Episode 104: The Black Dahlia 1 - Elizabeth Short

The murder of Elizabeth Short aka The Black Dahlia has become a sort of cultural fascination. Yet it's easy to forget that this was a real person. This was not a Hollywood invention. A real human being suffered terribly in her final hours. And we're left all these years later to wonder: who did this? And why?

⚠️ This episode contains true crime details of a horrific event. Please use caution.

Links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Dahlia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemicorporectomy

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Transcript

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Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

Sara Causey discusses the Black Dahlia murder, focusing on Elizabeth Short's life and the sensational media coverage. Elizabeth, born July 29, 1924, faced financial struggles and health issues. She moved to California in 1942, where she had a tumultuous relationship with her father and experienced domestic violence. In January 1947, her mutilated body was found in Los Angeles. The case involved numerous suspects, including George Hodel, but remained unsolved. Sara emphasizes the importance of remembering Elizabeth as a real person, not just a sensational headline. The next episode will delve into the Hodel family's involvement.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Black Dahlia, Elizabeth Short, murder investigation, Hodel family, George Hodel, Hollywood, mutilation, autopsy, suspects, tabloid journalism, military connection, cold case, media coverage, crime scene.

Welcome to con-sara-cy theories. Are you ready to ask questions you shouldn't and find information you're not supposed to know? Well, you're in the right place. Here is your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. In tonight's episode, I want to kick off a two parter that I'm going to do about the Black Dahlia Murder. In this episode, I want to talk about Elizabeth short, who she was and why was she in LA? Sometimes, when we get sensational media exposure, they start giving nicknames to certain crimes. It's easy to forget that it was a real person, a real human being, faced this horrible, awful thing. Their final moments must have been absolutely agonizing, and I want to put some humanity back into this, because I feel like she deserves that whatever she may have been doing in Hollywood, oh my God, what an awful, awful thing, an awful thing out of necessity, I will say disclaimer here. We're going to get into some graphic content. There's no way around it. If you're squeamish, if this is not your thing, then I would highly recommend that you skip the next two episodes. In order for me to delve into what happened, potentially why it happened, and who was involved, I have to be able to talk about what actually happened? I don't go into true crime all the time in this podcast, but it's something worth talking about for sure. In the next episode, I want to talk about the Hodel family. Was George Hodel involved? If so, why? What was his deal? And then, holy shit, all of the things that have been uncovered by the descendants about the Hodel family in general is absolutely mind boggling. It is some of the craziest stuff I have ever heard in my life. If you're still with me, select your frosty beverage of choice, and we will probe the scary catacombs of what was really going on with the Black Dahlia

