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Black Dahlia

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For the 2006 film directed by Brian de Palma, see The Black Dahlia (film)

Elizabeth Short, better known as the Black Dahlia, was the victim of an infamous murder in 1947. She was born July 29, 1924 and died January 15, 1947.

Biography

Born in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, Short was raised in Medford by her mother, Phoebe Mae, after her father, Cleo, abandoned her and her four sisters in October, 1930.

Troubled by asthma, she spent summers in Medford and winters in Florida. At the age of 19, she went to Vallejo, California to live with her father, and they moved to Los Angeles in early 1943. She left almost immediately because of an argument with her father and got a job in one of the post exchanges at Camp Cooke, which is now Vandenberg Air Force Base, near Lompoc. She moved to Santa Barbara, where she was arrested September 23, 1943, for underage drinking and was sent back to Medford by juvenile authorities.

Short subsequently went to Florida, where she met Maj. Matthew M. Gordon Jr., who was part of the 2nd Air Commandos and training for deployment in the China Burma India theater of operations. Gordon, who was awarded a Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star, the Air Medal with 15 oak leaf clusters, and Purple Heart, wrote a letter from India proposing marriage while recovering from an airplane crash he suffered while trying to rescue a downed flier. 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.

She 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. While living there for a few weeks, she received the nickname Black Dahlia at a corner drugstore as a play on the then-current movie The Blue Dahlia, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.

In August, 1946, she came to Hollywood to try her luck in the film business. She was last seen on the evening of January 9, 1947, in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel at 5th Street and Olive in downtown Los Angeles. She was 22 years old.

On January 15, 1947, her body was discovered in a vacant lot of the 3800 block of South Norton Avenue in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, cut in half at the waist and mutilated. The crime was never solved, but has remained the subject of intense speculation.

Although popular myth as well as many crime books portray Short as a call girl, a report by the district attorney's office for the Los Angeles County Grand Jury states that she was not a prostitute.

She was interred in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland rather than Medford because her oldest sister lived in Berkeley and because she loved California.

Her unsolved murder has been key to the perception of Los Angeles as a dystopia.

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 people are suggested as the possible killer of Elizabeth Short, much like the Jack the Ripper case.

  • 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 site.
  • 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 a witness 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 and had no known history of violence or criminal activity of any kind.
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.[1] 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 film "James Ellroy's Feast of Death".[2]
  • 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. [3]
  • 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 enthusiastically until it was revealed that Dumais had remained in 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.
  • 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 mails.
  • 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 included Hodel, a physician specializing in public health (not a surgeon), among its many suspects in the Dahlia case. Authorities put Hodel under surveillance from Feb. 18 to March 27, 1950 to ascertain whether he was implicated in the murder. In the final report to the grand jury dated Feb. 20, 1951, Lt. Frank Jemison of the Los Angeles County district attorney's office wrote:
Doctor George Hodel, M.D., 5121 Fountain Ave., at the time of this murder had a clinic at East 1st Street near Alameda. Lillian Lenorak [note: a mental patient later confined to the state hospital at Camarillo] 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 girlfriends. Tamara Hodel, 15-year-old daughter, stated that her mother, Dorothy Hodel, had told her that her father had been out all night on a party the night of this murder and said: "They'll never be able to prove I did that murder." Two microphones were placed in this suspect's home[4] (see the logs and recordings made over approximately three weeks' time which tend to prove his innocence. See statement of Dorothy Hodel, former wife[5]). Informant Lillian 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 S. Arlington, RE public 4953. She said that she was with Doctor Hodel sometime prior to the murder and that she knew nothing about his being associated with victim. Rudolph Walters, known to have been acquainted with victim and also with suspect Hodel claimed that 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 this suspect with this murder--Fred Sexton, 1020 White Knoll Drive; Nita Moladoro, 1617 1/2 N. Normandie; Ellen Taylor, 5121 Fountain Ave.; Finley Thomas, 616 1/2 S. Normandie; Mildred B. Colby, 4629 Vista Del Monte St., Sherman Oaks, this witness was a girlfriend of Charles Smith, abortionist friend of Hodel; Tarin Gilkey, 1025 N. Wilcox; Irene Summerset, 1236 1/4 N. Edgmont; Norman Beckett, 1025 N. Wilcox; Ethel Kane, 1033 N. Wilcox; Annette Chase, 1039 N. Wkilcox; Dorothy Royer, 1636 N. Beverly Glenn. See supplemental reports, long sheets and hear recordings, all of which tend to eliminate this suspect.
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.[6]. 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 his 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." Author James Ellroy endorsed Steve Hodel's theory in the foreword to the paperback version of Hodel's book.[7]
  • 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 Knowlton, 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.[8]. 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 since 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, CA, 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 as a child prostitute to a Pasadena devil-worshiping sex cult at the age of 9 (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.[9]
  • 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.[10] 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 a film Welles was making around the time of the murder. Pacios also cites the magic act Welles performed to entertain soldiers during WW II. She believes that the bi-section 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 say that both 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. [11]
  • Jack Anderson Wilson (also known as 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.[12] 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.

