I recently heard from someone who had taken a bus tour of Los Angeles and wondered why the tour guide said that Bevo Means had named the Black Dahlia case.
The answer, of course, is no, if the tour guide said that, then the tour guide was wrong.
Let me say that again: As for who named the Black Dahlia case, nobody did.
Although newspapers (mostly the Herald-Express) liked to nickname famous cases, Elizabeth Short was actually called the Black Dahlia as a joke at a drugstore lunch counter in Long Beach up the street from where she was living.
On the same day, Jack Smith learned the nickname by talking to the pharmacist at the drugstore; Bevo supposedly got it at a bar in Long Beach; and Aggie Underwood got it from the police. So it’s a three-way tie between Smith, Means and Underwood. Smith later wrote a column about losing the title to Bevo, but none of it was true.
Beverly Lafayette “Bevo” Means went out on strike at the Herald in the 1960s and never worked again, so I think people felt sorry for him. And “Bevo” is a funny nickname, so people remember it. He is played by the saintly Tom Bosley in the TV movie “Who Is the Black Dahlia?” and appears in James Ellroy’s “The Black Dahlia.”
Means was a notorious drinker as so many were in those days and Bevo was a beverage made by Anheuser-Busch during Prohibition as near beer, so the joke was that Means was always “near beer.”
The funniest thing about it is that the Herald-Express did nickname the case as the “Werewolf Murder,” and kept using it even after it had published the Black Dahlia nickname.
