A warning: this article concerns a murder whose physical particulars are extraordinarily violent. It is not possible to tell the story honestly without referring to them, and they are part of why the case became famous in the way it did. I have tried to handle them with the seriousness they deserve and to keep the focus, where possible, on the young woman whose name has, over the decades, almost disappeared beneath the nickname the newspapers gave her.
Contents
Part One: The Vacant Lot
At about ten o’clock on the morning of 15 January 1947, a young housewife named Betty Bersinger was walking with her three-year-old daughter along South Norton Avenue in the Leimert Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Leimert Park was, in those years, a quiet middle-class district of bungalows and undeveloped lots, several miles south of Hollywood and ten miles from downtown. The morning was cool and overcast. Bersinger was on her way to a shoe repair shop.
As she passed a vacant lot between 39th and Coliseum Streets, she saw what she initially took to be a discarded mannequin lying in the weeds near the pavement. Mannequins were not unusual debris in the post-war years; department stores sometimes dumped them when displays were changed out. She walked closer. Then, in the seconds it takes to understand what one is actually looking at, she realised it was a body. The body of a young woman. It had been cut in half at the waist.
Bersinger ran to a neighbour’s house and called the police. Within an hour, Los Angeles Police Department officers had cordoned off the lot. Within two, the press had arrived in numbers, including a young photographer for the Los Angeles Examiner named Felix Paegel who, by the standards of the era, was permitted extraordinary access to the scene. The crime-scene photographs Paegel and others took that morning would, for the next eighty years, define how the case was remembered.
What they saw, what the LAPD documented, and what the coroner Dr Frederick Newbarr would record in his post-mortem report a few hours later, was this. The body was that of a woman in her early twenties. She had been bisected with surgical precision through the lumbar region of the spine, between the second and third lumbar vertebrae — a clean, careful separation that the coroner believed indicated knowledge of human anatomy. Her body had been drained of blood almost completely before being placed in the lot, which is why there was no significant blood on or around the scene. Her face had been cut from the corners of her mouth to her ears, a mutilation that would later be called by various names but is now most commonly referred to by the Scottish dialect term, a Glasgow smile. Her body had been washed.
She was lying on her back, arms raised above her head, legs spread apart in a posed position. She was placed only a few feet from the pavement, in clear view of anyone passing. The killer had wanted her to be found.
Her fingerprints were taken at the scene and rushed by the LAPD to the offices of the Los Angeles Examiner, which used its newsroom’s Soundphoto wire to transmit them to the FBI in Washington. The Bureau had her identified within an hour. Her name was Elizabeth Short. She was twenty-two years old. She was from Massachusetts. The fingerprints had been on file because she had been arrested in Santa Barbara, California, in September 1943 — a minor charge of underage drinking, dismissed without serious consequence. The arrest had nonetheless put her in the federal database. Without that small administrative footprint, it might have taken weeks to know who she was.
Part Two: Who Elizabeth Short Actually Was
One of the durable injustices of the Black Dahlia case is how completely the woman at its centre has been overwritten by the legend the case became. The Elizabeth Short of popular imagination — the aspiring starlet, the femme fatale, the Hollywood hopeful with the dyed-black hair and the dahlia in her lapel — is a composite produced by the 1947 press, by James Ellroy’s 1987 novel, by Brian De Palma’s 2006 film, and by countless cheaper retellings in between. The actual Elizabeth Short was a quieter, sadder, and more recognisable figure: a young woman from a small town who had not yet figured out what she wanted to do with her life and who, in the last few months before her death, was running out of money and friends.
She was born on 29 July 1924 in Boston, Massachusetts, the third of five daughters of Cleo and Phoebe Short. Her family lived in Medford, a working-class suburb. In 1930, when Elizabeth — known to her family as Bette and to her friends as Beth — was five years old, her father parked his car on a bridge over the Charles River and disappeared. The car was abandoned. The family assumed he had committed suicide. Phoebe raised the five girls alone through the Depression, working as a bookkeeper, with what was by all accounts considerable strain.
Then, in 1942, Cleo wrote a letter to Phoebe from California. He had not killed himself after all. He had simply abandoned his family — walked away from his debts and his five daughters and started a new life on the other side of the country. Phoebe never spoke to him again. Beth, eighteen by then and the most fragile of the daughters, wrote back. In 1943 she travelled to California to live with him in Vallejo.
