The Black Dahlia

CASE BACKGROUND

Elizabeth Short was born on 29/7/1924 in Boston, Massachusetts, but raised in Portland, Maine. She was the third of five daughter when the family became broke and her father vanished. The family then moved to an apartment in Medford . Phoebe (Mother) worked to support them.

Elizabeth circa 1930

Phoebe Mae Short: Mother of five.

1942, Phoebe received a letter from her presumed-deceased husband, which told her he was in California. At age 18, Elizabeth went to live with her father. They didn't get on! so Elizabeth left. But while in Florida, Short met Major Matthew M. Gordon, a decorated Army Air Force officer. They, according to Elizabeth, planned to marry, but Gordon died in a plane crash.

Cleo Short: Elizabeth's father.

July 1946 Elizabeth moved to Los Angeles and visited Air Force Lt, Joseph G. Fickling, whom she had known from holidaying in Florida. Elizabeth lived in a room behind the Florentine Gardens nightclub, southern California for half a year before her death. She had been working as a waitress.

Elizabeth Short AKA "The Black Dahlia".

January 9, 1947, Short returned home from a excursion with Robert Manley, whome she had been dating. Manley claimed he left her at the Biltmore Hotel located at 506 South Grand Avenue LA, and said Short was meeting her sister, who was to visit her that afternoon.

Virginia Short: Elizabeth's sister.

Staff of the Biltmore recalled seeing Short use the lobbys telephone, she was also later seen in the Crown Grill Cocktail Lounge at 754 South Olive Street.

Robert Manley: a 25-year-old married salesman.

CRIMESCENE

January 15, 1947, Short's naked body was found bisected horizontally, on the vacant lot of S. Norton Avenue, north of Coliseum Street in Leimert Park, LA. At the time, the neighborhood was largely undeveloped.

"X" shows the position of discovery.

A local resident named Betty Bersinger discovered the body at approximately 10 a.m. while taking with her three-year-old daughterto the shops. Bersinger initially thought it was a discarded mannequin.

Betty Bersinger.

Elizabeth's body was completely drained of blood, leaving her skin a pallid white. Medical examiners determined that she had been dead for around ten hours.

Her hair was washed and her body cleaned with petrol inorder to destroy fingerprints.

Short's face had been slashed from the corners of her mouth to her ears.

She had several cuts on her thigh and breasts, where entire portions of flesh had been sliced away.

The lower half of her body was positioned a foot away from the upper.

Tic-Tac-Toe Mark made to the right hip.

Near the body, detectives found a bloody heel print Smear amid tire tracks and a cement sack containing watery blood.

Police Files:

AUTOPSY

Elizabeth's autopsy was performed on January 16, 1947, by Frederick Newbarr, the Los Angeles County coroner. The report stated that Short was 5 feet 5 inches tall, weighed 115 pounds, and had light blue eyes, brown hair, and badly decayed teeth (Bottom row).

Elizabeth in morgue. Section of left leg missing where her tattoo was removed.

There were ligature marks on her ankles, wrists, and neck, and superficial tissue loss on her right breast. It also noted superficial lacerations on the right forearm, left upper arm, and the lower left side of the chest.

Elizabeth had been bisected using a technique taught in the 1930s called a hemicorporectomy. The report noted "very little" ecchymosis (bruising) along the incision line, suggesting it had been performed after death.

The lacerations on each side of the face, which extended from the corners of the lips, were measured at 3 inches on the right side of the face, and 2.5 inches on the left. The

skull wasn't fractured, but there were bruising on the front, right side, with bleeding in the subarachnoid space.

The cause of death was determined to be hemorrhaging from the lacerations to her face and the blows to the head.

Elizabeth's anal canal was dilated at 1.75 inches, suggesting that she may have been raped. Samples were taken from her body but there was no indication of semen.

Elizabeth's death certificate.

Elizabeth was Identified by her fingerprints

as she had a previous arrest for drinking underage in 1943

Elizabeth's 1943 mugshot.

Elizabeth's fingerprint file.

THE PRESS

Front page of The Examiner.

The Examiner and the Herald-Express both sensationalized the case and made Elizabeth out to be promiscuous and a "Prowler".

They went on to dub the crime "The Warewolf murder"

Later adopting a name in which Elizabeth

would become synonymous with, a name given to her by staff of the pharmacy she frequented, on account of her large black flower shaped hair style in which she commonly wore flowers, this along with the curren move "Blue Dahlia".

Elizabeths pharmacy.

