CA 1940 Murder Of Nine Year Old Los Angeles Girl Dorothy Lee Gordon Still Unsolved Today

[Wire154a]

One of the “Tragic Mysteries in Local History” Has Been All But Forgotten
Los Angeles
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It was around 5 p.m. on March 5, 1940. Nine-year-old Dorothy Lee Gordon and her friend Christine Pollard were walking home from L.A.’s Cornerstone Baptist Church, where they’d been rehearsing f0r the upcoming Easter play. It was a perfectly normal L.A. evening in the friendly, then-predominately black neighborhood, with school children and adults all around. Then a man in a grey sedan pulled up alongside Dorothy and Christine at the intersection of 17th Street and Hooper Avenue. He stood out in L.A.’s Central-Alameda neighborhood—he was middle-aged, bareheaded, and white.

“Get in the car, Dorothy,” he’s said to have commanded. “I’m going your way.”
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[Wire154a]

The only other useful things I've found re: the DLG case -- a recap, eleven years on, and an interesting tabloid piece:

Los Angeles Sentinel

Los Angeles Daily Mirror

 

[skydelta3574]

I haven't been on here much lately so I hope it's okay to hypothesize like this, but - the Los Angeles Sentinel article mentions the murder of Patty Hull. In this OC Register article, it's stated that Henry Ford McCracken was convicted of Hull's murder. You'll need to go down the page just a bit to read the blurb.

So, as stated in the Los Angeles Sentinel article, Dorothy Lee was murdered in 1940 while Patty Hull (who, according to the OC Register article was 12 at the time of her murder) was murdered 11 years later in 1951 and her body found in Buena Park which is less than 45 minutes from where Dorothy Lee was murdered.

I'm just wondering - is it possible there were other child murders in this decade? Could these murders be connected? Having never been there, and going completely off what I see in the media, I know that LA has some unsavory areas, but was it always like that or was there a time where murder there wasn't so...prevalent?

 

[skydelta3574]

Here is a LA Times article about a man who was preying on children within seven minutes of Del Ray, the neighborhood that Dorothy lived in. He molested and murdered a neighborhood girl in 1949 and was convicted shortly after.

 

[CastlesBurning]

Episode 6: The Murder of Dorothy Lee Gordon — Underbelly L.A.