Hey there, DETECTIVES! DETECTIVE WRITER here to tell you all about a decade’s long-unsolved murder mystery of a young woman known as The Black Dahlia A.K.A murder victim, Elizabeth Short.
True beauty, isn’t she? Well, unfortunately, a beautiful woman who faced such a gruesome death. But we’ll get to that a while, DETECTIVES. Allow me to introduce or give you a brief recap if you have already heard of her, DETECTIVES!
Elizabeth Short was born in Boston, Massachusetts on July 29th, 1947. Her parents, Cleo and Phoebe Short split soon after the stock market crash and she was raised primarily by her mother. When she was fifteen years old, she had lung surgery since she suffered from asthma and bronchitis. As a teenager, she also got arrested for underage drinking and she soon moved away to live with her family, although, they began to argue a lot, leading her to move out.
She met a decorated Army officer in Florida who soon proposed marriage to her; however, he soon passed away in a plane crash in 1945. It has been speculated that she arrived in Los Angeles with the intention to become an actress but there are no records of her in any acting credits or jobs anywhere.
On January 9th, 1947, Short went missing after allegedly being seen at a cocktail lounge just a few miles away from the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles where she was visiting with her married lover, Robert. On January 15th, Short’s dismembered body would be found in Los Angeles’ Leimert Park vacant lot by a mother walking with her young daughter. The woman initially assumed she was looking at a mannequin, but upon looking closer, she realized it was a mutilated corpse. Now, the strangest thing was that her body was completely drained of any blood, cut at the waist, completely naked and pale, and with her arms raised above her head. Her face was even slashed brutally, with cuts throughout her entire body, and legs spread apart.
Trigger warning, DETECTIVES. Please feel free to skip forward if you don’t wish to view it.
Now, while there have been several admissions and a few suspicious individuals by the police, unfortunately, Short’s killer has never been caught and her murder still has not been brought to justice.
She was called The Black Dahlia because, in life, she apparently loved wearing black clothes and because of a film released with the same name in 1946, and no, she wasn’t in it. It’s been so long and the case is still unsolved, who do you think it could have been? When? Why?
I hope you have enjoyed this storytime as much as I did, DETECTIVES! Please let me know in the comments if you want to have more storytime! Have a great day, night, afternoon, or evening, DETECTIVES! Stay tuned for next week’s post and until then, keep on sleuthing, DETECTIVES!
Detective Writer 