurs

Robert Parry

Iraq, the endgame
The Matrix (redux)

The Framers

People like pictures with perfectly still frames and nice right angles. Windows, if you will? It appeals to our inner ear balance centers by squaring up the eye line with the pleasing perspective of a flat horizon. The history of the progression of art was of taking from non-linear nature bending toward ever more flat surfaces with regular angles of prospect from which to express deeper emotion and richer meaning through an ever more deftly manipulated and effective expression of the artistic medium.

An expert camera repairman, Edwin F. Burns implicitly understood how to capture a coherent visual message within a regular frame. Yet he rejected all that when he planned, executed, and dumped the carefully severed, dessicated and washed nude body of Elizabeth Short in the middle of an huge ugly vacant lot in West L.A. A waste ground, El Gehenna. Therefore we are obliged to rule out art, surreal or otherwise as his motive for leaving the body where he did. And yet moving the body to Liemert Park from the Hirsh Apts. over on East Washington Blvd. involved an incalculable risk, a minor traffic violation could have gotten him hanged by his neck until he was dead, but he took it. Why?

Well, it turns our bad boy had an inner life to express and it was a very strange one, indeed. And to do this he has gone miles outside the frame to shock and disturb what he sees as a nasty, corrupt and deeply complacent city and taunt the incompetent LAPD using some simple tricks of navigation and logic that he thought wouldn't fool anyone but the Keystone Kops for very long.

He was all wrong about that. Cut to the chase. They don't know it now. Ex-LAPD Det. Steve Hodel, who's father was framed by one of the later witch hunts, has seen the Google map of the crime and simply can't make heads or tails of it. Maybe the LAPD needs to spend less time and effort framing innocent people for murders they didn't commit and spend more time learning the city scheme? Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, you bet they do.

Ed knew it all because Los Angeles was his one beloved city and he doted on her. He even called her by her first name, Mary. But she broke his heart with her indolence and drove him to an highly cinematic dive into the bay in the end, just like Norman Maine in the frequently made, A Star is Born. Yes, and another one dies.

Capture and fame would elude him, even though the horrible crime he had committed remained unsolved until 2007, and open to this day, the reasons for it remain unclear. The institutional inertia that has developed over this case over those sixty-two years is absolutely immense, and it still remains an open investigation. But that's not even a cold case, so nobody in LAPD is going to stick their necks and /or carreers out on this one. Why is the FBI file on the Black Dahlia over two hundred pages long and so heavily redacted, you would think the entire National Security apparatus was somehow threatened? It's absurd.

The big LA newspapers are both using their Washington D.C. desk connections as back channels to the FBI on a case the Bureau had no jurisdiction over or any official business being involved in. Why? And most damning of all, all attempts to make an Hollywood A-list movie of the legendary sex murder have thus far failed miserably at the box offices and that's the kool-aid and acid test in LA. How can we make a buck framing somebody, anybody, up there on the flat screen test. Try mentioning Ed Burns and watch their sphincters tighten like a starfish on a wet rock.

The Boreshead

The Black Daliah Police Force Department is holding it's weekly members-only chat tonight at the Black Dahlia in Hollywood site. Bowling and donuts will follow. I used to be a member, but they won't let me back in there. Goody for them. Hope is a wonderful thing and one day (it could happen), I might have to become a member again, so I'll let sleeping dogs lie. Oh wait? Our ex-friend BDiHollywood Homicide Lieutenant Briar will make a self announced visit tonight, if I read their shouter correctly.

I hope she doesn't get her headache at some poorly timed and written crack and explode and banish them all in a blind fit of incoherent rage.

It's always been an ultra hot medium, you have to expect that sort of thing. Each spark of the flame is an unique reading experience. Never burn your bridges on-line, because the blogosphere is just that, a sphere. Whatever goes around it comes back around and at nearly the speed of light.

