She longed to become an actress—a Hollywood star. However, a very different sort of fame lay in store for the pretty, raven-haired girl, universally remembered in the history of crime as the Black Dahlia.
The morning of January 15, 1947, was dreary and chilly when Los Angeles housewife Betty Bersinger set off for a shoe repair store with her 3-year-old daughter, Anne. On South Norton Avenue, they passed eerie, abandoned lots, overgrown with brush and weeds. Something white caught Betty’s eye. At first she thought it was a tossed-aside mannequin, discarded perhaps because it was broken in half. Then she realized the two halves were the body of a woman. “I was terribly shocked and scared to death,” Betty later told a reporter.1 She grabbed her daughter and rushed to the first house that had a phone.
The woman that Betty and her daughter discovered would quickly become a household name as newspapers across the country detailed every twist and turn in the search for her elusive killer. Her name was Elizabeth Short, a young woman who had gone to California hoping for stardom—only to achieve it after her gruesome death. It was those two elements—the glamorous Hollywood dreams and the lurid details of Elizabeth’s murder—that catapulted the case into the public’s consciousness like few others before it. The young woman had been sliced carefully in half, drained of her blood, and then posed in a bizarre spread-eagle display among the weeds. Rope marks scarred her ankles, wrists, and throat, and police believed that she had been hung upside down by her feet and tortured for hours before her death. Her mouth had also been slashed into a grotesque, too-wide smile. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
Main images: A police mugshot of Elizabeth Short, taken after her arrest for underage drinking on September 23, 1943; a glamorous publicity shot of Elizabeth.
Clockwise from center: Suspect Leslie Dillon; suspect George Hodel; suspect Robert “Red” Manley taking a life detector test.
“The victim of one of the city’s most brutal killings, according to veteran detectives, the attractive brunette could have died from head wounds, a deep stab wound in the abdomen, frenzied slashings in the back or from strangulation, investigators said. Jagged knife wounds also were found on the breasts and the left leg and running from the mouth across the face.”2
Those who knew her could not imagine how this became the fate of the girl they affectionately called Beth or Bette. Elizabeth Short was born in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, in July 1924, to Phoebe Mae Sawyer and Cleo Short. Even as a child, she stood out with her raven hair and gray-green eyes. Her small nose was slightly upturned. The only physical flaws noted in death were a few surgical scars, chewed fingernails, and bad lower teeth.
“She always wanted to be an actress,” said Phoebe the week after Elizabeth’s death. “She was ambitious and beautiful and full of life, but she had her moments of despondency. Sometimes she would be gay and carefree, then in the depths of despair.”3 Such swings are not unusual for some young women, but Elizabeth’s early home life was troubled. Her father lost most of his life savings in the 1929 market crash and abandoned his family the following year. Phoebe was left to raise her five daughters alone. The fatherless family moved to Medford, Massachusetts, where Phoebe worked as a bookkeeper. Elizabeth struggled with asthma and recurring bronchitis, and a suggestion to move to a more hospitable climate led her to happily drop out of high school in 1943 and head to California to pursue her acting dreams. She stayed for a few months with her father in Vallejo, California, but the reunion was not happy. He claimed that she would not stay home so “I told her to go her way, I’d go mine.” He never spoke to her again.4
By 1947, 22-year-old Elizabeth had made something of a home in San Diego. She appeared occasionally as a movie extra and auditioned for acting jobs whenever she could. She “loved to see, and be seen, in the movie colony spotlights,” one friend said. Her roommates and friends told police that she had several suitors.
The media frenzy that engulfed Elizabeth’s death cannot be understated. Her face was featured time and again on the front pages of newspapers across the country. “The case itself took on a life of its own,” said Los Angeles Police Detective Brian Carr, who oversaw the case between 2000 and 2009.5 Reporters soon began calling Elizabeth “The Black Dahlia,” a sensational moniker bestowed in part as a nod to the then-popular movie The Blue Dahlia, and because of her dark hair and fondness for black clothing.
“IT WAS FRONT-PAGE NEWS IN ALL THE LOCAL PAPERS EVERY DAY.”
Every development in the case—no matter how fruitless—seemed to warrant breathless coverage. When Elizabeth’s friend said she had bragged about being friends with the famous actress Ann Todd, the wire service United Press International announced that police would question the British star. Todd told police she had never met the slain starlet.
One suspect after another was arrested, each getting a guilty man’s treatment for a day. 25-year-old Robert “Red” Manley, a married salesman, had been dating Elizabeth and, according to her roommates, had threatened her. He had driven her from San Diego to Los Angeles a week before her death.
January 9, 1947 / Robert Manley is the last known person to see Elizabeth Short alive.
Newspapers nationwide ran a photo of Manley taking a polygraph lie-detector test. Twenty-nine-year-old Army Cpl. Joseph Dumais was also said to have been dating Elizabeth shortly before her death. Interest in him was piqued because he said that he “blacked out” after their date and had no memory of what happened to her. Both leads fell apart when each man provided alibis that checked out.