January 21, 1947, someone claiming to be Elizabeth's killer phoned the office of the Examiner, condemning their coverage of the case. He also offered to post some "souvenirs" of Elizabeth in the mail.

Acquaintances of Elizabeth gave interviews.

January 24, a manila envelope addressed to The Examiner was discovered by the U.S. Postal Service. No handwriting could be attained as the words had been cut-and-pasted from newspaper clippings.

The envelope contained Short's birth certificate, business cards, photographs, names written on pieces of paper, and an address book with the name Mark Hansen embossed on the cover

Elizabeth's belongings as posted by the killer.

Black Book labelled Mark Hansen.

The packet had also been cleaned with gasoline. Despite this several partial fingerprints were lifted, however, the prints were compromised in transit and could not be properly analyzed.

The same day a handbag and a black suede shoe were found on top of a garbage can in an alley about two mile from Norton Avenue. They had also been wiped down with petrol.

Bag and shoe found close by murder site.

Police followed up Mark Hansen, the owner of the address book found in the packet. Hansen was a wealthy local nightclub and theater owner and an acquaintance at whose home Short had stayed with friends.

Ann Toth, Short's friend and roommate, told investigators that Short had recently rejected sexual advances from Hansen, and suggested it as potential cause for him to kill her.

Ann Toth.

Police cleare Hanson as well as people listed within the address book and went on to interview over 150 men in the ensuing weeks.

Marjorie Greyham: shared a past lodging with Elizabeth.

Robert Manley, being the last person to see Short alive, was one of such to be investigated, but police cleared him of suspicion after passing numerous polygraph examinations.

Manly identifying Elizabeth's belongings.

Robert Manly testifying.

A City councilman named Lloyd G. Davis posted a $10,000 (equivalent to $115.000) reward for information leading to the killer.[69] After the announcement of the reward, various persons came forward with confessions.

On January 26, another letter was received by the Examiner, this time handwritten, which read:

The letter also named a location at which the supposed killer would turn himself in. Police waited at the location that morning, but no one appeared. Instead, at 1:00pm, the Examiner offices received another cut-and-pasted letter, which read:

Local and national publications covered the story heavily, many of which reprinted sensationalistic reports suggesting that Short had been tortured for hours prior to her death; however, the stories, were false.

Punters reading the headlines.

Lead investigator Captain Jack Donahue told the press he believed the murder had taken place in a remote shack on the outskirts of L. A, and transported into the city. Based on the precise cuts, the LAPD began looking into the possibility the murderer may have been a surgeon or doctor. So in mid-February the LAPD served a warrant to the University of California Medical School, located near South Norton street, requesting a complete list of students. The university agreed so long as the students' identities remained private, they yielded no results.

FBI Headquarters. circa, 1947.

September 1949, a grand jury convened to discuss inadequacies in the LAPD's homicide unit based on their failure to solve numerous murders, Elizabeth's being one of them.

In the aftermath of the grand jury, further investigation was done on Elizabeth's past, with detectives tracing her movements and also interviewed people who knew her. However, the interviews yielded no useful information.

Black Dahlia Court Hearing.

Elizabeth Short "The Black Dahlia" became a cold case!

SUSPECTS

During the initial investigation into her murder, police received a total of 60 confessions. Since that time, over 500 people have confessed to the crime, some of whom had not even been born at the time of her death.

In 2003, Ralph Asdel, one of the original detectives, stated that he interviewed Elizabeth's killer, it was a man seen with next to a parked sedan at the vacant lot of South Norton, on the morning of the 15th. He was witnessed by a neighbor who was dumping a bag of lawn clippings in, the suspicious man seemed to get startled, then approached and peer in the window of the witnesses car, before returning to his sedan and driving away.

The witness followed him to a local restaurant, but the man in question was cleared of all suspicion.

The last person seen with Elizabeth Short before her disappearance, Manley was the LAPD's top suspect for the first few days. After two polygraph tests and a sworn alibi, he was set free.

Manley had been discharged from the army due to mental disability, and subsequently suffered a series of nervous breakdowns and claimed to be hearing voices. As a result, he was committed to Patton State Hospital by his wife in 1954. He died on January 16, 1986. The coroner attributed his death to an accidental fall.

Hansen was a Hollywood nightclubs owner at whose home Elizabeth lived, either as a boarder on several occasions between May and October 1946. Ann Toth shared a room with Elizabeth in this house, which was near Hansen's nightclub. Hansen was one of the last people known to have spoken to Elizabeth and The D.A. files indicate he made contradictory statements about the nature of the conversation.

