The Agonic Line

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 the same as true north. West of this line, a compass will give a reading that is east of true north.

The angle of declination 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 on Norton Ave. in L.A's. North Leimert Park area, where the neatly 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 slightly to the east? Did the killer raise her arms akimbo to objectify 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, yes, maybe and yes.

Edwin F. Burns was very good with machines and gadgets, he'd repaired cameras 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 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, but I digress.

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 why of it, is, indeed the where of it. There it is. Here it is. Where is this? Click on the map, it may contain the answers you seek.

And the winner is...

Lee Harvey Oswald. Yes, America's long-time most popular lone nut job assassin is a hit in the inaugural Black Dahlia Reader Survey. The margin was close. A perennial contest winner, Oswald came under heavy attack this time from a relative newcomer from the other side, as it were, one John Edgar Hoover (a.k.a. Bulldog). Who was himself was under pressure from the eternal bridesmaid of the case, the Mob. Of the nine votes cast, four went to the ex-marine, and three for the Director for Life and JFK conspiracy debutant, with the Mafia getting only the two votes.

The real surprise was the strength upon inclusion of F.B.I. Director Hoover, the very definition of an untouchable at the time, as a suspect in the overall conspiracy, (although full disclosure compels me to identify myself as having cast one of those votes, the elimination of which doesn't seriously alter the results). A bare majority of the American people still believe Lee H.Oswald (a.k.a. Alec Hidel) did the Kennedy Assassination, and that he was, in the Warren Commission's dubious verbiage, "acting alone". The eyewitness however, place Oswald in the Texas School Book Depository lunchroom before, and immediately after the shooting, acting at eating his lunch alone. Nobody ever places him on the sixth floor and the only fingerprint in the snipers nest belonged to one Malcolm Wallace, LBJ's long time chief enforcer in Texas. But I digress.

An obvious oversight on my part, and a problem with poll's construction might be the failure to provide either the CIA, or LBJ as an option to vote upon. Your opinions are sacrosanct, and will remain so, along with the rest of those pardonable assumptions a fairly rigorous scientific approach requires. Thanks to all eight of you for your kind participation, and I'll try to do better next time. What's the margin of error? Given the problems outlined above, I make it out quite large, (+or-9) but the fairly limited number of responses kept all outcomes just within the range of a 10% or better probability, or close enough for government work.

What have we learned? As I said, most people still cling to those facts as established by the Warren Commission whitewash as concocted by then President Johnson, but only half or less than half of the voting sample. There is some evidence of change. As many voted for Hoover as voted for the Mob, not counting my vote. That places the new conspiracy theory right alongside the most popular previous theory. Again it's a surprisingly good showing for the Hoover/Johnson/Rowley(HJR) hypothesis.

As lately shown, the spectacularly successful and cinematic 1963 assassination of an U.S. President and Commander in Chief, one John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, and the almost mind boggling cover-up that followed still generates controversy...the real change is in the reader's historical reactions to having a murderous lunatic fill out that term and the next, and another a lifetime appointment to the FBI and another hit TV drama which would run for years. As they have with the current malefactor holding their highest ELECTED office under questionable circumstances Armericans are seemingly willing to bide their time and let history run it's course.

The case for Edwin Burns

Anyone who's done any serious work on the Elizabeth Short murder is going to be somehow indebted to the mothership at bethshort.com and it's long running message boards. It's all there, even my early stuff, as I used it for a platform to conduct my initial internet investigation into the unsolved 1947 murder, until I was exiled from the group in 2007. The site itself owes most of it's original thrust to fans of true crime author John Gilmore (nobody ever called her Beth except Gilmore), but lately has become an haven for the ugly Oedipal fantasies of ex-L.A.P.D. Dick Steve Hodel. Even more troubling is that they may have lately run seriously afoul of the law over there, the worst law there is concerning discussion threads, Godwin's law.

