Strangest Mysteries of the World and Beyond !

Black Dahlia

Black Dahlia: 

  

The Black Dahlia is a story that has baffled police and crime buffs for decades now. 

On 15 January 1947, the body of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short was found. Short was an attractive, young girl who had arrived in Los Angeles searching for fame as an actress, just as thousands of others do every year. Her demise was to be one of the most gruesome murders America had ever seen.

Elizabeth Short left her hometown of Massachusetts at the age of 16. She arrived in Los Angeles after a few years of drifting from town to town. Short was nicknamed the Black Dahlia because of her jet-black hair and the black clothing that she constantly wore.

On the morning of 15 January, Short's body was found in a deserted lot in South Los Angeles. Her battered torso had been cut in half and sexually assaulted after her death.

The killer taunted investigators. The killer would send little notes that said, "Catch me if you can." There were other woman killed and those murders were never solved as well. Could it be that the other murders were related? Was it possible there was a copycat murder looking for attention? None of the murders were ever solved, even those investigators received numerous confessions that turned out to be false. Is it possible that one of those supposedly false confessions could have been the killer taunting the police another way?

Short's murder quickly became a sensation, not only because of its location in the show biz capital, but also because the police worked in tandem with the press to disseminate clues in hopes of locating a suspect. Several people confessed, only to be later released for lack of evidence. Much speculation surrounded the details of Short's life. Grieving after the death of a man she fell in love with, she reportedly befriended many men while frequenting jazz clubs, making it nearly impossible to pin down who she could have been with before she died.

One former detective, who later became a private investigator, had said that his father George Hodel had committed the murders of Jeanne French and Elizabeth Short. He said that he had the proof, but police ignored the evidence as a way to cover up medical records of some powerful people and police. If George would have been arrested, except police felt he would open up medical records of these people. George left the country never to be heard from again. He died in 1991. His son had asked for the investigation to be reopened. Did this man kill Elizabeth Short? The only people that could know for sure are dead.

Was the unsolved crime covered up and forgotten about because of some powerful people were maybe involved? Was the doctor really the one to kill these two women or was it the son who, was at the time, a detective. He has the evidence to prove his father killed these two women, but nobody wants that information. Was the Elizabeth Short murder related to something we do not even know about? She was only 22 years old. What could be the reason to close her murder file and forget about her?

Nobody knows.

It is surprising that a fifty year old murder can still capture our attention today. Though many people still believe the murder will be solved, others believe that the murderer himself has long since passed. If that is true, then we may never know who actually did kill Elizabeth Short.