Background
Elizabeth Short was born in Boston on 29 July 1924 and moved to California in the mid-1940s. At 22 she was a young woman living in and around Los Angeles, taking temporary jobs, moving between lodgings and hoping for an acting career. After her death the press nicknamed her the 'Black Dahlia', a name tied to a film title of the day and to stories that she liked to dress in black. The nickname has often overshadowed the person: to her family and friends she was someone with plans and dreams.
Los Angeles in the late 1940s was a fast-growing postwar city whose newspapers competed fiercely over crime stories, which helped the case attract exceptional media attention.
What happened
Short's body was found on the morning of 15 January 1947 in a vacant lot on South Norton Avenue in the Leimert Park neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Medical examiners estimated that she had died some hours earlier, between the evening of 14 January and the early hours of 15 January. The cause of death was recorded as blows to the head and shock.
She was identified quickly through fingerprints the FBI held from a 1943 incident. In the early days of the investigation hundreds of personnel, including sheriff's deputies and state patrol officers, worked on the case. Soon afterwards someone claiming to be the killer mailed Short's belongings to a newspaper; the envelope had been wiped with gasoline and no usable fingerprints remained.
Investigation and suspects
Over the years police looked at more than 150 people, and upwards of 500 people have claimed responsibility. None of them was ever convicted. Witnesses who had seen Short in her last days gave investigators their first leads, but these did not result in an arrest. In 1949 a grand jury reviewed the Los Angeles police's handling of unsolved murders, and this case was among those under scrutiny.
In later decades several names entered public discussion, among them Dr George Hodel, who was accused by his own son. These claims have never been proven, no one has been charged, and such individuals can only be described as alleged suspects.
Where it stands today
The case remains unsolved and is regarded as one of the best-known unsolved murders in United States history. Books, films and countless theories have kept it alive, sometimes at the cost of the woman at its centre. On this page Dark Location remembers Elizabeth Short not as a legend but as a 22-year-old whose future was taken from her.