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Black Dahlia

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This article focuses on the mystery of murder victim Elizabeth Short. For other uses of the term, see The Black Dahlia.
Elizabeth Short
Elizabeth Short's gravestone in Mountain View Cemetery
Born(1924-07-29)29 July 1924
Hyde Park, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died15 January 1947(1947-01-15) (aged 22)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
OccupationWaitress
Parent(s)Cleo Short and Phoebe Mae Sawyer

Elizabeth Short (born 29 July 1924) was a 22-year-old American woman who was the victim of a gruesome and much-publicized murder. Nicknamed the Black Dahlia, Short was found cut in half and severely mutilated on 15 January 1947 in Leimert Park, Los Angeles. The murder, which has remained unsolved, has been the source of widespread speculation as well as several books and film adaptations.

Biography

Elizabeth Short was born in Hyde Park, Massachusetts. She was raised in Medford, Massachusetts, by her mother, Phoebe Mae, after her father, Cleo Short, abandoned her and her four sisters in October 1930.[citation needed]

Troubled by asthma, Elizabeth (called "Bette," "Betty" or "Beth") spent summers in Medford and winters in Florida. At the age of 19, she went to Vallejo, California, to live with her father. The two moved to Los Angeles in early 1943. Elizabeth left almost immediately after arriving due to an argument with her father, getting a job in the post exchange at Camp Cooke (now Vandenberg Air Force Base), near Lompoc. She moved to Santa Barbara, where she was arrested on September 23 1943, for underage drinking and was sent back to Medford by juvenile authorities. In the few years following, she resided in various cities in Florida, with occasional trips back to Massachusetts, earning money mostly as a waitress.

In Florida, Short met Major Matthew M. Gordon Jr., who was part of the 2nd Air Commandos and training for deployment in the China Burma India theater of operations. Short told friends that Gordon wrote a letter from India proposing marriage while recovering from an airplane crash he suffered while trying to rescue a downed flier. (He was, according to his obituary in the Pueblo, Colorado newspaper, awarded a Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star, the Air Medal with 15 oak leaf clusters, and Purple Heart). She accepted his proposal, but he died in a crash on August 10 1945, before he could return to the U.S. to marry her. Later this story was embellished to say that they were married and had a child who had died. Although Gordon's friends in the air commandos confirm that Gordon and Short were engaged, his family subsequently denied any connection after Short's murder.

Short returned to Southern California in July 1946 to see an old boyfriend she met in Florida during the war, Lt. Gordon Fickling, who was stationed in Long Beach. For the six months prior to her death, she remained in Southern California, mainly in the Los Angeles area. During this time, she lived in at least a dozen hotels, apartment buildings, rooming houses, and private homes, never staying anywhere for more than a few weeks.

Death

Short was last seen alive on the evening of January 9 1947, in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel at South Olive and West 5th Street[1] in downtown Los Angeles.

On January 15 1947, Short's mutilated body, severed at the waist, her face cut from ear to ear, was discovered in a vacant lot in the 3800 block of South Norton Avenue in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles[2] by a woman who had her young child in a stroller[3].

The murder was never solved.

Elizabeth Short was laid to rest in Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, California. She was interred there, rather than in a cemetery in Medford, because her oldest sister lived in nearby Berkeley and, according to her mother, because she loved California.

According to newspaper reports shortly after the murder, Short received the nickname "Black Dahlia" at a Long Beach drugstore in the summer of 1946, as a 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 in life, 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. [4]

Many "true crime" books and other allegedly factual accounts claim that Short lived in or visited Los Angeles at various times in the mid-1940s; but 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 (D.A.) office for the Los Angeles County 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 sexual intercourse[5], including a Chicago police officer who was a suspect in the case[6]. The FBI files on the case also contain a statement from a man with whom Short had sexual intercourse. According to the LAPD summary of the case, in the district attorney's files, the autopsy describes Short's reproductive organs as anatomically normal. The autopsy also states that Short was not and had never been pregnant, contrary to what is sometimes claimed. [7] [8]

While the "infantile genitalia" story must be regarded as suspect, the D.A.'s files do 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. [9]

Suspects

The Black Dahlia murder investigation by the LAPD was the largest since the murder of Marian 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 Elizabeth 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 horrible 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, much like London's Jack the Ripper murders of 1888.