Gilmore's Severed was the first place I ever read about any Ed Burns. Where he got the character is notknown, but over the years bits and pieces of the true story have leeched out in droplets always as sparse as the November rain in sunny Los Angeles, and Gilmore takes us a sip of it. Ed makes his internet debut in cyberspace aboard the highly touted Black Dahlia Solution. An anonymously published dot.org chiefly notable for it's clever insights into the killers possible use of aircraft to concoct his alibi, but has recently come under fire from some self-appointed experts questioning the cryptology methods used to come up with the name Ed Burns, which, as we already know, was already way out there. I find it much ado about nothing. Consider the source, the lady protests too much.

The "loosed nut behind the wheel theory", as it were, is laid out completely in the extraordinary January 23, 1947 FBI teletype conference involving at least FBI HQ DC, LA and NY field offices, plus others redacted. Probably FBI Director Hoover, LA's Mayor and Chief of Police and other officials whose identities were black markered out for 67-B's (immaterial, still alive or classified). The suspect; born 1909 in New York, New York, but raised in Lala,December 15, 1942, Induction into the U.S. Army in LA and was about his duty until he was hospitalized in the green big funny farm in St. Louis. All because his wife had gone insane and killed their two year old daughter and then committed suicide sometime in early 1945, and going all psychotic about it,Ed goes to the crazy house for say, six months and is released August 6, 1945 and returns to home to LA, By Christmas he's out of the army and his mother out of the picture. Ed gets married to another California girl, but this time in New York at Eastertide. They settle in Las Vegas or some other southwestern location, not in California. But the marriage isn't working and by August of '46, Ed's drinking heavily, and spending money freely prowling the L.A. streets and jitterbug joints, again...Enter the Black Dahlia.

You might want to grab the accompanying photo and add it to your Black Dahlia arcana collections because it's very rare and no longer available in it's original context. Of course the photo is a very closely cropped image taken from the vertical photo strip found in Elizabeth's luggage which she had checked at the L.A. Greyhound station on January 9, 1947 and included in the packet mailed to the newspapers on January 25. I found it posted at Vet Friends, an entirely legit site for locating missed service members, and it was described there as having been taken in California in 1946, and the vet's name was Edwin F. Burns, US Army, Warrant Officer, Branch Immaterial. I managed to scrounge it just before the photo x-boxed early in 2008, leaving the only caption up, and I can't even locate it now. The photo was listed online as unknownman1946 jpg.

The last place we find Ed is in the LA Times March 15 edition in a blurb reporting a possible suicide in Santa Monica Bay leaving a note that he hoped would say more with another not really very clever riddle at all, right smack down the middle, if you will? But then since no body was ever found, the case remains open to this day. The note itself seems more like a last childish attempt to hurl on the city that killed his family while he was away fighting for his country and the police and the newspapers who were there to protect and serve them, and yet will not now serve his dark purposes...The pangs of despriz'd,love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes. When he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin? Hamlet, Act III. Scene I.

Ballin' the Jack

I had waited up for the JFK thing on Discovery Channel last night that I'd seen heavily pimped on one of the evening network news shows, and found it quite a dull sixties romp with no third act. I went to the DC's web site this morning and found first that they have spelled Gary Mack, Gary Mark. Ouch! That's no way to treat a guy with a gravy job like Gary, curator of the Six Floor Museum in Dallas, and now producer of blockhead TV. The few comments so far, have been fairly ruthless in demolishing this pseudo-scientific prime time noise. I hadn't the words to describe fully the problems with this show, or why I can't remember the name of it this morning...But, I'll try.

Gary and some Aussie with a hat and a huge hunting rifle go banging around. First in Dallas, Texas where they proceed to fire their cannon at a stationary target, mounted inside a replica of the 1962 Lincoln Continental limo, from the grassy knoll position behind THE picket fence. What fun? And how realistic? The first shot destroys the very expensive imported dummy figure of JFK's head completely in high definition 1081p. Pretty scary stuff, Who-ho-ho. but I digress.

