The "Black Dahlia" killing, Hollywood's most gruesome and baffling murder case in 1947 involving starlet Elizabeth Short, appears to finally have been solved.
Seventy years after the aspiring actress's body was found cut in half and drained of blood in a Los Angeles lot, legal sleuth Piu Eatwell has named a former mortician's assistant as the likely culprit.
In her book, "Black Dahlia, Red Rose: The Crime, Corruption, and Cover-Up of America's Greatest Unsolved Murder," Eatwell says the key to the mystery is Smart's involvement with a 55-year-old movie-theatre magnate and illegal-gambling boss named Mark Hansen.
After a 10-day flirtation, Hansen grew tired of the raven-haired beauty, who continually pestered him for money and had a long list of boyfriends despite insisting she was a virgin.
Hansen is believed to have instructed Leslie Dillon, a former mortuary worker who was his pimp and errand boy, to get rid of Short. But he didn't know Dillon, who allegedly kept newspaper clips about violence against women, was a madman.
On Jan. 15, Short's mutilated corpse was found sprawled in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. She had been severely beaten, a "smile" was carved into her face, and other gruesome acts.
"They were the marks of a sadistic lust murderer . . . and it was speculated that the killer either had medical training or experience with handling corpses in a mortuary — and a manifest fascination with death," Eatwell told the Daily Mail.
The press jumped on the sensational crime and nicknamed Short "The Black Dahlia," a play on words on "The Blue Dahlia," a Raymond Chandler-scripted murder mystery starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.
Short's murder was not a complicated case, but Eatwell believes it went unsolved because of a huge cover-up by the Los Angeles Police Department, which was alleged to be rife with corruption.
According to the Mail, Dillon was hauled in by cops for questioning but warned that if they arrested him, he would talk and 'he knew where the bodies were buried in terms of organized crime." He was let go and then vanished.
"There was definitely a cover-up. Even as I was going through the documents, pages were just missing and removed. And they're almost always connected somehow to Leslie Dillon or Mark Hansen," Eatwell told Fox News.
"There were many of these girls [like Elizabeth] in Hollywood, showing up in buses from all over the country, hoping to become movie stars and falling in with the wrong people."
In 2006, director Brian De Palma made "The Black Dahlia," a movie based on a novel about the crime by James Ellroy and starring Mia Kirshner, Scarlett Johansson and Josh Hartnett.
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