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So as I mentioned in the introduction, as time goes by, the decades pass, if all we hear about is a nickname or some sensational headlines, then it's like everything becomes dehumanized and things get farther away from the actual crime, and people tend to just think of the headlines and the nickname, and they forget this happened to a real person. This was not something from a movie or a fictional crime novel. It actually happened, and it was horrifying, and it deserves to be talked about. The Black Dahlia was actually named Elizabeth short. She was born on July 29 1924, in Boston. Her father was Cleo Alvin short Jr, and her mother was Phoebe may Sawyer. She had several sisters, and they moved around a little bit, but mostly they grew up in this Medford, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Apparently, Elizabeth's father built miniature golf courses. And who knew that was ever a thing I I mean, obviously someone has to construct them, but it never would have occurred to me that like somebody could have a job doing that, I guess, or doing that specifically. Apparently, when the stock market crash in 1929 whatever money that he had, whatever savings that he had put back, most of that was gone in the market crash the following year, his car is found abandoned on the Charlestown bridge. And people assume like, Okay, let's look at the mise en scene. Here you have somebody in this to me, what seems like an oddly niche job of building miniature golf courses. This person's savings gets obliterated in the 1929 market crash. And then. Thereafter, their vehicle is found abandoned on a bridge above the Charles River. Two plus two equals four. You pretty much assume that the man jumped in the river and committed suicide, and that's exactly what Elizabeth's mother Phoebe thought, that because he had lost everything and was financially wiped out. He had committed suicide to try to deal with it or escape dealing with it. So she goes to work as a bookkeeper. It's like, I'm a single mom. Now. I've got all these kids. I have to do something. Apparently, Elizabeth also had some health issues, things like bronchitis and asthma. So she had a surgery on her lungs when she was only 15, and the doctors had told her, probably a good idea for your health is to move to a more temperate climate, go somewhere that's drier and warmer, get away from Boston. And so her mom sends her each winter down to Florida so that she can be with friends of the family down there, and she won't have the harsher New England winters to potentially cause problems to her lungs. And this goes on for like three years, evidently, when she was in high school around her sophomore year she dropped out. There is a photo of her from 1943 and it's an arrest photo. And she was arrested at that time for drinking underage in late 1942 all of a sudden, Cleo, the the father, slash husband that was thought to have committed suicide in the Charles River, sends a letter to Elizabeth's mom, Phoebe, and says that actually he's alive and he's moved off to California and started a new life out there. So automatically, we haven't even gotten to any details of the crime yet, and it's like what this sounds like something from a movie. Dad is presumed dead because he lost everything. Mom is now a single mom, and has to go to work to provide for all of these kids, and one day, like in a Lifetime movie, a letter comes in the mail and it's from dad saying, Actually, I'm not dead, actually, I'm alive, and I've started a whole New Life in California. Wow. So we have this situation where Elizabeth has been told that it's better for her health to be in a warmer, drier climate. We also have her dropping out of high school somewhere during or around her sophomore year. We have this letter like something from a Lifetime movie of, hey, guess what? Everybody? I didn't kill myself. I'm in California with a new life. So in December of 1942 when she's about 18, Elizabeth moves out to Vallejo, California to live with her father, even though they have not seen each other in more than a decade. Somehow, this seems like a good idea, I guess. Vallejo, by the way, if you're not familiar with California, it's about six hours north of Hollywood, like if you go up i Five, it's about six hours north. So Vallejo is actually a lot closer to San Francisco than it is to Hollywood. Her father is working at a Naval Shipyard in the San Francisco Bay not long after she moves in. In fact, I think maybe only a period of weeks, the two of them have some spectacular routes they're not getting along. So Elizabeth and this estranged dad are locking horns all the time. And January of 1943 she moves out. She takes a job briefly at the base exchange at camp cook, and she lived for a little while with an Air Force Sergeant, but there was reportedly some domestic violence and abuse in the relationship. So, so she leaves around mid 1943 she moves down to Santa Barbara, and then on September 23 of 1943 that's when she gets arrested for drinking. She had gone to a bar and then got busted for drinking under age, and that's where we you know, there's a mug shot. I'll drop a link to it. You can see where she gets arrested for underage drinking. Is that the worst crime in the world? No, at this point, some mild juvenile delinquency we can we can say is present, but it's not like she's an ax murderer. So juvenile. Authorities send her back to Massachusetts, but she goes instead to Florida. She occasionally visits the mom and the sisters up in Massachusetts, but she really wants to stay in Florida, which we can kind of understand that, because if somebody is more or less emancipated themselves, and they're on their own, and now she's over the age of 18, like, Why? Why would you not want to go and explore and make your own way in the world? Again, that's not the weirdest thing we've ever heard, especially on this podcast. While she's in Florida, she meets a man named Matthew, Michael Gordon, Jr, who is also part of the Army Air Force. She claims that Gordon was going to propose. He had been injured in a plane crash in the service, and she says that his intent is to propose marriage. She says that she accepted, but then he was killed in a plane crash on August 10, 1945 so it's like she meets this man, and as far as we know, they have enough of a good relationship, enough of a love affair, that he intends to propose marriage and that she is accepted. But then he's he's killed in a plane crash in August, in July of 1946 so we're going forward in time by about a year. That's when she moves to LA and she wants to visit this Army Air Force Lieutenant named Joseph Gordon fickling, who was some kind of acquaintance or friend that she met in Florida. He had been stationed at the Naval Reserve Air Base in Long Beach. I'm just gonna butt in, you know, I don't want to get too far down this rabbit hole just yet, but it certainly seems like Elizabeth travels in military circles. This is something we see even when I did my my episode about the exorcist untold. It's like, lo and behold, even with a film like the exorcist that seemingly has no connection whatsoever, we find connections to the military industrial slash, military intelligence complexes, things that make you say, hmm. So the last six months of her life, she lives in So Cal, mostly in LA. Shortly before her murder, she was working as a waitress, and she had rented a room that was behind a nightclub on the Boulevard. Some sources say that she was an aspiring actress,

