On the morning of January 15, 1947, a Los Angeles housewife named Betty Bersinger was walking her three-year-old daughter to the playground in Leimert Park, a quiet south-central neighborhood of single-story bungalows and unmanicured lots. The morning was cold for Los Angeles — forty-six degrees — and a low fog clung to the empty grass at the corner of 39th Street and Norton Avenue.

From a distance, Bersinger thought she was looking at a department-store mannequin that someone had dumped in the weeds. It was only when she came closer that she understood what she was seeing.

The body in the lot belonged to Elizabeth Short. She was twenty-two years old. She had been missing for six days. She would become known to the world, almost immediately, as the Black Dahlia — the name the Los Angeles newspapers gave her within forty-eight hours, riffing on a 1946 film noir and the dark clothes she had favored in life. Seventy-nine years later, her case remains officially open and unsolved. No one has ever been charged.

The girl who came to Hollywood

Elizabeth Short was born in Hyde Park, a working-class neighborhood of Boston, on July 29, 1924. She was the third of five daughters of Cleo Short, a miniature-golf-course builder, and his wife Phoebe. Cleo lost everything in the 1929 crash, faked his suicide by abandoning his car on a Charlestown bridge, and disappeared. The family later discovered him alive in California, where he had quietly started over.

In 1943, at the age of nineteen, Elizabeth moved out to Vallejo, California, to live briefly with her father — the same father who had walked out fifteen years earlier. The arrangement did not last. She drifted south through California for the next four years, working as a waitress, an usherette at film theaters, and a sometime model. Witnesses who knew her in those years describe a striking young woman — dark hair, fair skin, blue eyes, a Massachusetts accent that softened over time — who told friends she wanted to be an actress and who showed up at Hollywood casting calls but rarely got past the audition room.

She had a brief, intense relationship with an Army Air Forces pilot named Major Matthew Gordon Jr., who died in a plane crash in India in August 1945 just before they were to be married. Friends would later say she carried his photograph everywhere and rarely talked about him.

By late 1946 she was twenty-two, broke, and living on the kindness of various Hollywood acquaintances — sleeping on couches, in shared hotel rooms, in a rented bedroom in a boarding house on Cherokee Avenue in Hollywood. She traveled to San Diego in early December, stayed with a family she had met at a bus station, and returned to Los Angeles on January 9, 1947, with a man named Robert “Red” Manley, a married hardware salesman who had agreed to drive her up from San Diego.

Manley dropped her off in front of the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles on the evening of January 9. She told him she was meeting her older sister from Boston, who was supposed to be staying there. Hotel staff and witnesses later saw her in the lobby that night using the lobby telephone. She walked out the front entrance some time after 10:00 p.m. and into the busy downtown evening.

She was not seen alive again.

A killer with a particular kind of knowledge

The condition of Elizabeth Short’s body, when Betty Bersinger discovered her six days later, told investigators two things immediately.

The first was that she had been killed somewhere else — indoors, in a controlled setting — and brought to the Leimert Park lot to be displayed. The body had been carefully arranged, drained of nearly all its blood, and scrubbed clean. There were no signs of struggle at the scene. There were no tire tracks, no footprints, no fibers, no cigarette butts on the grass beside her.

The second was that her killer had medical or surgical knowledge. The bisection of the body — the most widely reported and least dignified detail of the case — had been performed with a clean, deliberate technique used in medical school dissections, called a hemicorporectomy. It is not the kind of incision a person without anatomical training can produce. Coroner Frederick Newbarr, who performed Short’s autopsy, was unequivocal in his official report: the work had been done by someone who knew what they were doing.

The case immediately drew dozens of investigators, hundreds of false confessions, and the kind of breathless tabloid coverage that defined the William Randolph Hearst era of Los Angeles journalism. Within a week, the LAPD had received calls from more than fifty men claiming to be the killer. By the end of 1947, that number was over two hundred. None of the confessions held up.

The package that came in the mail

Nine days after the body was found, a manila envelope arrived at the offices of the Los Angeles Examiner. The address, in pasted-together letters cut from newspaper headlines, read: Los Angeles Examiner and other Los Angeles papers. Here is Dahlia’s belongings. Letter to follow.

Inside the envelope were Elizabeth Short’s birth certificate, her social security card, several photographs, an address book missing some pages, and a small collection of business cards. The contents had been doused in gasoline, presumably to destroy fingerprints. A few partial prints were lifted but degraded too badly in the FBI lab to be of use.

A follow-up postcard arrived several days later, written in capital letters with a ballpoint pen: Here is the Dahlia’s letter. Turning in Wed., Jan. 29, 10 a.m. Had my fun at police. It was signed, in a separate hand, “Black Dahlia Avenger.” The next day’s deadline passed with no further contact. A man calling himself the killer phoned the Examiner directly and spoke to its city editor for several minutes, but his identity could not be confirmed.

