Ellroy's Obsession With the Black Dahlia

Sept.15, 2006 — -- Though she was dead at 22, the Black Dahlia is in her 60th year of haunting minds.

For novelist James Ellroy, a lifelong obsession began with her brutal killing.

"We are looking for the language to explain how one human being can do something that is so utterly depraved to another human being," Ellroy said.

The woman known for decades as the Black Dahlia is the subject of a new movie, based on Ellroy's novel and directed by Brian DePalma, because she is the victim in the most famous unsolved murder in the history of Los Angeles.

On a sunny morning in January 1947, she was discovered in a vacant lot on an L.A. street, 54 feet from a fire hydrant that has remained on the site, by a woman pushing a baby stroller.

That woman, as Larry Harnisch of the Los Angeles Times knows only too well, would be only the first to be horrified by what she saw there.

"She saw the mutilated and dismembered body of Elizabeth Short," said Harnisch, an expert on the case. The victim's body was "cut in the middle... and then about a foot and a half apart [from the top of her torso], her legs were straight, sort of spread out, hands over her head. And as one of the detectives said, cut up in a real bad way," he said.

The body had been ravaged, drained of blood, sliced in half, brutalized in a manner that stuns even DePalma, no stranger to candid crime-scene photos.

"What's amazing about the Black Dahlia, besides the fact that her body is in two parts, and the way her mouth is slashed... she's displayed in like a horror show," DePalma said. "It's like a human body displayed for you to look at and go 'Oh, my God.'"

She was Elizabeth Short from Medford, Mass. Friends called her Betty. But in the headlines of the day, and ever after, she would be the Black Dahlia, inspired, it would be said, by the way she wore her hair.

She became a tabloid sensation, hot copy in a five-newspaper town. Now she has been incarnated on screen in "The Black Dahlia," a ferociously imagined fictional take on the brief life and cruel death of Elizabeth Short.