The address book with Hansen's name was among Short's belongings, but he had never used it; Short had been using it as her own. He was still a prime suspect as late as 1951 and was also linked to three other suspects, each one a M.D. -

• Dr. Patrick S. O'Reilly

• Dr. M. M. Schwartz

• Dr. Arthur McGinnis Faught

Richard F. Williams and Con Keller were both members of LA's Gangster Squad while investigating the case. Keller believed Mark Hansen was the killer and said Hansen spent some time Surgical School. Keller also said that Hansen held elaborate parties in Hollywood and members of the LAPD attended and thus aided Hansen in a cover up.

Hansen died of natural causes in 1964. No charges were ever brought against him. He had no criminal record and no known history of violence. Popular accounts of the Black Dahlia case often portray Hansen as having connections to organized crime, but there is no evidence to support this.

Dr. Patrick O'Reilly.

Dr. Patrick O'Reilly was a medical doctor who knew Elizabeth through nightclub owner Mark Hansen. At the time of the murder O'Reilly was frequently at Hansen's nightclub and attended sex parties at Malibu with Hansen.

O'Reilly had a history of sexually motivated violent crime. He had been convicted for taking his secretary to a motel and sadistically beating her for no other reason than to satisfy his sexual desires without intercourse. There is also evidence to suggest that O'Reilly had once been married to the daughter of an LAPD captain.

Although the LAPD never considered Bayley a suspect, many theorists believed he could be linked to Elizabeth’s murder due to his surgical expertise along with several geographic and social connections.

Walter Bayley was a Los Angeles surgeon who lived one block south of the vacant lot where Elizabeth’s body was found. He moved from this location when he and his wife split in October 1946.

Bayley’s daughter, Barbara Lindgren, was a friend of Elizabeth’s sister, Virginia and her husband Adrian West. She had even been the matron of honor at their wedding.

When Bayley died in January 1948 his autopsy showed he had been suffering from degenerative brain disease.

Bayley's widow claimed that his mistress, Dr. Alexandra Partyka, had known a “terrible secret” about him, and that this may be why he listed Partyka his main beneficiary.

Ruth Bayley and Alexandra Partyka.

Larry Harnisch, copy editor forTheLos Angeles Times, champions Bayley could have been Elizabeth’s killer and that Bayley’s neurological condition was known to illicit violent behavior in otherwise calm individuals.

Harnisch contacted John E. Douglas, renowned FBI profiler, who advised two things. The first was that the public location dumping site had to have some significance, as most killers would probably hide a victim’s body. We must remember the vacant lot on South Norton was only one block away from the property owned by Ruth Bayley, Walter Bayley’s estranged wife.

The second was that the facial lacerations indicated that the killer had to have some sort of personal anger toward the victim. Elizabeth would falsely tell others that she had a child who died from a tragic incident, in order to gain sympathy. Walter Bayley had a son who was struck by a car and died when he was eleven.

The son’s birthday was January 13, and Elizabeth Short’s body was discovered on January 15. Harnisch hypothesese that Bayley could have been trying to compensate for his son’s death in some way.

Why George Hodel didn't killed Elizabeth Short.

1. He was never a prime suspect in the Black Dahlia case. he was one of over 150 suspects.

2. He didn't have any king of medical degree from the American College of Surgeons. So probably couldn't even have bisected Elizabeth.

3. George Hodel was found not guilty of molesting his daughter. Infact she was constantly accusing males of such things.

Newspaper article on molestation case.

4. He didn't have any pictures of Elizabeth. One was identified as Marya Marco, an actress, the other debunked by Elizabeth's own family,once you take away the photo "evidence" there really is no evidence at all that they even knew each other.

Marya Marco, 1949.

"The only mystery is how a son could drag his father's name through the mud for a profit"!

5. And lastly George Hodel only ever had a minor business transaction with Man Ray, and he would not even have been aware of " The Minotaur" as at the time, it was only reproduce in France.....

....However if you want a piece of art inspired by Elizabeth Short, then I would direct you to Marcel Duchamps, Étant donnés: 1,a chute d'eau, 2,le gaz d'éclairage - (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas)

Which he reportedly started in secret, around the time of the murder, and did not anounce, until just before his death in 1966.

The piece is a diorama, which one views by looking through two peep holes in an old wooden door. The scene itself is eerily reminiscent of the 1947 crimescene.