The reunion did not last. Beth and her father quarrelled within months, and she moved out — first to a brief job as a clerk at a Camp Cooke military base, where she was arrested for the underage drinking offence that would later identify her body, and then, restlessly, to Florida, where she lived for various periods between 1944 and 1946. In Florida she became briefly engaged to a US Army Air Forces officer, Major Matt Gordon Jr, who died in an aviation accident in India in August 1945. The death of Gordon, by every account from those who knew her in the months following, hit her very hard.
By the summer of 1946 she had drifted back to California. She lived in a string of cheap hotels and shared rooms in Hollywood and Long Beach. She worked occasional jobs as a waitress and sometimes as an artists’ model. She told people she wanted to be an actress, though no studio records show her ever having seriously pursued it — no auditions, no agency representation, no screen tests. She borrowed small amounts of money from anyone who would lend it. She dated a number of men, including several servicemen, and was at one point asked by a Hollywood theatre owner named Mark Hansen, in whose home she had been a guest, to leave. By the early days of January 1947 she had no fixed address. She was, in the language her acquaintances would later use to investigators, a girl on a drift.
None of this was sensational. None of it was the stuff of Hollywood noir. It was the particular vulnerability of a young woman in a city that did not particularly care about her, whose family was far away, who had recently lost the man she had hoped to marry, and who was running out of options. It was the kind of vulnerability that, in a different week, would have ended in a quiet return to Massachusetts or a marriage of convenience or a slow disappearance into one of the entry-level jobs that Hollywood absorbed thousands of young women into every year. Instead, it ended on a vacant lot in Leimert Park.
Part Three: The Last Week
The final confirmed sighting of Elizabeth Short alive was at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles on the evening of 9 January 1947. She had been driven there earlier that day by a man named Robert Manley, a twenty-five-year-old salesman from Huntington Park whom she had met in San Diego the previous month. Manley had spent the night at the boarding house where Short had been staying in San Diego — sleeping, by both their accounts, separately — and had agreed to drive her back to Los Angeles when she said she needed to meet her sister, who was visiting from Berkeley.
The Biltmore was the largest hotel on the West Coast in 1947, an enormous Renaissance Revival building on Pershing Square. Manley waited with Short in the lobby for several hours while she made phone calls. Eventually he left her there. She told him she was meeting her sister. He drove home to Huntington Park. The next day he tried to telephone her at the Biltmore and was told no-one of that name was registered, which was true; she had been using the lobby as a meeting point, not staying at the hotel.
Hotel staff later told investigators that Short had stood in the lobby for some time after Manley left, made further telephone calls, and then walked out of the front entrance at approximately 10 p.m. into the cold January night. Where she went next is the central mystery of the case. Between 10 p.m. on 9 January and the discovery of her body on the morning of 15 January, there is a five-and-a-half day gap in which nobody who knew her appears to have seen her, and during which the coroner’s evidence indicates she was being held alive somewhere. She was tortured, the coroner believed, for much of that time. The fatal injuries — the bisection, the facial cuts — were inflicted after death. The cause of death itself was cerebral haemorrhage produced by repeated blows to the head, combined with shock and blood loss from her other injuries.
Robert Manley, the last person known to have been with her, was an obvious early suspect. He was questioned at length, given a polygraph test which he passed, and eventually cleared. He never recovered psychologically from the attention the case brought him. He was institutionalised for mental illness in the 1950s and died in 1986. He maintained until his death that he had nothing to do with what happened to her.
Part Four: The Press Circus
The press coverage of the Black Dahlia case was, even by the standards of 1947 Los Angeles, extraordinary. The city had four major daily newspapers locked in vicious competition — the Los Angeles Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Herald-Express, and the Los Angeles Daily News — and the war between them produced some of the most aggressive crime journalism in American history. The Examiner, a Hearst paper, was particularly notorious for arrangements with the LAPD that gave its reporters preferential access to crime scenes and police information in exchange for favourable coverage. It was an Examiner photographer who arrived at the Leimert Park lot before the body had even been covered.
The nickname “Black Dahlia” was applied to Elizabeth Short within days of her body’s discovery, by reporters writing for these papers. Its precise origin has been disputed for decades. The most common story holds that Short’s friends at a Long Beach drugstore had called her by the nickname earlier — a play on the 1946 Alan Ladd noir film The Blue Dahlia, applied affectionately to a young woman who favoured black clothing and had recently dyed her brown hair black. Whether that nickname was actually in use during her lifetime or was invented by reporters after her death has never been settled. What is certain is that by 18 January 1947, three days after her body was found, the name was everywhere.