22 District Attorney suspects
A summary of each of 22 suspects investigated by the Los Angeles district attorney's office, transcribed from the official document, can be found at this website.
Walter Bayley
Dr. Walter Alonzo Bayley was a Los Angeles surgeon who lived in a house one block south of the vacant lot in which Elizabeth Short's body was found, until leaving his wife in October 1946. At the time of the murder, Bayley's estranged wife still lived in the home. Bayley's daughter was a friend of Elizabeth Short's sister Virginia and brother-in-law Adrian, and had been the matron of honor at their wedding. When Bayley died in January 1948, his autopsy showed that he was suffering from degenerative brain disease. After his death, Bayley's widow alleged that his mistress knew a "terrible secret" about Bayley and claimed this was the reason the mistress was the main beneficiary upon his death. Bayley was never a suspect in the case, but many medical doctors and others with medical training were. In secret testimony, Detective Harry Hansen, one of the original investigators, told the 1949 Los Angeles County grand jury that in his opinion, the killer was a "top medical man" and "a fine surgeon". Bayley was 67 years old at the time of the murder, had no known history of violence or criminal activity of any kind, and is not known to have met Short.
When Larry Harnisch, a copy editor and writer for the Los Angeles Times, began studying the case in 1996, he eventually concluded that Bayley could be Elizabeth Short's killer.[10] Although critics of Harnisch's theory question whether Bayley's mental and physical condition at the time of the murder would have been consistent with the commission of this type of crime, the original investigators' theory that the body was cut in half because the killer wasn't strong enough to move it intact partially answers this objection. Harnisch theorizes that Bayley’s neurological deterioration contributed to his alleged violence against Short. Some have suggested that the secret that Bayley’s mistress was blackmailing him with was that he had performed abortions, then a crime. However, there is no evidence that Bayley performed abortions or associated with anyone involved in performing abortions. Author James Ellroy endorsed Harnisch's theory in the 2001 film James Ellroy's Feast of Death.[11]
Norman Chandler
Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, is accused of involvement in Elizabeth Short's murder, in Donald Wolfe's The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles. In a complicated scenario involving multiple perpetrators, Wolfe claims that Chandler impregnated Short while she was working as a call girl for the notorious Hollywood "madam" Brenda Allen, which led to Short's murder at the hands of gangster Bugsy Siegel. Wolfe's claim that Short was a prostitute is at odds with the Los Angeles County district attorney's files, which plainly state that she was not, as is Wolfe's assertion that she was pregnant [12].
Leslie Dillon
Leslie Dillon was a 27-year-old bellhop and aspiring writer who became a suspect in the case when he began writing to LAPD police psychiatrist Dr. J. Paul De River in October 1948. Dillon was living in Florida at the time of his correspondence with De River, but had formerly lived in Los Angeles. Dillon read a story about the case in a "true detective" magazine in which De River was quoted and wrote to De River regarding his thoughts on the case, mentioning another man named Jeff Connors as a possible suspect. Over the course of their correspondence, De River began to believe that Connors was a figment of Dillon's imagination and that Dillon had committed the murder himself. De River then lured Dillon to Los Angeles on the pretext that Dillon would assist him in solving the Black Dahlia case. De River and several LAPD officers met Dillon as he made his way to Los Angeles and took him to a hotel room outside Los Angeles. There they questioned him about the murder for several days, refusing to let him leave, call a lawyer, or communicate with anyone else. Dillon was only discovered when a passerby found a postcard with a plea for help on it, which Dillon had thrown out the window of the hotel room, and contacted local police.
Once Dillon's situation came to light, police soon discovered that Jeff Connors was a real person who had lived in Los Angeles around the time of the murder and that Leslie Dillon could be conclusively placed in San Francisco at the time of the murder. Dillon filed a $100,000 claim against the city of Los Angeles. The scandal caused by the Dillon affair triggered a 1949 grand jury investigation of police handling of the Black Dahlia case and some other unsolved murders. [13] [14]
