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The City of Angels Los Angeles, California, 1947 A sleepy movie town still thought as the step-sibling to the glamorous city of San Francisco to the north. A place full of immigrants from all over the world. A place just starting to realize what Hollywood really is. The City of Angels
It's January, 1947, in Leimert Park, a neighborhood in South Los Angeles. A woman, Betty Bersinger, walked the streets alongside her three-year-old daughter. It's 10 o'clock a.m., just after most residents of L.A. are busy at work in the office. As Betty and her daughter are enjoying their morning walk, they come across something that catches their eyes. Right there on the sidewalk,
Could that be... could that be a mannequin? Betty and her daughter slowly approached the object. "What a strange place to leave a mannequin," Betty thought. Well, it is Los Angeles after all. The City of Angels. But once Betty got a little closer, it started to look less and less like a mannequin. As soon as she was right up next to the object, she could even touch it.
The blood in Betty Bersinger's face drained. This was no mannequin. Betty and her daughter stumbled upon the body of a woman who had been cut in half. This week on Forensic Tales, we cover a story that has been highly requested by our listeners. This is the complete story of the murder of Elizabeth Short, the case of the Black Dahlia. ♪♪
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Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney. Each Monday, we release a new episode that discusses real, bone-chilling, true crime stories and how forensic science has been used in the case.
Some cases have been solved through cutting-edge forensic techniques, while other cases have been left sitting on the shelf, collecting dust in the cold case division, just waiting to be solved by forensic science. Just like in the case of this week's story. Now, let's get to a case that we've received a number of listeners' requests to cover on the show.
This is the complete story of the Black Dahlia. It's January 14th, 1947. In a South Los Angeles neighborhood known as Leimert Park, a woman, Betty Bersinger, is walking with her three-year-old daughter around 10 o'clock in the morning. Most Los Angeles residents have already begun their busy days.
Betty Bertsinger is out on the walk because she had to go to a local shoe repair shop to pick up one of her husband's pairs of shoes. It was a fairly cold January morning in Los Angeles, and at this time, the neighborhood children are making their way into school for the day. On her walk, Betty and her young daughter pass by a vacant, undeveloped lot covered in overgrown weeds and grass.
And as she passes by the vacant lot, she sees something that catches her eye. At first, Betty thought it might be a mannequin, a mannequin that was cut in half. What a strange place to put a department store mannequin cut in half, Betty thought as she got a little closer. Betty started to worry about the children that were passing by on their way to school.
she thought that the mannequin might frighten or scare the children. So she thought she better call someone to come pick up this weird looking mannequin. There was no question or even a thought in Betty's mind that this could be anything else than a pale department store mannequin. Now us true crime people know that this is never a mannequin. Once Betty gets closer to the object,
She quickly realizes that this is no mannequin. It's the dead body of a young woman. Betty jumps back from the body, grabs her young daughter, and rushes to a nearby house where she calls police to report what she's seen in the vacant lot near the sidewalk. Two police officers arrive on scene and are immediately shocked by what they see in front of them.
Not only is it the body of a deceased young female, it's the body of a young female that has been cut in half, lying completely naked in a posed position. When police first arrived at the scene where the body was discovered, the lower half of the victim's body was about a foot away from her upper half. Her body had been perfectly cut right above the waist.
The body appeared to have been intentionally posed with her hands over her head and her elbows bent at right angles. Her skin was completely white, showing no signs of any color. There wasn't a drop of blood anywhere on or near her body. It was as if her body had been completely drained of all of her blood prior to being dumped at the lot.
Police couldn't find a wallet, purse, or any other identifying information about exactly who this woman was. But it was clear to the responding officers that whoever killed this woman intentionally posed her to make a statement. The body was immediately transported to the Los Angeles coroner's office for an autopsy to be performed on the Jane Doe.
Medical examiners determined that the body was completely severed at the waist and drained of all of her blood. The victim's skin was left ghostly white after the loss of all of her blood. The body had been cut in half with surgical precision, almost as if she underwent some medical or surgical procedure and it was that clean.
