My Dark Places

Two photographs accompanied the story.

The first one showed Betty Short at 39th and Norton. Her legs were half visible. Men with guns and pocket notebooks were standing over her body.

The second one showed her in life. Her hair was swept up and back—like a 1940s portrait shot of my mother.

I read the Dahlia story a hundred times. I read the rest of The Badge and stared at the pictures. Stephen Nash, Donald Bashor and the firebomb guys became my friends. Betty Short became my obsession.

And my symbiotic stand-in for Geneva Hilliker Ellroy.

Betty was running and hiding. My mother ran to El Monte and forged a secret weekend life there. Betty and my mother were body-dump victims. Jack Webb said Betty was a loose girl. My father said my mother was a drunk and a whore.

My Dahlia obsession was explicitly pornographic. My imagination supplied the details that Jack Webb omitted. The murder was an epigram on transient lives and impacted sex as death. The unsolved status was a wall I tried to break down with a child’s curiosity.

I applied my mind to the task. My explication efforts were entirely unconscious. I simply told myself mental stories.

That storytelling worked counterproductively. My daytime tales of death by saw and scalpel gave me terrible nightmares. They were devoid of narrative lines—all I saw was Betty being cut, slashed, poked, probed and dissected.

My nightmares had a pure raw force. Vivid details burst out of my unconscious. I saw Betty drawn and quartered on a medieval torture rack. I saw a man drain her blood into a bathtub. I saw her spread-eagled on a medical gurney.

Those scenes made me afraid to sleep. My nightmares came steadily or at unpredictable intervals. Daytime flashes complemented them.

I’d be sitting in school. I’d be bored and prey to odd mental wanderings. I’d see entrails stuffed in a toilet bowl and torture gadgets poised for business.

I did not willfully conjure the images. They seemed to spring from somewhere beyond my volition.

The nightmares and day flashes continued through the spring and summer. I knew they were God’s punishment for my voyeur prowls and thievery. I stopped stealing and peeping Hancock Park windows. The nightmares and day flashes continued.

I went back to stealing and watching. A man caught me in his yard and chased me out. I quit voyeurizing altogether.

The nightmares and day flashes continued. Their power dwindled through sheer repetition. My Black Dahlia obsession assumed new fantasy forms.

I rescued Betty Short and became her lover. I saved her from a life of promiscuity. I tracked down her killer and executed him.

They were strong, narrative-based fantasies. They took the queasy edge off my Dahlia fixation.

I was set to enter junior high in September ’59. My father told me I should start taking buses by myself. I exploited that new freedom in the name of formal Dahlia research.

I took bus trips downtown to the Main Public Library. I read the 1947 Herald-Express on microfilm rolls. I learned all about the life and death of the Black Dahlia.

Betty Short came from Medford, Massachusetts. She had three sisters. Her parents were divorced. She visited her dad in California in 1943. She got hooked on Hollywood and men in uniform.

The Herald called her a “playgirl” and a “party girl.” I decoded the terms to read “whore.” She wanted to be a movie star. She was concurrently engaged to several army flyboys. A guy named Red Manley drove her up from San Diego a week before her death. She had no fixed Los Angeles address. She’d been bouncing around between rooming houses and cheap apartments for months. She frequented cocktail bars and cadged drinks and dinners off strange men. She told whopping lies routinely. Her life was indecipherable.

I instinctively understood that life. It was a chaotic collision with male desire. Betty Short wanted powerful things from men—but could not identify her needs. She reinvented herself with youthful panache and convinced herself that she was something original. She miscalculated. She wasn’t smart and she wasn’t self-aware. She recast herself in a cookie-cutter mold that pandered to long-prescribed male fantasies. The new Betty was the old Betty bushwhacked by Hollywood. She turned herself into a cliche that most men wanted to fuck and a few men wanted to kill. She wanted to get deep dark down and cozy with men. She sent out magnetic signals. She met a man with notions of deep-dark-down-and-cozy cloaked in rage. Her only complicitous act was a common fait accompli. She made herself over for men.

The Herald ran the Dahlia story for 12 solid weeks. It played up the massive investigation rife with fruitless leads and weirdo suspects. False confessions and other tangential offshoots got front-page coverage.

The lesbian theory was hot for a while: Betty Short might have traveled in dyke circles. The smut-picture theory had a good run: Betty might have posed for pornographic snapshots.

People ratted their neighbors off as the killer. People ratted off lovers who jilted them. People went to psychics and sought out the Dahlia’s spirit. Elizabeth Short’s death inspired a minor hysteria.

Postwar L.A. coalesced around the body of a dead woman. Hordes of people fell sway to the Dahlia. They weaved themselves into her story in bizarre and fantastical ways.

The story thrilled me and moved me. It filled me with a perverse sense of hope.

The Dahlia defined her time and place. She claimed lives from the grave and exerted great power.

Stephen Nash went to the gas chamber in August ’59. He spit some chewing gum at a chaplain right before they strapped him in. He sucked down the cyanide fumes with a big shiteating grin.

I enrolled at John Burroughs Junior High School a few weeks later. Harvey Glatman went to the gas chamber on