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MySpace Layouts MySpace Editor Icons Collage MySpace Graphics MySpace CodesBorn in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, Short was raised in Medford, Massachusetts, by her mother, Phoebe Mae. Her father, Cleo, abandoned her and her four sisters in October, 1930.Troubled by asthma, she spent summers in Medford, Massachusetts and winters in Florida. At the age of 19, she went to Vallejo, California, to live with her father, and they moved to Los Angeles in early 1943. She left almost immediately because of an argument with her father and got a job in one of the post exchanges at Camp Cooke, which is now Vandenberg Air Force Base, near Lompoc. She moved to Santa Barbara, where she was arrested September 23, 1943, for underage drinking and was sent back to Medford by juvenile authorities.For the next few years she resided in various cities in Florida, with occasional trips back to Massachusetts, earning money mostly as a waitress.In Florida she met Major Matthew M. Gordon Jr., who was part of the 2nd Air Commandos and training for deployment in the China Burma India theater of operations. Short told friends that Gordon—who, according to his obituary in the Pueblo, Colorado, newspaper, was awarded a Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star, the Air Medal with 15 oak leaf clusters, and Purple Heart—wrote a letter from India proposing marriage while recovering from an airplane crash he suffered while trying to rescue a downed flier. She accepted his proposal, but he died in a crash on August 10, 1945, before he could return to the U.S. to marry her. Short later embellished this story to say that they were married and had a child who had died. Although Gordon's friends in the air commandos confirm Gordon and Short were engaged, his family subsequently denied any connection after Short's murder.She returned to Southern California in July 1946, to see an old boyfriend she met in Florida during the war, Lt. Gordon Fickling, who was stationed in Long Beach. For the six months that remained of her life, she stayed in Southern California, mainly in the Los Angeles area. During this time, she lived in at least a dozen hotels, apartment buildings, rooming houses, and private homes, never staying anywhere for more than a few weeks.Short was last seen alive on the evening of January 9, 1947, in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel at 5th Street and Olive in downtown Los Angeles. She was 22 years old.On January 15, 1947, her body was discovered in a vacant lot of the 3800 block of South Norton Avenue in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, cut in half at the waist and mutilated.Elizabeth Short was laid to rest in Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, California. She was interred there rather than a cemetery within Medford because her oldest sister lived in nearby Berkeley and, reportedly, because she loved California.This unsolved murder has been viewed as emblematic of the perception of Los Angeles as a dystopia.