but I in my research for this episode, I have not found any hard evidence of that. I haven't seen that she actually picked up any acting jobs, or that she was even trying to get an acting job. And the reason why I bring that up is because it's part of the Hollywood stereotype, attractive girl moves to Hollywood hoping to make it big. Because if we don't go through and look at what her life was actually like and what she was actually about, that's what we tend to assume, and that's false. One would tend to assume this girl who's born on the East Coast, turns 18, moves out to Hollywood and wants to be an actress. But as Rick Springfield famously said, Every man's an actor, and every girl is pretty. And that's true. I've been to LA LA LAND many times, and I can tell you, when you get out there, being an attract an attractive person is negligible. It's nothing. There are attractive people everywhere. It's Hollywood, man. You don't stick out just by being cute or attractive, or even highly handsome or highly beautiful, like it's almost like Get in line. So that's part of our story. Girl moves to Hollywood, and she gets sucked into the lifestyle. She's waiting tables, she's trying. She's going to audition after audition. She's not making it big. And then one day, some creep isoid finds her and decides to exploit her. He tells her, Well, there's a movie that I'm producing. There's a movie I know of that you can be a part of, wink. And then it turns out to be pornography, but I just haven't found them. In the research that I did to put together this episode, I haven't found any concrete evidence that she was there or staying there with the hope of being an actress. And I haven't found any evidence of like some shady dude coming up to her in the restaurant, saying, I know that you want to be an actress, so if you'll show up at my house and make a blue movie for me, I'm sure you'll hit it big. I'm not saying that that didn't happen with the connection to hotel. I'm just saying I haven't been able to thread that needle myself. I don't really know that she was out there with the hopes of being an actress. Seems to me that she moved out there originally to live with her father. That didn't go well. In fact, it imploded, and she bounces around. She seems to be a bit of a drifter. Prior to the murder on January 9 of 1947 she had taken a trip with this man named Robert red manly, and on the ninth, she gets home to La after being on this trip to San Diego. Now, this dude, Red was 25 years old and he was married. I don't know if she knew that he was married. I mean, some guys can hide that information. Well, it depends on how long you've been dating them, but they were dating long enough to have a little frisky trip, if you know what I'm saying. Now, red claims that he dropped her off at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown LA. And he also said that Elizabeth had told him that she was going to meet one of her sisters that had come to LA from Boston. They were going to have like a girls afternoon. There are some authors who say that in their research, staff members at the Biltmore verified that they did see Elizabeth short in the lobby and that she also used the telephone while she was there. There were also people like just right down the street at the a place called the Crown Grill cocktail lounge. There were also people allegedly who saw her there. So we have some evidence to suggest she was in that area. We fast forward a few days, on the morning of January 15, 1947 Elizabeth's body, which was naked and cut into two pieces, was found in what was then a vacant lot on the west side of South Norton Avenue. The neighborhood that's been developed now was not developed at that time, and that's one of the reasons why it was a vacant lot. The body was not only mutilated, but it had been severed cleanly in two at the waist, and it had been drained of blood.

