The Black Dahlia: The Real Story of Elizabeth Short, Without the Myths

On the morning of January 15, 1947, a woman walking with her young daughter along a quiet street in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles saw something pale lying in the weeds of a vacant lot.

At first, she thought it was a store mannequin.

It was the body of a young woman.

Within days, she would be the most famous murder victim in America. The newspapers gave her a nickname that has outlived almost everyone involved: the Black Dahlia.

Her real name was Elizabeth Short. She was twenty-two years old.

Hundreds of people have confessed to killing her. Nobody was ever charged. And much of what most people "know" about her was invented by reporters.

This is her real story.

Who was Elizabeth Short?

Elizabeth Short was born on July 29, 1924, in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. She was the third of five daughters.

Her father, Cleo Short, was a veteran of the U.S. Navy. In 1930, during the Great Depression, his car was found abandoned on a bridge in Charlestown. Everyone assumed he had taken his own life by jumping into the river.

He hadn't. In 1942, the family learned he was alive, and living in California.

Elizabeth grew up in Medford, Massachusetts, with her mother, Phoebe. She had lung problems as a teenager and had surgery at fifteen. To help her health, she spent three winters in Miami, Florida. She dropped out of high school in her sophomore year.

In December 1942, at eighteen, she moved to California to live with her father. It did not last long. Within a month, she had moved out. She got a job at a military base exchange near Lompoc.

In 1943, she was arrested in Santa Barbara for drinking in a bar while underage. Her fingerprints were taken. That small detail would matter four years later.

She went back east. In Florida, she became close to an Army Air Force officer. In August 1945, he was killed in a plane crash.

In July 1946, she came back to Los Angeles. She spent the last six months of her life in Southern California, working as a waitress and renting a room behind a Hollywood nightclub.

She is often described as an aspiring actress. There is no record of her ever getting an acting job.

The last sighting

In early January 1947, Elizabeth was in San Diego. A twenty-five-year-old salesman she had been dating drove her back to Los Angeles.

According to him, on January 9, he dropped her off at the Biltmore Hotel downtown. He said she told him she was meeting her sister, who was visiting from Boston.

Some accounts say hotel staff later remembered seeing her use the phones in the lobby, and that people at a nearby cocktail lounge saw her. But those sightings are disputed, and a 1997 newspaper investigation questioned whether the Biltmore story was even part of the original news coverage.

The salesman was investigated. He passed multiple lie detector tests and was cleared.

After January 9, there is no confirmed record of where Elizabeth Short was for six days.

January 15, 1947

Her body was found on the morning of January 15, in a vacant lot on the west side of South Norton Avenue, in Leimert Park. In 1947, that area was still mostly undeveloped.

Reporters arrived at the scene very quickly. Some of them got there before the police had control of it.

The details of what had been done to her were horrific, and we are not going to describe them in full. What matters for understanding the investigation is this. Her body had been cut in half at the waist. It had been drained of blood and washed. And it had been carefully placed in the lot, which meant she had been killed somewhere else and brought there.

Medical examiners estimated she had died about ten hours before she was found.

The autopsy, the next day, found that she died from blood loss from wounds to her face, and shock from blows to her head. There were marks on her wrists, ankles and neck where she had been tied.

Her fingerprints were sent to the FBI. They matched the prints taken during her underage drinking arrest in 1943. That is how police learned her name.

The newspapers

What happened next is one of the ugliest chapters in the history of American journalism.

On the day Elizabeth was identified, reporters from the Los Angeles Examiner called her mother, Phoebe, in Boston. A reporter told her that her daughter had won a beauty contest. He kept her on the phone, gathering personal details. Only then did he tell her that her daughter had been murdered.

The Examiner then offered to fly her mother to Los Angeles. It was a way to keep her away from the police and from rival newspapers.

The nickname, "the Black Dahlia," spread fast. The papers said she had been called that at a Long Beach drugstore, as a play on a movie from 1946 called The Blue Dahlia, and because she liked to wear black. Investigators for the district attorney later reported that the nickname may have been invented by reporters. Before that, some papers had called it the "Werewolf Murder."

Newspapers printed rumors as facts. They described her as a party girl and worse. Some of the details they reported, including claims of torture, were false. The police actually let some false details circulate on purpose, to hide what they knew about the real cause of death.

The story sold enormous numbers of papers.

The packet

Then the killer appears to have joined the story.

On January 21, someone phoned the editor of the Examiner. The caller congratulated him on the paper's coverage of the case, and told him to expect "souvenirs" of Elizabeth in the mail.

Three days later, on January 24, a manila envelope arrived. It was addressed to the Examiner and other Los Angeles papers. Pasted on the front were words cut from newspapers, saying, in effect, that here were the Dahlia's belongings, and a letter would follow.

Inside were Elizabeth's birth certificate, business cards, photographs, names written on pieces of paper, and an address book.

The envelope and its contents had been wiped with gasoline. Investigators lifted some partial fingerprints, but they were damaged in transit and could not be used.

That same day, a handbag and a black suede shoe were found on top of a garbage can in an alley, about two miles from where the body had been found. They had also been wiped with gasoline.

The letters

More letters followed.

On January 26, a handwritten letter said the writer would turn himself in on January 29, at ten in the morning, at a location he named.

Police waited. Nobody came.

That afternoon, a letter made of cut-and-pasted words arrived saying the writer had changed his mind.

There were other notes over the following weeks. Some police believed were genuine. Many were clearly not.

Hundreds of confessions

The investigation was enormous. In its early stages, about seven hundred and fifty investigators from the Los Angeles Police Department and other agencies worked on the case. More than a hundred and fifty men were questioned as possible suspects in the first few weeks.

Police searched storm drains, abandoned buildings and the banks of the Los Angeles River. Because of the nature of the wounds, they wondered if the killer had medical training, and asked for a list of medical students. It went nowhere.

And then there were the confessions. In the early investigation alone, police received about sixty. Over the years, more than five hundred people have claimed to have killed Elizabeth Short. Almost all of them were dismissed. One detective said it was amazing how many people offered up a relative as the killer.

By the spring of 1947, the case had gone cold.

In 1949, a grand jury looked into failures by the Los Angeles police to solve a series of murders of women and children. Elizabeth's case was one of them. Detectives retraced her life across Massachusetts, Florida and California, and interviewed people as far away as Texas and New Orleans. They found nothing new.

Who she really was

Over the decades, many books have claimed to solve the case, each naming a different suspect. None of those theories has ever been proven. The case remains officially unsolved.

What gets lost in all of it is Elizabeth Short herself.

She was a young woman who had lost her father, then found out he was alive. Who had been sick as a teenager. Who had lost a man she cared about to a plane crash. Who came to Los Angeles, like thousands of young people did after the war, to try to make a life. She was not a movie star. She was not the character the newspapers invented.

Her mother, Phoebe, moved to Oakland, California, to be near her daughter's grave. She later returned east. She died in 1992.

Elizabeth Short is buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland.

What we still don't know

Nearly eighty years later, the murder of Elizabeth Short is one of the most famous unsolved crimes in American history.

We know where she was found. We know how she died. We know someone mailed her belongings to a newspaper and wiped them with gasoline. We know that hundreds of people confessed.

We do not know where she was for six days in January 1947. We do not know where she was killed. And we do not know who did it.

What do you think happened to Elizabeth Short? And how much of her story do you think was lost to the headlines?