On January 15, 1947, one of the most gruesome crime scenes was found in Los Angeles, California. Police and citizens alike gathered around the mutilated and naked body of Elizabeth Short. However, the crowd would be separated by a single woman hoping to get the best view of the victim, 44-year-old Agness “Aggie” Underwood.
Los Angeles during most of the first half of the 1900s was a land where gangs had more power than the mayors. So, crime (and especially murder) was extremely common. Out of all the people who covered this crime in LA, Aggie Underwood was one of the best.
Underwood’s story starts when she was 24 and it all began with stockings. When her husband said that he didn’t have the money for Underwood to buy new stockings, she decided to go out and get a job so she could afford them.
Underwood found herself getting a low-level job at the Los Angeles Record. From there, she worked herself up because of her pure ambition. She was willing to interview murders, cover any stories from murders to natural disasters, hide an accused killer in her home to have an exclusive interview (which she did in 1935 with Hazel Glab), and even fight to help a woman to get her sentence commuted after she killed her husband in self-defense (which she also accomplished).
Underwood was one of the main reporters on the aforementioned Elizabeth Short’s case (known as the Black Dahlia murder). Underwood investigated the case so well that she believed she solved it before any other reporter or even the police. However, Underwood was promoted to the position of the city editor of the Evening Herald and Express, making her the first woman to do so in a major metropolitan daily paper. Nonetheless, this prevented her from finishing the Black Dahlia case, which has remained unsolved to this day.
Overall, Underwood was a pioneer. During a period when many women were only in journalism for either entertainment or advice columns, Aggie Underwood was braving the LA crime scene with her pistol and sawed-off bat as she led teams of reporters with an iron fist.
Underwood would retire in 1968 before passing away in 1984 at the age of 81. While she has often flown under the radar of women pioneers, Aggie Underwood didn’t just break the glass ceiling for women in journalism but destroyed it, possibly with her bat.
