On January 15, 1947, a mother walking her child in a middle-class residential area of Los Angeles stumbled upon what seemed to be the discarded halves of a mannequin. What she found, eight inches from the sidewalk, was the badly beaten, meticulously bisected, and thoroughly cleaned corpse of a young woman, each half skillfully posed for maximum effect. The murder of Elizabeth Short, a.k.a. the Black Dahlia, is perhaps the most notorious and gruesome unsolved murder in recent American history. Maybe it was the brutality of the crime, or the beauty and youth of the victim, or the tragic story of a small-town girl looking for love and fame amidst the decadence of post-war Hollywood; who knows, but the story has remained entrenched in the American psyche for nearly 60 years. There have been countless interpretations conjecturing as to how Beth Short met her horrible end (the absence of blood shows the vacant lot was simply a dump site and the murder site has never been determined) and at whose hand. Numerous books, fiction and non-fiction, have been written, movies made, and documentaries filmed for A&E, Discovery, Court TV, and of course, Unsolved Mysteries. The only thing detectives (professional and amateur) can agree upon is that her killer had great surgical prowess; the bisection was that skillfully done.
Claiming to have finally solved the murder, retired LA homicide detective George Hodel contributes to the Black Dahlia industry with Black Dahlia Avenger. Hodel provides the reader with a true crime Hollywood noir police procedural far grimmer, visceral, and psychologically disturbing than any fiction conjured up on Patricia Cornwell’s morgue slab.
Serving for decades on the LAPD, coupled with a Hollywood pedigree, garnered Hodel access to records, photographs, and interviewees not available to other Black Dahlia theorists. Hodel’s métier is painstaking, careful detective work – he spent years researching this book and provides the reader with every piece of minutiae containing a potential clue. He also makes sure to distance himself from most Black Dahlia researchers/sensationalists by focusing on the evidence, not publishing, once again, the horrific crime scene and autopsy photographs.
His journey through the darker chasms of 1940’s Hollywood leads to a conclusion that may seem far-fetched, but when presented with the evidence, is wholly plausible. So plausible that fellow Dahlia junkie James Ellroy buys Hodel’s version and believes that the man Hodel names as Beth Short’s murderer also killed his mother, Geneva (read Ellroy’s My Dark Places for his frightening confessional about his own Black Dahlia demons). Furthermore, both men believe these murders to be just two in a series of killings that plagued Los Angeles until Hodel’s prime suspect, an L.A. physician, left the country under a shroud of sexual assault accusations and cries of police corruption.
Once again, but with more skill than most Dahlia authors, Steve Hodel situates Beth Short firmly within the Hollywood mythos -- the fable of the beautiful small-town girl looking for fame, fortune, and immortality -- revealing the ugliness lurking beneath the city’s max-factored veneer. For Beth Short, fame and immortality came at the ultimate price. I highly recommend Black Dahlia Avenger, and as companion pieces to Hodel’s narrative, I would also recommend West’s Day of the Locust and Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon I & II, while listening to Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle.”
Reviewed by Tanya Walsh
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Starting on Monday, May 1st 2006, Ticket to Read (the Adult Summer Reading program) officially starts! We will be running the program all the way through August 31st. Here’s how to participate:
