Killed: "The Black Dahlia"

 Killed: "The Black Dahlia"

A mugshot of Elizabeth Short from 1943, when she was arrested for underage drinking.

Also known as "The Black Dahlia," Elizabeth Short was an aspiring actress who wanted be famous more than anything else in the world. As the old doctrine tells us, be careful what you wish for. Her brutal murder at only 22 years old has immortalized her as one of the most gruesome unsolved murders of all time.

On January 15, 1947, a young woman and her three-year-old daughter stumbled upon the body of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short. She was horribly mutilated, lying in the grass of a Los Angeles residential neighborhood, her body completely chopped in half.

The two pieces of her body were about a foot apart. Her intestines had been removed, folded up and then shoved back into her gut. Her body had been drained of blood from holes in her wrists, and perhaps the worst part, the killer had cut it open from the corners of both sides of her mouth to her ears, permanently etching a Joker-like smile on the young woman’s face.

One week later, an editor at the Los Angeles Examiner received a call from someone claiming to be the murderer. He’d kept souvenirs, he said, and he’d be mailing them over as proof them over in the mail.

Four days later, a postal worker pulled out a letter addressed to the Examiner. Inside was Elizabeth Short’s birth certificate, business cards, photographs, and address book. 

As promising as this lead seemed, it turned out to be a false lead. Like so many other famous murders, this was a false confession. People come forward and confession to murders they didn't commit, in an attempt to gain recognition for the murder. This has been worsened significantly by the increase of media coverage of true crime and can be detrimental in obscuring police investigations.

With the publicity this murder garnered and the length the investigation spanned unsolved, the police were overrun with too many tips to filter out the truth from the lies. They interviewed 12 possible suspects and listened to more than 60 people who tried to insist they were the killers, but they never managed to make a single arrest.

The story of the horrific murder of Elizabeth Short, also known as "The Black Dahlia," began on January 15, 1947, it horrified America for decades, and it's legacy still lives on today.