Inside the Envelope: LAPD Brass and the Black Dahlia Cover-Up (Part 3 of 3)

September 28, 2025
Birch Bay, Washington

For those of you that have not read Blog 1 and 2 of this 3 part series I would highly recommend you read those prior to reading this Part 3.  The links are:

(Part 3 of 3)

By the 1960s and 70s, LAPD brass had already quietly declared the case solved, but you won’t find that in their official files. Instead, it’s buried in whispers, memos, and envelopes passed behind closed doors. Fifty years later, those same angles are still visible — if you know how to line them up.

And that brings us to the envelope. In Part 3 of this series, we step inside the LAPD brass files, open what was hidden, and follow the trail that shows not just who knew the truth, but why it was buried.

The Envelope

X marks the 1950 approximate location of LAPDs covert office at 411 E. 1st St.

In July 1949, Capt. Charles Stanley was appointed to head LAPD’s Personnel Division. His new office
was located at 411 East First Street — just two doors down from the First Street Clinic, where Dr.
George Hodel in his own words on the Hodel/Black Dahlia DA Bugging recordings would confirm that
throughout the 1940s he performed abortions; “lots of them.”

As far as we know, Capt. Stanley himself had no known ties to George Hodel. It appears his connection
comes through circumstance: his new post placed him inside the office that would soon receive some
of the most sensitive evidence in the Black Dahlia investigation.

By fall 1950, Capt. Stanley was barely a year into his role at Personnel when a sealed LAPD
Inter-Department Mail envelope landed on his desk.

This wasn’t routine correspondence. It was routed through command channels, hand-carried across
divisions, and marked for the eyes of select brass. The same Personnel Division office that had been
drawn into the Brenda Allen vice scandal just a year earlier was now handling materials tied directly to
the Dahlia case.

LAPD Inter-Department Envelope (Rev. 7/50)

The original envelope now in my custody thanks to Sgt. Harry Hansen’s granddaughter, Judy May,
allows us to track its passage through LAPD’s inter-department couriers and shows us where and to
whom the contents were sent. From Patrol (likely the Commander) Georgia Street, to Capt. McCauley,
University Division, to Dep. Chief Thad F. Brown, Commander of Detectives, to Capt. B.R. Caldwell,
City Hall, to Capt. Charles Stanley at his office next to George Hodel’s clinic, to Capt. Zink, Highland
Park Division, To Dep.Chief R. Murdock, Commander Patrol Division, to the Commander of Hollywood
Division—Eight Top LAPD Commanders, “The Brass”, the final recipeient, the lead detective on the
Black Dahlia investigation, Sgt. Harry Hansen, Homicide Division, who would take and keep the
contents at his home to be found fifty-three years later and handed over to me for my investigation.

The Envelope Opens

When Capt. Stanley opened the envelope in his First Street office — “two doors down” from Hodel’s
clinic — he found Black Dahlia crime scene and autopsy photographs. These were circulated not only
to Stanley but to eight other command officers of the LAPD, three and a half years after Elizabeth
Short’s murder.

The path of the envelope is traceable, but its contents raise even deeper questions.

“Do Not Remove From Counter- Restricted”

We ask the obvious question—Why?

In the summer of 1950:

• George Hodel had sold his Sowden Avenue mansion and was weeks away from fleeing the country.
  Just months after the DA/LAPD surveillance team had completed the bugging of the Hodel residence and obtained confessions to his murdering his secretary, Ruth Spaulding, in 1945 and confessing to the Black Dahlia murder in 1947. Also his admitting “to having performed abortions at his clinic and making police payoffs.”

• Lt Frank Jemison of the District Attorney’s Office was preparing to obtain a felony complaint against George Hodel for Short’s murder then immediately pulled of the case.

•  All his evidence and the surveillance recordings were ordered by DA Chief Investigator H. Leo Stanley (Lt. Jemison’s superior) to be turned over to LAPD Chief of Detectives Thad F. Brown. From there, they vanished.

“The district attorney added his aid will coninue with his inquiry “until he thinks he has sufficient evidence against a party or parties, and then will ask for formal murder complaints.”

A City of Scandal

The backdrop of 1949–1950 Los Angeles was a city that looked more like a noir film than a functioning justice system.

• Brenda Allen Vice Scandal (1949): LAPD’s Admin Vice Division was caught taking huge payoffs fromAllen’s prostitution ring. Capt. Cecil Wisdom, Chief of Personnel Division was personally interviewing witnesses behind locked doors at 3:30 a.m. in June 1949.

• 

  Leadership Change: By July, Wisdom was replaced by Capt. Charles Stanley.
  Public Outcry: On June 15, 1949, the Los Angeles Mirror declared that “vice and corruption were
  rampant in the Los Angeles Police Department” and condemned the DA’s indifference.

  

  Los Angeles Mirror newspaper July 15, 1949

  Just two days prior to the above article appearing George Hodel committed the kidnap/sexual assault murder of victim Louise Springer and LAPD paid undercover informant Glenn Martin informed the Department’s Intelligence Unit that “GH and I were friends of Louise Springer, and he killed her and the Black Dahlia.” Both Hodel and Martin were taken in and interrogated in secret by LAPD detectives from the Intelligence Unit but in Martin’s words, “GH was released because the detectives were his “friendlies.”

  Personnel wasn’t just a back-office assignment. It was a sensitive operations hub. And now, in 1950, it
  was the office through which Dahlia evidence was being funneled.

  This was Los Angeles as a real-life L.A. Confidential — with George Hodel, his clinic, and his connections only blocks away from “Chinatown.”

  As we now know, Lt. Jemison was preparing to obtain multiple felony complaints against George Hodel when the brakes were slammed. Lt. Jemison was ordered off the case and every piece of evidence, including the Dahlia phtos and bugging tapes was handed over to Chief of Detectives, Thad F. Brown. Once in his hands the recordings and transcripts, “disappeared.”

  For over half a century, George Hodel’s name was absent from every LAPD report. Nothing in the LAPD Black Dahlia files remained identifying him. The extensive recordings and six-weeks of surveillance with his admissions-ALL GONE. Only DA Lt. Jemison’s “second set of books” hidden in the DA’s vault kept the truth alive. Without that foresight, Hodel’s name would never have been reconnected to Elizabeth Short and the case would have remained officially unsolved.

  And yet, to this day, the case remains officially “unsolved.” For LAPD to acknowledge the truth would mean admitting that some of its most respected leaders were complicit in a cover-up.

• 

This was Los Angeles as a real-life L.A. Confidential — with George Hodel, his clinic, and his connections only blocks away from ‘Chinatown.’
The difference, of course, is that this wasn’t fiction. It was Los Angeles in 1950.

“The cover-up lasted decades. The evidence survived. Now, for the first time in one volume, you can read it all — Black Dahlia Avenger: Case Closed is available to preorder.”

CLICK HERE TO ORDER –
BLACK DAHLA AVENGER-CASE CLOSED-
THE DEFINITIVE EDITION  (2025)