He tells me that today is “an anniversary, of sorts.”
The morning was cold, gray and overcast. A housewife named Betty Bersinger was walking with her 3-year-old down a residential Los Angeles street. She was going to a cobbler to pick up a pair of shoes.
Mrs. Bersinger spied what she first thought was a mannequin laying face-up in the dirt just off the sidewalk. But a second glance revealed a horror: the body of a young woman, cut in half at the midsection, the legs splayed out, her face disfigured into a hideous parody of a grin, the two parts of the body about three feet apart. The body was clean. There was no blood. Bersinger, shielding her daughter from the gruesome sight, rushed to a nearby house to call the police.
Shortly, the crime scene, Norton Avenue between 39th and Coliseum streets, was swarming with newsmen, gawkers and police, led by detectives Harry Hansen and Finis Brown.
Aside from the mutilation, there was evidence the woman had been restrained, probably tortured. The police would soon identify the victim through fingerprint cards. She had worked at an Army base, and had once been arrested for underage drinking. She was somebody’s daughter. She was somebody’s sister. Her name was Elizabeth Short. In life, she’d had jet black hair, wore blood red lipstick and white flowers in her hair. Her skin was exceptionally pale, and her eyes were very light blue.
Like so many others, she’d dreamed of becoming a movie star or a fashion model, but existed only on the fringes of the glamour world. She lived off the kindness of strangers, mostly men.
The last person known to see her alive was a 25-year old married salesman named Robert Manley. He was the last, or more accurately, the next to last–her killer being the last–in a long line of men with whom Elizabeth Short had kept company. She was standing alone on a street corner in San Diego when Manley persuaded her he could be trusted to give her a ride.
At the time, Elizabeth Short was homeless. She’d been staying with a family who had taken her in after finding her sleeping at a 24-hour movie theater. She didn’t work, didn’t help around the house, and went out most nights partying. In early January 1947, they asked her to leave.
Manley and Short spent the night at a motel, but according to Manley, didn’t have sex. Later, during the investigation, detectives were unable to positively find any men who had slept with her, even though she had a long line of male friends.
After the night in the motel, on January 9, Manley drove Elizabeth to Los Angeles. She checked her luggage at the bus station. Short said she was going to Berkeley to stay with her sister, who was to meet her at the Biltmore hotel downtown. Manley went with her to the Biltmore’s famous and elegant lobby, and stayed with her until 6:30.
After he left, she hung around for some time. A desk clerk would later say she seemed to be waiting for someone. If she was, the person never showed. Late in the evening, Elizabeth Short left the Biltmore, turned left out of the lobby, and walked into the night.
A week later, on the cold, gray morning of January 15, 1947, her mutilated, bisected corpse would be discovered by Mrs. Bersinger, on her way, with her daughter, to pick up a pair of shoes.
The gruesomeness of the crime, Elizabeth Short’s striking looks and her mysterious and unconventional lifestyle, caused a feeding frenzy in the press. It was the most sensational murder case in Los Angeles since 1922, when director William Desmond Taylor was slain.
Hundreds of leads were followed. Dozens of men were questioned and re-questioned. Crackpots tried to take “credit,” and newspapers, especially The Examiner, played up every salacious detail. The killer mailed to The Examiner some of Short’s personal items. He wrote thirteen taunting letters to the police and media. (All now missing from the file.) Despite all the man hours of detective work, despite the letters, despite the salivating press, Elizabeth Short’s murder, like that of William Desmond Taylor a quarter of a century earlier, went unsolved.
It is unlikely anyone will ever discover where Elizabeth Short spent the last week of her life, or how she came to meet her killer. And no one knows for certain how she came by the moniker by which she will always be known: the Black Dahlia. Found dead, this day, 62 years ago.
“From hell.”
It’s dangerous to be beautiful.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
The body halves were originally positioned close together. The first cops on the scene let photogs move the pieces for a ‘better’ pic. They had been moved by later photogs as well because you can see different positions in different pictures. So much for maintaining the integrety of a crime scene. The real pictures have popped up on the internet as most things have.
Since “The Blue Dahlia” was playing at the time, I don’t think the moniker given to her by the Press is any mystery. Oh and there are those pictures of her wearing a flower in her hair. Would the Press know the difference between a dahlia and a georgine? Of course not. No one would.
We can probably assume that the real killer is dead and facing his punishment. Unless he was William Heirens. He still resides at the Dixon Correctional Center in Illinois. Until one of those law project groups get him out, of course.
The standards of crime-scene investigation in the past have left no doubt as to why so many open cases have remained open. At least in the days of Jack the Ripper, the cops didn’t have very good technology, or a very methodical process to follow; by the middle of the 20th Century they should have known better, but a lot of these old open cases are enough to curl one’s hair, in terms of sloppy detective work and inane crime-scene handling.