Not only does it look like he's the killer
of Elizabeth Short,
but I discover that he's a serial killer.
My dad was also investigated
18 months before the Dahlia murder
for the suspected overdose murder of his secretary.
It was listed as a suicide.
They couldn't prove it.
There were other murders too.
Three weeks after the murder of Elizabeth Short,
there's another murder and it's Jeanne French.
Her body was nude, posed on a vacant lot
about five miles west of the Dahlia crime scene.
Used blunt force to the head
just like the Dahlia was.
And the killer took a lipstick and wrote an obscenity,
"(bleep) you" and signed it BD, for Black Dahlia.
Then there was a Louise Springer,
who was kidnapped just two blocks away
from the Dahlia crime scene.
She was strangled, she was sexually assaulted,
and brutally beaten to death.
That's another one they're saying is definitely connected.
He was an urban terrorist.
He terrorized Los Angeles,
sending in the taunting notes to the police and the press.
He was an extreme narcissist.
He wanted to remain above the fold in the newspapers.
I see him as a misanthrope, the classic sadist.
He hated women.
He was pure evil.
(sinister music)
Well Steve's talkin' about the personality
of his own father.
And while we're on that topic,
I wanna add to our conversation
Dr. Robert Schug, a forensic psychologist
and professor of criminology at Long Beach State University.
Obviously, this is a very intelligent guy, right?
Seems to be.
I mean I think we can look at how the crime scene evidence
suggests the type of person that would do this,
and then we can also look at your dad
and see how good of a fit he is
for someone who might commit this type of murder.
And so when we look at the crime scene,
it suggests anger, hostility,
even hatred of women.
It suggests sexuality fused with aggression.
It suggests someone who is a bright person,
yet at the same time, can control their impulses
and plan and organize.
It suggests someone, as you said,
with medical knowledge, knowledge of anatomy.
Someone who's a bit callous and lacking empathy, right,
in terms of the pre-mortem torture,
as well as the posing in public
for some unsuspecting passer-by to be traumatized by.
And then as you said, Steve,
the narcissism, along with the brazen act of posing the body
and then taunting the police and the media afterwards.
He wanted this to be found
and he wanted to make a statement.
And when we look at the crime scene photo,
we see that there was some real exhibitionistic type
posing, and this was out,
meant to be found, meant to have shock value.
The body was cut in half.
And that's not easy to do, by the way.
No, no.
This does take somebody with some skill, right?
It's called a hemicorporectomy
and there's a specific vertebrae that you have to cut
through with a scalpel.
And they teach this or at least they taught this
in medical schools at that time.
So it's a sophisticated amount of knowledge
to be able to even pull this off.
Yeah, so this wouldn't have been an impulse?
Doesn't seem like it.
And also, adding to I think the washing and cleansing
of the body, the scrubbing it to remove fingerprints,
the way in which it was dragged and posed,
it doesn't really line up with someone who was doing this
spur of the moment, not thinking before they act.
Yeah.
And he was a very meticulous, methodical guy.
Yeah, well he was a trained surgeon, to begin with.
So he certainly had the skill.
And there was no question in LAPD and the experts' minds
that it had to have been a skilled surgeon.
And he was taunting the police, whoever,
someone was taunting the police,
whether it was the killer or someone
that was posing as the killer, whatever,
but if he was taunting the police,
that would be consistent with this narcissistic-
Very much.
This grandiosity and this arrogance
that Steve talks about that he actually witnessed.
Yeah, all of these notes were,
he wanted to be above the fold in the newspapers.
I mean this was a very important part of his egotism
and his narcissism.