Today Is the 75th Anniversary of Kidnap/Murder of Elizabeth “Black Dahlia” Short: Myth Busting “The Missing Week”
January 14, 2022
Birch Bay, Washington
Elizabeth Short circa 1946
Today is the actual 75th anniversary of the Kidnap/Murder of twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short.
Her nude and bisected body was found just fifteen hours later, carefully posed just a few feet west of the sidewalk on a vacant lot in the 3800 block of South Norton Ave in Los Angeles.
Myth Busting “The Missing Week”
Despite the evidence, the press and many “Dahlia theorists” continue to ignore the facts in preference for the story that “she walked out of the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles on January 9th into the mist and was not seen again until January 15 when her body was found on the lot.”
“The Missing Week” myth was created by the press through a misinterpretation of the official LAPD Police Bulletin, seen below:
Note that the bulletin was made public and distributed just five days after the body was found. (January 21, 1947). Further, LAPD stated that their last known witness dropped her at the Biltmore Hotel on Jan. 9th and they are asking for witnesses to come forward who may have seen her. Their headline, in bold letters, reads, “WANTED INFORMATION ON ELIZABETH SHORT Between Dates January 9 and 15, 1947.
The press took this to mean she had not been seen during that six-day period and thus created the myth, which prevails to this day, some seventy-five years later.
The real facts are that the victim was alive and well during that entire so-called “Missing Week” and was seen by fourteen separate witnesses who came forward as a result of the press publicity and in response to the Bulletin which was distributed and shown throughout the downtown area and reads: ” Inquiry should be made at all hotels, motels, apartment houses, cocktail bars, and lounges, night clubs to ascertain whereabouts of victim between dates mentioned.”
In 2002, I personally interviewed the last witness to see Elizabeth Short alive. That witness was LAPD policewoman, Meryl McBride, a foot beat officer working in DTLA who spoke with the victim on two separate occasions on January 14, 1947 at approx 4 PM. On that (the second occasion) the victim was exiting a bar with “two males and a female.” In my in-person interview, Officer McBride clearly confirmed that the person she spoke to was in fact, Elizabeth Short and that she positively identified her to her superiors in 1947, but stated, “the brass thought it would look bad and a few days later when they talked to the press they changed my positive identification and said, “Officer McBride indicated it was only possibly the victim.”
Officer McBride went on to inform me in my 2002 interview that “it was Elizabeth Short, no doubt. I spoke to her twice and the first time she came running up to me “in fear of her life.” A man had threatened to kill her.”
(See link HERE to more than a dozen witnesses who came forward and identified victim seven of whom KNEW HER, (and could not have been mistaken) during the so-called “Missing Week.”
Sadly, seventy-five years later, the myth continues, despite LAPD Officer Meryl Mcbride’s statement to having seen and spoken to Elizabeth Short just 18 hours before her body was found in the vacant lot. Add to that the dozen separate witness statements that establish her whereabouts on every day of the week between Jan 9-14, 1947.
As in the oft-quoted, saying (link to quote clip below) in John Ford’s, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence:
“This is the West Sir when the legend becomes fact, print the legend”
There really is no RIP in murders like Elizabeth Short’s (and so many others) for the victims or their survivors😓. But the relentless pursuit of the “how & whys” of these murders brings forth the tremendous dangers we face from our own callous & unfortunately cruel behaviors we use to deal with one another. That sounds pretty volatile but it can be as petty as simple mocking/belittling between family/friends etc. or brutal as assaultive behaviors. It’s great when we do develop that “thick skin” & a sense of humor and it is a lifesaver. But some people do not have the ability to do that. That’s when it becomes dangerous. That’s when the high IQ can become a pretty formidable weapon as it did with GHH. Tread carefully humans…….we still have much to learn!!
What intrigues me about the Mcbride recollection that Short was with a woman and two men is that it was a woman and two men that were looking for her in San Diego. Somehow they were able to go to the exact address where Short had stayed , Dorothy French’s house and asked if she was there. When told that she wasn’t, they left. Who were they? I think this may be the key to the murder.
Mike J:
Yes, in my follow-up investigation books I indicate I believe they were George Hodel, Dorothy Hodel and Fred Sexton.
The same three individuals that were seen a week later, coming out of the DTLA bar with Elizabeth Short the night she
was murdered on January 14, 1947.