Few cases in American history have had the staying power, and the ability to capture the public's imagination as the brutal murder that took place in January, 1947 in Los Angeles. A body, drained of blood, and cut in half, was found in a vacant lot.

The victim, born Elizabeth Short in 1924 in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, was abandoned by her father, Cleo, at age five. The only entertainment permitted to the struggling family was movies, and mother Phoebe Short took her daughters to the movies a few times each week. Betty grew up loving the movies, and dreamed of coming to Hollywood to be a star.

A few years later, Phoebe got a letter from Cleo apologizing for the fake suicide/abandonment, wanting to return. Phoebe refused his offer. However, he maintained a correspondence with Betty, and suggested that she come out to California, where he now lived. She could stay with him until she got on her feet. Cleo lived in Vallejo, hundreds of miles north of Hollywood, but it was still California, and that was a lot closer to where Betty wanted to be.

Before long, though, the relationship between father and daughter became strained. She took to hanging out and sponging off people-- which would mark the rest of her life, unfortunately. Cleo kicked her out of the house, but she soon got a job at Camp Cooke, and even won a beauty contest there. It was at Camp Cooke that she began to call herself Beth.

If Beth won a beauty contest, she didn't win any popularity contests with the men. In fact, she seemed to be uncomfortable around the opposite sex at this point.

An autopsy detail, revealed years after the murder, would state that Beth did not have properly developed genitals, and was therefore incapable of having normal vaginal sex. Her apologists hold that she was unaware of this condition, but the facts just don't support this belief. It is at Camp Cooke that she first realized that she was attractive to men, but avoided them. Later, her attitude changed, and she would act the tease, perhaps feeling that if push came to shove, she would have the perfect excuse!

Moreover, in two supposed love relationships, she absolutely refused sex and even intimate contact, until marriage. This hardly fit with her "hot tomato" personality, and could be better explained by her not wanting to reveal her terrible secret until it was "too late."

At any rate, the scene now shifts to Hollywood, where she started spending a lot of time at the Hollywood Canteen, meeting various wannabe actresses, and many servicemen. In 1946, a movie entitled "The Blue Dahila" was released, inspiring the guys to call Beth the Black Dahlia, because her hair was so black, her skin was so pale, and she dressed in black lacy clothes. She assumed her new vampy personality with gusto.

One of her friends at the Hollywood Canteen was Georgette Bauerdorf, an heiress who was also to meet a grisly death, before Beth's.

The last thing we know for sure about the Dahlia is that she began to run around with Robert Manley, a hardware salesman, who paid for a room for her on the night of January 8th. Characteristically, they did not sleep together. Beth told Manley that she was returning home to New England, but first wanted to meet her sister at the Biltmore Hotel. Manley left her at the hotel, and he and hotel employees were the last people to ever see her alive.

After the body was discovered, and her steps re-traced, Manley became the chief suspect. But, after extensive questioning, and a polygraph test, he was released. Soon after, a package of her personal effects was delivered to the Los Angeles Examiner. Many leads were followed up, including an address book with dozens of entries--and several pages ripped out. No fingerprints could be lifted from any of this evidence because the package, and all its contents, had been previously soaked in gasoline.

Nothing whatever came from the investigation of the package.

Aggie Underwood, a crime reporter from the LA Herald, was convinced that the Dahlia murder and the murder of Georgette Bauerdorf were connected. As it stood, authorities were looking for the tall soldier who dated Bauerdorf briefly, until she, scared, ran him off. Could this mystery man be the killer of both women?

All signs point to yes. The M.O.'s were very much the same, and famed LA detective John St. John obtained, in effect, a confession. A very tall, thin man calling himself Arnold Smith said that an Al Morrison killed the Dahlia. It didn't take St. John long to figure out that Arnold Smith and Al Morrison were one and the same person.

Furthermore, this very suspect was questioned in the Bauerdorf case. Arnold Smith was one of many aliases for Jack Anderson Wilson, a tall, gaunt, alcoholic with a bad leg, and a history of sex offenses and robbery.

A day or so before St. John was about to close in on him, Wilson died in a hotel fire, which he had accidentally started, while smoking in bed. If there were any evidence in his room, it burned up along with Wilson.

Even if the case can never be officially closed on this basis, since he wasn't interrogated in the Dahlia murder, there is little doubt that Wilson was the perp.

Beth Short goes Hollywood and hits bottom, never to return. Another lurid story out of Tinseltown.