Dr. Paul de River and the Black Dahlia

First, let me state, that I’m not a true crime murder person. It’s just not my thing, I don’t get a rush of adrenaline reading gory details or listening to disaffected podcasts, I’m no citizen detective, it is a pocket of current culture that, frankly, makes me sad (personal note- this aversion is probably because I used to work in the funeral industry and have dealt with too many bereft families). But twisted crimes are unavoidable in Los Angeles history and there isn’t a more famous unsolved murder than the Black Dahlia case. Plenty of people have done extensive research on the Black Dahlia, and it’s commendable.

I am, however, very interested in weirdos in Los Angeles who create their own success, and the house we’re talking about here happens to have housed quite a successful weirdo who had his life changed by the Black Dahlia case. This edition is going to touch on several LA crimes, consider this a warning for the squeamish.

Let’s get into it. So this lovely house was built in 1927, one of the original Hollywoodland houses. One of the first owners was attorney Allen Lund, who represented Olive Clark Day in 1931. Olive was formerly known as Dorothy Clark and was a child vaudeville dancer with an ambitious stage mother, and they accused actor Herbert Rawlinson of assault in 1922. A decade later, Ms. Day and her husband William Jobelmann ran a “Love Mart” where she sold underage girls to older wealthy men, providing her house in Hollywood for their trysts, and delivered them to out-of-town hotel parties. If the customer didn’t repeat, there may have been some gentle extortion. Her index card roster included 100 girls, the youngest ones were 15 years old. Funny, isn’t it, how there are truly no new stories in Hollywood? An ironic side note is that Jobelmann was the publicity agent for Arthur Pantages who, in 1930, had his own underage girl assault case, and Jobelmann was a character witness for Pantages. After being sentenced to 50 years in jail, he was released due to his poor health. One of the powerful clients named at one of the Love Mart hotel parties the year after he was released? Pantages. So Lund represented Olive and after lengthy court dramas in San Diego and Los Angeles, Olive/Dorothy claimed that the police had held her hostage in a hotel, plied her with liquor, and forced a confession out of her. Found guilty and the request for a new trial was denied. That hotel detail is of interest for our next resident.

And now we’re at the big show! In 1947 this house was bought by Dr. Paul de River, and he is the one I really want to talk about. So de River was a physician who came to Los Angeles in the 30s after working in the VA, evaluating disability cases for veterans. He offered his psychiatric evaluation services to the police in the mid-30s, as he was particularly professionally interested in sex criminals- he could provide insight for investigations while furthering his research. And it worked! Kind of! To his credit, he started the method of using psychological profiling to hunt criminals, and he created the Sex Offender Bureau. He was on the payroll, consulting for the city, he was named a police captain, and with his help, all sorts of people were arrested for truly heinous crimes.

So of course, when Elizabeth Short was murdered in 1947, de River was the man to help.

Several people (upwards of 40) made false confessions to the killing, but de River started to receive letters that interested him. In late 1948, a man was writing to him from Florida, with details about the case that weren’t public. Their correspondence was intriguing to de River, the letters seemed to contain a quiet sadistic sexual curiosity that fit de River’s profiling and he believed he had found the killer and was luring him into confession. He offered to fly his pen pal out, so they could keep talking in person, intimated he could have a job helping with de River’s book, and gave him his choice of cities for a meeting location. Las Vegas was the decision and de River met him there. The man, Leslie Dillon, proceeded to go on a road trip with de River back to LA and told de River he believed a handsome friend in San Francisco, Jeff Connors, was the killer.

Dr. de River and Dillon headed up to San Francisco to find Jeff Connors, unsuccessfully, and de River began to try convincing Dillon that he was projecting his own murderous guilt onto a created alter ego, and that this Connors was actually Dillon and then proceeded to bring him back to LA, where he essentially held him hostage at the Strand Hotel downtown. He and the police proceeded to grill Dillon, who surreptitiously threw a postcard out the window stating his predicament and that he needed a lawyer.

Meanwhile, Jeff Connors was found! The papers went wild, proclaiming arrests had been made, breathlessly relaying that Dillon had been a mortuary assistant, implying he would know dissection of bodies. Two days later, both men were released- Connors had an alibi for the night of the murder, and there was no actual evidence to hold Dillon.

The city was embarrassed, that’s the only way to say it. Immediately a lengthy article was released, blaming de River for the whole fiasco. The story mentioned that de River had been forbidden from interviewing underage witnesses after the Chloe Davis case (look it up if you want a really gruesome mental illness family slaughter story). Another fact that came to light was that de River had never registered with the psychiatry board, and while he did have a medical license, he was a physician, not a licensed psychiatrist.

In 1950, six felony counts were brought against de River for writing narcotics prescriptions for a false patient- later revealed to be for his wife, who was suffering from ALS.

Meanwhile, the city council was also mad, and Eugene Debs said that de River’s recently published book, The Sexual Criminal- A Psychoanalytical Study, was so lurid and graphic in its illustrations that it should be considered pornography and wanted him dismissed from his position with the city.

The doctor lost his job and was stripped of his previous glory. He went back to the VA, was no longer allowed to prescribe narcotics, and returned to practicing medicine. He published a second book (basically a sequel) in 1956, Crime and the Sexual Predator, also full of gory pictures. He befriended a writer, Donald Freed, and they spent evenings at this house going over de River’s Black Dahlia theories. Freed wrote a book validating de River’s accusation of Dillon and a local mobster/nightclub owner, Mark Hansen as the killers, despite evidence proving Dillon was in San Francisco during the murder. De River’s daughter Jacqueline wrote The Curse of the Black Dahlia in 2004, supporting her father’s theory, and the aftermath it had on his life.

Do I think de River is right? Not really. But I do love any Los Angeles story of someone waltzing in and pronouncing themselves an expert and then embodying their own myth, even if it’s doomed to end in downfall. And, to his credit, he’s the reason we have a sex offender registry and he helped write the sex offender laws that still stand today.

So! De River moved out of here in 1961, after his wife’s passing, and moved down to Orange County to live with his daughter.

Later we have a nice story of Frank and Barbee Andrina. Frank was an animator and animation director, and he worked on many favorites, including Scooby-Doo, Bugs Bunny, the Jetsons, and the Flintstones, and he collected antique arms and armor. In 2007, Barbee put up a prized possession for a local auction- years ago, one of her relatives had been hiking nearby and had found an original piece of the Hollywoodland sign, part of one of the D’s, with six light bulbs. It didn’t sell, to her relief.

So there’s a lot to this house- the full spectrum of Hollywood stories, lascivious if only tangentially (our lawyer Lund), the Icarus tale of Dr. Paul de River, and then a much happier ending with the Andrinas. Best of luck to current and future residents, the energy of this house can lead to shining blinking success, or an abandoned twisted metal reminder of a brighter time.

For more on de River, including some graphic details (and debunking of his wins) of his favorite crimes in his books, and more about his road trip with Dillon, I found some great information here

The wonderful LA Mirror is no fan of de River, and their Black Dahlia work is, in my opinion, the most thorough and passionate and those archives are here

For more on Olive and the Love Mart case, this is a great collection of all the court cases