January 9, 1947. A tall, red-headed salesman named Robert Manley drops a young woman off at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. He watches her walk toward the lobby, her dark hair contrasting against a beige coat. He thinks she's meeting her sister. He thinks he’s just done a nice thing for a girl he had a brief, messy crush on.
He was wrong.
That girl was Elizabeth Short. Six days later, her body would be found in a vacant lot, bisected and drained of blood, in a case that would haunt America forever. And Robert "Red" Manley? He became the first person the police wanted to put behind bars.
The Man Behind the Wheel
Robert Manley wasn't a criminal mastermind. Honestly, he was just a 25-year-old pipe clamp salesman with a wife at home and a bad habit of picking up hitchhikers. He met Elizabeth Short on a street corner in San Diego a few months before the murder. She was beautiful, mysterious, and—as Manley would later find out—prone to telling tall tales.
When Short needed a ride from San Diego to Los Angeles in early January, she called Red. He picked her up from the French family home, where she’d been staying, and they headed north.
It wasn't exactly a romantic getaway.
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During the drive, Manley noticed scratches on Elizabeth’s arms. When he asked about them, she spun a story about a "jealous Italian boyfriend." Maybe he existed. Maybe he didn't. Elizabeth was known for creating a bit of theater around her life. They spent the night at a motel, but Manley later swore the stay was "chaste." He said they didn't have sex; she slept in her clothes. Whether you believe that or not, it speaks to the weird, distant dynamic between them.
The Biltmore Drop-Off and the Alibi
Red dropped Elizabeth at the Biltmore Hotel around 6:30 p.m. She told him she was meeting her sister, Virginia. This was a lie. Virginia was actually hundreds of miles away in Oakland.
Manley waited for a bit, but when the sister didn't show, Elizabeth told him she’d be fine. He headed back to his wife, Harriet, in San Diego. He probably felt a mix of relief and guilt. He’d cheated—or at least tried to—and now he was going back to his real life.
Then the news broke.
When Elizabeth's body was found on January 15, the LAPD went into a frenzy. Manley was the last "known" person to see her. They picked him up fast. They grilled him for 12 hours straight. No lawyer. Just cops, cigarette smoke, and the heavy weight of a murder charge hanging over his head.
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The Polygraph and the "Truth Serum"
The police really wanted him to be the guy. He fit the bill: a married man with a secret connection to the victim. They put him on a polygraph. He passed. They didn't trust it, so they gave him another one. He passed again.
Eventually, they even gave him sodium pentothal—what they called "truth serum" back then. Even while drugged and incoherent, Manley’s story didn't change. He left her at the Biltmore. He went home.
His wife and another couple backed him up. They’d been playing cards with him on the night the murder likely happened. The physical evidence wasn't there either. His Studebaker was clean. No blood. No fibers. Nothing.
Why Robert Manley Still Matters
Even though the LAPD cleared him, the "Black Dahlia" label stuck to him like glue. He lost his job. His marriage crumbled. Imagine walking down the street and people whispering that you’re the guy who cut a girl in half. It takes a toll.
In 1954, things got dark. Manley started hearing voices. His wife had him committed to a mental hospital. Doctors there even questioned him again about Elizabeth Short, thinking maybe his breakdown was a confession waiting to happen. It wasn't. He stuck to the same story he’d told in 1947.
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He died on January 9, 1986. If you’re a fan of coincidences, that was exactly 39 years to the day after he dropped Elizabeth off at the Biltmore.
The "Last Man" Myth
You'll see a lot of documentaries call Robert Manley the "last person to see her alive." That’s technically not true. Someone saw her after 6:30 p.m. at the Biltmore. Several people claimed to see her at various bars and locations over the next few days.
The person who actually saw her last was the killer. Manley was just the last person who cared enough to tell the truth about it.
Making Sense of the Robert Manley Connection
If you're digging into the Black Dahlia case today, it's easy to get lost in the theories about George Hodel or Mark Hansen. But Robert Manley is the human element of the tragedy that often gets overlooked. He wasn't a monster; he was a guy who got caught in the orbit of a woman who was running away from something—and toward a fate neither of them could have imagined.
Here is what you should take away from the Manley chapter of this mystery:
- Polygraphs aren't everything, but in 1947, passing two of them and a "truth serum" test was a massive deal for clearing a suspect.
- The timeline matters. If Manley was in San Diego playing cards, he couldn't have been in a Los Angeles basement committing a surgical murder.
- Media "tunnel vision" is real. The press needed a villain, and Manley’s red hair and "cheating husband" status made for great headlines, even after he was cleared.
If you want to understand the reality of the Black Dahlia investigation, look at the trial transcripts and the witness statements from the 1949 Grand Jury. They highlight just how much the police relied on Manley’s initial statements to piece together Elizabeth's final week.
To get a better grip on the geography of the case, you can look up the 1947 Los Angeles street maps. Seeing the distance between the Biltmore Hotel and the Norton Avenue dump site helps clarify why the police eventually realized Manley couldn't have been the one.