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.[13]. 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 linkage between the Short murder and the 1945 murder of 6-year-old Suzanne Degnan in Chicago, who was also dismembered (and Short's body was discovered near Degnan Boulevard in Los Angeles). However, the so-called "Lipstick Killer" William Heirens confessed to the Degnan murder and was in jail when Short's body was discovered, although some have contended that Heirens was innocent of the Degnan murder.[14]

Author James Ellroy, who wrote a fictionalized account of the murder, has publiclly endorsed at least two mutually exclusive solutions to the crime. Whenever confronted with this seeming contradiction at public appearances or by TV interviewers, Ellroy now refuses to discuss theories about the case. He now says the case is unsolved.

Critically Acclaimed Poet James Pember, who was seen at the site of the murder jacking off to some hot porn. The LAPD have since found semen samples on Elizabeth that match Pember's exact DNA. He has since gone into exile in southern Mexico in a small town named Muchachos, under the leadership of a large Hispanic man named Pepi.

Books, films and other media

A 1975 TV movie about the case, Who Is the Black Dahlia by Robert Lenski and starring Lucie Arnaz is a highly fictionalized version of the murder. Many details were changed because several people, including Short's mother and Red Manley, who brought Short from San Diego to Los Angeles, refused to sign releases for the studio.

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.

Neo-noir author James Ellroy based his 1987 book, The Black Dahlia on the crime. A film by Brian De Palma, based on the Ellroy novel, began production in Bulgaria in May 2005. Also titled The Black Dahlia, the movie will star Josh Hartnett, Aaron Eckhart, Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank, and Mia Kirshner as Elizabeth Short, and is planned for release in 2006.

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.

Take 2 Interactive published the computer game, Black Dahlia, in 1998. The puzzle-based adventure game tied Elizabeth Short's murders to Nazis and occult rituals which the player had to investigate. The game features Dennis Hopper, whose son-in-law was one of the company's owners, and Teri Garr.

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.

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 Death Metal band The Black Dahlia Murder takes its name from this infamous murder.

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."

A blog, 1947project, explores this and other crimes occurring in Los Angeles during the calendar year 1947.

See also

References

  • Will Fowler; Reporters: Memoirs of a Young Newspaperman; Roundtable Publishing; ISBN 0-915677-61-X (hardback, 1991)
  • John Gilmore; Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder; Zanja Press; ISBN 0-938331-03-5 (paperback, 1994)
  • Steve Hodel; Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder; Arcade Publishing; ISBN 1-55970-664-3 (hardback, 2003)
  • Janice Knowlton, with Michael Newton; Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer : The Identity of America's Most Notorious Serial Murderer--Revealed at Last; Pocket Books; ISBN 0671880845 (paperback, reissue 1995)
  • Mary Pacios; Childhood Shadows: The Hidden Story of the Black Dahlia Murder; 1st Books Library; ISBN 1-58500-484-7 (paperback, 1999)
  • William T. Rasmussen; Corroborating Evidence, Sunstone Press; ISBN 0-86534-440-X (hardback, 2004)
  • James Richardson; For the Life of Me: Memoirs of a City Editor ; G.P. Putnam's Sons; (hardback, 1954)
  • Jack Smith; Jack Smith's L.A. ; Pinnacle Books; ISBN 0-523-41493-5 (hardback, 1981)
  • Agness Underwood: Newspaperwoman ; Harper and Brothers; (hardback, 1949)
  • Jack Webb: The Badge: The Inside Story of One of America's Great Police Departments ; Prentice-Hall; (hardback, 1958)
  • Donald Wolfe; The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles ; ISBN 0060582499; HarperCollins; (hardback, 2005)

Note that the FBI incorrectly gives Elizabeth Short's middle name as Ann. She had no middle name.

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