CONTENT ADVISORY: This story discusses, in detail, a brutally violent murder that took place in Los Angeles in 1947. It contains descriptions of extreme violence with language taken directly from official reports. The Courier has included this description, not to sensationalize the crime, but to underscore the very real tragedy of the crime, while also laying the groundwork for a later discussion of the possible murderer, who was never officially identified. Furthermore, the information in this is compiled from numerous sources, all of which are cited in the story. To access any source, click on the link in the citation.
January 15th, 1947. Los Angeles, California. It’s a West Coast winter morning in Tinseltown. Grey skies blend with much darker and thicker city smog, the streets are damp and cold from the drying rain of the previous night, temperatures in the mid-fifties.
Late morning.
All the all-night movie palaces have closed their doors, the after-hours clubs the same, and any extravagant Hollywood parties have long since wrapped. All the drying drunks and stirring-strung-junkies of the previous decrepit night, have crawled back into their warm hiding spots. Arguably more grisly, in the way a slithering snake unnerves easier than a mangy dog, the rich tomcats of local industry-actors, actresses, directors, producers, studio heads, hidden hedonists of the most extreme sort, have returned to their hillside ivory towers or their stucco sprawl fortresses of employment; the studio backlots.
In Leimert Park, a middle-class, largely undeveloped, white suburb, [9] about twenty minutes from Hollywood proper, Betty Bersinger and her three-year-old daughter leave their home to take a morning stroll. It’s about ten a.m. when the pair walk by a vacant lot on the west side of South Norton Avenue, halfway between Coliseum Street and West 39th [1]. Betty notices without much remark, a department store mannequin lying in two pieces.
Litter being a defining characteristic of Los Angeles’ working class areas, Betty didn’t pay it much mind from a distance. Then she got closer. Betty was wrong. It wasn’t a mannequin at all. It was a woman; barely. Once Betty realized what was lying in front of her, she ran to call the police. She reported a body lying in the grass, in two pieces. As she sputtered what she’d seen, and sirens began blaring and the lights flashing, up opened the pandora’s box of the Black Dahlia.
The following description is summarized and abridged from the official 1947 Los Angeles county autopsy report of the body found. I have attempted anywhere possible to use the exact language used by the county coroner. The details given are unpleasant but I will not censor any part of what happened as all details given are integral to identifying possible suspects and debunking common myths.
Female, young adult; naked, five-foot-six, shoulder length hair, dyed black, caucasian. Pale as milk, pale as cheap plastic. The body has been bisected. She has been severed in a clean, almost straight incision across her lower abdomen. No jagged edges on the wound. Likely sawed with a teethless kitchen knife, or medical grade bladed surgical instrument.
Multiple abrasions across her face as well as lacerations across her forehead and on the top of her head at the midline. The body has a cleanly carved three-inch deep Chelsea grin, an incision cut in the shape of a smile from her left ear, through her lips, to her right. Like the bisection, there are no jagged edges, and the wound is evenly incised across her cheeks [3].
Many abrasions and small lacerations across her upper body. Ligature marks around her wrists suggesting she’d been bound by some kind of rope or cuff [3] [1]. Several crisscross lacerations across the suprapubic area, extending into soft tissue of the bisection [3].
Lacerations of the small and large intestines as well as of both kidneys. Uterus is unharmed and no sign of past-pregnancy is shown. The ovaries and tubes remain intact, but inside her vagina lies a loose piece of skin and fat with several crisscross-lacerations. The anal opening is dilated to 1 1/4th inch in diameter with multiple abrasions. The stomach is filled with a greenish-brown, granular matter, made up of human feces and other unidentifiable particles. All smears taken for spermatozoa were negative, meaning that no sexual intercourse had taken place within the immediate past. The official cause of death is ruled as hemorrhage and shock due to concussion of the brain. Most, if not all lacerations, including the anal dilation, Chelsea grin, and placement of fecal matter inside the stomach were done post-mortem [1] [3].
There is no blood at the scene of the crime. She has been drained and cleaned of all blood. The body’s dry and completely white; dry and white as the plastic of a department store mannequin. There are no fingerprints or DNA samples on the body. The body has been placed meticulously with the arms up, bent at the elbows to form a wide-angled triangle. The palms of her hands are open, the fingers together. The lower body was placed several inches from the upper body with the legs spread apart. Her face lay on her left cheek, eyes opened post-mortem [3].
Within an hour, police identified the body by the fingerprints, which appeared twice in their database [2].
The body was identified as twenty-two year old Elizabeth Short.