The lower half of the body had been removed by separating the lumbar spine between the second and third lumbar vertebrae. It was a perfectly clean cut. The medical examiner noted that based on the bruising along the incision around her waist, the incision was most likely occurred after she was already dead.
Medical examiners also noted several other unusual things about the victim's body. It appeared to the medical examiner that the victim's body had been thoroughly washed and wiped clean, possibly with gasoline. There wasn't any amount of physical or forensic evidence left behind on the body. They also observed that the victim's face had been slashed.
Her killer slashed her face from the corners of her mouth to her ears, creating what is known as the Glasgow Smile. Picture Heath Ledger, Joker from the Batman movies. The victim also had several cuts along her thighs and her breasts, and even some places on her skin had been almost entirely sliced away.
The LA medical examiner determined that the cause of death was hemorrhaging from the lacerations to her face and the shock from blows to her head and her face. It was clear to police and the medical examiner that this was an insanely brutal and unusual style killing. What was the killer trying to tell us by killing his victim in this unusual way?
After the autopsy was performed on January 16th, police needed to find out exactly who this mystery woman was. When her body was discovered, she didn't have a purse or a wallet or literally anything that could identify her. So the police submitted her fingerprints to Washington, D.C.,
Now remember, this is all happening in the late 1940s, so how police dealt with things like fingerprints is much different nowadays. But back then, they sent the fingerprints off to Washington, D.C. via sound photo, which was this ancient-style fax machine that was commonly used in the 1940s in the United States.
So once the fingerprints were sent by way of this old school fax machine, the prints were matched based on a prior arrest record to 22-year-old Elizabeth Short. Elizabeth Short was the woman discovered cut in half along the streets of Los Angeles. Elizabeth Short was born on July 29, 1925 in Hyde Park, a neighborhood just outside the city of Boston.
As a young child, Elizabeth and her family moved to the city of Medford. Elizabeth's father, Cleo Short, made a living designing and building mini golf courses in the area. But once his business started to slow down, remember, this is right around the time of the Great Depression in the United States, Elizabeth's father left her mother and Elizabeth's four other siblings and headed out towards California.
How he left his family is even more disturbing. Cleo faked his own suicide by leaving his empty car near a bridge, which led police to believe he jumped and killed himself. This left Elizabeth's mother, Phoebe, to fend for herself and raise five children all on her own.
Elizabeth Short grew up to be, quote, a pretty girl. People always told her how much older she looked and acted way more mature than how she really was. Elizabeth was obsessed with movies for as long as anyone can remember about her. She would tell friends that the theater and movies allowed her to escape the ordinary life that she lived, even if it was just temporary.
She was described by friends and being, quote, good, sweet, funny, not stuck up, and always stopped and chatted. She would make you feel at ease, end quote. Another friend, when talking about Elizabeth, said, quote, the truck drivers and men would stare when she walked down the street. It was a wonder there weren't more truck accidents when she walked down Salem Street, end quote.
Elizabeth Short was a beautiful young woman who would have made the perfect Hollywood actress. As she got older, Elizabeth decided to move out west to California. Her father, who actually admitted to the fake suicide, offered her a place to stay in California while she looked for a job. She eventually found work in various restaurants and theaters around town.
But her interest started to change more towards becoming a Hollywood star. She dreamt about becoming an actress, just like the women she admired in the movies. And really, by this point, things weren't going so well at her father's house. Her father would constantly nag her about being lazy, and he strongly disliked the men that she was dating. So Elizabeth's father eventually kicked her out of the house by the mid-1943.
So she decided to leave her father's house in Vallejo and head down south towards the city of Los Angeles, the City of Angels, a place where she could finally start her career as an actress. While living in Los Angeles, Elizabeth met an army pilot, Lieutenant Gordon Fickling, and the two fell madly and deeply in love.
