ntroduction - The Black Dahlia Story
Elizabeth Short has been portrayed many ways in the six decades since her body was dumped in two pieces on an empty lot in Los Angeles: Manipulative playgirl. Aspiring starlet. Naïve cock tease. Troubled soul.
Black Dahlias body, covered
Above all, time has immortalized Elizabeth Short as the pin-up girl of Los Angeles Noir. The Black Dahlia. Fascination with her life, and especially her death — her gruesome, violent, unsolved murder — continues to this day.
The story of the unemployed 22-year-old waitress has inspired dozens of books, Web sites, a video game and even an Australian swing band. The quest to pinpoint her killer has become a hobby for generations of armchair detectives. And this fall, Hollywood will recast her tragic plight in a star-studded Black Dahlia movie.
Elizabeth Short - the Black Dahlia
The Los Angeles Police Department has all but given up hope of ever closing the Dahlia case; the department has more urgent crimes to investigate, and the killer has likely been dead for years. Yet, it is precisely the unsolved status of Elizabeth Short’s murder that gives it such an enduring allure.
We need to emphasize here that the case is so cold, the information so musty and bungled, that it’s difficult to get a lucid picture of Elizabeth Short’s brief life, much less her grisly death. The Crime Library will not attempt to solve the Black Dahlia murder in these pages, but to simply relate Short’s story based on the most unbiased, accepted facts available, including historical newspaper articles and law enforcement records, as well as contemporary literature.
n the morning of January 15, 1947, a housewife named Betty Bersinger was walking down a residential street in central Los Angeles with her 3-year-old daughter when something caught her eye. It was a cold, overcast morning, and she was on her way to pick up a pair of shoes from the cobbler.
At first glance, Bersinger thought the white figure laying a few inches from the sidewalk was a broken store mannequin. But a closer look revealed the hideous truth: It was the body of a woman who’d been cut in half and was laying face-up in the dirt. The woman’s arms were raised over her head at 45-degree angles. Her lower of half was positioned a foot over from her torso, the straight legs spread wide open. The body appeared to have been washed clean of blood, and the intestines were tucked neatly under the buttocks. Bersinger shielded her daughter’s eyes, then ran with her to a nearby home to call the police.
Black Dahlia’s (Elizabeth Short) body found in vacant lot
Two detectives were assigned to the case, Harry Hansen and Finis Brown. By the time the duo arrived at the crime scene — on Norton Avenue between 39th and Coliseum streets in Los Angeles — it was swarming with reporters and gawkers who were carelessly trampling the evidence. The detectives ordered the crowd to back off, then got down to business.
From the lack of blood on the body or in the grass, they determined the victim had been murdered elsewhere and dragged onto the lot, one piece at time. There was dew under the body, so they knew it had been placed there after 2 a.m., when the outside temperature dipped to 38 degrees.
The victim’s face was horribly defiled: the murderer had used a knife to slash 3-inch gashes into each corner of her mouth, giving her the death grin of a deranged clown. Rope marks on her wrists and ankles indicated she’d been restrained, and possibly tortured.
LAPD Detectives Harry Hansen and Finis Brown with Elizabeth Short’s Body
By measuring the two halves of the corpse, the detectives estimated the victim’s height to be 5′6 and her weight to be 115 pounds. Her mousy brown hair had been recently hennaed, and her fingernails were bitten to the quick.
After calling the Los Angeles County Coroner to retrieve the body, the detectives were left with a daunting assignment: finding out who the woman was.
According to newspaper reports shortly after the murder, Elizabeth Short received the nickname “Black Dahlia” at a Long Beach drugstore in the summer of 1946, as a word play on the then-current movie The Blue Dahlia. However, Los Angeles County district attorney investigators’ reports state the nickname was invented by newspaper reporters covering the murder. In either case, Short was not generally known as the “Black Dahlia” during her lifetime.
A number of people, none of whom knew Short, contacted police and the newspapers, claiming to have seen her during her so-called “missing week” between the time of her disappearance January 9 and the time her body was found on January 15. Police and district attorney investigators ruled out each of these alleged sightings, sometimes identifying other women that witnesses had mistaken for Short.[3]
Many “true crime” books claim that Short lived in or visited Los Angeles at various times in the mid-1940s; these claims have never been substantiated, and are refuted by the findings of law enforcement officers who investigated the case. A document in the Los Angeles County district attorney’s files titled “Movements of Elizabeth Short Prior to June 1, 1946″ states that Short was in Florida and Massachusetts from September 1943 through the early months of 1946, and gives a detailed account of her living and working arrangements during this period.
Although popular belief as well as many true crime books portrayed Short as a call girl, a report by the district attorney’s grand jury states that she was not a prostitute.
Another widely circulated rumor holds that Short was unable to have sexual intercourse because of some genetic defect that left her with “infantile genitalia.” Los Angeles County district attorney’s files state the investigators had questioned three men with whom Short had sex,[4] including a Chicago[5]FBI files on the case also contain a statement from one of Short’s alleged lovers. According to the Los Angeles Police Department’s summary of the case, in the district attorney’s files, the autopsy describes Short’s reproductive organs[4] police officer who was a suspect in the case. The as anatomically normal. The autopsy also states that Short was not and had never been pregnant, contrary to what is sometimes claimed.
The D.A.’s files contain the following:
Doctor Schwartz last stated that he studied surgery and that victim was on the make for him but that she was the patient of Doctor Arthur McGinnis Faught who was treating victim for trouble with her bartholin gland and that he wanted nothing to do with her. He stated that the bartholin gland was the lubricating gland in the vagina and that Doctor Faught had lanced it on several occasions and it could account for the fact that she had not been having intercourse with men.[6]
Suspects
The Black Dahlia murder investigation by the LAPD was the largest since the murder of Marion Parker in 1927, and involved hundreds of officers borrowed from other law enforcement agencies. Because of the complexity of the case, the original investigators treated every person who knew Short as a suspect who had to be eliminated. Hundreds of people were considered suspects and thousands were interviewed by police. Sensational and sometimes inaccurate press coverage, as well as the nature of the crime, focused intense public attention on the case. About 60 people confessed to the murder, mostly men, as well as a few women. As the case continues to command public attention, many more people have been proposed as Short’s killer.
(trutv.com, wikipedia.)
