Who Was the Black Dahlia? Hollywood Biographer Set Out to 'Find' the Real Elizabeth Short — and He Thinks He Found Her Killer Too By KC Baker

Solving one of the most infamous unsolved murder cases of all time was not what Hollywood biographer and true crime writer William J. Mann intended when he set out to write his new book on Elizabeth Short’s ill-fated life. 

Meticulous research led Mann, he believes, to unmask the killer of the woman better known around the world as the Black Dahlia.

Mann says his goal was simple when he set out to write the book.

“I said, ‘I want to find Elizabeth Short,” he recalls. “Finding her was more important to me than finding the killer, but I hope I’ve done both.”

After pouring through dusty records, scouring newspaper stories from the 1940s and conducting interviews with people who knew Short and those close to her, the answer to her murder, he says, became apparent.

“The FBI has a formula that says, ‘If you can figure out the how and the why, it equals the who,’” says Mann.

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), he acknowledges, has not released all of the records in Short’s case — so, according to Mann, it is possible that details in those records not yet seen could exonerate the man he believes killed the 22-year-old Massachusetts native.

“I’m not claiming I’ve solved it,” he says. But the suspect who emerged “fits all the boxes. It’s there in the records. He’s the only one who fits the how and the why.”

Mann presents his findings along with a definitive account of Short’s life in his latest book, Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood, debuting Tuesday, Jan. 27. 

Rich in detail, the book tells the story of how the sunny idealism of postwar America took a grim hit on Jan. 15, 1947, when Short’s naked, mutilated body was found splayed in a vacant lot in Los Angeles’ Leimert Park.

After being tortured and killed from blows to her face and head, the killer drained the blood from her body, cut her remains in half with surgical precision, and in a dramatically macabre move, slashed each side of her mouth in what is chillingly known as a Glasgow Smile. 

With solid reporting, Mann presents the case for each potential murderer out of a list of many suspects. “Then I’m able to find evidence or analysis that exonerates everybody — except for this one figure at the end,” he says.

Who Was the Real Elizabeth Short?

Soon after her sensational death made headlines across the country, people formed misconceptions about who and what Short was.

“I had all the preconceptions that everybody else does,” Mann says. “I assumed she was a sex worker or a bit-part actress who was trying to get ahead in Hollywood.”

But, she was none of those things, he says.

“The real woman is completely different from those stories,” Mann says.

In the aftermath of Short’s murder, newspapers drew readers in with over-the-top headlines that erroneously crowned her the Black Dahlia.

“Black Dahlia was something the newspapers invented to describe her because some guy at some lunch counter said, ‘Oh, yeah, there was a movie playing down the street, the Blue Dahlia, and she had black hair, so we called her the Black Dahlia,’” Mann recalls.

“That was irresistible for these rewrite men who sexed up every story,” he says. “Then that seeps into the Hollywood lore.”

It made its way into film noir as a woman who’s living on the edge, he says. “She lives by night and she’s always seducing men and all that. That’s such a trope in film noir.”

Short’s death also became a moral and cautionary tale.

“Murdered horrifically by the sinister side of Hollywood, she stood in for all of the shattered lives and disillusioned dreams of Hollywood,” Mann says.

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As with his other books, Mann tells Short’s story along with the historical backdrop of the times, giving readers a thorough picture of what it was like in post-war Los Angeles in 1946 and 1947.

During the war, women had become more independent by working for the first time outside of the home. When the war ended and men wanted their jobs back, women were told to go back to more traditional roles as homemakers and mothers.

Some women, including Short, had the courage to live life on their own terms, Mann explains.

Raised by a single mother to be independent, Short — “the dreamer” of the family, Mann says — had an adventurous character. “She wanted to find new places. She wanted to meet new people.”

“She was a young woman of curiosity and intelligence, street smarts more than book smarts,” he says, adding that she “was street smart, but she was also so innocent about things.”

Short was never an aspiring actress or prostitute, but rather someone who worked jobs here and there and relied on the kindness of others to survive — which may have led to her downfall, according to Mann.

With his book, he hopes readers come to know the real Short. Admitting that he now feels “protective” over her, he says, “We can’t allow the myth to go on.”

“Elizabeth Short’s death was notorious and grizzly, and her life was kind of ordinary and unremarkable, but her life still matters more than her death,” he says.