The first and still the best book on the strangest of all officially unsolved murders in the annals of modern crime January 1947. LA. Elizabeth Short, aka 'The Black Dahlia', a small-town beauty queen, is found murdered on wasteground. She has been badly mutilated. Her body bisected...John Gilmore, who has spent thirty-five years investigating the case, here tells the story of Short's tragically futile life and reveals the tangled inside story of the police investigation, which never resulted in a conviction. But most shocking of all, he recounts the startling circumstances and gruesome details of the killer's indirect confessions to him and the circumstances of his death.