The Black Dahlia is about the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles, California in 1947. The case became highly publicized and known due to the gruesome nature of the crime, and is even considered one of the most famous unsolved murders in U.S history. The details surrounding her death have had a long-lasting cultural intrigue, with multiple various theories and public speculation, which in turn, has caused her story to be the basis of many books and films over the years.
Please be warned some of this story could be considered gruesome with some details that might be disturbing or triggering. This story contains the following graphic content: mention of a real crime with a real victim; mention of the death, mutilation, and dismemberment of the deceased; mention of suicide; mention of rape and sexual abuse; and detailed description of victim injuries. If any of the above could trigger you, please don't read any further.
Life of Elizabeth Short
Elizabeth Short was born on July 29, 1924 in the Hyde Park section of Boston, Massachusetts to Cleo Alvin Short Jr. and Phoebe May Sawyer. She was the third out of five daughters. Her sisters were Virginia May West (1920), Dorothea Schloesser (1922), Elnora Chalmers (1925), and Muriel (1929). Elizabeth's father was a US Navy sailor who was born in Gloucester, Virginia in 1885. Her mother was a housewife born in 1897 in Milbridge, Maine. Cleo and Phoebe married in Portland, Cumberland in 1918.
The Short family had briefly moved to Portland, Maine in 1927, before they ended up settling in the suburb of Medford, Massachusetts that same year. Elizabeth's father had the interesting job of building miniature golf courses until he lost most of his saving in the 1929 stock market crash, also known as the Great Crash or the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Things unfortunately did not get any better, and in 1930 his vehicle was found abandoned by the Charleston Bridge where it was assumed he had committed suicide and jumped into the Charles River. Due to this belief that he killed himself, Phoebe, Short's mother, began working as a bookkeeper to support the family. If that wasn't hard enough, Short ended up having to get lung surgery at the age of fifteen due to severe asthma attacks and bronchitis issues. Doctors suggested that Elizabeth should periodically relocate to a milder climate to prevent further respiratory complications, so her mother send her to spend winters with family friends that lived in Miami, Florida for the next three years.
Life still didn't seem to be going well for Elizabeth and her family and she ended up dropping out of school at the end of her sophomore year at Medford High School in Massachusetts in June of 1940.
Then in late 1942, Short's mother received a letter in the mail from her presumed-dead husband apologizing because he was in fact alive and had started a new life in California. After Elizabeth turned eighteen, she moved to Vallejo, California in December to live with her father. Mind you she had not seen him since she was six years old. Her father was working at a nearby Mare Island Naval Shipyard in San Francisco Bay during this time. But arguments between the pair led to Short to decide to move out in January of 1943. Short then found a job at the Base Exchange at Camp Cooke, now known as the Vandenberg Space Force Base, near Lompoc and reportedly lived with an abusive U.S Army Air Force sergeant for a brief period until she left in mid 1943 and moved to Santa Barbara. It was there that she was arrested for underage drinking at a local bar on September 23, 1943. The juvenile authorities ended up sending her back to Massachusetts but she instead returned to Florida, making occasional visits to her family that lived near Boston.
While living in Florida, Elizabeth then met Major Matthew Michael Gordon Jr, who not only had one heck of a name but also was a decorated Army Air Force officer of the 2nd Air Commando Group. This group was training for deployment to Southeast Asian theater of World War II, and Short later told her friends that Gordon had written to propose marriage while he was recovering from injuries he sustained from a plane crash in India. She accepted his offer, but once again bad luck followed poor Elizabeth and on August 10, 1945 Gordon died in a second crash. Fun fact Dorothea, Short's older sister, also served in World War II and was assigned to decode Japanese messages.
In July of 1946, Elizabeth decided to relocate to Los Angeles to visit her acquaintance from Florida, Army Air Force Lieutenant Joseph Gordon Fickling, who was stationed at the Naval Reserve Air Base in Long Beach, California. She spent her last six months of life mostly around the Los Angeles area, and shortly before her death she had been working as a waitress. She also rented out a room behind the Florentine Gardens nightclub on Hollywood Boulevard. She'd been variously described as an aspiring or 'wanna-be' actress, though she had no known acting jobs or credits.
