George Knowlton: The Man Whose Daughter Thinks He Was The Black Dahlia Killer
David Muronaka/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)Janice Knowlton discusses her theory about her father, a Black Dahlia suspect, in 1993.
Like Steve Hodel, Janice Knowlton also thinks that the Black Dahlia killer was someone close to home — her own father, George Knowlton. Janice detailed her theory in the 1995 book Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer.
As Janice wrote in her book, she started to remember things she believed she’d suppressed in the late 1980s. Her father was long dead, but Janice began to recall him molesting her — and a disturbing memory of him murdering a young woman she knew as “Aunt Betty.”
Janice claimed that she saw her father beat Elizabeth Short to death with a claw hammer at their family home in Westminster, California when she was just 10 years old. What’s more, she wrote that George forced her to accompany him as he disposed of the Black Dahlia’s body.
Bettmann/Getty ImagesA headshot of Elizabeth Short, the so-called Black Dahlia.
But most have discounted Janice’s claims. Her own stepsister called Janice’s book “trash.”
“She believed it, but it wasn’t reality,” Jolane Emerson told the Los Angeles Times. “I know, because I lived with her father for 16 years… [he] could be meaner and ornerier than heck, but he wasn’t a killer.”
Though the Los Angeles police are aware of Janice’s claims, they came to the same conclusion. “The things that she is saying are not consistent with the facts of the case,” John P. St. John, an LAPD homicide detective, told the Los Angeles Times in 1991.
That said, Janice and her co-author, Michael Newton, insisted that there was evidence tying George Knowlton with Elizabeth Short. They claimed that the police had a suspect named “George” who drove a tan car — just like George Knowlton. And a man who dated one of Short’s roommates allegedly described a man he met named “Georgie,” whose interests and background eerily matched Janice’s father.
But George Knowlton doesn’t seem to have been a serious Black Dahlia suspect except to his daughter, who died of an overdose in 2004.
