Black Dahlia
More than 500 people have confessed to the murder of Elizabeth Short, and some of them were not yet born when she died. Short was an American woman from Boston who was found murdered in Los Angeles in January 1947. The press soon gave her a nickname, the Black Dahlia, and it has outlived nearly everyone who wrote it. Her killer has never been identified.
Who was the young woman behind the headlines? What happened to her family before she ever reached California? Why did newspapers, rather than detectives, shape so much of what the public believed? And why do so many rival theories still compete to explain one crime?
Elizabeth Short was born on the 29th of July 1924 in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Boston. She was the third of five daughters of Cleo Alvin Short Jr. and Phoebe May Sawyer. Her father was a Navy sailor from Virginia, and her mother came from Milbridge, Maine. In 1927 the family settled in Medford, Massachusetts.
The 1929 stock market crash wiped out most of the savings her father had earned building miniature golf courses. In 1930 his car was found abandoned on the Charlestown Bridge. Everyone assumed he had jumped into the Charles River, and her mother went to work as a bookkeeper to support the family.
Short's health was fragile. Bronchitis and severe asthma led to lung surgery when she was 15, and doctors advised periodic stays in a milder climate. For the next three years her mother sent her to spend winters with family friends in Miami, Florida. She left Medford High School during her sophomore year.
Late in 1942 a letter of apology reached her mother, and it came from her presumed-dead husband. He was alive and had started a new life in California. In December of that year Short, then 18, moved to Vallejo to live with the father she had not seen since she was 6. He worked at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard on San Francisco Bay. Arguments between them drove her out by January 1943.
Near Lompoc, Short took a job at the Base Exchange at Camp Cooke and briefly lived with an Army Air Force sergeant who reportedly abused her. She moved to Santa Barbara in mid-1943. On the 23rd of September she was arrested there for drinking in a bar while underage. Juvenile authorities sent her back to Massachusetts, but she returned to Florida instead.
In Florida she met Major Matthew Michael Gordon Jr., a decorated officer of the 2nd Air Commando Group who was training for deployment to Southeast Asia. Short later told friends that he proposed by letter while recovering from a plane crash in India. She accepted. Gordon died in a second crash on the 10th of August 1945. Her sister Dorothea also served in the war, assigned to decode Japanese messages.
In July 1946 Short traveled to Los Angeles to visit Lieutenant Joseph Gordon Fickling, an acquaintance from Florida stationed at the Naval Reserve Air Base in Long Beach. She is often described as an aspiring actress. Some sources say she did hope to become a film star, yet no acting job or credit has ever been found. She spent her last six months in southern California, mostly around Los Angeles. Shortly before her death she was waiting tables and renting a room behind the Florentine Gardens nightclub on Hollywood Boulevard.
On the morning of the 15th of January 1947, a naked body was found in a vacant lot on the west side of South Norton Avenue, midway between Coliseum Street and West 39th Street. The neighborhood, Leimert Park, was largely undeveloped at the time. The body lay in two pieces, severed at the waist.
Medical examiners judged that she had been dead about ten hours. That put her death on the evening of the 14th or in the early hours of the 15th. The body had been drained of blood and apparently washed. The lower half lay a foot from the upper. The killer had posed her, with her hands above her head, her elbows bent at right angles and her legs apart. Her face had been slashed from the corners of the mouth to the ears.
Herald-Express reporter Aggie Underwood was among the first to reach the scene, and she took several photographs. Detectives found a heel print among the tire tracks. Nearby lay a cement sack containing watery blood.
Six days earlier, on the 9th of January, Short had returned to Los Angeles from a short trip to San Diego with Robert "Red" Manley. He was a 25-year-old married salesman she had been dating. Manley said he dropped her at the Biltmore Hotel downtown, where she was to meet a sister visiting from Boston. Staff there reportedly saw her using the lobby telephone. Patrons of the Crown Grill Cocktail Lounge at 754 South Olive Street allegedly saw her soon afterward.
County coroner Frederick Newbarr performed the autopsy on the 16th of January. His report recorded that she stood 5 ft 5 in, weighed 115 lb and had light blue eyes, brown hair and badly decayed teeth. Ligature marks circled her ankles, wrists and neck. Bruising and bleeding at the scalp were consistent with blows to the head. Newbarr found that she died of hemorrhaging from the cuts to her face and shock from blows to the head and face.
