WEBVTT
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Every cold case begins the same way.
00:00:07.040 --> 00:00:08.720
Someone opens a box.
00:00:09.199 --> 00:00:14.240
Sometimes it's a cardboard archive in the basement of a police department.
00:00:14.720 --> 00:00:17.359
Sometimes it's a banker box in a courthouse.
00:00:17.519 --> 00:00:23.760
Sometimes it's a stack of yellowing newspaper clippings someone rescued from an attic decades ago.
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The Black Dahlia case has all of those hundreds of photographs, witness statements, FBI correspondence, autopsy summaries, newspaper articles from reporters racing each other to beat the evening deadline, and somewhere inside all of it, a twenty two year old woman named Elizabeth Short.
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That's where we're going to begin.
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Not in the vacant lot on Norton Avenue where her body was discovered.
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Not with the photographs that have become part of American criminal history, not with the theories.
00:01:03.679 --> 00:01:06.959
There are plenty of books that begin there.
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Most of them spend the next three hundred pages trying to convince you they know who killed the Black Dahlia.
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This isn't that story.
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This story asks a different question.
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Who was Elizabeth Short before somebody decided she would forever be remembered by a newspaper nickname?
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Because homicide investigators don't start with killers, they start with victims.
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If you don't understand the victim, you have very little chance of understanding the crime.
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Elizabeth Short was born on july twenty ninth, nineteen twenty four, in Hyde Park, a neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.
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She was the third of five daughters born to Cleo Alvin Short and Phoebe May Sawyer Short.
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Nothing about her birth suggested she would become one of the most recognizable homicide victims in American history.
00:02:05.760 --> 00:02:14.319
She was another child born into a country that for a brief time believed the good years would last forever.
00:02:15.599 --> 00:02:17.199
They didn't.
00:02:17.680 --> 00:02:24.159
The Great Depression had a way of changing lives long before anyone realized they had changed.
00:02:24.479 --> 00:02:27.759
The short family learned that lesson the hard way.
00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:31.520
Elizabeth's father built miniature golf courses.
00:02:31.840 --> 00:02:39.599
That sounds almost quaint today, but during the late nineteen twenties, miniature golf was a booming business.
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Courses appeared everywhere, investors poured money into them, families lined up to play.
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Then the stock market crashed.
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Businesses dependent on spare income disappeared almost overnight.
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Among them miniature golf.
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Financial pressure mounted.
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Then something happened that investigators would revisit decades later, not because it explained Elizabeth's murder, but because it explained part of Elizabeth.
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Her father disappeared.
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His automobile was found abandoned near the Charlestown Bridge.
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Many believed he had taken his own life.
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Nobody was recovered.
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The family mourned him.
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Years later, they learned something astonishing.
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He wasn't dead.
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He had simply walked away.
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He settled in California, started over, left his wife and five daughters behind.
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There's a temptation to treat that discovery as the key to Elizabeth's future.
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It isn't.
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Responsible investigators resist that temptation.
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People are more complicated than cause and effect.
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But if you're trying to understand someone's life, you don't ignore the fact that her father vanished during her childhood and didn't come back.
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You write it down.
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You keep reading.
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Elizabeth also suffered from chronic asthma.
00:04:18.959 --> 00:04:21.920
It wasn't an occasional inconvenience.
00:04:22.160 --> 00:04:24.079
It shaped where she lived.
00:04:24.319 --> 00:04:32.560
Doctors believed warmer climates would help manage the condition, so she spent extended periods in Florida while growing up.
00:04:32.879 --> 00:04:44.160
That decision would eventually point her west, not because she dreamed of Hollywood, because breathing mattered more than snow.
00:04:44.480 --> 00:04:49.360
Sometimes history changes because of grand events.
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Sometimes it changes because a doctor tells a family to find warmer weather.
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One thing becomes obvious after reading accounts from friends, classmates, and acquaintances.
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Very few described Elizabeth the way the newspapers later would.
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The press emphasized beauty.
