The Red Lipstick Murder
It was 8:15 a.m. on Feb. 10, 1947 when H.C. Shelby, a 42-year-old bulldozer operator, was on his way to a job site, one of the endless housing tracts springing up in the postwar boom. Just off Grand View Boulevard, on an isolated, weedy stretch of land nicknamed “the Moors,” Shelby noticed a pile of stylish women’s clothing. When he went to investigate, he found the naked body of a dark-haired woman, face up beneath a dew-covered red dress and blue coat with fox-fur cuffs.
The tragic victim had initially been smashed in the skull several times with a blunt metal weapon, a socket wrench most likely, however, this didn’t deliver the fatal blow. Instead, the murderer inflicted the killer blows by violently and sadistically repeatedly stomping upon the poor, unconscious victim’s body. She had been stomped and beaten so violently that she suffered massive internal bleeding, a broken neck and a punctured heart.
Whilst bleeding to death the killer took the time to mark their heinous crime. Using red lipstick from the victim’s purse the killer proceeded to write a message across the victim’s torso: Fuck you P.D. Beneath this the name “Tex” was also written.
The victim was quickly identified as 44-year-old Jeanne French. Not surprisingly, French’s horrific death made front-page news and was quickly dubbed “the lipstick murder.” Headlines for the Herald-Express blared
“WEREWOLF STRIKES AGAIN! KILLS L.A. WOMAN, WRITES ‘B.D.’ ON BODY,”
Now what you heard was not a slip-up on my part. The Harald-Express misreported at the time, as did other news outlets, the message that was left by the supposed killer. Despite the coroner stating that the words written in red lipstick included the words “P. D” many of the press instead reported this as “B. D”.
This immediately led many in the media to link the murder of Jeanne French to that of Elizabeth Short a.k.a the Black Dahlia murder whose nude, bisected body had been found in an empty lot in Leimert Park only three weeks earlier. While Short’s brief, tragic life and unsolved murder have captivated the popular imagination for decades — a cautionary, noir tale of a pale, pretty Red Riding Hood swallowed up by the Hollywood wolves — French’s life has been reduced to little more than a footnote, despite its fascinating mix of triumph and tragedy.
Jeanne “Nettie” Axford was born into a large family in Texas on Oct. 6, 1902. At the age of 18, she married David Yandell Wrather, often described as a “wealthy oilman,” who owned several large farms. That same year she gave birth to David, her only child. The couple settled in Amarillo, where Jeanne worked as a nurse at St. Anthony’s Hospital. But the marriage was short-lived, and in 1924 the young couple divorced. The pretty, restless divorcée soon moved to Los Angeles with her son and continued working as a nurse. In 1925, she married a man named David Thomas in Long Beach. They divorced soon after.
Over the next few years, Jeanne lived an adventurous, unconventional life. She was put “in charge of a band of nurses employed by a large oil company in South America.” Flying over jungles from oil field to oil field, she soon became captivated by the skies and learned to fly herself. She was a member of the Women’s Air Reserve and the 99 Club, an organization of pioneering women aviators. By 1931, “the flying nurse” was gaining notoriety. One story, syndicated nationwide, featured a photograph of a beaming Jeanne in a formfitting aviatrix uniform with the following quote, “Maybe patients won’t want to get well when Miss Jeanne Axford Thomas of Dallas, Texas, returns to Columbia [sic], South America, as a nurse. After flying over jungles in her professional capacity a few years ago, she quit nursing to study aviation. Now she is trying for a mechanic’s license, in Dallas, and will then fly back to Columbia [sic].”
Jeanne’s love of flying consumed her personal life as well. In October 1931, she married a fellow aviator named Curtis Bower, in Dallas. The couple separated only five weeks later. In February 1932, Jeanne again made national news, when she became the first person in Southern California to attempt to obtain a divorce by “airmail” from the liberal Mexican courts. That summer, her story hit the wires again, when she was reported missing by her mother:
Mrs. Jeanne Axford Thomas, Los Angeles aviatrix, was reported missing today from Mexico City by her mother, Mrs. Oma Randall, who told authorities her daughter intended to fly from Mexicali to the Mexican capital the latter part of June. Mrs. Randall said Mrs. Thomas left Los Angeles June 27, traveling [sic] by automobile with two Mexican flyers whose names she did not know. She said she has received no word from the aviatrix and asked police to aid in the search.
