Suspects and confessions
The notoriety of Short's murder has spurred a large number of confessions over the years, many of which have been deemed false. During the initial investigation into her murder, police received a total of 60 confessions, most made by men. Since that time, over 500 people have confessed to the crime, some of whom had not even been born at the time of her death. Sergeant John P. St. John, a detective who worked the case until his retirement, stated, "It is amazing how many people offer up a relative as the killer."
In 2003, Ralph Asdel, one of the original detectives on the case, told the Times that he believed he had interviewed Short's killer, a man who had been seen with his sedan parked near the vacant lot where her body was discovered in the early morning hours of January 15, 1947. A neighbor driving by that day stopped to dispose of a bag of lawn clippings in the vacant lot when he saw a parked sedan, allegedly with its right rear door open; the driver of the sedan was standing in the lot. His arrival apparently startled the owner of the sedan, who approached his car and peered in the window before returning to the sedan and driving away. The owner of the sedan was followed to a local restaurant where he worked, but was ultimately cleared of suspicion.
Suspects remaining under discussion by various authors and experts include a doctor named Walter Bayley, proposed by the former Times copyeditor Larry Harnisch; Times publisher Norman Chandler, whom biographer Donald Wolfe claims impregnated Short; Leslie Dillon, Joseph A. Dumais, Artie Lane (a.k.a. Jeff Connors), Mark Hansen, Dr. Francis E. Sweeney, Orson Welles, George Hodel, Hodel's friend Fred Sexton, George Knowlton, Robert M. "Red" Manley, Patrick S. O'Reilly, and Jack Anderson Wilson.
The police came to consider George Hill Hodel, Jr. a suspect after the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short. He was never formally charged with the crime, and came to wider attention as a suspect after his death when he was accused by his son, Los Angeles homicide detective Steve Hodel, of killing Short and committing several additional murders. Prior to the Dahlia case, he was also a suspect in the death of his secretary, Ruth Spaulding, but was not charged; and was accused of raping his own daughter, Tamar, but acquitted. He fled the country several times, and spent 1950 to 1990 in the Philippines.
Theories and potentially related crimes
Several crime authors, as well as Cleveland detective Peter Merylo, have suspected a link between the Short murder and the Cleveland Torso Murders, which took place in Cleveland, Ohio, between 1934 and 1938. As part of their investigation into other murders that took place before and after the Short killing, the original LAPD investigators studied the Torso Murders in 1947 but later discounted any relationship between the two cases. In 1980, new evidence implicating a former Torso Murder suspect, Jack Anderson Wilson (a.k.a. Arnold Smith), was investigated by Detective St. John in relation to Short's murder. He claimed he was close to arresting Wilson for Short's murder, but that Wilson died in a fire on February 4, 1982. The possible connection between Short's murder and the Torso Murders received renewed media attention when it was profiled on the NBC series Unsolved Mysteries in 1992, in which Eliot Ness biographer Oscar Fraley suggested Ness knew the identity of the killer responsible for both cases.
The February 10, 1947, murder of Jeanne French in Los Angeles was also considered by the media and detectives as possibly being connected to Short's killing. French's body was discovered in west Los Angeles on Grand View Boulevard, nude and badly beaten. Written on her stomach in lipstick was what appeared to say "Fuck You B.D.", and the letters "TEX" below. The Herald-Express covered the story heavily, and drew comparisons to the Short murder less than a month prior, surmising the initials "B.D." to stand for "Black Dahlia". According to historian Jon Lewis, however, the scrawling actually read "P.D.", ostensibly standing for "police department".
Crime authors such as Steve Hodel (son of George Hill Hodel) and William Rasmussen have suggested a link between the Short murder and the 1946 murder and dismemberment of six-year-old Suzanne Degnan in Chicago, Illinois. Captain Donahoe of the LAPD stated publicly that he believed the Black Dahlia and the Chicago Lipstick Murders were "likely connected". Among the evidence cited is the fact that Short's body was found on Norton Avenue, three blocks west of Degnan Boulevard, Degnan being the last name of the girl from Chicago. There were also striking similarities between the handwriting on the Degnan ransom note and that of the "Black Dahlia Avenger". Both texts used a combination of capitals and small letters (the Degnan note read in part "BuRN This FoR heR SAfTY" [sic,]), and both notes contain a similar misshapen letter P and have one word that matches exactly. Convicted serial killer William Heirens served life in prison for Degnan's murder. Initially arrested at 17 for breaking into a residence close to that of Degnan, Heirens claimed he was tortured by police, forced to confess, and made a scapegoat for the murder. After being taken from the medical infirmary at the Dixon Correctional Center on February 26, 2012, for health problems, Heirens died at the University of Illinois Medical Center on March 5, 2012, at 83.
Additionally, Steve Hodel has implicated his father, George Hodel, as Short's killer, citing his father's training as a surgeon as circumstantial evidence. In 2003, it was revealed in notes from the 1949 grand jury report that investigators had wiretapped Hodel's home, and obtained recorded conversation of him with an unidentified visitor, saying: "Supposin' I did kill the Black Dahlia. They couldn't prove it now. They can't talk to my secretary because she's dead."