Gordon Fickling was just the type of man that Elizabeth Short hoped that she would spend the rest of her life with. But just as quickly as the relationship began, it came to an end even quicker, with Gordon being shipped out to Europe to continue his service in the military. Elizabeth worked a number of modeling jobs around L.A., but she couldn't help feeling pretty discouraged about where her acting career was going.
So she decided to go back to Medford before moving in with relatives in Miami, Florida. During this time, Elizabeth dated around, but she was really looking for a guy that she could marry and settle down with. One of the men that Elizabeth started dating was another Army pilot by the name of Major Matt Gordon. Gordon promised to marry Elizabeth and give her the life that she always wanted.
Major Matt Gordon was killed in action while serving in India, and this left completely crushed Elizabeth behind. This was now the second time she met a man who she could see spending the rest of her life with, but was left completely heartbroken. While trying to recover from the death of her boyfriend, Matt Gordon, Elizabeth reconnected with her former boyfriend, Gordon Fickling.
So remember, this is the 1940s. So when I say that the two of them reconnected, that means that Elizabeth and Gordon started to write each other letters and not sending text messages or anything like that. So during this time, Elizabeth actually agreed to meet up with Gordon in Chicago. And shortly after, she agreed to join him across the country in Long Beach, California.
The move back to Southern California was just what Elizabeth needed to jump back into her dreams of becoming an actress and becoming that Hollywood star she always wanted to be. The only contact Elizabeth Short had with police was on September 23, 1943, when she had been out with a group of friends in a restaurant and the owner decided to call the police on the rowdy group of underage drinkers.
which is kind of weird to me that even way back in the 1940s, we had underage drinking charges. I thought basically anyone was allowed to drink, but the police interaction is where they obtained Elizabeth's fingerprints that were later used to identify her mutilated body in Los Angeles.
On January 9th, 1947, five days before her murder, Elizabeth returned to her home in Los Angeles after a quick trip down south to San Diego. She was with a guy named Robert Red Manley, a 25-year-old that she was reportedly dating, who was actually married to someone else at the time.
Manley was a salesman from Los Angeles who admitted that he and Elizabeth were seeing each other on and off the few weeks prior to her murder. This is all while Manley's wife was pregnant with their first child together. Robert Manley told police that after he picked Elizabeth up from her house on January 8th, he took her to the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
He told police that Elizabeth was going to meet up with her sister who was in town visiting from Boston. Workers at the hotel recall seeing Elizabeth make phone calls from the lobby payphone. Again, this is the 1940s when the idea of a cell phone was a long way away.
Some people even reported seeing Elizabeth about a half mile away from the Biltmore Hotel at the Crown Gill Cocktail Lounge that same evening. The man Elizabeth Short was with, Robert Manley, told police that the last time he saw Elizabeth was when he dropped her off at the hotel lobby on January 9th.
From January 9th, the time Robert Manley dropped Elizabeth off at the hotel, and the same day hotel workers and locals report seeing Elizabeth, until her body was discovered on January 15th, no one has ever reported seeing Elizabeth. For nearly six days, Elizabeth Short was missing. She had simply vanished.
On January 21st, six days after her severed body was discovered, a person claiming to be Elizabeth Short's killer placed a phone call to the office of James Richardson, the editor of Examiner newspaper. The caller told the newspaper editor that he was the one who was responsible for killing Elizabeth Short.
and that he would turn himself in, but not before police could have a chance to chase after him. The caller talked to the newspaper editor and said that he would send over some quote, "souvenirs of Elizabeth Short very shortly," proving that he was in fact her killer.
A couple days later, on January 24th, a suspicious envelope was addressed to the Los Angeles Examiner was spotted by a U.S. postal worker. The letter was addressed with letters that had been individually cut and pasted to the envelope, kind of like what you would see in an old school ransom letter.
