Quote:
Originally Posted by Martin Pal
Jeff and Scott...
Larry Harnisch, who used to work for the Herald Examiner and L.A. Times, considers himself a historian of this subject and often debunks a lot of this stuff that often comes up about this case. He has two youtube podcasts a month: Black Dahlia: Ask Me Anything and Black Dahlia Book Club.
He addresses this documentary in this one, and probably others, Black Dahlia: Ask Me Anything, August 2026.
To me his manner takes some getting used to, he repeats things a lot, and sometimes his responses have the air of someone who knows so much about something that it could take an hour or more to explain so he'll sound dismissive, but I tend to believe he really knows what he's talking about.
Has anyone else watched any of these?
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Martin pal & Scott Charles, forgive my taking forever to respond to your posts about The Black Dahlia (upcoming documentary) and Dahlia historian Larry Harnisch.
I certainly have watched several of Harnisch's Dahlia podcasts & even sent in some questions, which he answered. One of them was about Mamie Van Doren's claim that she was a friend of Elizabeth Short's. The claim is now in a new autobiography 95-year-old Mamie has written. Larry came down HARD on her & indeed her Betty Short story sounds not credible. Perhaps they had a passing accquaintance in 1946, when Mamie was 15, and her tale is a super-exaggeration of that. I've seen several interviews with Mamie & she always comes across as honest, down-to-earth, and very funny. Hard to believe she would flat-out lie, but Larry claims she is "hallucinating" the whole thing. Whatever.
Harnisch is known as the "world's authority on the Black Dahlia." He comes across as sincere & trustworthy, but one does notice that every single solitary book that has ever been written about the case (to my knowledge) is scathingly dismissed as "garbage" by Larry. Perhaps they all deserve that rating - I'm knowledgeable about the case, but not an authority & have read maybe two of the books - but have certainly read reviews & synopses of the others.
Larry has his own prime suspect, the 67-year-old doctor Walter A. Bayley. I first heard Harnisch propose his theory about Bayley in a 1999 documentary on the case, hosted by noted ex-cop and celebrated novelist Joseph Wambaugh. I well-remember Wambaugh saying at the close of the program that "Walter Bayley, a 67-year-old man with severe Alzheimers could NOT have commited the murder." In spite of some odd coincidences involving Bayley, it does seem hard to believe that an "elderly" man with advanced dementia could have summoned the psychotic savagery required of the killer.
Harnisch has been working on a "definitive" book about The Black Dahlia for a long time, and I fear that his Walter Bayley theory will be savaged by critics just as he has savaged all of the other BD writers. We'll see - I certainly look forward to his book, which he claims will be more of a definitive portrait of Elizabeth Short, although I've read that author William Mann has made a similar claim about his fairly recent "Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood."
Finally, on a somewhat related note concerning Hollywood history, may I recommend the fascinating youtube videos of Justin Root. I have no association with Root, nor ulterior motive in promoting him - I just think his videos are exceptionally researched & well-made. His main specialty is walking tours of the neighborhoods of Hollywood Heights and Whitley Heights. He has obviously dug into vintage newspaper archives to find a treasure-trove of fascinating details about the residents of houses he passes on various streets he walks along.
He also has some two-part video tours of places that figure in the lives of Lana Turner, Carol Burnett, and yes - Jean Spangler. Here is part 1 of his exploration of the life of the mysterious Jean Spangler, and you will learn many things you probably have never heard:
https://youtu.be/KZOK6nLQFTo?si=V1bL4Rv-WcrNYjmB
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