In My Dark Places, James Ellroy’s brutally honest memoir of his journey into his mother’s unsolved murder, he writes “he learned some things about murder early on. He learned that men killed with less provocation than women. Men killed because they were drunk, stoned or pissed. Men killed for money. Men killed because other men made them feel like sissies. Men killed to impress other men. Men killed so they could talk about it.  Men killed because they were weak and lazy. Murder sated their lust for the moment and narrowed down their options to a comprehensible few.”  Mostly, writes Ellroy, men kill women because other men let them. 

Ellroy’s approach is part of his dark obsession with murder and flavours his novel, the Black Dahlia. The Black Dahlia killing is probably the most famous unsolved murder in Los Angeles, if not America.  On 15^th January, 1947 the body of a young woman was discovered in a vacant scrap of land in Los Angeles. She had been cut in half, ensanguinated and left posed on the ground.  There were signs of torture. She had obviously been held somewhere else, killed and transported to the site where she was found.  Detectives were confident they would find the killer of the young woman, Elizabeth Short, in days.  Six decades later the murder remains unsolved, one of the LAPD’s cold cases that passes from detective to detective. 

In his novel, the Black Dahlia, Ellroy burrows obsessively into Elizabeth Short’s tawdry, limited life. He uncovers her lies, her scams, the invented fiancée, the dead child who never existed.  She was 22 when she died, and before that, like most pretty women had come to Los Angeles hoping to break into the movies.  She was constantly broke, working as a waitress on occasion, mostly just wandering the streets of Los Angeles picking up men who paid for hot meals, new clothes and other basic necessities.  She hid from landladies and rent collectors, scammed acquaintances into letting her stay in their homes, told complicated, heartbreaking stories about a dead war fiancée, a lost child, a broken life. She hid the truth of her background. She was born in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, to a moderately successful businessman. When his business failed during the 1929 Stock Market Crash,  he faked his own suicide and fled, leaving behind a fragile wife and five daughters. Elizabeth’s family moved into meagre lodgings and her mother started working as a bookkeeper.  Elizabeth longed for a more glamorous life, and fled to Los Angeles to stay with her father as soon as she could. It was not a happy reunion and Elizabeth soon found herself adrift in Los Angeles, with no real home, no money, no skills and nothing to offer expect her striking pin-up girl looks. She ended up on the edges of Mafia run prostitution rings, although there is no evidence that she took her scams of gullible men that far. For a time, she lived in the Florentine Gardens, notorious for its criminal links and its pretty girls, who worked as cocktail waitresses and dime dancers around the seedy clubs and bars that peppered Hollywood.  

Her violent death haunts Ellroy, from The Black Dahlia through My Dark Places to Destination Morgue.  He searches for the killer, exploring theory after theory.  Ellroy confesses “I never knew her in life. She exists for me through others, in evidence of how her death drove them”.  Ellroy was not the only writer who became obsessed with the Black Dahlia. Her unexplained death has exercised a deep fascination for writers. True Confessions by Gregory Dunne was based on the Dahlia killing and is about the murder of a woman whose body is found dumped in a vacant lot.  The book is drenched in the dialogue of salvation and redemption that is so much an aspect of Catholicism and the killer in this version of story may be a priest. 

True crime writer Donald Wolfe has written a complex, multi-layered narrative that posits the Dahlia murder as part of a wider exploration of  the Mafia in Hollywood. Wolfe, who spent years on the book, The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul and the Murder, identifies Bugsy Siegal as the psychopathic killer and the placing of Elizabeth Short’s body in the vacant lot as a macabre message to a local Mafia figure.  Wolfe winds a narrative of corruption and organised crime around the Dahlia killing that makes sense for the Hollywood of the 1940s. John Gilmore, in Severed lays the killing at the feet of an alcoholic thug who was loosely linked to a high class prostitution ring, police corruption and Mafia shake-downs.   Since the 1980s there has been a steady stream of ‘the Dahlia killer is revealed’  books naming the killer as a local doctor who conducted abortions, illegal at that time, a policeman, various Mafia figures, a woman. Larry Harmish, a writer for the Los Angeles Times maintains a blog on the Dahlia killings and has named the killer as a well known doctor who conducted abortions and had a penchant for watching autopsy films with his mistress.  Troy Taylor, in Fallen Angel, returns to the notion that Bugsy Siegal killed and mutilated Elizabeth Short and left her body near the home of Jack Dragna, who ran Mafia operations in Los Angeles.  John Douglas, FBI profiler,  detailed the Dahlia case in Cases that Haunt Us but like all the others who have been fascinated with the murder, failed to definitely prove who the killer was and why the murder happened the way that it did. 

The killer of Elizabeth Short is most likely dead now, either in a violent way or through old age. Whoever it was, it is unlikely now that he will be named in a court of law as responsible for her  sad and terrible death.  Writers obsessed with the murder have kept her memory alive, and in death, she achieved a fame that in life eluded her.  There is a fairly robust cottage industry in discovering who really killed the Black Dahlia, some of it quite tawdry and vendetta driven, some of it driven by the curiosity of armchair detectives.  Movies,  games, Youtube documentaries all contribute to the legend of the unsolvable murder. 

Michael Connelly wrote The Last Coyote as a tribute to Ellroy. The Last Coyote is the story of the Detective Harry Bosch’s investigation into the unsolved murder of his prostitute mother. Bosch, Connelly main protagonist in over a dozen books, is the stereotypical cop with a broken life and an obsession with unsolved murders.  Dead women haunt him, just as they haunt Ellroy. His obsession with the Dahlia killing has shaped his life as a writer and taken him, finally to the unsolved murder of his mother, Geneva Hiliker,  in 1958. Hilliker, a nurse working at the medical office of a local factory, was killed by a unknown man in what looks like a date rape gone wrong.  Ellroy wrote Clandestine and set it in 1951. It is the story of young cop’s obsession with the murder of a nurse.  By the time he came to write the Black Dahlia in 1993, Ellroy had spent decades obsessed with the killing, finding in it a safer place to peer into the messy, unsolved killing of the mother he had wished dead three months before her murder.  It would take him many years to write My Dark Places, his non-fiction narrative of the investigation into Geneva Hilliker’s murder.  The fascination with unsolved murders haunts crime writers, often for decades, as they approach truth and justice by the best means at their disposal, the laser focus that comes from storytelling and imagination.  Ellroy should have the last word on the writer’s obsession with the Black Dahlia killings; in Destination Morgue, he writes “the novel avenges sand kicked in the face of larger and more long standing trauma”. For Elizabeth Short there was no such thing as resolution or justice but she lingers unforgotten in the imagination of so many writers who carry her torch.