Jeanne soon sent word to the United Press by cablegram that she was “safe and okay” in Mexico City. “I can’t understand the worry I have caused in the United States by flying to Mexico,” she said, frustration evident in her words. “I am flying back for the Olympics.”
Over the next decade, it’s unclear what Jeanne was up to. It has been reported that she worked as a nurse, as a stewardess and for the Red Cross, and that she continued to fly. It also has been written that she acted in bit parts in films and traveled the world as part of the “international set in Paris, London and New York” with her friend, heiress and fashion icon Millicent Rogers. But these accounts are difficult to corroborate or source.
What is certain is that, by 1947, these glory days had long since passed. Newly separated from her fourth husband of two years, aircraft plant employee Frank F. French, Jeanne lived in a small apartment at 3535 Military Ave. in Palms, little more than a mile from where her broken body was found. She seems to have succumbed to a drinking problem, and had accused Frank of beating her on Jan. 26, during a drunken brawl.
The last hours of Jeanne’s life were a confusing, baffling tangle. At around 7:30 p.m., on Sunday, Feb. 9, she had dinner and drinks at the Plantation Café on Washington Boulevard. She was there with two men, one of whom waitress Christine Studnicka described as having “dark hair and a small mustache.”
While the men ordered food, Jeanne went to a pay phone, apparently already intoxicated (Jeanne’s autopsy reported her blood alcohol level as .31 percent. At the time, a person was considered intoxicated at .15 percent.) According to author and former LAPD detective Steve Hodel, who was interviewed by LAWeekly, “During the phone call, Studnicka said people nearby could hear French bark into the receiver in a very loud voice, “Don’t bring a bottle, the landlady doesn’t allow it.” While still on the phone, the victim yelled to the two men in her booth, “Don’t put any liquor in the car” and “Don’t take any liquor.” Studnicka observed that the two men appeared “to be arguing between themselves,” and it was her impression that they were “arguing over which one was going to accompany the victim.”
Roy J. Fecher, the operator of a drive-in café on Santa Monica Boulevard, reported that Jeanne came into his establishment around 9:30 p.m., alone. She drank a cup of coffee with Fecher, and told him her woes. “She said her husband was sadistic. She said he liked ‘dark’ things, and said he had beaten her several times,” he reported. “Then she raised a pair of dark glasses she was wearing to show me a couple of black eyes she said he had given her.” At 10:30, Jeanne appeared in a Venice Boulevard bar and “announced she was committing her husband to the neuropsychiatric ward at the Sawtelle Veteran’s Hospital the following day.”
Jeanne then went to visit her estranged husband at his rooming house in Santa Monica. Frank claimed that she tried to convince him to go out with her before hitting him on the head with a handbag. “She was mean when she’d been drinking,” Frank told police. “She had been drinking Sunday night but did not appear intoxicated.”
Sometime after midnight, Jeanne was at the Piccadilly Drive-In on Washington Place, with a “medium-small, dark-complexioned” man who bragged about the large tip he gave their waitress. At around 1:30, Jeanne sat on the first stool of the Pan American bar and drank a Seven-High. She put 25 cents in the kitty and asked pianist Sam Young to play for her. At 2 a.m., the bar closed and the bartender noticed Jeanne and her friend fighting. Young went outside just in time to see Jeanne and her companion get in an old, beat-up sedan. He was the last person, besides her killer (or killers), to see Jeanne alive.
LAPD was unwilling to publicly link the murders of Jeanne French and Elizabeth Short to one unidentified, on-the-loose serial killer. Instead they choose to focused on Frank French, Jeanne’s “tall and taciturn” husband, who may have been suffering from PTSD after years in the Marine Corps, including a stint as a gunnery sergeant in World War II.
Frank and Jeanne had a volatile relationship, with violence on both sides. Shortly before Jeanne’s murder, Frank himself had been arrested after he had punched Jeanne in the face during one particularly bad argument.
