The Black Dahlia

On the morning of January 15, 1947, a young mother named Betty Bersinger was walking with her three-year-old daughter along a quiet street in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, on their way to a shoe repair shop.

As they passed a vacant lot overgrown with weeds, she saw something pale lying in the grass, a few feet from the sidewalk. At first she thought it was a discarded store mannequin.

It wasn’t. It was the body of a young woman. She had been murdered and her body left there, in plain sight, in a residential neighborhood, sometime during the night.

The young woman’s name was Elizabeth Short. She was twenty-two years old. Within days, the newspapers had given her another name, one that would follow her for the rest of history: the Black Dahlia.

Elizabeth

Elizabeth Short was born in Boston in 1924 and grew up in Medford, Massachusetts, a working-class suburb. Her father abandoned the family during the Depression, faking his own death, and her mother raised five daughters alone. Elizabeth suffered from asthma and other health problems as a child. She was a dreamer. She loved the movies, and she wanted to be an actress.

As a young woman, she moved around: to Florida, to California, back to Massachusetts, back to California. She worked as a waitress and a cashier. She stayed with friends, in boarding houses, in cheap hotels. She had boyfriends, some of them servicemen. During World War II, she fell in love with an Army Air Forces pilot who was killed in a plane crash in 1945 before they could marry.

In 1946, she arrived in Los Angeles, hoping to break into the movies. She never did. She drifted from place to place, often without money, relying on the kindness of friends and acquaintances.

The Last Days

In early January 1947, Elizabeth was in San Diego. On January 8, a young salesman named Robert “Red” Manley, whom she had met there, drove her back to Los Angeles. On the evening of January 9, he dropped her off at the Biltmore Hotel downtown. She told him she was meeting her sister, who was visiting from Boston.

Her sister was not in Los Angeles.

Staff at the Biltmore later remembered seeing her in the lobby, making phone calls. She then walked out into the night.

What happened to Elizabeth Short over the next six days is unknown. No one has ever been able to account for her whereabouts. Some people later claimed to have seen her at bars and hotels around Los Angeles during that time, but none of those sightings was ever confirmed.

On the morning of January 15, she was found in the vacant lot on Norton Avenue.

The Crime

Elizabeth had been tortured and killed in a horrific way, and her body had been posed in the lot. I’m not going to describe the details here. They have been described, in gruesome and often exploitative detail, in countless books, articles, websites and films over the years. They are terrible, and they say far more about the person who did this than about the young woman to whom it was done.

The killing shocked Los Angeles and the nation.

The Press

What happened next was, in its own way, almost as disturbing.

The Los Angeles newspapers of 1947 were locked in a fierce competition for readers, and the murder of a young, beautiful aspiring actress was exactly the kind of story they wanted. Reporters swarmed the case, sometimes reaching witnesses and evidence before the police did. They dug into Elizabeth’s life and portrayed her, often falsely, as a party girl, a prostitute, or a femme fatale.

They gave her a nickname. According to the story, she was called “the Black Dahlia” by men at a drugstore in Long Beach, a play on the title of a popular film noir released the year before, The Blue Dahlia, and on her habit of wearing black and her dark hair. Whether or not anyone actually called her that when she was alive, the press seized on it. It made her sound glamorous and mysterious. It sold papers.

The Package

About a week after the murder, someone mailed a package to the Los Angeles Examiner. Inside were some of Elizabeth’s belongings: her birth certificate, her address book, photographs and other papers. The package had been wiped with gasoline, apparently to remove fingerprints. A message made of words cut from newspapers was pasted on the outside.

Over the following weeks, more letters arrived, some claiming to be from the killer. Investigators believed some were genuine; many were hoaxes. Dozens of people confessed to the murder — men and women, many of them clearly disturbed or seeking attention. None of their confessions held up.

The Suspects

Over the decades, investigators and amateur detectives have named more than a hundred possible suspects in the Black Dahlia murder.

Some were men Elizabeth had known. Some were doctors, because investigators at the time believed the killer had medical knowledge. Some were people who had nothing to do with the case at all, but who fit someone’s theory.

One of the most widely discussed theories was put forward in 2003 by a former Los Angeles police detective, Steve Hodel, who claimed that his own late father, a prominent Los Angeles physician named George Hodel, was the killer. He pointed to evidence including a 1950 police surveillance recording of George Hodel, in which Hodel made remarks that some interpreted as suspicious. George Hodel had been investigated at the time, but never charged. Steve Hodel’s theory has many supporters, and many skeptics.

The case has never been officially solved.

Elizabeth

The Black Dahlia has become a legend — the subject of novels, movies and endless speculation. But I think the legend has buried the real person.

Elizabeth Short was a young woman from a hard background who wanted something more from life, and who came to Los Angeles with a dream. She didn’t get it. She was murdered by someone who has never been held accountable, and then her life was rewritten by people who never knew her.

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