“Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.”
The grisly 1947 murder of aspiring starlet and nightclub habitué Elizabeth Short, known even before her death as the “Black Dahlia,” has over the decades transmogrified from L.A.’s “crime of the century” into an almost mythical symbol of unfathomable Hollywood Babylon/film noir glamour-cum-sordidness. It is somehow fitting that author John Gilmore should be the one to unravel the multilayered mystery of this archetypal Los Angeles slaying as it begins to take its place in the collective memory, somewhere next to Bluebeard and Jack the Ripper, a cautionary tale about the pretty girl who came to Hollywood to be a movie star and wound up in a dirt lot, hacked in two.
Gilmore’s father was an LAPD officer at the time of the Dahlia’s murder and was involved in the citywide dragnet that immediately followed the discovery of her corpse. His mother was once a would-be starlet under contract with MGM Studios; and Gilmore himself was a rebel-type young actor in the ’50s, carousing Screenland with the likes of James Dean, Dennis Hopper, and Vampira. In the ’60s and early ’70s, Gilmore wrote two true-crime classics: The Tucson Murders, about the Speedway Pied Piper Charles Schmid, and one of the finest books ever about the Manson Family, The Garbage People.
In Severed’s hard-boiled yet haunting prose, Gilmore tells several previously unrevealed stories at once, each filled with its own bizarre elements through which the book transcends the true-crime genre and becomes literature. One is the tale of victim Elizabeth Short, small-town beauty queen with big hopes who seemed to float through her tragically futile life as an alluring yet doom-laden enigma. Severed also unfolds the tangled inside story of the police investigation and the remorseless Hearst-stoked press hoopla that paralleled it. Furthermore, Gilmore reveals the twisted psychology and down-and-out life story of the murder suspect—as well as the startling circumstances and gruesome details of the suspect’s “indirect confession” wherein he fingers his female-impersonator pal as the purported killer.
The Black Dahlia murder—unlike such earlier headline-grabbing cases as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and the Lindbergh kidnapping—was the first case to command the attention of post-war America with its stark carnality. One can see the origins of the blood-fueled media feeding-frenzy rituals surrounding subsequent high-profile victims, such as Sharon Tate and Nicole Brown Simpson, in the hypocritical newspaper flogging of the deceased Elizabeth Short.
Growing up in wartime L.A., the impressionable young Gilmore’s mind was strongly shaped by emanations from the subterranean American pop-cultural matrix of Black Mask, pulp, tabloid, True Detective, pin-up, and B-movie, which has come to be known by the French appellation noir. He has developed a complex personal relationship with his legendary subject, the seductive cipher we know as the Black Dahlia. “She was my light in this shadow world,” he reflects. As Gilmore recounts in his memoirs, Laid Bare, she would continue to haunt him for the duration of his work as a screenwriter, as well as through his then-unfashionable fascination with the vanished Hollywood of his youth and its denizens, like actors Franchot Tone, Barbara Payton, and Tom Neal, who were linked in some personal way to the fatal trajectory of the ill-fated beauty.
Having begun his painstaking investigations into the case more than thirty-five years ago, John Gilmore—handsome ex-actor, back then a pulp novelist and aspiring screenwriter—now appears to have been the only one with enough grit and determination to doggedly run down every lead through the bureaucratic miasma, like real detective work entails. Meanwhile, LAPD detectives were holding back evidence and grandstanding to the press to promote their upcoming movie deals.
“You catch them with their pants down,” Gilmore says. “I’ve sought some people out almost as they were breathing their last, choking on blood, in order to get corroboration on something or other. And then what have I got? Words—a jumble of ideas and tapes and transcripts in my head.” In the kaleidoscopic blurring of Hollywood fact, fiction, and fantasy so prevalent in the lives of both Elizabeth Short and John Gilmore, it was TV cop Jack Webb of Dragnet fame who became the deadpan coach egging Gilmore on in his unflagging pursuit of “the facts.”
Severed remains the first and only non-fiction book to offer a documented solution to the Black Dahlia case as endorsed by law enforcement and forensic science experts. In the just over 50 years since the murder, the terms serial killer and behavioral profiling have moved from FBI jargon to essential archetypes of the American cultural landscape, crossing the nebulous bounds of newspaper, TV, book, and blockbuster movie. The psychosexual nexus of violence and control that impels the serial killer was psychological terra incognita, barely comprehended even by law enforcement, at the midpoint of the twentieth century. Now, through the once-controversial efforts of FBI behavioral sciences unit experts like Robert Ressler and John Douglas, Elizabeth Short’s infamous murder can be seen in context as the handiwork of a sexual psychopath who stalked and struck down at least one young woman, and possibly multiple others in various states, with a very similar modus operandi.
John Gilmore is the first writer to bring to light the hushed-up murder of wild young “Sunset Strip socialite” Georgette Bauerdorf, found defiled and slaughtered in her Hollywood bathtub only months before the murder of Elizabeth Short. Bauerdorf’s car, stolen by her fugitive murderer, was recovered afterward, a short distance away from the building in which Short is believed to have been murdered and not far from where her mutilated corpse was found. Using the now-accepted methodology of behavioral profiling, Gilmore is able to show how the two murders bear the same psychopathic “signature” of a serial killer—brutal bathtub slayings of beautiful, flirtatious USO hostesses, who both moved in the same Hollywood nightlife démi-monde as the suspect.
For the Amok Books edition of Severed, Gilmore penned an afterword that recounts for the first time his personal involvement with the murder suspect that the LAPD homicide detectives sought to “bring down.” Gilmore recalls, “I soon found that this elusive bum was watching me—the watcher being watched. For over 13 years, I’d be intermittently contacted by this limping stranger, a man who’d hobble up and down the more soused he’d get, an almost nameless character who possessed knowledge of a deed so overwhelmingly notorious, and yet no one knew but him. He wanted to tell someone, he said, ‘because death was breathing on his neck.’ He wanted to tell someone who would understand—who could appreciate.” This updated edition contains a new addendum, “The Girl With Flowers in Her Hair,” that ushers the reader even closer into the personal world of Elizabeth Short.
Through Gilmore’s relentless spade work, the spectral luster of this most spectacular “unsolved” murder in American crime history seems not diminished but enhanced. Ultimately, John Gilmore boils down its undying allure to this haiku-like equation: “The pale white body severed in two and left for the world to view, and her name: Black Dahlia.”
Stuart Swezey
Publisher
Amok Books