A Joycean from the very cradle, my Internet interest and endeavour has been centered upon seeking an artificial intelligence, and realizing we don't want machines to think, we want them to work and keep records which can be accessed instantly, so all we really need to do is make them smart, serviceable and utilitarian. The Internet has succeeded far beyond it's designers hope as a near universal information utility and a nascent agent of real political change. The reader's red scare in redux. Tim Finnegan's wake!

But things won't change much in Hollywood tonight as the same people talk past one another about this steak and fries joint on Sunset or American Idol runner-ups. But nobody will dare mention Ed Burns or the map in their chat. I can only imagine that. Not with hilarious proto-McCarthyists like Dr. Patch Briar around to scold them or metaphorically throttle them until they stop or for some executive blackballing sessions. Guilt or innocence? No way!

Facts are irrelevant and friendships an obstacle to the creepy fetishes and fantasies of the founding father framers, of the Black Daliah Police Force Department.

Gene Lyons

The Arc

Sorry Gary

Beat it, beat it, no one wants to be defeated. I was just waiting for Gene's column to get picked up. It's an hoot. Blogs wait for no one. While firmly stating her aversion to all the theories, Briar still formed an oblique reference to me this week with "crypto cartographer" Two words, Bri, two words. And since the reference was back-handed one anyway, I'll reject it out of hand. Crime cartographer, maybe. That said, your crypto cartographer label's an apt description of the overwhelmingly suspect, Edwin F. Burns.

Who is the only really skilled cartographer or Skipjack who comes to mind? Crypto Ed Burns. Insane, murderous, and just outside the reach of the law, Ed Burns comes to mind. It was Ed's plan to humiliate the LAPD and shock the city of Angels to it's very core with his thoroughly premeditated and perfectly executed murder scheme. I have merely restored the thing to the land of the living. Ed wanted to be caught, but he also wanted to commit the perfect crime, or else why bother with the elaborately planned and expensive getaway?

Because he was crazy in the old sense and getting no help in the new, he was too sick for his time so he cacks himself into the bay where lines segments join, in yet another inexplicable act, that is, for a sane or rational person.

Briar wants to pursue political villains at home and so has severed me and left me for dead. I wish her well, and remind her that politics are the art of compromise. The definition of political power then is, the authoritative allocation of scarce resources, saavy? Steve's channeling Big Brother today. Click on The Squad Room.

When I was a young and willing U.S.P.S. Letter Carrier we had to learn much, if not all about all of those thick and rich, sticky, snotty little model burgs and who lived where, and on whom and how much. Mail we sacredly dumped upon the people in their homes. Where the postcards came back stamped. Hollywood U.S.A.? Return to sender, address not found. Postage due.

The Lap Dissolve

Nobody has been more critical on-line of Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia(2006) than I, and while others are busy apportioning credit for this theory or that suspect, I have a bit of crow to eat for my own breakfast this morning. Inspiration is where you find it, I guess. The difficulty comes remembering where you left it. Jo and I were discussing the case Saturday evening when I recalled that my original notion that I'd be able to solve the Short murder was immediately after we had watched the movie on pay-per-view. It was something about that one last shot. Something wrong.

But for that you could easily dispense with the bulk of the film even today. Veteran director De Palma does his best to mail it in, seemingly dooming the whole enterprise with his listless and generic rendition of Ellroy's awful neo-noir novel. But De Palma somehow senses the danger and keeps his single artistic ace up his sleeve is about to be brilliant, and the film will go on to gross $50 million worldwide and earn a well deserved Academy Award nomination for it's cinematography.

The shot itself is set up at night, centering on the front of the female lead's house somewhere in Los Angeles. The male lead joins her on the front porch, they go to the door, and together their gazes turn back into the camera, and cut to the well manicured lawn and to our horror the nude severed body of the Black Dahlia. The apparition slowly resolves itself before our eyes and then it dissolves away.

Message received, something clicked on that, all of the sudden something about that single shot was informing me on another level. The virtuoso artist director has returned in the last moment to rescue his film from oblivion and encoded his own technical masterstroke in a strictly controlled visual tableau but has included some obvious anomalies, and that's always a good place to start. Lap resolve: We know that the Black Dahlia's remains were dumped on an unimproved housing lot north of Liemert Park. The vacant lot. Lover's Lane. Lacking even an address or a mail drop or any signs of occupation...No house!

