Black Dahlia murder

The Event Unsolved torture and murder of Elizabeth Short

Date January 15, 1947

Place Los Angeles, California

Elizabeth Short’s murder became notorious through newspaper articles highlighting its sensational aspects. The media portrayed Short as a beautiful aspiring actor whose Hollywood dreams ended in horrible suffering. Public interest in Short’s murder continued when detectives failed to identify her killer, and the crime lent itself to a variety of possible solutions.

The story of the “Black Dahlia” was a gripping and cautionary tale for young women in the postwar era. On the morning of January 15, 1947, a woman walking on Norton Avenue in southwest Los Angeles found the nude body of twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short lying in a vacant lot. Short’s body had been drained of blood, cut in half at the waist, and arranged in a sexually suggestive pose just feet from the sidewalk. An autopsy showed that Short had been tortured and died from blows to the head and face. Her body had been further mutilated, possibly after her death, then bisected by someone with medical knowledge and skill. Newspapers reported that Short was called the “Black Dahlia” (a nickname playing on the title of the 1946 movie The Blue Dahlia) for her black hair and preference for black clothing. Friends and family called her Betty or Beth.

Robert “Red” Manley, a married salesman whom Short had dated briefly, and the last known person to see her alive, was arrested on January 19 but released a day later. On January 24, postal inspectors intercepted an envelope addressed to Los Angeles newspapers that contained Short’s address book, other personal papers, and a note composed of cutout newspaper headlines saying, “Here is Dahlia’s belongings. Letter to follow.” More letters were received but none could be conclusively connected to the case. On January 28, Army veteran Daniel Voorhees gave police the first demonstrably false confession in the case.

Short was a challenge to investigators. Having traveled to California from Massachusetts to become an actor or model, she was rarely employed, moved frequently, and lied often about her travels and jobs she had never held. Short also dated widely and had known at least fifty men at the time of her death. Detectives never learned where Short had been during the week before her body was found.

Impact

In October, 1949, the Los Angeles grand jury asked the district attorney’s office to examine police handling of the Short case. The grand jury noted that 192 suspects had been investigated and dismissed, and it found the murder remained unsolved through a lack of evidence and not because of police misconduct. In the following years, independent researchers continued to publish conflicting theories, suggest possible suspects, and argue over the facts of the case. Two novels inspired by Short’s life and murder, John Gregory Dunne’s True Confessions (1977) and James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia (1987), were adapted as major motion pictures.

Bibliography

Douglas, John, and Mark Olshaker. “American Dreams/American Nightmares.” In The Cases That Haunt Us: From Jack the Ripper to JonBenet Ramsey, the FBI’s Legendary Mindhunter Sheds Light on the Mysteries That Won’t Go Away. New York: Scribner, 2000.

Hodel, Steve. Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder. Rev. ed. New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2006.

Wolfe, Donald H. The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles. New York: ReganBooks, 2005.