‘Black Dahlia’ suggests a possible solution to the storied 1947 murder

A pitfall lies in wait for the true-crime author who chooses to explore a grisly murder: Describing the killing in lurid detail may seem sensationalist, even sadistic. Yet in writing his new book, “Black Dahlia,” William J. Mann had no choice but to explain exactly what befell Elizabeth “Betty” Short, the 22-year-old woman whose brutalized body was found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 1947.

Short’s murder occasioned a slew of newspaper headlines and articles during the two or three years after her death and has since figured in several novels, notably James Ellroy’s “The Black Dahlia” (1987) and Michael Connelly’s “The Waiting” (2024), as well as a number of movies and TV episodes. Short’s moniker goes back to a coincidence: the release of a film noir, “The Blue Dahlia,” starring Veronica Lake, a few months before Short’s death. Lake’s character, the unfaithful wife of a returning GI played by Alan Ladd, was not called the Blue Dahlia — that was the name of the L.A. nightclub owned by her paramour. But on the strength of Short’s glorious head of black hair, she got stuck with that nickname. This was a pity because, as Mann painstakingly shows, the term’s sinister connotations have nothing to do with Short’s personality or lifestyle.

Rather, Mann’s admirably researched and generous book portrays Short as ahead of her time in claiming the freedom allowed young men. The middle sister of five raised by a single mother who worked as a bookkeeper in Medford, Massachusetts, Short had left home in 1942 and gone west to alleviate the respiratory problems that had plagued her since childhood, to reunite with her long-absent father and to see the wider world.

For a while she managed a hand-to-mouth existence — her good looks, outgoing personality and love of walking city streets could motivate strangers to buy her a meal or let her crash in their apartment. On occasion, Mann notes, Short might have sex with a male Good Samaritan, but that wasn’t by plan — in fact, she had no plan. Now and then she got a job, but she never held it for long. As Mann writes after recounting how she quit a summertime job as a camp counselor: “That’s the Betty we’ve come to know. Why work if you can help it?”

Mann does that a lot — bridging the gap between author and reader, enlisting us to join a kind of revisionist club of which he is the president. The tactic not only rouses sympathy for Short but allows Mann to pause, summarize and help us follow the zigzags of a life as erratic as hers. For this reader, at least, the we’re-in-this-together approach worked well.

I’m afraid it’s time for me to lay out what Short was put through, by quoting from journalist Agness Underwood’s contemporary account in the Los Angeles Herald-Express. Found in the Leimert Park neighborhood of South Los Angeles, Short’s body “had been cut in half through the abdomen, under the ribs. The two sections were ten to twelve inches apart. … Both cheeks were slashed from the corners of the lips almost to the ears … and the entire lower section of the body had been hacked, gouged, and unprintably desecrated.” The coroner subsequently reported that Short’s facial injuries probably caused her to drown in her own blood and that the rest of her body had been drained of blood. Certain conclusions about the killer are deducible from these details: He was full of rage, well-versed enough in human anatomy “to drain a corpse of its blood and cleanly cut it in two.” He was also determined to flaunt his savagery.

The police work was hampered by higher-ups’ near-desperation to divert attention from the Los Angeles Police Department’s reputation as a hotbed of corruption by solving the crime fast. Attempting to do so, they shuffled and reshuffled personnel until, in 1949, one detective complained, “Hundreds of police officers have worked on this case.” The rotating cast left multiple loose ends and never gathered enough evidence to support a successful prosecution.

Mann’s previous books include “Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn” and “Hello Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand.” If those titles sound a bit fanboy-ish, let it be said that Mann’s Edgar-winning “Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood” (2014) is a smart and persuasive reassessment of the 1922 murder of director William Desmond Taylor. “Black Dahlia” is even better, especially in its indictment of the popular press of the day, which lazily pigeonholed Short as a “man-crazed adventuress.” Naive and careless she certainly was, but those are not reprehensible flaws.

Does Mann solve the crime? I think so — or at least he comes as close as one can to finding a plausible solution so many years after the fact. Bearing in mind the salient traits mentioned above, he narrows the field to the only one of Short’s male friends with both the appropriate medical know-how and outbursts of fury in his past. When “In Cold Blood,” Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel” about the slaying of a family in rural Kansas, came out in 1966, British author Rebecca West called it “a grave and reverend book.” William J. Mann’s “Black Dahlia” deserves the same compliment.