Elizabeth Short has been portrayed many ways in the six decades since her body was dumped in two pieces on an empty lot in Los Angeles: Manipulative playgirl. Aspiring starlet. Naïve cock tease. Troubled soul.
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| Black Dahlias body, covered |
Above all, time has immortalized Elizabeth Short as the pin-up girl of Los Angeles Noir. The Black Dahlia. Fascination with her life, and especially her death — her gruesome, violent, unsolved murder — continues to this day.
The story of the unemployed 22-year-old waitress has inspired dozens of books, Web sites, a video game and even an Australian swing band. The quest to pinpoint her killer has become a hobby for generations of armchair detectives. And this fall, Hollywood will recast her tragic plight in a star-studded Black Dahlia movie.
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| Elizabeth Short - the Black Dahlia |
The Los Angeles Police Department has all but given up hope of ever closing the Dahlia case; the department has more urgent crimes to investigate, and the killer has likely been dead for years. Yet, it is precisely the unsolved status of Elizabeth Short's murder that gives it such an enduring allure.
We need to emphasize here that the case is so cold, the information so musty and bungled, that it's difficult to get a lucid picture of Elizabeth Short's brief life, much less her grisly death. The Crime Library will not attempt to solve the Black Dahlia murder in these pages, but to simply relate Short's story based on the most unbiased, accepted facts available, including historical newspaper articles and law enforcement records, as well as contemporary literature.
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