The Unsolved Case of the Black Dahlia
On January 15, 1947 an aspiring actress by the name of Elizabeth Short was found brutally murdered in Los Angeles.
allthatsinteresting claims that the first person who found Short’s dead body was a mother who was out on a morning walk with her child in Leimert Park. The woman claimed that the way Short’s body had been posed made her think that the corpse was a mannequin at first, but upon closer inspection, the true nature of the gruesome crime scene was revealed.
Short’s body had been sliced in half at the waist and completely drained of blood, and some of her organs had been removed and placed underneath her bottom. To make the scene even darker, pieces of flesh had been cut away from her thighs and breasts. Another chilling fact is that Short’s body also had gashes cut from each side of her mouth, and the autopsy found that she had suffered from repeated blows to the face, according to biography.
After a phone call to her mother in Massachusetts and questioning in Long Beach, it was discovered that to acquaintances, Short was known as the Black Dahlia, a reference to her taste in black dresses and to the 1946 crime film, “The Blue Dahlia.”
Both biography and allthatsinteresting state that a few weeks after the murder, the Examiner's office received an envelope with Short’s personal documents, including her birth certificate, social security card and an address book that had the name Mark Hansen on the cover.
Police were able to track down 75 men from the book, including Mark Hansen, who was a successful nightclub owner, but eventually, they were all cleared. Authorities even went as far as sifting through copycat letters, listening to fake confessions and following up on crimes that were similar, such as the Red Lipstick Murder, which occurred the following month in February of 1947, but they ended up nowhere.
The following year, a new lead emerged due to a former L.A. resident, Leslie Dillon contacting police about an acquaintance who he believed may have murdered Short. The police, however, believed that Dillion was actually the killer who had a split personality and tried to lure him west in an attempt to gain a confession. Dillon was able to sneak a note about his situation out a window to his friend who he suspected who turned out to be innocent.
Dillion filed a lawsuit against the city, and the jury disseminated without indicating a suspect, leaving the case to be cast aside and turning into a cold case.
To this day, the Black Dahlia case remains unsolved and is one of the oldest cold cases in Los Angeles.