In 2004, De River's daughter, Jacque Daniel, published a book called The Curse of the Black Dahlia, where she expressed her belief that her father had been unfairly maligned for the Dillon affair.[15]
Joseph A. Dumais
Joseph Dumais, a 29-year-old soldier stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey, confessed to the murder a few weeks after it occurred. Although this "breakthrough" was quickly dismissed by the original investigators, the Los Angeles press covered it enthusiastically until it was revealed that Dumais had been at Fort Dix at the time of the murder. Dumais was cleared of any involvement in the crime, although he continued to claim he killed Elizabeth Short each time he was arrested for various offenses, well into the 1950s.
Female suspects
Although the vast majority of suspects in the case were male, authorities did not rule out the possibility of a female killer. One theory held that, because Short had checked her baggage, including her clothing and cosmetics, a week before she died, she must have been staying with another woman (who presumably would have lent Short the essentials) during the intervening time. Another theory was that the assailant bisected Short's body because he or she was not strong enough to move it in one piece. One of the first people to confess to the murder was a WAC sergeant stationed in San Diego. Authorities took the confession seriously enough to investigate and found it groundless. [16] Another suspect is referred to simply as "Queer Woman Surgeon" in the Los Angeles district attorney's files on the case. Newspaper stories at the time implied that Short was homosexual or bisexual, but the district attorney files state bluntly that Short "had no use for queers".
Woody Guthrie
The folksinger was one of the many suspects in the murder, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney's files and Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie written by Ed Cray and published in 2004 by W.W. Norton, Page 331. According to Cray, Guthrie drew police attention due to some sexually explicit letters and lurid tabloid clippings he sent to a Northern California woman with whom he was smitten. The mailings disturbed their recipient so much that she showed them to her sister in Los Angeles, who contacted the police. Guthrie was quickly cleared of involvement in the murder, but various authorities attempted to prosecute him, with minor success, on charges related to sending prohibited materials through the mail.
Mark Hansen
Mark Hansen was a Hollywood nightclub and theater owner who knew Short while she was in Los Angeles. Short lived in Hansen's home, as a paying boarder or as a guest (accounts vary), on several occasions between May 1946 and October 1946. Hansen's girlfriend Ann Toth shared a room with Short in this house, which was near Hansen's nightclub, the Florentine Gardens. Short called Hansen in Los Angeles from San Diego on January 8 or 9, making him one of the last people known to have spoken to her. [17] Los Angeles district attorney files indicate that Hansen made contradictory statements to authorities about the nature of this conversation. An address book embossed with Hansen's name was among Short's belongings mailed to a newspaper after Short's murder by someone claiming to be her killer. The address book belonged to Hansen, but he had never used it. Short had been using it as her own. Los Angeles district attorney files indicate that Hansen had tried to seduce Short but she rebuffed him. Hansen was one of the first serious suspects in the case and he was still a prime suspect as late as the 1951 DA's investigation and grand jury inquest. Hansen was linked to three other suspects in the case, each of whom was a medical doctor: Dr. Patrick S. O’Reilly, Dr. M. M. Schwartz, and Dr. Arthur McGinnis Faught. [18]
Hansen died of natural causes in 1964. No charges were ever brought against him. He had no criminal record and no known history of violence. Popular accounts of the Black Dahlia case often portray Hansen as having connections to organized crime, but there is no evidence of this.
George Hodel
Dr. George Hodel came under police scrutiny in October 1949, when his 14-year-old daughter, Tamar, accused him of molesting her. Hodel was tried and acquitted of these charges in December 1949. The molestation case led the LAPD to include Hodel, a physician specializing in public health and sexually transmitted diseases, among its many suspects in the Dahlia case. Authorities put Hodel under surveillance from February 18 to March 27, 1950, to ascertain whether he could be implicated in the murder. In the final report to the grand jury dated February 20 1951, Lt. Frank Jemison of the Los Angeles County district attorney's office wrote:

