[16] Troubled by bronchitis and severe asthma attacks, Short underwent lung surgery at age 15, after which doctors suggested she periodically relocate to a milder climate to prevent further respiratory problems.

[d] On January 9, 1947, Short returned to her home in Los Angeles after a brief trip to San Diego with Robert "Red" Manley, a 25-year-old married salesman she had been dating.

[42] Near the body, detectives located a heel print on the ground amid the tire tracks,[43] and a cement sack containing watery blood was also found nearby.

[46] Newbarr's autopsy report stated that Short was 5 feet 5 inches (1.65 m) tall, weighed 115 pounds (52 kg) and had light blue eyes, brown hair and badly decayed teeth.

[52] Immediately following the identification, reporters from William Randolph Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner contacted her mother, Phoebe Short, in Boston, and told her that her daughter had won a beauty contest.

[60] Despite efforts to clean the packet, several partial fingerprints were lifted from the envelope and sent to the FBI for testing; however, the prints were compromised in transit and thus could not be properly analyzed.

[61] The same day the packet was received by the Examiner, a handbag and a black suede shoe were reported to have been seen on top of a garbage can in an alley a short distance from Norton Avenue, two miles (three kilometers) from the crime scene.

[15] On March 14, an apparent suicide note scrawled in pencil on a bit of paper was found tucked in a shoe in a pile of men's clothing by the ocean's edge at the foot of Breeze Avenue in Venice.

[67] In addition to Hansen, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) interviewed over 150 men in the ensuing weeks whom they believed to be potential suspects.

[70] A total of 750 investigators from the LAPD and other departments worked on the Short case during its initial stages, including 400 sheriff's deputies and 250 California State Patrol officers.

"[76] This led some reporters (namely the Herald-Express's Bevo Means) and detectives to look into the possibility that Short was a lesbian, and begin questioning employees and patrons of gay bars in Los Angeles; this claim, however, remained unsubstantiated.

[39] When interviewed, lead investigator Captain Jack Donahue told the press that he believed Short's murder had taken place in a remote building or shack on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and that her body transported to the location where it was disposed of.

In mid-February 1947, the LAPD served a warrant to the University of Southern California Medical School, which was located near the site where the body had been discovered, requesting a complete list of the program's students.

[78] Sergeant Finis Brown, one of the lead detectives on the case, blamed the press for compromising the investigation through journalists' probing of details and unverified reporting.

[79] In September 1949, a grand jury convened to discuss inadequacies in the LAPD's homicide unit based on their failure to solve numerous murders—especially those of women and children—in the previous several years, Short's being one of them.

"[84] In 2003, Ralph Asdel, one of the original detectives on the case, told the Times that he believed he had interviewed Short's killer, a man who had been seen with his sedan parked near the crime scene in the early morning hours of January 15, 1947.

[85] Suspects remaining under discussion by various authors and experts include a doctor named Walter Bayley, proposed by former Times copyeditor Larry Harnisch;[74] Times publisher Norman Chandler, whom biographer Donald Wolfe claims impregnated Short;[86] Leslie Dillon,[87] Joseph A. Dumais,[88] Artie Lane,[65] Mark Hansen,[64] Francis E. Sweeney,[89] Woody Guthrie, Bugsy Siegel, Orson Welles,[90] George Hodel,[91] Hodel's friend Fred Sexton,[92] George Knowlton,[93] Robert M. "Red" Manley,[15] Patrick S. O'Reilly[94] and Jack Anderson Wilson.

Prior to the Dahlia case, George Hodel was suspected, but not charged, in the death of his secretary, Ruth Spaulding; and was accused of raping his own daughter, Tamar, but acquitted.

[98] In 2003, it was revealed in notes from the 1949 grand jury report that investigators had wiretapped George Hodel's home and obtained recorded conversation of him with an unidentified visitor, saying: "Supposin' I did kill the Black Dahlia.

[65] The Examiner stated in 1949 that LAPD chief William A. Worton denied that the Aster Motel had anything to do with the case, although its rival newspaper, the Los Angeles Herald, claimed that the murder took place there.

[101] In 2000, Buz Williams, a retired detective with the Long Beach Police Department, wrote an article for the LBPD newsletter The Rap Sheet on Short's murder.

[102] Harnisch disputes this, stating that Dillon was cleared by police after an exhaustive investigation and that the district attorney's files positively placed him in San Francisco when Short was killed.

[103] Harnisch claims that there was no LAPD coverup, and that Dillon did in fact receive a financial settlement from the City of Los Angeles, but has not produced concrete evidence to prove this.

Initially arrested at age 17 for breaking into a residence close to that of Degnan, Heirens claimed he was tortured by police, forced to confess and made a scapegoat for the murder.

[i] The eager involvement of both the public and press in solving her murder have been credited as factors that complicated the investigation significantly, resulting in a complex, sometimes inconsistent narrative of events.

[61] Some sources, such as Oliver Cyriax's Crime: An Encyclopedia (1993), state that Short's body was covered in cigarette burns inflicted on her while she was still alive,[153] though there is no indication of this in her official autopsy report.

[41] In Severed, Gilmore states that the coroner who performed Short's autopsy suggested in conversation that she had been forced to consume feces based on his findings when examining the contents of her stomach.

[6] Harnisch claims that the rumor regarding Short's history as a prostitute originates from John Gregory Dunne's 1977 novel True Confessions, which is based in part on the crime.

[67] Short's murder has been described as one of the most brutal and culturally enduring crimes in U.S. history,[98] and Time magazine listed it as one of the most infamous unsolved cases in the world.

Among the most famous fictional accounts of Short's death is James Ellroy's 1987 novel The Black Dahlia, which, in addition to the murder, explored "the larger fields of politics, crime, corruption, and paranoia in post-war Los Angeles," according to cultural critic David M.