Brought in for questioning, Frank initially denied having seen Jeanne the night before. When he finally did admit to having been visited by her, he emphatically denied hurting her, claiming he wouldn’t have “harmed a hair on her head.”
Jeanne’s son, David, a 25-year-old father living in Redondo Beach, also was questioned. When he ran into his stepfather at the police station, the two men had a curious conversation, as reported by the Los Angeles Times:
“Well, I’ve told them the truth.” [David] Wrather said, “if you’re guilty, there’s a God in heaven who will take care of you.”
“I swear to God I didn’t kill her,” French stated emphatically.
“There was a time this afternoon when if I had seen you, I can’t say what might have happened. You know I loved Mom very much. “
“I loved her too,” French replied.
Despite their initial belief police could find no evidence with which to tie the murder of Jeanne French to her ex-husband Frank. Furthermore, Frank’s landlady did indeed confirm his alibi that he hadn’t left his flat that evening. Finally, investigators couldn’t match the shoe prints found at the murder scene to Frank.
Despite no evidence against Frank French police still believed Frank could be the man they were looking for and so had Frank partake in a lie detector test. Frank passed the lie detector test and police finally moved on to other possible suspects.
Detectives next tried to find the man with a dark complexion that was seen with Jeanne in the Pan American Bar in West Washington Place. Unfortunately, police were unable to trace the individual in question.
Detectives were getting nowhere fast and they had very few leads to go on. They traced the car Jeanne French owned to a parking lot. Witnesses said that the vehicle had been there since around 3 a.m on the morning of the murder. One of the witnesses spoken to, a night watchman, claimed that it was a male who had left the car at the location and not Jeanne. This man was never traced.
“We thought we had this one wrapped up at the start,” said one homicide officer. “Now we are just as far from a solution of this one as we are from the ‘Black Dahlia.” Whilst the murder of Elizabeth Short was constantly in the press and under investigation, it appears the brutal murder of Jeanne French was quickly forgotten and the Red Lipstick Murder case soon went cold. But as with many unsolved cases there are some theories.
The main theory that keeps getting pushed is that Elizabeth Short’s killer is the same killer of Jeanne French. Some police officers, including LAPD Homicide captain Jack Donahoe, started publicly that they believed the “Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French murders were committed by the same man.” On Mach 14, 1947 the Los Angeles Examiner published “11 points of Similarity,” a document written by members of LAPD, informing the public that they believed the three women (Elizabeth Short, Jeanne French, and a new victim Evelyn Winters) had all been murdered by the same killer. But no suspect was ever publicly identified, and investigators were unable to identify and locate vital witnesses/suspects, including the two male “friends” Jeanne had been seen with on her final night out.
Another theory involves a lover of Jeanne.
Some three years after the murder of Jeanne French an investigation by the Grand Jury was ordered. They gave a scathing report on the standard of investigations into a number of unsolved murders of women throughout the 1940s in Los Angeles.
This led to many of them been looked into again, including that of Jeanne French. Walter Morgan and Frank Jemison of the District Attorney’s office were assigned the French case and they soon discovered a prime suspect.
Four months before the brutal killing of Jeanne French, and whilst still with husband Frank, the pair hired a painter named George Whitt to work on the couple’s home. The investigators discovered that Jeanne and the man soon started seeing one another, with Whitt admitting to going on several dates with Jeanne.
Morgan and Jemison found the man’s behavior during their investigation into him questionable. The pair also uncovered during there investigation that the painter had burned some clothing and several pairs of shoes around the time of the murder. Whitt reportedly said he did this as he feared he would have the murder of Jeanne French pinned on him once police found out about the affair. Contradicting reports make it hard to decipher whether those shoes would even have been the same size as those wore by the person who savagely stomped Jeanne French to death (Jon Lewis claims in his book Hard Boiled Hollywood they weren’t a match).
Despite the initial interest, George Whitt was seemingly able to provide a solid alibi and prove he wasn’t the killer. The man was soon cleared of any involvement.
A third theory involves a hidden message.