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The people who knew her remembered personality.
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They described her they described someone polite, soft spoken, friendly, someone who smiled easily, someone who enjoyed conversation.
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Those aren't dramatic observations.
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They're ordinary.
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And that's precisely why they matter.
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Most victims are ordinary until they aren't.
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One myth deserves attention before it becomes fact simply because it's been repeated for seventy nine years.
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Elizabeth Short is frequently described as an aspiring actress.
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That statement appears in countless books, articles, documentaries, and television specials.
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The evidence supporting it is surprisingly thin.
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She admired Hollywood.
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She posed for photographs.
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She hoped for a better life.
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None of those things make someone an actress.
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If new evidence emerges, conclusions change.
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Until then, the responsible answer is we don't know.
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That sentence appears less often in true crime than it should.
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By the end of nineteen forty six, Elizabeth was living the kind of life thousands of young Americans lived after World War two, temporary jobs, boarding houses, friends' spare bedrooms, long conversations in cafes, bus tickets, suitcases, plans that changed from one week to the next.
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From a distance, it could look chaotic.
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To someone living in post war California, it looked normal.
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That's one of the dangers of looking backward through history.
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We know where the story ends.
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Elizabeth didn't.
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Every decision she made still had tomorrow attached to it.
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She expected another sunrise, another job, another place to stay, another chance to figure things out.
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She never got that chance.
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Close the newspaper articles for a minute.
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Forget the nickname, forget the photographs, forget everything you've ever heard about the Black Dahlia.
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Because none of that existed yet.
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At this point, there is no famous murder, no investigation, no suspects.
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Only a twenty two year old woman trying to build a life in Southern California.
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A case file will catch up with her soon enough.
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For now, she is simply Elizabeth Short, and that's exactly how she deserves to be remembered before we begin asking who took her life.
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I think we found the voice.
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If you read enough newspaper accounts about Elizabeth Short, something strange begins to happen.
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She starts changing.
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One reporter describes her as quiet.
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Another says she was outgoing.
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One article calls her an aspiring actress.
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Another insists she spent her time chasing military officers.
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Years later, a book claims she worked as a prostitute.
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Another says there isn't credible evidence that she ever did.
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It's almost as if every generation creates its own version of Elizabeth Short.
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That's one of the first problems with this case.
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The woman has spent nearly eighty years buried beneath other people's opinions.
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The file tells a different story.
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Homicide investigators have a saying don't investigate the rumor, investigate the person.
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Rumors grow.
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People don't.
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The job is figuring out where one ends and the other begins.
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The surviving record suggests Elizabeth had one remarkable talent.
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She could make friends almost anywhere.
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Boarding house owners remembered her.
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Waitresses remembered her.
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Former classmates remembered her.
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Military personnel remembered her.
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The descriptions weren't identical, but they shared common ground.
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Polite, well dressed, friendly, soft spoken, attractive.
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There wasn't much disagreement there.
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The disagreements came later.
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Money was a constant problem, not because Elizabeth lived extravagantly, because she rarely had much of it.
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She worked when work was available.
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Restaurant jobs, clerical work, seasonal employment, nothing that produced long term stability.
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By modern standards that can sound alarming.
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By nineteen forty six standards, it wasn't unusual.
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Southern California was overflowing with young adults trying to establish themselves after the war.
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Some stayed in hotels, some rented furnished rooms, some slept on friends' couches.
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Elizabeth did all three.
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One misconception deserves to be addressed early.
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People often describe Elizabeth as homeless.
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That isn't quite accurate.
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She didn't have a permanent residence.
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Those aren't the same thing.
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She almost always had somewhere to stay.
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The address simply changed.
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Understanding that makes a difference because investigators always asked the same question.
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Who knew where the victim would be sleeping tonight?
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In Elizabeth's case, the answer changed constantly.
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She also liked to dress well.
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That detail appears repeatedly.
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Friends remembered pressed clothing, well kept hair, carefully applied makeup.
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It would be easy to dismiss those observations as superficial.
