Robert ‘Red’ Manley: The Last Person To See Elizabeth Short Alive
Bettmann/Getty ImagesRobert “Red” Manley identifies Elizabeth Short’s purse in the Black Dahlia murder case. He’s believed to be one of the last people to see her alive.
Shortly after Elizabeth Short’s body was discovered on Jan. 15, 1947, police tracked down the last person believed to have seen her alive: a married, red-headed pipe clamp salesman named Robert “Red” Manley.
As Manley told police, he first met Short in late 1946, when he struck up a conversation with her on a street corner. “I asked her if she wanted to ride. She turned her head and wouldn’t look at me,” he said in a 1947 interview, reported by the Los Angeles Times.
“Finally she turned around and asked me if I didn’t think it was wrong to ask a girl on a corner to get into my car.” That auspicious beginning was the start of their relationship, and when Short needed a place to stay after the holidays, she sent Manley a message and asked him to pick her up.
Bettmann/Getty ImagesRobert “Red” Manley embraces his wife, Harriet, after being arrested and questioned as a Black Dahlia suspect.
Manley and Short stayed in a hotel together — chastely, according to Manley — and then Manley drove Short to Los Angeles. According to the Los Angeles Times, Short had lied and said she was meeting her sister at the Biltmore Hotel. When her “sister” hadn’t shown up by 6:30 p.m. on January 9, Manley left Short at the hotel to go home to his family.
Though police considered him a Black Dahlia suspect, Manley passed a polygraph test. Yet he spent the rest of his life struggling with his mental health.
The Los Angeles Times reports that his wife had him committed in 1954 because he was hearing voices. That same year, doctors gave Manley sodium pentothal — which can allegedly make people more truthful — and asked him about the Black Dahlia case. Manley stuck to his story.
Robert Manley died on Jan. 9, 1986, exactly 39 years after he left Elizabeth Short at the Biltmore Hotel, with a cloud of suspicion still on him.
