On the morning of January 15, 1947, a housewife named Betty Bersinger was walking down a residential street in central Los Angeles with her 3-year-old daughter when something caught her eye. It was a cold, overcast morning, and she was on her way to pick up a pair of shoes from the cobbler.
At first glance, Bersinger thought the white figure laying a few inches from the sidewalk was a broken store mannequin. But a closer look revealed the hideous truth: It was the body of a woman who'd been cut in half and was laying face-up in the dirt. The woman's arms were raised over her head at 45-degree angles. Her lower of half was positioned a foot over from her torso, the straight legs spread wide open. The body appeared to have been washed clean of blood, and the intestines were tucked neatly under the buttocks. Bersinger shielded her daughter's eyes, then ran with her to a nearby home to call the police.
Two detectives were assigned to the case, Harry Hansen and Finis Brown. By the time the duo arrived at the crime scene — on Norton Avenue between 39th and Coliseum streets in Los Angeles — it was swarming with reporters and gawkers who were carelessly trampling the evidence. The detectives ordered the crowd to back off, then got down to business.
From the lack of blood on the body or in the grass, they determined the victim had been murdered elsewhere and dragged onto the lot, one piece at time. There was dew under the body, so they knew it had been placed there after 2 a.m., when the outside temperature dipped to 38 degrees.
The victim's face was horribly defiled: the murderer had used a knife to slash 3-inch gashes into each corner of her mouth, giving her the death grin of a deranged clown. Rope marks on her wrists and ankles indicated she'd been restrained, and possibly tortured.
LAPD Detectives Harry Hansen and Finis Brown with Elizabeth Short's Body
LAPD Detectives Harry Hansen and Finis Brown with Elizabeth Short's Body
By measuring the two halves of the corpse, the detectives estimated the victim's height to be 5'6 and her weight to be 115 pounds. Her mousy brown hair had been recently hennaed, and her fingernails were bitten to the quick.
After calling the Los Angeles County Coroner to retrieve the body, the detectives were left with a daunting assignment: finding out who the woman was.
In the 1940s, the police and the press lived in a symbiotic relationship. Reporters used the cops for inside scoops and the cops used reporters to disseminate information to the public that they hoped would help solve crimes.
In the Black Dahlia case, detectives gave the Los Angeles Examiner fingerprints lifted from the dead woman and reporters used their "Soundphoto" machine — a precursor to a modern fax machine — to send enlargements of the prints to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.
FBI technicians compared the prints with 104 million fingerprints they had on file, and quickly made a match to one Elizabeth Short. Short's fingerprints were taken for a mail room job she'd had at an army base in California — and for an arrest record for underage drinking in Santa Barbara.
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