Black Dahlia

William J. Mann's Black Dahlia is a nonfiction account of the 1947 murder of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, whose bisected body was found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles and whose case became one of the most infamous unsolved crimes in American history. Rather than attempting to solve the case, Mann seeks to recover the real woman behind the sensationalized "Black Dahlia" myth and to understand what her story reveals about midcentury America, particularly regarding women's autonomy.

Mann begins with Short's life in the summer of 1946, when she arrived in Long Beach, California, at the invitation of Gordon Fickling, a decorated army air force lieutenant she had met in Miami in late 1944. Short was a young woman from Massachusetts, raised by her mother, Phoebe Short, a bookkeeper who single-handedly supported five daughters after her husband, Cleo Short, abandoned the family during the Depression. Elizabeth was curious, restless, and determined to see the world on her own terms.

In Long Beach, Short attracted attention with her dark hair, high heels, and confident bearing. After parting with Fickling in late August, she stayed in Hollywood, taken in by Marjorie Graham, a young woman she knew from Cambridge, Massachusetts. The two joined a circle of young veterans and working women who gathered at drive-in restaurants. Among them was Lynn Martin, actually a 15-year-old runaway named Jo Ann Smith who survived through sex work after years of abuse in foster homes. Mann uses Martin's story to illustrate the dangers facing vulnerable young women in postwar Los Angeles, rooted not in moral failings but in a society that offered no protection.

Mann contextualizes Short's story within broader postwar upheaval. National homicide rates spiked 31 percent between 1944 and 1946; in Los Angeles County, murders of women rose by nearly 53 percent. Female-headed households grew by a third, and the FBI and civic leaders blamed rising crime on juvenile delinquency and the breakdown of the traditional family, particularly targeting young women who lived independently.

Short did not trade sex for sustenance but leveraged her looks and charm to secure meals and lodging. She carried a newspaper clipping about her deceased fiancé, Major Matt Gordon, a decorated pilot with the Flying Tigers, a famed World War II volunteer air unit. She used Gordon's memory as both a source of grief and a shield against unwanted advances. Mann characterizes her as "crafty" and "enterprising," arguing that a young man exhibiting similar behavior would be celebrated rather than condemned.

Around October 1946, Short moved into the Hollywood home of Mark Hansen, a wealthy Danish-born theater owner who routinely housed young women in financial distress. There she befriended Anne Toth, a tough, independent movie extra who became her closest ally. Hansen became possessively attached to Short after she claimed to be a virgin, but tensions over her other male friends, including Marvin Margolis, a pre-med student at the University of Southern California (USC), led to her expulsion twice. By December, Short had exhausted her support network. After spending two days with Carl Balsiger, a former army lieutenant, she boarded a bus for San Diego on December 8. Dorothy French and her mother, Elvera French, took her in for nearly a month. When the Frenches asked Short to leave because of crowding, a man known as "Red" arrived on January 8, 1947. Short departed with him, never to be seen alive again by anyone else.

Mann shifts to the discovery of Short's body on January 15. The corpse had been cut in half at the waist with surgical precision, the face slashed into a "Glasgow smile," a wound in which cuts extend the corners of the mouth into a grotesque grin. The body had been washed clean of blood and placed in a vacant lot on Norton Avenue in Leimert Park. Lead detectives Harry Hansen and Finis Brown determined that Short was killed elsewhere. The autopsy, performed by surgeon Frederick Newbarr, revealed that the cause of death was hemorrhaging from head and face wounds inflicted while Short was alive, and that the bisection was remarkably clean, severing the spine without damaging internal organs.

Short was identified after the Los Angeles Examiner used wirephoto technology to transmit her fingerprints electronically to the FBI, which matched them to a 1943 arrest record. The press christened Short "the Black Dahlia," a nickname coined by men at a Long Beach drugstore, likely inspired by the 1946 film The Blue Dahlia. The epithet transformed her from a murder victim into a noir icon, and coverage recast her as a dangerous seductress. Mann also draws attention to the murder of Mary Hodges Tate, a Black woman beaten and strangled in a Little Tokyo lodging house on January 18. Tate's case received almost no press coverage, illustrating how Short's whiteness made her a "reporter's dream girl" while Tate was forgotten.

The manhunt focused first on "Red," identified as Robert Manley, a married salesman who drove Short from San Diego to the Biltmore Hotel on January 9 and left her there around 7 p.m. After intense interrogation, Manley was cleared, and Short's whereabouts for the next six days remain unknown. The investigation expanded through Short's address book, which arrived in a gasoline-soaked envelope addressed to the Examiner. Detectives interviewed Mark Hansen, Maurice Clements (a married radio dispatcher who bought Short meals), Michael Otero (a USC graduate student), and others, but no evidence connected any of them to the murder.

The LAPD's consulting psychiatrist, Dr. J. Paul de River, pushed theories the lead detectives dismissed. Nearly two years later, de River engineered a covert operation to ensnare Leslie Dillon, who had written to him about a friend named "Jeff" matching the killer's profile. Working with the Gangster Squad, a secretive police unit known for extrajudicial tactics, de River lured Dillon to California and arranged his arrest. The operation collapsed when Jeff Connors proved to be a real person with an alibi, and Dillon's presence in San Francisco during the murder week was confirmed. Reporter Sara Boynoff of the Daily News then exposed de River's total lack of psychiatric credentials. He was later convicted on narcotics charges, and the position of police psychiatrist was abolished. Mann notes that de River's methods contributed to likely wrongful executions in other cases, suggesting Dillon narrowly escaped a similar fate.

District Attorney investigator Frank Jemison independently reviewed the case, compiling a final list of 22 suspects. Balsiger, who admitted spending Short's last two days in Los Angeles with her, passed a polygraph but was never fully cleared; Mann concludes he lacked the rage the murder required. Mark Hansen was exonerated after repeated blood tests of his properties proved negative and no evidence of motive was found.

The last uneliminated suspect was Margolis. Military records revealed he had served as a surgical apprentice in the Navy Medical Corps, witnessed horrific combat, collected body parts, and was diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A psychiatric evaluation described him as a "resentful individual who shows ample evidence of open aggression." In 1954, around the time Finis Brown publicly suggested an arrest was imminent, Margolis changed his name and disappeared from Chicago. He later reinvented himself as an artist in Kansas, claiming to have been a Flying Tiger pilot, the same unit to which Matt Gordon had belonged. Mann presents a circumstantial scenario in which Margolis killed Short on the USC campus during semester break, when he would have had access to the cadaver lab, but acknowledges there is no hard evidence. He also considers the possibility, favored by Detective Harry Hansen, that the killer was a stranger never identified by any investigation.

The book closes by recovering Short's humanity. Mann argues that her insistence on traveling, exploring, and living independently defied postwar pressure on women to conform. Her niece Valerie Reynolds offers the final word: "She wasn't a flower. She wasn't the Black Dahlia. Her name was Elizabeth."