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They aren't.
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Appearance tells investigators something.
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Presentation mattered to her.
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Even when money was scarce, that says something about priorities.
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Not guilt, not innocence, simply priorities.
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Then there's the question almost every book asks was Elizabeth looking for wealthy men?
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Probably.
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So were countless other young women in postwar America.
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Marriage represented stability, security, a home.
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That wasn't manipulation.
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It was reality.
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The problem begins when ordinary behaviors transformed into evidence of something darker.
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Reading the original files, one thing becomes obvious.
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Investigators spent enormous amounts of time separating ordinary from suspicious.
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Most of the time ordinary one.
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One name resurfaces repeatedly Major Matthew Michael Gordon Jr.
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Their relationship has become part of Black Dahlia folklore.
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Some writers call him the love of her life, others barely mention him.
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The evidence sits somewhere in between.
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We know they knew each other.
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We know Gordon was killed in an aircraft accident while serving in India in august nineteen forty five.
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Friends later recalled Elizabeth taking the news hard.
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Did they intend to marry?
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Maybe.
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Do we have documentary proof?
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No.
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That's an important distinction.
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One of the easiest mistakes an investigator can make is promoting possibility into certainty.
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This case has suffered from that mistake for decades.
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There's another myth worth retiring, Hollywood.
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If you search online today, you'll quickly find Elizabeth described as a struggling actress whose dreams never materialized.
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It makes for a compelling headline.
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There's just one problem evidence.
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No verified acting contracts, no studio employment, no documented auditions that changed the course of her life.
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Could she have dreamed about movies?
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Of course.
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Half of Los Angeles did.
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Dreams aren't evidence.
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They're just dreams.
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One thing investigators often do is build what they call a victim profile, not a psychological profile, a practical one.
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What did this person do every day?
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Who did they spend time with?
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How did they travel?
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Who did they trust?
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Elizabeth's profile is surprisingly uncomplicated.
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She depended on other people, not because she wanted to, because she had to.
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Friends offered rides, friends offered meals, friends offered places to sleep.
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That network kept her moving.
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It also made reconstructing her final days incredibly difficult.
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Every new place meant new witnesses.
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Every new witness meant another statement, another memory, another opportunity for mistakes.
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As this investigation moves closer to january nineteen forty seven, something becomes increasingly clear.
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There is no evidence Elizabeth believed she was in danger.
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No reports that she feared for her life, no documented threats, no frantic letters home, no warnings to friends.
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Whatever happened next, it appears to have caught her completely by surprise.
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Investigators don't always get that luxury.
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Sometimes victims leave breadcrumbs.
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Sometimes they don't.
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Elizabeth left almost none, so close the file, ask yourself for a moment.
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Just a simple question.
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If Elizabeth Short had lived another fifty years, would anyone know her name today?
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Probably not.
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She would have become one of the millions of Americans who lived through the Depression, the Second World War, and the enormous changes that followed.
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Instead, history remembers her for a single morning in January 1947.
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That's unfortunate.
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Before anyone had ever heard the words Black Dahlia.
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The nickname would come later.
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The murder would come later.
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The questions were just beginning.
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And that is the dreadful truth.
00:00:03.680 --> 00:00:06.480
Every cold case begins the same way.
00:00:07.040 --> 00:00:08.720
Someone opens a box.
00:00:09.199 --> 00:00:14.240
Sometimes it's a cardboard archive in the basement of a police department.
00:00:14.720 --> 00:00:17.359
Sometimes it's a banker box in a courthouse.
00:00:17.519 --> 00:00:23.760
Sometimes it's a stack of yellowing newspaper clippings someone rescued from an attic decades ago.
00:00:24.079 --> 00:00:48.399
The Black Dahlia case has all of those hundreds of photographs, witness statements, FBI correspondence, autopsy summaries, newspaper articles from reporters racing each other to beat the evening deadline, and somewhere inside all of it, a twenty two year old woman named Elizabeth Short.
