The Black Dahlia
Elizabeth Short
She was born July 29, 1924 in Boston Massachusetts.
She was an aspiring actress.
She was found murdered in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.
Before
Her father's car was found abandoned on the Charlestown Bridge in 1930.
It was assumed that he had committed suicide by jumping into the Charles River.
Troubled by bronchitis and severe asthma attacks, Elizabeth underwent lung surgery at age fifteen.
In late 1942, Elizabeth's mother received a letter of apology from her presumed-deceased husband.
He was alive and had started a new life in California.
In December, at age eighteen, Elizabeth relocated to Vallejo to live with her father.
In January 1943, arguments between Elizabeth and her father led to her moving out.
Short returned to her home in Los Angeles after a brief trip to San Diego with Robert "Red" Manley.
He was a 25-year-old married salesman she had been dating.
Robert stated he dropped Elizabeth off at the Biltmore Hotel located at 506 South Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles.
Elizabeth was to meet her sister, who was visiting from Boston, that afternoon.
The staff of the Biltmore recalled seeing Elizabeth use the lobby telephone.
Shortly after, she was allegedly seen by patrons of the Crown Grill Cocktail Lounge at 754 South Olive Street.
It was approximately 1⁄2 mile away from the Biltmore Hotel.
Discovery
January 15, 1947, Elizabeth's body was found on a vacant lot on the west side of South Norton Avenue, midway between Coliseum Street and West 39th Street in Leimert Park, Los Angeles.
The area was largely underdeveloped at the time.
Resident Betty Bersinger was walking with her three-year-old daughter when she discovered the body at approximately 10:00 a.m.
Elizabeth's naked and severely mutilated body was completely severed at the waist and drained entirely of blood, leaving its skin a pale white.
Medical examiners determined that she had been dead for around ten hours.
Her time of death was either sometime during the evening of January 14, or the early morning hours of January 15.
The body had been washed by the killer.
Her face had been slashed from the corners of her mouth to her ears.
Long gashes extended her mouth into an eerie smile.
That created an effect known as the "Glasgow smile".
She had several cuts on her thigh and breasts.
Entire portions of flesh had been sliced away.
The lower half of her body was positioned a foot away from the upper.
Her intestines had been tucked neatly beneath her butt.
The corpse had been "posed", with her hands over her head.
Her elbows bent at right angles.
Her legs spread apart.
Detectives located a heel print near the body on the ground amid tire tracks.
A cement sack containing watery blood was also found nearby.
Autopsy
Her autopsy was preformed on January 16, 1947, by Dr. Frederick Newbarr, the Los Angeles County coroner.
The report stated that Elizabeth was 5 feet 5 inches tall, weighed 115 pounds.
She had light blue eyes, brown hair, and badly decayed teeth.
There were ligature marks on her ankles, wrists, and neck.
There was an "irregular laceration with superficial tissue loss" on her right breast.
There were superficial lacerations on the right forearm, left upper arm, and the lower left side of the chest.
Her official cause of death was a cerebral hemorage.
Media
The graphic nature of the crime and the subsequent letters, resulted in a media frenzy surrounding Elizabeth's murder.
Both local and national publications covered the story heavily.
The Examiner describing the black tailored suit Short was last seen wearing as "a tight skirt and a sheer blouse"
Media nicknamed her as the "Black Dahlia".
They described her as an "adventuress" who "prowled Hollywood Boulevard".
Reports about Elizabeth's personal life were publicized.
Details about her alleged declining of Hansen's romantic advances.
A stripper who was an acquaintance of Elizabeth's told police that she "liked to get guys worked up over her, but she'd leave them hanging dry."
Additional newspaper reports, such as one published in the Los Angeles Times on January 17, deemed the murder a "sex fiend slaying".
Some reporters and detectives looked into the possibility that Elizabeth was a lesbian.
They begin questioning employees and patrons of gay bars in Los Angeles.
This claim, remained unsubstantiated.
Investigation
A person claiming to be Elizabeth's killer placed a phone call to the office of James Richardson, the editor of the Los Angeles Examiner, on January 21, 1947.
He congratulated Richardson on the newspaper's coverage of the case.
He also stated he planned on eventually turning himself in.
The caller told Richardson to "expect some souvenirs of Beth Short in the mail".
A suspicious manila envelope was discovered by a U.S. Postal Service worker, on January 24.
The envelope had been addressed to "The Los Angeles Examiner and other Los Angeles papers".
It had individual words that had been cut-and-pasted from newspaper clippings.
The envelope contained Elizabeth's birth certificate, business cards, photographs, and names written on pieces of paper.
There was also an address book with the name Mark Hansen embossed on the cover.
Like Elizabeth's body, the packet had been cleaned with gasoline.
This led the police to believe that the packet was sent directly from her killer.
Several partial fingerprints were lifted from the envelope and sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for testing.
