The Elizabeth Short aka Black Dahlia Murder

Elizabeth Short, aka the "Black Dahlia," was just 22 years old when she was brutally murdered in Los Angeles on January 15, 1947.

The 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, also known as the “Black Dahlia,” is one of the oldest cold cases in Los Angeles. Not only was it a horrific crime, but it’s also proven notoriously difficult to solve.

In the decades since the Black Dahlia murder, police, the press, and amateur sleuths alike have all delved deep into this unsolved crime and developed several convincing theories.

On January 15, 1947, Elizabeth Short’s dead body was found in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Leimert Park. The first person who reported the grisly sight was a mother out for a morning walk with her child.

According to the woman, the way Short’s body had been posed made her think that the corpse was a mannequin at first. But a closer look revealed the true horror of the Black Dahlia crime scene.

The 22-year-old Short had been sliced in two at the waist and completely drained of blood. Some of her organs — such as her intestines — had been removed and neatly placed underneath her buttocks.

Pieces of flesh had been cut away from her thighs and breasts. And her stomach was full of feces, leading some to believe that she’d been forced to eat them before she was killed.

The most chilling mutilations, however, were the lacerations on her face. The killer had sliced each side of her face from the corners of her mouth to her ears, creating what’s known as a “Glasgow smile.”

Since the body had already been washed clean, Los Angeles Police Department detectives concluded that she must have been killed elsewhere before being dumped in Leimert Park.

Near her body, detectives noted a heel print and a cement sack with traces of blood that had presumably been used to transport her body to the vacant lot.

The LAPD reached out to the FBI to help identify the body by searching their fingerprint database. Short’s fingerprints turned up rather quickly because she had applied for a job as a clerk at the commissary of the U.S. Army’s Camp Cooke in California back in 1943.

And then her prints turned up a second time since she had been arrested by the Santa Barbara Police Department for underage drinking — just seven months after she’d applied to the job.

The FBI also had her mugshot from her arrest, which they provided to the press. Before long, the media began reporting every salacious detail they could find about Short.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Short’s mother Phoebe Short didn’t learn of her daughter’s death until reporters from The Los Angeles Examiner telephoned her pretending that Elizabeth had won a beauty contest.

They pumped her for all the details they could get on Elizabeth before revealing the terrible truth. Her daughter had been murdered, and her corpse had been dismembered in unspeakable ways.

Moreover

https://allthatsinteresting.com/black-dahlia-murder# :~:text=Elizabeth%20Short%2C%20aka%20the%20%22Black,cold%20cases%20in%20Los%20Angeles.

http://.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/the-black-dahlia