Los Angeles has always been a city of contradictions—sunshine and shadows, glamor and violence, dreams made and lives shattered. Few crimes reveal that darker side of Hollywood more chillingly than the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, the aspiring actress who became known forever as the Black Dahlia.
Her brutal death captured the nation’s attention, inspired countless theories, and produced more than 150 suspects. Yet nearly eight decades later, the identity of her killer remains unknown.
Read this haunting chapter from California: Surf, Sand & Murder and step beyond the palm trees and movie premieres into one of Hollywood’s most infamous unsolved mysteries.
LOS ANGELES
“.... All the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray. I’ve been for a walk, on a winter’s day. I’d be safe and warm If I was in L.A….”
Even the FBI has given up on solving the case of “The Black Dahlia.”
“The murderer has never been found, and given how much time has passed, probably never will be,” says their website.
There was no shortage of suspects in Elizabeth’s murder, as more than 150 of them emerged for one of the most popular ladies in Tinseltown. She was a 22 year old aspiring actress. She had spent the day with Robert “Red” Manley, married man, in San Diego on January 9, 1947. Back in Los Angeles, she had dinner with a sister who was visiting from Boston, and then she disappeared, her beaten nude body discovered a week later, in a vacant lot near Leimert Park, home of famed singers Ray Charles and Ella Fitzgerald, on the city’s southside.
Her body had been cut in half, drained of blood, and scrubbed clean. And then there was her face: Her mouth was cut from its corners to her ears, in surgical precision, leaving a “Glasgow smile,” a signature wound that had become legendary in Scotland. And her body was placed, perfectly, in plain sight, for everyone to see. Autopsy reports say she had only been dead for about 10 hours. From where her body lay you could look up and see the giant Hollywood sign hanging over the city.
Ten days after the murder, the case took a bizarre twist, as the banner headline in the Los Angeles Examiner screamed “Dahlia Killer Mails Contents of Missing Purse to Examiner!”
The newspaper had received a manilla envelope that contained Short’s birth certificate, photographs, business cards, various names written on pieces of paper, and an address book. To make matters more bizarre, everything in the envelope had been cleaned with gasoline, just as Short’s body had been cleaned. Police contacted every name in the address book, including some 75 men, all of whom claimed they never had any type of relationship with Short.
Police then began looking at suspects with medical knowledge, perhaps butchers. The FBI interviewed students at the University of Southern California Medical School, which was close to the homicide scene. Eventually, some 150 suspects came and went and the case went cold.
Police early on focused on a man named Leslie Dillon. He was a bellhop and a former mortician’s assistant, knew details about the case, and had ties to someone who knew Short. Famed gangster Bugsy Siegel was a suspect for a time. A homicide detective would later write a book and claim his father was the killer. And now, some 70 years later, a retired detective who worked on the case has come forward and named a suspect: a surgeon whose estranged wife lived just a block away from the crime scene. Over the years, hundreds of people have confessed to the killing. Police do not believe any of them.
Time magazine listed the case as one of the most infamous unsolved cases in history. It remains one of the oldest and most famous in Hollywood, and in 2006, it hit the big screen, The Black Dahlia directed by Brian DePalma and starring Scarlett Johansson and Hilary Swank.
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