Earl Eugene Ellingson, 23, returned home from work on Jan. 13, 1925, and found his mother, Anna, 46, sprawled across her bed with a bullet in her brain. Right away, he knew what had happened.
“Dot killed my mother,” he told police when they arrived. Dot was Earl’s little sister, Dorothy Ellingson, 16, the family’s problem child.
The issue was Dot’s desire to follow her dreams, which included boozing, partying, and spending her nights with jazz musicians in the seediest sections of her hometown of San Francisco. She had been making trouble since she was 14, and her parents — Anna and Dot’s father Joseph, a tailor — were struggling to control her.
Dot fled before her brother made his horrifying discovery. Police immediately started a statewide hunt for the young fugitive.
But even before she was in custody, before she had a chance to utter a confession or denial, newspapers declared what was wrong with her.
They called this new disease of young people “Jazz-mania.”
Cafes used the term to promote sizzling entertainment. But mental health professionals and religious leaders coined it as a synonym for degeneracy, saying the music sparking a “mad rush after pleasure,” as one clergyman noted in the San Francisco Examiner.
On the morning after the murder, detectives found Dot asleep in a boarding house about two miles from her home. At first, she denied the slaying, blaming it on a boyfriend.
But it took just 35 minutes for her to break down.
“JAZZ-MAD GIRL KILLS MOTHER,” was how the Daily News summed it up on Jan. 16.
“I did it. I shot her. I might as well have told you in the first place,” she said with an eerie calm.
New York Daily News Friday, January 16, 1925
“Mother scolded me because of the parties I went to and the men I went with and a whole lot of things that happened. She was old-fashioned, and I thought that my life was my own and I was going to live it my own way,” The News reported her saying.
Dot knew that her brother had a Colt automatic in his room, so when her mother went into the kitchen for a moment, she grabbed the gun.
“I went back to the bedroom in which both she and I slept. My mother had come in before me and was putting on her shoes. I was in the doorway when I saw my mother. I raised the gun and fired one shot. She fell back on the bed.”
After that, Dot packed her clothes, swiped $45 from her mother’s dresser, and got a room in the boarding house.
Hours after she murdered her mom, the red-headed flapper was living it up at another party.
“I had a good time,” she admitted. “I sang and danced with the rest of them. It was just like other parties—as though nothing had happened.”
Newspapers gave the young killer nicknames like “Jazz Baby, Tiger Girl,” and “Fiery Dot.” She lapped up the publicity, even writing columns baring the secrets of her jazz-mad soul.
One thing that struck most reporters was her apparent lack of remorse or grief over this rare crime — matricide, the murder of a mother by her biological child. Anna’s murder was said to be the first such case in California.
Dot’s pre-trial composure vanished by the time she faced the jury in March. She wept, had fits of hysteria, screamed at her lawyers, and fainted several times.
The judge agreed to the request by her defense team to have the murder trial changed to an insanity hearing. The jury was instructed to pass judgment based on the opinions of alienists and those closest to her, including her grieving father. Asked about her mental state, he said, “I am confident she is insane.”
The jury agreed, and she was carted off to a state hospital then known as the Napa Asylum for the Insane for observation.
In a few short weeks, doctors at the institution offered their opinion.
“TIGER GIRL FACES NEW TRIAL,” the Daily News blared in big, bold letters on Aug. 9. “Flapper-Slayer, Sane, in Court Again Tuesday.”
At her second trial, which started in August, her attorneys blamed the killing on a sad home life that sent her seeking love in jazz clubs. “Dorothy Ellingson — not the jazz girl, but the girl who never had a chance,” was how her attorney described her in his closing argument. It moved some jurors to tears.
Instead of first-degree murder and life in prison, the jury agreed on a verdict of manslaughter, which meant a maximum of 10 years. She was out in six and a half. The San Francisco Examiner ran a front-page series in which Dot wrote of her times behind bars. A year later, she was in the news again when she was accused of stealing clothes and jewelry from a roommate.
By the 1950s, she was married and divorced and had a son and daughter. She hid her past behind her married name — Mrs. Diane Stafford.
Dot appeared once more in the news before her death at age 59 in 1967. In 1955, she was arrested for stealing $2,000 in jewelry and cash from her employer and was sent to the county jail for six months.
Fingerprints revealed her true identity, which was reported in newspapers. She decided to tell her son about the murder that she had hidden from him for his whole life. At the time, they occupied opposite cells in the Marin County jail. UPI reported the boy had been locked up for a burglary, the latest in a series of crimes.
“He took it like a little man,” Dot said. “He said it made him understand why I stuck by him through his problems.”