29 July: Black Dahlia

This date in 1924 was the birth date of Elizabeth Short, better known as Black Dahlia, victim of a gruesome murder which remains unsolved. 10 things you might not know:

1. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the third of five daughters born to Cleo and Phoebe Short. She had lung surgery at the age of 15 because she had severe asthma and bronchitis. After the stock market crash in 1929 her father faked his death and fled to California. He later wrote to the family explaining this. Elizabeth, although she'd not seen her father for ten years, moved to California to join him.
2. Possibly her move had less to do with her father than her wanting to be a film star. According to a former room mate, she paid particular attention to how she looked in the hope that she might be discovered. Sadly, it wasn't to be; when she died she had no acting credits to her name.
3. In September 1943 she was arrested for underage drinking. The mug shots she had taken then were the ones circulated at the time of her murder. This also meant the police had her fingerprints on file, which helped them identify her body.
4. The court ordered her to go home to Boston, but she ignored the order and went to Florida instead. There, she met and became engaged to Major Matthew Michael Gordon, Jr., to whom she became engaged. In August 1945, Major Gordon died in a plane crash, weeks before the end of the war.
5. Why was she called Black Dahlia? It's thought it was a name her friends gave her, because she liked to wear Black and also had jet black Hair. Or it might have been the customers of the drugstore where she worked who gave her the name. It was no doubt a corruption of the title of a film which came out about a year before the murder – The Blue Dahlia, a film noir written by Raymond Chandler, starring Veronica Lake.
6. Her body was discovered on 15 January 1947 by a mother on her way to the shops with her three year old daughter. Betty Bersinger thought at first that someone had dumped a mannequin in the grass. Once she realised it was way more grisly than that, she whisked her daughter away to a nearby house and asked to use the phone to call the police.
7. Short's body had been slashed in half and her mouth had been slashed from ear-to-ear. Her intestines had been removed and a tattoo of a rose sliced off her thigh. Her face and pubic area had been badly cut and she'd been left lying in what some described as a seductive pose. However, there was no blood at the scene, and her body had been washed. Police concluded she'd been killed elsewhere and then dumped.
8. There was a lot of press interest, and reporters didn't always behave ethically. In an attempt to find out more about Elizabeth's background, they called her mother, who hadn't been informed yet that her daughter was dead. The reporters lied and said they wanted to know about Elizabeth because she'd won a beauty contest.
9. The case was never solved, and was linked with other unsolved crimes. There had been a series of murders in Cleveland between 1934 and 1938, known as the Cleveland Torso Murders, where 12 women had been killed and dismembered. That killer was never caught, either. Could he have moved to California? It didn't help that the press coverage resulted in between 60 and 500 men turning themselves in and claiming to have killed her. This carried on for years until eventually they could rule some of these people out because they weren't even born when the murder took place.
10. Not long after, the killer started writing to the local paper and sending in many of Short's personal documents and effects. There were no identifiable fingerprints on the letters. The prints they did find weren't on file. Police figured whoever did it must have been skilled in dissecting bodies and some students at the University of Southern California Medical School were under suspicion for a while. Two significant suspects were George Hodel, a physician who ran a venereal disease clinic in Los Angeles, and Leslie Dillon, a bellhop, writer, and mortician’s assistant. They were both questioned and Hodel's home was bugged, but neither was convicted. Hodel's son Steve wrote a book in which he claimed his father was guilty, and another book about the case by Piu Eatwell claimed that Dillon did it, but a bent copper let him go.

Death and Faxes

Several women have been found murdered - it looks like the work of a ruthless serial killer. Psychic medium Maggie Flynn is one of the resources DI Jamie Swan has come to value in such cases - but Maggie is dead, leaving him with only the telephone number of the woman she saw as her successor, her granddaughter, Tabitha Drake.

Tabitha, grief-stricken by Maggie's death and suffering a crisis of confidence in her ability, wants nothing to do with solving murder cases. She wants to hold on to her job and find Mr Right (not necessarily in that order); so when DI Swan first contacts her, she refuses to get involved.

The ghosts of the victims have other ideas. They are anxious for the killer to be caught and for names to be cleared - and they won't leave Tabitha alone. It isn't long before Tabitha is drawn in so deeply that her own life is on the line.

Paperback -  Amazon 

Or get the E-book: Amazon Kindle 

There's some more information about the book and about Tabitha in my review on Goodreads:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23502802-death-and-faxes?ac=1

Themes
Crime; murder; serial killer; life after death; spirit communication; near death experiences; romance; domestic violence; family relationships; being different; trusting intuition.

Reasons not to read it

• Psychics? Talking to dead people? Helping the police solve crimes? Do me a favour.
• The main psychic isn't even a circus act or a gypsy. She's a normal woman living in 21st century London, with a normal office job who happens to have this weird talent.
• Not to mention her oh so normal family who don't understand who or what she is.
• She's psychic. Surely this means she knows everything and always does the right thing, but she doesn't!
• She doesn't even make the right decisions about her love life!
• People die in it. There are horrible murders.
• The protagonist has decided she doesn't want to have children.
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