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Elizabeth Short, better known as the Black Dahlia, is a murder victim, born July 29, 1924 and died January 15, 1947.
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 wintered 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 Southern California 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.
She returned to Southern California in July 1946 to see an old boyfriend, Lt. Gordon Fickling, who was stationed in Long Beach, and while there she received the nickname "Black Dahlia" at a corner drugstore as a play on the 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.
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.
Her unsolved killing has been key to the perception of Los Angeles as a dystopian land of broken dreams. The investigation by the LAPD was the largest since the killing of Marian Parker in 1927 and involved hundreds of officers borrowed from other law enforcement agencies. About 60 people confessed to the killing, mostly men, as well as a few women.
Although popular myth and many crime books portray her 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. |
Severed:
The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder
By John Gilmore
The Black Dahlia murder hit post-War Los Angeles like a bombshell and this impenetrable mystery was the haunting crown jewel of LAPD's unsolved murders. Even before her savage death, beautiful 22-year old Elizabeth Short, an aspiring starlet and nightclub habitu‚ was known as the Black Dahlia. Since her horrible demise, she has become a magnetic icon in American pop culture, a mythical symbol of noir Hollywood. In this new, expanded edition, John Gilmore plumbs to the dark core of this terrifying story that he argues can never be truly solved and delivers to us the real Elizabeth Short, the girl who became the enigmatic Black Dahlia. He ushers the reader into her world and her life in intimate, searing, explosive, first-hand revelations.
"The most satisfying and disturbing conclusion to the Black Dahlia case. After reading Severed, I feel like I truly know Elizabeth Short and her killer." - David Lynch
"The most uncanny evocation of LA during and after the war... His portrait of Elizabeth Short as a strange, unknowable somnambulist sleepwalking through that unique junction of time and space is permanently haunting."- Gary Indiana
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Corroborating Evidence (Revised Edition)
By William T. Rasmussen
NEW CLUES AND EVIDENCE IN THIS REVISED EDITION. They killed and dismembered their victims, one after the other, and then vanished. These were horrific crimes committed by a group of thrill killers. Fear gripped the city. When would they strike again? Hundreds of policemen thought they had sifted through every shred of evidence, but subtle clues and corroborating evidence left behind by the real killers were overlooked. Seventeen-year-old William Heirens was eventually arrested for three of the murders. He confessed and was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences in 1946. Heirens is the longest-serving living inmate in the Illinois penal system. Now after fifty-nine years the author has uncovered evidence that will show, with reasonable certainty, not only that someone else may have committed the murders but also the culprits' identities. This is an intriguing true story that is both fascinating and convincing. The pieces and history of this true crime puzzle will surprise even the most seasoned detective. This edition includes a First Revised Epilogue containing new clues and evidence supporting the connections between the Cleveland Torso Murders, the murder of Suzanne Degnan and the murder of the Black Dahlia. The author shows how Jack Anderson Wilson's DNA may still be available for comparison even though his charred remains were cremated following the 1982 fire at the Holland Hotel in Los Angeles. Now there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that William Heirens did not kill and dismember six-year-old Suzanne Degnan on January 7, 1946, in Chicago. In the interests of justice, law enforcement should reopen these cold cases and William Heirens should be set free from his incarceration.
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The Black Dahlia Files:
The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles
By Donald H. Wolfe
In 1946, movie star wannabe Elizabeth Short traveled to Hollywood to become famous and see her name up in lights. Instead, the dark-haired beauty became immortalized in the headlines as the "Black Dahlia" when her nude and bisected body was discovered in the weeds of a vacant lot. Despite the efforts of more than 400 police officers, homicide investigators, and the arrest of numerous suspects, the heinous crime was never solved. Now, after endless speculation, theories, and false claims, bestselling author Donald H. Wolfe discovers startling new evidence and reveals the shocking secrets of the sealed autopsy -- buried in the files of the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office for more than half a century. Furthermore, Wolfe discloses that the brutal murder of Elizabeth Short was the work of one of the most notorious mob leaders of the era, a brazen playboy known for his explosive temper and pathological bouts of violence -- Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel. How did this ordinary young woman from Medford, Massachusetts, end up the victim of Los Angeles's most powerful political and criminal elements? Wolfe evokes the time, place, and converging circumstances that led her down a tangled trail to her death. Desperate for cash and showbiz connections, Short entered a labyrinthine world of Syndicate-run clubs, brothels, casinos, and other shady velvet rope operations that catered to Hollywood's elite and preyed on naive, ambitious beauties such as herself. Soon after she took a job with Madam Brenda Allen's call-girl ring, which fell within Bugsy Siegel's vice-map, Short found herself involved with the most powerful political figure in the city, the mogul who ran Los Angeles -- Norman Chandler. Wolfe discovers that the real trouble began when Short became pregnant with his child. In recounting the whole noir tale in The Black Dahlia Files, Wolfe not only reveals the motive behind the murder and identifies the killer and his accomplices, but also shrewdly unravels the large-scale cover-up behind the case. With the aid of more than 150 archival photos, news clippings, and investigative reports, Wolfe documents the riveting untold story that stands apart from all other works on the Black Dahlia case and casts a far wider net -- implicating practically an entire city and Hollywood way of life in the murder of an aspiring starlet. Wolfe's extensive research, based on the evidence he discovered in the recently opened LADA files on the murder, make The Black Dahlia Files the authoritative work on the mystery that has drawn endless scrutiny but remained unsolved -- until now.
