FAMOUS COLD CASES: The Case of the Black Dahlia
By Davina Willett, Court TV
(Court TV) —
Like many young women before her, Elizabeth Ann Short left her small
Massachusetts town for Tinseltown, to pursue her dream of becoming an
actress. She was 19 when she arrived and 22 when her pale, nude,
blood-drained body, severed in two, was found in a vacant lot in Hollywood.
Her jet-black hair, black lacy clothes and penchant for wearing bright
red nail polish and lipstick earned her the nickname, the Black
Dahlia. According to some reports, Elizabeth was known to acquaintances
as the Black Dahlia before her murder in January 1947. Others say the name
was concocted by journalists to sensationalize the crime.
The name is borrowed from the movie, The Blue Dahlia, starring
Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd, which was released a few years before the
murder. The film is a classic amnesia film noir about a Navy vet accused of
murdering his wife.
The grisly nature of the murder, coupled with rumors about her allegedly
promiscuous lifestyle, kept the investigation at the forefront of newspaper
headlines for months. Her murder also sparked one of the greatest manhunts
in California history.
According to John Gilmore, author of Severed: The True Story of the
Black Dahlia Murder, the rumors about Elizabeth being "flaky and
promiscuous" were fabricated by the press and by those who knew her loosely.
The coroner who examined Elizabeth's tortured body reported that she had a
genital defect that rendered her incapable of having standard intercourse.
Gilmore surmised in his book that before the coroner's report was handed
to the police working on the case, only Elizabeth and her mother knew about
her sexual limitations. Knowledge of this fact only added to her mother's
pain in the few weeks following the murder when the press portrayed her
daughter as a man-chaser and a hooker.
The police implored her mother, however, in the interests of justice, to
keep her genital defect confidential, so as they would recognize, beyond
doubt, a true confession when they found the killer.
Another author, Mary Pacios, who had grown up in the same neighborhood as
Elizabeth in Medford, Mass., wrote a book about the Black Dahlia to "set the
record straight." Mainly motivated by James Ellroy's fictionalized version
of the killing, she set out to "clean up" Elizabeth's reputation. Pacios
proposed that Elizabeth had been living a free life in Hollywood during the
war, and that the press had held her up as an example of what could happen
to a woman who did not return to the home now that the war was over.
America was recovering and recouping from WW II, and hoped to return to
normalcy. But Elizabeth's brutal murder rattled these hopes, Pacios
concluded, and her reputation and lifestyle were smeared to appease the
collective horror and nerves of a country rebuilding itself.
To the horror of some Hollywood coterie, Pacios fingered Orson Welles as
a possible suspect in Elizabeth's murder. She reported that he had
previously been accused of rape by women who had worked with him, and that
he had allegedly paid off a rape charge, prior to Elizabeth's death. She
believes that Welles was suffering from a mental illness, which she terms a
"diphasic personality." Sufferers channel creative frustration into
aggression, according to Pacios.
She outlines many coincidences between Welles' work and the murder of the
Black Dahlia, but what convinced her the most, was a set design of a
carnival fun house which was designed and constructed by Welles for his film
The Lady from Shanghai. Although unused in the movie, the fun house
was decorated with female body parts, a mannequin face similarly mutilated
to Elizabeth's, and a woman's body cut in two.
All in all, about 50 people — men and women — professed to
killing the Black Dahlia. Some wanted to cash in on the notoriety of the
case, others were drunk or in need of psychiatric help, and one man, looking
for his wife, confessed as he thought he would get his face in the paper and
subsequently find his wife. But to this day, nobody has been charged.
This Courttv.com series focuses on cases in which one fingerprint, one
hit of DNA, one whispered secret, one hidden trace could mean prosecuting a
murder, finding the loot or solving a mystery. Reporters have dug through
archives, retraced steps and interviewed the detectives and other
investigators who are still doggedly pursuing the answers before the case
goes cold. More
HIDDEN TRACES.
