The Girl Who Believed in California: Elizabeth Short and The Invention of The Black Dahlia

Long before she was the Black Dahlia, she was an average girl who coughed through Massachusetts winters and dreamily stared at the sky as if it could grant her a special wish. She was always a girl who wanted something more, something bigger, something better. 

Elizabeth Short was born in 1924 outside of Boston, the third of five daughters in a house filled with tension and disappointment. Her father’s business, building miniature golf courses, collapsed during the Great Depression. And then one morning, his car was found by a bridge, and the police thought it was suicide: Phoebe Short, Elizabeth’s mother, knew otherwise. What she was left with were five mouths to feed and no money to do it.

Elizabeth was a delicate child.  Pale, thin, with a weak immune system that had a broken filter. Every night, she slept propped on pillows, so her inflamed lungs wouldn’t become filled with fluid, cutting off her airways, making it impossible for her to breathe. Her mother religiously rubbed Vicks into her chest at night and soothed her with whispers that someday she’d live somewhere warm, somewhere the air didn’t cut like tiny shards of glass. Elizabeth believed her.

Perhaps in a different life, she might have stayed that sickly Massachusetts girl. But fantasies are the company of the lonely. Her notebooks were filled with movie star faces, cut from magazines; each face was a version of who she wanted to be. She studied the way Jean Harlow tilted her head, the bedroom eyes of Veronica Lake. Her mirror was her first stage, but it wouldn’t be her last. 

Elizabeth and her mother, Phoebe

When she turned fifteen, her father magically reappeared. He was healthy and alive in California, asking for nothing but a chance for redemption. She was quick to forgive and wrote him back as if this was The Answer. He was in California. "California." The word itself seemed to hum and sing songs of promises. Elizabeth packed what little she had: her dresses, perfume, but mostly her dreams.

Cleo Alvin Short, her father.

However, as it turned out, her father didn’t really want a daughter. What he wanted was a reminder of what he’d run from and to confirm that disappearing had been the right choice. He hurled insults like fists, calling her lazy, calling her wild, making it clear that she was unwanted. Elizabeth endured for a few months before she left him, and it was a second abandonment in the same lifetime, by the same man. Yet this time she was the one walking away.

Rootless, without a plan, she eventually drifted south through California, a girl alone in a world she’d never own. In Santa Barbara, where the air smelled of oranges and sea salt, where movie stars drove by in shiny convertibles, she’d landed a job as a waitress. Every time a fancy car with someone glamorous and famous passed by her, she’d abruptly stop what she was doing to watch. It wasn’t envy that moved through her; it was the tingle of recognition. That could be me. That should be me.

At twenty, despite being poor, untrained, and unprotected, she carried herself with a confidence that suggested she was on the cusp of stardom.  People described her as sweet, polite, and quick to blush. Others said she was naïve, too trusting. Without irony, she told men she was an actress, though she never had a single credit to her name. It didn’t matter; saying it made it real, even if only for a moment. 

When Elizabeth smiled, her entire face seemed to light up; however, her smile never actually reached her eyes. The kind of beauty she possessed suggested something wasn’t quite right underneath, maybe a secret longing or an unfinished dream. It was the kind of pretty Los Angeles devours. Not quite a beauty, but attractive enough to be desirable to a certain type of man. 

And in the only surviving police photograph of her, the infamous mugshot, 1943, she looks impossibly young and impossibly old all at once. She had been arrested in a bar for being underage, her hair perfectly curled, lips painted into perfection. The girl in the photo had starlit dreams and was rehearsing to become a legend. 

By the time she had arrived in Los Angeles, unsteady and still broke, she’d been dreaming of it so hard, she’d already worn a groove into the idea. The city met her with its usual manners, a hazy gloss that made everything look slightly kinder than it was, reflecting her hope. World War 2 had the streets teeming with uniforms and big dreams. Girls with freshly permed hair carried application forms and compact mirrors. Men on leave practiced falling in love as fast as they could. Half the city felt temporary, an encampment of desire pitched on borrowed ground.

Beth, eager to navigate her new world, learned the bus lines even before she found any safe places to land. Apartment houses with names like The Haven and The El Rita took her in only to let her go again. There were always vacancies, always signs in windows, always another room with a thin door and a window that faced a brick wall. During the daytime, she often walked past other girls on stoops, painting their nails, pretending they were actresses in a Hollywood montage of their own making. At night, her radio threw its ambient light over her world, and the city seemed to murmur like a lover, stay, stay, stay.