00:00:48.719 --> 00:00:50.880
That's where we're going to begin.
00:00:51.840 --> 00:00:56.719
Not in the vacant lot on Norton Avenue where her body was discovered.
00:00:56.960 --> 00:01:03.439
Not with the photographs that have become part of American criminal history, not with the theories.
00:01:03.679 --> 00:01:06.959
There are plenty of books that begin there.
00:01:07.200 --> 00:01:13.439
Most of them spend the next three hundred pages trying to convince you they know who killed the Black Dahlia.
00:01:14.000 --> 00:01:15.760
This isn't that story.
00:01:16.079 --> 00:01:19.040
This story asks a different question.
00:01:19.519 --> 00:01:26.319
Who was Elizabeth Short before somebody decided she would forever be remembered by a newspaper nickname?
00:01:26.560 --> 00:01:32.799
Because homicide investigators don't start with killers, they start with victims.
00:01:33.120 --> 00:01:39.200
If you don't understand the victim, you have very little chance of understanding the crime.
00:01:39.519 --> 00:01:49.599
Elizabeth Short was born on july twenty ninth, nineteen twenty four, in Hyde Park, a neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.
00:01:49.840 --> 00:01:56.400
She was the third of five daughters born to Cleo Alvin Short and Phoebe May Sawyer Short.
00:01:56.719 --> 00:02:05.599
Nothing about her birth suggested she would become one of the most recognizable homicide victims in American history.
00:02:05.760 --> 00:02:14.319
She was another child born into a country that for a brief time believed the good years would last forever.
00:02:15.599 --> 00:02:17.199
They didn't.
00:02:17.680 --> 00:02:24.159
The Great Depression had a way of changing lives long before anyone realized they had changed.
00:02:24.479 --> 00:02:27.759
The short family learned that lesson the hard way.
00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:31.520
Elizabeth's father built miniature golf courses.
00:02:31.840 --> 00:02:39.599
That sounds almost quaint today, but during the late nineteen twenties, miniature golf was a booming business.
00:02:39.919 --> 00:02:47.680
Courses appeared everywhere, investors poured money into them, families lined up to play.
00:02:47.919 --> 00:02:50.479
Then the stock market crashed.
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Businesses dependent on spare income disappeared almost overnight.
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Among them miniature golf.
00:02:59.759 --> 00:03:01.680
Financial pressure mounted.
00:03:01.919 --> 00:03:13.599
Then something happened that investigators would revisit decades later, not because it explained Elizabeth's murder, but because it explained part of Elizabeth.
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Her father disappeared.
00:03:16.000 --> 00:03:20.000
His automobile was found abandoned near the Charlestown Bridge.
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Many believed he had taken his own life.
00:03:23.360 --> 00:03:25.840
Nobody was recovered.
00:03:26.240 --> 00:03:28.159
The family mourned him.
00:03:30.080 --> 00:03:33.680
Years later, they learned something astonishing.
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He wasn't dead.
00:03:35.360 --> 00:03:37.840
He had simply walked away.
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He settled in California, started over, left his wife and five daughters behind.
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There's a temptation to treat that discovery as the key to Elizabeth's future.
00:03:51.120 --> 00:03:52.400
It isn't.
00:03:54.479 --> 00:03:58.000
Responsible investigators resist that temptation.
00:03:58.319 --> 00:04:02.000
People are more complicated than cause and effect.
00:04:02.240 --> 00:04:10.159
But if you're trying to understand someone's life, you don't ignore the fact that her father vanished during her childhood and didn't come back.
00:04:10.400 --> 00:04:11.840
You write it down.
00:04:12.319 --> 00:04:13.680
You keep reading.
00:04:14.800 --> 00:04:18.480
Elizabeth also suffered from chronic asthma.
00:04:18.959 --> 00:04:21.920
It wasn't an occasional inconvenience.
00:04:22.160 --> 00:04:24.079
It shaped where she lived.
00:04:24.319 --> 00:04:32.560
Doctors believed warmer climates would help manage the condition, so she spent extended periods in Florida while growing up.
00:04:32.879 --> 00:04:44.160
That decision would eventually point her west, not because she dreamed of Hollywood, because breathing mattered more than snow.
00:04:44.480 --> 00:04:49.360
Sometimes history changes because of grand events.
00:04:49.600 --> 00:04:54.319
Sometimes it changes because a doctor tells a family to find warmer weather.
00:04:54.639 --> 00:05:01.279
One thing becomes obvious after reading accounts from friends, classmates, and acquaintances.
00:05:01.600 --> 00:05:06.240
Very few described Elizabeth the way the newspapers later would.
00:05:06.480 --> 00:05:08.959
The press emphasized beauty.
00:05:09.199 --> 00:05:12.800
The people who knew her remembered personality.
00:05:13.360 --> 00:05:25.680
They described her they described someone polite, soft spoken, friendly, someone who smiled easily, someone who enjoyed conversation.
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Those aren't dramatic observations.
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They're ordinary.
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And that's precisely why they matter.
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Most victims are ordinary until they aren't.
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One myth deserves attention before it becomes fact simply because it's been repeated for seventy nine years.
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Elizabeth Short is frequently described as an aspiring actress.
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That statement appears in countless books, articles, documentaries, and television specials.
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The evidence supporting it is surprisingly thin.
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She admired Hollywood.
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She posed for photographs.
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She hoped for a better life.
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None of those things make someone an actress.
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If new evidence emerges, conclusions change.
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Until then, the responsible answer is we don't know.
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That sentence appears less often in true crime than it should.
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By the end of nineteen forty six, Elizabeth was living the kind of life thousands of young Americans lived after World War two, temporary jobs, boarding houses, friends' spare bedrooms, long conversations in cafes, bus tickets, suitcases, plans that changed from one week to the next.
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From a distance, it could look chaotic.
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To someone living in post war California, it looked normal.
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That's one of the dangers of looking backward through history.
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We know where the story ends.
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Elizabeth didn't.
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Every decision she made still had tomorrow attached to it.
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She expected another sunrise, another job, another place to stay, another chance to figure things out.
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She never got that chance.
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Close the newspaper articles for a minute.
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Forget the nickname, forget the photographs, forget everything you've ever heard about the Black Dahlia.
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Because none of that existed yet.
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At this point, there is no famous murder, no investigation, no suspects.
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Only a twenty two year old woman trying to build a life in Southern California.
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A case file will catch up with her soon enough.
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For now, she is simply Elizabeth Short, and that's exactly how she deserves to be remembered before we begin asking who took her life.
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I think we found the voice.
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If you read enough newspaper accounts about Elizabeth Short, something strange begins to happen.
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She starts changing.
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One reporter describes her as quiet.
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Another says she was outgoing.
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One article calls her an aspiring actress.
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Another insists she spent her time chasing military officers.
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Years later, a book claims she worked as a prostitute.
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Another says there isn't credible evidence that she ever did.
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It's almost as if every generation creates its own version of Elizabeth Short.
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That's one of the first problems with this case.
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The woman has spent nearly eighty years buried beneath other people's opinions.
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The file tells a different story.
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Homicide investigators have a saying don't investigate the rumor, investigate the person.
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Rumors grow.
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People don't.
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The job is figuring out where one ends and the other begins.
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The surviving record suggests Elizabeth had one remarkable talent.
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She could make friends almost anywhere.
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Boarding house owners remembered her.
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Waitresses remembered her.
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Former classmates remembered her.
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Military personnel remembered her.
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The descriptions weren't identical, but they shared common ground.
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Polite, well dressed, friendly, soft spoken, attractive.
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There wasn't much disagreement there.
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The disagreements came later.
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Money was a constant problem, not because Elizabeth lived extravagantly, because she rarely had much of it.
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She worked when work was available.
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Restaurant jobs, clerical work, seasonal employment, nothing that produced long term stability.
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By modern standards that can sound alarming.