The Murder
On January 9th, 1946, Elizabeth returned to her home in Los Angeles after a short trip to San Diego with Robert Manley, known as Red, who was a 25 year old married salesman. I mention married because apparently Elizabeth had been dating Robert, and he reportedly dropped her off at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles where she was meeting her sister, who was visiting from Boston. By some accounts, the staff at the Biltmore recalled seeing Short use the lobby telephone and then shortly after seen by patrons of the Crown Grill Cocktail Lounge at 754 South Olive Street, which was about 3/8 mile or six hundred meters away from the Biltmore Hotel.
In the morning of January 15th, 1947, Elizabeth's naked body, which was also severed into two pieces, was found in the vacant lot on the west side of South Norton Avenue by a mother taking a walk with her child. This lot was a midway point between Coliseum Street and West 39th Street in the neighborhood of Leimert Park, which at this time the park was largely undeveloped. At first glance the mother reportedly though it was a mannequin with how the body was posed. Elizabeth's body was severely mutilated and completely severed at the waist and drained of blood, which left her skin ghostly white. Medical examiners determined that she had been dead for around ten hours prior to the discovery of her body. This left her time of death for either sometime during the evening of January 14th or the early morning hours of January 15th. Her body had apparently been washed by the killer and Short's face had been slashed from the corners of her mouth all the way to her ears, creating an effect known as the "Glasgow smile". That sadly wasn't all, she also had several cuts to her thigh and breasts, where entire portions of flesh had been sliced away. She was positioned so that her lower half of her body was a foot away from her upper half, and her intestines had been tucked neatly beneath her buttocks. The corpse had obviously been posed, with her hands positioned over her head, her elbows bent at right angles, and her legs spread apart. Despite all the extensive cuts and mutilations of the body, there was not a drop of blood found at the scene which indicated that the victim had been murdered elsewhere.
Aggie Underwood, a reporter from the Los Angeles Herald-Express, was among the first to arrive on the scene and took several photos of the corpse and crime scene. Near the body of the victim, detectives found a heel print amid the tire tracks on the ground, and a cement sack containing watery blood was also found near by the scene.
The autopsy of Short's body was performed by Frederick Newbarr on January 16th, 1947 in the Los Angeles County coroner. Newbarr's autopsy report stated that Short was five feet and five inches tall and weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds. She had light blue eyes, brown hair, and badly decayed teeth, as well as ligature marks on her ankles, wrists and neck. She had an "irregular laceration with superficial tissue loss" on her right breast, and superficial lacerations on her right forearm, left upper arm, and the lower left side of the chest. If that wasn't aweful enough, she had been completely cut in half by a technique taught in the 1930s called hemicorporectomy. The lower half of her body had been removed by transecting the lumbar spine between the second and third lumbar vertebrae, thus severing the intestine at the duodenum, which is the first section of small intestine.
The report noted very little ecchymosis aka bruising along the incision line, suggesting that this was performed after the victim was already deceased. Another "gapping laceration" that measured four and one fourth inches (110 millimeters) long ran longitudinally from the navel to below the stomach. The lacerations on each side of her face that extended from the corners of the lips, measured three inches (75 millimeters) on the right side of the face and two and a half inches (65 millimeters) on the left side. The skull was not fractured, but there was bruising that was noted on the front and right side of her scalp. With a small amount of bleeding in the subarachnoid space on the right side of her scalp,
it was consistent with blows to the head. The official cause of death was determined to be hemorrhaging from the lacerations to Short's face, and the shock from the blows to the head and the face. Newbarr also noted that there was evidence that suggested that Short might have been raped. Samples were taken and tested for the presence of sperm but the results came back negative, which doesn't mean that she wasn't sexual assalted.
