Hello there tiktakers!
It's crime-day once more, and today we'll be talking about one that, even many years
later, is still a mystery.
Have you ever heard of "The Black Dahlia"?
This is the nickname the newspapers in the United States gave to Elizabeth Short, a young
woman who was brutally tortured and murdered in 1947.
She was born in Hyde Park, Boston, on July 29 of 1924, and was raised by her mother with
her sisters.
Her father abandoned them years before, and they no longer had any relationship with him.
However, over time, the father wanted to reconnect with them.
And even though the rest of her family didn't accept him, Beth, as they called her affectionately,
decided to move in with him when she was 19 years old.
She wanted to try her luck at being a model or actress, and he lived very close to Hollywood,
so moving in with him seemed like a great plan.
Unfortunately, things didn't go well at all.
Turns out Beth's father basically wanted her to become his personal maid, so shortly after,
she left his house.
She lived in different parts of the country, although she would travel frequently to her
mother's home to visit her.
She earned a living working as a waitress, and doing other odd-jobs.
She also had a long-term boyfriend, Matthew Gordon Jr., but unfortunately the young man
passed away, leaving Beth extremely sad and confused.
At the time she lived in different hotels of Los Angeles, but would only stay in each
one of them for a short time.
Some say that she started to interact with really bad people, and that she started becoming
known in bad circles.
Meanwhile, she still held the hope of succeeding in the mecca of film.
Her physical appearance definitely helped: She had beautiful blue eyes, pale skin, and
black hair.
She would usually wear black, and would invest her savings in clothes and makeup.
The last hotel she visited was the Cecil Hotel, which some of you may be familiar with from
the story of Elisa Lam… it's as if that hotel was actually cursed, wasn't it?
On the Thursday of January 9 of 1947, Beth was seen at the bar of the Cecil Hotel.
She went out that night… and never came back.
A few days later, on January 15, a woman named Betty Bersinger thought she saw a broken mannequin
during a walk with her daughter on Leimert Park.
They approached the figure… and realized it wasn't a mannequin, but a person.
More specifically, it was a mutilated, naked, corpse.
She called the police, and agents soon arrived at the park.
That scene was brutal, disturbing, but also pretty bizarre: For one, there was no blood
on the body, since it had been thoroughly washed.
And after many different investigations, Elizabeth's body was finally identified due to her having
been detained years before for a minor crime.
During that same analysis, they discovered something horrible: The body had been cut
in half at the waist.
Moreover, in a very technical way, the murderer knew exactly where and how to do it.
Whoever killed Beth completely drained her blood, and also extracted many of her organs.
A bit of her chest was mutilated, and her face had what is known as the Glasgow Smile
– that is, she had two cuts where each cut would go from the corner of her mouth, to
her ear.
And to top it all off, she had bruises all over her body, cigarette burns, her legs were
broken, and many other terrible things tiktakers.
The forensic analysis determined that Beth had been tortured while alive, for about three
days.
This is one of the most atrocious crimes ever recorded, and without a doubt, just thinking
about it can be terrifying.
Because of this, this case had a lot of media attention at the time.
Many journalists took advantage of that to sell more stories, giving way to pure sensationalism.
That's where the nickname "The Black Dahlia" came from, which referenced the color she
wore the most, mixed with the title of a movie recently released at the time: "The Blue Dahlia".
It is believed that the media hindered a lot the efforts of the police, as the journalists
would go into particular places before them, ruining the entire forensic process.
There were many suspects: Some people even confessed to being the ones responsible, and
some relatives of Beth claimed to know who the murderer was… but the true culprit could
never be found.
One person called several newspapers many times claiming to be the murderer, and even
sent them belongings of Elizabeth, but all that caused was to increase the media morbidness
even more.
The police could never find him – he seemed to always be one step ahead of them.
And not even the passage of time managed to silence the rumors.
Steve Hodel, a murder detective from Los Angeles, examined for years the belongings and behavior
of Beth's father, who he believes was the real culprit.
Hodel found several photographs of young Beth in his house, and the handwriting of the letters
sent to the newspapers also seemed to be his.
The detective found several clues like those which he believed were conclusive, and the
father also had medical knowledge, which would explain his modus operandi.
At the end, Steve Hodel ended up compiling all of that information in a book titled:
Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story.
There wasn't any trial, but Hodel believes that Beth's father was not arrested due to
a conflict of interest.
In fact, he thinks that man was responsible of even more crimes.
The case of the black dahlia has certainly sparked a lot of conversation, and several
works have been made about it, including non-fiction books, an episode of American Horror Story,
and a movie titled The Black Dahlia (2006).
And that's to be expected tiktakers, because without a doubt, this is one of the scariest
real-life crimes we've seen in a long time.
What do you think?