September 3, 2025 • 30 mins
🎬 Elizabeth Short dreamed of stardom—instead became Hollywood's most haunting murder mystery. 💔 January 1947: Her artfully posed body shocked Los Angeles and changed crime investigation forever. 🔍 New evidence reveals prime suspects: A surgeon with surgical precision? A director with a dark vision? A cop's son with inside knowledge? 🌍 Modern investigators still study this case that revolutionized forensic science worldwide. ⚰️ From failed dreams to eternal infamy—the unsolved case that haunts Hollywood. ⚠️ Warning: Contains graphic forensic details. 😱
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Elizabeth Short has been portrayed many ways in the almost
eight decades since her body was dumped in two pieces
on an empty lot in Los Angeles. Manipulative playgirl, aspiring
starlet Naive cock T's troubled soul above all time has
immortalized Elizabeth Short as the pin up girl of Los
Angeles noir, the Black Dahlia. Fascination with her life and
(00:45):
especially her death her gruesome, violent, unsolved murder continues to
this day. The story of the unemployed twenty two year
old waitress has inspired dozens of books, websites, a video game,
and even an Australian swing band. The quest to pinpoint
her killer has become a hobby for generations of armchair detectives.
(01:08):
The Los Angeles Police Department has all but given up
hope of ever closing the Dahlia case. The department has
more urgent crimes to investigate, and the killer has likely
been dead for years. Yet it is precisely the unsolved
status of Elizabeth Short's murder that gives it such an
enduring allure. On the morning of January fifteenth, nineteen forty seven,
(01:31):
a housewife named Betty Bursinger was walking down a residential
street in central Los Angeles with her three year old
daughter when something caught her eye. It was a cold,
overcast morning and she was on her way to pick
up a pair of shoes from the cobbler. At first glance,
Bursinger thought the white figure laying a few inches from
(01:52):
the sidewalk was a broken storm mannikin, but a closer
look revealed the hideous truth. It was as the body
of a woman who'd been cut in half and was
laying face up in the dirt. The woman's arms were
raised over her head at forty five degree angles. Her
lower half was positioned a foot over from her torso
(02:13):
the straight legs spread wide open. The body appeared to
have been washed clean of blood, and the intestines were
tucked neatly under the buttocks, bursting her shielded her daughter's eyes,
then ran with her to a nearby home to call
the police. Two detectives were assigned to the case, Harry
Hansen and Phinis Brown. By the time the duo arrived
(02:35):
at the crime scene on Norton Avenue between thirty ninth
and Colosseum Streets in Los Angeles, it was swarming with
reporters and gawkers who were carelessly trampling the evidence. The
detectives ordered the crowd to back off, then got down
to business. From the lack of blood on the body
or in the grass, they determined the victim had been
(02:55):
murdered elsewhere and dragged onto the lot one piece at
a time. There was dew under the body, so they
knew it had been placed there after two a m.
When the outside temperature dipped to thirty eight degrees. The
victim's face was horribly defiled. The murderer had used a
knife to slash three inch gashes into each corner of
(03:16):
her mouth, giving her the death grin of a deranged clown. Rope.
Marks on her wrists and ankles indicated she'd been restrained
and possibly tortured. By measuring the two halves of the corpse,
the detectives estimated the victim's height to be five feet
six inches and her weight to be one hundred and
fifteen pounds. Her mousey brown hair had been recently hented,
(03:40):
and her finger nails were bitten to the quick. After
calling the Los Angeles County Coroner to retrieve the body,
the detectives were left with a daunting assignment. Finding out
who the woman was. In the nineteen forties, the police
and the press lived in a symbiotic relationship. Reporters used
(04:00):
the cops for inside scoops, and the cops used reporters
to disseminate information to the public that they hoped would
help solve crimes. In the Black Dhlia case, detectives gave
the Los Angeles Examiner fingerprints lifted from the dead woman,
and reporters used their sound photo machine, a precursor to
a modern fax machine, to send enlargements of the prints
(04:23):
to FBI headquarters in Washington, d C. FBI technicians compared
the prints with one hundred and four million fingerprints they
had on file and quickly made a match to one
Elizabeth Short. Short's fingerprints were taken for a mail room
job she'd had at an army base in California and
for an arrest record for underage drinking in Santa Barbara.
(04:47):
The FBI also sent the paper Short's government application photo.
When reporters saw how attractive the twenty two year old
victim was, they knew they had a sensational tail on
their hands. This was new use noir at its best.
To juice up the story, examiner reporters resorted to an
unethical ploy. They called her mother, Phoebe Short, and told
(05:10):
her that her daughter had won a beauty contest. After
prying as much personal information about Elizabeth as possible from
missus Short, they informed her that her daughter was actually dead.
Sex beauty violence. The story had it all and soon
made front page news across the nation. Police seek mad
(05:32):
pervert in girl's death, ran one headline in the Washington Post.
Elizabeth Short embodied the feminine ideal of the forties. With
her meaty legs, full hips, and a small, upturned nose.
She was drama personified. She dyed her mousey brown locks
raven black, painted her lips blood red, and pinned white
(05:53):
flowers in her hair. With her alabaster skin and startling
light blue eyes, she looked like a porcelain dog. The
provenance of her nickname is unclear. Some say her friends
started calling her the Black Dahlia because of her fondness
for the color black, and in reference to a nineteen
forty six movie called The Blue Dahlia. Whatever its genesis,
(06:16):
the press ran with it, and doing so made Elizabeth
Short a legend in the town where she grew up, however,
she was known simply as Bet according to her childhood
friend and neighbor, Mary Passios. Born on July twenty ninth,
nineteen twenty four, in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, Short was one
(06:37):
of five daughters born to Phoebe and Cleo. At some
point during her childhood, the family moved half an hour
north to Medford, a town famous for Paul Revere's Midnight
Ride in seventeen seventy five and as the place where
the Jingle Bells was written. Cleo Short launched a successful
business building miniature golf courses, but the nineteen twenty nine
(06:59):
stock market left him bankrupt. Unable to provide for his
large family, Cleo left his car on local bridge to
make it look as if he'd jumped into the river
in despair. Pasios writes in her book Childhood Shadows, when
he wrote his wife from California a few years later,
saying he was saving up money to move the family there.
