A Shrine to Brine: The Mysterious Case of Missouri's Highway Pickle Jar
In TNT’s new mystery series I Am the Night, a teen (India Eisley) and a disgraced journalist (Chris Pine) get caught up in the case of the Black Dahlia—the most notorious unsolved murder in Hollywood history.
The case has been a matter of public fascination since 1947, when aspiring actress Elizabeth Short was found dead and dismembered in southern Los Angeles. To this day, no one knows who killed the 22-year-old who came to be known as the Black Dahlia, but that certainly hasn’t stopped them from speculating. Here are 10 things we know about the cold case, based on accounts from local newspapers, the FBI, and the son of a primary suspect.
1. A mother and her toddler found Elizabeth Short's body.
On the morning of January 15, 1947, Betty Bersinger was pushing her 3-year-old daughter Anne in a stroller down the sidewalk, heading to a shoe repair shop. She paused when she noticed what she thought was a mannequin lying in the grass. But as she looked closer, she discovered it was something much more alarming: a mutilated corpse. Bersinger grabbed Anne and ran to a nearby house, where she used the telephone to call the police. Authorities arrived on the scene just a few minutes later, kick-starting what would become a years-long investigation (that many people are still trying to solve).
2. There was no blood found at the scene.
The naked body Bersinger discovered was in horrifying condition. In addition to being cut completely in half at the waist, and having her intestines removed, Short's mouth had been slashed from ear-to-ear, giving her face a ghastly, semi-smiling appearance known as a Glasgow Smile. Her body had also been washed clean before it was left to be found. Despite the severe mutilation, there was no blood at the scene, leading police to conclude that the young woman had been murdered somewhere else, drained of blood, then cleaned before the killer dumped her body.
3. The FBI identified Short with fingerprints and a proto fax machine.
In order to identify the body, the Los Angeles Police Department pulled fingerprints off the corpse, which it then sent to the FBI through a device called a Soundphoto (a forerunner to the fax machine). About an hour later, the FBI got a hit and was able to identify the victim as 22-year-old Elizabeth Short. Short's fingerprints had been entered into the system twice before: once when she applied to work in the commissary of a U.S. Army base and once when she was arrested in Santa Barbara, California on September 23, 1943 for underage drinking.
4. The Black Dahlia nickname has murky origins.
There are a number of competing theories about who exactly coined Short’s infamous moniker. Some say it was a media invention, while others claim Short’s friends had nicknamed her "Black Dahlia." But most accounts pin the inspiration on a film noir written by Raymond Chandler that hit theaters one year before the murder: The Blue Dahlia, starring Veronica Lake. Why the switch from “blue” to “black”? The FBI cites a rumor that Short wore lots of black clothing, but some reports point to her dark hair color instead.
5. Some linked the case to the Cleveland Torso Murders.
When Short’s death became national news, police officers in Cleveland felt an awful sense of déjà vu. Between 1934 and 1938, a serial killer had terrorized their city, claiming 12 victims—all of whom were grotesquely dismembered. Some theorized that the Ohio serial killer and Short's murderer could be the same person, especially since—like Short's killer—the perpetrator of what came to be known as the Cleveland Torso Murders was never caught.
6. It was also connected to a “Lipstick Murder.”
One month after Short's murder, another woman's body was discovered in Los Angeles—and the circumstances mimicked the Black Dahlia's case in a few ways. It all began with a stranger (in this case, a construction worker) stumbling upon the naked body of a dead woman in the grass. Jeanne French had dark hair like Short’s, and her face was also badly beaten. But this time, there was an unusual message scrawled on her stomach in bright red lipstick: “F**k You B.D.” Just below that were the letters “TEX.” People were quick to link the "B.D." in the gruesome murder to the Black Dahlia, but the police were wary of officially connecting the two. Like Short, French’s murder was never solved.
7. Many people confessed to the crime.
The LAPD had to rule out many suspects in the Black Dahlia investigation, including several people who turned themselves in. Though some sources quote a lower number, the Los Angeles Times puts the tally of false confessions in Short's case at more than 500. The phony claims came from housewives, clergymen, soldiers, drunk ramblers, and, much later, pranksters who weren’t even alive when Short's life was brutally taken.
8. No charges were ever filed.
The FBI files on the Black Dahlia case indicate that many men were held for questioning—and some even took polygraph tests—but ultimately, no one was ever charged with Short’s murder. Still, a few names stand out ...
9. George Hodel is one of the most notorious suspects.
One of those names is George Hodel, a physician who ran a venereal disease clinic in Los Angeles in the 1940s. According to The Guardian, Hodel was on a list of six primary suspects in the Black Dahlia case, and the LAPD even bugged his home during the investigation. But Hodel—who died in 1999—gained more recent notoriety when his son, Steve Hodel, accused him of killing Short in the 2003 bestselling book Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story.
Steve claims his father’s handwriting matches strange letters the police received, supposedly from the killer. He also uncovered photos of a woman who resembles Short in his father’s personal photo album, and believes Hodel’s medical background would explain the precise, clinical cuts on the body. But some have discounted Steve’s claims since he started linking his father to other infamous unsolved murders, including the Zodiac killings.
I Am the Night, the new TNT miniseries, centers around Hodel as a prime suspect in the Black Dahlia case.
