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Black Dahlia: The Crime Scene Disaster That Doomed a Case Forever
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In January 1947, Elizabeth Short was found murdered in Los Angeles — and within hours, the crime scene was gone. This episode traces how a contaminated scene, a complicit press, and a flawed investigation ensured her killer was never found.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On the morning of January fifteenth, nineteen forty-seven, a woman walking with her young daughter through a vacant lot in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, spotted what she initially took to be a discarded department store mannequin. It wasn't a mannequin.
Before the case, before the nickname the press would give her, Elizabeth Short was a young woman from Medford, Massachusetts, who had moved west chasing the modest optimism a lot of people carried toward California in the nineteen forties. She'd lived in Florida, spent time in Camp Cooke near Santa Barbara where she mixed with military personnel during the war years, and had drifted through Los Angeles on multiple occasions trying to find steady work and stability.
The Los Angeles Police Department responded to the call that morning, and within hours the crime scene at South Norton Avenue had become something close to a spectacle. Uniformed officers arrived.
The LAPD investigation became one of the largest in the department's history up to that point. Over the following months, detectives interviewed more than one hundred and fifty suspects.
The evolution of forensic science since nineteen forty-seven is worth pausing on, because the gap between what was possible then and what's possible now is enormous. Modern DNA analysis can extract genetic profiles from microscopic biological material: a single hair, a trace of saliva, skin cells transferred through contact.
Elizabeth Short was buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, California. The investigation officially remains open.
Seventy-five years later, the LAPD's cold case unit has reviewed the Black Dahlia file multiple times. Investigators have pursued DNA testing where samples existed.
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