Article Title: Why Do We Care About the Black Dahlia?
Tagline: The fate and legacy of Elizabeth “Black Dahlia” Short.
By: Clare Rushing
When I first heard the name “The Black Dahlia”, it was in reference to the 2006 film. Based on critiques I heard from other students, I inferred only that it was an uncomfortably explicit movie about an actress who was murdered. It wasn’t until years later, when I looked into the real story, that I realized she wasn’t a Hollywood starlet like Vivien Leigh or Elizabeth Taylor. I’d assumed she was someone already famous before her death—after all, why would people care enough to make a film about her decades later?
On January 15th, 1947 a body was discovered in a vacant lot by a woman taking a morning walk with her daughter. The too-pale, disjointed figure near the sidewalk looked initially to Betty Bersinger like a mannequin. A closer inspection revealed something that would become one of the most publicized mysteries in Los Angeles history.
Elizabeth Short, last seen at the Biltmore Hotel a week prior, was lying in the grass, unclothed and severed at the waist. Despite her body being cut in half and badly mutilated, there was no sign of blood. Most notable of all were the two deep cuts that ran from the corners of her mouth to her ears, giving her a gruesome smile that has influenced media, artists, and conspiracy theorists for decades since.
Her identity was discovered swiftly through fingerprinting. The FBI had two files in their collection—one from when Elizabeth had applied to work at an army base commissary, and another when she was arrested seven months later for underage drinking. The LAPD distributed her mugshot to the press in hopes to identify where she had been during the missing days before her body was discovered. Despite many promising (and even more false) leads over the following months, it was a mystery that would not be solved.
Dr. Frederick Newbarr, LA’s Chief Autopsy Surgeon, worked on numerous major cases, including the death of Universal Studios costume designer, Vera West. He concluded that Elizabeth died from “hemorrhage and shock due to concussion of the brain and lacerations of the face.” The rest of the horrible abuse had been inflicted post-mortem, including a tic tac toe style grid carved into her hip and flesh removed from her left leg.
From the beginning of the investigation, there was significant attention given to Elizabeth’s appearance. A bulletin posted by the LAPD described her as “very attractive” and stated she’d been last seen wearing a “black suit…white fluffy blouse, black suede high-heeled shoes…white gloves…and carrying a black plastic handbook.” They also felt the need to throw in that she “readily makes friends with both sexes and frequented cocktail bars and night spots.” This was more than enough to inspire newspaper outlets.
They painted Elizabeth alternately as a sex worker who appeared in pornographic movies, and mysteriously beautiful aspiring movie star who always wore black dresses. Her own acquaintances were only too eager to comment on her love life, youthful demeanor and coquettish personality. None of this helped the police in their search. But it was what the people wanted, which meant it sold newspapers—and eventually films and books.
It’s unclear where the official moniker for the case arose from. Aggie Underwood, a reporter for the Herald Express and one of the few journalists who actually seemed to care about finding the truth, claimed people at a neighborhood drugstore called Elizabeth “Black Dahlia.” Other sources point to a noir murder mystery film that was popular at the time, The Blue Dahlia. Whatever the case, the name stuck.
The public was obsessed. Elizabeth, or rather, Elizabeth’s corpse was interesting and terrifying and exactly what people wanted to read about in the newspaper. And, bizarrely, the sort of crime people wanted credit for. More than 50 people confessed to her murder, and even more tried to give tips that they’d seen her during her “missing days”.
Aggie interviewed one of the first suspects, a man named Robert “Red” Manley, who had stayed with Elizabeth in San Diego and driven with her back to Los Angeles on January 9th. According to Red, he had shared a platonic night at a hotel with her as a self-test for his own fidelity with his wife, and dropped Elizabeth off in front of the Biltmore the next day—at her own request. He was reluctant to leave her alone, but she insisted she would be okay.
Red was eventually dismissed as a suspect, as well as dozens of other potential killers. The police began with more than 100 and slowly whittled that number down, but because of the media’s sensationalized coverage of the murder and the numerous false confessions, it was all but impossible to develop an accurate pool of suspects.
One of the most famous—and controversial—was George Hodel. If you’re familiar with the case, you know him to be the volatile doctor whose backyard tested positive for human remains, though not Elizabeth’s. He was thoroughly investigated and deemed not a suspect, but his own son has made a career off of insisting his father was not only Elizabeth’s murderer, but the true identity of the Zodiac Killer as well.