Elizabeth Short, Beth as her friends called her, was born and raised outside Boston, Massachuesets. Born in 1924, Beth grew up poor through the Depression. Her father staged a suicide, reportedly after losing his business. Some years later, for reasons only known to the dead man himself, he decided to contact Elizabeth’s mother, revealing that he’d faked his death and now-by some divine change of heart-wanted to reconnect with his family [7] [2].
While reportedly Elizabeth’s mother wouldn’t accept her husband’s tardy apologies, Beth herself was enamored by the idea of meeting the father she never knew. When she turned eighteen in 1943, Beth left Massachusetts for Vallejo California, to live with her father. She was an aspiring actress and moving in with her father seemed the most cost effective way to get to California [7] [9]. Her paternal reconciliation didn’t mend quite as smoothly as she’d imagined. Their fighting was almost constant, and Beth would move out less than a month after arriving [7].
After leaving her father’s place, Beth applied for a job at Camp Cook (Vandenberg Air Force), where she was fingerprinted. The chain of events following her army camp application-and the sequence of that chain, are up for contention-but one way or another, seven months after applying at Camp Cook in August ‘43 Beth was arrested for underage drinking in Santa Barbara. She was booked, with a mugshot and another round of fingerprints taken [7] [9] [10]. Somehow, Beth made bail and scraped up enough money to leave California.
By 1944, Nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Short was in Miami, Florida. She got engaged to an Air Force Officer and her luck was seeming to land right side up, until August of 1945, when her fiance died in a plane crash during the last days of the war [7] [9].
In 1946, Beth moved back to Southern California; to Long Beach. Raymond Chandler’s “The Blue Dahlia” came out in April of that year, and it soon became Beth’s favorite movie. As word of personal trivia spread among her inner circle, Beth’s friends-almost cleverly-started calling her the Black Dahlia because of her black No. 1 dyed hair, and her penchant for black clothes [9]. Some claim this story a farce, and that journalists coined the ‘Dahlia’ post-mortem.
During the majority of the latter-half of 1946, Beth lived rootless and transient. Drifting around the greater Los Angeles area from hotel to motel to apartment to boarding house. Beds, to couches, to attics, back to beds. Elizabeth was enigmatic, elusive, making no serious ties to anyone or anything, often taking company with total strangers over past friends [7] [9].
On December 15th, 1946, Robert ‘Red’ Manly picked up Elizabeth Short off a San Diego street corner. Manly, a married salesman, later told police he picked up Beth as a way to test his own loyalty to his wife [6]. Manly drove Beth to Pacific Beach, to the home of Elvera and Dorothy French. Beth had been staying on their couch for the past month or so. On the drive over, Manly asked Beth if she’d like to get dinner with him. She agreed. Manly and Beth went out, danced, and drank, but they did not have sex and Beth didn’t spend the night with Manly. He dropped her at the French’s home that evening, and drove off [9] [6].
Manly wouldn’t see Short again until January 7th. Beth told Manly she needed a ride to Los Angeles, he said he had some business down there so he took her. He rented a motel and they spent another sexually uneventful night together. She didn’t say much during the drive to LA. Manly later told LAPD “I don’t know what was the matter with her. It didn’t make any difference to me. I was just glad to get rid of her” [6].
Beth had told Manly that she was coming to LA to meet her sister, Mrs. Adrien West. Manly believed that Short had never been in Los Angeles, as she’d supposedly told him, so when Beth asked him to drop her off at a Greyhound station in Downtown, Manly refused. He believed it was too unsafe a neighborhood to leave a young girl new to the city. So, he took her all the way to the Biltmore Hotel, where her sister was supposedly staying. Inside, as Beth used the lobby bathroom, Manly asked the front desk for Mrs. Adrien West. The desk clerk told him there’s been no record of that person at the hotel. Around 6:30pm, Manly leaves the Biltmore, reportedly without saying goodbye to Elizabeth. He would never see her again. At the age of 64, Robert Manly fatally toppled over the balcony of his Anaheim apartment on January 9th, 1986. Thirty nine years to the day since he left Elizabeth Short [6] [8].
According to eyewitnesses, after Manly left Beth, she was seen making frantic phone calls in the lobby phone booth. A short time later, a car pulled up outside the Biltmore. Beth went outside, got in the car, it drove away, and that was the last anyone saw of Elizabeth Short [2]…until she lay in front of the hollow, wet eyes of Betty Bersinger, four days later on the morning of January 15th.
To be continued in Part 2…
