The Black Dahlia: The True Story of Elizabeth Short's Unsolved 1947 Murder

By Domonique Luchin · Published November 3, 2026 · 15 min read

Watch: 79 Years. No Killer. Who Mailed the Black Dahlia's Belongings? #shorts

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Just before 11 a.m. on January 15, 1947, a mother walking her small child along South Norton Avenue in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles saw something pale in the weeds of a vacant lot, a few feet from the sidewalk. According to the FBI, she reportedly thought at first that it was a mannequin. It was the body of a young woman, cut in half at the waist, and posed. There was almost no blood at the scene. She had been killed somewhere else and brought there.

Within days the whole country knew her by a nickname she may never have used in life: the Black Dahlia. Her real name was Elizabeth Short. She was 22 years old. Nearly eight decades later, no one has ever been charged with her murder, and the case remains one of the most famous unsolved homicides in American history.

This is the true story of the Black Dahlia case as the record tells it: who Elizabeth Short actually was, how the FBI identified her in 56 minutes, the envelope of her belongings someone mailed to a newspaper, the suspects, the false confessions, and the myths that grew so large they almost buried the woman at the center of the case.

On The Sealed Docket, host Domonique Luchin works from the record: real names, real documents, real footage. This write-up is built on the FBI's own published history of the case, the FBI's released case files, Los Angeles Times reporting and the public record summarized on Wikipedia. A note before you read on: this is the murder of a young woman, and some details are disturbing. They are kept to what the record supports and what matters for understanding the case.

Who Was Elizabeth Short?

A Boston childhood

Elizabeth Short was born on July 29, 1924, in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, the third of five daughters of Cleo and Phoebe Short. The family settled in Medford, a Boston suburb. Her father built miniature golf courses until the 1929 stock market crash wiped out most of his savings. In 1930 his car was found abandoned on the Charlestown Bridge, and the family assumed he had jumped into the Charles River. Phoebe Short went to work as a bookkeeper to keep the household going.

Elizabeth suffered from bronchitis and severe asthma. After lung surgery at 15, doctors suggested she spend time in a milder climate, and for the next few winters she stayed with family friends in Miami. She left Medford High School during her sophomore year.

California, and a father who was not dead

In late 1942, Phoebe Short received a letter from the husband she believed was dead. Cleo Short was alive and living in California. In December of that year, Elizabeth, now 18, moved to Vallejo to live with the father she had not seen since she was six. It did not last. After arguments, she moved out in January 1943.

That month she applied for a job as a clerk at the commissary of the Army's Camp Cooke, near Lompoc, California. That application put her fingerprints on file with the FBI. Seven months later, in September 1943, police in Santa Barbara arrested her for underage drinking, and that arrest put her fingerprints on file a second time, along with a mug shot. Those two sets of prints would matter enormously three and a half years later.

The last six months in Los Angeles

After the Santa Barbara arrest, Short spent much of the next few years in Florida, with visits home to Massachusetts. In Florida she met Major Matthew Michael Gordon Jr., an Army Air Forces officer. She later told friends he had proposed; Gordon was killed in a plane crash on August 10, 1945.

In July 1946, Short came to Los Angeles to see Lieutenant Joseph Gordon Fickling, an acquaintance from Florida stationed in Long Beach. She spent the last six months of her life in Southern California. Popular accounts describe her as a would-be actress, and some sources say she hoped to work in films, but she had no known acting jobs or credits. Larry Harnisch's 1997 Los Angeles Times account describes her more plainly as an unemployed cashier and waitress.

The Missing Week: January 9 to 15, 1947

On January 9, 1947, Short returned to Los Angeles from San Diego with Robert "Red" Manley, a 25-year-old married salesman she had been seeing. Manley told police he dropped her off at the Biltmore Hotel downtown, where, he said, she was going to meet one of her sisters visiting from Boston. Some accounts place her afterward in the lobby of the Biltmore and at the Crown Grill Cocktail Lounge on South Olive Street, though a 1997 Los Angeles Times article questioned whether the Biltmore sighting actually appeared in news accounts of the time.

After that, the record goes dark. A number of people later told police and newspapers they had seen her during what became known as the "missing week." Police and district attorney's investigators ruled out each of those sightings; in some cases witnesses had mistaken another woman for Short. Where she was and who she was with between January 9 and the morning of January 15 has never been established. That gap is the heart of the mystery.

The Discovery in Leimert Park

The vacant lot where her body was found sat on the west side of South Norton Avenue, between Coliseum Street and West 39th Street, in a part of Leimert Park that was still largely undeveloped. The body had been severed at the waist, washed, and deliberately posed. Her face had been cut from the corners of her mouth toward her ears. Medical examiners estimated she had been dead for about ten hours.

