Case closed? The riddle of The Black Dahlia
In the Forties, young women flooded into Hollywood in search of the fabled screen test. Most found only the casting couch and a waitress’s pay cheque. A few ended up on the mortuary slab.
One such was Elizabeth Short, known posthumously as the Black Dahlia. Short’s 1947 murder was to become America’s most notorious unsolved crime. Her corpse, discovered on wasteground, had been cut in half through the abdomen, the two sections lying a foot apart.
Author and lawyer Piu Eatwell applies rigorous deductive reasoning to try to solve the puzzle. The characters she encounters – the hardboiled news hound, the sinister nightclub owner – are straight from the sets of film noir but Eatwell is unmoved by her subject’s mythic quality. She takes us to the motel where Hollywood’s drifters congregated, and where a blood-drenched room was scrubbed clean, destroying vital evidence.
She pursues her suspect to the nightmarish end, uncovering corruption of every kind, and offers a convincing solution. Her book could also be read as a critique of an era in which emotional devastation and exploitation were inevitable by-products of a system capitalising on desire..