[kznyc2k]

Originally Posted by GaylordWilshire

So this guy was on a date with Elizabeth Short, and none other than John Wayne just happened to notice her from his car...he pulls over and begins to flirt with this other man's date. Balderdash. Actually, I know "positively" that the man in the picture is my cousin Edgar. He stayed in Hollywood after the war to break into pictures after being encouraged to do so by Bette Davis, with whom he had danced at the Canteen. In his true story, it was Clifton Webb who slammed on his brakes in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard, leapt out of his car, and went right up to Elizabeth, threw her over his shoulder--at which point the white dahlia wrist corsage my uncle had given her fell off and was run over by a truck, blackening it (the little-known source of the term "Black Dahlia")--and carried her off to a wild party. The rest is history. My uncle Edgar, his manhood challenged, followed Clifton and Liz to the party (Clifton's mother Maybelle was in the back seat, acting as chaperone), a clothes-optional affair at Howard Hughes's house. Edgar always had a short fuse. In a jealous rage, he forced Miss Short to leave the party with the derringer he kept under his fedora, dispatched her in the back seat of the Isotta-Fraschini he'd borrowed for the evening from his sugar-mama, and pushed her body out of the car way down near Mays Crenshaw. I am now writing the defintive history of the Black Dahlia. Watch for it at your local bookstore.

You sold me!

For real, the John Wayne bit instantly voided that story. Oh well...nice try, guy!