It could be a murder straight out of a bone-chilling Hollywood thriller!
More than six decades have passed since the blood-curdling ‘Black Dahlia’ murder shook up a Los Angeles neighbourhood, but the memories of one of the most shocking incidents recorded in the annals of crime continue to haunt not just the residents of North Avenue but people across the world.
A mother was strolling her three-year-old daughter on a bright and sunny morning in the North Avenue block on January 15, 1947, when her eyes fell upon a vacant plot of land adjacent to the pavement she was on.
A Horrific Discovery
Wedged in the maze of uncut grass in the vacant lot was a figure, which the woman initially thought to be a mannequin from a nearby departmental store.
To her horror, however, the figure turned out to be the lifeless body of a woman, cut in half from the waist.
Worse, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times, her mouth was slit open at both ends and her arms were outstretched. One look at the mutilated corpse was enough to say conclusively that the woman, later identified as 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, an aspiring actor with dreams of a career in Hollywood, had been subjected to torture of the most horrific kind before she was killed.
According to an article in the TIME magazine, the body of the 22-year-old was drained out of blood before it was dumped.
Short later came to be known as ‘Black Dahlia’. The film, Blue Dahlia, was released around the same time, and the media chose to call her ‘Black Dahlia’ for her reported liking to black clothes.
An Admission With A Rider
Based on early suspicion and observing the surgeon-like precision in the dissection of the body, the FBI, working with the LA police, checked out a group of students at the University of Southern California Medical School.
Interestingly, according to the FBI, a number of people had come forward over the years, owning responsibility for the macabre crime. But the agency ruled them out as mere publicity seekers with not even the remotest links to the crime.
Quoting ‘Black Dahlia’, the James Ellroy novel based on the sensational murder, the TIME magazine write-up claimed Short was drawn to Servicemen.
A year after the aspiring actor turned up dead in the North Avenue neighbourhood, an Army corporal claimed that he had been drinking with Short in San Francisco just days before she went missing, the article said, drawing from police reports.
Claiming that he had passed out drunk after the bingeing session, the corporal said he couldn’t recall what happened before when he came to his senses “in a cab outside New York’s Penn station”, TIME reported.
Though the corporal said “yes” when asked if he thought he had committed the grisly murder of the 22-year-old Hollowood hopeful from New England, the detectives later determined beyond any reasonable doubt that he had been at his army base the day Short died, the report added.
‘Thought Someone Was Playing A Trick’
The Los Angeles Times broke the story with the headline “Girl Victim of Sex Fiend Found Slain”. The report was dotted with chilling phrases such as “Butchered by a sex maniac” and an “orgy or torture”.
Patt Morrison, a crime reporter with the LA Times, recalled a conversation he had with Betty Bersinger, the mother of the three-year-old who had stumbled upon the corpse. He quoted her as saying that she tried not to think about the murder unless someone brought it up.
“At the time I wasn’t quite aware it was a real person — maybe somebody playing a trick. So frightening,” Morrison quoted Bersinger as recalling her moment of the horrid discovery in the LA Times report.
After realising that it wasn’t a mannequin pieced in half as she had initially assumed, Bersinger said, her first thought was to roll her child away from the crime scene.
According to a Fox News report quoting People magazine, a ‘rose’ tattoo was also carved out on the thigh of the victim woman.
Further, according to the Rolling Stone magazine, the coroner determined that Short’s death came from a “haemorrhage and shock from a concussion and facial lacerations”.
The Mirror, quoting from the findings of her autopsy, reported that her intestines and uterus were removed.
The Author Who ‘Solved’ The Case
Years later, in 2017, a book written on the case hit the stands. Piu Eatwell, the author of ‘Black Dahlia, Red Rose’, claimed to have cracked the case that puzzled the LA detectives for the better part of seven decades.
She was quoted as saying in The Mirror report that the “killer” was asked to get rid of the 22-year-old by a “Hollywood businessman with links to both the underworld and the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department)”.
The author further claimed the underworld and the police helped to bury the case.
The Mirror further quoted her as saying that there is “overwhelming evidence” that Leslie Dillon, identified as a 27-year-old bell worker, carried out the horrifying murder at the behest of Mark Hansen, a Hollywood businessman with connections in the LAPD, who was “obsessed” with Short but eventually grew tired of her.
Dillon had been picked up during the initial years of the probe, but was released for lack of evidence, as per the Rolling Stone report quoted earlier.
According to Eatwell, as Dillion went too far with his torture and mutilation and Hansen’s hand in the killing threatened to come out in the surface, the latter had the matter hushed up using his connections in LAPD, the Mirror reported.
Interestingly, years after the murder, Dillon named his daughter ‘Elizabeth’, the Rolling Stone report said.
But The Case Remains Unsolved
Who actually killed Elizabeth Short, and why, has remained a mystery to date.
“The murderer has never been found, and given how much time has passed, probably never will be,” the FBI says in the ‘Black Dahlia’ article on its website in the section dedicated to ‘Famous Cases & Criminals’.
The gory end of a small town girl, who came to LA with big dreams of Hollywood but found fame in her macabre death, is a story told many times to deter women from pursuing silver screen dreams.