The prints were compromised in transit, so they couldn't be properly analyzed.
The same day the packet was received by the Examiner, a handbag and a black suede shoe were reported to have been seen on top of a garbage can in an alley a short distance from Norton Avenue.
That was 2 miles from where Elizabeth's body had been discovered.
The items were recovered by police, but they had also been wiped clean with gasoline.
There was no salvageable prints.
The Second Letter
Another letter was received by the Examiner, on January 26.
This time it was a handwritten.
It read:
"Here it is. Turning in Wed., Jan. 29, 10 am.
Had my fun at police. Black Dahlia Avenger".
The letter also named a location at which the supposed killer would turn himself in.
On the morning of January 29, The police waited at the location.
The alleged killer did not appear.
At 1:00pm, The Examiner offices received another cut-and-pasted letter.
The letter read:
"Have changed my mind. You would not give me a square deal. Dahlia killing was justified."
The Los Angeles Herald-Express also received several letters from the supposed killer.
The letters again were made with cut-and-pasted clippings.
Lead investigator Captain Jack Donahue told the press that he believed Elizabeth's murder had taken place in a remote building or shack on the outskirts of Los Angeles.
He also believed her body transported into the city where it was disposed of.
The LAPD looked into the possibility that the murderer may have been a surgeon, doctor, or someone with medical knowledge, based on the precise cuts and dissection of Short's corpse.
The LAPD served a warrant to the University of Southern California Medical School in mid-February 1947.
It was located near the site where Short's body had been discovered.
The warrant requested a complete list of the program's students.
The university agreed so long as the students' identities remained private.
Background checks were conducted, but they yielded no results.
Sgt. Finis Brown, on the various dead ends in the case said:
"No lead had any conclusions. Once we'd find something, it seemed to disappear in front of our eyes."
The Los Angeles Police Department interviewed over 150 men in the ensuing weeks whom they believed to be potential suspects.
Profile
The police were convinced that the killer knew Elizabeth, due to the mutilations present on Elizabeth’s corpse, which were signs of a personal vendetta.
The killer wanted the world to see Elizabeth and the wrongdoings that they believed she had done to them.
They were a sadist who wanted to dominate Elizabeth.
It was also suggested the killer might have been a necrophiliac.
Suspects
Robert Manley
He had been one of the last people to see Elizabeth alive.
He was a medical student.
They were dating.
He was married.
He was also investigated, but was cleared of suspicion after passing numerous polygraph examinations.
Mark Hansen
Mark Hansen was the owner of the address book found in first packet.
Police quickly deemed him a suspect.
He was a wealthy local nightclub and theater owner.
He was an acquaintance at whose home Elizabeth had stayed with friends.
He confirmed that the shoe and the purse discoverd in the alley were Elizabeth's.
Ann Toth was Elizabeth's friend and roommate.
She told investigators that Elizabeth had recently rejected sexual advances from Hansen.
She suggested it as potential cause for him to kill Elizabeth.
Con Keller was a member of LA's Gangster Squad investigating the case.
Keller believed Hansen was the killer.
He said Hansen had spent some time at a Medical surgical school in Sweden which would explain the precise dissection of Elizabeth's body.
Keller also said that Hansen would have elaborate parties at his Hollywood house.
The members of the Los Angeles Police Department along with the Chief of Detectives would attend and perhaps later aided Hansen in a cover up.
Hansen was cleared of suspicion in the case.
Police also interviewed several persons found listed in Hansen's address book.
Martin Lewis
He was in Hansen's address book.
He had been an acquaintance of Elizabeth's.
Lewis was able to provide an alibi for the date of Short's murder.
He was in Portland, Oregon visiting his father-in-law, who was dying of kidney failure.
George Hill Hodel
Steve Hodel says his father was Elizabeth's killer.
He presented his father's training as a surgeon as circumstantial evidence.
Crime scene photos showed that Elizabeth had been given a hemicorporectomy.
This is a procedure that slices the body beneath the lumbar spine.
That is the only spot where the body can be severed in half without breaking bone.
It was taught in the 1930s, when George Sr. had been in medical school.
The letters sent to the press and police from The Black Dahlia Avenger, also had a chilling resemblance to his dad’s handwriting.
A handwriting expert determined that there was a strong likelihood that his father’s handwriting matched the script on some of the notes the killer sent to the LAPD, but the results were inconclusive.
He also went through his fathers things.
There were two pictures of a young woman, her eyes cast downward, with curly, deep-black hair.
Steve still doesn’t know why he had the idea, but as he looked at the images, he thought to himself:
“My God, that looks like the Black Dahlia.”
Steve found a folder in the archives of UCLA, containing receipts for contracting work on his childhood home.
One of the receipts showed a purchase a few days before Elizabeth's murder of 10 five-pound bags of concrete.