Now it was my turn to be brilliant. It was 2007 and that vacant lot isn't vacant any longer. It's a neat, well kept, cute as a button bungalow in a better neighborhood. 3825 S. Norton Ave. And now with a working street address, I was then able to Google the exact location of the body of Elizabeth Short within a two foot margin of error to (N34.015/W118.33 ). From there I performed a simple grid search for any clues and was able to eventually recover a map of the entire crime.

Is this really what De Palma meant by the shot? I don't know. That's what I got from it for my $4.50. Visually groundbreaking, protohistorical and still quite cheap compared to gasoline in 2007. Motion pictures are still your best value, I guess.

The Crying Shame

I just love that photo. What an unforgettable weepy man moment. Steve finally gets all the attention he's always wanted and the networks and the wire services, whereas he immediately breaks down and cries uncontrollably. It was broadcast news here in Chicago. And this haunted, emotionally damaged, soft-boiled, boo-hoo LAPD has been ex-gumshoe who laughed all the way to the bank as the book reached the NY Times bestseller list, is currently one of the only two people actually working on the Black Dahlia murder of late, according to Briar. Who's the other one, Bri? One of them has a beard, I know. Arrah, the awful smell of flop sweat in the morning. All the hot news in BD circles is that yours truly is a mean streaking bad-assed SOB&G and a very, very, rude customer. Get it? Well, now you know.
I've said over and again that trying to bring order and make sense out of this plenty screwy 1947 murder is like trying to herd stray cats. Everybody goes off on their own feline psycho trip. So I've also known from the beginning that only a sharp eye, a firm hand and a lethal sense of humor would cut through the accumulated scar tissue, real suffering and pain that the murder of Elizabeth Short has engendered over sixty-two years.
Lately modern law enforcement has started to notice that the victims of crime required more attention than was traditionally given them. What we learn from Steve's horrific childhood experience is that left unsolved, murder investigations can develop new and oblique angles and tangential consequences such as McCarthyism, witch hunting and blacklists. Steve has quite a high profile as a victim, there are others.
With the collateral damage being done in the most highly vulnerable places, too. Like inside the head of a small boy who's father had been unjustly framed by corrupt local authorities for a murder that we now know, and they knew, the elder Hodel had not committed.
None of this could be construed as being exceptionally polite to what is still a very troubled adult. So? Tough love, Steve has made his mistakes but can't admit them, because he must continually find more fodder, fertilizer and fantasy victims, as his dead fathers shadow continually lengthens in Steve's own mind. Noir, a real scary tale of life's vicissitudes in the City of Mary, Queen of the Angels suddenly morphs into a silly comedy of mistaken identity type, so popular in American sitcoms, and back until the poor baffled and bamboozled reader of the Black Dahlia Avenger is forced to have to beg the obvious question of why Daddy never got around to murdering His Little Stevie Dumpling before his guilty thought patterns were exposed? Nah...That would shut me up but good, but it's not going to happen...Nah! He wouldn't have the guts.
So here's the lurking question, can certain connected victims of horrific crimes be relied on to be objective about these crimes and if such a person has some law enforcement experience, would they be best person to lead an investigation into it? How would you ever be sure he didn't have other fish to fry?
In this case it depends entirely upon whether the sleuth is of an adult mental age, and if and only if, they're able to correctly read the Black Dahlia Virtual map on your right sidebar through their bi-focals and tears and explain how I could have possibly faked such a thing. Other than that, it's a free country.

