into a piece of lore. Although some of the other victims were more beautiful and more exotic than Elizabeth, it was the name that made her crime stand out.
As the beloved
I have always supposed that I was the first one to get 'the Black Dahlia' into print, though I didn't make it up. As I remember, one of our reporters picked up a tip that Miss Short had frequented a certain Long Beach drugstore for a time. I looked the number up in the phone book and got the drugstore and talked to the pharmacist.
Yes, he remembered Elizabeth Short. 'She used to hang around with the kids at the soda fountain. They called her the
— on account of the way she wore her hair.'
It was a rewrite man's dream. The fates were sparing of such gifts. I couldn't wait to get it into type.
From day one, with the birth of that name, her real identity disappeared. Few today can tell you the actual name of the Black Dahlia, but most know her story. Not only was her name forgotten, but also her true character. Truth gave way to fiction almost immediately. Initially, the press was to blame, through insinuation and innuendo.
Her character assassination started out slowly in the dailies, with one-liners scattered here and there: 'Elizabeth was seen at a Hollywood bar with a mannish-looking female.' 'Elizabeth was seen in a vehicle with a large muscular blonde woman.' 'Unidentified sources indicated Elizabeth preferred the company of women.'
To LAPD's credit, no confirmations discrediting her reputation came from any detectives assigned to the investigation, at least in those early years. Unfortunately, that would change in later decades.
But what the cops didn't do, the authors and self-proclaimed 'true-crime experts' did quite well. Hank Sterling, in his 1954 book
It's fair to say that her death was the result of her deplorable way of life. Did she go there [Biltmore Hotel] because she hoped to find a pickup, found one and was lured to her death? If so, we can say that the same thing could have happened to a blameless virgin intrigued by a deceptive personality. In that case her death would have nothing to do with her lurid past. In fact, it can be said that a girl with Beth's experience would have been too wise to be trapped that way.
A few years later Elizabeth Short was mentioned in another book,
She was a lazy girl and irresponsible; and, when she chose to work, she drifted obscurely from one menial job to another ... To the sociologist, she is the typical, unfortunate depression child who matured too suddenly in her teens into the easy money, easy living, easy loving of wartime America.
Closing his chapter on the Dahlia, Webb wrote:
All LAPD can say is that its detectives exonerated every man and woman whom they have talked to. Beyond that you are free to speculate. But do him a favor; don't press your deductions on Finis Brown.
By the 1980s, Elizabeth's character had reached rock bottom. In
She hung around radio stations, went on casting calls — and soon descended into the netherworld of the street hustler where scoring a meal, a drink, a new dress, or a little folding money was as easy as finding a willing guy on Sixth Street. For a few months in 1946, she was a fixture of the Hollywood street scene, a pretty girl not too mindful about where or with whom she slept, a girl pretty and desperate enough to pose nude for sleazy pornographers, a pretty girl descending into a private hell.
She spent a drunken night in a Hollywood hotel with a traveling salesman in return for a bus ticket to San Diego and pocket change.
Three years later, Steven Nickel, in
The odyssey of Elizabeth Short was a tragic and progressively sordid story. At age seventeen, she had left her home in Massachusetts and headed west in an attempt to break into motion pictures in Hollywood. But her break never came, and she had drifted among the hustlers and flesh peddlers of Santa Barbara, Long Beach, San Diego, and Los Angeles during the next five years. Her romance with a young pilot ended tragically when he was killed in the war; her lover's death marked a turning point in Elizabeth Short's brief life. For a time, she operated as an expensive call girl with a flashy lifestyle. Some of her clients were Hollywood producers who promised her movie roles, but before long she degenerated into a common street prostitute hooked on alcohol and drugs, posing for nude photos to earn extra cash and occasionally living with a lesbian lover.
. . . Her blouses, her dresses, her hosiery, her shoes, and her undergarments, as the detectives who searched her apartment found, were exclusively black. It was easy to see how Elizabeth Short had come by her nickname. She apparently realized it; there had been a tattoo of the exotic black dahlia on her left thigh that her killer viciously gouged out.
In 1993, the editors of Time-Life Books, in their
Short gravitated to Hollywood, hoping to break into the movies, but the closest she got was a job as a movie- house usherette. Her main line of work was prostitution.
Years after his 1971 retirement, LAPD detective Harry Hansen dealt the final blow: 'She was a bum and a tease.'
From one of the case's lead homicide detectives to the star of television's
But none of this is true. Worse, what people had to say about Elizabeth, from Hansen right through to today's commentators, is actually a blame-the-victim rationale for why the case was never solved. In reality it