Short was identified after her fingerprints were sent to the FBI and because of her 1943 arrest her fingerprints were on file. Immediately following the identification, reporters from William Randolph Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner contacted her mother, Phoebe, in Boston and told her that her daughter had won a beauty contest. It was only after prying as much personal information as they could that the reporters came clean and revealed that her daughter had actually been murdered. Just a horrid way to find out that your daughter was dead. The Examiner also offered to pay Phoebe's airfare and accommodations if she'd come to help the police with their investigation, yet it was another ploy because the newspaper actually kept her away from the police and other reporters to protect its own scoop of the story. The Examiner and another newspaper called the Herald-Express, later sensationalized the case and even went as far as releasing an article about the black tailored suit that Short was last seen wearing before being murdered. They described it as a "tight skirt and sheer blouse" and the media ended up nicknaming her the "Black Dahlia". They also describe Short as being an "adventuress" girl who would "prowl Hollywood Boulevard". Some went even further like one publishing in the Los Angeles Times on January 17th where they deemed the murder a "sex fiend slaying".
Investigation
On January 21st, 1947, a person who claimed to be Short's killer placed a phone call to the office of James Richardson who was the editor of the Examiner. They congratulated Richardson on the newspaper's coverage of the murder and even stated that he planned on turning himself eventually. To kick it up even more, the caller told Richardson to "expect some souvenirs of Short in the mail". Only a few days later on January 24th, a suspicious manila envelope was discovered and it was addressed to the "The Los Angeles Examiner and other newspapers in the city". This was all spelt out with individual words that'd been cut from newspaper clippings and pasted to spell out the message. In addition, a large message on the face of the envelope read: "Here is Dahlia's belongings, letter to follow". In the envelope it contained not only Short's birth certificate, but also business cards, photographs, names written on pieces of paper, and an address book with the name Mark Hansen embossed on the cover. The packet had been carefully cleaned with gasoline, similarly to Short's body, which led the police to suspect that the packet had been sent by Short's murder. Despite the efforts to clean the packet, police were able to lift several partial fingerprints from the envelope. They were sent to the FBI for testing, but the prints were compromised in transit and couldn't be properly analyzed. The killer didn't stop there though, the same day the packet was received, a handbag and a black suede shoe were reported to be seen on top of a garbage can in an alley a short distance away from Norton Ave, which was two miles (three kilometers) from the crime scene. Unfortunately, the items had also been wiped clean with gasoline and there were no fingerprints found.
On March 14th, a suspected suicide note was scrawled in pencil on a small piece of paper that was found tucked inside a shoe in a pile of men's clothing left by the ocean's edge at the foot of Breeze Ave in Venice Beach. The clothes included a coat, trousers made of blue herringbone tweed, a brown and white tshirt, white jockey shorts, tan socks and tan leisure moccasin shoes that were about a size eight. Now you might be wondering why a suicide note found with a bunch of clothes would be connected to the murder of Short, well this case just keeps getting more and more mysterious and mind boggling because the suicide note read: "To whom it may concern: I have waited for the police to capture me for the Black Dahlia killing, but have not. I am too much of a coward to turn myself in, so this is the best way out for me. I couldn't help myself for that, or this. Sorry, Mary." The pile of belongings was first seen by a beach caretaker, who in turn reported the discovery to lifeguard captain John Dillon. Dillon then immediately notified Captain L. E. Christensen of the West Los Angeles police station. After looking over the clothes, it was determined that they wouldn't be able to identify the owner with only these items.
Since the police didn't have much to go on and they kept hitting dead ends, they were quick to deem Mark Hansen, the owner of the address book found in the packet, a suspect in the murder. Hansen was a wealthy local nightclub and theater owner, and even was an acquaintance of the home owner where Short had stayed with friends. According to some sources, Hansen himself had confirmed that the purse and shoe discovered in the alley belonged to Short. One of Short's friends and roommates, Ann Toth, told the investigators that Elizabeth had recently rejected the sexual advances from Hansen, and suggested that this could be a potential motive for him to kill her. However, Hansen was cleared of suspicion in the case. In addition, the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) interviewed over a hundred and fifty men in the ensuing weeks of the murder, all of whom they believed to be potential suspects. Manley had been one of the last people to see Short alive was investigated, but ended up cleared of suspicion after passing numerous polygraph examinations. The LAPD even interviewed several of the people that were listed in Hansen's address book, which included Martin Lewis who was an acquaintance of Short's. Once again, every lead they got turned sour, and Lewis was able to provide an alibi, which was that he had been in Portland, Oregon visiting his dying father-in-law for the date of Short's murder.