The FBI's history of the case makes the point that matters most for investigators: despite the extensive cuts, "there wasn't a drop of blood at the scene." She had been killed and cleaned somewhere else, and then driven to Norton Avenue. Detectives found a heel print among tire tracks near the body, and a cement sack with watery blood nearby. Los Angeles Herald-Express reporter Aggie Underwood was among the first people on the scene, and according to the FBI's own records, the press had arrived and taken pictures even before police.

What the autopsy found

Los Angeles County coroner Frederick Newbarr performed the autopsy on January 16, 1947. He recorded ligature marks on her wrists, ankles and neck, and bruising to the head consistent with blows. The cause of death was hemorrhage from the facial lacerations and shock from blows to the head and face. The bisection, a surgical technique called a hemicorporectomy, showed very little bruising along the incision, which indicated it was done after death. That precision, which seemed to require anatomical knowledge, would steer the investigation for months.

56 Minutes: How the FBI Identified the Black Dahlia

The Los Angeles Police Department had jurisdiction over the murder, but it asked the FBI for help almost immediately, and the first thing the Bureau did was give the victim back her name.

Los Angeles sent the dead woman's fingerprints to Washington by "Soundphoto," a primitive fax system used by news services. The prints arrived blurred. According to the FBI, its fingerprint examiners identified her just 56 minutes after receiving them. At the time the Bureau held more than 100 million fingerprint cards (its 2006 account puts the number at 104 million). Short's prints appeared twice: once from the 1943 Camp Cooke job application, and once from the Santa Barbara underage drinking arrest seven months later. The FBI also had her Santa Barbara mug shot in its files and released it to the press. That photo is the face most of the world still associates with the case.

The FBI went on to support the LAPD with records checks on potential suspects and interviews across the country. Because the body had been so cleanly cut, investigators suspected the killer might have training in dissection, and the Bureau was asked to look into a group of students at the University of Southern California Medical School, which was close to where the body was found. Those background checks produced nothing.

How the newspaper got to her mother first

The speed of the identification produced one of the ugliest episodes of the case. As soon as the name was known, reporters from William Randolph Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner phoned Phoebe Short in Boston. According to accounts later given by Examiner staff, reporter Wain Sutton first told her that her daughter had won a beauty contest and gathered as much personal detail as he could before telling her the truth: Elizabeth had been murdered. The paper then offered to fly her to Los Angeles, and kept her away from police and rival reporters to protect its story.

The FBI's released files capture how badly the press was crowding the case. According to the FBI, its Special Agent in Charge commented that it was "not possible for the investigators to have a confidential telephone conversation or even read mail without some news reporter looking it over to see if it relates to this case."

"Here Is Dahlia's Belongings": The Envelope

This is the detail at the center of The Sealed Docket's Black Dahlia case file, and it is the closest investigators ever came to the killer.

On January 21, 1947, a man claiming to be the murderer phoned James Richardson, the city editor of the Examiner. He congratulated the paper on its coverage and told Richardson to expect some souvenirs of Beth Short in the mail.

On January 24, a manila envelope reached the Examiner, addressed to "The Los Angeles Examiner and other Los Angeles papers." Words on it had been cut from newspapers and pasted on, and a larger message on the front read: "Here is Dahlia's belongings[,] letter to follow." Inside were:

• Elizabeth Short's birth certificate
• Her business cards and photographs
• Names written on scraps of paper
• An address book with the name Mark Hansen embossed on the cover

The packet had been wiped with gasoline, the same way the body had been cleaned, which convinced police it came from the killer himself. Even so, investigators lifted several partial fingerprints and sent them to the FBI. Wikipedia's account says the prints were damaged in transit and could not be properly analyzed. The FBI's own account describes the result as "a tantalizing near-miss": the Bureau searched for a match to fingerprints on an anonymous letter that may have been sent by the killer, and the prints were not in its files.

The same day, a handbag and a black suede shoe were reported on top of a garbage can in an alley a couple of miles from Norton Avenue. Police recovered them. They too had been wiped with gasoline.

The "Black Dahlia Avenger" letters

More messages followed. On January 26 the Examiner received a handwritten note signed "Black Dahlia Avenger" promising the writer would turn himself in on Wednesday, January 29, at 10 a.m., and naming a place. Police waited there that morning. No one came. That afternoon another cut-and-paste note arrived saying the writer had changed his mind because he would not get "a square deal." The Herald-Express received similar pasted-up letters. Whether any of them after the first envelope came from the real killer has never been settled. The first envelope, with its genuine personal documents, is the one item investigators were confident about.