The Examiner, in particular, treated the case as something between a homicide investigation and a serial. Reporters tracked down Phoebe Short in Massachusetts and, by the account that has been told in newsrooms ever since, deceived her into believing they were calling about her daughter winning a beauty contest before breaking the news of her murder over the telephone — a tactic intended to extract uninhibited reaction quotes. The paper also competed for and obtained details of the body that the LAPD would have preferred to keep confidential, including the bisection and the facial cuts.
The coverage also created its own evidence. Hundreds of people came forward over the following weeks to provide tips, confess to the murder, or claim relationships with Short they had never actually had. The LAPD eventually estimated that more than fifty separate individuals made formal confessions to killing the Black Dahlia in the months following the murder. None of them could provide details consistent with the actual crime. The phenomenon — false confessions to a sensational murder, made by mentally ill or attention-seeking people — was new enough at the time that the LAPD did not have a standard procedure for handling it. Every confession was investigated, often at length, before being discarded. The investigative resources expended on false leads in those first months almost certainly damaged the real investigation.
One element of the post-discovery period, however, was almost certainly genuine. On 21 January 1947, six days after the body was found, an envelope arrived at the Los Angeles Examiner. It had been mailed from downtown Los Angeles. The address was made of words and letters cut from magazines. Inside, wrapped in paper that had been doused in petrol — apparently in an attempt to remove fingerprints — were Elizabeth Short’s birth certificate, her social security card, photographs of her with Major Matt Gordon, and a small black address book with the name “Mark Hansen” embossed on the front and a number of pages torn out. A note attached read: Here is Dahlia’s belongings. Letter to follow.
The materials were authentic — only the killer or someone working closely with him could have had access to Short’s personal documents. The address book, however, with its missing pages, would prove a frustration. Hansen, the Hollywood theatre owner Short had briefly stayed with, was interviewed at length and remained a suspect of interest for years, but no charge was ever brought. The torn-out pages have never been recovered.
Over the following weeks, several further notes arrived at newspapers and at the LAPD, some of them probably genuine and others certainly hoaxes from copycats. The communications eventually stopped. The killer, whoever he was, fell silent.
Part Five: The Investigation
The LAPD investigation of the Elizabeth Short murder was, in its first months, the largest in the department’s history to that point. Hundreds of officers were assigned to it. More than a hundred and fifty potential suspects were interviewed and at various points considered seriously. The investigation eventually expanded to include the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and was tracked, at intervals over the decades, by the FBI.
The medical evidence pointed strongly toward a killer with anatomical training. The clean bisection between specific vertebrae, performed with what was almost certainly a surgical instrument, was not the kind of mutilation a non-medical person would produce. The draining of blood and washing of the body suggested both knowledge of procedure and access to a location where such work could be conducted without interruption — a private home, a garage, a clinic, or a mortuary. Several investigators noted similarities to a surgical procedure called a hemicorporectomy, which was an experimental technique known to a small number of doctors in the 1940s.
The pool of suspects narrowed, in the LAPD’s eventual working theory, to men with medical or military medical training who had been in contact with Short during her final months in California, and who had access to a private property where the murder could have been committed. Several names emerged from this filtering process. None of them produced enough evidence to support a charge.
Walter Bayley was a Los Angeles surgeon who lived just a block from the lot where Short’s body was found. He had separated from his wife in late 1946. His wife later told an LAPD detective that she believed Bayley might have been involved in the killing. Bayley died of natural causes in 1948 before any serious investigation of his possible involvement could be undertaken. His name has resurfaced in some of the more serious modern retellings of the case but rarely with conclusive new evidence.
Mark Hansen, the theatre owner whose address book the killer mailed to the Examiner, remained an LAPD person of interest for years. He had known Short. He had asked her to leave his home. He could not satisfactorily explain why his property was among the materials sent to the press. He was never charged.
Leslie Dillon, a former bellhop and amateur mortician who wrote to LAPD psychiatrist J. Paul De River in 1948 claiming to have information about the killing, was eventually picked up and interrogated for several days. He gave conflicting statements. He was eventually released, and several historians have argued that the LAPD’s pursuit of Dillon was so badly handled that even if he had been the killer, no prosecution would have been possible.