(07:19):
His wife wanted nothing to do with him. After Cleo's abandonment,
the Short family moved into a meager apartment building next
to Pasios, and Phoebe found a job as a bookkeeper.
Elizabeth became a big sister of sorts to Pasios, ten
years her junior, taking her out for ice cream or
to the movies. The two girls watched all the Ginger
(07:41):
Roger and Fred Astaire flicks that were popular at the time,
as well as the debut of Gone with the Wind.
Perhaps it was in that small town theater where Short's
Hollywood dreaming began. Short was born with respiratory problems that
developed into asthma and bronchitis as she got older. When
she was sick, her mother started sending her to spend
(08:02):
winters with family friends in Miami, where she found work
as a waitress. At nineteen, Short took a train cross
country to move in with her father, who was living
in Vallejo, a city just above San Francisco and working
at the Mare Island Naval Station. She hoped to move
to California would enable her to break into movies. Passio
(08:24):
writes from the beginning, Short's new found relationship with her
father was fraught with strife. She hadn't seen him for years.
He was haunted by regret. They were strangers living in
the same house with clashing ideas of how things should be.
Cleo Short expected his teenage daughter to serve him as
(08:44):
a maid of sorts, cooking and housekeeping. But Short was
a free spirit who wanted nothing to do with domesticity.
She found a job in the mail room at Camp
Cook now Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, two and
a half hours north of Los Angeles. At Camp Cook,
Short was surrounded by entire regiments of lonely soldiers on
(09:07):
the verge of being sent to war. She left a
trail of erotic longing in her wake. Wherever she walked,
the young men clamored for her attention, voted her camp cutie,
and told her she was movie star quality. Her idol
came to an end a few months later, however, when
she was arrested at a Santa Barbara bar for underage
(09:27):
drinking and shipped home to Medford. Over the next couple
of years, Short drifted back and forth across the country,
taking trains from Medford to Chicago, to Florida to California,
and back to Massachusetts again. Waitressing gigs paid her way
wherever she went and fed her compulsion to experience new
places and people. Her lust for life was overwhelming. She
(09:51):
frequented night clubs, where she swayed across the dance floor
to swing, jazz and bebop. She loved the music, the men,
the atmosph sphere. She was never alone unless she wanted
to be. But on the last day of December nineteen
forty four, her playgirl lifestyle changed when she met a
young man who stood out from the testosterone horde, a
(10:13):
major with the Flying Tigers. She sent her mother a
gushing letter. Passios writes, I met someone New Year's Eve,
a Major, Matt Gordon. I'm so much in love. I'm
sure it shows. He is so wonderful, not like other men,
and he asked me to marry him. After Short returned
(10:34):
to Medford that summer, Passio says she wore Matt's pilot's
wings pinned to her blouses and started a hope chest,
filling it with hand embroidered linens. He sent her from
the Philippines. When a Western Union bicycle messenger pedaled toward
the Short residence in the late August heat, it was
a fate to cruel to contemplate. The Japanese had surrendered
(10:56):
on August fourteenth, and Short had finally stopped worrying that
Matt would be killed in combat. Instead, she fantasized about
her upcoming nuptials, about the silk wedding gown, the floral arrangements,
what cannapes to serve at the reception, how to wear
her hair. But the bicycle messenger did stop in front
of the Short residence, delivering a terse missive from her
(11:19):
fiance's mother. Matt killed in plane crash on way home
from India. My sympathy is with you. Pray it isn't so.
Short spent the next days in a funk, reading and
re reading Matt's letters. When the Yankee air turned frosty,
she returned to Miami, a copy of his obituary tucked
into her suit case. In Miami, Short distracted her heartache
(11:43):
with a parade of men. She enjoyed the company of
men of every stripe, soldiers, entrepreneurs, older, younger. But the
men she enjoyed best were the sort with plenty of
spending money in their wallets. Short knew the value of
her beauty. As she sacheted down the sidewalk in peep
toed heels, she held her head high, primly aware of
(12:06):
her effect on mail passers by. They gawked, they whistled,
they offered to buy dinner. Frequently she accepted. They paid
for her meals, bar tabs, rent clothes. They gave her
cash what were a few greenbacks for the privilege of
basking her dazzling aura. Some authors have suggested that Short
(12:27):
took this behavior to an extreme and worked as a prostitute,
but there is no evidence to back this up. Whatever
money she managed to accumulate on her own through waitressing,
she used to expand her wardrobe. She'd rather go hungry
than wear outdated or worn clothing. When she stepped outside,
she was always dressed to the nines, favoring tailored black suits, feminine,
(12:51):
ruffled blouses, high heels, and long gloves. She embodied the cool,
sophistication of a forty's working gal. Had a particular fetish
for men in uniform. In July nineteen forty six, she
returned to southern California to be close to Joseph Gordon Fickling,
an intensely handsome Air Force lieutenant with sensual dark eyes.
(13:14):
They'd met in California two years earlier, shortly before he
was shipped overseas. It was a rocky relationship from the start.
In their private letters, which were confiscated by the police
and excerpted in newspapers after Short's murder, Fickling expressed impatience
with Short's flirtations, wondering if he ranked higher in her
(13:35):
heart than any other man. Apparently she wasn't able, or
didn't try to convince him that he did. He moved
to North Carolina to work as a commercial airline pilot,
but they stayed in touch, and he continued sending her money,
including a one hundred dollar wire transfer the month before
she died. The last letter Fickling received from Short was
(13:58):
dated January eighth, nineteen forty seven, seven days before her murder.