Having drawn a blank so far, police shifted focus to the women in Elizabeth’s life. Could the killer have been the girlfriend or wife of one of Elizabeth’s lovers? Indeed, Elizabeth’s sex life was the undercurrent in many stories, with reporters and officials alike dwelling on the tawdry subject—and passing judgment. “The averages may have caught up with Beth Short. She may have picked up one man too many,” was the observation of police psychiatrist Dr. Paul De River.7
The killer then reached out to the police, sending a letter created from words and letters cut from various newspapers and magazines. The creepy correspondence read: HERE! IS DAHLIA’S BELONGINGS. Enclosed were Elizabeth’s birth certificate, her address book, and other personal papers. A few days later, more of her belongings—a shoe and a bag—were found in a trash dump. The killer sent a letter to the Examiner telling police where he would turn himself in. However, he never showed up. He then sent another letter: “Have changed my mind. You would not give me a square deal. Dahlia killing was justified.”8 Strangely, several innocent people—both men and women—did turn themselves in. By 1996, police had fielded about 500 such confessions.
In January 1949, a bellhop named Leslie Dillon contacted Dr. De River, saying he wanted to discuss the murder for a book he hoped to write. De River immediately grew suspicious. Dillon had previously worked as a mortician’s assistant—meaning he knew how to drain blood from a body, as had been done with Elizabeth’s corpse—and “without prompting Dillon revealed details of the crime which police have never been able to explain,” said LAPD Detective Lt. Harry Hansen.9 After questioning, Dillon implicated his friend Jeff Connors, who police interviewed but released. Investigators refocused on Dillon, and he was set to appear in late 1949 before a grand jury—but the case was dismissed when a judge ruled that Dillon had been illegally detained.
In 2017, British author Piu Eatwell presented a theory that Dillon had orchestrated the Black Dahlia murder with his friend Connors and Mark Hansen, a local nightclub and movie theater owner. Hansen was known to frequently bed chorus girls and wannabe actresses, despite being married. He was linked to Elizabeth because he had given her a place to stay in the months before her death. Eatwell suggested that Hansen had connections within the police department—connections that had enabled the trio to get away with murder.10
More than 70 years after the crime, investigators continue to wade through countless theories. Most can be discounted, but one of the most intriguing comes from a former homicide detective who claims to have figured out the killer’s identity: his own father.
Los Angeles Police Department veteran Steve Hodel began suspecting his father, a respected Los Angeles doctor, after his stepmother gave him a small photo album that belonged to the elder Hodel after his death in 1999. The book, which measured 3 inches (7.6 cm) square, contained black-and-white photographs, many of which Steve Hodel recognized. Then he came upon two images of a black-haired woman he did not know. After painstakingly comparing facial contours and counting freckles, Steve Hodel became convinced the photos were of the infamous Black Dahlia. “I loved my father and respected him,” Steve Hodel told an Associated Press reporter in 2003. “His blood flows through my body. He gave me being. But now I have come to look at my father as the true Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”11 Hodel laid out his suspicions in a bestselling book, Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder.12
According to case files released 50 years after the slaying, Dr. George Hodel was indeed a suspect in Elizabeth’s murder. Police electronically surveilled his home for three weeks in 1950. Soon after, the Black Dahlia case was mentioned in court when Hodel was tried for committing incest with his daughter. (He was acquitted of the charge.) Transcripts of overheard conversations included Hodel saying “Supposin’ I did kill the Black Dahlia. They couldn’t prove it now. They can’t talk to my secretary anymore because she’s dead.” At another point, Hodel also suggested he might have killed his secretary.
Why police didn’t pursue Hodel is unclear. Officials have repeatedly declined to comment because the Black Dahlia investigation—while ice cold—is still technically open. “I don’t have the time to either prove or disprove Hodel’s investigation,” said LAPD Det. Brian Carr in a 2006 episode of the television series Cold Case Files. “I am too busy working on active cases.”
Hodel was not the first to accuse his own father of being the infamous killer. In 1995, a woman named Janice Knowlton released a book called Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer. She said that her deceased father, George, not only killed Elizabeth, but that she had witnessed the murder as a 10-year-old child. She claimed she had been brought to Elizabeth’s house during her father’s affair with the raven-haired starlet, and that police documents indicating that they had sought a man named “George” as a suspect further implicated her father.
Another doctor was put forward as a possible suspect. Larry Harnisch, a Los Angeles Times copy editor, suggested that a man named Walter Bayley could have been the killer. Bayley was a surgeon who, until he left his wife some four months before the murder, had lived one block from the lot in which Elizabeth’s body was dumped. Harnisch became convinced Bayley was a viable suspect after learning that one of the doctor’s daughters was good friends with Elizabeth’s sister, Virginia. According to Harnisch, Bayley left his wife for another woman—a fellow doctor named Alexandra von Partyka. Alexandra allegedly ended up blackmailing the doctor because she knew a secret about him—possibly that he was the Black Dahlia killer.
According to one of the countless websites dedicated to tracking the case, at least eight men are still labeled people of interest in one fashion or another. They include Los Angeles Times publisher Norman Chandler, who some allege had dated Elizabeth; a medical doctor named Patrick O’Reilly who allegedly met Elizabeth through nightclub owner Mark Hansen—and who was once convicted of sexual assault against his secretary; and an unidentified, dark-haired man pictured with Elizabeth in an undated photo found in the trunk of her car.
With today’s advances in forensic science, it is feasible that evidence in Elizabeth’s case could have been tested to get a solid new lead and find the killer once and for all. However, that is no longer possible. Over the years, physical evidence in one of the highest-profile cases in California history has gone missing. Unless it is somehow recovered, the Black Dahlia mystery is destined to endure.
Elizabeth Short’s fingerprints from a prior arrest enabled officers to identify her body.
The killer’s letter to The Examiner, received January 23, 1947