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Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder
By Steve Hodel
In this startling tour-de-force, a professional homicide detective finally solves the case of one of the most shocking murders of the twentieth century in this true-crime page-turner. In 1947, the sadistic murder of a beautiful young woman, twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short, led to the largest manhunt in Los Angeles history and came to be known as the Black Dahlia murder. In the film noir streets of Los Angeles, the killer teased and taunted the police and public alike through notes written to L.A. papers, much like Jack the Ripper had done in London sixty years earlier. When the LAPD failed to solve the crime, it was passed down from year to year to crack homicide detectives, but none could ever bring the killer to justice -- until now. Even more startling -- a twist worthy of any great mystery novel -- is the identity of the murderer: the author's own father, George Hodel, a real-life Jekyll and Hyde, a man who by day was a highly respected member of society and by night a mad, sadistic killer. Black Dahlia Avenger is the result of more than three years of meticulous investigation by Steve Hodel. At long last, he closes what has often been called "the most notorious unsolved murder of the twentieth century."
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Case Reopened:
The Black Dahlia with Joseph Wambaugh
VHS
An exceptional documentary, with dramatized re-enactments. When Elizabeth Short came to Hollywood she was not unlike thousands of other young women, hoping her good looks and a little bit of talent would propel her into the world of the rich and famous. Elizabeth Short did earn notoriety, but in a horrifying way that would come to chill even the most seasoned investigators. Within weeks of her murder, 37 innocent men and women had confessed to the crime. What is it that fascinates us so about the Black Dahlia? What was the dark secret that police kept under lock and key for over half a century? And what kind of person could have committed such a violent, brutal, yet carefully planned and executed crime? Crime writer Joseph Wambaugh picks up his pen and goes back on the beat with the mysterious case of the Black Dahlia. A brave new genre in storytelling, Case Reopened fuses history, mystery and scientific research by enlisting the greatest minds in crime fiction to re-examine our most notorious unsolved crimes.
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The Black Dahlia
By James Ellroy
Based on a notorious, unsolved Los Angeles murder case, the central drama of this hard-boiled mysteryset in the late 1940sbegins when the body of Elizabeth Short, an engagingly beautiful and promiscuous woman in her 20s, is discovered in a vacant lot, cut in half, disemboweled and bearing evidence that she had been tortured for several days before dying. Dubbed "The Black Dahlia" by the press, the victim becomes an obsession for two L.A.P.D. cops, narrator Bucky Bleichert and his partner, Lee Blanchard, both ex-boxers who also are best friends and in love with the same woman. Despite a huge effort by the department, leads seem to go nowhere, and Bucky is mortified when he inadvertently helps to suppress evidencethe apparently innocuous fact that a woman he spends many nights with, casually bisexual Madeleine Sprague, daughter of a crooked real-estate tycoon, knew "the Dahlia" and slept with her once. Bucky begins to fear for his future, but slowly and dangerously, he learns that his is one of the tamest crimes of corruption committed by the many people he knows. Building like a symphony, this is a wonderful, complicated but accessible tale of ambition, insanity, passion and deceit, with the perfect setting of booming, postwar Los Angeles.
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Childhood Shadows:
The Hidden Story of the Black Dahlia Murder
By Mary Pacios
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Angel in Black
By Max Allan Collins
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