THE BLACK DAHLIA (Distinguishing the fact from theory)

Elizabeth Short has been portrayed many ways in the six decades since her body was dumped in two pieces on an empty lot in Los Angeles.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 and 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 two years ago, Hollywood will recast her tragic fate in a star-studded Black Dahlia movie.

The Los Angeles Police Department has given up 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. The Crime Library will not attempt to solve the Black Dahlia murder in these pages, but to simply relate Short's story based on the most unbiased, accepted facts available, including historical newspaper articles and law enforcement records, as well as contemporary literature.

MACABRE DISCOVERY

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 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 full of 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 feet 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.

THE INVESTIGATION

In the 1940s, the police and the press lived in a symbiotic relationship. Reporters used the cops for inside work and info 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 getting as much personal information about Elizabeth from Mrs. Short as possible, they informed her 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," said one headline in the Washington Post.

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.

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 written 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.

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.

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. And because most of the key physical evidence has disappeared from the Black Dahlia file — including 13 scornful letters the killer sent the police and the media — it's unlikely the case will ever be solved. Det. Brian Carr, who inherited it in 1996, has publicly stated as much.

Elizabeth Short have finally made it onto the big screen the last year — six decades after her death — in a Universal Pictures release based on the 1987 James Ellroy novel ''The Black Dahlia.''

ANGEL POMA (GROUP 5)