The list of seriously considered suspects, in addition to these, includes Norman Chandler, the Los Angeles Times publisher who was briefly looked at for reasons that have never been fully clarified; Patrick O’Reilly, a sadistic businessman with a documented history of violence against women; Joseph A. Dumais, a soldier who confessed to the killing in February 1947 and was, after extensive investigation, found to have been hundreds of miles away at the time of the murder; and a handful of others. Books continue to appear, on a regular cycle, identifying new suspects. None has produced evidence sufficient to convince the agencies that still hold the file.
Part Six: George Hodel
The most famous post-1947 candidate for the role of Elizabeth Short’s killer is George Hill Hodel, a Los Angeles physician whose case has been investigated and argued for, over the past two decades, by his own son.
Steve Hodel is a retired LAPD homicide detective who served on the force for twenty-four years before retiring in 1986. In 1999, when his father died at the age of ninety-one, Steve was sorting through his effects when he came across a small album of photographs. Two of the photographs, he believed, were of Elizabeth Short. He had also discovered, in researching his father’s life, that George Hodel had in fact been an LAPD suspect in the Black Dahlia case at the time of the original investigation. The LAPD had bugged his home in the late 1940s and had recorded conversations in which Hodel made remarks that some investigators believed amounted to admissions of involvement in the killing. The bugging had been part of a separate investigation into Hodel’s molestation of his fourteen-year-old daughter Tamar, in which Hodel was charged in 1949 and, after a sensational trial during which several witnesses were apparently bribed or intimidated, acquitted. Hodel had then left the country and lived for many years in Asia before eventually returning to California.
Steve Hodel published his case for his father’s guilt in his 2003 book Black Dahlia Avenger, which has been updated repeatedly in subsequent editions. The case he makes is extensive and circumstantial. George Hodel was a surgeon with the relevant medical training. He had a private home in Hollywood — a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building called the Sowden House — with a basement large enough to have been used to dispose of a body. He moved in artistic and bohemian circles that intersected with Elizabeth Short’s. The LAPD had considered him a suspect at the time. Steve Hodel argues that handwriting samples from the Black Dahlia killer’s notes match his father’s handwriting, that the photographs in his father’s effects are of Short, and that statements his father made on the LAPD’s secret recordings amount to an admission.
The case against the case against George Hodel is also substantial. Most academic and journalistic Black Dahlia researchers have found the handwriting comparison unpersuasive. The identification of the photographs as Elizabeth Short has been challenged by some experts and accepted by others. The LAPD recordings, while suggestive in places, are open to multiple interpretations. Steve Hodel is the son of the man he is accusing, which both gives him privileged access to evidence and gives skeptics reason to question his objectivity. The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office reviewed Steve Hodel’s evidence in 2003 and 2004 and concluded that it was not sufficient to support charges, though the case was officially listed as one in which sufficient evidence had been gathered to charge had the suspect been alive.
The honest position on George Hodel, as on Arthur Leigh Allen in the Zodiac case, is that the circumstantial evidence is substantial enough that he cannot be dismissed and not conclusive enough that he can be confirmed. He died in 1999, and so neither outcome is now possible.
Part Seven: Why the Case Endured
The Black Dahlia murder was not, in 1947 terms, an unusually rare crime. Los Angeles in that year saw more than two hundred homicides, several of them involving young women whose bodies were found in degrading or violent circumstances. A killing called the Jeanne French murder, which took place on 10 February 1947 — less than a month after the Short discovery, in the same broad area of Los Angeles, with similar mutilation features — has been the subject of intermittent speculation that it may have been committed by the same killer. The French case is also unsolved.
What separated the Black Dahlia from these other cases, and what has sustained its place in American memory for nearly eight decades, was a combination of factors that came together in a way that no individual newspaper editor, prosecutor, or investigator could have engineered.
The first was the particularity of the crime scene. The body’s posing, the bisection, the facial cuts, the public placement — these elements were so specifically theatrical that they invited interpretation. The killer, whoever he was, had wanted the body to be found and discussed. He had succeeded. The crime suggested a mind, and a mind suggests a story, and stories are what newspapers exist to sell.
The second was the press environment. The four-paper war in 1947 Los Angeles produced coverage of a kind that no later city could replicate. Every detail was milked. Every potential suspect was named and shamed. Every angle was explored to and beyond the limits of responsible journalism. The case became, in the early weeks of 1947, the dominant story in the largest city in the American West, and the dominant story remains, even now, the one against which all subsequent Los Angeles murders have been measured.