In it, she told him she was moving to Chicago,
where she hoped to become a fashion model. In the
last six months of her life, Short moved constantly between
a dozen hotels, apartments, boarding houses, and private homes in
southern California. She crashed for free where she could, paid
(14:21):
as little as possible where she couldn't. She was chronically
short on cash. From November thirteenth to December fifteenth, Short
lived in a cramped two bedroom apartment in Hollywood with
eight other young women, cocktail waitresses, telephone operators, dime dancers,
other out of towners who hoped to break into showbiz.
(14:42):
The women paid one dollar a day for a bunk
bed and a couple feet of closet space, but Short
couldn't even afford this paltry sum and snuck out a
side door to avoid the manager when the rent was due.
Her roommates told the La Times after her death that
Short was out with a different boyfriend friend every night
and didn't have a job. She was always going out
(15:04):
to prowl Hollywood Boulevard. Linda Rohrer, twenty two, told the
paper Short was elusive in life as she remains in death.
She didn't have close friends, male or female, but preferred
the company of strangers and a constant change of entourage.
The last person to see her alive was a recent acquaintance,
a twenty five year old married salesman named Robert Manly,
(15:28):
nicknamed Red for his flaming auburn hair. According to press reports,
Manley picked her up on a street corner in San Diego.
He noticed her standing alone, a beautiful woman with no
apparent destination, and pulled over to ask if she wanted
a ride. Short played coy, turning her head and refusing
to look at him, but many kept talking reassuring her
(15:52):
that he was harmless, that he just wanted to help
her out give her a lift home. At the time,
Short was staying with a family who took pity on
her after finding her at the Twenty four Hour Movie Theater,
where she'd gone to spend the night, but they soon
got tired of her. She layzed around their small house
during the day and spent her evenings out partying. In
(16:14):
early January nineteen forty seven, they asked her to leave
many came to pick her up. The pair stayed in
a local motel, but Short slept in her clothes and
the pair didn't have sex, he later told a reporter.
The next day, January ninth, he drove her to Los
Angeles and helped her check her luggage at the bus station.
(16:36):
She told him she was going to Berkeley to stay
with her sister, whom she was meeting at the Biltmore
Hotel downtown. Manley accompanied her into the hotel lobby, but
took leave of her at six thirty pm to return
to his family in San Diego. The Biltmore was exactly
the sort of place Short loved to hang out in.
It was as glamorous as she aspired to be filled
(16:58):
with wealthy travelers and luxuriously appointed. Built in the early twenties,
it was the largest hotel west of Chicago, with one
thousand rooms. Its lobby was its centerpiece, featuring hand painted
cathedral ceilings, crystal chandeliers, and marble floors. This elegant setting
could offer no greater contrast to the dirt lot where
(17:21):
her desecrated body was dumped one week later. In the
wake of her murder, forty police officers scoured the neighborhood,
going house to house looking for clues and evidence. The
checked gutters and laundromats for blood stained clothing, interviewed residents,
poked through dumpsters. They gained no solid leads. Investigators tracked
(17:43):
down Cleo Short, who was living a mere three miles
from the dirt lot. He told them he hadn't heard
from his daughter in three years. He was apparently still
angry that she refused to keep house for him when
she came to California, but spent her time running around instead.
He refused the coroner's request to identify the body. The
(18:03):
coroner's office determined that Short had been killed by massive
internal hemorrhaging caused by blows to the head. No traces
of seamen were found anywhere on her body, the coroner's
report revealed. It also disclosed a less than becoming detail
about Short. Her teeth were in a severe state of
decay and plugged with wax. They questioned more than twenty
(18:27):
of Short's former boyfriends, but gained no solid leads. After
the story hit the newspapers, more than thirty confessing psams
stepped forward, ranging from certified nut jobs to attention starved
losers looking for a moment in the spotlight. The police
wasted precious man power proving they were innocent. While searching
(18:48):
for the real killer. Detective Hanson complained to the press
his office had to sort through letters from pranksters and
wise acres writing from as far away as El Paso
and the Bronx. He came to theorize that whoever killed
Elizabeth Short wasn't someone she knew, but a pick up.
The police interviewed thousands of people who had even the
(19:10):
slightest knowledge of Short or her acquaintances, and quickly stuffed
a steel filing cabinet with notes and affidavits. At one point,
LAPD investigators were so certain that the clean bisection of
Short's body was the handiwork of an expert that they
persuaded the University of Southern California, located in the same
neighborhood where the corpse was found, to turn over a
(19:33):
list of medical students. According to the FBI, which has
declassified two hundred and three pages of documents related to
its own investigation of the murder, the Bureau was inundated
with handwritten letters to J. Edgar Hoover from individuals claiming
to know who the murderer was, or blaming the crime
(19:53):
on someone they held a grudge against. This suspect swindled
seventy five dollars out of me, which he promised would
put me in motion picture and make me famous, one
woman wrote the Bureau on May twenty third, nineteen forty seven.
What happened from the time Short was seen leaving the
biltmore to the time her mutilated body was dumped in
(20:14):
the dirt lot remains a mystery. One thing is certain.
Sometime during those seven days she had a fatal date
with her killer, who taunted and tortured her before snuffing
out her young life in a horrific fashion. On January
twenty fifth, Short's black patent, leather purse and one of
her black, open toed pumps was found in a dumpster
(20:37):
at eighteen nineteen East twenty fifth Street, several miles from
the crime scene. Robert Manly identified the items as hers.
He recognized the shoes because he paid to get them
resold in San Diego, and said the handbag smelled of
the heavy perfume that Short wore and that had permeated
his car as they drove from San Diego to Los Angeles.
