BLACK DAHLIA: Is L.A.'s most infamous murder close to being solved?
· Toronto Sun
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A 22-year-old starlet murdered in the most grotesque manner.
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Her body dumped in plain view for all to see without any attempt at concealment.
We are now in postwar Los Angeles, a.k.a. “Noir City,” the unrest, turmoil, inner and outer is palpable. Hollywood is there, too, tantalizing the rubes that, yeah, you too can be a star.
She became the ‘Black Dahlia’
Her real name was Elizabeth Short, but for generations she has been better known as the “Black Dahlia,” America’s most famous unsolved murder victim and a cautionary tale if ever there was one.
“Her body was found on Jan. 15, 1947, and unfortunately a lot of heinous stuff had been done to her. It was a very brutal crime. It was a very ghastly crime,” producer Jeff Thomas of Talestorm Productions told the Toronto Sun .
“She’d been drained of all her blood. She had massive trauma done to both her breasts, massive trauma to her face. And the big sucker punch is that she was bisected at the waist. Now, if we review this in today’s standards, it’s absolutely horrifying. Think about it in postwar America 1947.”
Thomas said he typically isn’t a big true crime fan, but the Black Dahlia is different.
Now, with a team of former investigators, he said his team knows who the killer is and where Elizabeth Short was murdered. Those long elusive answers are the culmination of a five-year probe.
Producers, family demanding autopsy report
In addition, the team and Short’s family have launched a petition demanding the Los Angeles Police Department release the long-secret autopsy report and the case files.
More than 10,000 have already signed.
It’s all part of an upcoming docuseries entitled Deconstructing Dahlia, which is currently in production.
In the intervening years since her murder, numerous movies, books and documentaries have been done on the Black Dahlia. Much of the information on Short has been wildly speculative. Many characterizations painted the young woman from Medford, Mass., with stars in her eyes as a man-crazy vixen, a prostitute, a porn star and a grifter.
She was just a naive kid, Thomas said.
“I think it is a cautionary tale. We’re in postwar America and during the war, a lot of women had gone to work because all the men were overseas,” he said, adding that Short was “very independent” and a bit of a “vagabond” who travelled a lot.
Short didn’t fit the postwar mould of returning to hearth and home.
Who was Elizabeth Short?
“We spent a lot of time focused on Elizabeth Short because it came to a point in the investigation that I just said, ‘Hey, I don’t want to know anything more about the Black Dahlia. I just want to know about Elizabeth Short,'” Thomas said, adding the team connected with her relatives in New England and the story still resonated with locals.
The portrait filmmakers came back with was of a beautiful young woman who was friendly and a “wonderful, warm person.” His team is an “all-star” team of detectives, forensics experts and even a retired district attorney who went back to the beginning.
There were promising leads in the all-hands-on-deck Black Dahlia investigation from the beginning. The probe was led by the LAPD’s two best homicide detectives, Harry Hansen and Finis Brown. So what went wrong?
Thomas said the files accumulated by his team all “blatantly” pointed in one direction. And because of the presence of superstar cops, the endeavour has been run more like an investigation than a documentary.
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Cops knew who murdered the Dahlia
One team member, former L.A. County sheriff homicide Det. Karen Shanka, told Thomas she was sure the killer’s name would be in the files. And it was.
“(She said), ‘If you did deep enough and look closely and pay attention to all the details, you’re gonna see this person’s name pop up,” Thomas said. “And once we started getting all these files in, especially the ones that had not been released or seen the light of day in over 80 years, yes, it became quickly apparent there was one particular person of interest we wanted to focus on.”
At this time, they are not releasing the name.
He added that the crew began the probe without any preconceived notion of who the monster was that butchered Short.
After identifying their suspected killer, the team learned everything they could about him. He was politically connected and a “person of significance.” As a result, politics was at play in the Black Dahlia investigation from the beginning. Cops? They knew who murdered Short.
Nothing was accidental with the killer, who investigators believe murdered others.
Did they find murder weapon?
“We know where the scene of the crime was because where her body was found is now where she was killed. She was left there. She was posed there on purpose. We know the reason why she was posed that way as well. And we also know what the murder weapon was,” he told the Sun .
Among the crew’s other findings:
— They believe they have found the blunt-force instrument that killed Short (who died of a brain haemorrhage.)
— In addition to the who killed the Dahlia, the team believes it knows the motive and has shared the evidence with LAPD.
— The team had the co-operation of the victim’s family for DNA comparison and generational trauma remains deep.
Zeroing in on the crime scene
The seedy motel — still in operation — became a focal point of the probe. Thomas said his team even zeroed in on the correct room. After tearing through decades of drywall, they hit pay dirt.
“On the walls we found a lot of blood evidence from the ’40s,” Thomas said, adding that because of the team’s connections they got their hands on files no one has seen for 80 years.
The contents were chilling.
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