Elizabeth Short, known posthumously as the "Black Dahlia", was an American woman who was found murdered in the Leimert Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles, California. Her case became highly publicised due to the graphic nature of the crime, which included her corpse having been mutilated and bisected at the waist.
On January 9, 1947, Short returned to her home in Los Angeles after a brief trip to San Diego with Robert "Red" Manley, a 25-year-old married salesman she had been dating. Manley stated that he dropped Short off at the Biltmore Hotel located at 506 South Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, and that Short was to meet her sister, who was visiting from Boston, that afternoon. By some accounts, staff of the Biltmore recalled having seen Short using the lobby telephone. Shortly after, she was allegedly seen by patrons of the Crown Grill Cocktail Lounge at 754 South Olive Street, approximately 0.64 km away from the Biltmore Hotel.
On the morning of January 15, 1947, Short's naked body was found severed into two pieces 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. At the time, the neighbourhood was largely undeveloped. Local resident Betty Bersinger discovered the body at approximately 10 a.m. while walking with her three-year-old daughter. Bersinger initially thought she had found a discarded store mannequin. When she realised it was a corpse, she rushed to a nearby house and telephoned the police.
Short's severely mutilated body was completely severed at the waist and drained of blood, leaving her skin a pallid white. Medical examiners determined that she had been dead for around ten hours prior to the discovery, leaving her time of death either sometime during the evening of January 14, or the early morning hours of January 15. The body had apparently been washed by the killer. Near the body, detectives located a heel print on the ground amid the tire tracks, and a cement sack containing watery blood was also found nearby.
Short was identified after her fingerprints were sent to the FBI via Soundphoto, a device which transmitted images by telephone and was normally used for news photographs; Short's fingerprints were on file from a 1943 arrest.
The Los Angeles Examiner contacted her mother, Phoebe Short, 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 from Phoebe that the reporters revealed that her daughter had in fact been murdered. The newspaper offered to pay her airfare and accommodations if she would travel to Los Angeles to help with the police investigation. That was yet another ploy since the newspaper kept her away from police and other reporters to protect its scoop.
The Examiner and another Hearst newspaper, the Los Angeles Herald-Express, later sensationalised the case, with one article from the Examiner describing the black tailored suit Short was last seen wearing as "a tight skirt and a sheer blouse".The media nicknamed her as the "Black Dahlia" and described her as an "adventuress" who "prowled Hollywood Boulevard". Additional newspaper reports, such as one published in the Los Angeles Times on January 17, deemed the murder a "sex fiend slaying".
On January 21, 1947, a person claiming to be Short's killer placed a phone call to the office of James Richardson, the editor of the Examiner, congratulating Richardson on the newspaper's coverage of the case, and stated he planned on eventually turning himself in, but not before allowing police to pursue him further. Additionally, the caller told Richardson to "expect some souvenirs of Beth Short in the mail".
On January 24, a suspicious manila envelope was discovered by a U.S. Postal Service worker: The envelope had been addressed to "The Los Angeles Examiner and other Los Angeles papers" with individual words that had been cut-and-pasted from newspaper clippings; additionally, a large message on the face of the envelope read: "Here is Dahlia's belongings, letter to follow". The envelope contained Short's birth certificate, 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 police to suspect the packet had been sent directly by her killer.
Despite the efforts to clean the packet, several partial fingerprints were lifted from the envelope and sent to the FBI for testing; however, the prints were compromised in transit and thus could not be properly analysed. 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, 3.2 km from where Short's body had been discovered. The items were recovered by police, but they had also been wiped clean with gasoline, destroying any fingerprints.
On March 14, an apparent suicide note scrawled in pencil on a bit of paper was found tucked in a shoe in a pile of men's clothing by the ocean's edge at the foot of Breeze Ave. Venice. The 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 Los Angeles Police Department interviewed over 150 men in the ensuing weeks whom they believed to be potential suspects. A total of 750 investigators from the LAPD and other departments worked on the case during its initial stages, including 400 sheriff's deputies and 250 California State patrol officers. Various locations were searched for potential evidence, including storm drains throughout Los Angeles, abandoned structures, and various sites along the Los Angeles River, but the searches yielded no further evidence.
By the spring of 1947, Short's murder had become a cold case with few new leads. Sergeant Finis Brown, one of the lead detectives on the case, blamed the press for compromising the investigation through reporters' probing of details and unverified reporting.
The notoriety of Short's murder has spurred a large number of confessions over the years, many of which have been deemed false. During the initial investigation into her murder, police received a total of 60 confessions, most made by men. Since that time, over 500 people have confessed to the crime, some of whom had not even been born at the time of her death.
Short's murder has been described as one of the most brutal and culturally enduring crimes in American history, and Time magazine listed it as one of the most infamous unsolved cases in the world.
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