The second shot, using a 7.62mm cartridge, the same as found in the sniper's perch in the former Texas School Book Depository shortly after the assassination, took the dingus right above the right ear doing the requisite amount of damage and eliciting squeals of delight from Gary and Crocodile Gundee, as they deduce loads from the mess they made with the new goop. They're whooping like schoolboys as they report that they would have, all other thing being equal successfully killed Jackie Kennedy for bonus points.

Now, that's a new one, anyhow. No post-adolescent delayed wish fulfillment going on there guys? No, just a few noise complaints, one shots fired in Dealey, and who the hell ...who stopped traffic?
Now for sure the webcam stays. When next we find our Gypsies, they're back in L.A. presumably on post-production and they still have a few expensive imported dummy likeness of JFK to use and twenty-odd minutes to fill, so they haul timber for the high country and are next seen in Sylmar buying more ammo and renting a Hi-Jacker for the day and then disappearing into the tinder dry foothills, only to return sometime later, and under their own power and hotfooting it back to the city.

Boom, boom, boom, three more high-tech Jacks die in an humble cardboard box with a studio fan blowing grit in it's face at twenty-five miles an hour. Mocking the unliving victims of junk science and the ongoing fallacious condom nation of the untrue facts surrounding the of death of the last president assassinated while in office. And when they're gone, all Sylmar succumbs to the torchy Santa Ana winds,dry vacuous and empty, ashes. Up far too late last night.

A salty dog

Arrah! Avast all ye landlubbers and shut yer gobs, I can drink more coffee than any man alive and I sing like Nat King Cole. Take it down, Steve the Bloody Pirate is back, Captain of The Black Caddy, the scrounge of Santa Monica Bay, I bring the hope of westerly winds well laden with water for you southlanders. Come in and meet the wife. Donut? There's coffee. Let me tell you about my grandchildren back east. Good luck firefighters!

When I was on the desk at Great Lakes, I had to learn to fight fires over the radio, using a telephone and a pencil and paper. CAD came later. The scariest thing I ever did was working fires, not that I was ever exposed to any danger. We had a real nasty fire at the VA hospital on the geriatric ward. It came in about two in the morning via an automatic alarm, hard wired smoke detector. It seemed some little old WWII vet wanted to end it all and take a few of his fellows with him by setting his mattress on fire, hoping to ignite some of the oxygen on in use on the ward. A tontine? Or a band of brothers?

The duty assistant fire chief arrived on the scene, established incident command and described a scene from dante's inferno, with smoke pouring out of the a third floor window and little old people everywhere in various stages of an orderly, if surreal evacuation and the first responders arrived at the scene too late to save the old guy whose bedding was fully engaged by then. No one else was injured, that because the staff had secured the oxygen before the fire could reach any.

Mission accomplished? Well, yes and no. Mine was. Why? And what's with that hat, you ask? Something to tip to the smokeaters. No shark has ever made it all the way to Lake Michigan but I'm not taking any bets. Fact is the sharks feed in Santa Monica Bay in the spring and it's a foolish swimmer who braves those waters in mid-March. If the hypothermia doesnt kill you the sharks will finish the job. Such a fool it seems was our Edwin F. Burns, (1909-????) ex-Army private and a native New Yorker. The F. stands for Fishbait.

Dem Changes

Maverick ex-New Jerseyian Gene Lyons is now a featured opinion writer for Arkansas Online. Yes, it's pay per view, but entirely worth it. It looks like like it might be a sweet deal for Gene and nobody deserves it more. Hope so, because he's got a lot of new mouths to feed. Always an huge drawing card on the Internet, he's provided free content for years to blogger and sites since the coup.

Even Finnegan ponied up half a C-note for the years subscription to the thing, and AO has a long way to go, particularly with their blogs, there's only three or four and they're cheerful and relatively inoffensive, and how about a photo? Well, it's off to the sidebar with them, a real honor. I've been pimping his stuff since my days blogging at Salon dotcom. and it will be very nice to finally know where to find the damn thing thing on a regular basis! Thanks for everything, Pal.