Overall, a total of seven hundred and fifty investigators from the LAPD and other departments ended up working on the case during its initial stages, which included four hundred sheriff's deputies and two hundred and fifty California State Patrol officers. Many various locations were searched for potential evidence, including storm drains throughout Los Angeles, abandoned structures and other sites along the Los Angeles River, but all the searches came up blank and no further evidence was found. Lloyd G. Davis, the city councilman, even posted a ten thousand dollar reward, which would be equivalent to over a hundred thousand dollars today, for information leading police to the killer. Of course, after the reward was announced various people came forward with confessions, which most ended up dismissing as false. Some were so bad that several of the false confessors ended up getting charges with obstruction of justice.
On January 26th, another letter was received by the Examiner, this time handwritten. The letter said: "Here it is. Turning in Wednesday, January 29th at 10:00am. Had my fun at police. Black Dahlia Avenger". The letter also named a location at which the supposed killer would turn himself in. Police waited at the location but the alleged killer never appeared. Instead, at 1:00pm, the Examiner offices received yet another cut-and-pasted letter, which read: "Have changed my mind. You would not give me a square deal. Dahlia killing was justified". This just left investigators more baffled. Obviously with these new letters, it also seemed less likely that the suicide note left was actually a suicide since the killer was still alive to send more letters. Because of all of this and the graphic nature of the crime, a media circus surrounded Short's entire murder case. Both local and national publications were covering the story very heavily, and many started reprinting sensationalistic reports suggesting that Short had been tortured for hours prior to her death, which of course was untrue. However, the police allowed the reports to circulate in hopes to conceal Short's true cause of death, which was a cerebral hemorrhage, from the public.
Further reports also started going into her personal life and details about her alleged declining of Hansen's sexual advances were publicized. An acquaintance of Short's, who happened to also be a stripper, told police that Short liked to "get guys worked up over her and then leave them hanging dry". This lead to police and some reporters to look into if Short was possibly a lesbian. They started questioning employees and patrons of gay bars in the city, but this claim ended up remaining unsubstantial. The Herald-Express also received several letters from the supposed killer, which again were all made with cut-and-paste clippings. One of these letters read: "I will give up on Dahlia killing if I get ten years. Don't try to find me". Now to me, this guy is just continuously messing with the cops like he's enjoying leading them on meaningless trails, and the police don't seem to buy into what he's saying. Because of this, sadly, Short's case just ended up with no more leads for investigators to follow. On February 1st, the Los Angeles Daily News reported that the entire case had hit a dead end with no new leads for the police to pursue. The Examiner, however, continued running stories on the murder and the investigation, which was front page news for thirty five days following the discovery of Short's body.
The lead investigator for the case, Captain Jack Donahue, when interviewed told the press that he believed that the murder had taken place in a remote building or shack on the outskirts of the city, and that her body had then been transported into the city were it was disposed of. Based on the precise lacerations of dissection of the victim, the LAPD concluded that the murderer probably had a medical background like a surgeon doctor or other person who would have medical knowledge. In mid February 1947, the LAPD served a warrant to the University of Southern California Medical School, which was located close to the site where Short's body had been found. The police requested a complete list of the program's students and the university agreed as long as the students' identities remained private. The LAPD ran background checks on all students on the list given but it yielded no results, so once again another dead end to this mystery.
By the spring of 1947, Short's murder had officially become a cold case with few leads. Sergeant Finis Brown, who was one of the lead detectives on the case, blamed the press for compromising the investigation through journalists probing for details and reporting unverified information. In September of 1949, a grand jury met to discuss the inadequacies in the LAPD's homicide unit based on their failure to solve numerous murders, especially those of women and children, in the last few years. Short's being one of them, and the most publicized. In the aftermath of the discussion, further investigation was done on Short's past and detectives traced her previous movements between Massachusetts, California and Florida. During this, they also interviewed people who knew Short in Texas and New Orleans. Luck still wasn't on their side though and the interviews yielded no useful information. The driver was followed to a local restaurant where it was later learned that he worked there and ultimately was cleared of suspicion.
