Inside Unsolved 'Black Dahlia' Case

Twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short was found brutally murdered on January 15, 1947. She was severed at the waist and left naked in a vacant lot in the Los Angeles area. The newspapers nicknamed her the “Black Dahlia” after a film noir murder mystery, The Blue Dahlia, which was released nine months prior to her murder. The Los Angeles Police Department proceeded with a deep and lengthy investigation into Elizabeth Short’s death. After shifting through a list of hundreds of suspects, many false reports and witnesses, and several false murder confessions, the police struggled to make progress in the murder case. The Black Dahlia would quickly become one of Los Angeles’s most infamous cases, and the case still remains unsolved almost seventy years later.