Doctor George Hodel, M.D. 5121 Fountain [Franklin] Avenue, at the time of this murder had a clinic at East First Street near Alameda. Lillian DeNorak [Lenorak] who lived with this doctor said he spent some time around the Biltmore Hotel and identified the photo of victim Short as a photo of one of the doctor's girl friends. Tamar Hodel, fifteen year old daughter, stated that her mother, Dorothy Hodel, has told her that her father had been out all night on a party the night of the murder and said, "They’ll never be able to prove I did that murder." Two microphones were placed in this suspect's home (see the log and recordings made over approximately three weeks time which tend to prove his innocence.[19] See statement of Dorothy Hodel,[20] former wife). Informant Lillian DeNorak [Lenorak] has been committed to the State Mental Institution at Camarillo. Joe Barrett, a roomer at the Hodel residence cooperated as an informant. A photograph of the suspect in the nude with a nude identified colored model was secured from his personal effects. Undersigned identified this model as Mattie Comfort, 3423-1/2 South Arlington, Republic 4953. She said that she was with Doctor Hodel sometime prior to the murder and that she knew nothing about his being associated with the victim. Rudolph Walthers, known to have been acquainted with victim and also with suspect Hodel, claimed he had not seen victim in the presence of Hodel and did not believe that the doctor had ever met the victim. The following acquaintances of Hodel were questioned and none were able to connect the suspect with murder: Fred Sexton, 1020 White Knoll Drive; Nita Moladero, 1617-1/2 North Normandy [Normandie]; Ellen Taylor 5121 Fountain Avenue; Finlay Thomas, 616-1/2 South Normandy [Normandie]; Mildred B. Colby, 4029 Vista Del Monte Street, Sherman Oaks, this witness was a girlfriend of Charles Smith, abortionist friend of Hodel, Turin Gilkey, 1025 North Wilcox; Irene Summerset, 1236-1/4 North Edgemont; Norman Beckett, 1025 North Wilcox; Ethel Kane, 1033 North Wilcox; Annette Chase, 1039 North Wilcox; Dorothy Royer, 1636 North Beverly Glenn. See supplemental reports, long sheets and hear recordings, all of which tend to eliminate this suspect.

