It came to light shortly after 10 on the morning of January 15, 1947. That's when a young mother, escorting her child past a vacant lot in the Leimert Park section of southwest Los Angeles, came upon the earthly remains of Elizabeth Short. After a half-century they still have located no one who saw the doomed girl alive after she stepped from an auto in front of L.A.'s Biltmore Hotel on the afternoon of January 9. Inasmuch as she would later be elevated to the level of sex goddess, it is ironic that an initial police bulletin on the case indicated something very different. The mother who called in thought the motionless form she had glimpsed was someone sleeping off a hangover.
Rope burns on wrists and ankles seemed signs of prolonged torture.
As a final indignity, upward knife slashes from the corners of the mouth fashioned an eerie grin. FBI fingerprint files would answer the question-prints that were there because of Elizabeth's brief employment in an Army PX at Camp Cooke, also because of an arrest for underage drinking in Santa Barbara. Detectives thereupon took up the circuitous trail of a girl whose wanderlust, whetted by the new opportunities opened for women in a nation at war, caused her to leave home in Massachusetts and head west at 17. By sheer luck, the Black Dahlia story fell into the lap of the Los Angeles Examiner. The location given was less than a half-mile from where the newsman was driving.