The front of the envelope read, quote, Here is Dahlia's belongings. Letter to follow. End quote. Inside the envelope, postal workers discovered Elizabeth's birth certificate, business cards, photographs, and even an address book with the name of Mark Hansen embossed across the cover.
The envelope had been carefully cleaned with gasoline, which was very similar to how Elizabeth Short's body was eventually found. So this made police suspect that whoever wrote this letter just might actually be her killer. But once again, there was absolutely no physical or forensic evidence left behind on the envelope.
The same exact day that the envelope was received at the examiner, a handbag and a black suede shoe were reported to have been seen on a garbage can just a short distance from where Elizabeth's body was discovered. Just like her body and just like the mysterious envelope, the handbag and shoe had been wiped completely clean with gasoline.
destroying any hope of finding a fingerprint or any other valuable forensic evidence from the center. After the discovery of the address book with the name of Mark Hansen on it, police immediately identify him as a possible suspect in the case. Mark Hansen was a super wealthy nightclub owner who had actually shared several acquaintances with Elizabeth before her death.
But shortly after interviewing Hansen about the murder, he was quickly eliminated as a possible suspect in the case. After the interview with Mark Hansen, police interviewed more than 150 men over the next couple weeks. But one person who police really wanted to talk to was Robert Manley, the man who was believed to be the very last person to see Elizabeth alive.
But Manley was pretty straightforward with the police, and he even voluntarily took a polygraph test, which he passed with flying colors, officially ruling him out as a potential suspect in the case.
By this point in the investigation, 750 investigators from the LAPD and other surrounding police departments worked on the case to try and find Elizabeth Short's killer. City Councilman Lloyd David even offered a $10,000 reward, which in today's money is well over $100,000, to anyone with information about the case.
Of course, this caused several people to come forward claiming to have information and pointed the fingers at several potential suspects, but eventually didn't lead to any new information. Elizabeth Short's murder became known as the Black Dahlia. Now, I've read a couple different reports on how exactly her case gained the nickname
And some reports indicate that a drugstore owner in Long Beach, California, had told reporters that his male customers had nicknamed Elizabeth the Black Dahlia, and it kind of just stuck to the media. But other reports indicate that the case earned the nickname from the film The Blue Dahlia that was released in 1946.
Regardless of the origin, the murder of Elizabeth Short became one of the most famous and most talked about murders in Los Angeles history. And it was largely because of the absolutely horrible nature of her murder and how her body was brutally dissected in half.
On January 26th, a second letter arrived at the examiner. This time around, the letter was handwritten. And you guys, I'm sorry if it's a little bit hard to understand or follow because I'm going to read it exactly how it was written. But the letter read, quote, here it is, turning in when Jan 29, 10 a.m.,
The letter went on to describe a location, date, and time that he planned to turn himself into the police. So on January 29th, the date that was indicated in the letter, police arrived at the very location to wait for their suspect to finally arrive and turn himself in. But the seconds turn into minutes.
and the minutes turn into hours, and no one arrives at the location. By 1 p.m. that same afternoon, the examiner's office received yet another letter that was created with cut and pasted letters from a magazine that read, quote, End quote.
So here we have a young, absolutely beautiful young woman found cut in half on a Los Angeles sidewalk, followed by three very unusual and frankly pretty creepy letters from the suspected killer made out of cut and paste letters. You can imagine that this caused a media frenzy.
The story of Elizabeth Short's murder was covered on just about every news media that was available in the 1940s. And just like what we would expect if a similar thing happened today, the story of her murder spiraled into so many different directions. News reports suggest that Elizabeth was actually tortured for hours before her death.
which simply wasn't true based on the autopsy findings and the forensic evidence. Media also suggested that Elizabeth might have been killed because she denied the sexual advances from Mark Hansen, the wealthy nightclub owner. The story and news coverage of Elizabeth Short literally went out of control, which personally, I find that to be really sad because
Because some of the stories about Elizabeth and her personal life are just so untrue with absolutely no evidence to support the rumors. And just like with all murder victims, she isn't even here to be able to defend herself against all of these rumors. The rumors went as far as to claim that Elizabeth may have even been a sex worker and things like that.
