Chapter 1

Elizabeth Short - 1945

December 29, 1949

My name is Roy Shannon. I don't expect that any of you have heard of me, especially since I finished writing this document in the fall of 1949 and handed it over to a law firm with instructions to publish it some sixty years hence. I should be long dead by then, having ceased worrying my obsession with a man who could pass from one body to another without the host body being aware of his presence. A man whom I have no doubt has been the greatest serial-killer known to man; a man who causes me to lie awake night after night wondering if I really killed him that night in Los Angeles, or if I murdered an innocent man who walked in the door, with me thinking him serving as his host of the moment.

I'd better start from the beginning; this tale is complicated and rambles from the summer of '47 back in time to the 1870's. It is wrought with early years of baseball history, told by one who was there; and by an alien who desperately sought to right a wrong; and a serial killer who will never be tried or confined for his sins.

The Beginning:

Roughly seventeen years ago I thought I was a hotshot baseball pitcher. Hell, the White Sox thought enough of me to give me $500 to sign with them and took me to their spring-training camp where I promptly ruined my arm trying to strike out everyone I faced. The year was 1933. Need I go into the details of just how bleak a time that was?

I wasn't without a work ethic though, and after returning home, I found two meager jobs, busing tables and cleaning up a speakeasy after closing hours. That was in Columbia, Missouri. I managed to get into the local university and garner a degree in journalism. That was June, 1938; and with no newspaper job waiting for me, or any other job for that matter, I did what many other young men were doing at the time, I joined the Army.

My subsequent war experience involved, among other niceties, some hot times in North Africa, and the invasion of Normandy, where I was wounded, twice. So, with two Purple Hearts, I got to go back home after they healed the wounds in my chest and got most of the shrapnel out of my ass.

Thanks to my journalism degree from the University of Missouri, and my war hero status, I landed a decent job with the Chicago Tribune. In the ensuing year I devoted my spare time to preparing to write what I thought would be the Great American novel. I had no idea that maybe ten million other Americans were attempting the same thing; and like me, failing.

I should have been working on an article about Chicago's Lincoln Park. It was due the following afternoon. Instead, I was sitting behind the ivy covered wall in the bleachers at Wrigley Field watching my beloved Cubs drop the first game of a series with the Pirates, 12 to 8.

It was another game they should have won, but the wind was with the Pirates not my Cubbies, and Thornton Lee got shelled early and often, ultimately losing to Big Jim Bagby. It was almost the end of June, and the Cubs were settled in at a comfortable record of 31 wins and 31 losses. But as I watched Phil Caverretta foul out to the Pittsburgh first baseman for the final out, it was painfully obvious they were not the pennant winning caliber team of just two short years before.

Not being a slacker, I had most of the Lincoln Park article set up in my mind, and during the slower parts of the game I mulled over how I would present it to my editor. Taking a pad from my jacket, I began to jot down more perteninet details about the park. For instance, I knew it bcame into being in 1843 as a Cemetary, and one of the more notable occupants was former Chicago Mayor James Curtiss, whose body was lost when the cemetery was turned into the park.

Suddenly it hit me, and I stopped jotting in my notebook. My novel would be about Elizabeth Short, better known as the Black Dalhlia. Why the thought occurred just then I will ever know, but it did and I will always wonder if someone or something put it in my head.

What I knew about the Black Dahlia Murder was this: a stunningly beautiful, twenty-two-year-old girl struggling to make a name for herself in the Babylon of Hollywood, never seemed to be able to escape a curse of unbelievably bad fortune. Having lost two fiancées in the war, it was said that she turned to drinking and promiscuity in a desperate effort to shelter her broken heart from overwhelming grief. Her passion for servicemen and aspiration to be famous made her a different kind of woman for her time. Her nickname evolved from her black hair, and that she always wore black attire. Some said she was named the Black Dahlia before her murder, others said the name was applied by journalists to sensationalize the crime. I figured the latter had a ring of truth to it, having done the same to several murders I'd covered for the Tribune, most notably that of the so-called Lipstick Killer, William Heirens.