The bisection followed a technique taught in the 1930s, called a hemicorporectomy. Newbarr noted very little bruising along the incision line, which suggested it was done after death. Her fingerprints, on file since her 1943 arrest, let the FBI put a name to the body.
Wain Sutton of William Randolph Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner made the telephone call to Boston, with City Editor Jimmy Richardson and Jim Murray sitting beside him. Sutton told Short's mother, Phoebe, that her daughter had won a beauty contest. Only after he had drawn out every personal detail did the reporters reveal that she had been murdered.
Decades later Murray described the call to journalist Larry Harnisch. "I sat there and listened to the poor, dear mother telling him about her school-day triumphs," he recalled. He said he was still appalled. Phoebe could not believe the news until the Los Angeles police confirmed it through her local police department.
The Examiner then offered to pay her airfare and lodging to come to Los Angeles and help the police. That was another ploy. The paper wanted to keep her away from detectives and rival reporters to protect its scoop.
The Examiner and the rival Herald-Express went on to sensationalize the case. One Examiner story described the black tailored suit Short was last seen wearing as "a tight skirt and a sheer blouse." Reporters called her an "adventuress" who "prowled Hollywood Boulevard." On the 17th of January the Los Angeles Times labeled the killing a "sex fiend slaying."
The Examiner soon became a target of the killer, or of someone posing as the killer. On the 21st of January a caller phoned editor James Richardson, praised the paper's coverage and said he would eventually turn himself in. First, he said, he would let police chase him a while longer. He told Richardson to "expect some souvenirs of Beth Short in the mail."
Three days later a manila envelope arrived, addressed to "The Los Angeles Examiner and other Los Angeles papers." Its words were cut from newspaper clippings and pasted on. A message on the front read: "Here is Dahlia's belongings, letter to follow." Inside were Short's birth certificate, business cards, photographs, slips of paper bearing names and an address book embossed with the name Mark Hansen.
The packet had been cleaned with gasoline, much as the body had been washed. Police therefore suspected it came straight from the killer. Partial fingerprints were lifted and sent to the FBI, but they were compromised in transit and could not be analyzed. That same day a handbag and a black suede shoe were reported on a garbage can in an alley 2 mi from Norton Avenue. Police recovered them, but they too had been wiped with gasoline.
On the 26th of January the Examiner received a handwritten letter: "Here it is. Turning in Wed., Jan. 29, 10 am. Had my fun at police. Black Dahlia Avenger." It named a place for the surrender. Police waited there on the morning of the 29th, and no one came. At 1:00pm another cut-and-pasted letter arrived at the Examiner: "Have changed my mind. You would not give me a square deal. Dahlia killing was justified."
The Herald-Express also received letters assembled from clippings. One read: "I will give up on Dahlia killing if I get 10 years. Don't try to find me." Police, meanwhile, had already started looking hard at the name on the address book.
On the 14th of March a pencil note was found tucked in a shoe in a pile of men's clothing at the ocean's edge, at the foot of Breeze Avenue in Venice. It read: "To whom it may concern: I have waited for the police to capture me for the Black Dahlia killing, but have not. I am too much of a coward to turn myself in, so this is the best way out for me. I couldn't help myself for that, or this. Sorry, Mary." A beach caretaker had spotted the clothes and told lifeguard captain John Dillon, who notified Captain L. E. Christensen of the West Los Angeles station. The coat and trousers of blue herringbone tweed, and the rest of the outfit, gave no clue to who owned them.
Mark Hansen, the owner of the address book, was a wealthy nightclub and theater owner at whose home Short had stayed with friends. Her friend and roommate Ann Toth told investigators that Short had recently rejected his advances, which suggested a motive. Even so, Hansen was cleared. Robert Manley was also investigated, and he was cleared after passing numerous polygraph examinations. Martin Lewis, another name from Hansen's address book, had an alibi. He had been in Portland, Oregon, visiting his dying father-in-law.