That's horrifying. So her skin is like extremely pale, not only from death itself, but from having been drained of the blood, the medical examiners felt that she had probably been dead for about 10 hours before the body was discovered. So working backwards, they felt that the time of death was probably either the evening of January 14 or sometime in the early, like the wee hours of January 15. The body itself had been washed by the killer or by someone. Her face had been cut from the corners of her mouth all the way back to her ears. She also had several lacerations on the upper part of her legs and her breasts, and there were places where entire pieces of flesh had essentially been fileted again. I know this is terrible, this is disgusting, but we need to talk about what happened to this person, to this human being, this was done to and then in the next episode, get into who done it and why. What kind of satanic, diabolical creature does this to someone the lower half of the body was moved about a foot away from the upper part of the body, and her intestinal tract had been tucked underneath the lower part of the body. The corpse had also been positioned in a sort of artistic way, with her hands above her head. The elbows were bent and the legs were spread far apart. There was a reporter named Underwood who arrived at the crime scene pretty quickly after the news broke, well after by that, I mean not the news to the public. I mean news within the journalistic community that are in touch with the cops. He got the word that this had happened, and he took several photos of the body. And of course, the journalists on the scene were like, and the cops as well were like, this is some. Most horrific shit we have ever seen. They also noticed that near the body, there was a heel print on the ground and some tire tracks, and there was a bag of cement that contained water and blood. Super bizarre. Everything about this is grotesque and weird. An autopsy was performed on January 16, and in that autopsy, we learned that the victim was five foot five, weighed 115 pounds, had brown hair and light blue eyes. She also evidently had some bad tooth decay. I don't know if that's indicative of a health problem that she had before this, if it's indicative of lifestyle issues. They also found ligature marks, like from where rope or something had been used to bind her on her ankles, wrists and her neck. They also found, as I mentioned earlier, the cuts that were on her breasts, as well as some other cuts that were on her arms and her chest.

Here's where things get even freakier. The body had been cut in a clean and specific way. It's called a Hemi corporectomy. Hopefully I'm saying that correctly, not not a not a word that those of us not in the medical community would be using all the time. I had to look this up when I encountered it, because I never even heard of such a thing before, I was like, Oh, this is, this is a real medical thing. I just thought that this was some horrific, awful thing that was done to Elizabeth, like, this is a this is a thing. Evidently, yes, there was a technique that was taught back in the day long ago, let's say, in medical school. In Elizabeth's case, the lower half of her body had been removed from the upper half and somebody went in the spine, between the second and third lumbar vertebrae, there was not much bruising along the cut, and that led the coroner to think that it had probably been performed after she died. And I if there's anything that we can say, I hope that that these awful things were mostly done after she was dead and she didn't have to go through any pain. Because this is awful, absolutely awful, awful, awful, the Hemi corporectomy. Apparently, when I looked it up on Wikipedia, in 2009 66 cases had been reported in medical literature. From what I understand, it's like the absolute last ditch effort, like, if this is the only way to even maybe save somebody's life, we'll try it, but the odds are good that they're going to die. Evidently, it removes the legs and the feet, obviously, but as as well as a person's genitalia, their entire urinary tract, their pelvic bones. I mean, it's um, scary to, I mean, to even contemplate that something like that would have to be done to somebody surgically to save their life. And even then, it's like, I'm probably gonna die anyway, but we're gonna try this super scary, super scary stuff this, this is like absolutely what nightmares are made of. There's a variety of cuts, okay, around her body. I don't want to get into all the minutia here. Her skull was not fractured, but she did have bruising along her head and along her scalp, the coroner determines that the cause of her death was most likely hemorrhaging due to the lacerations or the cuts that were on her face and then from blunt force trauma to the head. So in other words, somebody probably beat her about the head and face, and she died from that trauma, and obviously we hope that the bulk of the awful things that were done happened posthumously. She was not awake, she was not aware, and she didn't suffer from that. I mean, this is awful, awful stuff. There was evidence to suggest that she had been sexually assaulted in trying to find things like fingerprints or sperm, no results came back, at least, we're told, so far as we know, they weren't able to lift any fingerprints or any semen from the body. She was actually identified herself after her fingerprints were sent to the F. The eye, and they happened to be on file from that arrest in 1943 when she got nabbed for drinking underage in a bar, a team of reporters, of course, of course, of course. After her body was identified, we had a name. We knew it was, they decide to contact her mother, which one an awful thing to have to experience. Your daughter is dead and has been sawed in half. And I just want to know some information about you and your family so we can print it in the paper. Wow, that's that's the media for you. And the thing of it is, people have the tendency to think like tabloid journalism is something in modern times, but it isn't. It's been around a long time, and whenever I was doing the primary research for my book, simply DAG, that was one of the things that I encountered was just some of the smut and nasty nonsense that got printed in the 1950s it's like we have this idea. Those of us like myself, I'm a Gen Xer, so I wasn't alive in the 50s. We have this perception of Ozzy and Harriet and white bread culture. And it's shocking to go back and look at some of the headlines and some of the shady ways that journalists try to get information back in the 50s. It's like maybe it wasn't so clean and white bread and Aussie and Harriet, after all, certainly in the press it wasn't. We also hear tabloid stories where it's like the fish tale, where I've said this before, the about the Clint Murchison house party story, somebody embellishes, and then somebody else, and then somebody else. So we hear about a tablet article that claims that Elizabeth was out on the Boulevard in a tight skirt and a see through top, and she gets labeled as the Black Dahlia, which was possibly a reference to a film noir called the Blue Dahlia that starred Veronica Lake. And we're told that she goes out on the prowl on the Boulevard. She's out for sex and a good time Sex, drugs and rock and roll. And this is the 40s, mind you. And this kind of stuff is going on.