Suspects
During the initial investigation, police received a total of sixty confessions with most if them being from men and since then there has been over five hundred people in total that have confessed to the crime, some of whom hadn't even been born yet at the time of the murder. In 2003, Ralph Asdel, one of the original detectives on the case, told the Times that he believed he had interviewed the killer and that it was a man who had been seen with his sedan parked near the vacant lot where Short's body had been found. The sedan had previously been reported when a neighbor driving by that day to dispose of lawn clippings saw the sedan parked with its rear door open, and the driver of the sedan was standing in the lot. This neighbors appearance then reportedly startled the driver, who then peered into the window before returning to the sedan and driving away.
Suspects that remain under discussion by various authors, experts and investigators include: Walter Bayley, a doctor that was proposed by the former Times publisher Norman Chandler, whom biographer Donald Wolfe claims impregnated Short; Leslie Dillon; Joseph A. Dumais; Artie Lane, aka Jeff Connors; Mark Hansen; Francis E. Sweeney; Woody Guthrie; Bugsy Siegel; Orson Welles; George Hodel and/or Hodel's friend Fred Sexton; George Knowlton; Robert M. "Red" Manley; Patrick S. O'Reilly; and Jack Anderson Wilson. So quiet the collection of suspects and with no new evidence investigators have been unable to narrow the list down more.
Although he was never formally charged in the crime, George Hodel came to wider attention after his death in 1999 when he was accused by his son, who was LAPD homicide detective Steve Hodel, of killing Short and committing several other murders. Prior to Short's murder, George was the suspect in the death of his secretary, Ruth Spaulding. He was never charged but he was also accused of raping his own daughter, Tamar, but got acquitted. Hodel even went as far as fleeing the county several times and lived in the Philippines between 1950 and 1990. If that was damning enough, his son also cited that his father's training as a surgeon as circumstantial evidence. In 2003, it was reveled in notes from the 1949 grand jury report that investigators had wiretapped Hodel's home and obtained recorded conversations of him with an unidentified visitor, saying "Supposin' I did kill the Black Dahlia. They couldn't prove it now. They can't talk to my secretary because she's dead. They though there was something fishy. Anyway, now they may have figured it out. Killed her. Maybe I did kill secretary."
In 1991, Janice Knowlton, who was ten years old at the time of Short's murder, claimed that she witnessed her father, George Knowlton, beat Short to death with a claw hammer in the detached garage of her family's home in Westminster. She even published a book in 1995 called Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer, where she made additional claims that her father had sexually molested her. But her book was condemned as 'complete trash' by her stepsister, Jolane Emerson, who stated that, "Janice believed it, but it wasn't reality. I know, because I lived with her father for sixteen years." To add to the doubt of Janice's claims, Detective St. John told the Times that Knowlton's claims were not consistent with the facts of the case.
In 2017, a novel Black Dahlia, Red Rose by Piu Eatwell was published and focuses on Leslie Dillon, who was a bellhop and also a former mortician's assistant. He was also associates with Mark Hansen and Jeff Connors, and Sergeant Finis Brown, who was a lead detective who had links to Hansen and was allegedly corrupt. Eatwell posits that Short was murdered because she knew too much about the men's involvement in a scheme for robbing hotels. She further suggests that Short was killed at the Aster Motel in Los Angeles, where the owners reported finding one of their rooms covered in blood and fecal matter on the morning that Short's body was found. The Examiner stated in 1949 that LAPD chief William A. Worton denied that the Aster Motel had anything to do with the case but the papers rival, the Los Angeles Herald, had claimed that the murder took place there.
In 2000, Buz Williams, a retired detective with the Long Beach Police Department, wrote an article for the LBPD newsletter The Rap Sheet on Short's murder. Buz's father, Richard F. Williams, and his friend, Con Keller, were both members of the LAPD's Gangster Squad that were investigating the case. William's father believed that Dillion was the killer and that when he returned to his home state of Oklahoma, he was able to avoid extradition to California because his ex-wife Georgia Stevenson was second cousins with Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson II, who contacted the governor of Oklahoma on Dillion's behalf. However, Keller believed that the killer was Hansen since he studied at a surgical school in Sweden and had thrown elaborate parties attended by prominent LAPD officials. William's article stated that Dillion sued the LAPD for three million dollars but the suit was dropped. Harnisch disputes this, claiming that Dillion was cleared by police after an exhaustive investigation, and that the district attorney's files positively placed him in San Francisco when Short was killed. Harnisch claims that there was no LAPD cover-up and that Dillion did in fact receive a financial settlement from the City of Los Angeles, but there is not concrete evidence to prove this.
