Sylvia Blomier, 21-year-old gift wrapping clerk in a downtown department store, was ordered held for trial in Superior Court today on five counts of forging her customers’ signatures on sales receipts.
The motive: acquiring fancy duds, to the tune of $1479 retail. Judge Edwin L. Jefferson ruled that the girl be held in County Jail, as she was unable to meet a $2000 bond.
We direct our readers to information on an event hosted by the LA Press Club in Hollywood on Thursday, a reading and reception for Donald H. Wolfe’s new book The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul, and Murder that Transfixed Los Angeles
The 1947project bloggers have not yet read Mr. Wolfe’s book, but our Larry Harnisch has thoroughly examined the D.A.’s files that form the heart of Wolfe’s thesis. He is concerned that there are numerous inconsistancies between the files he read and Wolfe’s claims (see below). Still, it sounds like an entertaining night out in Miss Short’s old stomping grounds, and we invite any reader who attends to post back in the comments about their experience.
Larry says: Having been through the D.A.’s files on the Dahlia case (I inventoried and indexed every scrap of paper) I can say definitively that Bugsy Siegel, Norman Chandler, Jack Dragna and Brenda Allen are never mentioned.
In fact, the D.A.’s files say 1) Elizabeth Short was not a prostitute and 2) she wasn’t in Los Angeles in 1944 or 1945. According to the D.A.’s files and everything else I have ever found, she arrived in late July or early August 1946.
I chatted with Wolfe while he was going through the files at the D.A.’s office so I know he had the opportunity to find those documents. He apparently just ignored them.
The D.A.’s files, incidentally, aren’t some neat archive. They’re papers that were saved when the D.A. was cleaning house and were just shoveled into boxes. Material from different cases is mixed up, including unlabeled photographs from other murders that got put into the Dahlia material–at least one turns up incorrectly identified in a certain “true†crime book.
Siegel’s voluminous FBI files are online at the bureau’s FOIA site. They are heavily censored but show he was under virtually constant surveillance from at least the middle of 1946. Agents saw him (and Virginia Hill) move out of the Chateau Marmont and into the house on Linden on Jan. 14, 1947, and files say he and Hill left for Palm Springs the next day. I refer specifically to FBI document 62-81518-406 and surrounding material.
I just got the book and haven’t read it yet as I’m getting ready for the Crime Bus tour this weekend, but anything that relies on “Severed,†which is 25% mistakes and 50% fiction, cannot be trusted. I’ll put on my waders and slog through this opus when I get a chance.
Larry Harnisch
A teenage party at 4156 Rosewood Ave. went terribly wrong tonight when 15-year-old Alan Jerome Gordon was accidentally shot by Edward Eisenhart, also 15, and Gordon’s closest pal. It seems Loraine Collins, 14, brought her daddy’s automatic pistol to Marcia Bronstein’s soiree, and handed it over to Edward. Edward went to demonstrate the safety mechanism, after removing the clip, and squeezed off one unlucky bullet. “I’m shot through the heart,” cried Alan, who died.
Police were called and got to hear a fanciful tale of a mysterious prowler who’d climbed through the window, killed Alan and run off, but the truth soon came out.
The dead boy lived at 126 Magnolia Court, Compton, his best friend and killer at 5449 Virginia Ave., and wee gun moll Loraine at 516 Commonwealth Ave.
Streetcar motorman Jesse Viscarra, 33, is not one to suffer a cold lightly. Returning home to 2403 N. Broadway on his lunch break after sneezing and wheezing all morning, he told his wife that his Army buddies had always sworn by “the old reliable” when a bug struck, and he reckoned he’d do the same.
So after snorting a snootful, Viscarra returned to his route and promptly crashed into a car driven by Mrs. Olga Milosevick, of 733 Bernard Street, at the corner of College and North Broadway. Arriving officers got a whiff of Viscarra’s breath and whisked him off to the Lincoln Heights drunk tank, while Viscarra moaned that he’d never had an accident before, and that the lady had turned in front of him.
Well, so what if she did? He’s still admittedly guilty of California Penal Code 367F, operating a streetcar while inebriated.
Police have arrested eight youngsters on charges of burglary related to the brazen theft of weaponry from the Fort McArthur armory. The boys sawed through a lock and entered the building where returning troops’ weapons were stored, making off with a veritable arsenal of a dozen automatic pistols, four carbines plus jungle knives, bayonets and ammo.
The thieves were discovered when they returned to the area to dig up their plunder, which they had hidden for later pick up.
The four boys who rented ponies for an hour’s canter from the Rocking Horse Stables at 470 Riverside Dr. seemed like nice kids to manager Roy Brown, but a day after they saddled up he’s yet to see the front of ’em. The names and addresses they left were false–one is a Van Nuys funeral parlor–and Brown can offer few clues save that one of the quartet walked with crutches. With the horses and their gear, Brown is out $6000–an expensive lesson in the low moral character of the youth of 1947.
The Nazis were afoot tonight, making yet another assault on the walls of the Temple Beth El synagogue at 1508 N. Wilton Place. Alert Hun-hunters will recall that the edifice was streaked with oil in a 1937 incident, and defaced with swastikas and graffiti reading “Heil Hitler” and “Viva Il Duce” the following year.
The modern anti-Semite works quicker, and in potentially more deadly fashion. Witnesses told investigating officers that a man pulled his car in front of the Temple and fired 14 rifle shots into the front door, then sped off. Bullets were later recovered from the back wall of the building.
Bernard E. Schwartz died in his car near the intersection of Stocker and Baldwin Streets. He had run a hose from the exhaust pipe into the cab. When passing motorists discovered the body, they also found a note directing that Schwartz’ corneas be donated to someone who needed them.
Unfortunately, Schwartz had been dead too long for his eyes to be transplanted. However, his friend and executor Arthur Wasson has honored the dead man’s desires by arranging for all usable portions of Schwartz’ body to be used for the aid of science at Medical School of the University of Southern California.
Schwartz, a former Naval chief petty officer who lived at 3835 W. Seventh Street, left a poignant note explaining his passing as “a simple case of suicide, induced by my complete lack of desire to continue living.” He was thirty years old.
The two robbers, one tall, one short, both shabby-looking, entered the California Bank branch and Sunset and Alvarado during the afternoon rush. At first they waited for a turn at LaVonne Quigley’s window, then made a sudden switch to Edward G. Miske’s teller station.
It was a bad choice. For when the tall man slid the note reading “This is a stickup. Give the alarm and we’ll kill you. We want your money.” across the counter, Miske looked right down the barrel of an automatic pistol and snapped “You’ll not get any money!” Then he reached for the alarm and was promptly shot in the arm, severing an artery.
The two men rushed out of the bank, up Alvarado, to Reservoir and into a waiting Yellow Cab. But their bad luck wasn’t over. Gerald Hough had just parked behind the cab, and reported the license to police. By nightfall, hundreds of officers were searching the city for the men, while brave, foolish Edward Miske celebrated his 26th birthday at Georgia Street Receiving Hospital. Despite losing a lot of blood, he is expected to recover.
When confronted by a would-be bandit in the 8900 block of Sunset Blvd., Miss Eleanor Falk, 30-year-old bookkeeper for a nightclub at 9039 Sunset, refused to hand over the sack containing $2000 in receipts. Instead, the clever girl dropped the bag and sat on it, then commenced to yell so forcefully that the crook hopped back into his accomplice’s car and took a powder. Then the unflappable miss continued along to the bank, where she made her deposit as planned.