10. Others think it was a bellhop.
Another name that's popular among Black Dahlia theorists is Leslie Dillon. He appears in the FBI case files, but gained renewed attention in 2017 when author Piu Eatwell argued his guilt in her book Black Dahlia, Red Rose. Dillon was a bellhop, writer, and mortician’s assistant who seemed to know a surprising amount of details about Short’s murder when the LAPD hauled him in for questioning. He was eventually let go—thanks to a dirty cop, according to Eatwell—but some of the detectives investigating the case never forgot him.
In 2018, Buz Williams—a retired officer with California's Long Beach Police Department and the son of Richard F. Williams, part of the LAPD’s Gangster Squad—told Rolling Stone that “My dad thought Leslie Dillon was the killer," and that other cops suspected that Dillon was, at the very least, an accomplice.
Opinion | Reservations based on economic deprivation are an aberration
The National Democratic Alliance government legislated recently to reserve 10% of jobs in the government sector and seats in higher education institutions—both in the private and public sector—for the unreserved general category of upper castes and any religion. Two eligibility criteria includes annual household income below ₹8 lakh and land owned below 5 acres. In stark contrast to its smooth passage in Parliament but with inconsequential outbursts of dissent, the opposition to this expansion of affirmative action outside has been vociferous and has rested on the all-inclusiveness of the income cut-off and its potential as an electoral brahmastra. Although assertions of all-inclusiveness of the generous income cut-off abound, these are essentially broad-brush in nature and devoid of empirical content. Admittedly, lack of recent data is a constraint, but something can be said on the basis of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) 2015, which covers 2012. Its richness in terms of coverage of caste, religion and income more than compensates for the fact that it is not so recent. Extrapolation to 2018 is somewhat risky except that if inequality in income distribution has risen—a plausible assumption—greater inequality within the unreserved category is likely as also greater leakage to the less economically weaker sections.
Subject to this caveat, two questions are addressed here. Specifically, (i) it is argued below that the economic differentiation within and between castes blunts the sharp distinction between social and economic backwardness; and (ii) in a random draw from the unreserved general category, the quota benefits are likely to accrue more than moderately to the less economically backward and thus undermine the case for uplifting the most deprived.
Let us first consider the cumulative income distributions for 2012. About 98.91% of the rural population and about 96.7% of the urban population lay below the annual household income cut-off of ₹8 lakh in 2012 (at 2018 prices). Thus there is little doubt about the all-inclusiveness of the income cut-off. Besides, of the total households below ₹8 lakh, about 68.6% lived in rural areas and the remaining 31.4 % in urban areas. Thus twice as many households in the rural areas were economically backward, relative to the urban.
We considered four income intervals: below ₹2 lakh, between ₹2 lakh and ₹5 lakh, between ₹5 lakh and ₹8 lakh and above ₹8 lakh. Among the rural households, about 86% had incomes below ₹2 lakh, about 11% ₹2-5 lakh, about 1.8% ₹5-8 lakh, and the remaining over 1% above ₹8 lakh. The urban contrast is striking. A considerably lower share of over 64 % were in the lowest income interval (below ₹2 lakh), a much higher share of below 28 % in the next higher income interval ( ₹2-5 lakh), a higher share of about 6 % in the third income interval ( ₹5-8 lakh) and the remaining in the highest income interval (above ₹8 lakh). Of the total households below ₹2 lakh, nearly three-quarters lived in rural areas and the rest in urban areas. So two inferences follow: (i) if economic deprivation or backwardness is the sole criterion of assigning quotas, the target group should be the most economically deprived (that is, households below ₹2 lakh); (ii) given the fact that the rural population is three times as deprived as the urban, the former deserve a much higher priority in the assignment of quotas.
Based on the IHDS caste classification (Brahmins, forward/general, OBCs, SCs, STs, and others), in each caste—including the upper castes—95% or more belonged to the income cut-off of ₹8 lakh in both rural and urban areas. Thus the all-inclusiveness of the income criterion is unmistakable. Besides, a little over 21% and 34% of the upper castes of the total households in rural and urban areas, respectively, were below this income criterion, implying that the vast majority of the economically backward belonged to the lower castes. This undermines the sharp distinction between the socially backward and economically backward.
Stark disparities are observed between and within castes. Confining to the urban population, among the Brahmins, about 46 % earned below ₹2 lakh, and about 36% ₹2-5 lakh while among the forward/general castes a slightly larger share of about 56% and about 32% belonged to these income intervals. In sharp contrast, among the OBCs, SCs and STs, the corresponding shares were about 69% and nearly 25%, over 68% and about 26%, and 61% and well over 26%, respectively. Thus, it is self-evident that the overlap between social backwardness and economic backwardness was markedly higher among those lower in the caste hierarchy. However, if the quotas are randomly assigned among the upper castes, the risk of leakage to the less economically backward between ₹2 lakh and ₹5 lakh is far from negligible.
In conclusion, the case for quotas on the economic backwardness criterion lacks an unambiguous rationale and is thus an aberration. In the absence of employment growth in the public sector, such aberrations may result in a violent backlash and widespread disruption. False or contrived distinctions are not just bad politics but also bad economics.
Vani S. Kulkarni & Raghav Gaiha are with, respectively, University of Pennsylvania and University of Manchester.
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