Steven Hodel represents an entire legacy of true crime stories inspired by Elizabeth. Her death is one of the most influential mysteries in U.S. history, and it’s easy to see why. She was beautiful, young, and according to the people who knew her, a little wild. A free-spirited girl from Boston, she’d moved west in search of a new life. Popular myth claims she had dreams of becoming a Hollywood actress, but there is no evidence she ever pursued a career in the film industry. More than likely, she was simply trying to find her way in the aftermath of World War II, like many other young people at the time.
The Black Dahlia’s murder is unquestionably fascinating, and people can’t be blamed for fixating on the mystery surrounding Elizabeth’s life and death. The very public place where her exsanguinated body was carefully arranged. The Glasgow smile, bludgeoned face, and post-mortem abuse. How could rumors and speculation not spread, taking a tragic death and transforming it into a nationwide obsession?
But when the damning headlines and lingering myths are drawn aside, we’re left with an unlucky young girl, barely out of her teens, with no home of her own and no true friends. An easy target for someone who wanted exactly what he got—the attention of the world and immortality through an unforgettably disturbing crime.
Everyone wanted, and still wants a piece of Elizabeth Short—from newspapers and murder mystery books to conspiracy forums and Top Ten Unsolved Crimes videos. This includes the 2006 film mentioned above, which I begrudgingly watched before writing this.
I’m not sure what I expected, but an attempted noir film based on a fictionalized novel written in 1987 was not it. Instead of focusing on Elizabeth’s life and demise, The Black Dahlia tells a dramatic story of a detective whose partner falls deep into the investigation, to the point of tragedy. There are some confusing plot details regarding 1940’s crime and political corruption, but overall, the film depicts Elizabeth as a histrionic failed actress who ends up in cringy adult films and is eventually murdered by a drunken socialite. At least the credits include a too-late disclaimer that the story and main characters are fictional.
The one valuable thing The Black Dahlia film achieves is to reflect how Elizabeth’s murder became bigger and more impactful than Elizabeth herself. It consumed the police, the media, the public, and eventually writers and filmmakers who would take the bits they liked and spin them into an exciting, racy narrative. Who cares what’s accurate if it sells? The result is a maddening amount of misinformation and blatant falsehoods that started from the days following Elizabeth’s discovery to modern time.
Elizabeth Short was buried in Oakland, California’s Mountain View Cemetery, where she remains today with no resolution and no accountability for her death. She wasn’t Vivien Leigh or Elizabeth Taylor, or a mysterious woman in black. She was a 22-year-old girl who wore flowers in her hair and hoped to find love and purpose in the big city. Instead, she became a victim of a sadistic killer who got away, a headline-sensation and, eventually, inspiration for a weird pseudo-noir movie starring Josh Hartnett and Scarlet Johannsen.
Originally Posted on DeadTalkNews.com
Contest Entry for Wild Muse Nature Writing Prize: Nature’s Wisdom and Healing
Tagline: Only Visitors in the Forest
By: Clare Rushing
A maple tree grows near my first-floor balcony. It’s green now, just on the cusp of yellowing for fall. When these words are read, it might already be autumn gold or leafless in winter—or the budding green of new spring. Time doesn’t matter so much when it comes to trees.
Buddha was said to have reached enlightenment beneath a fig tree, and Odin tied himself to Yggdrasil—the world tree—for nine days and nights to gain knowledge. The ancient Irish believed that eating the nut of the hazel tree would give a person poetic inspiration.
In the region where I live, Lenape tribal legend says humans sprouted from the roots and branches of a tree on the back of a giant turtle.
There are stories of sacred trees in every culture. And no wonder: they make up entire biomes, providing nourishment and protection for vegetation and animals alike. One of the largest organisms on earth is a colony of quaking aspen called Pando. An entire forest, interconnected and related by root and seed.
A tree is a home, then, and an ecosystem. When a tree stands in the desert for many arid centuries, it petrifies and becomes stone.
How many things can claim such fluid nature?
They build their own communities in partnership with the animals and insects and fungi and other plants that live alongside them.
A tree was cut down so that I could write these words on paper. And so, a tree can also be a story.
When I was much younger, one of my favorite places to visit was a massive Osage-orange tree near the Dallas Arboretum. I was jealous of the children who could climb its low branches, but even without that ability, I loved walking beneath the leaves. The tree was large enough that it gave the impression of a tent—you walked past the low-hanging branches and inside found a wide, sprawling shady resting place.
