Wednesday, January 15, 1947 Leimert Park, Los Angeles, California Around 10 am, Betty Bersinger walks with her three-year-old daughter. He stumbles upon what at first glance looks like a mannequin split in two. It is located on an undeveloped lot on the west side of South Norton Avenue between Coliseum Street and West 39th Street. Frau Berzinger approaches and discovers that it is the corpse of a young woman. This is the beginning of one of the most complex and disturbing cases in American judicial history.
The corpse is naked, cut in two. He has deep lacerations on his face, two cuts on the sides of his mouth that seem to reproduce the so-called Glasgow smile, a kind of ritual used by some criminal gangs. The insides are missing, the blood has drained from the body.
Onlookers and journalists flock to the scene, apparently oblivious to any traces that might be useful in the investigation. Finally, investigators arrived at the scene. As a result of the autopsy to which the remains are subjected, it turns out that the woman was tied up and died from bleeding from cuts to her face. The killer cut the body with surgical precision. Some sources report that the young woman’s raven hair was supposed to be dyed red.
Someone calls the police, expressing the hope that the investigation of the case will not be abandoned, and informing them that the documents proving the identity of the murdered woman will be sent soon. Shortly thereafter, the investigators did receive his birth certificate, shoes, and diary. The unknown sender, who will later forward new letters and who some scholars of the story believe will be the killer, signs himself “Avenger of the Black Dahlia”.
The victim’s name was Elizabeth Short, twenty-three years old, born in Boston on July 29, 1924. Parents separated, mother lived in Medford, Massachusetts, father in Vallejo, California. A nineteen-year-old girl was arrested by the Santa Barbara police for being found drunk outside a pub. As a minor, she was immediately released.
In the mid-1940s, she met Matthew M. Gordon, Jr., an Air Force major who proposed to her. However, he died on August 10, 1945 during an air battle. Beth dreamed of becoming an actress and moved to Los Angeles in 1946. She was given the nickname “Dahlia Nera”, which was later adopted by anonymous letter writers and journalists, because she dressed in black and because of her interest in film noir. blue dahliawritten by Raymond Chandler and directed by George Marshall, released theatrically the same year.
The difficulties she encountered in trying to establish herself in Hollywood soon forced her to make short pornographic films, which were illegal in the United States at the time, to support herself.
The investigation of the crime is proceeding at a rapid pace, hundreds of police officers are involved, the public is passionate about the case and follows its development with great interest through the newspapers. Many mythomaniacs attribute the murder to Elizabeth Short. About a thousand people have been interrogated, twenty-two main suspects, among the hundreds whose position is being checked: surgeons, musicians, thieves, soldiers, journalists, against whom no significant evidence will be obtained in any case.
Various scenarios are being considered. Among other things, it is speculated that Elizabeth may have been killed by organized crime members with whom she may have come into contact in an attempt to establish herself in the entertainment world; that his death can be attributed to the Cleveland Butcher, a never-identified serial killer active in the 1930s and the author of at least twelve murders; that the crime is attributed to the person responsible for the Chicago murder of Suzanne Degnan, a six-year-old girl abducted on January 7, 1946, and whose body was later found dismembered in the sewer system near her home.
Of course, the possibility that Elizabeth Short could have been the victim of a serial killer is plausible and cannot be ruled out: the methods of murder show features that may well be associated with recidivism. It is probable that a subject capable of committing such a crime, clearly revealing a psyche burdened with cumbersome “ghosts,” might be tempted to repeat its dynamics, to relive the sensations that should have accompanied it.
Suspects include: Robert M. Manley, the last person to see Beth alive, whose alibi, however, turned out to be solid; Walter Bailey, a Los Angeles surgeon who lived until October 1946 in the area where the body of Elizabeth, his daughter’s friend, was found; George Hodel, a physician, unsuccessfully investigated in October 1949 following an allegation of molestation by his 15-year-old daughter, Tamara. Hodel’s son, Steve, a former LAPD homicide detective, would later claim that his father was the author, as well as the Black Dahlia murder, of a number of crimes that remained unsolved.
Obviously, there is no shortage of hypotheses that have appeared decades after the fait accompli. In 1999, childhood friend Beth published a book accusing director and actor Orson Welles of murder, believing that she could see similarities between the autopsy methods on Elizabeth’s body and the mannequins shown in the film. Lady of Shanghaidirected by Welles in the title role in 1947. In any case, the murder of the Black Dahlia is still without a culprit.
The plot, the features that characterize the crime, the context in which it happened, turn out to be an effective source of inspiration for screenwriters and directors. In 1953, Fritz Lang shoots film noir. blue gardenia (blue gardenia), with Anne Baxter, Richard Conte, Anne Sothern and Raymond Burr, whose title directly refers to Dahlia. In 1973 it was made for television. Who is Black Dahlia? (Who is the Black Dahlia?), directed by Joseph Pevney and starring Ephraim Zimbalist Jr., Ronnie Cox, MacDonald Carey and Lucy Arnaz.
In 1987, James Ellroy dedicated one of his most famous and inspiring novels to the story of Elizabeth Short. black dahlia (black dahlia), published in Italy in 1989, from which in 2006 Brian De Palma (Face with a scar, Untouchables, Straight kill) will draw the film adaptation of the same name, starring Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank and Mia Kirshner.
