Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia

The grisly 1947 murder of aspiring starlet and nightclub habitue Elizabeth Short, known even before her death as the "Black Dahlia," has over the decades transmogrified from L.A.'s "crime of the century" into an almost mythical symbol of unfathomable Hollywood Babylon/film noir glamour-cum-sordidness. It is somehow fitting that author John Gilmore should be the one to unravel the multilayered mystery of this archetypal Los Angeles slaying as it begins to take its place in the collective memory, somewhere next to Bluebeard and Jack the Ripper, a cautionary tale about the pretty girl who came to Hollywood to be a movie star and wound up in a dirt lot, hacked in two. The Black Dahlia murder--unlike such earlier headline-grabbing cases as the St. Valentine's Day Massacre and the Lindbergh kidnapping--was the first case to command the attention of post-war America with its stark carnality. In hard-boiled yet haunting prose, Gilmore tells several previously unrevealed stories at once, each f