15. The Black Dahlia
The morning of January 15, 1947, saw the beginning of one of Hollywood’s greatest scandals as well as one of its most famous unsolved mysteries. That winter morning the mutilated body of a woman, later determined to have been dead for about ten hours, was discovered by a woman and her three-year-old daughter, out for a leisurely morning stroll. She had been mangled in a manner similar to some of the victims of the notorious London killer Jack the Ripper; eviscerated, dismembered, exsanguinated, and then posed. The woman who found the body thought that the scene was so grisly that it had been set up using a mannequin for the purpose of shocking the police and witnesses. But it was no mannequin. It was the body of Elizabeth Short, who became known as the Black Dahlia in the sensationalized aftermath of her murder.
Among the men later suspected of being involved in the murder were actor/director Orson Welles, several newsmen including the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, Norman Chandler, who it was claimed dismembered the body to hide the fact of her pregnancy; a small-time criminal named Jack Anderson Wilson; and George Hodel, a Los Angeles physician who was accused of the murder by his own son, LAPD detective Steve Hodel. Gangster Bugsy Siegel was implicated by some. The LAPD also investigated the murder as part of a lesbian affair, identifying one suspect only as “Queer Woman Surgeon” in their files. The crime was never solved and the sensational nature of the murder, widely covered by an ill-informed and voracious press, was a scandal in Hollywood for years. In the 21st century amateur and professional criminologists continue to search for the killer of Elizabeth Short.