It’s bigger in my mind now—in reality the Osage-orange tree only grows to around 40 feet—made legendary and larger than life by the awe I felt back then. The fact of its size is less important than the impression it left. I had always loved trees, from the softened stump in my backyard that housed roly-poly bugs, to the twins in the empty lot beside my house that became a makeshift altar for offerings of acorns and sticks. Trees held life and promise, shelter from the raging Texas summer heat, and a place to watch snails crawl and moss grow and rivulets of rain collect.
The Osage-orange tree in the park introduced me to the experience of trees as sacred place.
I later learned the experience of “not-tree” in college. During a winter trip to Manhattan, the novelty of the big city was gradually stifled over three weeks of skyscrapers and gray overcast sky. The only trees were barren small things occasionally dotting sidewalks, and a few carefully curated, picturesque scenes in central park.
By the end, all my classmates and I wanted was to walk on grass and touch tree bark. The city was lively and rainy and exciting, but all of us felt suffocated by the lack—by the not-tree.
We returned back to our shady campus; even during leafless February, it was a relief. Back to late night walks and breezy afternoons, the shadow of branches beyond our dorm windows.
Chance led me to Chicago after graduation, a city built on a swamp beside an expansive lake that gave the impression of a saltless ocean. There were small parks nestled in unexpected places, the city’s deliberate attempt not to forget the natural world over which it had grown up.
A misadventure with an apartment that lacked water pumps and flooded during every storm ended in moving south to one of Chicago’s secret grottos. We called our apartment the treehouse—a one hundred-year-old red brick, ivy covered building. You could walk a few blocks to find an almost deserted stretch of the lake, a perfect spot for weddings due to its serene isolation. Further and you’re greeted by an uncommon sight: the Roman-styled Museum of Science and Industry, originally built for the 1893 World’s Fair. It’s a quiet sanctuary in a busy world, surrounded on one side by a duck pond and a grassy, tree-lined path that leads eventually to the Garden of the Phoenix, a Japanese garden complete with picturesque bridges, a small waterfall that’s perfect for contemplation, and a little river that flows among flowers and shrubbery and small, twisting trees.
The lake and garden were my refuge for the year I lived in the tree house. In a time when Chicago faced a major spike in violent crime and one of the coldest winters in history, I knew I could find myself again there. It was an imperfect, harsh time made tolerable by ivy, leaf, quiet lake, and a squirrel who made its nest on my windowsill.
When the lease was up and it was time to find affordable rent, it was back to the drab north of the city. Back, in many ways, to reality. The only garden was a small vegetable plot my neighbor grew but never harvested. Beyond, dirty sidewalks and a highway lined with broken fences.
It was affordable though, so I put up with the constant construction outside my cracked window, the stove with a single burner that worked, tiles that fell off my bathroom wall, and, towards the end, a ceiling that fell in pieces onto my head.
When you have a decent enough job and affordable rent, it’s amazing what you’ll ignore in order to hold on to your perceived comfort.
By my fifth year in that apartment, I was ready to leave. This time somewhere unexpected but familiar—the east coast, not far from the city of not-tree.
Most people think of the shore when they hear New Jersey. For those of us in the northern part of the state, it’s the maple trees and red oaks, the hilly gravel paths and wild waters of Hacklebarney State Park, the neat rows of apple trees at the cider mills, the historic log cabins in Waterloo Village. I may have found myself in Chicago, diving headfirst into the responsibilities and anxieties that come with adulthood. But in the northeast, I lost myself again.
I thought experienced nature in its fullness until I moved to the Appalachian Ridges, where roads wind through endless green in spring, vibrant golden red in the fall, and sleepy glistening white in the dark months when the hills sleep.
Life in cities, rambling from tree places to not-tree places and back, clinging to bits of green, culminated in days beneath untamed canopies spread over gently rolling hills, endless and sacred. Birds visit my apartment now to steal the peanuts I leave for a neighborhood squirrel. I fed her mother first, and now her. There’s a bluejay couple who’ve brought their entire family to squabble over treats, and over a dozen young sparrows who roosted in my balcony occasionally come back to spy from the maple and yew bushes outside my glass door.
Deer step quietly through the grassy slopes at night and feral cats lounge happily in the sun. Skunks venture out shyly beneath the stars and hide in the cedar trees during the day.
These little miracles have marked a meaningful shift. Everyone has wounds and worries; it’s part of the journey. But there was no real healing in a city where nature was hidden like a secret and carefully controlled to behave in its narrow borders. Here in the forests, the green, the old growth trees, there is a truth that can’t be spoken. It must be lived. And in the silent world of leaf and clean air, here is spirit. Here, we can safely lose ourselves, and in that loss, find freedom.
