Elizabeth Short/Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood

Lou Reed said to have been influenced by Raymond Chandler. "And despite people's derision proved to be more than diversion. Neither one regretted a thing." -Street Hassle (1978) by Lou Reed. “There’s a lot of what you might call vicious songs in my work but I feel compassion for the characters in them. Because I know what that’s like; I know what it’s like to be on the outside. I know what it’s like to have an unhappy childhood. Not everybody is born with money or an education or friends or nice parents. And I delineate these people because either I identify with them or I think that they deserve their moment in the sun." -Lou Reed, Frebuary 1992 (Q Magazine)

“Some people would love me to die onstage. It never dawns on them if I was so high, how would I hit the cues on time? Heroin in movies or novels is not a big deal but in rock and roll it is. How many people do you think could go up there and do a song about heroin and not be laughed off the stage? Scott Walker? Frank Sinatra maybe. Why doesn’t he sing a song with some lyrical content? He did it “My Way.” Congratulations. Who doesn’t do it his way? There are many pretty songs I’ve written. Why don’t people talk about them?” -Lou Reed, 17 April 1975 (NY Daily News)

The Black Dahlia refers to Elizabeth Short, a 22-year-old aspiring actress found brutally murdered in Los Angeles in 1947. The Blue Dahlia is a 1946 film noir starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, scripted by Raymond Chandler. The media coined the "Black Dahlia" moniker based on her rumored clothing style and the popular movie title. Despite a massive media frenzy, thousands of interviews, and several false confessions, the crime remains one of Los Angeles's most famous unsolved mysteries. The press branded Elizabeth Short the "Black Dahlia" because she reportedly favored black attire, though the name was primarily a play on the 1946 film The Blue Dahlia. 

The myth will tell you that Elizabeth Short was a sex worker, a gangster’s moll, or a movie extra yearning to become Lana Turner. She was none of those things. She was a young woman who was fired up by wanderlust to leave her small New England town and see the world, defying the postwar gender expectations to settle down, marry, and have children. She lived by her wits and her charm as she traveled around the country, exploring places far more exotic than Medford, Massachusetts, where she was raised. True-crime narratives deal with, in the words of pioneering FBI investigator John E. Douglas, the “fundamentals of what we loftily call ‘the human condition.’ ” But her life is still more important than her death.

Business along the Pike in Long Beach, California, was up 25 percent from the year before. But there was something sinister out there lurking behind the levity of the liberated world that hinted things would never go back to the way they were before. Doomsayers warned that the war had upended traditional morality. The Pike lured thousands of tourists to Long Beach every week. Many boys loitered outside an amusement arcade. Among them was the owner’s son, Tod Faulkner. On a sweltering day in July, Tod spotted a young woman striding alone toward the beach. She wore a two-piece bathing suit, far more revealing than the prewar one-pieces. Her hair was dark, swept back from an extremely high forehead and framing her face like a lion’s mane. Over the next several days, Tod would see this woman again on the Pike. Whether he looked for her or just spotted her by chance isn’t known. But one thing is certain. He did not forget her. David Lander noticed her, too. On her way from the beach, past the massage parlors and tobacconists, the woman often stopped for refreshment at Lander’s pharmacy, Service Drug, at 102 Linden Avenue.  

The Roosevelt Base on Terminal Island employed upward of twenty thousand, and the sprawling Naval Reserve Air Base saw a steady stream of reservists every few weeks. Even if she had wanted to, Elizabeth wouldn’t have been able to avoid military men in Long Beach. Robert Robertson was one of them. He and a buddy spotted her one morning on her way to Service Drug. “She was a very nice-looking girl,” Robertson said, “and she smiled at us.” Afterward, he and his friend walked with her to the beach. The next day, Elizabeth announced she wanted to go dancing at the Palladium in Hollywood, the big-band ballroom made famous by composer Tommy Dorsey. Robertson obliged, taking her on the thirty-mile ride to Hollywood on board the famous red trolleys. Something about her, however, must have appeared aimless, as he suggested she come back with him to Boise, where he was sure she could get a job. That was impossible, Beth explained. She needed to send for her birth certificate before she could get any work. So, Robertson helped her fill out a form for a town in Massachusetts called Hyde Park. 

“Loving you the way I do would make me do practically anything,” Gordon Fickling wrote to her, and he proved it by renting her a room at the Brevoort Hotel in Hollywood on Lexington Avenue near the corner of Vine. On August 20, they registered as “Lieutenant and Mrs. J.G. Fickling.” Gordon headed back to base. The Brevoort was “the friendliest spot in Hollywood,” its ads claimed. Actors on their way up or way down stayed at the Brevoort. Within easy walking distance from the Brevoort was the Brown Derby, NBC, RKO, Columbia, Sardi’s, and Earl Carroll’s Theatre, where Betty had posed under the marquee not long before. Hollywood offered more to see than just the Long Beach Pike, and Betty liked to wander. The most salient fact people knew about Betty Short, however, was that she had once been engaged to marry a war hero, Matt Gordon, who was killed in action. Was that why she seemed to just drift along? Was grief the reason she’d been unable to commit to Gordon Fickling? “Betty appeared very depressed over Matt’s death,” Margie recalled. “She carried a newspaper clipping and picture of him in her pocketbook.” The clipping stated that he was planning to marry his sweetheart from Medford, Massachusetts.

