"The basic rule of homicide applies. Nothing stays buried forever. Nothing."
Dwight 'Bucky' Bleichert, The Black Dahlia Movie (2006)
Hello everyone and welcome back to my blog. Today is Day 2 of Blogtober.
The Black Dahlia has always been an intriguing true crime case to me. It is still unsolved to this day, seventy-one years after the murder. If you are unfamiliar with the case, then keep reading this blog. It is sure to keep you on the edge of your seat. I’ve been interested in every detail of this case since I first learned about it many years ago. I am not inserting photos of the crime scene or any of the gruesome photos taken on that fateful day, out of respect for any remaining family members of the victim’s family. So, get a snack, get a glass of wine, light a fall candle, and get ready for a very interesting read.
********* WARNING: IF YOU ARE TRIGGERED BY GRUESOME DETAILS OF A TRUE MURDER, VIEW DISCRETION IS ADVISED**********
Elizabeth Short was born on July 29, 1924, in Boston, MA. Her parents were Cleo and Phoebe May Short. Elizabeth was the third of five daughters. Her father Cleo built miniature golf courses for a living. During the stock market crash of 1929, Cleo lost his job and most of his savings, leaving the family broke. In 1930, Cleo’s car was found abandoned on the Charlestown Bridge, assumed that he committed suicide by jumping into the Charles River. Elizabeth’s mother Phoebe assumed her husband was dead and moved away with her five daughters to a small apartment. She worked as a bookkeeper to support the family. At age 15, Elizabeth underwent lung surgery due to bronchitis and severe asthma. Her doctors had suggested Elizabeth relocate to a milder climate during the winter months to prevent further respiratory problems. She spent the next three years living in Miami, FL with family friends. Short then dropped out of high school when she was just a sophomore.
In late 1942, Phoebe received an apology letter in the mail. The letter revealed that her presumed dead husband was alive after all. He stated he had started a new life in California. In December of 1942, at the age of 18, Elizabeth relocated to CA to live with her father in Vallejo, CA. She had not seen him since she was six years old. Cleo was working at Mare Island Naval Shipyard on the San Francisco Bay. Elizabeth moved out in January 1943 due to arguments between her and her father. She took a job at the base exchange at Camp Cooke (now Vandenberg Air Force Base) near Lompoc, CA.
Short live with several friends, and briefly with an Airforce Sergeant who was reportedly abusive towards her. In mid-1943, Elizabeth left Lompoc and moved to Santa Barbara. On September 23, 1943, Elizabeth was arrested at a local bar for underage drinking. Juvenile authorities sent her back to Massachusetts, but she went back to Florida, visiting Massachusetts occasionally. While in Florida, she met Major Matthew Michael Gordon, a U.S. Army Airforce officer at the 2nd Air Command group. He was in training for deployment to the China Burma India Theater of Operations of WWII. Elizabeth told friends that he had written to purpose marriage while he was recovering from injuries from a plane crash in India. Elizabeth accepted his proposal, but Gordon died in a second crash on August 10, 1945, less than a week before the Japanese surrender ended the war.
After her fiance's death, she relocated to Los Angeles in July 1946 to visit Army Air Force Lieutenant Joseph Gordon Fickling, who she has known from living in Florida. Fickling was stationed at the Naval Air Force Base in Long Beach. Elizabeth Short spent the last six months of her lie in Southern California. She was a waitress and rented a room behind The Florentine Gardens Nightclub on Hollywood Blvd. Short was described as an aspiring actress. She had aspirations to be a film star, but she had no known acting jobs or skills.
On January 9, 1947, Short returned to her home in Los Angeles after a trip to San Diego with Robert ‘Red” Manley, a 25-year-old married salesman she had been dating. Manley said he dropped her off at the Baltimore Hotel in L.A. and that short was to be meeting her sister who was visiting from Massachusetts. The staff of the Baltimore Hotel said they saw short using the lobby telephone. After that, she was seen by restaurant guests of the Crown Grille Cocktail Lounge, a half mile away from the Baltimore Hotel 6.7 miles away from home.
On January 15, 1947, a naked body was found in two separate, severed pieces in a vacant lot on the West Side of South Morton Avenue. The body was of Elizabeth Short. A local resident by the name of Betty Bersinger discovered the body at around 10:00 am while walking with her three-year-old daughter. Betty thought it was a mannequin at first when she then realized it was a human body. Shorts severely maimed body was cut off at the waist. And drained entirely of blood, leaving Shorts skin a pasty white.
The medical examiner’s office determined that she has been dead for around ten hours prior to the discovery, leaving the time of death during the evening of January 14 or in the early morning hours of January 15. The body had been washed by the killer. Elizabeth’s face had been slashed from the corners of her mouth to her ears. She has several cuts on her thighs and breasts where entire portions of flesh had been removed. Elizabeth’s lower half was positioned a foot away from her upper half and intestines were tucked beneath her buttocks. Her corpse had been ‘posed; with her hands over her head and her elbows bent at right angles, and her legs spread apart. Reporter Aggie Underwood was among the first to arrive at the scene and took photos of Shorts corpse and the crime scene. Detectives located a heel print on the ground. Amid some tire tracks and a cement sack containing watery blood was also found nearby.
