Black Dahlia Murder Suspect George Knowlton

Black Dahlia Murder Suspect

George Knowlton

Little reliable information is available on George Knowlton, except that he lived in the Los Angeles area at the time of the Black Dahlia murder and died in an automobile accident in 1962. In the early 1990s, George Knowlton's daughter Janice began claiming that she had witnessed her father murdering Elizabeth Short, a claim she based largely on "recovered memories" that surfaced during therapy. The Los Angeles Times said in 1991:

Los Angeles Police Detective John P. St. John, one of the investigators who had been assigned to the case, said he has talked to Knowlton and does not believe there is a connection between the Black Dahlia murder and her father. "We have a lot of people offering up their fathers and various relatives as the Black Dahlia killer", said St. John, better known as Jigsaw John. "The things that she is saying are not consistent with the facts of the case."

Nevertheless, the Westminster Police Department took her claims seriously enough to dig up the grounds around her childhood home, looking for evidence. They found nothing to tie George Knowlton to the crime. In 1995, Janice Knowlton created a sub-genre as the first person to publish a book claiming that his or her own father committed the Black Dahlia murder. The book was written with veteran crime writer Michael Newton. In the book Knowlton, a former professional singer and owner of a public relations company, alleged that her father had been having an affair with Elizabeth Short and that Short was staying in a makeshift bedroom in their garage, where she suffered a miscarriage. Knowlton said she was later forced to accompany her father when he disposed of the body. Knowlton claimed that a former member of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department told her that her father was considered a suspect in the case by that agency, but this claim is unsupported by the public documents that have been released in the case. She claimed the same source told her that future LAPD chief and California politician Ed Davis and Los Angeles County District Attorney Buron Fitts were suspects in the murder as well. Janice Knowlton died of an overdose of prescription drugs in 2004, in what was deemed a suicide by the Orange County, California, coroner's office.

In a side note to her accusations against her father, Janice Knowlton, who was a frequent contributor as ""jgk61"" to various online forums where the Black Dahlia case was discussed, posted an article[14] to a Usenet group in August 1998, in which she names Dr. George Hodel as a suspect in the case. Knowlton's sister has since stated on amazon.com's web page for her sister's book, Daddy Was The Black Dahlia Killer, that after publication of Knowlton's book, Tamar Hodel, daughter of George Hodel and sister of Steve Hodel, contacted Knowlton and the two women remained "email pals for several years."

Knowlton also made claims prefiguring those of Black Dahlia Files author Donald Wolfe. In 1999, she claimed in various public forums that Norman Chandler participated in a cover-up of the murder. Knowlton claimed that on Halloween 1946 she was sold at the age of nine as a child prostitute to a Pasadena Satanic sex cult.[15] She frequently alleged that she was sold as a child prostitute to a long list of dead movie stars and other notables, including Norman Chandler, Gene Autry (whose name she continually misspelled as Autrey), Arthur Freed, and Walt Disney. Knowlton became so abusive in her Usenet posts [16] that Pacbell canceled her account in 1999.

-- wiki