It was the same size and brand found near Short’s body that police believe her killer used to carry her.
Steve tracked down a policewoman who reported seeing Elizabeth on the night before she was found murdered, on the street with a man and a woman.
Half a century later, the cop could only remember what Elizabeth looked like, not the two other people present.
It was revealed in 2003, notes from the 1949 grand jury report that investigators had wiretapped Hodel's home.
On 19 February 1950, there’s a haunting exchange.
8:25pm. “Woman screamed. Woman screamed again."
Later in the day, Hodel talks to a confidant.
“Realise there was nothing I could do, put a pillow over her head and cover her with a blanket.
Get a taxi.
Expired 12:59.
They thought there was something fishy.
Anyway, now they may have figured it out. Killed her.”
"Supposin' I did kill the Black Dahlia. They couldn't prove it now. They can't talk to my secretary because she's dead."
George Knowlton
In 1991, Janice Knowlton, a woman who was ten years old at the time of Elizabeth's murder, claimed that she witnessed her father, beat Elizabeth to death with a clawhammer in the detached garage of her family's home in Westminster.
In 1995, she also published a book titled Daddy was the Black Dahlia Killer.
In the book she made additional claims that her father sexually molested her.
Janice's stepsister, Jolane Emerson, condemned the book, in 2004.
She deemed it "trash", saying:
"She believed it, but it wasn't reality. I know, because I lived with her father for 16 years."
LAPD homicide detective John P. St. John told the Los Angeles Times that Janice's claims were "not consistent with the facts of the case".
The Man in the Sedan
Ralph Asdel was one of the original detectives on the case.
In 2003, he told the Los Angeles Times that he believed he had interviewed Elizabeth's killer.
He was a man who had been seen with his sedan parked near the vacant lot where Elizabeth's body was discovered.
A neighbor driving by that day stopped to dispose of a bag of lawn clippings in the vacant lot.
He saw a parked sedan, allegedly with its right rear door open.
The driver of the sedan was standing in the lot.
His arrival apparently startled the owner of the sedan.
The man approached his car and peered in the window before returning to the sedan and driving away.
The owner of the sedan was followed to a local restaurant where he worked.
He was ultimately cleared of suspicion.
Connections
Jack Anderson and The Cleveland Torso Murders
Some journalists and law enforcement have speculated a connection between the 1936 Cleveland Torso Murders.
The original LAPD investigators studied the Cleveland murders in 1947.
Then later discounted any relationship between the two cases.
New evidence, in 1980, implicating a former Cleveland torso murder suspect, Jack Anderson Wilson (a.k.a. Arnold Smith), was investigated by Detective John P. St. John in relation to Elizabeth's murder.
The detective claimed he was close to arresting Wilson for Short's murder.
February 4, 1982, Wilson died in a fire.
When profiled on the series Unsolved Mysteries in 1992, Eliot Ness biographerm Oscar Fraley suggested Ness knew the identity of the killer responsible for both cases.
The Murder of Jeanne French
The murder of Jeanne French in February 10, 1947 Los Angeles, was also considered by the media and detectives as possibly being connected to Elizabeth's killing.
French's body was discovered in west Los Angeles on Grand View Boulevard.
She was nude and badly beaten.
Written on her stomach in lipstick was what appeared to say "Fuck You B.D.", and the letters "TEX" below.
The Herald-Express covered the story heavily, and drew comparisons to the Elizabeth's murder less than a month before.
Saying the initials "B.D." to stand for "Black Dahlia".
According to historian Jon Lewis, the scrawling actually read "P.D.", standing for "police department".
Captain Donahoe of the LAPD stated publicly that he believed the Black Dahlia and the Chicago Lipstick Murders were "likely connected".
Suzanne Degnan's Murder
Son of George Hill Hodel, crime author Steve Hodel and fellow crime author William Rasmussen and others, have suggested a link between Elizabeth's murder and the 1946 murder and dismemberment of six-year-old Suzanne Degnan in Chicago, Illinois.
Some evidence is the fact that Elizabeth's body was found on Norton Avenue, three blocks west of Degnan Boulevard, Degnan being the last name of the girl from Chicago.
There were also similarities between the handwriting on the Degnan ransom note and that of "the Black Dahlia Avenger".
Both texts used a combination of capitals and small letters.
Both notes contain a similar misshapen letter P and have one word that matches exactly.
Hector Verburgh, was a janitor in the building where the Degnans lived.
He was originally arrested for her murder.
He was released several days later with no charges and was later awarded $20,000 for false arrest and police brutality in 1948.
Convicted serial killer William Heirens served life in prison for Degnan's murder, along with two others.
He was arrested at 17 for breaking into a residence close to that of Degnan.
He claimed he was tortured by police, forced to confess, and made a scapegoat for Degnan's murder.