The letters were one of the strangest and least explainable elements of the case. Their author either was the killer — in which case he had Elizabeth Short’s personal documents, which only the killer would have had — or he was a person who had somehow stolen them after the murder and was tormenting the police for sport. The address book had several names torn from it. The names that were missing have never been recovered.

The suspects, then and now

Over the next seven decades, the LAPD looked seriously at more than 150 suspects. A few have lingered in the public imagination.

Robert “Red” Manley — the salesman who drove Elizabeth from San Diego — was the first and most obvious. He was the last verified person to see her alive. He was interrogated for days, subjected to polygraph examinations and intravenous sodium pentothal, and ultimately cleared. He produced a verified alibi for the days between January 9 and January 15 and was demonstrably elsewhere when the body was placed in the vacant lot. Manley would suffer a mental breakdown a few years later and spent much of the 1950s in psychiatric institutions, but his name has been formally cleared in the case file since 1947.

Walter Bayley, a 67-year-old USC Medical School physician, lived less than a block from where the body was found. He had also socialized with Elizabeth’s older sister Virginia in the years before the murder. He was a skilled surgeon with the anatomical training the bisection required. He died in 1948 of an unrelated neurological condition. His name surfaced as a credible suspect only in the 1990s, in research by Los Angeles Times reporter Larry Harnisch, who argued that the geographical and medical evidence pointed strongly at Bayley but that the LAPD had been too embarrassed by their early failure to revisit him.

George Hodel is the suspect that has dominated public conversation about the case for the last twenty years. Hodel was a Los Angeles physician and a former staff doctor with the LA County Department of Health — a man with both medical training and reach into Hollywood social circles. He was, in fact, on the LAPD’s 1949 short list of suspects in the Black Dahlia case. Surveillance recordings the LAPD secretly made in his home that year captured Hodel saying, in conversation with another person, that they could not prove anything because his secretary was dead, and a separate fragment in which he can be heard to say, “Supposin’ I did kill the Black Dahlia. They couldn’t prove it now.” The investigation against him was dropped shortly afterward, for reasons the LAPD has never fully explained.

George Hodel left the United States for the Philippines in 1950 and lived abroad for nearly four decades. He died in San Francisco in 1999. His son, Steve Hodel, a retired LAPD homicide detective, has written a series of books since 2003 making the case that his father was the killer — work that has been taken seriously by some historians and rejected by others. The LAPD has never reopened the case to formally name George Hodel.

Other names have surfaced and receded: bellhop Leslie Dillon, who confessed and then unconfessed; mortician Jack Anderson Wilson; Cleveland’s torso-murder suspect Francis Sweeney; even, in some fringe theories, the Black Dahlia killings as the early work of a longer-running American serial murderer who simply faded out. None has ever produced enough evidence for an indictment.

What we lost when we made her a story

The Black Dahlia case is, by some measures, the most famous unsolved murder in American history. It has spawned dozens of novels (most famously James Ellroy’s 1987 book of the same name), three major Hollywood films, several television series, and an entire subgenre of true-crime podcast obsession.

What gets lost in the noise is the person. Elizabeth Short was not a femme fatale. She was not a Hollywood starlet on the verge of a big break. She was a poor twenty-two-year-old woman with no permanent address, an absent father, a fiancé killed in the war, and the kind of soft, hopeful relationship to Hollywood that hundreds of thousands of young Americans had in the 1940s — a sense that if you just kept showing up at the right diner counter at the right time, the city might eventually let you in.

She had a mother and four sisters back in Massachusetts who learned what had happened to her from a reporter who called the house before the LAPD did. Phoebe Short, her mother, was first told the call was for an interview about Elizabeth winning a beauty contest. The reporter asked the questions about the contest first, got her talking, and only then broke the news. Phoebe lived another forty-five years and rarely gave interviews again.

The Leimert Park lot where she was found is now a residential block of single-family homes. There is no marker. Most of the people who live there do not know the address has a history. Elizabeth Short is buried in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California, in a plot her mother and sisters paid for. The headstone reads only her name, her dates, and the words: Daughter and Sister.

Sources: LAPD case file 30-1268 (selected releases); Coroner Frederick Newbarr’s autopsy report, January 16, 1947; Larry Harnisch, Black Dahlia Solved (in progress, Los Angeles Times research files); Steve Hodel, Black Dahlia Avenger (Arcade, 2003); John Gilmore, Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder (1994); Piu Eatwell, Black Dahlia, Red Rose (Liveright, 2017); Los Angeles Examiner and Herald-Express archives, 1947–1949.