Severed: The True Story Of The Black Dahlia

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The grisly 1947 murder of aspiring starlet and nightclub habitue Elizabeth Short, known even before her death asthe "Black Dahlia," has over the decades transmognified from L.A.'s crime of the century to an almost muthical symbol of Hollywood Babtlon/film noir glamour-cum-sordidness. SEVERED the first true-crime book published on the strangest of all "unsolved" murders in the annals of modern crime, offers the documented solution to the case as endorsed by law enforcement and forensic science experts. It is appropriate that hard-boiled, Hollywood-born author John Gilmore, whose father was an Lapd officer at the time of the murder, should be the one to unravel the mutilayered mystery of this archetypal Los Angeles slaying, having begun his painstaking investigations into the case over thirty-five years ago. One is the tale of Victim Elizabeth Short, Small-town beauty queen with big hopes, who seemed to float through her tragically furtile life as an alluring yet doomladen enigma. Another is the tangled inside story of the police investigations and the remorseless, Hearst-stoked press hoopla that paralleled it. Finally, Gilmore reveals the twisted psychology and down-and -out-life story of the actual murderer---as well as the startling circumstances and gruesome details of the killer's indirect confessions to him.