The Daily Paper

One thing you won't find anywhere on the Daily Mirror blog is an image of Larry Harnisch.
Is he demonstrating objectively the professional editor's reticence to write the thing and expose himself to the critics? No, you see, Larry has, as they say in Hollywood, a great face. For radio. Little furry critters are all the rage in the movies and on TV these days and somewhere out there there's got to be an animated weasel with Larry's name on it. Larry's blog is a mess. All loosely organized information dumps and buzy work from the Time's bottomless archives, Larry Fivel burrows down into the Excelsior and naps in the afternoon. Larry's an Editor of a big city daily. Pride and pre-nocturnal emissions abound:

Larry Harnisch. The leading Black Dahlia expert and a collaborator in the 1947project, Harnisch has been a copy editor at The Times since 1988. He has appeared on many TV shows discussing the Dahlia case..."

Our pal EZ Zorn in Chicago is still the ugliest blogger in the fish wrapper blogger category. Smile for us, EZ? The tabloids be damned. Real live newspapers make ripping good paper hats, and they always did. But they got greedy and sold their cherished freedom of the press to Rupert Murdoch, a subject of the Queen's bidding, for heavily devalued English pounds. And then they tried unsuccessfully to frame an American President for impeachment, while the country looked on in horror.
The New York Times once the newspaper of record bought into the big lie like a muskie on a worm and the rest of the old school followed. They didn't read the letters and emails they got from the mere readers. There were far too many critics and they were angry harsh and blunt so they ignored them, but worse they tried to minimize their message. They had their shark and they jumped it. But it was war, but they lost, but they came up a little short on the jump and the fish ate them.
Not Larry of course. He's still trying to figure out where Sen. Joe McCarthy went wrong. He's out here on the front lines of the blogosphere, and still in there kicking but the mirror is cracked, the stunt failed, the Daily Lavatory. Larry the blacklister filters out the usual suspects for your reading pleasure, he could jump a whale with his eyes closed. Showing a true fondness for automobiles and all they've given Larry evokes an certain nostalgia for a period when whitey man ruled, and a hard rain never fell on Los Angeles.

The Locker Room

Steve Hodel's latest blog is an hilarious attempt follow up on the cement bags blog. The moral of the story is I guess, "People who lived in stone houses, shouldn't blow glass...or something". I tease him mercilessly like he asks for, but taken as a whole Steve has a truly remarkable story to tell. He was surely a victim of the outrageous police corruption in pre-blacklist Los Angeles, and at a most tender age, too.
So he deserves a certain compassion, but the man himself was so deeply wounded by the 1949 witch hunt which tried repeatedly to frame his father, (first for performing abortions, then incest, and finally for the Short murder, all of which failed to find any wrong doing), that the great ingrate betrays his father's massive legacy and joins in the hunt trying to frame his innocent sire's ghost.
Hollywood Hodel turns Hamlet on his head.
A fully tragic hero in the Greek sense, our Steven Icarus, who has fallen away from the light to seek his fortune writing a blasphemous book and now an author's blog and soon another bound book. Doomed by the Gods to slop feed a monstrous and insatiable monkey falsehood, which must grow or die. Steve then is a mixed bag, part cop, part outrageous grifter. His highly touted observational skills not really in evidence anywhere.
The semi-autobiographical Black Dahlia Avenger was an international sensation and bestseller. The cop part was an utter disaster flick, The Lost Weekenders. The Unprofessionals, maybe? LAPD...nuff' said. Steve said,

"I think my old partner and I still hold the record at Hollywood. We were called in and investigated three separate unrelated murders on one weekend standby".

The pig grunts. Disgusting, stick a cork in it, McRuff. But easily within LAPD standards of police conduct and reasoning. I wonder where those records are kept? The locker room. Right there with the sworn deposition of Indiana Jones, and G. Hill Hodel's motive. Now that, I'd really like to see. Oh well, Hollywood has never been kind or fair to writers.

Briar jumps the shark

If you could say that the pen was mightier than the sword, and I believe that aphorism to be true. Then surely the computer is mightier than the handgun. Very much akin to the late discovery of codes in the Torah which could not be deciphered until humans had fast compiler technology to run the millions and billions of calculations needed to do so. Certain aspects of law enforcement will never be the same once it's applications are fully realized. But computers will never change anyone's mind for them. They have to do that for themselves. Sorry Mary, I can't win them all.