Sisters in Death: The Black Dahlia, the Prairie Heiress & Their Hunter
Shortly before 11:00 p.m, 24-year old heiress Leila Welsh and her boyfriend Richard Funk stepped into Kansas City’s swinging Hotel Phillips. They walked across the palatial lobby into the Tropics Room, a tiki bar fitted with sounds of thunder, flickering lights, paper-mache palm trees, and a rainstorm behind the bar. Richard sipped on his usual rum collins and Leila on her usual Coca-Cola. Just two miles away, Leila’s mother Marie Welsh awoke from her half slumber. She checked the clock. Leila should have been home by now. The moon was dim, and the darkness outside looked impenetrable to her.
Outside, the temperature was settling into the low thirties, with a sharp wind from the northwest blowing at twenty miles per hour. The ground was still covered in a light dusting of snow, but the melt had begun and conditions outside were soggy. A trail of fresh footprints snaked across the backyard, leading to the north window of Leila’s bedroom. A knife was thrust below the bottom frame of the window screen, allowing for it to be swung out from its upper hooks. Fingers gripped at the window, but it was locked tight from the inside.
Two houses away, neighbor Marguerite Garner felt something was not right. She was home alone with her six-year-old son, her husband and mother yet to return from the theater. It wasn’t just the unusual sound of neighborhood dogs barking at midnight, but something else she could sense. She couldn’t put her finger on it. Marguerite drew down every curtain in her home and nervously sipped coffee in the kitchen. Moments later, she heard glass breaking.
A gloved hand reached through a smashed pane of glass, fumbled for a doorknob, and turned it. Inside was a garage. Eyes scanned the dark room, and boxes filled with old clothes were quietly turned over. The detached garage belonged to John Blackman, whose dog was barking wildly from the basement of the adjoining house.
It wasn’t unusual for the dog to be alarmed by a foreign sound, but this was different. The intensity of his howls roused Blackman from bed. He peered out of his second-floor window into the small backyard below. Steps beyond it, the Welsh home. Had he lingered a moment longer, he would have seen a prowler stepping out of his garage, tossing a pile of clothes to the ground, rummaging through them, and pulling out Blackman’s own white undershirt.
The dark figure added the shirt to a collection of tools and instruments, none of which came from the garage. They had been carefully assembled, brought to this place at this time for their specific intended use. Cradling the package, the intruder waited on a mound of dirt under a large cedar tree, eyes boring into the east window of Leila Welsh’s bedroom.
At 1 a.m., the intruder heard a car pull up to the front curb of the Welsh home. The wait was over.
By the time Richard’s car pulled up to the curb at 6109 Rockhill Road, the banter about the evening’s festivities had run its course. He shut off the engine and sat quietly with Leila, trying to gather the courage to tell her for the first time in five years of dating that he loved her. But the moment never arrived. Instead, Richard leaned in, they embraced, then kissed passionately. Several more minutes of small talk followed by yet more kissing came and went with no mention of love or marriage. He would tell her he loved her next time.
At 1:30 a.m., Leila exited Richard’s car, and he escorted her to the front door. She kissed him good-bye on the porch and entered the home. As he turned to leave, Richard glanced through the glass panel in the door and noticed Leila’s brother George asleep on the living room couch.
Before retiring, Leila attended to familial duty, waking her mother to let her know she was home, safe and sound. Marie asked about her date with Richard as Leila opened the window for fresh air, the gas furnace having turned the room stuffy. Leila sat on the bed and talked with her, but soon grew tired. She asked to be woken at 9:00 a.m. for church, then kissed her mother on the forehead. Marie squeezed her hand one last time.
Leila’s bedroom was mere steps from her mother’s, only a narrow bathroom dividing them. She closed the door behind her and immediately went to open the north window, as she regularly did. Having grown up in the country, she was used to open windows and unlocked doors. She wasn’t about to change her way of life now, despite her mother’s concerns about prowlers.
The window jammed. She pulled again, but it was caught on the screen, which was oddly hanging off its bottom hinges. There was another window on the east side of the room, but its screen had gone missing the year before. Still, she wanted the cold air. Leila unlatched the east window and lifted it.
