While, who made his statement as he was being questioned about another crime in another jurisdiction (in this case, the Santa Monica Police Department), which forwarded the information to the LAPD. The second bogus confession involved Charles R. Actually, all Patterson wanted was to get into the movies and all he got was a trip back home to Minnesota. Patterson, who told the Examiner that he was a friend of Bacon and that the actor was being blackmailed. The “Masked Marvel Murder” faded from view rather quickly, but long enough to attract a couple of bogus confessions. The Times was squeamish about killings in the 1940s and rarely put them on the front page. Recall that The Times never put the original Black Dahlia coverage on the front page - except for the one day when it seemed that Army Cpl. 12, 1943, (pay attention to the date of death, fact-checkers, because many writers get it wrong – which should tell you something about the caliber of their research), and the stories appeared the next day and continued to Oct. The only thing missing in the Bacon case is a stream of crank mail that newspapers were delighted to publish in the Dahlia killing.Īlthough the “Masked Marvel Murder” was never solved, it disappeared from the newspapers relatively quickly compared to the Black Dahlia case. Then there are the lessons about the newspaper coverage: The subject of homosexuality and what I call “the sideshow,” the false confessions by crackpots and publicity seekers that overwhelmed the Black Dahlia story in 1947. If you look carefully at the crime scene photos, you will see uniformed officers holding back people up at the corner of Norton and Coliseum Street. The reason that no barrier is visible in the Black Dahlia crime scene - and it took me quite a while to determine this - is that the LAPD sealed off the entire block of South North Avenue. Never at a loss for a good story, former Los Angeles Examiner reporter Will Fowler would claim that he walked through the crime scene, although all existing photos show him standing on the sidewalk, not in the grass and weeds. No such barrier is visible in the many Black Dahlia crime scene photos that have spread all over the Internet. I mention this because in later years, the question was raised about how well the police guarded the Black Dahlia crime scene. We also find rope used in the 1948 film “He Walked by Night,” on which LAPD Detective Marty Wynn was a technical advisor - the film that was the inspiration for “Dragnet.” Ed Jokisch, but this is the earliest photographic evidence I have found of a crime scene being blocked off with rope by the LAPD. Obviously, crime scene tape did not exist in the 1940s, so the LAPD homicide detectives carried rope in their call car to block off a crime scene. The individual is unidentified, but I’m fairly certain it isn’t Detective Harry Fremont or Detective Lloyd Hurst (the homicide detectives were famously well-dressed, unlike this gent), so my hunch is that it’s someone from the coroner’s office, a man who appears in several other crime scene photos.īut do you see anything remarkable about this picture? This photograph shows some sort of official with Bacon’s body. Our first lesson is about how the LAPD handled a murder scene in 1943. And no one has come forward – yet – to claim that their father killed David G.G Bacon. There is only one shoddy, heavily fictionalized book dealing with the case at any length instead of the five-foot shelf of nonsense about the Black Dahlia. There are several lessons for the serious researcher and historian, particularly the insight it offers into the 1947 Black Dahlia case.įor example, we meet many of the same individuals who will appear in the Elizabeth Short killing, but the Bacon case is relatively pristine compared to the layers upon layers of fictionalized nonsense about the Black Dahlia. I have spent far more time than I intended on the “Masked Marvel Murder” and not just because it’s an intriguing, unsolved homicide. The 1942 marriage of Greta Keller and David G.G.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |