In the 1940s, the police and the press lived in a symbiotic relationship. Reporters used 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 Dahlia case, detectives gave the Los Angeles Examiner fingerprints lifted from the dead woman and reporters used their "Soundphoto" machine — a precursor to a modern fax machine — to send enlargements of the prints to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. FBI technicians compared the prints with 104 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. The FBI also sent the paper Short's government application photo. When reporters saw how attractive the 22-year-old victim was, they knew they had a sensational tale on their hands. This was news noir at its best. To juice up the story, Examiner reporters resorted to an unethical ploy; they called her mother, Phoebe Short, and told her that her daughter had won a beauty contest. After prying as much personal information about Elizabeth from Mrs. Short as possible, they informed her that 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 pervert in girl's death," ran one headline in the Washington Post.
Black Dahlia Intro Elizabeth Short has been portrayed in many ways in the six decades since her body was dumped in two pieces on an empty lot in Los Angeles: Manipulative playgirl. Aspiring starlet. Naïve cock tease. 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 especially her death - her gruesome, violent, unsolved murder - continues to this day. The story of the unemployed 22-year-old waitress has inspired dozens of books, Web sites, a video game and even an Australian swing band. The quest to pinpoint her killer has become a hobby for generations of armchair detectives. And this fall, Hollywood will recast her tragic plight in a star-studded Black Dahlia movie. 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. We need to emphasize here that the case is so cold, the information so musty and bungled, that it's difficult to get a lucid picture of Elizabeth Short's brief life, much less her grisly death. On the morning of January 15, 1947, a housewife named Betty Bersinger was walking down a residential street in central Los Angeles with her 3-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, Bersinger thought the white figure laying a few inches from the sidewalk was a broken store mannequin. But a closer look revealed the hideous truth: It was 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 45-degree angles. Her lower of half was positioned a foot over from her torso, 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. Bersinger 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 Finis Brown. By the time the duo arrived at the crime scene — on Norton Avenue between 39th and Coliseum 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 murdered elsewhere and dragged onto the lot, one piece at time. There was dew under the body, so they knew it had been placed there after 2 a.m., when the outside temperature dipped to 38 degrees. The victim's face was horribly defiled: the murderer had used a knife to slash 3-inch gashes into each corner of 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 5'6 and her weight to be 115 pounds. Her mousy brown hair had been recently hennaed, and her fingernails 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.
Elizabeth Short embodied the feminine ideal of the 40s, with her meaty legs, full hips and a small, up-turned nose. She was drama personified. She dyed her mousy brown locks raven black, painted her lips blood red and pinned white flowers in her hair. With her alabaster skin and startling light blue eyes, she looked like porcelain doll. 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 1946 movie called "The Blue Dahlia." Whatever its genesis, 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 "Bette," according to her childhood friend and neighbor Mary Pacios. Born on July 29, 1924, in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, Short was one 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 1775 and as the place where the "Jingle Bells" was written. Cleo Short launched a successful business building miniature golf courses, but the 1929 stock market crash 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, Pacios 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, his wife wanted nothing to do with him. After Cleo's abandonment, the Short family moved into a meager apartment building next to Pacios, and Phoebe found a job as a bookkeeper. Elizabeth became a big sister of sorts to Pacios, 10 years her junior, taking her out for ice cream or to the movies. The two girls watched all the Ginger 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 theatre 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 16, her mother started sending her to spend winters with family friends in Miami, where she found work as a waitress. At 19, 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 the move to California would enable her to break into movies, Pacio writes.
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 frequented night clubs where she swayed across the dance floor to swing jazz and bebop. She loved the music, the men, the atmosphere. She was never alone unless she wanted to be. But on the last day of December 1944, her playgirl lifestyle changed when she met a young man who stood out from the testosterone horde, a major with the Flying Tigers. She sent her mother a gushing letter, Pacios 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 to Medford that summer, Pacios says she wore Matt's pilots 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 on August 14, 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 canapés 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 fiancé'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 suitcase.
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 as little as possible where she couldn't. She was chronically short on cash. From November 13 to December 15, 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. The women paid $1 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 every night" and didn't have a job. "She was always going out to prowl [Hollywood] boulevard," Linda Rohr, 22, 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 25-year-old married salesman named Robert Manley, 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 Manley kept talking, reassuring her 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 24-hour movie theater where she'd gone to spend the night. But they soon tired of her. She lazed around their small house during the day and spent her evenings out partying. In early January 1947, they asked her to leave. Manley 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 9, he drove her to Los Angeles and helped her check her luggage at the bus station. 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 6:30 p.m. 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 with wealthy travelers and luxuriously appointed. Built in the early 20s, it was the largest hotel west of Chicago, with 1,000 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 her desecrated body was dumped one week later.
In the wake of her murder, 40 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 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 coroner's office determined that Short had been killed by massive internal hemorrhaging caused by blows to the head. No traces of sperm 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 20 of Short's former "boyfriends," but gained no solid leads. After the story hit the newspapers, more than 30 "confessing Sams" stepped forward, ranging from certified nutjobs to attention-starved losers looking for a moment in the spotlight. The police wasted precious manpower proving they were innocent while searching for the real killer, Det. Hansen complained to the press. His office had to sort through letters from "pranksters" and "wiseacres" 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 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 list of medical students, according the FBI, which has declassified 203 pages of documents related to its own investigation of the murder. The bureau was inundated with hand-written letters to J. Edgar Hoover from individuals claiming to know who the murderer was or blaming the crime on someone they held a grudge against. "This suspect swindle[d] $75 out of me, which he promised would put me in motion picture and make me famous," one woman wrote the bureau on May 23, 1947.
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 killer would appear to say one last scornful goodbye to his victim. On a recent trip to the cemetery, Short's gravesite 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 views of the San Francisco Bay. After half an hour searching 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 29, 1924 — January 15, 1947." 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. Elizabeth Short, rest in peace.