(20:59):
The five daily papers in Los Angeles gobbled up these
details in a ferocious competition to outscoop each other. Someone,
possibly the killer, mailed a package to the Examiner nine
days after Short's death. It reeked of the gasoline the
sender used to erase his or her finger prints from
the envelope. Inside were Short's belongings, including photographs, her birth certificate,
(21:24):
social Security card, and Matt Gordon's obituary. It also contained
an address book containing the names of seventy five men.
The police quickly tracked them down, and they told investigators
a surprisingly similar story. They'd met Short on the street
or in a club, bought her drinks or dinner, but
never saw her again. After she made it clear she
(21:45):
was uninterested in a physical relationship. The LAPD has refrained
from speculating on the identity of the killer. The truth
is that Elizabeth Short's killer is most likely dead, if
not of disease of old age, and will never be
brought to justice. This fact hasn't stopped a large group
of amateur sleuths from picking up the torch in an
(22:08):
attempt to solve the case. Their conclusions range from fanciful
to downright risible. Mary Passios pins the blame incredibly on
movie director Orson Wells, who once did a magic act
where he sawed a woman in half. In another book,
Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer, a public relations specialist
(22:30):
named Janis Nolton blames her father for the murder. She
writes that therapy helped her recover childhood memories of her
father forcing him to torture, murder, and hack up Short.
Knowlton goes on to accuse her father of nine such killings,
including that of a son he engendered with her. Her
book was a flop, but Knowlton harassed anyone writing about
(22:54):
the case who did not support her claims until she
committed self checkout. In two thousand four with a drug overdose.
Here are some of the suspects whove topped the list
as the could haves for the last seventy five years.
Robert Manley Manly was the last known person to see
Short alive. He was initially booked as a suspect, but
(23:16):
released after he passed a polygraph test. Beset by a
long history of mental health problems, in nineteen fifty four,
his wife committed him to a psychiatric hospital after he
told her he was hearing voices. That same year, doctors
gave him a shot of sodium pentathol aka the truth serum,
in another attempt to glean information about the Black Dahlia
(23:39):
murder from him. He was absolved a second time. He
died in nineteen eighty six, thirty nine years to the
day after he left Short at the Biltmore. The coroner
attributed his death to an accidental fall. Mark Hanson. Hanson's
name was embossed on the address book that was mailed
to the Examiner. It's unclear how the item fell into
(24:01):
Short's hands. The fifty five year old Denmark native was
the manager of the Florentine Gardens, a sleazy Hollywood night club,
featuring burlesque acts. Many of the young women working for
Hanson lived at his home, which was located behind the club.
Short was his guest for several months in nineteen forty six,
and the aging lothario is rumored to have tried to
(24:23):
bed her unsuccessfully George Hoddle. In two thousand three, a
retired lapd detective named Steve Hoddle published another Daddy Did
It tract, but this one became a national bestseller. According
to The Black Dahlia Avenger, a Genius for Murder, Hodell
Junior depicts his dad as a tyrant and misogynistic pervert
(24:47):
who held orgies at the family home and was put
on trial for raping his own fourteen year old daughter.
He was acquitted. After his father died. In nineteen ninety nine,
Steve Hodell acquired his father's private photo album, which contained
two snapshots of a dark haired woman. Hodell claims the
woman was Short, but Short's family has refuted his claims.
(25:10):
Jack Anderson Wilson in Severed, The True Story of the
Black Dahlia Murder, writer John Gilmore points to an alcoholic
drifter named Jack Anderson Wilson. When Gilmore interviewed him in
the early eighties. Wilson purportedly divulged details about the murder
that only the killer would have known, including knowledge of
(25:30):
a supposed vaginal defect which would have prevented Short from
having sexual intercourse. A few days before his pending arrest,
Wilson died in a hotel fire. The book's validity has
been questioned by other Dahlia devotees, who have failed to
track down many of Gilmore's primary sources, leading them to
question the source's very existence. Walter Alonzo Bailey. In nineteen
(25:55):
ninety seven, a Los Angeles Times writer named Larry Harnish
d jested yet another suspect, doctor Walter Alonso Bailey, a
surgeon whose house was located one block south of the
lot where Short's body was found. Bailey's daughter was a
friend of Short's sister, Virginia Harnish. Theorizes that Bailey suffered
(26:16):
from a degenerative brain disease that made him kill Short,
while the police believe Short's killer was affiliated with a
cutting profession, a surgeon or butcher. Say Bailey was sixty
seven at the time of the murder and had no
known record of violence or crime. Neither is it known
whether he ever met Short. None of these suspects have
(26:37):
been endorsed by the LAPD, and because most of the
key physical evidence has disappeared from the Black Dahliaphile, including
thirteen scornful letters the killer sent the police and the media,
it's unlikely the case will ever be solved. Detective Brian Carr,
who inherited it in nineteen ninety six, has publicly stated
(26:59):
as much. In two thousand six, six decades after her death,
Elizabeth Short finally made it on to the big screen
in a Universal Pictures release based on the nineteen eighty
seven James Elroy novel The Black Dahlia, directed by Hollywood
heavyweight Brian de Palma and budgeted at about forty five
(27:19):
million dollars, The cast includes Josh Hartnett, Aaron Eckhart, Scarlett Johansson,
Hillary Swank, and as the enigmatic title lady Mia Kirshner.
Short was buried in Oakland's Mountain View Cemetery in a
quiet ceremony attended by six family members. A handful of
cops was also there on the odd chance that the
(27:41):
killer would appear to say one last scornful good bye
to his victim. On a recent trip to the cemetery,
Short's grave site would have been impossible to locate without
the help of detailed instructions downloaded from the Internet. Mountain
View Cemetery is large and rambling and offers sweeping use
of the San Francisco Bay. After half an hour searching
(28:03):
a steep hillside, her plot was found. The modest pink
marble headstone marking It was overgrown with crabgrass, and the
words engraved on it were simple Daughter Elizabeth Short. July
twenty ninth, nineteen twenty four January fifteenth, nineteen forty seven.