The report, from which the above excerpt was taken, was submitted at the completion of the D.A.'s investigation of George Hodel and at least 21 other suspects.
In 2003 George Hodel's son, former LAPD homicide detective Steve Hodel, published a book claiming his father, who died in 1999, had in fact committed the Black Dahlia murder as well as a host of unsolved murders over the better part of two decades. Steve Hodel says he came up with the idea when he saw two pictures in his dead father's photo album that he claims resemble Short, although Short's family insists they are not of her and many other observers have failed to see the resemblance.[21] Steve Hodel claims he was unaware at the time that his father had been a suspect in the case, although his sister Tamar was friends with Daddy Was The Black Dahlia Killer author Janice Knowlton and case documents make it clear that Steve's parents and many of their associates knew the senior Hodel was a suspect. After reviewing the information presented in Steve Hodel's book, Head Deputy D.A. Stephen Kay (Manson Family prosecutor) proclaimed the case solved, but others have noted that Kay, who has since retired, formed this conclusion by treating Steve Hodel's many disputed assertions as established fact. Detective Brian Carr, the LAPD officer currently in charge of the Black Dahlia case, said in a televised interview that he was baffled by Kay's response, adding that if he ever took a case as weak as Steve Hodel's to a prosecutor he would be "laughed out of the office". In a September 2006 television interview with Cold Case Files investigative-reporter Bill Kurtis, Detective Carr added, "I don't have the time to either prove or disprove Hodel's investigation. I am too busy working on active cases." Author James Ellroy endorsed Steve Hodel's theory in the foreword to the paperback version of Hodel's book.
As of November 2006, Ellroy refuses to discuss theories in the case and says he will never again talk about the Black Dahlia publicly.
George Knowlton
Little reliable information is available on George Knowlton, except that he lived in the Los Angeles area at the time of the Black Dahlia murder and died in an automobile accident in 1962. In the early 1990s, George Knowlton's daughter Janice began claiming that she had witnessed her father murdering Elizabeth Short, a claim she based largely on "recovered memories" that surfaced during psychological therapy. The Los Angeles Times said in 1991:

Los Angeles Police Detective John P. St. John, one of the investigators who had been assigned to the case, said he has talked to Knowlton and does not believe there is a connection between the Black Dahlia murder and her father. "We have a lot of people offering up their fathers and various relatives as the Black Dahlia killer", said St. John, better known as Jigsaw John. "The things that she is saying are not consistent with the facts of the case."