It’s true that Betty could be a bit of a con artist. She knew that a well-timed letter to Gordon with a heart-rending tale of woe always brought a money order into Western Union. She’d sung a comparable refrain to Marjorie Graham to get free accommodations. What we still need to discover, however, is what she was looking for in Hollywood, if anything. Was modeling really her goal, or was it merely something she told people? We know, or can infer, details about the lives of Lynn Martin, Gordon Fickling, Marjorie Graham, and others. But it’s much more difficult to do that with Beth Short. She never gave an interview, never answered the questions of investigators the way her friends and acquaintances would do. To get closer to Beth and comprehend her life—and the forces that ended it—we need to consider the world around her, which was changing faster than anyone could have anticipated. 

It was a world increasingly unfamiliar and more dangerous in some ways in peace than it was in war. Even today, most studies of the U.S. homicide rate see only the forty-year trough that extends on charts from the early 1930s until the early 1970s. The historic eleven-year plunge of the homicide rate stopped abruptly in 1944, leveling at 4.9 out of every 100,000 people. A year later the rate had climbed to 5.6, and by 1946 it was 6.3. A 31 percent increase in American homicides over three years. And while the rate started to fall again in 1947, it took until 1955 to dip past the low point of 1944. In Los Angeles, where homicides were already higher than elsewhere, the spike wasn’t as dramatic, but it’s still noticeable, peaking in 1944 and only dropping significantly in 1948. Los Angeles police psychiatrist Dr. J. Paul de River claimed that the number of “girl criminals” in the city had increased 28 percent since Pearl Harbor.   

Anne Toth, her family said, had “brass.” She spoke her mind and “took nothing from nobody,” and that included both Leo Hymes and Mark Hansen. In short, Anne Toth was exactly the sort of person Beth Short needed to meet at that moment in her life. They became good friends. Anne kidded Beth about her Boston accent, the way she said “pahk” for “park” and “rawk” for “rock.” Young women, Anne counseled, had to be careful of the “jerks and moochers.” “You’ve got to stop being innocent sometime.” That’s fine for a kid, Anne said, but by the time you turn twenty-one, “gullibility is a liability.” Anne had left home at eighteen, traveling across the country to New York City “to seek her fortunes,” she said. She landed a job as a hostess at the New Yorker, the famous forty-two-story Art Deco hotel on Eighth Avenue. “That’s the center of the garment district,” Anne recalled, “and the first week I was there I had about fifty offers of modeling jobs.” Anne met “an exceptionally wonderful man, a very high-type fellow,” who was “very well connected,” she remembered. They began dating, and Anne’s new beau made introductions for her at the movie studios. 

Anne told Beth she had a great look, with that cascade of dark hair and porcelain doll face, although she’d have to do something about her teeth. Anne offered to help Beth get work in the movie studios. Yet while Beth listened to her advices and seemed grateful for it, she failed to follow through. The problem, Anne concluded, was a lack of confidence on Beth’s part, something Marjorie Graham seconded. She “had an inferiority complex,” Margie told a reporter some months later. The goal of modeling, Margie came to believe, was a ruse. Beth wasn’t lazy. She was insecure. “She was too scared to try because she thought she might fail,” Anne said. To mask her insecurity, Beth sometimes acted like a blue blood from back East. “Betty had a lot of high ideas, believe me, with her Boston family and all that stuff,” Anne said. She alternated between calling her Betty and Beth, probably because Margie called her the former and Mark Hansen the latter. 

The postwar transformation of America was not only social but also physical. In Los Angeles, the massive freeway development, finally underway, fundamentally changed the topography of the area, uprooting families and paving over neighborhoods, empowering the automobile over every other form of transportation. Rolling hills and citrus groves were bulldozed into tract housing. White flight abandoned urban areas to communities of color, who faced decreased funding for essential services and maintenance, and thus began the era of urban decay. From above, the verdant picture of Los Angeles County in 1940 would have compared starkly to the asphalt and brick of 1950, like before-and-after crime scene photos. One writer’s parallel between the disfigured body of Elizabeth Short and the disfigured City of Los Angeles is not an overstated metaphor. 

Under Harry Hansen’s scenario, a solution proposed by Larry Harnisch might be compelling. As a very likely suspect, Harnisch put forward Walter Bayley, a doctor who once lived on the block just past the vacant lot where the body of Elizabeth Short was found. Bayley’s daughter served as a witness at the marriage of Short’s sister Virginia to Adrian West in 1945. The connection is a bit tenuous, but Harnisch theorized that Virginia may have told Elizabeth to contact Dr. Bayley if she ever needed assistance and Elizabeth, upon being stranded at the Biltmore hotel, took her sister’s advice. Dr. Bayley, who had been suffering from emotional and mental problems due to degenerative illness, certainly had the skills to drain and bisect the body. Under Harnisch’s theory, Bayley then posed the corpse in order to traumatize his estranged wife, who still lived in the neighborhood. Virginia said in 1947 that she hadn’t seen her sister in several years and hadn’t spoken to her for two, which predates her wedding. (Boston Herald, January 18, 1947) —Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood (2026) by William J. Mann