Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia by John Gilmore

Author:John Gilmore
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Amok Books
Published: 2006-05-01T06:00:00+00:00

11

The Los Angeles County morgue, where the questionable deaths and murder victims were delivered pending identification or burial, was cramped, dingy, and had leaking water pipes. Glass panels in many of the doors were fogged over with a sticky moisture. The foul air reeked of decomposition and the constant electric fans only blew the odors from one hallway or room to another. The fumes of formaldehyde partly masking the smells “was like a gas that stuck to your clothes,” says Detective Herman Willis, who had been transferred from the metro division to assist in the investigation.

Willis had been summoned to Central during the night to assist in the search of missing persons files in an effort to identify the victim, and to join in picking up and questioning more than a hundred “sex degenerates and suspected sadists.” Other divisions had been pooled for the task, but Captain Jack Donahoe had requested that Willis, the “bright kid” of metro, who was to work with detectives Finis Brown and Harry Hansen, was to report directly to Donahoe.

“I didn’t like going to the morgue,” Willis says. “It was an awful place.” For ages there had been threats to shut the morgue down—plans for condemning or moving the facilities. Time and again they got out of it with improvement schemes, but nothing was done. “There were other changes going on in the city, but a lot of things were staying the way they’d been—pockets were being filled and the dead weren’t going to kick.”

Rooms opened off halls that were filled with deputy coroners drinking coffee, joking, and talking, while in some rooms the bodies were stacked two and three deep— “stacked up like cord wood,” Willis says. “I once had a judge order a check on a particular decedent in a case, and a deputy took me into one room and dumped one body off the other like you’d roll logs to get to the one on the bottom. I never found the right corpse. When we left the place he didn’t bother to stack them back up again, but left them where he’d turned them over looking for the one I needed.”

Often it would seem almost hot and humid in the halls. At one point the incoming cases became so “bottled up” that, with the severe shortage of equipment, the autopsies were performed on the gurneys. The rims around the table edges were too shallow to contain the fluids spilling over. “The examiners didn’t seem to bother with their own regulations,” Willis says.

Civilian mortuaries had grown to hate the county morgue—hated the surgeons and the deputies. “Guys at funeral parlors griped that bodies were sent over half the time without being sewn up or put back in shape.” Willis says. “Sometimes body parts were put in wax paper—especially with traffic fatalities— or put into boxes for the independent undertakers. I remember one incident where the face was still folded back over the top of the head, which they’d sawed through, and the body was sent out like that, with the wife and relatives waiting for it at the other end.

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