She worked when she could, sometimes it was a lunch counter, a dress shop, the front of a theater where the carpet smelled like old perfume and butter. She was exacting about tiny luxuries: cold cream, a fresh pair of stockings when she could afford them, a ribbon for her black hair. She ironed her blouses meticulously, as if fabric could hold a person together. The little she owned, she kept immaculate. It was her way of saying: I am not what happened to me.

She wrote letters, and they were always polite, careful, the handwriting rounded and optimistic. To a friend back east: California is more beautiful than pictures say, though the light makes my eyes water. I think of home when it’s cool in the evenings. To men who’d been kind to her, or claimed they would be: I’m doing fine, really, and I hope you are well and safe. Perhaps we might see a picture when you’re back in town. There was a formality to it, a plea to be understood without needing to explain. She signed them all with love because she wanted the word near her name.

Men orbited, came, stayed for brief forgettable moments, and then left. They always had. She didn’t possess the kind of beauty the studios dispatched scouts for; she was the kind that made strangers offer rides, the kind that made a lonely person think she might be the clue.  Thick hair, a mouth painted perfectly, a laugh that came out like an apology, and then twisted into an invitation. Some nights, she allowed herself to be taken to dinner. Some nights, she stood them up because the grinding loneliness felt safer than the company. She had arrived with rules, even if she kept revising them. Beth told friends she was waiting for the right break, the right gentleman, the right yes.

Los Angeles is kindest to the girls who already have somewhere else to go. For everyone else, it is a ruthless carousel that never stops long enough to let you off. She wandered from one boarding house to another, the way other people change seasons. A girl’s couch sufficed when she was broke. A rented bed off Pico when money ran thin. A hostess’s spare cot in a building that had too many windows and not enough doors that locked. Each place offered a fresh start that always looked exactly like the one before it: a window, a chair, a mirror, a bed, and the feeling that if you could just get the lighting right, everything would eventually make sense.

She studied other women as if they were maps. At soda counters and powder rooms, she watched the mundane rituals of glamour: the way a woman reapplies lipstick without looking, the way a cigarette can be a scepter, how a hat, tilted precisely, makes a person seem undeniable. She copied it all because to her it looked like armor. She learned how to keep her voice low and amused when men made promises. She mastered how to shut a door gently and still make it sound like goodbye.

Her body had remained uncooperative; her lungs seized when the air turned wet, her stamina thinned in summer. She fantasized that it was otherwise. There is a kind of courage that doesn’t look like courage because it looks ordinary. It looks like returning a ribbon to your hair and deciding to take a bus ride to Hollywood to polish the hope.

Ruthlessly, the city continued to teach her its lessons. A phone can ring all night without meaning anything. A man can be gentle and still dangerous. The difference between a date and an arrangement is sometimes just the hour on the clock. That a woman’s story can be edited by anyone who touches it, she clung to the bright spots: courtyards with lemon trees, apartments with little balconies where the air smelled crisp and clean, movie houses where a stranger’s life flickered large enough to stand inside for two hours at a time.

People remembered her as sweet, fragile, dreamy, and as someone who meant well. They also remembered her as secretive, a collector of favors, as a girl who owed too many dinners, as a lovely guest who stayed a week longer than she should have. Memory is unfaithful; it keeps the details that flatter the teller, no matter how much truth lies in between. What stays true is more ordinary and more damning: she was young and poor in a city that recognizes both like blood in the water.

Sometimes, out on a sidewalk where neon hummed like bees, she’d stop walking and look up at nothing, as if receiving instructions from a sky that stubbornly withheld the answers. The city gives you signs everywhere, but they don’t mean anything. Palmistry, Rooms by Week, Girl Wanted, Picture Casting Today. She believed in all of it with the practical faith of someone reckless enough to have no backup plan.

Some nights were good. A booth under a green lamp, a song on the jukebox she hummed under her breath, the crisp snap of a fresh twenty-dollar bill that made the room look compassionate. There were awful nights. The kind where your feet hurt from walking and your name feels like iron in your mouth. In between were the long, ordinary hours where a girl can forget she is prey because she is busy being a person.