She stepped into her tiny closet, changed into baby blue pajamas, and meticulously folded her clothes, placing them on a chair in the corner of the room. She brushed her teeth, washed her face of makeup, and swallowed a pill for her menstrual cramps. It would tranquilize her just enough to sleep through the pain.
Two houses northeast of the Welsh home, Lois Malsness and her husband arrived home from a rare late night out. Usually, they were the first ones to bed in the neighborhood, but tonight, she commented to her husband, they would be the last ones to bed. She drove the babysitter home, then listened to her favorite radio program from Hollywood on the drive back. At 2:20 a.m., she parked in her driveway but remained in the car for twenty minutes to finish listening to the broadcast.
Twenty feet away from her on the other side of her garage crouched the intruder, staring through the east window at Leila Welsh, who was deep asleep under a blue chenille bedspread. At 2:40 a.m., Lois entered her home. She drank a glass of water in the kitchen and looked out across her backyard directly toward the Welsh home. She saw nothing.
Marie Welsh woke with a start. She had heard a thud. No, two thuds. Seconds later, the Welshes’ next-door neighbor Ruth Kennedy awoke as well. Her three-year-old son, Johnny, was crying for her. Ruth was alarmed. A sound sleeper, Johnny never woke this early. Something must have startled him. His window faced the Welsh home next door, but there was no sound, no movement outside.
Marie paused to consider the sound that had awoken her. It was unusual—deep and close. She wondered if the furnace had broken or if George had fallen off the couch. She rose and stepped into the living room, where she found George still asleep on the couch. She turned the reading light off in the living room and returned to bed. Just before falling asleep, she glanced at her clock. It was 3:00 a.m.
Marie slept soundly until 7:30 a.m., when George’s stirrings in the kitchen woke her. Though it was Sunday, he faced a packed schedule of real estate showings, and she knew he would step out without eating. George had prepared coffee and an early exit, but Marie’s protestations forced him to sit through a hearty breakfast. He was soon gone, leaving the house eerily quiet. Marie considered waking Leila and stepped to her door but heard no sound on the other side. Honoring the request for a late wake up, Marie passed the hour tidying up the home until 9:15 a.m.. It was time.
Leila’s bedroom door didn’t open freely; it was caught on something, an obstruction. Marie pushed harder until the door relented, dragging something with it across the wood floor. She peered inside. Inexplicably, Leila’s vanity chair had been propped up against the door. The room was cold. Marie went to close the east window, but a strange smell caught her attention, then the sound of something dripping. She turned to her daughter—the blue bedspread had been pulled up over Leila’s head, shielding her from view.
Marie’s gaze lowered to an expansive pool of blood on the floor. Confused, Marie called out, “What’s the matter, honey, have you had the nosebleed?” Silence. A primal terror struck her. She stepped onto a small bedside rug adorned with the image of a puppy, an island in the red pool of blood. Marie fumbled her hand beneath the bed covering and touched Leila’s ice-cold forehead. When she pulled her hand out, it was covered in blood.
Marie’s screams jolted Ruth Kennedy, who ran out of her home to meet her hysterical neighbor in the backyard. Marie could barely speak, sputtering that something had happened to Leila. Ruth tried to calm her. She could hear neighbors stirring at the sound of Marie’s wails. Ruth grabbed her around the waist and guided her back inside. She instructed Marie to wait in the living room while she went to see about Leila.
Kennedy steeled herself for what was to come. She walked toward the lake of blood beneath the bed, stepped onto the island formed by the rug, and ripped back the bed cover. Leila’s mutilated body was splayed on its left side atop a blood-soaked mattress. As Kennedy stood frozen, a man’s undershirt dropped out of the body and fell to her feet. Kennedy’s screams rivaled Marie’s.
Excerpted from Sisters in Death. Reprinted with permission from the publisher, Citadel.
Eli Frankel is a television and documentary producer, true crime writer, and the author of Sisters In Death: the Black Dahlia, the Prairie Heiress & Their Hunter