(28:24):
Because in the end, she is more than the enigmatic
black Dahlia, more than the unflattering reputation that has dogged
her for six decades, more than another tragic Hollywood story.
She was someone's sister and someone's daughter at.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
Miss booms Thing, It's boomed upsting, it's people mis booms Thin,
It's boomed upoluting, it's people stas notustus StAst
Elizabeth Short has been portrayed many ways in the almost
eight decades since her body was dumped in two pieces
on an empty lot in Los Angeles. Manipulative playgirl, aspiring
starlet Naive cock T's troubled soul above all time has
immortalized Elizabeth Short as the pin up girl of Los
Angeles noir, the Black Dahlia. Fascination with her life and
(00:45):
especially her death her gruesome, violent, unsolved murder continues to
this day. The story of the unemployed twenty two year
old waitress has inspired dozens of books, websites, a video game,
and even an Australian swing band. The quest to pinpoint
her killer has become a hobby for generations of armchair detectives.
(01:08):
The Los Angeles Police Department has all but given up
hope of ever closing the Dahlia case. The department has
more urgent crimes to investigate, and the killer has likely
been dead for years. Yet it is precisely the unsolved
status of Elizabeth Short's murder that gives it such an
enduring allure. On the morning of January fifteenth, nineteen forty seven,
(01:31):
a housewife named Betty Bursinger was walking down a residential
street in central Los Angeles with her three year old
daughter when something caught her eye. It was a cold,
overcast morning and she was on her way to pick
up a pair of shoes from the cobbler. At first glance,
Bursinger thought the white figure laying a few inches from
(01:52):
the sidewalk was a broken storm mannikin, but a closer
look revealed the hideous truth. It was as the body
of a woman who'd been cut in half and was
laying face up in the dirt. The woman's arms were
raised over her head at forty five degree angles. Her
lower half was positioned a foot over from her torso
(02:13):
the straight legs spread wide open. The body appeared to
have been washed clean of blood, and the intestines were
tucked neatly under the buttocks, bursting her shielded her daughter's eyes,
then ran with her to a nearby home to call
the police. Two detectives were assigned to the case, Harry
Hansen and Phinis Brown. By the time the duo arrived
(02:35):
at the crime scene on Norton Avenue between thirty ninth
and Colosseum Streets in Los Angeles, it was swarming with
reporters and gawkers who were carelessly trampling the evidence. The
detectives ordered the crowd to back off, then got down
to business. From the lack of blood on the body
or in the grass, they determined the victim had been
(02:55):
murdered elsewhere and dragged onto the lot one piece at
a time. There was dew under the body, so they
knew it had been placed there after two a m.
When the outside temperature dipped to thirty eight degrees. The
victim's face was horribly defiled. The murderer had used a
knife to slash three inch gashes into each corner of
(03:16):
her mouth, giving her the death grin of a deranged clown. Rope.
Marks on her wrists and ankles indicated she'd been restrained
and possibly tortured. By measuring the two halves of the corpse,
the detectives estimated the victim's height to be five feet
six inches and her weight to be one hundred and
fifteen pounds. Her mousey brown hair had been recently hented,
(03:40):
and her finger nails were bitten to the quick. After
calling the Los Angeles County Coroner to retrieve the body,
the detectives were left with a daunting assignment. Finding out
who the woman was. In the nineteen forties, the police
and the press lived in a symbiotic relationship. Reporters used
(04:00):
the cops for inside scoops, and the cops used reporters
to disseminate information to the public that they hoped would
help solve crimes. In the Black Dhlia case, detectives gave
the Los Angeles Examiner fingerprints lifted from the dead woman,
and reporters used their sound photo machine, a precursor to
a modern fax machine, to send enlargements of the prints
(04:23):
to FBI headquarters in Washington, d C. FBI technicians compared
the prints with one hundred and four million fingerprints they
had on file and quickly made a match to one
Elizabeth Short. Short's fingerprints were taken for a mail room
job she'd had at an army base in California and
for an arrest record for underage drinking in Santa Barbara.
(04:47):
The FBI also sent the paper Short's government application photo.
When reporters saw how attractive the twenty two year old
victim was, they knew they had a sensational tail on
their hands. This was new use noir at its best.
To juice up the story, examiner reporters resorted to an
unethical ploy. They called her mother, Phoebe Short, and told
(05:10):
her that her daughter had won a beauty contest. After
prying as much personal information about Elizabeth as possible from
missus Short, they informed her that her daughter was actually dead.
Sex beauty violence. The story had it all and soon
made front page news across the nation. Police seek mad
(05:32):
pervert in girl's death, ran one headline in the Washington Post.
Elizabeth Short embodied the feminine ideal of the forties. With
her meaty legs, full hips, and a small, upturned nose.
She was drama personified. She dyed her mousey brown locks
raven black, painted her lips blood red, and pinned white
(05:53):
flowers in her hair. With her alabaster skin and startling
light blue eyes, she looked like a porcelain dog. The
provenance of her nickname is unclear. Some say her friends
started calling her the Black Dahlia because of her fondness
for the color black, and in reference to a nineteen
forty six movie called The Blue Dahlia. Whatever its genesis,
(06:16):
the press ran with it, and doing so made Elizabeth
Short a legend in the town where she grew up, however,
she was known simply as Bet according to her childhood
friend and neighbor, Mary Passios. Born on July twenty ninth,
nineteen twenty four, in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, Short was one
(06:37):
of five daughters born to Phoebe and Cleo. At some
point during her childhood, the family moved half an hour
north to Medford, a town famous for Paul Revere's Midnight
Ride in seventeen seventy five and as the place where
the Jingle Bells was written. Cleo Short launched a successful
business building miniature golf courses, but the nineteen twenty nine
(06:59):
stock market left him bankrupt. Unable to provide for his
large family, Cleo left his car on local bridge to
make it look as if he'd jumped into the river
in despair. Pasios writes in her book Childhood Shadows, when
he wrote his wife from California a few years later,
saying he was saving up money to move the family there.