Beth practiced being someone else without abandoning herself. That is the paradox of a city built on fiction: if you’re not careful, you become the practice. In mirrors, she tried on dazzling futures. She’d tip her chin the way a starlet might, hold a look until she could feel it take root, then laugh at herself and break it, feeling shy, embarrassed, real again. A friend once teased her for looking at her reflection too long. “Just checking if I’m still here,” she said, and meant it.

By the time winter should have softened, the edges of everything felt raw and serrated. Eventually, friends moved away or married. Men shipped out. The jobs became scarce,  the rooms felt tinier, and the letters took longer to answer. She began to know the city’s danger and silent places too well: bus stops at the edge of neighborhoods where no one waited with you, sidewalks behind theaters where the air smelled of wet paint, forgotten souls, and older dreams. She still laughed easily. She still said yes to a picture now and then. She still believed in a lucky break that never came.

From the hilltops at dusk, the basin looked like it belonged to her, lights in every direction, a quilt of lives stitched together by roads. From the sidewalks where she walked, it resembled a gaping mouth. The kind that grins at you with too many teeth.

If you had asked her then, before the winter turned, before the last address, before the last ride, what she wanted, she might have said something small and enormous at once: to be seen as I am and loved for it. The city, which collects such prayers like lint, would have nodded and turned away.

She kept going. Because girls like her always do. She still had a laugh that could make a stranger feel forgiven. She held herself together with powder and glimmers of hope and the intractable belief that tomorrow has more doors than today. And Los Angeles, patient as the tides, waited.

In the end, it was the city that claimed her, long before the sun could rise on her dreams.

Morning, January 15, 1947. A vacant lot south of Coliseum Street, the thin winter light not yet warm enough to soften the surroundings.  A mother pushing a pram saw what she thought was a broken mannequin lying in the grass. The world prefers its gruesome horrors to give the illusion of being toys first; it provides the mind a chance to breathe once before it breaks down.

Betty Bersinger, the mother who discovered 
the body.

The police came. The press came even faster. They always do. The body was strangely sparkling clean. Posed. No blood in the earth where there should have been oceans. Whoever was responsible did their work elsewhere and delivered her here like a package or a message. The city, an expert at staging illusion, had been beaten at its own craft.

The question was asked about her name, and the city answered with a headline: The Black Dahlia. It was quick work, alchemy by typewriter, dark hair, black dresses, a pun off a popular film noir. The nickname fit the narrative too well, but fit the person very poorly. A mask that was sealed on contact.

Phones rang and never stopped. “I knew her.” “I saw her.” “She was with me last week.” Everyone had a piece; no one had the whole picture.  Editors fed copy into the daily maw, and the maw learned the smell and taste of her. Tips bloomed into stories; stories hardened into “facts.”  An anonymous man mailed a battered envelope to the Examiner with her belongings, scrubbed of prints, as if to prove the killer could edit her life much better than the city could. The letter inside was clipped from newsprint like a ransom note. 

From there, what has remained of Elizabeth Short is split in two, the way a myth usually does. The police worked the case with the blunt tools of the era: shoe leather, interviews, rumor, and maps with pins. The newspapers worked it with a greedy appetite. Out of that frenzy came every version of her that didn’t resemble her: the bad girl, the good girl, the social climber, the innocent, the tease, the saint, the liar, the grifter, the dreamer. When a woman dies strangely, she is put on trial without the trouble of a courtroom.

Several men stepped forward to claim proximity. The last ride. A last dinner. A last warning. A last “She seemed so sweet.” Los Angeles is a benevolent city when there’s attention to be had; it lends out importance by the hour. Detectives carried notebooks that fattened with interviews and thinned with clarity.

Leslie Dillon, one of the many suspects. 

And then there are all the theories and necessary constellations we draw so the dark looks like an inky sky.

The Surgeon. Someone who knew anatomy, the papers whispered. The cuts were clean, the staging meticulous. The city maintains a polite number of doctors; a few were suddenly very interesting. In this version, the killer is competent and well-heeled. He parks precisely, washes precisely, arranges precisely, and then goes home and eats dinner. It’s a theory built on the human desire to believe that order, even monstrous order, presides.

