The Murder/Riddle Solution-Page 4
Ed Had It All PlannedBetty had used San Diego to avoid moving in with Ed. And Ed knew it. But she'd whapped him with it right before she'd headed south. And for a month she'd never write nor phone Ed. But she'd never be out of Ed's brain. Ed cried the blues and replayed the way she'd done him dirty. He pondered what he'd have done had he seen Betty's juke maneuver coming. So transmutation of the Degnan murder into the Dahlia murder probably was a brain movie during Betty's San Diego hiatus.
And Ed plotted it out: he created unarrestability by doing the crime in a place where trace evidence would be moot; he snuck his murder kit into the hotel room in a suitcase; he snuck suitcase-friendly Liz and Beth out in two suitcases; in his 3rd message he opened the door for an insanity plea. And Ed had to cerebrate how to allude the Degnan murder into the eerie blend of Poe and Freud that would be his lover's-lane display. I bet Ed had prepared his 2nd and 3rd messages before cutwork began. He had a manager sign the log for him on the 12th: Ed would not show his handwriting. Why? And pre-murder originals would've enabled Ed to read Betty translations of the messages after he'd told her how he was going to turn her into a Suzanne doll. If Ed did the grisly lecture, he maybe concluded by telling Betty that all this was theirs alone: nobody else would fathom the messages or what truly had happened o her, so he and she would be Iinked forever . . .
Mad Obsession
Ed told us the Black Dahlia murder story in his messages. And the profound Dahlia Murder/Degnan Murder interweave tells us the Ed story: Ed was as obsessed with the Dahlia as she was with the Suzanne Degnan murder. So it was a very old story: obsession plus rejection plus perceived betrayal equals murder most foul.
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They Got the Easy Part
The "No Short-slaying suspect" chant
has promulgated an LAPD-masterminded myth. Agness Underwood had been
one of the newshawks at the Dahlia deathsite After retiring from her
job as editor of the LA Herald Examiner, Aggie told West
magazine: "Detectives had very grave suspicions about one guy
who was questioned in the case...The evidence at hand [in 1947] was
almost conclusive against this man." Aggie didn't reveal the man's
name; she did say he was "not a well-known person." The shadowy
guy Aggie was talking about was Ed Burns.
Madding Rumination
LAPD cops with a need to know have
known the Dahlia murderer, Ed Burns, all along. A banality like physical
evidence to show the DA has been the snag. But did '47 LAPD see that
the Dahlia murder was an allusional aberration, a Degnan-murder ditto?
This demonic deja vu was a reasonable-doubt-snuffing strand in unrandom-ripper
Ed's web of guilt. Maybe LAPD didn't decipher Ed's trilogy; maybe LAPD's
circumstantial evidence plus Ed's name on the confessional and parallelism
messages would have added up to Ed's arrest and conviction for the
Black Dahlia murder . . .
Looney Tooners
Almost from Dahlia-case day one, LAPD was bombarded
by cuckoo confessors. The funny-farm fallout came by car, foot and phone, a
few repeatedly, consistently at cuckoo's own cost. The sweatfests appeared
to be a time-wasting nuisance when Dahlia-case sleuths had little time to spare.
And a kinkily colorful contingent of "players" in the Dahlia case
kept police-beat newshawks scooping and not snooping, while LAPD cops interviewed
burlesque-joint operators, porno cameraman, Hollywood Wolves' Club members,
nightclub owners, hookers, female impersonators, lesbians, transsexuals . .
.
Kooks and the color crowd were case-protection fodder. Prior to 3/14/47, Dahlia-case
dicks were guarding this secret: Ed Burns their man. On 3/14/47, LAPD added
a "Pandora's Box" secret to their
Dahlia file: Dahlia-killer Ed had reached the Great Beyond, via Neptuneville.