But the Westminster Police Department took her claims seriously enough to dig up the grounds around Ms. Knowlton's childhood home, looking for evidence. They found nothing to tie George Knowlton to the crime. In 1995, Ms. Knowlton created a sub-genre as the first person to publish a book claiming that his or her own father committed the Black Dahlia murder. The book was written with veteran crime writer Michael Newton. In the book Ms. Knowlton, a former professional singer and owner of a public relations company, alleged that her father had been having an affair with Elizabeth Short and that Short was staying in a makeshift bedroom in their garage, where she suffered a miscarriage. Ms. Knowlton said she was later forced to accompany her father when he disposed of the body. ISBN 0-671-88084-5 Ms. Knowlton claimed that a former member of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department told her that George Knowlton was considered a suspect in the case by that agency, but this claim is unsupported by public documents that have been released in the case. She claimed the same source told her that future LAPD chief and California politician Ed Davis and Los Angeles County District Attorney Buron Fitts were suspects in the murder as well. Janice Knowlton died of an overdose of prescription drugs in 2004, in what was deemed a suicide by the Orange County, California, coroner's office.
In a curious side note to her accusations against her father, Ms. Knowlton, who was a frequent contributor as jgk61 to various online forums where the Black Dahlia case was discussed, posted this article to a Usenet group in August 1998, in which she names Dr. George Hodel as a suspect in the case. George Hodel was the father of Steve Hodel, who published a book in 2003 naming his father as the killer. Ms. Knowlton's sister has since stated on amazon.com's web page for her sister's book, Daddy Was The Black Dahlia Killer, that after publication of Ms. Knowlton's book, Tamar Hodel, daughter of George Hodel and sister of Steve Hodel, contacted Ms. Knowlton and the two women remained "email pals for several years".
Ms. Knowlton also made claims prefiguring those of Black Dahlia Files author Donald Wolfe. In 1999, she claimed in various public fora that Norman Chandler participated in a cover-up of the murder. Ms. Knowlton claimed that on Halloween 1946 she was sold at the age of 9 as a child prostitute to a Pasadena devil-worshiping sex cult (Daddy Was The Black Dahlia Killer, Page 128). She frequently alleged that she was sold as a child prostitute to a long list of dead movie stars and other notables, including Norman Chandler, Gene Autry (whose name she continually misspelled as Autrey), Arthur Freed, and Walt Disney. Knowlton became so abusive in her Usenet posts that Pacbell canceled her account in 1999.
Robert M. "Red" Manley
The last person seen with Elizabeth Short before her disappearance, Manley was the LAPD's top suspect in the first few days after killing. After two polygraph tests and a sworn alibi, Manley was set free. He also identified Short's handbag purse and one of her shoes after they were discovered in a trashcan on January 25 1947, several miles from the murder scene.[22] Manley, who had been discharged from the army due to mental disability, subsequently suffered a series of mental breakdowns and claimed to be hearing voices. As a result, he was committed to Patton State Hospital by his wife in 1954. He died on January 9 1986.[23]
Patrick S. O'Reilly
According to Los Angeles district attorney files, Dr. Patrick S. O’Reilly was a medical doctor who knew Short through nightclub owner Mark Hansen. According to the files, at the time of the murder O’Reilly was a good friend of Hansen and frequented Hansen's nightclub. Files also state that O'Reilly "attended sex parties at Malibu" with Hansen. O'Reilly had a history of serious, sexually motivated, violent crime. He had been convicted of assault with a deadly weapon for "taking his secretary to a motel and sadistically beating her almost to death apparently for no other reason than to satisfy his sexual desires without intercourse", the files state. Further, the files indicate that O'Reilly's right pectoral had been surgically removed, which investigators found similar to the mutilation of Short’s body. The files indicate that O'Reilly had once been married to the daughter of an LAPD captain. [24]
Orson Welles
In her 1999 book, Mary Pacios, a former neighbor of the Short family in Medford, MA, suggested filmmaker Orson Welles as a suspect.[25] Pacios bases this theory on such factors as Welles' volatile temperament and his obsession with cutting-in-half, as indicated by the visual clues Pacios claims can be found in the crazy house set he designed for scenes that were later deleted from The Lady From Shanghai, a film Welles was making around the time of the murder. Pacios also cites the magic act Welles performed to entertain soldiers during World War II. She believes that the bisection of the body was part of the killer's signature and an acting out of the perpetrator's obsession. Welles applied for his passport on January 24 1947, the same date the killer mailed a packet to Los Angeles newspapers. Welles left the country for an extended stay in Europe ten months after the murder. According to Pacios, witnesses she has interviewed state that Welles and the victim frequented Brittingham's restaurant in Los Angeles during the same time period. Welles was never a suspect in the original investigation. Pacios now maintains a web site containing a great deal of information and official documents about the Black Dahlia case, but only a short section on Welles' supposed involvement.[26]
Jack Anderson Wilson (a.k.a. Arnold Smith)
Wilson was a life-long petty criminal and alcoholic who was interviewed by author John Gilmore while Gilmore was researching his book Severed. After Wilson's death, Gilmore named Wilson as a suspect due to his alleged acquaintance with Short. Prior to Wilson's death, however, Gilmore made an entirely different claim to the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in a story appearing Jan. 17, 1982. While Severed says that homicide Detective John St. John was about to "close in" on Wilson based on the material Gilmore provided, St. John told the Herald-Examiner in the same article that he was busy with other killings and would review Gilmore's claims when he got time. As reliable sources of information about the case, such as the FBI files and portions of the Los Angeles district attorney files, have become publicly available, statements about Short and the murder attributed to Wilson in Severed and supposedly tying him to the crime have not been borne out as accurate. Severed also claims Wilson was involved in the murder of Georgette Bauerdorf. Severed, and many other sources based on Severed, erroneously claim that Short and Bauerdorf knew each other in Los Angeles, supposedly because they were both hostesses at the same nightclub. In reality, by the time Short arrived in Los Angeles in 1946, Bauerdorf had been dead for two years and the nightclub had been closed for a year. Wilson was never a suspect until Gilmore brought him to the attention of authorities.
Wilson figures in Donald Wolfe's book The Mob, The Mogul, And The Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles. Wolfe hypothesizes that Wilson was present at Short's murder and claims a connection between Wilson and gangster Bugsy Siegel through some small-time gangsters Wilson supposedly associated with.