The investigation fingers a few people, but I'll get to the part about suspects momentarily. There are a few people that are in the could have been this guy, right? But it's a bit of a shoulder shrug. A suspicious envelope gets sent to a newspaper called The Los Angeles examiner and several other newspapers in the area, and it's like a ransom note. There are words that have been cut out and then pasted from newspaper clippings to make a letter. And the letter like I guess the envelope says, Here is dahlia's belongings. A letter is to follow. And then the envelope contains a copy of her birth certificate, business cards, photographs, the packet itself had been cleaned, so to speak, or wiped with gasoline, and that had also been done to her body. So then they suspect that this envelope must have been sent directly by her killer, even though the envelope, you know, had there was an attempt to clean it by using gasoline to get rid of the prints, a few partials were actually taken from the envelope and they were sent to the FBI. But wouldn't you know it, oops, a daisy, the prints get compromised. There's trouble in transit. The chain of custody is compromised, and these partials could not properly be analyzed. On March 14, there was an alleged suicide note that had been written in pencil and tucked into a man's shoe, and this was near the edge of the water on Brees Avenue in Venice, this apparent suicide note says to whom it may concern, I have waited for the police to capture me for the Black Dahlia killing, but have not. I'm too much of a coward to turn myself in, so this is the best way out for me. I couldn't help myself for that or this, sorry Mary, this pile of clothes and and abandoned shoes with the note is seen by a caretaker, like a guy whose responsibility is to try to take care of the beach. He notifies the police, of course, they decide that this man named Mark Hanson, who was the owner of an address. Book that was found in the envelope was a suspect. We're told that he was a nightclub owner, and he owned some theaters, and he had been an acquaintance of Elizabeth short Anne Toth, who had been Elizabeth's friend and a roommate had told police that Elizabeth had recently told Hanson that she didn't want to be involved with him, that he had made a pass at her and wanted to have sex with her, and she said no, and the police wondered if her rebuffing him could have been a potential motive for him to kill her, but ultimately he gets cleared of suspicion in the case Robert Manley, the red guy, since he was one of the last people to see her alive, he was also investigated, obviously, as one would be, but he gets cleared of suspicion because he's able to pass some lie detector tests. There were various people who were listed in Mark Hanson's address book who had known or come into contact with her, but they were either alibied or they passed polygraphs. And it was like, well, we don't think it's any of them. On January 26 another letter comes in to the examiner. It's not done in ransom note style. This time, someone has handwritten it and it says, here it is turning in Wednesday, January 29 at 10am had my fun at police, Black Dahlia Avenger. There was also a location where this alleged killer would turn himself in at this specific time, naturally, the police go there, but the supposed killer never shows up. Instead, later that day, the newspaper, the examiner, gets another letter, but this time it's done like a ransom note. It's back with cut and paste letters from other newspapers, and it says, I've changed my mind. You wouldn't give me a good deal, and I was justified in killing the Black Dahlia. Okay? Naturally, because of the sensation around this, the graphic murder, and the way that the tabloid press has hyped it up. There are all kinds of letters coming in, and there's a veritable media firestorm around the coverage. But police have tried to keep certain bits of information from from ever reaching journalists or the public, because they they want to have a sense of whether, if a dude shows up and says, I did it, can he tell them details that are not widely known? Can he tell things to them that only the killer or somebody close to the killer would have actually known? And we're told that one of the things that the cops hid from the public was that her true cause of death was a brain hemorrhage and not actually being cut in half, which, so far as the coroner thought happened after she was dead.