(07:19):
His wife wanted nothing to do with him. After Cleo's abandonment,
the Short family moved into a meager apartment building next
to Pasios, and Phoebe found a job as a bookkeeper.
Elizabeth became a big sister of sorts to Pasios, ten
years her junior, taking her out for ice cream or
to the movies. The two girls watched all the Ginger
(07:41):
Roger and Fred Astaire flicks that were popular at the time,
as well as the debut of Gone with the Wind.
Perhaps it was in that small town theater where Short's
Hollywood dreaming began. Short was born with respiratory problems that
developed into asthma and bronchitis as she got older. When
she was sick, her mother started sending her to spend
(08:02):
winters with family friends in Miami, where she found work
as a waitress. At nineteen, Short took a train cross
country to move in with her father, who was living
in Vallejo, a city just above San Francisco and working
at the Mare Island Naval Station. She hoped to move
to California would enable her to break into movies. Passio
(08:24):
writes from the beginning, Short's new found relationship with her
father was fraught with strife. She hadn't seen him for years.
He was haunted by regret. They were strangers living in
the same house with clashing ideas of how things should be.
Cleo Short expected his teenage daughter to serve him as
(08:44):
a maid of sorts, cooking and housekeeping. But Short was
a free spirit who wanted nothing to do with domesticity.
She found a job in the mail room at Camp
Cook now Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, two and
a half hours north of Los Angeles. At Camp Cook,
Short was surrounded by entire regiments of lonely soldiers on
(09:07):
the verge of being sent to war. She left a
trail of erotic longing in her wake. Wherever she walked,
the young men clamored for her attention, voted her camp cutie,
and told her she was movie star quality. Her idol
came to an end a few months later, however, when
she was arrested at a Santa Barbara bar for underage
(09:27):
drinking and shipped home to Medford. Over the next couple
of years, Short drifted back and forth across the country,
taking trains from Medford to Chicago, to Florida to California,
and back to Massachusetts again. Waitressing gigs paid her way
wherever she went and fed her compulsion to experience new
places and people. Her lust for life was overwhelming. She
(09:51):
frequented night clubs, where she swayed across the dance floor
to swing, jazz and bebop. She loved the music, the men,
the atmosph sphere. She was never alone unless she wanted
to be. But on the last day of December nineteen
forty four, her playgirl lifestyle changed when she met a
young man who stood out from the testosterone horde, a
(10:13):
major with the Flying Tigers. She sent her mother a
gushing letter. Passios writes, I met someone New Year's Eve,
a Major, Matt Gordon. I'm so much in love. I'm
sure it shows. He is so wonderful, not like other men,
and he asked me to marry him. After Short returned
(10:34):
to Medford that summer, Passio says she wore Matt's pilot's
wings pinned to her blouses and started a hope chest,
filling it with hand embroidered linens. He sent her from
the Philippines. When a Western Union bicycle messenger pedaled toward
the Short residence in the late August heat, it was
a fate to cruel to contemplate. The Japanese had surrendered
(10:56):
on August fourteenth, and Short had finally stopped worrying that
Matt would be killed in combat. Instead, she fantasized about
her upcoming nuptials, about the silk wedding gown, the floral arrangements,
what cannapes to serve at the reception, how to wear
her hair. But the bicycle messenger did stop in front
of the Short residence, delivering a terse missive from her
(11:19):
fiance's mother. Matt killed in plane crash on way home
from India. My sympathy is with you. Pray it isn't so.
Short spent the next days in a funk, reading and
re reading Matt's letters. When the Yankee air turned frosty,
she returned to Miami, a copy of his obituary tucked
into her suit case. In Miami, Short distracted her heartache
(11:43):
with a parade of men. She enjoyed the company of
men of every stripe, soldiers, entrepreneurs, older, younger. But the
men she enjoyed best were the sort with plenty of
spending money in their wallets. Short knew the value of
her beauty. As she sacheted down the sidewalk in peep
toed heels, she held her head high, primly aware of
(12:06):
her effect on mail passers by. They gawked, they whistled,
they offered to buy dinner. Frequently she accepted. They paid
for her meals, bar tabs, rent clothes. They gave her
cash what were a few greenbacks for the privilege of
basking her dazzling aura. Some authors have suggested that Short
(12:27):
took this behavior to an extreme and worked as a prostitute,
but there is no evidence to back this up. Whatever
money she managed to accumulate on her own through waitressing,
she used to expand her wardrobe. She'd rather go hungry
than wear outdated or worn clothing. When she stepped outside,
she was always dressed to the nines, favoring tailored black suits, feminine,
(12:51):
ruffled blouses, high heels, and long gloves. She embodied the cool,
sophistication of a forty's working gal. Had a particular fetish
for men in uniform. In July nineteen forty six, she
returned to southern California to be close to Joseph Gordon Fickling,
an intensely handsome Air Force lieutenant with sensual dark eyes.
(13:14):
They'd met in California two years earlier, shortly before he
was shipped overseas. It was a rocky relationship from the start.
In their private letters, which were confiscated by the police
and excerpted in newspapers after Short's murder, Fickling expressed impatience
with Short's flirtations, wondering if he ranked higher in her
(13:35):
heart than any other man. Apparently she wasn't able, or
didn't try to convince him that he did. He moved
to North Carolina to work as a commercial airline pilot,
but they stayed in touch, and he continued sending her money,
including a one hundred dollar wire transfer the month before
she died. The last letter Fickling received from Short was
(13:58):
dated January eighth, nineteen forty seven, seven days before her murder.