The third was the cultural moment. Los Angeles in 1947 was a city becoming, very rapidly, the centre of American film-making and the engine of American fantasy. The post-war years were a period of enormous migration into the city, much of it of young women hoping to enter the studios. The Black Dahlia case appeared to confirm every dark suspicion about what could happen to such a young woman in such a city. It became, almost from the first headlines, a kind of foundational warning narrative — the dark side of the Hollywood dream. James Ellroy’s 1987 novel and Brian De Palma’s 2006 film amplified this reading. So did the dozens of cheaper retellings in between.
The fourth, and perhaps the most important, was the simple fact of the case not being solved. As with the Zodiac killings two decades later, the absence of an ending has functioned as a kind of permanent invitation to retell the story. Every generation of true crime writers has produced its own theory. Every generation has found new readers to persuade. The lack of resolution is what has kept the case alive when many similar killings have been completely forgotten.
Part Eight: Elizabeth Short, as Distinct from the Black Dahlia
It is worth, before closing, attempting to set aside everything the case has accumulated and remember the young woman at its centre.
Elizabeth Short was twenty-two years old. She had been described by her sisters as the prettiest of the five Short girls and also as the most easily hurt. She had asthma, which had been serious enough in childhood to lead her mother to send her to Florida several winters running for the warmer weather. She had a strong New England accent that she had not lost during her time in California. She did not drink heavily. She did not, despite the post-1947 mythology, sleep around indiscriminately — friends and former roommates described her as unusually modest for the era and the milieu, and the autopsy found anatomical conditions that were consistent with her being a virgin or near-virgin at the time of her death, though this has been a point of some disagreement among researchers. She had recently been talking, in her last weeks, about leaving Los Angeles and going home to Massachusetts. She had run out of money. She was waiting for a friend, or her sister, or for some particular phone call that would tell her what to do next, on the night she walked out of the Biltmore Hotel and into whatever happened to her.
She had wanted to act, in the vague way that thousands of girls in 1940s California wanted to act, and had not actually done very much about it. She had wanted to be loved. She had wanted, more than anything, to be respectable in a way that the early loss of her father and the unstable years that followed had made difficult for her to be. She was a young woman in trouble. She did not deserve what happened to her, and she did not deserve the eighty years of retelling that have, in their cumulative effect, turned her into a symbol of post-war Hollywood seediness rather than a person.
Her mother Phoebe outlived her by nearly half a century, dying in 1992 at the age of ninety-six. Phoebe never accepted that her daughter’s case would not be solved, and she gave occasional interviews into her final years insisting that she would live to see the killer named. She did not.
A Final Note
The Black Dahlia case is, as of 2026, the oldest unsolved homicide on the Los Angeles Police Department’s books. It remains technically open, in the sense that no statute of limitations applies to murder and that the case file is not closed. In practical terms, no active investigation is being conducted. The detectives who worked it in 1947 are long dead. The witnesses are dead. Most of the suspects are dead. Many of the physical exhibits collected in the original investigation have been lost to fire, flood, theft, or simple administrative attrition over the intervening decades. The handwriting samples, the photographs, and a small amount of physical material from the crime scene are believed to still exist in LAPD storage; whether they would yield to modern forensic techniques is unclear and has never been seriously tested.
The case will almost certainly never be solved. Unlike the Zodiac killings, where genealogical DNA may yet produce an identification, the Black Dahlia case predates the forensic era in which such evidence might have been preserved. The body was washed before being dumped. Any DNA the killer left on or near her would have been destroyed by his own actions before it could have been collected, and even if it had been collected, the storage and laboratory techniques of 1947 would not have preserved it usefully. The murder belongs to a category of historical crimes that are, in all practical terms, beyond the reach of modern investigation.
What remains is Elizabeth Short. Not the Black Dahlia — that figure is the property of newspapers and novelists and screenwriters, and has done well enough for itself over the past eight decades — but the small, hurt, hopeful young woman from Medford who came to California to find her father and found instead a string of cheap rooms and the wrong kind of attention. She was buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland in January 1947. Her grave has been visited, over the years, by thousands of strangers. The marker is simple. It gives her name and her dates. It does not mention the case, or the nickname, or any of the rest. It says only: Daughter, Elizabeth Short, July 29, 1924 – January 15, 1947.
That is the most honest summary of the case that anyone has yet managed to put together. The rest is commentary.