Several who have looked into the crime have tried to use the message left in Red Lipstick on Jeanne’s body as a clue (which makes perfect sense: it must have been left for a reason). Some have taken the changing “P.D” to “B.D” path to link French to Elizabeth Short, however, others have used the actual message left by the killer.
One theory is that “P.D” stands for police department and it was some sort of message to the police. A more interesting theory is that the message refers to someone with the initials P. D and “Tex” is short for Texas.
Jeanne French, of course, spent much of her early life in Texas, not leaving until after her first divorce. Could something or someone from Jeanne’s past have caught up with her and led to her murder?
A more bizarre theory comes for Dr. George Hodel.
In the book Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius For Murder the author of the book, Steve Hodel, names his own father as the killer of Elizabeth Short. Hodel also believes his father killed several other women including Georgette Bauerdorf and Jeanne French.
Hodel claims that the murder of French was a message to the police after it was reported in the press that they had arrested a suspect for the murder of Elizabeth Short. Dr George Hodel, therefore, murdered Jeanne French and left the initials “B.D” on her body.
This, of course, does ignore the fact that the coroner clearly stated the initials written were “P.D” and not “B.D”. It also doesn’t explain the writing of the word “Tex” underneath. Hodel also makes several other mistakes such as writing that French died of blunt trauma due to the blows she suffered to the head when in fact she was still alive after those blows and she died due to injuries incurred from being stomped on so viciously.
Hodel’s book does make for an interesting read. However, it has to be questioned whether in his desperation to name his father as the killer Hodel opts to pick and chose which evidence to believe and incorporate in his book.
One final point to be made against George Hodel as the killer is pointed out by Larry Harnisch. Much like Frank French the shoe simply didn’t fit, in other words, George Hodel didn’t wear a size 6 or 7 shoe but a larger size. Surely this fact makes it highly unlikely that George Hodel was the person who stomped Jeanne French to death.
But this brings us to our finial theory which is Jeanne’s death was a racist attack.
The description of the last person seen with Jeanne French was that it was a small man with a dark complexion. The man was undeniably a suspect, as mentioned he was the last person seen with the victim and the fact he was small also stands out due to the killer only have been a size 6 or 7 shoe. However, could he have been the cause of Jeanne’s death in a totally different way?
1940s Los Angeles had its fair share of problems with racism, in particular between white men and the Latino community. Just a few years before Jeanne French’s murder the Zoot Suit riots had taken place in the city.
Is it possible that someone took offense in seeing a white woman with a man of dark complexion? If they did and chose to confront French it isn’t hard to imagine the confrontation getting completely out of hand and leading to her brutal attack.
As with most theories, this one is interesting but there is one big downside: What about the man she was with? Was he too scared to come forward? Did the killer wait for the man to leave before confronting Jeanne? Was he perhaps murdered too but dumped somewhere else?
It seems with this case the more you dive into it the more questions pop up that remain unanswered. Of all the known theories or possibilities I would suggest that the man she was last seen with was most her likely killer. My thinking is that the pair got into a drunken argument, things escalated all too quickly and ultimately led to Jeanne’s death that night. The only real problem with this answer is it doesn’t explain the message left in red lipstick on the body. Though the killer could have taken inspiration from the Elizabeth Short case and left the message for the police to throw them off the trail.
The sad reality though is that in all likelihood we just won’t ever know the truth about what happened on that day that led to Jeanne’s death. I do find it strange how little Jeanne’s murder has been remembered. Jeanne French lived quite the life and yet her horrifically brutal murder seems pretty much forgotten and lost in the realms of time. Whilst searching for information on Jeanne French it was astounding how little information there was in comparison to that of Elizabeth Short, despite both terrible murders taking place just weeks apart.
(Though I believe it’s because Elizabeth was a pretty actress while Jeanne was older.)
In April 1950, Jeanne’s case was reopened and police said they had a “hot suspect.” They also admitted that the initial investigation had been “considerably below standard.” However, no charges ever came from this investigation. The murder remains unsolved, another tragedy for a woman whose life was so much more than her senseless, sensationalized death, now a mere footnote in the annals of L.A. noir.
Stay safe and remember, it’s scary out there so, leave the lights on.
