Elizabeth Short "The Black Dahlia"
Elizabeth Short has been portrayed many ways in the six decades since her body was dumped in two pieces on an empty lot in Los Angeles: Manipulative playgirl. Aspiring starlet. Naive cock tease. Troubled soul.
Above all, time has immortalized Elizabeth Short as the pin-up girl of Los Angeles Noir. The Black Dahlia. Fascination with her life, and especially her death - her gruesome, violent, unsolved murder - continues to this day.
The story of the unemployed 22-year-old waitress has inspired dozens of books, Web sites, a video game and even an Australian swing band. The quest to pinpoint her killer has become a hobby for generations of armchair detectives. And this fall, Hollywood will recast her tragic plight in a star-studded Black Dahlia movie.
The Los Angeles Police Department has all but given up hope of ever closing the Dahlia case; the department has more urgent crimes to investigate, and the killer has likely been dead for years. Yet, it is precisely the unsolved status of Elizabeth Short's murder that gives it such an enduring allure.
We need to emphasize here that the case is so cold, the information so musty and bungled, that it's difficult to get a lucid picture of Elizabeth Short's brief life, much less her grisly death. The Crime Library will not attempt to solve the Black Dahlia murder in these pages, but to simply relate Short's story based on the most unbiased, accepted facts available, including historical newspaper articles and law enforcement records, as well as contemporary literature.
On the morning of January 15, 1947, a housewife named Betty Bersinger was walking down a residential street in central Los Angeles with her 3-year-old daughter when something caught her eye. It was a cold, overcast morning, and she was on her way to pick up a pair of shoes from the cobbler.
At first glance, Bersinger thought the white figure laying a few inches from the sidewalk was a broken store mannequin. But a closer look revealed the hideous truth: It was the body of a woman who'd been cut in half and was laying face-up in the dirt. The woman's arms were raised over her head at 45-degree angles. Her lower of half was positioned a foot over from her torso, the straight legs spread wide open. The body appeared to have been washed clean of blood, and the intestines were tucked neatly under the buttocks. Bersinger shielded her daughter's eyes, then ran with her to a nearby home to call the police.
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Axeman of New Orleans
One of the most mysterious, and still unsolved, frenzies to grip the city of New Orleans came in the early 1900's with the arrival of the enigmatic "Axeman". Who was this strange and terrifying creature? Ghost, ghoul or something worse?In May 1918, the greatest "boogeyman" that New Orleans has ever known arrived in the city. His coming would begin a period of terror in the city that would last for the next year and a half. With the coming of darkness, the residents of New Orleans would spend each night listening to every sound, looking at every shadow and would open their newspapers with trembling hands each morning. The Axeman had come to the city -- and no one was safe, or so it seemed. To this day, the identity of the Axeman remains a mystery. Many believe that he was not a "man" at all, but a supernatural creature that was able to appear and disappear at will. There are others who believe that he was merely a demented serial killer who hacked off the heads of his victims while they slept. We will never really know for sure...
On May 23, 1918, an Italian grocer named Joseph Maggio and his wife were butchered while sleeping in their apartment above the Maggio grocery store. Upon investigation, the police discovered that a panel in the rear door had been chiseled out, providing a way in for the killer. The murder weapon, an axe, was found in the apartment, still coated with the Maggio's blood. Nothing in the house had been stolen, including jewelry and money that were nearly in plain sight. Detectives quickly went to work on the case and while several suspects were arrested and questioned, all were released for lack of evidence against them. The only clue that was discovered was a message that had been written in chalk near the victim's home. It read: "Mrs. Joseph Maggio will sit up tonight. Just write Mrs. Toney"
Investigators began digging into old files, looking for possible cases that matched the Maggio murders, and to their surprise discovered that three murders and a number of attacks against Italian grocers had already taken place in 1911. The murders bore a striking resemblance to the Maggio crime in that an axe had been used in each and access to each home had been gained through a panel in the rear door. These earlier crimes had been thought to be a vendetta of terror organized by the Mafia. The police, and the Italian residents of the French Quarter, braced themselves for the worst.
Almost exactly a month after the Maggio murder came a second crime. Louis Bossumer, a grocer who lived behind his store with his common-law wife, Annie Harriet Lowe, was discovered by neighbors one morning, lying in a pool of blood. He had been badly injured but was not dead. Beside him was Annie, also injured but amazingly, not dead. Both of them had been hacked with an axe. The weapon was also lying next to Bossumer and was also covered with blood. A panel of the kitchen door had been removed, a chisel was lying on the back steps and nothing had been stolen.
