The Black Dahlia
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Elizabeth Short, better known as the Black Dahlia, is a murder victim, born July 29, 1924 and died January 15, 1947.
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Biography
Born in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, Short was raised in Medford by her mother, Phoebe Mae, after her father, Cleo, abandoned her and her four sisters in October 1930.
Troubled by asthma, she spent summers in Medford and wintered in Florida. At the age of 19, she went to Vallejo, California to live with her father, and they moved to Los Angeles in early 1943. She left Southern California almost immediately because of an argument with her father and got a job in one of the post exchanges at Camp Cooke, which is now Vandenberg Air Force Base, near Lompoc. She moved to Santa Barbara, where she was arrested September 23, 1943, for underage drinking and was sent back to Medford by juvenile authorities.
She returned to Southern California in July 1946 to see an old boyfriend, Lt. Gordon Fickling, who was stationed in Long Beach, and while there she received the nickname "Black Dahlia" at a corner drugstore as a play on the current movie The Blue Dahlia, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.
In August 1946, she came to Hollywood to try her luck in the film business. She was last seen on the evening of January 9, 1947, in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel at 5th Street and Olive in downtown Los Angeles.
On January 15, 1947, her body was discovered in a vacant lot of the 3800 block of South Norton Avenue in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, cut in half at the waist and mutilated. The crime was never solved but has remained the subject of intense speculation.
She was interred in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland rather than Medford because her oldest sister lived in Berkeley and because she loved California.
Her unsolved killing has been key to the perception of Los Angeles as a dystopian land of broken dreams. The investigation by the LAPD was the largest since the killing of Marian Parker in 1927 and involved hundreds of officers borrowed from other law enforcement agencies. About 60 people confessed to the killing, mostly men, as well as a few women.
Although popular myth and many crime books portray her as a call girl, a report by the district attorney's office for the Los Angeles County Grand Jury states that she was not a prostitute.
Books and Films
A 1975 TV movie about the case, Who Is the Black Dahlia (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073897/) by Robert Lenski and starring Lucie Arnaz is a highly fictionalized version of the murder. Many details were changed because several people, including Short's mother and Robert M. "Red" Manley, who brought Short from San Diego to Los Angeles, refused to sign releases for the studio.
John Gregory Dunne used the murder as a point of departure in his 1977 novel True Confessions, which was made into the 1981 film True Confessions (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083232/) starring Robert Duvall and Robert De Niro with a screenplay by Dunne and his wife, Joan Didion.
Neo-noir author James Ellroy based his 1987 book, The Black Dahlia, on the crime. A film by Brian De Palma, based on the Ellroy novel, began production in Bulgaria in May 2005. Also titled The Black Dahlia, the movie will star Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank, and Mia Kirshner as Elizabeth Short, and is planned for release in 2006.
A 1988 episode of the TV detective thriller Hunter depicts Rick Hunter and Dee Dee McCall discovering a case similar to the Black Dahlia murder when a skeleton that has been cut in half is found during demolition of a building constructed in 1947 and are joined by a retired detective who worked on the Elizabeth Short case.
Max Alan Collins blends fact and fiction, as well as the Cleveland Torso Murderer, in his Shamus Award-winning 2002 novel, Angel in Black, featuring his character, private investigator Nathan Heller.
Music
Bob Belden's 2001 CD Black Dahlia draws inspiration from the case for a moody, noir score divided into 12 sections depicting her life, on a par with Jerry Goldsmith's score for Chinatown and David Shire's music for the film Farewell, My Lovely.
A melodic death metal band from Detroit call themselves The Black Dahlia Murder (http://www.theblackdahliamurder.com/) in reference to this crime.
See also
References
- Will Fowler; Reporters: Memoirs of a Young Newspaperman; Roundtable Publishing; ISBN 0-915677-61-X (hardback, 1991)
- John Gilmore; Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder; Zanja Press; ISBN 0-938331-03-5 (paperback, 1994)
- Steve Hodel; Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder; Arcade Publishing; ISBN 1-55970-664-3 (hardback, 2003)
- Janice Knowlton, with Michael Newton; Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer : The Identity of America's Most Notorious Serial Murderer--Revealed at Last; Pocket Books; ISBN 0671880845 (paperback, reissue 1995)
- Mary Pacios; Childhood Shadows: The Hidden Story of the Black Dahlia Murder; 1st Books Library; ISBN 1-58500-484-7 (paperback, 1999)
- William T. Rasmussen; Corroborating Evidence, Sunstone Press; ISBN 0-86534-440-X (hardback, 2004)
- James Richardson; For the Life of Me: Memoirs of a City Editor ; G.P. Putnam's Sons; (hardback, 1954)
- Jack Smith; Jack Smith's L.A. ; Pinnacle Books; ISBN 0-523-41493-5 (hardback, 1981)
- Agness Underwood: Newspaperwoman ; Harper and Brothers; (hardback, 1949)
- Jack Webb: The Badge: The Inside Story of One of America's Great Police Departments ; Prentice-Hall; (hardback, 1958)
External links
- Larry Harnisch's Black Dahlia murder website (http://www.lmharnisch.com/)
- Pamela Hazelton's Black Dahlia murder website (http://www.bethshort.com/)de:Die schwarze Dahlie