At any rate, on January 15, 1947, a passerby spotted Elizabeth Short's nude body in a vacant lot near Hollywood. Her body, cut in half, was bruised and beaten. Grass had reportedly been forced into her vagina and she had been sodomized after death.

Murder stories sold. I knew this from the money the Tribune and other Chicago dailies made with the Heirens trial or more importantly, prior to the trial almost exactly a year earlier when all but convicting the seventeen year old in the press with one outlandish – and more than likely fictional – story after another until the young man confessed rather than face the death sentence.

I was ashamed that I participated in the event, for I was convinced that the kid was railroaded into confessing after he was interrogated around the clock for six consecutive days, beaten by police and not allowed to eat or drink.[1] He was not allowed to see his parents for four days.[2] He was also refused the opportunity to speak to a lawyer for six days.[3] [4]

In the middle of July, the Chicago Tribune published a front page headline story indicating that Heirens had confessed to the crimes. They gave lurid details. This purely fabricated article was picked up by the remaining four daily Chicago papers and the news services. It was apparent to Heirens that a fair trial would be impossible. Urged by his lawyers to accept the plea bargain, he confessed to all three murders to avoid certain death in the State's electric chair. There was no appeal process. Within weeks, Heirens would have been dead. From that standpoint, his plea bargain was completely understandable. Ten weeks after his arrest, during which the Chicago papers headlined the Heirens case 157 times, Heirens began serving three life sentences.

I can still hear his words as he stood there in the courtroom following his sentencing. "Everyone believed I was guilty ... If I weren't alive, I felt I could avoid being adjudged guilty by the law and thereby gain some victory.[5] But I wasn't successful even at that ... Before I walked into the courtroom my counsel told me to just enter a plea of guilty and keep my mouth shut afterward. I didn't even have a trial." [6] [7]

Unlike the Lipstick Murders, the Short murder investigation was unresolved, but was still getting the occasional front page column in the Chicago dailies, and I could only imagine what was happening on the West Coast with the Hearst papers that were even more sensational than Chicago's.

I left the ballpark and made it to my bank ten minutes before closing. I drew out my savings, a whopping $733.45, and then headed to the Tribune. My editor was livid when I told him I was going to Los Angeles within the next day or so. He didn't believe my story about taking a vacation to be with my sick aunt. He thought I was going after another job out there with one of the LA dailies. But he honored my request, adding that if I wasn't back at my desk in two weeks time, I was fired.

I didn't actually leave for LA until the fifth of July. My '37 Desoto was a temperamental thing, and the shop kept it much longer than necessary. They didn't do that great a job either, the Desoto broke down on the outskirts of Tulsa, but I was fortunate in finding a mechanic who not only knew his business, but had me up and running in only four hours.

Okay, now hang with me on this ... I know it's a stretch, but honest to God it's true, please believe me. I met the Alien - on the 8^th of July, 1947, while headed west on Route 247, roughly 12 miles east of Corona, New Mexico.

This was definitely desert country. I remember experiencing a kind of smug, self-satisfied feeling for having filled the gas tank that morning before heading into the desert. I was on my fourth Lucky Strike – I'd been counting them, trying to cut down to one and a half packs a day, when I spotted a kind of shimmering form in the sand off to my left. I brought my 1937 Desoto to a halt on the side of the road and got out to investigate.

In the next thirty seconds as I half-walked, half-trotted toward a shimmering form laying next to a baby cactus, my life changed forever.

I really thought it a woman at first because it couldn't have been even five feet in height. But on approaching the figure, I saw that the gray shimmer was not clothing, but the creature's skin. See? I was already thinking it a creature.

It spoke to me when I was about seven feet from it. No, let me restate that. It reached into my mind and spoke to me. There wasn't a sound made, except for the light breeze blowing sand against my combat boots.

"Help me, I'm about to expire," it whispered in my head.

To my surprise I responded in kind, not uttering a word, I thought, "How can I help?"

It informed me succinctly and with almost no hesitation, "I require Qvpty."

"I don't understand," I thought.

"Oh, so sorry, of course you don't. I need what you call motor oil."

"I have some in the car," I said aloud, and thought, "I'll be right back."