The Investigation: 750 Investigators, 150 Suspects, No Arrest

The search that followed was enormous for its time. A total of about 750 investigators from the LAPD and other agencies worked the case in its early stages, including some 400 sheriff's deputies and 250 California State Patrol officers. They searched storm drains, abandoned buildings and stretches of the Los Angeles River. The LAPD interviewed more than 150 men as possible suspects. Los Angeles City Councilman Lloyd G. Davis posted a $10,000 reward, which brought a fresh wave of confessions.

The first suspects

Robert "Red" Manley, one of the last known people to see Short alive, was investigated and cleared after passing polygraph examinations. Mark Hansen, the nightclub and theater owner whose name was on the mailed address book, and at whose home Short had stayed, was looked at closely after a friend of Short's told police she had rejected his advances. He too was cleared. Police worked through the names in the address book; one acquaintance, Martin Lewis, had an alibi placing him in Portland, Oregon.

Lead investigator Captain Jack Donahoe told reporters he believed Short was killed in a remote building on the edge of the city and moved afterward. By February 1, the Los Angeles Daily News reported the case had "run into a stone wall." The Examiner kept it on the front page for 35 days.

Rumors the police let run

Newspapers printed lurid claims that Short had been tortured for hours. Police knew this was not what the autopsy showed, but according to the record they let the reports circulate so that the real cause of death would stay known only to investigators and the killer, a standard way of screening false confessions. The press coverage also branded Short as an "adventuress" and worse. Many of those characterizations have since been shown to be false.

The 1949 grand jury

By spring 1947 the case had gone cold. In September 1949 a Los Angeles County grand jury convened to examine the LAPD's failure to solve a string of murders of women and children in the preceding years, Short's among them. Detectives traced her movements again through Massachusetts, Florida, California, Texas and New Orleans. No new evidence came of it.

More Than 500 Confessions

Few cases have drawn as many false confessions. During the initial investigation police received about 60 confessions, mostly from men. Over the decades the total has passed 500, including from people who were not yet born in 1947. Several early confessors were charged with obstructing justice. LAPD Sergeant John P. St. John, who worked the case until his retirement, observed how many people offered up a relative as the killer.

In 2003, Ralph Asdel, one of the original detectives, told the Los Angeles Times he believed he had interviewed the killer: a man whose sedan was seen parked by the lot early on January 15, 1947. The man was followed to the restaurant where he worked and was ultimately cleared.

The Suspects Still Debated

Because no one was ever charged, the Black Dahlia case has become a competition of theories. The suspects most often discussed by authors and investigators include:

• George Hodel, a Los Angeles physician, accused after his death by his son, retired LAPD homicide detective Steve Hodel, in a 2003 book. Notes released in 2003 from the 1949 grand jury material show investigators had bugged George Hodel's home. He was never charged in the case.
• Walter Bayley, a surgeon whose house was one block south of the lot, proposed by former Los Angeles Times copy editor Larry Harnisch. Bayley was 67 in 1947 and had no known history of violence.
• Leslie Dillon, a bellhop and former mortician's assistant, the focus of Piu Eatwell's 2017 book Black Dahlia, Red Rose. Harnisch disputes this, saying the district attorney's files place Dillon in San Francisco when Short was killed.
• Jack Anderson Wilson, a drifter named in John Gilmore's 1994 book Severed. Sergeant St. John said he was close to arresting Wilson when Wilson died in a fire on February 4, 1982. Gilmore's book has been heavily criticized for its sourcing.
• Mark Hansen and Robert Manley, both investigated in 1947 and cleared.

Names like Bugsy Siegel and Orson Welles turn up in popular retellings, but neither was ever a suspect in the actual investigation. Harnisch, who inventoried the district attorney's files, has said several of the celebrity names attached to the case never appear in them at all.

Is the Black Dahlia linked to Cleveland's Torso Murders?

One theory ties the case to another unsolved file on The Sealed Docket's channel: the Cleveland Torso Murders of 1934 to 1938, investigated under Eliot Ness. Cleveland detective Peter Merylo and several crime authors suspected a connection because victims in both cases were dismembered. The original LAPD investigators studied the Cleveland killings in 1947 and discounted a link. The theory resurfaced on NBC's Unsolved Mysteries in 1992 but has never been proven.

Myth vs. Record: What the Black Dahlia Case Got Wrong

Part of what makes this case so hard is that the legend grew faster than the facts. Some of the most repeated claims do not hold up:

• The nickname. The FBI says the press dubbed her the Black Dahlia "for her rumored penchant for sheer black clothes and for the Blue Dahlia movie out at that time," a reference to the 1946 film noir The Blue Dahlia. Accounts differ on whether staff at a Long Beach drugstore used the name during her life or reporters invented it after her death. Before "Black Dahlia" caught on, the Herald-Express had called it the "Werewolf Murder."
• "Hollywood starlet." She had no known acting credits. She was a young woman without steady work, moving between rented rooms.
• Prostitution. According to Harnisch, the grand jury found no evidence she was ever a prostitute; he traces the claim largely to a 1977 novel based loosely on the case.
• Pregnancy. The autopsy states she was not and had never been pregnant.
• Cigarette burns and torture. These appear in some books but are not in the official autopsy report.
• Fiction treated as fact. James Ellroy's 1987 novel The Black Dahlia and Brian De Palma's 2006 film adaptation are works of fiction that bear little relation to the facts of the case.

