From the L.A. Times, the death of a sad nutter:
For more than a decade, Janice Knowlton believed she knew the answer to a question that has long intrigued crime buffs: Who killed the Black Dahlia? Knowlton was 10 years old and living in Westminster when the nude body of Hollywood hopeful Elizabeth Short — bisected at the waist and drained of blood — was found Jan. 15, 1947, in a vacant lot in the Leimert Park district of southwest Los Angeles. More than 40 years later, Knowlton inserted herself into one of the city’s most sensational and gruesome unsolved murder mysteries. She said horrifying, long-repressed memories had convinced her that George Knowlton — her long-dead father — had murdered Short. . . appearances on “Larry King Live,” “Sally Jessy Raphael” and other TV shows followed, as did the 1995 book “Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer,” which Knowlton wrote with Michael Newton and which chronicles her lurid tale of incest, rape and multiple murders. “Any time we ran anything about the Black Dahlia case, she’d leave long, rambling voice messages on my answering machine at The Times,” said Larry Harnisch, a Times copy editor who wrote about the Black Dahlia for the paper in 1997 and is writing a book on the case.
But he did not hear from Knowlton after the 2003 publication of “Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder,” a book by retired LAPD Det. Steve Hodel that became a national bestseller. In it he makes a compelling but controversial case that it was his own father, the late physician George Hodel, who murdered Short. Recently, Harnisch’s curiosity was piqued by Knowlton’s silence after a Nov. 21 Los Angeles Times Magazine article on Hodel. Harnisch began investigating and discovered that Knowlton, 67, had died March 5 at her home. The Orange County coroner’s office classified the death, which escaped public notice, as a suicide from the combined effect of five drugs. Police in Los Angeles and Westminster placed little credence in Knowlton’s Black Dahlia story when it surfaced. “The things that she is saying are not consistent with the facts of the case,” John P. St. John, an LAPD homicide detective, told The Times in 1991.
—Infuriating that vultures like Larry King and Sally Jessy Raphael would exploit an obviously disturbed women like that. Besides, my father killed the Black Dahlia. Let’s see, in January '47, he and my mother were living in Troy, NY. He could easily have “slipped out for a pack of cigarettes,” flown cross-country, killed Beth Short and dumped her corpse in the grassy lot and gotten home before my mother noticed he was gone.
Were your fathers in on it, too?
