On This Day in History: January 15

The Black Dahlia

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Her name was Elizabeth Short. She was an aspiring actress who was brutally murdered in Los Angeles when she was only 22. The media gave her the nickname “Black Dahlia,” and despite there being more than 150 suspects, no one was ever arrested for the crime. It remains one of the most famous unsolved murders in American history.

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: January 15, 1947--

Elizabeth was born in 1924 in Boston, and when she was six, her father, having lost all his money in the 1929 stock market crash, abandoned his car on the Charlestown Bridge. It was assumed he had taken his own life by jumping into the river. When Short was 18, her mother received a letter of apology from her father, saying he’d not killed himself but had started a new life in California. His daughter, not imagining that a guy who deserted a wife and his five girls might be a piece of shit, traveled there to live with him. Big surprise, the happy reunion didn’t last long, and she moved out soon after.

She moved around, was engaged to an Air Commando who died in a plane crash five days before the war with Japan ended, and then landed in L.A. six months before her death to try her hand at acting. She was working as a waitress to support herself and living on Hollywood Boulevard when her mutilated body was found on January 15, 1947, in Leimert Park. She wasn’t just mutilated, but cut completely in half at the waist. Yikes.

There are a lot of other grisly details you can google, but I’ll only share that the poor woman’s body had been washed and “posed” by the murderer. Although no semen was present, there was evidence of rape. The nickname Black Dahlia came from a pharmacy owner who said that’s how the male customers referred to her.

The media shitstorm by Hearst-owned newspaper the Los Angeles Examiner was disgusting. They phoned Short’s mother in Boston and said that her daughter had won a beauty contest in order to wring information out of her for their scoop. The Examiner and another Hearst paper, the Herald-Express, slut-shamed Short and falsely characterized her as a woman who prowled Hollywood Boulevard for sex.

A week later, the killer taunted the Examiner by mailing them items including Short’s birth certificate, and two months later, an alleged suicide note was found tucked into some men’s clothing near the ocean. The note claimed responsibility for the murder, but there was no evidence to its veracity. Over the years, hundreds of men have claimed to be the killer. Many hypotheses have been generated, with a physician named George Hodel becoming a prime suspect after his death, but there’s no certainty about who killed Elizabeth Short.

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