When again, there were absolutely no evidence to support that. So the stories and the news media coverage of the Black Dahlia went on for months. Her murder dominated the news media as if there wasn't anything else occurring in the world. By February 1st, the Los Angeles Daily News reported that the Black Dahlia case had, quote, run into a stone wall.
By this point, there had been absolutely no arrests in the case, and police really didn't even have a list of potential suspects or persons of interest. Even with the story of Elizabeth Short's murder covering the front page of the Examiner for 35 straight days following her murder, there were no new leads in the investigation.
Police suspected that Elizabeth Short may have been murdered somewhere else on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and then her body was transported to the dump site where she was eventually found by Betty and her daughter. It was even theorized that maybe a doctor or surgeon was behind her murder.
And this theory was largely based on the fact that the incision marks and cuts on Elizabeth's body were just so precise that only someone with proper medical training could pull something off. But remember, her body was literally cut in half right between two vertebrae.
It seemed to police that her killer quite possibly could have had some sort of medical training to even have an idea of how to do something like this so cleanly. It just seemed so unlikely that someone like you or I or anyone without medical training could be so skilled and so precise with the knife that was used in the murder.
By mid-February 1947, there seems to be a small break in the case of the Black Dahlia. The LAPD served a search warrant on the University of Southern California Medical School, which just so happens to be located very close to where Elizabeth Boddy was discovered. And in the search warrant, the LAPD requested a complete list of students at the time of her murder.
And this was based on the suspicion that the killer might be a surgeon or a doctor. Once the LAPD got back the list of medical students, they were super hopeful that they might find something that could finally help their investigation. So they ran background checks on each and every one of the medical students, still hopeful they might catch the break they've been searching for.
But once all the background checks come back, it didn't bring them any closer to catching the Black Dahlia's killer. The months after Elizabeth Short's death rolled by, with no answers to who her killer might be. By the spring of 1947, her case officially became a cold case. And this is how the case would remain to this day.
In September 1949, two years after the Black Dahlia murder, a grand jury came together to basically discuss the LAPD's homicide unit inadequacies at solving cases around this same time, especially homicides involving women and children in Los Angeles. And the grand jury specifically discussed the case of the Black Dahlia.
Once the grand jury finished meeting, a further investigation was conducted on Elizabeth's past, especially her movements between Boston, Florida, and finally her move to Southern California before her murder. They wanted to investigate anyone who came into contact with Elizabeth during this time in hopes that it would lead to a new break in the case.
Police conducted several more interviews with different men, including those who knew her from Texas to New Orleans. But just like before, these interviews failed to produce any new leads in the case. Although the murder of Elizabeth Short remains unsolved, over 500 individuals have confessed to her murder.
Even crazier is that of the 500 reported confessions, some of the people weren't even born at the time of the Black Dahlia's murder. And I know what you're thinking. Why in the world would anybody confess to a crime, especially a murder that they didn't commit?
Well, as crazy and bizarre as this sounds to you and I, there's literally a ton of research that suggests that people confess to crimes that they didn't commit all the time.
And I actually wrote a paper on false confessions as one of my final projects in graduate school. So I can tell you that this definitely happens and it happens probably way more than you think. And in the case of the Black Dahlia, people were coming forward right and left confessing to her murder.
And my assumption is that people really wanted the fame and the notoriety that would be associated with being the Black Dahlia's killer. This murder is literally one of the most notorious unsolved murders in America's history. So in the mind of a vulnerable person, confessing to this murder might actually sound like a good idea.
Since the Black Dahlia's murder, there's been several people who have thought of as potential suspects, and there's been several different theories associated with the Black Dahlia's murder. Some of the theories connect the murder of Elizabeth Short to the Cleveland Torso murders and the murder of Janine French, another woman who was found in the city of Los Angeles.