UnID'd Man was Ed Burns . . . Circumstantial
Evidence
(1) Ed Burns was razzed about his rabbity mug; UnID'd Man had a Bugs Bunny
countenance. Two bunnies at once for foxy Betty? Don't bet on it. Bet that
UnID'd Man was Ed Burns.
(2) The man checked into the downtown hotel with Betty, as "Barnes. " The
duo was ID'd by the managers. LAPD changed Barnes' name to "unIDd man" upon
hearing details of the strange couple's last of several stays at the hotel: "Barnes" was
a thinly veiled and risky occultation of "Burns." UnID'd Man
was Ed Burns
(3) A tritely anonymous "Smith" or "Jones" sign-in was
OK with the normal guy. Use of "Barnes" as an anonymity was cryptically
accordant with the concealment-cipher guy: Ed Burns...
(4) UnID'd Man reacted in a zip his scent being sniffed at the hotel. Ed Burns
knew he had to get with it, lest his trilogy be snuffed by an arrest. Ed was
the only stokable man.
(5) The hotelier held all three photos from Betty's luggage: UnID'd Man sent his copy
of the bottom photo of the pics. UnID'd Man sent the photo for reverse-psych.
UnID'd Man was Ed Burns.
(6)UnID'd never went to the police and convinced them his name was releasable
to the media. Bet that he'd zeroed the Dahlia and, by spring of 1947, himself. UnID'd
Man was Ed Burns.
(7) UnID'd was seen with Betty on BD Day-3: he was the prime Dahlia-case
suspect. There was no APB for Barnes in January 1947. LAPD must have
interviewed him. So LAPD knew his identity. But UnID'd wasn't "ID'd." Why?
LAPD knew . . . UnID'd Man was Ed Burns.
(8)UnID'd Man never was in a "photo-story" and it would've been a big story.
Ed Burns drove Betty from place to place, with her stuff in tow. Ed was big-photo-story
material, but he never was in a photo-story. 'Why? UnIDd and Ed Burns were
the same man, and he zeroed the Dahlia, and he was an LAPD secret.
(9) UnID'd was seen with the Dahlia on BD Day-3. On BD Day-1 he searched for
a room with private bath. On BD Day he returnedto the hotel to "wait for
his wife," and did not wait. Who does this uniquely match him up with?
Ripper Rabbit: the guy who told us he'd murdered the Dahlia. UnID'd Man was
Ed Burns.
(10) The photos appear to be photo-booth snapshots. The grinner and the Dahlia
are not in nightclub apparel, they're in Betty-'n-Eddy garb. UnID'd Man was
Ed Burns . . .
"UnID'd" was a Harry The Hat Hansen ploy. It was the "Now you see Ed, now you don't" opener for a cover-up which would outlive sage Detective/magician Hansen...Via his cryptic trilogy, Ed told us he murdered the Black Dahlia. Then Burns told us he suicided. LAPD ID'd the man in the pics in January 1947 and initially called him "unID'd" to protect the case. If not, they were amateurs. Reductio ad absurdum. Case protection meant they "knew their man." This man was Ed Burns, otherwise LAPD was amateur. Reductio ad absurdum. But Ed suicided before LAPD could arrest him. And in 2002, LAPD still calls Ed Burns "unID'd"(?) . . . Oh, now I get it: "unIDd" means "unEd'd," and Ed wasn't the killer who got away, he was the little man who wasn't there . . .
A judge noted that circumstantial evidence is better than eyewitness testimony: it has good eyes and it can't sit on the stand and lie like hell! And it can't mislabel a photo.
Hellllooo, you Black Dahlia obsessors. . . It's time to stop following the bouncing blue ball. UnID'd Man was Ed Burns!
Finis
Now we're Educated about the grinning
man in the photographs with the Black Dahlia. He was the closet case
who modeled a mimic of Suzanne Degnan and displayed her in a Degnan
Boulevard lovers'-lane . . . so Elizabeth Short would be an eternal
lover with rejected Ed Burns' nemesis, William Heirens.
