Post by Joanna on Jan 16, 2015 0:58:35 GMT -5
Black Dahlia Murder Still Unsolved after 68 Years
On Wednesday, January 15, 1947, the grotesque remains of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short (above) are found in Los Angeles. Sixty-eight years later, her murder remains unsolved There has never been a shortage of suspects in the Black Dahlia murder – but police have never been able to pin the crime on any of them.
After the mutilated body – cut in half at the waist and drained of blood – was discovered in a vacant Los Angeles lot, dozens of people confessed to killing the woman whom newspapers dubbed “the Black Dahlia.” It became the most sensational murder story in a city rife with sensational murders and fame-seekers all over town wanted to play a part. Through the ensuing years, the number of people claiming responsibility grew to hundreds, most of whom detectives ruled out almost immediately.
One promising admission came a few weeks following the murder from an army corporal who said he had been drinking with Miss Short in San Francisco a few days before her body was discovered – then blacked out, with no memory of his activities until he came to again in a cab outside New York’s Penn Station. (According to The Black Dahlia, a novel by James Ellroy, Short, an aspiring movie star, had a fondness for servicemen.) Asked if he thought he had committed the murder, the corporal said yes and became a prime suspect until evidence emerged that he had actually been on his military base the day of the woman’s death.
Then there was the woman who became convinced – in 1991, after therapy chipped away at 40-year-old repressed memories – that her late father was the killer. Police dug up the yard of her childhood home, where she believed authorities would find his weapons or the remains of other victims. They did find a rusty knife, farm tools and costume jewelry – but no evidence to tie him to the Black Dahlia case or any other murders.
More recently, retired detective Steve Hodel landed on a suspect he believes is unquestionably the killer: his own father, the late doctor George Hodel. Soil samples taken from the doctor’s Hollywood estate in 2012 tested positive for the chemical markers for human decomposition, indicating bodies may have been buried there. The younger Hodel’s suspicions were raised when he found pictures of a woman he believed was the Black Dahlia among his father’s possessions; furthermore, he says the surgical accuracy with which she was cut in half and disemboweled suggests a killer with medical training – like George Hodel, who died in 1999. While the LAPD had long considered Hodel a suspect, they are not ready to call him the killer. According to a CBS News report that aired in 2004, George Hodel was just one of their 22 viable suspects in the Black Dahlia murder – seven of whom were doctors.
Source: Jennifer Latson, Time, January 15, 2015.