R.I.P. Mitch Mitchell, (1947-2008)


Dear Bri, thanks so much for the very enlightening link. As to "calling you a liar" which you mention on your Brian Carr thread? I never did. Read it again. Finnegan says he called you no such thing, and that crack about you telling a whooper was just that. He goes on to attribute it to "early being a relative concept" and totally absolves you of any prevarication in the matter, in fact he says just the opposite in his comment, that, while you may have misled, we are agreed you most certianly didn't lie, nor would you ever.

http://www.blackdahlia.info/ is a reliable site, but she's no fan of the Hodel hypothesis and demolishes it better and quicker than I ever could. Amateur sleuth Mary Pacio's made important contributions to finding the killer and will and should be noted well, even though her conclusions are somewhat far-fetched, her research is invaluable to the modern investigator.

And lastly, as for retired L.A.P.D. Detective Steve Hodel, only professional courtesy requires some circumspection on my part. Deadpan, I'll just leave him and his crocker-croaker to the judgement of his own peers, and that's far better than he did by me; "It is amazing," said Sgt. St John, a detective who had the case until his retirement, "how many people offer up a relative as the killer." Amazing, indeed! It's bloody prescient.

Map 101

Americans are notoriously bad at geography. It's no stretch to argue that had we understood exactly where Korea or Viet Nam were, we never would have approved of those wars, to say nothing of the ongoing horror in Afghanistan and Iraq. Stupid kills.

Obama wins, I get blacklisted

In 1863 Abraham Lincoln, an Ur Republican, freed the slaves in the so-called Southern Confederacy by a single Presidential proclamation. Some have argued that this didn't really free any slaves, all of which were still in the hands of the rebels at the time. But, you can't beat the jive time with that kind of logic. It doesn't allow for any change, it only fills up the jails and runs up huge deficits and disenfranchises Americans.

The irony is that Lincoln's party became an haven for the sort of divisive whitey on top politics which would eventually hand the Democrats, the crumpled honor of electing one of their own and a man of color as well, their forty-fourth chief executive. Expiating of the older party's role in a century of Jim Crow? Who can say?

Of course by handing to the Democrats, I mean African-Americans did it themselves, by keeping hope alive, and empowering millions and millions of voters all over the United States in decades long voter registration drives in the black wards and Hispanic neighborhoods swelling the party's ranks with each succeeding Republican outrage, until they couldn't no longer be denied the big prize.

Long-time readers will recall that my one lasting and cherished issue in the political sphere is campaign finance reform, and I'm here to report that great progress was made in this here election cycle by both parties under the new law, which was authored by McCain and Fiengold. Obama raised a billion they say, most of it in small contributions over the internet, and spent six hundred million in a virtual landslide. The results speak for themselves and they augur badly for the Republicans, and probably for a generation to come.

Jason, you see, has delivered the Golden Fleece, and it's not made of gold at all, but woven from long silky chains of e-mail addresses. These donations are from people of perhaps somewhat limited means, but of overwhelming numbers. The GOP reliance upon wealthier and more exclusive donors has proven catastrophic in the final tally. They will need far more than a Dr. Phil moment, they're doomed if they don't wake up to the danger, or not, they simply haven't governed at all well in modern times, perhaps they're extinct? We'll see.

Note to Bri. I noticed you told a whopper over at that website you admin, and I feel it's my duty to correct your obvious error. Dr. George Hodel was not, repeat, not any kind of suspect at the time of the Elizabeth Short murder, and didn't become one until years later in 1949. Maybe you're afraid of hurting Steve Hodel's feelings? Really, now is it fair to the newbies that my simple hypotheticals are never even discussed over there? Is my poor little blog on your hateful blacklist? Exiled for life? Such cruelty. Shame on you, Monica. We shall overcome, someday.