What inspired you to delve into the Black Dahlia murder case? Were you planning on a book all along? And did you know, from the beginning, you were going to become so involved with it?

It was not so much a matter of inspiration (curiosity and fascination played a part) that focused my attention upon the Black Dahlia murder case as it was a matter of financial necessity. It was 1963 and tough-guy actor Tom Neal (of DETOUR, etc) wanted to produce and star in a movie based on the case. I was living in Hollywood, writing screenplays and stories, and trying to keep my head above water. The deal with Tom offered some cash up front and the big carrot on the other end--when Tom raised the “rest of the financing...” Tom came via another low-budget producer I knew, and had information about my father (a policeman) and his connections in LAPD. Taking the assignment, I went into LAPD via the “inside” door, and forged my associations with officers and detectives in Homicide.

As to the inspiration and curiosity on a personal level: I had met Elizabeth Short when I was about eleven years old. She came to my grandmother’s house believing the Short side of my family might’ve been related to her family, and she was seeking information regarding her father. This meeting became a haunting sort of memory following her murder months later. Like everyone in Los Angeles, I had been fascinated with the case.

Actor/director Jack Webb of Dragnet fame, was also associated with members of LAPD’s homicide division, and during my previous work as an actor, I was acquainted with Webb. Both Webb and I were considered “enemies” by Det. Harry Hansen, then in charge of the Dahlia case, and as interlopers upon Hansen’s private territory. Hansen attempted to stop Tom Neal from pursuing a movie deal (since Hansen had plans of his own).

Almost two years later, after failed attempts by Neal to raise the financing, he was charged with murdering his own wife in Palm Springs. He went to prison for this, and of course the movie deal fell apart (much to Hansen’s satisfaction).

However, I continued my investigations, feeling I had gone too far to turn back. At that time many people linked in some way to Beth Short were still alive. I wasn’t a cop. They could talk without fearing whatever they said “might be held against” them. A year later I was involved with the Charles Schmid case in Arizona - the boy who had thrill-killed three girls and buried them in the desert. My interest in this case, which formed an association between myself and Schmid, as well as my bringing F. Lee Bailey into the case, resulted in my first true-crime book, THE TUCSON MURDERS, being published. (A new edition of this book, COLD BLOODED, is now in print.)

My publisher was interested in what I’d been doing with LA’s Black Dahlia case, and this was how the book concept first came about. I had no idea then that it would take me another twenty years before the many pieces of the puzzle began to take shape enough for a picture to emerge. Even then, it was and is a study in shadow.

After many years of associations with press and police, I knew that whole field lived in a different place--like where they operated was on the face side of the moon. Where I had to go was to find what I was looking for was on the dark side.

The Black Dahlia case is a world in shadow--a night world where things and people move in the dark, where motivations and individual psychologies are riddled with inconsistencies and ambiguity. But I was hooked--it became a peculiar juggling act of odd shapes and strange chunks, seemingly without pattern. I’d jumped into a dark, lonely lake and was going to the bottom without knowing what I’d find. All I knew was that I had to keep going. It became an obsession, they say, because I was chasing something I knew not what--only that I knew that it was.

Question by Pamela Hazelton