In the weeks that followed, the LAPD interviewed over 150 men as possible suspects. In the early stages 750 investigators from the LAPD and other agencies worked the case, among them 400 sheriff's deputies and 250 California State Patrol officers. They searched storm drains across Los Angeles, abandoned structures and sites along the Los Angeles River. None of it produced further evidence.
Lead investigator Captain Jack Donahue told the press he believed the murder took place in a remote building or shack on the outskirts of the city. In his view the body was then carried to the lot. The precision of the cuts led the LAPD to consider a surgeon or someone with medical training. In mid-February 1947 the department served a warrant on the University of Southern California Medical School, near the site, for a list of its students. The university agreed on condition that the students' names stay private. Background checks found nothing.
City Councilman Lloyd G. Davis posted a reward for information. Confessions poured in, and police dismissed most as false. Several of the false confessors were charged with obstruction of justice.
On the 1st of February the Los Angeles Daily News reported that the case had "run into a Stone Wall." The Examiner still kept it on the front page for thirty-five days. Many outlets reprinted false reports that Short had been tortured for hours before she died. Police let those reports circulate so that the real cause of death stayed secret. Sergeant Finis Brown, one of the lead detectives, later blamed the press for compromising the investigation.
By the spring of 1947 the case was cold. In September 1949 a grand jury convened to examine why the LAPD's homicide unit had failed to solve so many murders, especially of women and children. Short's was one of them. Afterward detectives retraced her movements through Massachusetts, California and Florida. They also interviewed people who had known her in Texas and New Orleans, and those interviews yielded nothing useful.
Police logged sixty confessions during the initial investigation, most of them from men. Sergeant John P. St. John, an LAPD detective who worked the case until he retired, remarked, "It is amazing how many people offer up a relative as the killer."
In 2003 Ralph Asdel, one of the original detectives, told the Times he believed he had once interviewed the killer. In the early hours of the 15th of January 1947, a neighbor stopped at the lot to dump a bag of lawn clippings. He saw a sedan parked there, reportedly with its right rear door open, and a man standing in the lot. Startled, the driver left. Someone followed the car to a restaurant where its owner worked, but he was ultimately cleared.
Authors and experts have proposed a long list of names. Larry Harnisch, a former Times copy editor, suggested a doctor named Walter Bayley. Others point to Leslie Dillon, Mark Hansen and Jack Anderson Wilson. Folk singer Woody Guthrie was briefly a suspect and was cleared. Mobster Bugsy Siegel and filmmaker Orson Welles were never suspects at all, yet their names circulate.
George Hodel was never charged, but after his death his son Steve Hodel, an LAPD homicide detective, accused him of killing Short and committing other murders. Earlier, George Hodel had been suspected, though not charged, in the death of his secretary, Ruth Spaulding. He was also accused of raping his daughter Tamar and was acquitted. He lived in the Philippines from 1950 to 1990. Steve Hodel cites his father's surgical training as circumstantial evidence.
In 2003, notes from the 1949 grand jury report revealed that investigators had wiretapped George Hodel's home. They recorded him telling an unidentified visitor: "Supposin' I did kill the Black Dahlia. They couldn't prove it now. They can't talk to my secretary because she's dead. They thought there was something fishy. Anyway, now they may have figured it out. Killed her. Maybe I did kill my secretary."
In 1991 Janice Knowlton, who was 10 at the time of the murder, claimed she saw her father, George Knowlton, beat Short to death with a claw hammer. She placed it in the detached garage of the family home in Westminster. Her 1995 book was titled Daddy was the Black Dahlia Killer. Her stepsister Jolane Emerson condemned it as "trash" and said, "She believed it, but it wasn't reality. I know, because I lived with her father for sixteen years." St. John told the Times the claims were "not consistent with the facts of the case."
Piu Eatwell's 2017 book Black Dahlia, Red Rose focuses on Leslie Dillon, a bellhop who had been a mortician's assistant. It also names his associates Mark Hansen and Jeff Connors, and Sergeant Finis Brown, a lead detective with links to Hansen who was allegedly corrupt. Eatwell argues that Short knew too much about their scheme to rob hotels. She places the killing at the Aster Motel, where the owners reported a blood-covered room the morning the body was found. In 1949 the Examiner stated that LAPD chief William A. Worton denied any link to the motel. The rival Los Angeles Herald claimed the murder happened there.