In 1991, Janice Knowlton, a woman who was ten years old at the time of Short's murder, claimed that she witnessed her father, George Knowlton, beat Short to death with a clawhammer in the detached garage of her family's home in Westminster. She also published a book titled Daddy was the Black Dahlia Killer in 1995, in which she made additional claims that her father sexually molested her. The book was condemned as "trash" by Knowlton's stepsister Jolane Emerson in 2004, who stated: "She believed it, but it wasn't reality. I know, because I lived with her father for sixteen years." Additionally, Detective St. John told the Times that Knowlton's claims were "not consistent with the facts of the case".
John Gilmore's 1994 book Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder, suggests a possible connection between Short's murder and that of Georgette Bauerdorf, a socialite who was strangled to death in her West Hollywood home in 1944. Gilmore suggests that Short's employment at the Hollywood Canteen, where Bauerdorf also worked as a hostess, could be a potential connection between the two women. However, the claim that Short ever worked at the Hollywood Canteen has been disputed by others, such as the retired Times copyeditor Larry Harnisch.
The 2017 book Black Dahlia, Red Rose by Piu Eatwell focuses on Leslie Dillon, a bellhop who was a former mortician's assistant; his associates Mark Hansen and Jeff Connors; and Sergeant Finis Brown, a lead detective who had links to Hansen and was allegedly corrupt. Eatwell posits that Short was murdered because she knew too much about the men's involvement in a scheme for robbing hotels. She further suggests that Short was killed at the Aster Motel in Los Angeles, where the owners reported finding one of their rooms "covered in blood and fecal matter" on the morning Short's body was found. The Examiner stated in 1949 that LA Police Chief William A. Worton denied that the Flower Street [Aster] Motel had anything to do with the case, although its rival newspaper, the Los Angeles Herald, claimed that the murder took place there. Eatwell is working on a television documentary, and a revised edition of her book is due to be released in the autumn of 2018.
In 2000, Buz Williams, a retired detective with the Long Beach Police Department, wrote an article for the LBPD newsletter The Rap Sheet on Short's murder. Williams' father, Richard F. Williams, and his friend, Con Keller, were both members of LA's Gangster Squad investigating the case. Williams, Sr. believed that Dillon was the killer, and that when Dillon returned to his home state of Oklahoma, he was able to avoid extradition to California because his ex-wife Georgia Stevenson was second cousins with Governor Adlai Stevenson II of Illinois, who contacted the governor of Oklahoma on Dillon's behalf. Keller believed Hansen was the killer, as he had studied at a surgical school in Sweden and had thrown elaborate parties attended by prominent LAPD officials. Williams' article says that Dillon sued the LAPD for $3 million, but that the suit was dropped. Harnisch disputes this, claiming that Dillon was cleared by police after an exhaustive investigation, and that the District Attorney's files positively placed him in San Francisco when Short was killed. Harnisch claims that there was no LAPD coverup, and that Dillon did in fact receive a financial settlement from the City of Los Angeles, but has not produced concrete evidence to prove this.
Rumors and factual disputes
Numerous details regarding Short's personal life and death have been points of public dispute. The eager involvement of both the public and press in solving her murder have been credited as factors that complicated the investigation significantly, resulting in a complex, sometimes inconsistent narrative of events. According to Anne Marie DiStefano of the Portland Tribune, many "unsubstantiated stories" have circulated about Short over the years: "She was a prostitute, she was frigid, she was pregnant, she was a lesbian. And somehow, instead of fading away over time, the legend of the Black Dahlia just keeps getting more convoluted." Harnisch has refuted several supposed rumors and popular conceptions about Short and her murder and also disputed the validity of Gilmore's book Severed, claiming the book is "25% mistakes, and 50% fiction". Harnisch also had examined the district attorney's files (he claimed that Steve Hodel has examined some of them pertaining to his father, along with Times columnist Steve Lopez) and contrary to Eatwell's claims, the files showed that Dillon was thoroughly investigated and was determined to have been in San Francisco when Short was killed. Harnisch speculated that Eatwell either did not find these files or she chose to ignore them.
Murder and state of the body
A number of people, none of whom knew Short, contacted police and the newspapers and claimed to have seen her during her so-called "missing week", between her January 9 disappearance and the discovery of her body, on January 15. Police and DA investigators ruled out each alleged sighting; in some cases, those interviewed were identifying other women whom they had mistaken for Short. Short's whereabouts in the days leading up to her murder and the discovery of her body are unknown.
After the discovery of Short's body, numerous Los Angeles newspapers printed headlines claiming she had been tortured leading up to her death. This was denied by law enforcement at the time, but they allowed the claims to circulate so as to keep Short's actual cause of death a secret from the public. Some sources, such as Oliver Cyriax's Crime: An Encyclopedia (1993), state that Short's body was covered in cigarette burns inflicted on her while she was still alive, though there is no indication of this in her official autopsy report.
