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It was a gift to a sensationalist newspaper. Two days after the mutilated body of a young woman had been discovered on a vacant lot in Los Angeles, and one day after she was identified as Elizabeth Short, an enterprising reporter learnt that her nickname around a Long Beach drugstore was the Black Dahlia, on account of her jet-black tresses. The period of the murder, 1947, was the heyday of pulp fiction and film noir (though it wasn’t called that back then), and so, with that exotic nickname implanted in the public consciousness, a myth of enigmatic mystery was born.
The Black Dahlia case (“a cold, cold case”, says the author) is one of the most notorious unsolved murders of modern times. Apart from her pulp-fiction moniker, it was the B-movie star looks of the victim and the state of her corpse that caught the popular imagination. She had been killed by blows to the head, probably from a pistol-whipping, and by deep incisions from her mouth up to each ear. If that had been all, even her nickname would not have been enough to guarantee her posthumous fame. But it was not all. Her body had been severed in two, drained of blood and washed, before being dumped, with half of the torso placed above and alongside the other half.
Immediately, the unknown culprit was dubbed a “werewolf fiend”, a vicious, depraved individual who might well strike again. Yet this was no ordinary rage killing and the victim had not been sexually assaulted. Because the spinal cord had been severed at the optimum point for the sake of ease, between the second and third vertebrae, it was suspected that the murderer was medically trained. Though it was never disclosed at the time, illegal abortionists were among those investigated.
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The police had to deal with numerous “confessing Sams” and anonymous hoaxers. But there was a “control question” they could ask, something about the corpse which could help them eliminate attention-seeking would-be suspects. I shan’t spoil the unfolding pleasure of the book by revealing this secret, knowledge of which emerged only when some Los Angeles Police Department files were made public after 50 years.
This crucial nugget of information, along with other evidence gleaned from the files, has enabled Wolfe to posit the most plausible theory advanced thus far as to how the Black Dahlia met her end and why. Suffice it to say that pieces of the murder mosaic include a cover-up by senior LAPD personnel, and implicate the son-in-law of William Randolph Hearst who was married to the illegitimate daughter of Hearst and Marion Davies, his mistress; the son and heir of the Chandler dynasty, which owned not only the Los Angeles Times but also the mayor and the police commission; the mobster Bugsy Siegel, who was the victim of a mob execution five months after the Black Dahlia murder; and an abortion doctor.
The Black Dahlia wasn’t exactly beautiful. She had a certain allure and knew how to grab men’s attention with her confident, sashaying walk. But her teeth were bad and she used white candle-wax to disguise their imperfections. For several years she had been drifting between her native Massachusetts and Miami and LA, which were bristling with sexually charged servicemen. Although she harboured conventional dreams of settling down as a married woman, there was an element of quiet desperation about her and of mystery about her acquaintances and fitful sources of income. She had worked as a B-girl — a type who sat on barstools and pushed drinks to lusty “Georges” — and there is evidence that she may have taken what was so often the next step for dreamy, impecunious girls and become a full-blown prostitute. Shortly before she was killed she had been living in an apartment paid for by a known procurer who worked in the talent department at Columbia Studios and who chauffeured prostitutes around on behalf of Brenda Allen, a Hollywood madam under the direction of Siegel.
Native Los Angeleno Donald H Wolfe first became captivated by the Black Dahlia at the time of the murder, as a 15-year-old, and has remained so ever since. His taut analysis of the case, cogently argued and conveyed with admirable economy, uncovers a motive and a conspiracy never previously suggested.
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