The Black Dahlia
That Wednesday morning, the fifteenth of January, was a dreary gray day that held little promise of improvement, but it didn't keep housewife Betty Bersinger from going outside. She and her three-year-old daughter left her home on Norton Avenue in the Leimert Park section of Los Angeles to the shoe repair shop. As they reached Norton and 39th Street, they passed by several vacant lots overgrown with weeds. In 1947, development of this area south of Hollywood had been slowed by the war.
In one of the vacant lots, Betty caught a glimpse of something near the sidewalk. It looked like part of a broken mannequin lying in the weeds. The lower half of the department store dummy had been separated from the upper half and twisted in a macabre way. The closer she got to the strange ghostly white object, the more she realized that it wasn't a department store dummy at all.
Officers Frank Perkins and Will Fitzgerald were at the scene in minutes to find the naked body of a woman who had been cut in half. They called immediately for assistance. The dead woman seemed posed, lying on her back with her arms raised over her shoulders, her legs spread eagle. She had been cut in half at the waist and her face and body had been slashed viciously.
She had clearly been killed somewhere else and dumped in the vacant lot during the night or early morning. There was no blood on the ground where she lay and it appeared as though her bruised and broken body had been washed clean of blood before it had been dumped onto the lot. Grass had reportedly been forced into her vagina, and she had reportedly been sodomized after death. Rumors of henna in her hair and BD carved into her body, as of yet to this outlet, have not been verified.
The victim of this brutal murder was a 22-year-old woman named Elizabeth Short, who was born in Hyde Park, Massachusetts on July 29, 1924. Now known as The Black Dahlia.