Theories
The Torso Murders - Since Short's murder was so widely publicized, people have been trying to solve the mystery of the unsolved murder for years. Several crime authors, including police detective Peter Merylo, have suspected a link between the Short murder and the Cleveland Torso Murders which took place in Cleveland between 1934 and 1938. As part of their investigation into the other murders that took place before and after Short murder, the original investigators that studied the Torso Murders later discounted any connection between the two cases. But in 1980, new evidence implicating a former Torso Murder suspect, Jack Anderson Wilson was investigated by Detective St. John in relation to Short's murder. He claimed he was close to arresting Wilson for Short's murder but Wilson then died in a fire in 1982. The possible connection to the Torso Murders received renewed media attention when it was profiled on the NBC series Unsolved Mysteries in 1992, where Eliot Ness biographer Oscar Fraley suggested that Ness knew the identity of the killer that was responsible for both cases.
The Lipstick Murders - Crimes authors, like Steve Hodel and William Rasmussen have suggested a link between the Short murder and the 1946 murder and dismemberment of six year old Suzanne Degnan in Chicago, Illinois. Captain Donahoe of the LAPD stated publicly that he believed the two murders were "likely connected". Among the evidence of this connection was cited the fact that Short's body was found on Norton Avenue which was three blocks west of Degnan Boulevard, and Degnan being the last name of the girl from Chicago. There was also strikingly similarities of the handwriting from both cases, the ransom letter and letter to the newspaper. Both texts used a combination of capitals and small letters and they even contained the same misshaped letter P. The convicted serial killer for Degnan's murder was William Heirens and he was sentenced to serve life in prison. He was initially arrested at seventeen for breaking into a residence close to Degnan's and he also claims that he was tortured, forced to confess and made a scapegoat for the murder by the police. On February 26th, 2012, he was brought to the medical infirmary at the Dixon Correctional Center for health problems and later died at the University of Illinois Medical Center on March 5th, 2012.
Lone Woman Murders - From 1943 to 1949, within Los Angeles over a dozen unsolved murders occurred, one of the more widely known ones being of Elizabeth Short. Authorities at the time suspected that they were working with a singular unidentified serial killer. In 1949, the Los Angeles County Grand Jury was tasked with the investigation into the failure of law enforcement to solve the cases. As a result, further investigating was done but unfortunately none of the murders were solved.
Today
Elizabeth Short is buried at the Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California. Once her younger sister, Elnora, grew up and got married, their mother, Phoebe, moved to Oakland to be closer to her daughter's grave. She moved back to the East Coast in the 1970s and lived there into her 90s until her death in 1992.
Short's murder has been described as one of the most brutal and culturally enduring crimes in American history. The Time magazine listed her murder as one of the most infamous unsolved cases in the world. Short's life has also been the basis of numerous books, television shows ,and films, including fictionalized and non-fictional.
Interesting Facts
On February 2nd, 1947 just two weeks after Short had been murdered, Republican state assemblyman C. Don Field was prompted by the case, thus introduced a bill that called for the formation of a sex offender registry. This made California the first U.S. state to make the registration of sex offenders mandatory.
The nickname "Black Dahlia" that the media gave Short is believed to have been influenced from the film noir murder mystery called The Blue Dahlia that came out in 1946 with the media changing it to "Black Dahlia" due to Short's jet black hair and penchant for dark attire.
Short's identity was determined in approximately fifty-six minutes with help from an early fax machine by sending fingerprints via the newspaper's "Soundphoto" to an office in Washington, D.C by an editor at the Examiner.
References:
'The Murder Files: History's Greatest Secrets Revealed' by Sam Pilger, 2021
https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2006/october/dahlia_102006