Sadly, the homicide remains unsolved and the killer has never been caught.

Some crime authors have speculated on a link between the Short murder and the Cleveland Torso Murders, also known as the Kingsbury Run Murders, which took place in Cleveland between 1934 and 1938.[27] The original LAPD investigators examined this case in 1947 and discounted any relationship between the two, as they did with a large number of killings that occurred before and afterward, well into the 1950s.

Other crime authors have suggested a link between the Short murder and the 1945 murder of 6-year-old Suzanne Degnan in Chicago, Illinois, who was also dismembered (and Short's body was discovered near Degnan Boulevard in Los Angeles). However, William Heirens (the so-called "Lipstick Killer") confessed to the Degnan murder and was in jail when Short's body was discovered.

Books, films, and other media

Adaptations

References in other media

  • John Gregory Dunne used the murder as a point of departure in his 1977 novel True Confessions, which was made into the 1981 film True Confessions starring Robert Duvall and Robert De Niro with a screenplay by Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion.
  • A 1988 episode of the TV detective thriller Hunter depicts Rick Hunter and Dee Dee McCall discovering a case similar to the Black Dahlia murder when a skeleton that has been cut in half is found during demolition of a building constructed in 1947. Hunter and McCall are joined by a retired detective who worked on the Elizabeth Short case. The murderer in the recent case turns out to be Short's murderer as well. (A disclaimer at the end of the episode explains that the Black Dahlia case remains open and unsolved on the books of the Los Angeles Police Department.)
  • Max Allan Collins combined the Black Dahlia and Cleveland Torso Murder in his Shamus Award-winning 2002 novel, Angel in Black, featuring his character, private investigator Nathan Heller.
  • The Carver from the popular TV series Nip/Tuck leaves a distinctive "smile" shaped cut on the faces of all his victims. This cut is very similar to the one found on Elizabeth Short's face.
  • In 2002, rock star and artist Marilyn Manson created a series of water color paintings based upon the murder.
  • Bob Belden's 2001 CD Black Dahlia draws inspiration from the case for a moody, noir score divided into 12 sections depicting her life, on a par with Jerry Goldsmith's score for Chinatown and David Shire's music for the film Farewell, My Lovely.
  • Musician Lisa Marr also mentions the Black Dahlia in her song "In California" from the album 4 AM. This song was later covered by her former Cub bandmate Neko Case.
  • The band The Black Dahlia Murder takes its name from this infamous murder.
  • Lamb of God has a song entitled "The Black Dahlia" on their album New American Gospel.
  • William Randolph Fowler, a reporter at the scene of the crime, included the Black Dahlia case in his 1991 autobiography, "Reporters: Memoirs of a Young Newspaperman."
  • The case inspired the 1953 noir film The Blue Gardenia, including a title song sung by Nat King Cole.
  • American Thrash metal band Anthrax has a song entitled "Black Dahlia" on their album We've Come for You All.
  • Dwarves vocalist Paul Cafaro's stage name is Blag Dahlia, an obvious reference to the Black Dahlia.
  • Australian band, Jimmy Vargas & The Black Dahlias, make literal references to the case. Both in their name choice, but no less so in their music.
  • The book Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism And The Black Dahlia Murder compares the Black Dahlia murder to surrealist art.
  • Musicians Courtney Leigh Heins [28] & Bryan Dobbs of Los Angeles-based duo Refolk have a song about the murder of Elizabeth Short called "The Black Dahlia." [29]
  • In Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), William Holden arrives at a New Year's party and is jokingly introduced to the crowd of revelers as a "Black Dahlia suspect".
  • Black Dahlia is a computer game released in 1998 by Take Two interactive. The game's plot begins with the player investigating the real life murder, but spirals out into the supernatural. It includes references to Norse mythology and the coming of Ragnarök.
  • On The Girls Next Door, Bridget and Holly visit the spot where Elizabeth's body was found.
  • American rap band Hollywood Undead, have a song named My Black Dahlia, whilst the title may refer to the murder, the lyrics have no reference to it.
  • Dahlia Hawthorne, a character in Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations, may be a reference to this.

References

  • Daniel, Jacque (2004). The Curse of the Black Dahlia. Los Angeles: Digital Data Werks. ISBN 0-9651604-2-4.
  • Fowler, Will (1991). Reporters: Memoirs of a Young Newspaperman. Minneapolis: Roundtable Publishing. ISBN 0-915677-61-X.
  • Gilmore, John (2006) [1994]. Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia. Los Angeles: Amok Books. ISBN 1-878923-17-X.
  • Hodel, Steve (2003). Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder. New York: Arcade Publishing. ISBN 1-55970-664-3.
  • Knowlton, Janice (1995). Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer: The Identity of America's Most Notorious Serial Murderer – Revealed at Last. New York: Pocket Books. ISBN 0-671-88084-5. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • Nelson, Mark (2006). Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder. New York: Bulfinch Press. ISBN ISBN 0-8212-5819-2. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • Pacios, Mary (1999). Childhood Shadows: The Hidden Story of the Black Dahlia Murder. Bloomington, IN: Authorhouse. ISBN 1-58500-484-7.
  • Rasmussen, William T. (2005). Corroborating Evidence: The Black Dahlia Murder. Santa Fe, NM: Sunstone Press. ISBN 0-86534-536-8.
  • Richardson, James (1954). For the Life of Me: Memoirs of a City Editor. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. (ISBN unavailable).
  • Smith, Jack (1981). Jack Smith's L.A. New York: Pinnacle Books. ISBN 0-523-41493-5.
  • Underwood, Agness (1949). Newspaperwoman. New York: Harper and Brothers. (ISBN unavailable).
  • Webb, Jack (1958). The Badge: The Inside Story of One of America's Great Police Departments. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0-09-949973-8.
  • Wolfe, Donald H. (2005). The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles. New York: ReganBooks. ISBN 0-06-058249-9.

See also

Note that the FBI file incorrectly lists her as Elizabeth Ann Short. In reality, she had no middle name.

One route from the Biltmore Hotel (Short's last known location) to the crime scene, although it uses freeways that didn't exist in 1947.

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