We also get some sensational claims that Elizabeth was a lesbian and have been going to gay bars in and around LA maybe some man killed her because she didn't want to be with him sexually or or maybe there was some kind of love triangle gone wrong again. There hasn't been any evidence to substantiate that. It's just the realm of tabloid rumor. By the time it gets to be spring of 47 nothing's really much going on. Effectively, it becomes a cold case, and the police blame the journalists. It's like, the journalists blame the cops and say they haven't done a good enough job investigating, and then the cops blame the journalists, because they're like, You guys created such a freaking circus around this murder. How could we now? We get to various people who have been examined over the years, or a finger has been pointed at them. In 2003 there was a man named Ralph asdale who was one of the original detectives on the case from back in the 40s, and he told the news media that he thought he had actually identified her murderer. He said that there was a man who was parked in a car near the crime scene early in the morning on January 15. He said that a neighbor who drove by saw this man, and he saw the car had, like its right rear door open, and the driver of that car was standing in the lot. And he thought, well, where there's smoke, there's fire. This is probably the guy. However, the owner of that car was followed to his place of work. There was no real evidence. He had done anything, and so he was cleared of any suspicion and was never actually charged. Now the additional list of individuals, there are people such as a doctor named Walter Bailey. There was a publisher, a newspaper publisher named Norman Chandler and a biographer named Donald Wolfe claimed that Norman had impregnated Elizabeth short, and that was his motive. We also hear about people like Mark Hanson, who I talked about earlier, and Robert red manly, who supposedly she was dating. But we also get names like Woody Guthrie, Bugsy Siegel, the gangster, Orson Welles, the actor, and George Hodel. Hodel was never formally charged in the crime, but obviously he became like the center of his own shit storm, when his son, who became of all things, an LAPD homicide detective, accuses GEORGE So Steve Odell, who is the son of George Odell, and who also becomes an LAPD homicide detective, says that He believes George Odell was the one who murdered Elizabeth short, aka The Black Dahlia, in 1991 a woman named Janice Knowlton, who would have been 10 at the time that Elizabeth was murdered, she says that she saw Her father, a man named George, beat Elizabeth to death in their home. She published a book in 1995 that was titled, Daddy was the black doll, Black Dahlia killer. And she further said that her father had been doing inappropriate things to her. Her stepsister Jolene said that the book was false, and she further said, I think that Janice believed it, but it wasn't real. I know because I lived with her father for 16 years. There are other individuals who have said that her claims have not been consistent and have not been consistent with the facts of the case. Now, why would somebody want to come forward and claim that their father did it? I don't know, but I'm thinking immediately of somebody like James files in the JFK case. Like, why would somebody want to come forward and say I was on the grassy knoll? For some people, being infamous is as good to them as being famous, and they will say anything. There's a book from 2017 called The Black Dahlia red rose. And the author looks at someone named Leslie Dillon, who was a bell hop and a former assistant to a mortician in 2000 a retired detective named Buzz Williams wrote an article called The rap sheet. That was a piece he did about Elizabeth Schwartz murder. His father, Richard F Williams, was actually part of the Gangster Squad, the LAPD Gangster Squad that investigated the case. And William's father believed that Dylan was the killer, and that when Dylan went back to Oklahoma, this is the Leslie Dillon guy who was a bell hop that was a former morticians assistant. When Dylan went home to his home state of Oklahoma, he was not extradited back to California because, apparently, his ex wife had some connection to Adelaide Stevenson, and phone phoned in a favor so that he wouldn't be extradited. Allegedly, I have no idea. This is just crazy. If this is one of those cases where the more you learn, the stranger it gets. So you know is that a reason to hide from extradition? You are innocent, but you're going to have your ex wife call in a favor allegedly from Adelaide Stevenson to keep you from being extradited. Certainly, that's odd. That's odd.