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By nineteen forty six standards, it wasn't unusual.
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Southern California was overflowing with young adults trying to establish themselves after the war.
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Some stayed in hotels, some rented furnished rooms, some slept on friends' couches.
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Elizabeth did all three.
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One misconception deserves to be addressed early.
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People often describe Elizabeth as homeless.
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That isn't quite accurate.
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She didn't have a permanent residence.
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Those aren't the same thing.
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She almost always had somewhere to stay.
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The address simply changed.
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Understanding that makes a difference because investigators always asked the same question.
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Who knew where the victim would be sleeping tonight?
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In Elizabeth's case, the answer changed constantly.
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She also liked to dress well.
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That detail appears repeatedly.
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Friends remembered pressed clothing, well kept hair, carefully applied makeup.
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It would be easy to dismiss those observations as superficial.
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They aren't.
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Appearance tells investigators something.
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Presentation mattered to her.
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Even when money was scarce, that says something about priorities.
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Not guilt, not innocence, simply priorities.
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Then there's the question almost every book asks was Elizabeth looking for wealthy men?
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Probably.
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So were countless other young women in postwar America.
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Marriage represented stability, security, a home.
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That wasn't manipulation.
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It was reality.
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The problem begins when ordinary behaviors transformed into evidence of something darker.
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Reading the original files, one thing becomes obvious.
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Investigators spent enormous amounts of time separating ordinary from suspicious.
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Most of the time ordinary one.
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One name resurfaces repeatedly Major Matthew Michael Gordon Jr.
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Their relationship has become part of Black Dahlia folklore.
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Some writers call him the love of her life, others barely mention him.
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The evidence sits somewhere in between.
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We know they knew each other.
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We know Gordon was killed in an aircraft accident while serving in India in august nineteen forty five.
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Friends later recalled Elizabeth taking the news hard.
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Did they intend to marry?
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Maybe.
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Do we have documentary proof?
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No.
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That's an important distinction.
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One of the easiest mistakes an investigator can make is promoting possibility into certainty.
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This case has suffered from that mistake for decades.
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There's another myth worth retiring, Hollywood.
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If you search online today, you'll quickly find Elizabeth described as a struggling actress whose dreams never materialized.
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It makes for a compelling headline.
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There's just one problem evidence.
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No verified acting contracts, no studio employment, no documented auditions that changed the course of her life.
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Could she have dreamed about movies?
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Of course.
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Half of Los Angeles did.
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Dreams aren't evidence.
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They're just dreams.
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One thing investigators often do is build what they call a victim profile, not a psychological profile, a practical one.
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What did this person do every day?
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Who did they spend time with?
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How did they travel?
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Who did they trust?
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Elizabeth's profile is surprisingly uncomplicated.
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She depended on other people, not because she wanted to, because she had to.
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Friends offered rides, friends offered meals, friends offered places to sleep.
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That network kept her moving.
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It also made reconstructing her final days incredibly difficult.
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Every new place meant new witnesses.
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Every new witness meant another statement, another memory, another opportunity for mistakes.
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As this investigation moves closer to january nineteen forty seven, something becomes increasingly clear.
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There is no evidence Elizabeth believed she was in danger.
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No reports that she feared for her life, no documented threats, no frantic letters home, no warnings to friends.
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Whatever happened next, it appears to have caught her completely by surprise.
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Investigators don't always get that luxury.
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Sometimes victims leave breadcrumbs.
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Sometimes they don't.
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Elizabeth left almost none, so close the file, ask yourself for a moment.
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Just a simple question.
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If Elizabeth Short had lived another fifty years, would anyone know her name today?
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Probably not.
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She would have become one of the millions of Americans who lived through the Depression, the Second World War, and the enormous changes that followed.
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Instead, history remembers her for a single morning in January 1947.
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That's unfortunate.
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Before anyone had ever heard the words Black Dahlia.
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The nickname would come later.
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The murder would come later.
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The questions were just beginning.
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And that is the dreadful truth.