In Severed, Gilmore states that the coroner who performed Short's autopsy suggested in conversation that she had been forced to consume feces based on his findings when examining the contents of her stomach. This claim has been denied by Harnisch and is also not indicated in Short's official autopsy, though it has been reprinted in several print and online media.
"The Black Dahlia" name
According to newspaper reports shortly after the murder, Short received the nickname "Black Dahlia" from staff and patrons at a Long Beach drugstore in mid-1946 as wordplay on the film The Blue Dahlia (1946). Other popularly-circulated rumors claim that the media crafted the name due to Short's adorning her hair with dahlias. According to the FBI official website, she received the first part of the nickname from the press "for her rumored penchant for sheer black clothes".
However, reports by DA investigators state that the nickname was invented by newspaper reporters covering her murder; Herald-Express reporter Bevo Means, who interviewed Short's acquaintances at the drugstore, has been credited with first using the "Black Dahlia" name, though reporters Underwood and Jack Smith have been alternatively named as its creators. While some sources claim that Short was referred to or went by the name during her life, others dispute this. Both Gilmore and Harnisch agree that the name originated during Short's lifetime and was not a creation of the press: Harnisch states that it was in fact a nickname she earned from the staff of the Long Beach drugstore she frequented; in Severed, Gilmore names an A.L. Landers as the proprietor of the drugstore, though he does not provide the store's name. Prior to the circulation of the "Black Dahlia" name, Short's killing had been dubbed the "Werewolf Murder" by the Herald-Express due to the brutal nature of the crime.
Alleged prostitution and sexual history
Many true crime books claim that Short lived in or visited Los Angeles at various times in the mid-1940s, including Gilmore's Severed, which claims she worked at the Hollywood Canteen. This is disputed by Harnisch, who states that Short did not, in fact, live in Los Angeles until after the canteen's closing in 1945. Although some of her acquaintances and several authors and journalists described Short as a prostitute or call girl during her time in Los Angeles, according to Harnisch, the contemporaneous grand jury proved that there was no existing evidence that she was ever a prostitute. Harnisch claims that the rumor regarding Short's history as a prostitute originates from John Greggory Dunne's 1977 novel True Confessions, which is based in part on the crime.
Another widely circulated rumor (sometimes used to counter claims that Short was a prostitute) holds that Short was unable to have sexual intercourse because of a congenital defect that resulted in gonadal dysgenesis, also known as "infantile genitalia". Los Angeles County district attorney's files state that the investigators had questioned three men with whom Short had engaged in sex, including a Chicago police officer who was a suspect in the case; FBI files on the case also contain a statement from one of Short's alleged lovers. Short's autopsy itself, which was reprinted in full in Michael Newton's 2009 book The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes, notes that her uterus was "small"; however, no other information in the autopsy is provided that would suggest her reproductive organs were anything other than anatomically normal. The autopsy also states that Short was not and had never been pregnant, contrary to what had been claimed prior to and following her death.
Another rumor—that Short was a lesbian—has often circulated; according to Gilmore, this rumor began after Bevo Means of the Herald-Express was told by the deputy coroner that Short "wasn't having sex with men" due to her purportedly "small" genitalia. Means took this to mean that Short had sex with women, and both he and reporter Sid Hughes began fruitlessly investigating gay bars in Los Angeles for further information.
Legacy
Short is interred at the Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland. After her younger sisters had grown up and married, their mother, Phoebe, moved to Oakland to be near her daughter's grave. She finally returned to the East Coast in the 1970s, where she lived into her nineties. On February 2, 1947, just two weeks after Short's murder, Republican state assemblyman C. Don Field was prompted by the case to introduce a bill calling for the formation of a sex offender registry; the state of California would become the first U.S. state to make the registration of sex offenders mandatory.
Short's murder has been described as one of the most brutal and culturally enduring crimes in American history, and Time magazine listed it as one of the most infamous unsolved cases in the world.
Short's life and death have been the basis of numerous books and films, both fictionalized and non-fiction. Among the most famous fictional accounts of Short's death is James Ellroy's 1987 novel The Black Dahlia, which, in addition to the murder, explored "the larger fields of politics, crime, corruption, and paranoia in post-war Los Angeles", according to cultural critic David M. Fine. Ellroy's novel was adapted into a 2006 film of the same name by director Brian De Palma: Short was played by actress Mia Kirschner. Both Ellroy's novel and its film adaptation bear little relation to the facts of the case. Short was also portrayed in heavily fictionalized accounts by Lucie Arnaz in the 1975 television film Who Is the Black Dahlia?, and again by Mena Suvari in the series American Horror Story, in 2011 featuring Short in the plot line of the episode "Spooky Little Girl", and again in 2018 with "Return to Murder House". The 2011 video game L. A. Noire by developer Team Bondi features five fictional homicide cases inspired by Short's murder.