THEY GOT AWAY WITH MURDER

Five whodunits that continue to confound the law

- Bill Hangley Jr., Andy Simmons, and Marc Peyser

WHO KILLED THE BLACK DAHLIA?

A former Los Angeles police detective is sure he knows who the murderer is, and the suspect is too close for comfort.

WINTER MORNINGS IN Los Angeles can be chilly, and so it was as Betty Bersinger pushed her daughter’s stroller along the weedy sidewalks of Leimert Park on January 15, 1947. In those days, LA was full of half-finished developments like this: gap-toothed mixtures of bungalows and empty lots, construction stalled by the war.

As she approached 39th and Norton at about 11 a.m., Bersinger spotted amid the tall grass and shattered glass what she thought was a broken mannequin just feet from the street. A cloud of insects hung over pale body parts. In the distance, she saw children on bikes. “It just didn’t seem right,” she said later. “I thought I’d better call somebody.”

Within an hour, the overgrown lot was crawling with cops and reporters, all gaping at a dismembered corpse. The body of the victim—a small woman, about 118 pounds, dark hair, five foot six—had been meticulously severed at the waist and emptied of blood, and it was covered with bruises and violent lacerations. The woman’s liver hung from her torso. Her mouth had been sliced from ear to ear. It was, said one eyewitness, “sadism at its most frenzied.”

All signs pointed to an agonizing death at the hands of a disturbed soul—perfect fodder for LA’s rapacious news biz. The victim, Elizabeth Short, was on every front page within hours: an unemployed Boston girl with no fixed address who’d once been named “Cutie of the Week” while working the PX at a nearby Army base. The owner of a drugstore the aspiring actress frequented mentioned the floral nickname some of his male customers had for her, and the papers soon slapped “Black Dahlia” on every story they ran.