In 2000 Buz Williams, a retired Long Beach detective, wrote in the department newsletter The Rap Sheet about Dillon. His father, Richard F. Williams, had served in the LAPD's Gangster Squad and reportedly believed Dillon was the killer. The article claimed Dillon avoided extradition from Oklahoma because Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson II intervened for him. Harnisch disputes this. He says the district attorney's files positively placed Dillon in San Francisco when Short was killed.
Police detective Peter Merylo and several crime authors suspected a link between Short's murder and the Cleveland Torso Murders, committed in Cleveland, Ohio, between 1934 and 1938. LAPD investigators studied those killings in 1947 and later discounted any connection. In 1980 St. John examined new evidence against Jack Anderson Wilson, a former Torso Murder suspect. He said he was close to arresting Wilson, who died in a fire on the 4th of February 1982. In 1992 the NBC series Unsolved Mysteries revived the idea. On the program, Eliot Ness biographer Oscar Fraley suggested that Ness knew who was behind both cases.
In Chicago in 1946, six-year-old Suzanne Degnan was murdered and dismembered in what became known as the Lipstick Murders. Steve Hodel and William Rasmussen have suggested a connection to Short's case. Captain Donahue said publicly that the two were "likely connected." Short's body was found three blocks west of Degnan Boulevard. The Degnan ransom note read in part "BuRN This FoR heR SAfTY." Like the Black Dahlia Avenger's letters, it mixed capitals and small letters, had a similar misshapen letter P and shared one word exactly.
William Heirens served life in prison for Degnan's murder. He was first arrested at 17 for breaking into a residence near the Degnan home. Heirens claimed police tortured him, forced a confession and made him a scapegoat. He died on the 5th of March 2012, at age 83.
Between 1943 and 1949, over a dozen unsolved murders of women occurred in Los Angeles, involving sexual mutilation. Authorities at the time suspected a single killer. The 1949 grand jury investigated law enforcement's failure to solve them, and further work solved none. The cases include Ora Elizabeth Murray, 41, found on the 27th of July 1943 near the parking lot of the Fox Hills Golf Course. She had last been seen leaving a downtown dance at the Zenda Ballroom with an unidentified man.
John Gilmore's 1994 book Severed proposes a link with Georgette Bauerdorf, 20, found dead in her West Hollywood apartment on the 12th of October 1944. Gilmore points to the Hollywood Canteen, where Bauerdorf worked as a hostess and where he says Short also worked. Harnisch disputes that Short ever worked there. Steve Hodel still argues one person killed both women, because in each case the media received taunting notes.
After Short's death, Jeanne "Nettie" French, 44, was found beaten on Grand View Boulevard on the 10th of February 1947. The Herald-Express read lipstick scrawling on her body as referring to "B.D.," for Black Dahlia. Historian Jon Lewis says it actually read "P.D.," for police department.
Other victims include Evelyn Winters, found in March 1947 in an abandoned rail yard in Norwalk, and Dorothy Ella Montgomery, found in May under a pepper tree in Florence-Graham. Laura Eliza Trelstad vanished after leaving a card game at her Long Beach home, saying, "If the boys can play poker, we girls can go dance." Rosenda Josephine Mondragon, Lillian Dominguez, Gladys Eugenia Kern, Louise Margaret Springer and Mimi Boomhower also appear on the list.
Jean Spangler, 26, left home on the 7th of October 1949, saying she was going to work as an extra on a film set. Two days later her tattered purse turned up in Griffith Park, 5.5 mi from her home. Inside was a letter addressed to a "Kirk" that mentioned seeing a doctor.
Staff and patrons at a Long Beach drugstore are said to have given Short the name Black Dahlia in mid-1946, as wordplay on the film The Blue Dahlia. Herald-Express reporter Bevo Means, who interviewed her acquaintances there, is credited with first using it. Aggie Underwood and Jack Smith have also been named as its creator. One popular rumor says she wore dahlias in her hair. The FBI's website says the press chose the name for her rumored taste for sheer black clothes. John Gilmore and Larry Harnisch both hold that the name began in her lifetime, while others dispute that she ever went by it. Before it caught on, the Herald-Express had called the crime the Werewolf Murder.
A number of strangers contacted police and newspapers claiming to have seen Short during her so-called missing week, between the 9th and the 15th of January. Investigators ruled out each sighting, and some witnesses had mistaken other women for her. Where she spent those days remains unknown. Oliver Cyriax's Crime: An Encyclopedia, published in 1993, says her body bore cigarette burns inflicted while she was alive. Her official autopsy report gives no sign of this.
Some acquaintances and commentators have called Short a prostitute or call girl. Harnisch says the contemporaneous grand jury found no evidence of it. He traces the rumor to John Gregory Dunne's 1977 novel True Confessions, which is based partly on the crime. Her autopsy states she was not and had never been pregnant, contrary to claims made before and after her death.
Another rumor holds that Short was a lesbian. According to Gilmore, it began when Means was told by the deputy coroner that she "wasn't having sex with men." Means and Herald-Express reporter Sid Hughes took this to mean she had relationships with women and fruitlessly searched gay bars in Los Angeles for evidence. Writing in the Portland Tribune, Anne Marie DiStefano listed the stories: "She was a prostitute, she was frigid, she was pregnant, she was a lesbian. And somehow, instead of fading away over time, the legend of the Black Dahlia just keeps getting more convoluted." Harnisch has called Gilmore's Severed "25% mistakes, and 50% fiction."
Short is buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland. After her sister Elnora grew up and married, their mother Phoebe moved to Oakland to be near her daughter's grave. She returned to the East Coast in the 1970s and lived into her nineties. On the 2nd of February 1947, just over two weeks after the murder, Republican assemblyman C. Don Field introduced a bill calling for a sex offender registry. California would become the first state to make such registration mandatory.
Historians credit the case as one of the first major crimes in postwar America to capture national attention. Time magazine listed it among the most infamous unsolved cases in the world. James Ellroy's 1987 novel The Black Dahlia, which ranges across politics, crime, corruption and paranoia in postwar Los Angeles, became a 2006 film by Brian De Palma, with Mia Kirshner as Short. Both novel and film bear little relation to the facts. Lucie Arnaz played her in the 1975 television film Who Is the Black Dahlia?, and Mena Suvari portrayed her in American Horror Story in 2011. In 2024 Michael Connelly's novel The Waiting gave the Black Dahlia case a major subplot.
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Common questions
Who was Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia?
Elizabeth Short was an American woman born on the 29th of July 1924 in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Boston. She was found murdered in Los Angeles in January 1947, and the press posthumously nicknamed her the Black Dahlia.
Where and when was the Black Dahlia found?
The Black Dahlia's body was found on the morning of the 15th of January 1947 in a vacant lot on South Norton Avenue in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Medical examiners estimated she had been dead about ten hours.
How did the Black Dahlia get her nickname?
The Black Dahlia nickname is disputed. Newspaper reports say staff and patrons of a Long Beach drugstore coined it in mid-1946 as wordplay on the film The Blue Dahlia, and Herald-Express reporter Bevo Means is credited with first using it.
Was the Black Dahlia murder ever solved?
The Black Dahlia murder has never been solved. The LAPD pursued over 150 suspects in the early weeks and made no arrests, and a grand jury review in September 1949 produced no breakthrough.
Who are the main suspects in the Black Dahlia case?
Suspects discussed by authors and experts include George Hodel, Leslie Dillon, Mark Hansen, Walter Bayley and Jack Anderson Wilson. Steve Hodel, an LAPD homicide detective, accused his father George Hodel, though George Hodel was never charged.
What was the Black Dahlia's connection to the Examiner newspaper?
Reporters from William Randolph Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner telephoned Short's mother in Boston and deceived her about her daughter's fate to extract personal details. The Examiner later received the killer's phone call, a packet of Short's belongings and several letters signed "Black Dahlia Avenger."
What is the legacy of the Black Dahlia murder?
The Black Dahlia case inspired James Ellroy's 1987 novel The Black Dahlia and Brian De Palma's 2006 film of the same name. On the 2nd of February 1947, the murder also prompted assemblyman C. Don Field to introduce a bill for a sex offender registry in California.
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