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Page 38-A THE INDEPENDENT l»« «•«*—*-*r, ■ ” *»•Dahlia Case Wilts In 4-Year-Old FileBy LEROY HANSEN (UP Staff Correspondent)LOS ANGELES, Jan. 13—(U.E). Four years ago tomorrow a sadistic killer kidnaped and butchered Elizabeth Short of Long Beach . . . beautiful 22-year-old Black Dahlia. Her brutal sex slaying still is unsolved.Police are no nearer solution of the crime than they were the night of Jan. 15, 1947, when the blackhaired beauty was found slain and horribly mutilated in a vacant lot only a few feet from a busy Los Angeles street.The investigation has stretched from New York to Hawaii. Thousands of persons have been questioned and 400 suspects have been cleared.Reports on the Black Dahlia murder take up a special filing case in the Los Angeles Police Department’s homicide office. Some* 33 files, with 200 pages to the folder, trace the case from its “Jane Doe” beginning to the latest information.At one time 50 detectives and 200 uniformed officers worked on the case. Now only three detective sergeants — Harry Hansen,Finis Brown and Edward Barrett —are active in the investigation.“We’re still putting in time on the case,” said Ba*rrett. “There’s not a day goes by that we don’t work on one phase or another of the Black Dahlia case.”28 persons, including several women, have falsely confessed to the sex murder. One man confessed four times, another three times and a third twice. Of the 28, one-third have been sentenced to jail for other crimes or sent to mental hospitals.Psychiatrists attributed some of the confessions to exhibition tendencies and others to a form of attempted “mental suicide,” Barrett said.Elizabeth Short was a Medford, Mass., girl who came to Southern California for a good time. She went out with a different man almost every night, but friends said she never encouraged amorous advances from her escorts.Her jet-black hair, petal-white skin and fondness for sheer black clothing earned her the nickname “Black Dahlia.”When found, her naked body was cuf in half at the waist and both parts were arranged neatly on the ground so that the bisecting was not immediately visible. Police said mutilated portions were clean and “appeared to be washed.”The three sergeants check closely . details of other sex murders here and in other cities in hopes of finding similarities to the Short
Newspaper Details
Long Beach Independent
Long Beach, California, US
Sun, Jan 14, 1951
Page 42
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USA 19 May 2024
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