An autopsy was performed on January 15, 1947, by Dr. Frederick Newbart. The Autopsy stated that Elizabeth was five feet five inches tall, weighed 115 pounds, had light blue eyes, brown hair, and badly decayed teeth. Elizabeth's body had been cut completely in half. Newbart's report distinguished that there was very little bruising along the incision line, meaning it had been completed after Elizabeth had died. The lacerations on her face measured three inches on her right side and two and a half on her left side. The official cause of death was determined to be hemorrhaging from the lacerations to her face, and the shock from blows on the head and face.
On January 21, 1947, someone claiming to be Elizabeth’s killer made a phone call to the editor of the Los Angeles Examiner, James Richardson, giving their congratulations on the paper's coverage of the murder. The caller also exclaimed that he had planned on turning himself in eventually but wanted the police to pursue him a little bit longer. The caller also told Richardson that he should ‘expect some things of Beth’s in the mail’. On January 24, 1947, a manila envelope suspiciously addressed to the Los Angeles Examiner. The same information inside the envelope was sent to other Los Angeles papers as well. The addresses were made from individualized words that had been cut and pasted from newspaper clippings. The large message on the front of the envelope read “Here are Dahlia’s belongings; letter to follow.” It contained Elizabeth’s birth certificate, business cards, photographs, names written on pieces of paper, and an address book with the name Mark Hansen on the cover. The envelope was cleaned with gasoline, similar to how Elizabeth’s body was cleaned. Several fingerprints were lifted from the envelope and sent to the FBI for testing. Unfortunately, the prints were contaminated in transit to FBI headquarters, and they could not analyze the prints properly. A handbag and a black suede shoe were found on top of a garbage can in an alley a small distance away from Norton Avenue, only 2 miles away from where Elizabeth’s body was found. The items that were recovered by the police, have also been wiped with gasoline, destroying any fingerprints left behind.
Police quickly named Mark Hansen, who is the owner of the address book, a suspect in the investigation. He is a wealthy local nightclub and theater owner. According to some sources, he confirmed that the purse and shoe were discovered in the alley were Elizabeth Shorts. Elizabeth’s friend, Ann Toth, told police that Elizabeth had recently forbidden sexual advances from Hansen, signifying it as a probable cause for him to kill her. Nevertheless, he was cleared of suspicion in the investigation. The LAPD had interviewed over 150 men in the following weeks whom they believed to be potential suspects. Police interviewed several persons found in Hansen’s address book, including Martin Lewis, who was an acquaintance of Short’s. Lewis had an alibi the day of Elizabeth’s murder. He was in Portland, Oregon visiting his father-in-law who was dying of kidney failure.
Seven hundred and fifty investigators from the LAPD worked on Elizabeth’s case during the preliminary stages, that includes four hundred sheriff’s deputies, and two hundred and fifty state patrol officers of California. Different sites were searched for possible evidence, including storm drains, abandoned buildings, and various locations. But he searches revealed no further evidence. City Councilman Lloyd G. Davis a $10,000 reward for information that leads to Elizabeth’s killer. After the announcement of the reward, various people came forward with confessions, most of the confessions the police dismissed as false information. Several of those false confessions were charged with obstruction of justice.
By the spring of 1947, Elizabeth Shorts murder had become a cold case with little new leads. Finis Brown, one of the lead detectives on Elizabeth Short’s murder case, blames the newspapers for compromising the investigation through the reporters’ searching of details and unconfirmed facts. In September 1949, a grand jury assembled to discuss meagerness in the LAPD’s homicide department, based on their failure to solve several murders, especially ones involving women and children, in the last few years, Elizabeth Short’s being one of those cases. Detectives also investigated Elizabeth’s past, tracing her movements between Massachusetts, California, and Florida. They interviewed people who knew her in Texas and New Orleans, but the interviews produced no useful information in the murder.
Over the years, Elizabeth Short’s infamous murder prompted a large number of confessions, many of them believed to be false. Over five hundred people have confessed since the initial investigation, some of whom were not born at the time of the murder. In 2003, Ralph Asdel, one of the original detectives on the case, told the L.A. Times that he believes he had interviewed Elizabeth’s killer. He said he was a man who had been seen with his sedan parked near the vacant lot where Elizabeth’s body was found.
Elizabeth Short is buried in Mountain View in Oakland. After her younger sisters grew up and got married, their mother, Phoebe, moved to Oakland to be near Elizabeth’s grave. In the 1970’s, she moved back to the East Coast, where she lived well into her nineties. Two weeks after Elizabeth’s death, California Republican, Assemblyman C. Don Field was encouraged by the case to present a bill calling for the development of a sex offender registry. California would become the first state in the United States to make the sex offender registry mandatory.
When I think of the True Crime of the Black Dahlia, I thought it was about a girl who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That may be the case, but I feel someone was out to get her. I am not accusing anyone of the crime, I am simply stating my opinion about what had happened and my feelings. I believe Mark Hansen got so obsessed with her after her initial decline of his advances towards her, that he couldn’t take ‘NO’ for an answer. He was so obsessed with being with her and having her to himself, that he did the most unspeakable act. After doing my research, I had no clue who to think would have murdered her. Men’s minds seem to turn off when they hear the word ‘no’ they turn into the person we don’t want to see, and they lose consciousness of what they do. Its been 71 years and I do not think this case is going to be solved. The only two people who know what happened are Elizabeth and her killer.
See you tomorrow in the next blog where things get weird in an elevator.