After she regained consciousness in Charity Hospital, Annie first claimed her attacker had been young and very dark, but later, she changed her story and stated that Bossumer had attacked her. The police were skeptical however, never being able to ascertain how Bossumer could have attacked Annie and then fractured his own skull with the axe. After he recovered from his injuries, he was released.
Later on that year, in August, a woman named Mrs. Edward Schneider awakened in the night to see a tall, phantom-like form standing over her bed. She screamed just as the axe fell. A few minutes later, her neighbors found her unconscious with her head gashed and bloody and several of her teeth knocked out. She recovered from her injuries.
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Boy In The Box
In February 1957, a man walking through an abandoned lot in Philadelphia stumbled upon the naked body of a boy wedged inside a corrugated J.C. Penney's carton marked "Fragile, Handle with Care." The bruised and battered child, covered with a cheap flannel blanket, soon became known as "The Boy in the Box." As stark as it may seem, the moniker summed up what little investigators had to work with.
The coroner determined that the child, about 4 years old, had been beaten to death and died from massive head wounds, but could not answer the question that swept the city. Why was he killed? And who had dumped him in the lot? Hoping to identify the boy as a missing child, officials kept his body in the morgue as visitors from more than 10 states filed through, scanning his small, bruised body for familiar markings. A group of Camden, N.J., residents were convinced he was the child of Camden local Charles Speece (he wasn't). A Marine with 17 siblings falsely claimed the child was one of his brothers. Others thought he was Stephen Damman, a child with a similar L-shaped scar under his chin who was snatched in 1955 in Long Island, N.Y. But it was another dead end.
Philadelphia police had little to go on except for the limited physical evidence. The carton the boy was found in once held a baby's bassinet and was one of only 12 units shipped to a store in Upper Darby, Pa. A blue corduroy "Ivy League" cap found in the debris-strewn field near the boy was traced to a store in South Philadelphia. Scars on the boy's body suggested he had been hospitalized before his death, so investigators canvassed local hospitals to see if any had treated the boy in recent months. They even singled out his freshly cut hair, theorizing that he may have met his end at a barber shop.
Five months after he was found, the Boy in the Box was buried in a potter's field. His tombstone read "Heavenly Father, Bless This Unknown Boy." The official investigation eventually languished, but the boy's unseemly end had burned an indelible image into the minds of a few investigators and citizens who would spend the rest of their lives wondering: How does a child turn up dead and no one come to claim him?
The Boy in the Box became the original poster child for what are now known as "Child Does." According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, there are 1,000 to 1,200 of these unidentified children at any given time. Some remain anonymous forever, buried in unmarked graves. Others may be identified, often thanks to the work of a diligent few who keep their cases alive.
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The Zodiac Killer
The Zodiac Killer is one of the great unsolved serial killer mysteries of all time, taking only second place to Jack the Ripper.Even though police investigated over 2,500 potential suspects, the case was never officially solved. There were a few suspects that stood out, but the forensic technology of the times was not advanced enough to nail any one of them conclusively.
This October, 1966 killing began a ghoulish series of murders that panicked the people of the San Francisco area. For years the Zodiac taunted the police with weird ciphers, phone calls, insulting and cryptic messages.
Before it was all over, this clever and diabolical killer changed the lives of eight people, only two of whom lived to tell the tale.
On the night of Sunday, October 30, 1966, long before anyone was to hear of the Zodiac, an 18-year-old student named Cheri Jo Bates was brutally murdered near the parking lot of Riverside City College's library annex. Neither rape nor robbery seemed to have been a motive, as her clothes were undisturbed and her purse was present and intact.
After disabling her lime green Volkswagen by pulling out the distributor coil and the condenser, then disconnecting the middle wire of the distributor, the zodiac killer had apparently waited for Bates to return to her car and try to start it, whereupon he made a pretense of unsuccessfully tinkering with the engine.
After this ruse, and probably with the offer of a ride, he lured her into a dark, unpaved driveway between two empty houses owned by the college, where they spent approximately an hour and a half. Exactly what they did during this time is uncertain, but eventually the man attacked her, slashing her three times in the chest area, once in the back, and seven times across the throat.
Police determined that the murder weapon was a small knife with a blade about 3 1/2" long by 1/2" wide, but the wounds to Bates' throat were so deep and brutal as to nearly decapitate her, severing her larynx, jugular vein, and carotid artery. She had also been choked, beaten, and slashed about the face.
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