On the morning of January 15, 1947, officers Frank Perkins and Will Fritzgerald responded within minutes after they received a call from a woman who had made a gruesome discovery in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. The officers found the body of a woman who had been severed in half. They noticed that there was no blood on the body or in the area where she had been left, clearly indicating she had been murdered elsewhere and washed clean. Although the woman’s name was Elizabeth Short, the media called her the Black Dahlia, and her heinous murder would go down in history as one of the most disturbing and well-known cases of all time.
Details of the Black Dahlia Murder
A neighborhood woman and her three-year-old daughter were walking to the shoe store in the Leimert Park neighborhood when they found the body of Elizabeth Short. Initially, the woman thought it was just a broken mannequin. After she looked again, she screamed when she saw that it was a real person dead in the grass. The murderer had posed the body in a suggestive way.
Elizabeth was on her back with her arms raised over her shoulders and her legs spread apart. It appeared that someone had drained the blood from the body and washed it off somewhere else. There were only a few spots of blood: one on a tire track, one on the curb next to the body, and one on an old cement bag nearby. Someone had removed portions of her flesh. Cuts and abrasions covered her entire body. Her mouth had been slashed toward her ears, three inches on one side and two and a half inches on the other – what they call “the Glasgow smile.”
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