The Black Dahlia murder

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.

Black Dahlia's (Elizabeth Short) body found in vacant lot

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.

LAPD Detectives Harry Hansen and Finis Brown with Elizabeth Short's Body

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.

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.

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.

Phoebe Short (left) with Beth

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.

Suspects

The LAPD has refrained from speculating on the identity of 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 attempt to solve the case. Their conclusions range from fanciful to downright risible:

• Mary Pacios pins the blame, incredibly, on movie director Orson Welles, 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 named Janice Knowlton blames her father for the murder. She writes that therapy helped her recover childhood memories of her father forcing her to watch him 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 the case who did not support her claims until she committed suicide in 2004 with a drug overdose.�

Book cover: Daddy was the Black Dahlia Killer

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Here are some of the suspects who've topped the list as the could-haves the last 60 years:

• Robert Manley
  Manly was the last known person to see Short alive. He was initially booked as a suspect, but released after he passed a polygraph test. Beset by a long history of mental health problems, in 1954, 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 pentothal aka the "truth serum" in another attempt to glean information about the Black Dahlia murder from him. He was absolved a second time. He died in 1986, 39 years to the day after he left Short at the Biltmore. The coroner attributed his death to an accidental fall.
• Mark Hansen
  Hansen's name was embossed on the address book that was mailed to the Examiner; it's unclear how the item fell into Short's hands. The 55-year-old Denmark native was the manager of the Florentine Gardens, a sleazy Hollywood nightclub featuring burlesque acts. Many of the young women working for Hansen lived at his home, which was located behind the club. Short was his guest�for several months in 1946, and the aging lothario is rumored to have tried to bed her - unsuccessfully.
• George Hodel
  In 2003, a retired LAPD detective named Steve Hodel published another daddy-did-it tract, but this one became a national bestseller.� According to the "Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder" Hodel Jr. depicts his dad as a tyrant and misogynistic pervert who held orgies at the family home and was put on trial for raping own his 14-year-old daughter (he was acquitted). After his father died in 1999, Steve Hodel acquired his father's private photo album, which contained two snapshots of a dark-haired woman. Hodel claims the woman was Short, but Short's family has refuted his claims.

Steve Hodel and book cover: Black Dahlia Avenger

• Jack Anderson Wilson
  In "Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder," actor-cum-crime writer John Gilmore fingers an alcoholic drifter named Jack Anderson Wilson. When Gilmore interviewed him in the early 80s, Wilson purportedly divulged details about the murder that only the killer would have known, including knowledge 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 sources' very existence.

Jack Anderson Wilson

• Walter Alonzo Bayley
  In 1997, a Los Angeles Times writer named Larry Harnisch suggested yet another suspect: Dr. Walter Alonzo Bayley, a surgeon whose house was located one block south of the lot where Short's body was found. Bayley's daughter was a friend of Short's sister Virginia. Harnisch theorizes that Bayley suffered 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 Bayley was 67 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 been endorsed by the LAPD.