In it, she told him she was moving to Chicago,
where she hoped to become a fashion model. In the
last six months of her life, Short moved constantly between
a dozen hotels, apartments, boarding houses, and private homes in
southern California. She crashed for free where she could, paid
(14:21):
as little as possible where she couldn't. She was chronically
short on cash. From November thirteenth to December fifteenth, Short
lived in a cramped two bedroom apartment in Hollywood with
eight other young women, cocktail waitresses, telephone operators, dime dancers,
other out of towners who hoped to break into showbiz.
(14:42):
The women paid one dollar a day for a bunk
bed and a couple feet of closet space, but Short
couldn't even afford this paltry sum and snuck out a
side door to avoid the manager when the rent was due.
Her roommates told the La Times after her death that
Short was out with a different boyfriend friend every night
and didn't have a job. She was always going out
(15:04):
to prowl Hollywood Boulevard. Linda Rohrer, twenty two, told the
paper Short was elusive in life as she remains in death.
She didn't have close friends, male or female, but preferred
the company of strangers and a constant change of entourage.
The last person to see her alive was a recent acquaintance,
a twenty five year old married salesman named Robert Manly,
(15:28):
nicknamed Red for his flaming auburn hair. According to press reports,
Manley picked her up on a street corner in San Diego.
He noticed her standing alone, a beautiful woman with no
apparent destination, and pulled over to ask if she wanted
a ride. Short played coy, turning her head and refusing
to look at him, but many kept talking reassuring her
(15:52):
that he was harmless, that he just wanted to help
her out give her a lift home. At the time,
Short was staying with a family who took pity on
her after finding her at the Twenty four Hour Movie Theater,
where she'd gone to spend the night, but they soon
got tired of her. She layzed around their small house
during the day and spent her evenings out partying. In
(16:14):
early January nineteen forty seven, they asked her to leave
many came to pick her up. The pair stayed in
a local motel, but Short slept in her clothes and
the pair didn't have sex, he later told a reporter.
The next day, January ninth, he drove her to Los
Angeles and helped her check her luggage at the bus station.
(16:36):
She told him she was going to Berkeley to stay
with her sister, whom she was meeting at the Biltmore
Hotel downtown. Manley accompanied her into the hotel lobby, but
took leave of her at six thirty pm to return
to his family in San Diego. The Biltmore was exactly
the sort of place Short loved to hang out in.
It was as glamorous as she aspired to be filled
(16:58):
with wealthy travelers and luxuriously appointed. Built in the early twenties,
it was the largest hotel west of Chicago, with one
thousand rooms. Its lobby was its centerpiece, featuring hand painted
cathedral ceilings, crystal chandeliers, and marble floors. This elegant setting
could offer no greater contrast to the dirt lot where
(17:21):
her desecrated body was dumped one week later. In the
wake of her murder, forty police officers scoured the neighborhood,
going house to house looking for clues and evidence. The
checked gutters and laundromats for blood stained clothing, interviewed residents,
poked through dumpsters. They gained no solid leads. Investigators tracked
(17:43):
down Cleo Short, who was living a mere three miles
from the dirt lot. He told them he hadn't heard
from his daughter in three years. He was apparently still
angry that she refused to keep house for him when
she came to California, but spent her time running around instead.
He refused the coroner's request to identify the body. The
(18:03):
coroner's office determined that Short had been killed by massive
internal hemorrhaging caused by blows to the head. No traces
of seamen were found anywhere on her body, the coroner's
report revealed. It also disclosed a less than becoming detail
about Short. Her teeth were in a severe state of
decay and plugged with wax. They questioned more than twenty
(18:27):
of Short's former boyfriends, but gained no solid leads. After
the story hit the newspapers, more than thirty confessing psams
stepped forward, ranging from certified nut jobs to attention starved
losers looking for a moment in the spotlight. The police
wasted precious man power proving they were innocent. While searching
(18:48):
for the real killer. Detective Hanson complained to the press
his office had to sort through letters from pranksters and
wise acres writing from as far away as El Paso
and the Bronx. He came to theorize that whoever killed
Elizabeth Short wasn't someone she knew, but a pick up.
The police interviewed thousands of people who had even the
(19:10):
slightest knowledge of Short or her acquaintances, and quickly stuffed
a steel filing cabinet with notes and affidavits. At one point,
LAPD investigators were so certain that the clean bisection of
Short's body was the handiwork of an expert that they
persuaded the University of Southern California, located in the same
neighborhood where the corpse was found, to turn over a
(19:33):
list of medical students. According to the FBI, which has
declassified two hundred and three pages of documents related to
its own investigation of the murder, the Bureau was inundated
with handwritten letters to J. Edgar Hoover from individuals claiming
to know who the murderer was, or blaming the crime
(19:53):
on someone they held a grudge against. This suspect swindled
seventy five dollars out of me, which he promised would
put me in motion picture and make me famous, one
woman wrote the Bureau on May twenty third, nineteen forty seven.
What happened from the time Short was seen leaving the
biltmore to the time her mutilated body was dumped in
(20:14):
the dirt lot remains a mystery. One thing is certain.
Sometime during those seven days she had a fatal date
with her killer, who taunted and tortured her before snuffing
out her young life in a horrific fashion. On January
twenty fifth, Short's black patent, leather purse and one of
her black, open toed pumps was found in a dumpster
(20:37):
at eighteen nineteen East twenty fifth Street, several miles from
the crime scene. Robert Manly identified the items as hers.
He recognized the shoes because he paid to get them
resold in San Diego, and said the handbag smelled of
the heavy perfume that Short wore and that had permeated
his car as they drove from San Diego to Los Angeles.
(20:59):
The five daily papers in Los Angeles gobbled up these
details in a ferocious competition to outscoop each other. Someone,
possibly the killer, mailed a package to the Examiner nine
days after Short's death. It reeked of the gasoline the
sender used to erase his or her finger prints from
the envelope. Inside were Short's belongings, including photographs, her birth certificate,
(21:24):
social Security card, and Matt Gordon's obituary. It also contained
an address book containing the names of seventy five men.