But as of today, all these years later, no theories have ever been definitively linked to Elizabeth or her murder. The murder of Elizabeth Short is a case that has truly captured anyone with an interest in true crime or cold cases. And her case has brought together some of the world's greatest forensic psychologists and criminal profilers.
to try and create a profile of who her killer might be. John Douglas, a retired FBI special agent, who was one of the FBI's first criminal profilers, who was actually one of the FBI agents who inspired the super popular Netflix series Mindhunter.
Douglas has interviewed literally hundreds of America's most notorious serial rapists and killers, including Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and BTK. John Douglas literally wrote the book on criminal psychology and criminal profiling. So John Douglas shared his criminal profile on who the Black Dahlia's killer is.
Douglas says that the killer must have known Elizabeth pretty well at the time of the murder and most likely had some deep emotional attachment to her. He doesn't believe that this was a random act of violence or simply that Elizabeth was at the wrong place at the wrong time.
He believes that the unbelievable display of violence towards her and her body indicate that the killer wanted the entire world to see Elizabeth short for who she really was and quite possibly for all the wrongdoings he believed that she had done to him in the past.
This profile explains why the killer did such horrifying things to her body and why he displayed and posed her body the way that he did. I agree with John Douglas and his profile of the killer. For someone to display such violence towards someone and to do something like cut their entire body in half feels so deeply personal.
it doesn't fit with what we know about people who kill. To display this type of deeply personal violence on people they don't know, this style of killing is much more consistent between people who have a very close, very personal connection to one another. So if John Douglas' criminal profile of the killer is accurate...
That means that Elizabeth must have known who her killer was. It's even likely that her killer was someone very close to her, possibly an ex-boyfriend or someone she had a brief intimate relationship with. If this criminal profile is accurate, then her killer is even more likely to be someone that police had interviewed after her murder.
Remember, police dug deep into Elizabeth's personal life after the murder and literally interviewed hundreds of men that she knew. So in my opinion, and based on Douglas's criminal profile, it's quite possible that police interviewed and incorrectly ruled them out as her killer.
Besides the criminal profile that was created for the Black Dahlia's killer, there's been very little physical or forensic evidence in the case. The letters that were sent to the Examiner newspaper, likely from the killer, had been extensively cleaned with gasoline, leaving behind no fingerprints or any other forensic evidence.
To me, this truly speaks to the killer's sophistication when it comes to covering up his tracks. Even for the later 1940s, this displays a high level of self-awareness about leaving behind any forensic evidence. Beyond the lack of forensic evidence at the crime scene and on the subsequent letters,
It appears as though the killer intentionally throws the police off track during the investigation. Many of the letters provide false information and sent police in entirely different directions in the investigation, once again suggesting that the killer in this case is highly sophisticated.
The murder of Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia, has become one of the most notorious unsolved murders in America's history. At first, it gained such notoriety because of the bizarre way in which she was murdered and subsequently displayed right there on the sidewalk. It was the unusual and creepy way that her body was dissected in half with surgical precision.
Elizabeth Short was laid to rest at the Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California. Since her death, Elizabeth Short's sister and her husband moved to Oakland in order to be closer to her burial site.
The murder of Elizabeth Short has been described as one of the most brutal murders in America's history and has been described by Times Magazine as one of the most infamous unsolved cases in the entire world. By the time of this recording, the case of the Black Dahlia remains unsolved and as cold as ever.
The Black Dahlia case has been featured in so many books and films over the years. The case has even been featured on the popular television show Hunter, and there's been literally a dozen movies made about her murder. Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, will continue to be known as the world's most notorious unsolved cases. Who killed Elizabeth Short and why?
The world may never get an answer. Forensic Tales is a Rockefeller Audio Production. I would love to hear your theories on the Black Dahlia case and who you think the killer might be. Share your theories with me by sending an email to Courtney at ForensicTales.com.
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Join us next week. We release a new episode every Monday to satisfy your true crime and forensic science itch. Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings.
