Sixty-one years ago today, a 22-year-old beauty by the name of Elizabeth Short was found brutally slain in a vacant lot at 39th and Norton streets in Los Angeles. Her body cut in half at the waist with surgical precision, her face and breasts slit, and there was a large gash where her vulva should have been. Her body had been drained of fluids as if prepared for an embalming and she was left in a garish pose, her head turned to the side and one arm above her body.
The case became known as the Black Dahlia Murder because Betty, as the wannabe actress liked to be called, wore her hair and clothes black.
The lurid crime shook Angelenos usually inured to the rampant crime in their midst, and a huge team of detectives was assigned to track down the perpetrator. Many suspects were pursued, but all were released and the case technically remains unsolved.
I’m somewhat of an armchair expert on the Black Dahlia Murder and have looked pretty deeply into it in connection with research on another brutual murder for a book project that also does not lack for suspects and hasn’t been solved.
I was involved in my share of homicide cases during a long newspaper career, and you haven’t really lived until you’ve stood in a morgue and watched a coroner in a white lab coat open one of those stainless steel drawers and slide out a sheet-covered corpse. Yup, just like in the movies. I also have read dozens of criminology and forensic texts and true-crime books in order to steep myself in investigative methodology and police jargon for my project.
Steve Hodel’s Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius For Murder was the best of the true-crime books I read, although it was the least well written.
As for literary pretension, it certainly cannot be compared to the Black Dahlia, the first of the novels in James Ellroy’s acclaimed “L.A. Quartet” and the book on which The Black Dahlia, director Brian De Palma’s 2006 bomb, was based. But Hodel’s Black Dahlia Avenger is in its own way an extraordinary stemwinder.
Here’s the story:
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