There are also some murders that have taken place. We don't hear as much about them, but there are some other murders that have taken place that bear some similarity to what happened to Elizabeth short. There's one called the Cleveland torso murders that occurred in the 1930s another set called the lipstick murders, which happened in Chicago and were possibly connected to what happened to Elizabeth. There's also this set of what's called the lone woman murders that happened in the 1940 40s, and it really just comprises a set of, I don't know, 15 or 20 unsolved crimes, unsolved murders that happened in and around LA that involve some kind of mutilation and sex crimes against women who were young and attractive. So that's a lot to take in, just just in and of itself.

I think where I will leave this for the moment is the idea that Elizabeth had moved out to Hollywood to become an actress. It didn't work out, and she somehow wound up in the sex trade, or she had some, like, sex maniac attitude, like what we see from the tabloids, oh, she went out and short skirts and see through blouses, and she was prowling the boulevard looking for it. And it's like, I'm, I just roll my eyes. I'm like, Yeah, I'm, I'm so sure, there was a rumor also at the time that she was a prostitute. And this is another, another way to like besmirch the victim, like to say that she was wearing provocative clothing and strutting up and down Hollywood Boulevard as working as a prostitute. You have a certain cadre of people that will say, well, she must have had it coming to her, because she was doing this high risk lifestyle and flaunting her body at strange men, which is a disgusting way to look at the whole thing.

Then we have the rumor that she was a lesbian and that she was going to gay bars, and she made men mad because she would dress provocatively and act like she was going to do something with them, but then she would reveal that she didn't like men. It's like, oh my god. Just on and on the rumor mill goes. And that also, it also, to me, is part of the idea that the person loses their humanity. They get flattened into stereotypes and caricatures, damaging caricatures, and the person's not around, they can't speak up for themselves and say, this is true, and that's not. This is accurate, and that's complete bullshit. So it's important to remember that this was a real person, an egregious, awful crime was done to them, and now they're remembered in history by a nickname, The Black Dahlia that they didn't choose, and all kinds of rumors, tabloid rumors, about their sexuality, who they were consorting with, what were they doing? That comes into play as well. 

In the next episode, I will talk about the Hodel family, and in particular George Hodel. Was he involved? If so, how and if so why? It's also worth noting that the very first episode, my inaugural episode for this podcast, was about Dave McGowan's book, weird scenes inside the canyon where he talks about was the 1960s counterculture something organic? Did it really spring up as a revolution against 1950s uptight, repressed culture, or was it manipulated? Was it orchestrated to make people think the counterculture cropped up organically? Would really it did it. It was totally engineered. He talks about the Black Dahlia briefly, and he talks about George Hodel as well, because it's like, how far back does some of the weird perversion and sadism in Hollywood go? And one of the things that McGowan writes is much of what has been written about the brief life of Miss short is contradictory, and that's true, as I just mentioned, tabloids get information from all over the place. They make up spurious rumors, and the person's not around to defend themselves anymore. One thing that McGowan points out is among the facts that seem to be agreed upon are that she had recently worked at a military facility that is now known as Vandenberg Air Force Base, and that she had some kind of close connection to a US Naval Hospital in San Diego, where she may have also worked. That is, in any event, what she had indicated in the letter to her mother. And as I mentioned, yeah, there is kind of a strange connection there between her and the military, as seems to be so often the case in these crazy California stories, just there's a little chin scratcher for us. I almost don't even know what to say. This is just such a horrific topic. But as I said, it's important for us to remember this is a real person, and it was a. Real crime. It's not the realm of fiction or fantasy or a terrible horror movie. It really happened. So let's prepare for the next time to go into the insane story that is the Hodel family, stay a little crazy, and I'll see you in the next episode.

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