BE A TRUE DETECTIVE
Can you unlock the secrets of some of the infamous unsolved murders that have baffled the world? MARION McMULLEN follows the clues of the notorious Black Dahlia case
ELIZABETH SHORT headed to Hollywood with dreams of becoming a big movie star, but instead the raven-haired beauty made the headlines for her lurid murder after her naked body was discovered severed in two in a vacant lot.
Los Angeles housewife Betty Bersinger and her three-year-old daughter, Anne, made the gruesome find on their way to a shoe repair shop.
At first Betty thought she was looking at a broken mannequin that had been tossed aside and then realised the two halves were actually the body of a woman. She grabbed her daughter and rushed to the first house that had a phone to call the police.
“I was terribly shocked and scared to death,” Betty later told a reporter.
The body of 22-year-old aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, or Beth and Bette as she was also called, had been sliced in half, drained of blood and then posed in a bizarre display among the weeds.
Rope marks scarred her ankles, wrists and throat and police believed that she had been tortured before her death.
The Los Angeles Times reported the 1947 murder saying: “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 to the abdomen, frenzied slashings in the back or from strangulation, investigators said.”
The murder victim was soon being called the Black Dahlia in the papers – the name 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.
Her face featured on the front pages of newspapers across America as police searched for her killer.
Her mother Phoebe Mae said following her daughter’s death: “She always wanted to be an actress. 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.”
When Elizabeth’s estranged father, Cleo Short, learned of
her murder, he simply told police: “I want nothing to do with this.”
Elizabeth had appeared occasionally as a movie extra and auditioned for acting jobs whenever she could. Her roommates and friends told police she had several suitors and many were taking in for questioning, but later released.
Police psychiatrist Dr Paul De River said: “The averages may have caught up with Beth Short. She may have picked up one man too many.”
The killer even sent a creepy letter to the police created from words and letters cut from newspapers and magazines saying: “HERE! IS
DAHLIA’S BELONGINGS.”
Enclosed were her birth certificate, her address book and other personal papers. A few days later more of her belongings – a shoe and bag – were found in a rubbish dump and another letter was sent to the Examiner newspaper by the killer claiming they would turn themselves in, but they never made an appearance.
A final letter was sent to the police saying: “Have changed my mind. You would not give me a fair deal. Dahlia killing was justified.”
The murder case is among those featured in new true crime book Unsolved Murders, which turns the reader into the detective as it presents the facts in some of the most infamous unsolved cases of the 20th and 21st centuries.
As well as the Black Dahlia, there are key facts, maps and plans of crime scenes relating to the Zodiac Killer, who terrorised San Francisco in the 1960s, the Hollywood whodunnit of the mysterious murder of film director William Desmond Taylor at his home in 1922 and the Cleveland torso murders of the 1930s, which even eluded the detective skills of famed Prohibition agent Eliot Ness.
The latter case saw discarded body parts turning up on a shantytown creek bed and led to the gruesome rhyme “Floating down the river, chunk by chunk by chunk/Arms and legs and torsos, hunk by hunk by hunk.”
There are also more recent cases included like the drive-by shootings of rap stars Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls in the 1990s and the doorstep murder of TV presenter Jill Dando in 1999.
Meanwhile, the identity of Elizabeth Short’s murderer remains unknown. Police said in 1996 that they had fielded about 500 confessions to the Black Dahlia over the years, but the case remains unsolved.
Unsolved Murders: True Crime Cases Uncovered (pictured left) by Amber Hunt and Emily G Thompson, published by DK, £12.99, is out now.