No matter the stage of life, trees have been with us. The nothing stump, the proud Osage-orange, the quiet shade that shelters stressed out college students, the half-hidden picturesque parks in chaotic cities, the orchards and wilds between towns. Steadfast they stand, roots growing deep beneath yards and sidewalks, sprawling branches reminding us in great leafy crowns that we are only visitors in the forest, that we must step lightly among the vines and trunks and pay respect to the true giants of the earth, many who have and will outlive us by centuries.
We show our appreciation by planting more trees in hopes we might offset the impact of deforestation and pollution, or by naming a four-thousand-year-old bristlecone pine Methuselah.
When a tree dies or is cut down, we grieve its loss. Here was a tree, and now there is not a tree. We are grateful for the resources it provides but saddened by its crude transformation into toothpicks and paper.
It’s no wonder Buddha found enlightenment under the fig tree, and the Irish Fionn gained all the world’s knowledge by eating a fish who swallowed a hazelnut. These are stories, maybe with some truth, but the facts don’t matter as much as the message.
We built cultures and belief systems around the base of oak trees, crafted boats and wheels to travel, constructed homes and castles and forts with the bounty of trees.
We are raised by trees and die among them, and in between those moments, we pass from tree place to not-tree place, helped along every step of our lives by our silent companions.
After death, some people are buried in wooden caskets, and others even have saplings planted above their graves.
The Lenape people believed we were born from trees. Maybe that story holds the most truth.
Without them, who are we?
Title: The Terrible Legacy of Danvers State Hospital
By: Clare Rushing
There’s an old cemetery at the end of a hidden trail, where over 500 patients of the Danvers State Hospital rest, just outside of Salem, Massachusetts. The old psychiatric hospital has been transformed in modern day to luxury apartments–unless you know to follow the rocky path that winds behind the complex, it’s easy to miss. So easy, in fact, that after the hospital was closed, the cemetery was forgotten entirely until it was rediscovered and members of the community raised funds to remove the mass of plants and grass that had covered the site. There was an effort to match a name with each of the graves as well, but some of them remain unknown.
The historic informational markers placed in front of the apartment complex speak of the open air and healing power of nature that was the central approach of the hospital–offering solace from the hectic chaos of society so mentally ill people could rest and recover. The conditions that led to the deaths of so many patients are–perhaps understandably–absent.
What started as a progressive plan for healing the state’s most vulnerable citizens became a horror story after its first few successful years. More and more patients were sent to the hospital until there were not enough rooms or staff to properly care for them. Despite the overflow, the hospital was still seen as a shining example of modern mental healthcare. This made it a choice location to perform experimental procedures, including lobotomies, hydrotherapy, electroshock therapy, and other “treatments” that frequently left patients in worse state than when they entered the hospital.
It’s unsurprising that eventually the hospital closed due to the terrible abuse and negligence that were taking place, though it took decades for the state to finally shut it down. Decades for patients to be tortured, experimented on, forgotten, and abused, and for the hospital to gain an infamous reputation that is now immortalized in literature and media.
H.P. Lovecraft was said to have drawn inspiration for his Arkham Sanitarium from Danvers. While not overtly mentioned by the creators of American Horror Story, the Asylum season draws clear parallels and their new show, Ratched, also bears similarities (particularly in the lobotomy experiments).
Danvers State Hospital and similar psychiatric institutions have dark histories that provide horror writers with ample, too-terrible-to-be-true content for their creative works. And admittedly, the events that went on in those institutions do make for great horror. I suspect the draw is rooted in the unbelievability of what went on in those places. In the day of mental health advocacy and emphasis on regulated, safe treatment, it’s hard to fathom the awful things mentally ill patients endured back then.
But in a broader view of history Danvers State Hospital, ice pick lobotomies, abusive psychiatric professionals, and the rest of the events that inspired Lovecraft and American Horror Story only stopped a few decades ago. The Americans with Disabilities Act, which played a major role in preventing discrimination against mentally ill and mentally handicapped individuals, was only enacted in 1990. And even now, people with disabilities are still frequently abused and taken advantage of.
We have come a long way from the days of Danvers. Legal battles have been won, treatments discovered, and mental health education has become widely available. It’s easier now to watch Ratched and see the characters as simply that–characters on a screen, instead of representations of real monsters who called themselves doctors. Someday, hopefully, those fictional stories will reflect only events of the past.
But we’re not there yet.