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.
