Black Dahlia

About Black Dahlia

Elizabeth Ann Short (July 29, 1924 – ca. January 15, 1947) was an American woman who was the victim of a gruesome and much-publicized murder. Nicknamed the Black Dahlia, Short was found severely mutilated, with her body severed, on January 15, 1947 in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, California. The murder, which remains unsolved, has been the source of widespread speculation as well as several books and film adaptations.

Elizabeth Ann Short was the third of five girls. She was born in Hyde Park, Massachusetts and her father built miniature golf courses until the 1929 stock market crash. In 1930, he parked his car on a bridge and vanished. Elizabeth Short was raised in Medford, by her mother, Phoebe Mae, who moved the family to a small apartment and found work as a bookkeeper. Troubled by asthma and bronchitis, Elizabeth was sent to Florida at 16 for the winter, and spent the next three years living there during the cold months and in Medford the rest of the year, while working as a waitress. She was 5'5" and 115 pounds, with bad teeth, light blue eyes and brown hair. At the age of 19, she went to Vallejo, California, to live with her father, who was working at Mare Island Naval Shipyard. The two moved to Los Angeles in early 1943, but after an argument, she left and got a job at one of the post exchanges at Camp Cooke (now Vandenberg Air Force Base), near Lompoc. She then moved to Santa Barbara, where she was arrested on September 23, 1943 for underage drinking and was sent back to Medford by juvenile authorities. In the few years that followed, she lived in Florida, with occasional trips back to Massachusetts, earning money mostly as a waitress.

In Florida, Elizabeth met Major Matthew M. Gordon Jr., who was part of the 2nd Air Commandos and training for deployment in the China Burma India theater of operations. Short told friends that Gordon wrote a letter from India proposing marriage while recovering from an airplane crash he suffered while trying to rescue a downed flier. (He was, according to his obituary in the Pueblo, Colorado newspaper, awarded a Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross, Bronze Star, the Air Medal with 15 oak leaf clusters, and Purple Heart). She accepted his proposal, but he died in a crash on August 10, 1945, before he could return to the U.S. She later embellished this story, saying that they were married and had a child who died. Although Gordon's friends in the air commandos confirm that Gordon and Short were engaged, his family subsequently denied any connection after Short's murder.