He taken from the medical infirmary at the Dixon Correctional Center on February 26, 2012 for health problems.
He died at the University of Illinois Medical Center on March 5, 2012, at age 83.
The murder of Georgette Bauerdorf
She was a socialite who was strangled to death in her West Hollywood home in 1944.
John Gilmore's 1994 book Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder, suggests a possible connection between Elizabeth's murder and the murder of Georgette Bauerdorf.
He suggests that Elizabeth's employment at the Hollywood Canteen, where Bauerdorf also worked as a hostess, could be a connection between the two women.
The claim that Elizabeth ever worked at the Hollywood Canteen has been disputed by those such as Los Angeles Times editor Larry Harnisch.
Leslie Dillion
Leslie was a bellhop who was a former mortician's assistant.
The Black Dahila, Red Rose by Piu Eatwell, a 2017 book , focuses on Leslie Dillon and his associates Mark Hansen and Jeff Connors.
It alleges that Sergeant Finis Brown, one of the lead detectives who had links to Hansen, was corrupt.
The book says that the motive for the killing was that Elizabeth knew too much about the men's involvement in a scheme for robbing hotels.
The book also suggests Elizabeth was killed at the Aster Motel in Los Angeles.
The owners said that on January 15, 1947, they found one of the motel's rooms "covered in blood and fecal matter".
The Los Angeles Examiner had stated in 1949 that LA Police Chief WIlliam A. Worton denied that the Flower Street (Aster) Motel had anything to do with the case.
Eatwell is working on a TV documentary for Peacock Productions.
She has a revised edition of her book due to be released in the Fall of 2018.
Buz Williams, a retired detective with the Long Beach Police Department,in 2000, wrote an article for the LBPD newsletter The Rap Sheet on Elizabeth Short's murder.
Williams' father Richard F. Williams and his friend Con Keller were both members of LA's Gangster Squad investigating the case.
Williams Sr believed that Leslie Dillon was the killer.
He believes that when Dillon returned to his home state of Oklahoma was able to avoid extradition to California because Dillon's relative was the governor of Oklahoma.
An exhaustive investigation and that the LA District Attorney’s files positively placed Dillon in San Francisco when Elizabeth Short was killed.
There were suspects remaining under discussion by various authors and experts.
The suspects included Walter Bayley, Norman Chandler (whom biographer Donald Wolfe claims impregnated Elizabeth),Joseph A. Dumais, Artie Lane (a.k.a. Jeff Connors), Dr. Francis E. Sweeney, George Hill Hodel's friend Fred Sexton, and Patrick S. O'Reilly.
Curious
When the Black Dahlia case struck, Agness Underwood had been with The Herald-Express for twelve years.
An LAPD homicide detective-lieutenant, Ray Giese, pushed Agness in the direction of Elizabeth Short’s case while the LAPD continued to search down leads.
She covered the interview for the first suspect arrested in Elizabeth Short’s murder, Robert M. “Red” Manley.
The following morning, Agness was suddenly taken off the case.
One theory behind why she had been removed from the Black Dahlia case is that she was getting too close to finding out the truth behind Elizabeth Short’s murder.
In 1949 when the Black Dahlia case was still open, the Grand Jury was convened to both investigate Elizabeth Short’s murder and evaluate the possibility of police corruption or cover-up.
With the evidence presented, the 21 jurors named Leslie Dillon as the prime suspect.
Dillon was never indicted.
There was plenty of circumstantial evidence to name him as Elizabeth’s murderer.
Dillon had been illegally detained.
There also had been a lack of concrete evidence.
So he was never brought to trail.
In the event of a trial actually occurring, a few witnesses were willing to come forward.
They were willing to say Dillon was in San Francisco during the time of the murder.
The 1949 Grand Jury said this on the police corruption.
“Deplorable conditions indicating corrupt practices and misconduct by some members of the law enforcement agencies in the county… alarming increase in the number of unsolved murders… jurisdictional disputes and jealousies among law enforcement agencies.”
The Grand Jury, to this day, has never indicted a suspect for the murder of Elizabeth Short.
The Grand Jury findings did bring light police corruption at the highest ranks.
Case information often were not be passed on properly.
The Police Chief Clemence Horrall was dissmissed from the LAPD.
After
The majority of the physical evidence has been lost over the years.
Most of the witnesses are dead, as are the original cops that worked the case.
Elizabeth's whereabouts in the days leading up to her murder and the discovery of her body are unknown.
Her grave his Oakland, California.
Two weeks after Elizabeth's murder, California Republican assemblyman C. Don Field was prompted by the case to introduce a bill calling for the formation of a sex offender registry.
The state of California became the first U.S. state to make the registration of offenders mandatory.
Who do you think killed the Black Dahlia?
i think it was Dillon or Hodel.
Doesn't Hodel look like a product of Groucho Marks and Shia lebouf?
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