Black Dahlia Suspects - Current Suspects - Leslie Dillon

Leslie Dillon

Leslie Dillon was a 27-year-old bellhop, aspiring writer and former mortician's assistant who became a suspect in the case when he began writing to LAPD police psychiatrist Dr. J. Paul De River in October 1948. Dillon was living in Florida at the time of his correspondence with De River, but had formerly lived in Los Angeles. Dillon read a story about the case in a "true detective" magazine in which De River was quoted and wrote to De River regarding his theories on the case, and mentioning his intense interest in sadism and sexual psychopathia in hopes of authoring a book on the subject. Contrary to public perception, Dillon, unlike so many other headline chasers involved at the time, was not a Confessing Sam. He never confessed or admitted to the crime but rather offered up another man as a likely suspect, a friend of his named Jeff Connors. Over the course of their correspondence, De River began to believe that Connors was a figment of Dillon's imagination and that Dillon had committed the murder himself. After the correspondence, in December 1948 Dillon agreed to meet with De River and was given the choice of one of three cities, Phoenix, Los Angeles, or Las Vegas. Dillon expressed reservations about Los Angeles and chose Las Vegas instead and was sent an airline ticket. De River and a few undercover LAPD officers met Dillon in Las Vegas for a couple of days and then proceeded to drive back to California. Once there, Dillon had hopes of going to San Francisco to point out his friend Jeff Connors to De River. After reaching San Francisco, they searched for Jeff Connors but failed to locate him. Only after not being able to track down Connors in San Francisco and offering up intimate details about the crime that even investigators had difficultly explaining was Dillon then handcuffed by an undercover officer and officially taken into custody for their trip back to Los Angeles. After this happened, Dillon sailed a postcard out a hotel window with a plea for help on it; it was discovered by a passerby and turned into local authorities.

After De River and the undercover officers had Dillon in Los Angeles, police soon discovered that Jeff Connors was a real person whose real name was Artie Lane. Lane had lived in Los Angeles at the time of the murder and was employed by Columbia Studios, a favorite hangout of Elizabeth Short's, as a maintenance man. However, contrary to popular belief, Leslie Dillon could not be conclusively placed in San Francisco at the time of the murder. Police concluded that Dillon was most likely in San Francisco at the time of the murder, but not that he conclusively was. In fact, police never could account for Dillon's whereabouts between January 9 and January 15, 1947. Dillon later filed a $100,000 claim against the City of Los Angeles but quickly dropped the lawsuit after it came to light that he was wanted by Santa Monica police for robbing the vault of a Santa Monica hotel while employed there as a bellhop a few years earlier. This "scandal" caused by the Dillon affair partially triggered a 1949 grand jury investigation of police handling of the Black Dahlia case and some other unsolved murders. In 2004, De River's daughter, Jacque Daniel, published a book called The Curse of the Black Dahlia in which she expressed her belief that her father had been unfairly maligned for the Dillon affair.