The Drifter. The war had left the city full of temporary men: bellhops with long stories, mechanics who changed names when they changed jobs, rooming house ghosts. In this theory, the killer is the opposite of the surgeon with no pedigree, just opportunity and a taste for cruelty. He meets a girl, offers a ride, takes a turn the map doesn’t list, and the city swallows another secret. It explains the randomness, yet it comforts no one.

The Familiar. Not a stranger at all, but someone she knew. A man whose kindness curdled, a protector who wanted payment for protection, someone who’d been told “no” and mistook it for an insult. The statistics favor this one. Reality does too. Women are more often killed by the people who insist they love them.

The Collector. The man who mailed her things, the neat package, the smug performance. He writes to the papers because the papers are the only kind of recognition he believes in. He wants to be read. He posed her because he wanted us to look and be horrified. In this version, the killer is an artist of the worst kind: he uses a body as his medium and public attention as the frame. The point isn’t who he is. The point is that we’re still looking.

The Pattern. Connect her to other women elsewhere, earlier, later. A Cleveland butcher. A lipstick scrawl on a wall in Chicago. An unsolved dossier blossoming across the map like spilled ink. The comfort here is paradoxical: if she is part of a pattern, then the world is a single story, not a million cruel coincidences. Patterns feel like answers, even when they’re only shapes, we trace over again.

Witnesses offered timelines that contradicted each other by hours, then days. Addresses drifted. Alibis changed outfits and went out again. Detectives followed leads that looked promising at noon but were hollow by dinner. A suspect confessed; another recanted; a third talked until talking was the only thing he could do. Everyone wanted the last word on a girl who never had one.

Meanwhile, Beth’s humanity kept getting smaller on paper: reduced to a silhouette with perfect hair and a ruinous ending. The city that had promised her a life gave her eternity instead, which is a word for being repeated forever without ever arriving.

What remains, if we strip the noise, is almost unbearable in its simplicity. A young woman moved through a city that sells desire the way corner stores sell soda. She was poor, sick sometimes, lonely often, and shining when the light hit right. She wanted more than she had and believed that wanting wasn’t sinful. She met the wrong person on the wrong night, or the right person with the wrong need, but she didn’t survive the collision.

The rest is us.

It is the way we turn girls into horror stories so we can pretend caution could have saved them. The way we gleefully feed a dead woman to the news machine and call it closure. The way a nickname becomes a heist. The way a pleasing face makes cruelty feel like art.

There’s a story people like to tell: that if Beth had made it, she’d landed a small role, a studio contract, a decent marriage, a room with a balcony and lemon trees, she would have disappeared into ordinary happiness, and we would never have known her name. Perhaps. Or maybe we would have known her anyway, the way we know neighbors, the way we remember a kind waitress or a girl on a bus who offered her seat when your feet hurt. Fame is not the only metric for mattering.

What we know for certain is a list so short it feels like an indictment of our appetite for narrative: She was born. She tried. She suffered. She hoped. She was killed. She was used. She has not been solved.

The detectives aged and files yellowed. The city changed its skyline like a cinematic costume change. New murder files came to sit on old chairs. The lot where she was found became other things. A tree grew; a sidewalk cracked; a child learned to ride a bike along a curb that once held police chalk. Time performed its long erasures. The nickname did not.

If you stand there at dusk, the hour she always looked best in, the neighborhood looks like anywhere: quiet, the air mild, a dog barking behind a fence, a plane dragging a line of silver across the sky. Nothing announces what happened there. That is perhaps the most honest thing Los Angeles has ever done: it refuses a memorial. The city knows what the papers don’t: the dead do not need billboards; the living do.

And so, we leave it as we must, sad, unsolved, which is not the same as unknowable. We know enough to grieve. We know enough to indict the hunger that swallowed her. We know enough to say her name without the mask the papers glued to it.

Elizabeth Short.

An American girl who believed the California air could be kind. A girl who ironed her blouses like desires. A girl who kept going because tomorrow might have more open doors. She did not make it out, and that is the tragedy, not the lurid staging or the cleverness of the monster, but the loss of the small life she wanted.

The rest, the theories, the suspects, the envelopes, the careful cuts, the insistence on a spectacular villain will keep circling as long as there are readers to feed and nights to fill. Let them circle. The wound is older than the story and quieter than the noise.

If there is any justice in telling this again, it is in returning the last word to the person who never got one: the soft, ordinary human wish that sent her west.

Let the air be kind.

photos: various blogs, getty, archives, L.A Times.