The police quickly tracked them down, and they told investigators
a surprisingly similar story. They'd met Short on the street
or in a club, bought her drinks or dinner, but
never saw her again. After she made it clear she
(21:45):
was uninterested in a physical relationship. The LAPD has refrained
from speculating on the identity of the killer. The truth
is that Elizabeth Short's killer is most likely dead, if
not of disease of old age, and will never be
brought to justice. This fact hasn't stopped a large group
of amateur sleuths from picking up the torch in an
(22:08):
attempt to solve the case. Their conclusions range from fanciful
to downright risible. Mary Passios pins the blame incredibly on
movie director Orson Wells, who once did a magic act
where he sawed a woman in half. In another book,
Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer, a public relations specialist
(22:30):
named Janis Nolton blames her father for the murder. She
writes that therapy helped her recover childhood memories of her
father forcing him to torture, murder, and hack up Short.
Knowlton goes on to accuse her father of nine such killings,
including that of a son he engendered with her. Her
book was a flop, but Knowlton harassed anyone writing about
(22:54):
the case who did not support her claims until she
committed self checkout. In two thousand four with a drug overdose.
Here are some of the suspects whove topped the list
as the could haves for the last seventy five years.
Robert Manley Manly was the last known person to see
Short alive. He was initially booked as a suspect, but
(23:16):
released after he passed a polygraph test. Beset by a
long history of mental health problems, in nineteen fifty four,
his wife committed him to a psychiatric hospital after he
told her he was hearing voices. That same year, doctors
gave him a shot of sodium pentathol aka the truth serum,
in another attempt to glean information about the Black Dahlia
(23:39):
murder from him. He was absolved a second time. He
died in nineteen eighty six, thirty nine years to the
day after he left Short at the Biltmore. The coroner
attributed his death to an accidental fall. Mark Hanson. Hanson's
name was embossed on the address book that was mailed
to the Examiner. It's unclear how the item fell into
(24:01):
Short's hands. The fifty five year old Denmark native was
the manager of the Florentine Gardens, a sleazy Hollywood night club,
featuring burlesque acts. Many of the young women working for
Hanson lived at his home, which was located behind the club.
Short was his guest for several months in nineteen forty six,
and the aging lothario is rumored to have tried to
(24:23):
bed her unsuccessfully George Hoddle. In two thousand three, a
retired lapd detective named Steve Hoddle published another Daddy Did
It tract, but this one became a national bestseller. According
to The Black Dahlia Avenger, a Genius for Murder, Hodell
Junior depicts his dad as a tyrant and misogynistic pervert
(24:47):
who held orgies at the family home and was put
on trial for raping his own fourteen year old daughter.
He was acquitted. After his father died. In nineteen ninety nine,
Steve Hodell acquired his father's private photo album, which contained
two snapshots of a dark haired woman. Hodell claims the
woman was Short, but Short's family has refuted his claims.
(25:10):
Jack Anderson Wilson in Severed, The True Story of the
Black Dahlia Murder, writer John Gilmore points to an alcoholic
drifter named Jack Anderson Wilson. When Gilmore interviewed him in
the early eighties. Wilson purportedly divulged details about the murder
that only the killer would have known, including knowledge of
(25:30):
a supposed vaginal defect which would have prevented Short from
having sexual intercourse. A few days before his pending arrest,
Wilson died in a hotel fire. The book's validity has
been questioned by other Dahlia devotees, who have failed to
track down many of Gilmore's primary sources, leading them to
question the source's very existence. Walter Alonzo Bailey. In nineteen
(25:55):
ninety seven, a Los Angeles Times writer named Larry Harnish
d jested yet another suspect, doctor Walter Alonso Bailey, a
surgeon whose house was located one block south of the
lot where Short's body was found. Bailey's daughter was a
friend of Short's sister, Virginia Harnish. Theorizes that Bailey suffered
(26:16):
from a degenerative brain disease that made him kill Short,
while the police believe Short's killer was affiliated with a
cutting profession, a surgeon or butcher. Say Bailey was sixty
seven at the time of the murder and had no
known record of violence or crime. Neither is it known
whether he ever met Short. None of these suspects have
(26:37):
been endorsed by the LAPD, and because most of the
key physical evidence has disappeared from the Black Dahliaphile, including
thirteen scornful letters the killer sent the police and the media,
it's unlikely the case will ever be solved. Detective Brian Carr,
who inherited it in nineteen ninety six, has publicly stated
(26:59):
as much. In two thousand six, six decades after her death,
Elizabeth Short finally made it on to the big screen
in a Universal Pictures release based on the nineteen eighty
seven James Elroy novel The Black Dahlia, directed by Hollywood
heavyweight Brian de Palma and budgeted at about forty five
(27:19):
million dollars, The cast includes Josh Hartnett, Aaron Eckhart, Scarlett Johansson,
Hillary Swank, and as the enigmatic title lady Mia Kirshner.
Short was buried in Oakland's Mountain View Cemetery in a
quiet ceremony attended by six family members. A handful of
cops was also there on the odd chance that the
(27:41):
killer would appear to say one last scornful good bye
to his victim. On a recent trip to the cemetery,
Short's grave site would have been impossible to locate without
the help of detailed instructions downloaded from the Internet. Mountain
View Cemetery is large and rambling and offers sweeping use
of the San Francisco Bay. After half an hour searching
(28:03):
a steep hillside, her plot was found. The modest pink
marble headstone marking It was overgrown with crabgrass, and the
words engraved on it were simple Daughter Elizabeth Short. July
twenty ninth, nineteen twenty four January fifteenth, nineteen forty seven.
(28:24):
Because in the end, she is more than the enigmatic
black Dahlia, more than the unflattering reputation that has dogged
her for six decades, more than another tragic Hollywood story.
She was someone's sister and someone's daughter at.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
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