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BLACK DAHLIA MURDERBetty Short was born in Hyde Park, Massachusetts USA. She was raised in Medford, Massachusetts, by her mother, Phoebe Mae, after her father, Cleo Short, abandoned her and her four sisters in October 1930. Troubled by asthma, Betty spent summers in Medford and winters in Florida. At the age of 19, she went to Vallejo, California, to live with her father. The two moved to Los Angeles in early 1943. Betty left almost immediately after arriving due to an argument with her father, getting a job in the post exchange at Camp Cooke (now Vandenberg Air Force Base), near Lompoc. She moved to Santa Barbara, where she was arrested on September 23, 1943, for underage drinking and was sent back to Medford by juvenile authorities. In the few years following, she resided in various cities in Florida, with occasional trips back to Massachusetts, earning money mostly as a waitress. In Florida, Short met Major Matthew M. Gordon Jr., who was part of the 2nd Air Commandos and training for deployment in the China Burma India theater of operations. Short told friends that Gordon wrote a letter from India proposing marriage while recovering from an airplane crash he suffered while trying to rescue a downed flier. (He was, according to his obituary in the Pueblo, Colorado newspaper, awarded a Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star, the Air Medal with 15 oak leaf clusters, and Purple Heart) She accepted his proposal, but he died in a crash on August 10, 1945, before he could return to the U.S. to marry her. Later this story was embellished to say that they were married and had a child who had died. Although Gordon's friends in the air commandos confirm that Gordon and Short were engaged, his family subsequently denied any connection after Short's murder. Short returned to Southern California in July 1946 to see an old boyfriend she met in Florida during the war, Lt. Gordon Fickling, who was stationed in Long Beach. For the six months prior to her death, she remained in Southern California, mainly in the Los Angeles area. During this time, she lived in at least a dozen hotels, apartment buildings, rooming houses, and private homes, never staying anywhere for more than a few weeks. DeathShort was last seen alive on the evening of January 9, 1947, in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel at 5th and Olive Streets in Downtown Los Angeles. On January 15, 1947, Short's mutilated body, severed at the waist, was discovered in a vacant lot in the 3800 block of South Norton Avenue in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles by a woman walking her infant in a stroller. The murder was never solved. Elizabeth Short was laid to rest in Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, California. She was interred there, rather than in a cemetery in Medford, because her oldest sister lived in nearby Berkeley and because she loved California, according to her mother. Popular myths and misconceptionsAccording to newspaper reports shortly after the murder, Short received the nickname "Black Dahlia" at a Long Beach drugstore in the summer of 1946, as a play on the then-current movie The Blue Dahlia, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. However, Los Angeles County district attorney investigators' reports state the nickname was invented by newspaper reporters covering the murder. In either case, Short was not generally known as the "Black Dahlia" during her lifetime. A number of people, none of whom knew Short in life, contacted police and the newspapers, claiming to have seen her during her so-called "missing week" between the time of her disappearance January 9 and the time her body was found on January 15. Police and district attorney investigators ruled out each of these alleged sightings, sometimes identifying other women that witnesses had mistaken for Short. Many "true crime" books and other allegedly factual accounts claim that Short lived in or visited Los Angeles at various times in the mid-1940s; but these claims have never been substantiated, and are refuted by the findings of law enforcement officers who investigated the case. A document in the Los Angeles County district attorney's files titled "Movements of Elizabeth Short Prior to June 1, 1946" states that Short was in Florida and Massachusetts from September 1943 through the early months of 1946, and gives a detailed account of her living and working arrangements during this period. Although popular myth as well as many "true" crime books portrayed Short as a call girl, a report by the district attorney's (D.A.) office for the Los Angeles County grand jury states that she was not in fact a prostitute. Another widely circulated myth holds that Short was unable to have sexual intercourse because of some genetic defect that left her with "infantile genitalia." Los Angeles County district attorney's files states the investigators had questioned three men with whom Short had sexual intercourse, including a Chicago police officer who was a suspect in the case. The FBI files on the case also contain a statement from a man with whom Short had sexual intercourse. According to the LAPD summary of the case, in the district attorney's files, the autopsy describes Short's reproductive organs as anatomically normal. The autopsy also states that Short was not and had never been pregnant, contrary to what is sometimes claimed. While the "infantile genitalia" story must be regarded as suspect, the D.A.'s files do contain the following:- Doctor Schwartz last stated that he studied surgery and that victim was on the make for him but that she was the patient of Doctor Arthur McGinnis Faught who was treating victim for trouble with her bartholin gland and that he wanted nothing to do with her. He stated that the bartholin gland was the lubricating gland in the vagina and that Doctor Faught had lanced it on several occasions and it could account for the fact that she had not been having intercourse with men. SuspectsThe Black Dahlia murder investigation by the LAPD was the largest since the murder of Marian Parker in 1927, and involved hundreds of officers borrowed from other law enforcement agencies. Because of the complexity of the case, the original investigators treated every person who knew Elizabeth Short as a suspect who had to be eliminated. Hundreds of people were considered suspects and thousands were interviewed by police. Sensational and sometimes inaccurate press coverage, as well as the horrible nature of the crime, focused intense public attention on the case. About 60 people confessed to the murder, mostly men, as well as a few women. As the case continues to command public attention, many more people have been proposed as Short's killer, much like London's Jack the Ripper murders of 1888. 22 District Attorney suspects. A summary of each of 22 suspects investigated by the Los Angeles district attorney's office, transcribed from the official document, can be found at this website. Walter Bayley Norman Chandler Leslie Dillon Joseph A. Dumais Female suspects Woody Guthrie Mark Hansen George Hodel | |||||||