The Black Dahlia's Legacy

On February 2, 1947, less than three weeks after the murder, California assemblyman C. Don Field introduced a bill prompted by the case calling for a sex offender registry. California became the first U.S. state to require sex offender registration. The Black Dahlia case is also routinely cited as one of the first crimes of postwar America to capture the whole country's attention, and it helped define the noir image of 1940s Los Angeles that Hollywood has been selling ever since.

Elizabeth Short is buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California. Her mother, Phoebe, moved to Oakland to be near the grave, later returned to the East Coast, and died in 1992. The FBI's conclusion is blunt: the murderer has never been found, "and given how much time has passed, probably never will be."

Why the Black Dahlia Case Was Never Solved

Looking at the record as a whole, a few reasons stand out:

1. A contaminated scene. Reporters and onlookers reached the lot early, and the FBI's files note photos were taken before police arrived.
2. A killer who cleaned. The body, the mailed packet, the handbag and the shoe were all wiped, and the one set of partial prints from the packet did not produce a match.
3. No primary crime scene. Wherever Elizabeth Short was killed, it was never found.
4. A flood of noise. Hundreds of false confessions, fake letters and rival newspaper theories buried real leads.
5. No forensic DNA. In 1947 the tools that now solve decades-old cases did not exist.

Black Dahlia Timeline

• July 29, 1924: Elizabeth Short is born in Boston.
• December 1942: Moves to Vallejo, California, to live with her father.
• January 1943: Applies for a job at Camp Cooke; her fingerprints go on file.
• September 23, 1943: Arrested in Santa Barbara for underage drinking; fingerprinted and photographed.
• July 1946: Comes to Los Angeles.
• January 9, 1947: Last confirmed sighting; Robert Manley drops her at the Biltmore Hotel.
• January 15, 1947: Her body is found on South Norton Avenue, Leimert Park.
• January 16, 1947: Autopsy by the Los Angeles County coroner.
• By January 17, 1947: The FBI has identified her from fingerprints, 56 minutes after receiving them; newspapers publish her name.
• January 21, 1947: A caller claiming to be the killer phones the Examiner.
• January 24, 1947: The gasoline-cleaned envelope of her belongings arrives.
• January 29, 1947: "Black Dahlia Avenger" fails to appear as promised.
• September 1949: Los Angeles County grand jury examines the unsolved killings.
• 2003: Grand jury material on the George Hodel surveillance becomes public.
• Today: No one has ever been charged.

Watch the Black Dahlia Case File on The Sealed Docket

Domonique Luchin breaks down the envelope, the 56-minute fingerprint match and the question nobody has answered in "79 Years. No Killer. Who Mailed the Black Dahlia's Belongings?". Reenactment scenes in the video are labeled. For the other dismemberment case investigators once tried to connect, watch "At Least 12 Dead. No One Ever Tried. Cleveland's Torso Murders". For another case broken open by FBI record-keeping, read the true story of Samuel Little; for another 20th-century mystery with no ending, read what happened to Judge Crater or the D.B. Cooper case. Then browse the full Sealed Docket case index, every episode, and more about the host.

Follow for more case files. New real-case files drop every week on the @TheSealedDocket YouTube channel. Subscribe so the next one finds you.

Related Case Studies from The Sealed Docket

• Samuel Little: The True Story of the 93 Confessions and the Most Prolific Serial Killer in U.S. History
• The Lindbergh Kidnapping: The True Story and Whether They Executed the Right Man
• The Great Brink's Robbery (1950): The True Story of the "Crime of the Century"
• Patty Hearst: The True Story of the Kidnapping, "Tania," and the Bank Robbery Trial
• D.B. Cooper: The True Story of the 1971 Hijacking and the Man Who Vanished
• Leopold and Loeb: The True Story of the "Perfect Crime" That Shocked 1924 Chicago
• What Happened to Judge Crater? The True Story of the 1930 Disappearance
• John Dillinger: The True Story of Public Enemy No. 1 and the Biograph Theater

Sources

• FBI History: Black Dahlia
• FBI: The Black Dahlia Murder, Read About It in FBI Records (October 20, 2006)
• FBI Records: The Vault, Black Dahlia (Elizabeth Short)
• Los Angeles Times: A Slaying Cloaked in Mystery and Myths, by Larry Harnisch (January 6, 1997)
• Wikipedia: Black Dahlia

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