Sitting on bench seats in a retrofitted old hearse, stuck in quintessentially choked Los Angeles highway traffic, I listened to a woman narrate the macabre details of an 80-year-old murder.
The guide, Blaze Lovejoy—whose business card identified her as a “dark storyteller” and “Manson specialist”—had already driven us through Hollywood. Now she was bringing us to downtown Los Angeles, the heart of this particular darkness. Lovejoy wore combat boots with flames across the toes and had a microphone headset on, her British accent giving the narration a Vincent Price vibe: “A Hollywood dream turned to a real-life nightmare, with a grim homicide!”
The spell was broken by her phone. The theme from Twin Peaks played. Lovejoy laughed and let it play as she continued her monologue to us, her willing captive audience, about the last hours of a lost young woman in postwar L.A.
I was one of a handful of paying customers for Grave Line Tours and its drive-by greatest hits of the last moments of Elizabeth Short, the so-called Black Dahlia, a young woman whose final days and murder in January 1947 is the Book of Genesis for American true crime. Her killing, unimaginably brutal and enigmatic, spawned years of movies, novels, and nonfiction books attempting to piece together a dozen different overlapping theories and conspiracies about who might be responsible.
In my adolescence, the Black Dahlia story also ensnared me. I fell in love with crime fiction—I grew up in New England as Dennis Lehane was dropping classics like Gone, Baby, Gone and Mystic River—and was at the perfect age for L.A. Confidential, the 1997 Oscar-winning film adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel. I devoured Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet of novels soon after. The first in that set? 1987’s The Black Dahlia, which sent my own fascination with a bygone Los Angeles toward the killing that had immortalized it most.
Since then, Dahlia lore has changed. Where once those curious about the murder had to content themselves with archives and books, they and their interests—honest or prurient—have crashed into the contemporary whirlpool of social media power users, influencers, and podcasters. Since December, a high-wattage new book by a respected biographer and a buzzy podcast hosted by a bestselling crime fiction writer have again led to a surge of interest in the case, and both entities ultimately point to the same man for the murder, once and for all.
In Los Angeles, my hearse mates seemed alternately subdued and giddy. They were trying to ground themselves in their closeness to the real site of this mythical and yet all-too-real murder, now seemingly on the cusp of an actual resolution.
I was here on a different mission. If you look closely enough at the Black Dahlia, you can see the whole playing field of the American true-crime genre that was to come. I was not immune: I had just spent months reading and consuming every corner of the literature, culminating in new works by the two men with bombshell claims that had stirred it all up anew. But I wanted to know where that had really led us. Eventually, I spoke to them to ask about what they had discovered, and about how they felt about the way they’d gotten there. Soon, in L.A., I was turning that question on myself.
The facts of the Short case are limited and disturbing. On the morning of Jan. 15, 1947, a young mother taking her child out for a walk found the dismembered body of a woman in what would become the middle-class neighborhood of Leimert Park in Los Angeles.
The victim would be identified as Elizabeth Short, a young woman who had left her home in Massachusetts to find relief from her bad asthma, to search for her father, who had faked his death and abandoned his family, to wander around America a bit, and ultimately to try her luck in California. Her life became particularly desperate after the death of a serious boyfriend in a postwar plane crash. Short’s time in Los Angeles carries some of the clichés of the young person with few prospects making a go of it in Hollywood. Unlike the many other young Americans who arrived in California with similar aims, Short never got on that bus back to her hometown.
By all accounts, the last days of Short’s life were spent shuttling across Los Angeles, crashing with friends, meeting men for drinks in downtown bars, trying to survive. The granular, hour-by-hour accounts of her final week have soaked up chapters of books and pages of old, buggy websites. Some of the hotels and apartment buildings and bars still stand. Others have been demolished or gutted by time and California’s forever-ravenous developers.
Short was disfigured postmortem, her body cut in two at the waist, her limbs removed, and a Glasgow smile carved into her face. Jack the Ripper killed sex workers, always the socially acceptable victims of gruesome murder. H.H. Holmes created a literal death trap of a house, something out of Poe or Lovecraft. This was different. Short’s body was left where anyone could find it, a brutal symbol that the postwar white middle-class fantasy of Southern California was only that. Gory headlines topped the papers of Los Angeles, which, like most American cities in the ’40s, had multiple competing print outlets, each with its own political bent.
The investigation that followed was, in many ways, the story itself. Any decent book about the murder provides the sketches of objectively charismatic players: Aggie Underwood, one of the first prominent female journalists in L.A., who covered the case from the outset; the Los Angeles Police Department’s famed Gangster Squad, a unit created to catch crime lords like Mickey Cohen; J. Paul de River, a doctor who presented himself as an expert in psychological profiling. Suspects were identified. Suspects were interviewed and eliminated: a handsome de facto drifter who had dated Short. An equally handsome nightclub owner. The troubled veteran who had served in the medical corps during the war.
After the LAPD went through over 100 suspects, the case was left unsolved. The authorities left Elizabeth Short. Decades of culture picked her up as the Black Dahlia.
Popular culture injected itself into the case from the outset. The Black Dahlia name came from the 1940 noir The Blue Dahlia, written by Raymond Chandler, a canonical crime writer who made Californian inequities and illusions his métier. Tellingly, this was the rare crime in which the victim, not the preparator, got a sobriquet, unlike the Night Stalker, BTK, the Boston Strangler, and so on.
Generations of writers, filmmakers, and other creatives have made a dark prism of ideas and images around the murder of Elizabeth Short. There was my own entryway, Ellroy’s 1987 novel, and Joyce Carol Oates’ 2012 collection Black Dahlia & White Rose, which both took up the case explicitly. Others used the images of the crime as a jumping-off point, like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and the writer John Gregory Dunne’s 1977 novel True Confessions. There was the misbegotten 2006 film adaptation of Ellroy’s novel by the sultan of psychosexual pulp, Brian De Palma, with Mia Kirshner in the Short role. The open-world video game L.A. Noire made the Black Dahlia a solvable case with a cut-rate conspiracy plot that has your LAPD player character jumping across the planks of a sinister old movie set like a war-haunted Mario in a fedora. Contemporary schlock merchant Ryan Murphy drummed up Short’s ghost for American Horror Story: Murder House. My tour by hearse of Los Angeles would stop at the house whose exterior was used for the show.
The roster of Black Dahlia nonfiction books is robust, especially in the past three decades. The better ones use the Los Angeles County district attorney files and the FBI files made available by Freedom of Information Act requests. Others are content to pick at archives from the Los Angeles Times and the now-closed Daily News and Los Angeles Examiner. Still other books remix the Black Dahlia literature that has come before, executive summaries jazzed up with morbid theorizing.
Some are solid. Others are pulp. Still others point fingers irresponsibly. They add to meaningful debates about the ethical responsibilities of true crime, even with long-cold cases.
In 2003 retired LAPD officer Steve Hodel wrote a true-crime memoir, Black Dahlia Avenger, in which he posited that his father, Dr. George Hodel, was the killer. That theory has been shot down, but it was racy and cinematic, and the house Hodel owned at the time—still standing today—is a spooky architectural curio whose strangeness makes the theory more sellable. Helpful as well is the fact that George Hodel was a world-class creep accused of incest who also had a social role among L.A.’s elite. (He was sort of a Timothy Leary type crossed with one of Epstein’s doctors.) More recently, Hodel’s memoir-slash-investigation begat a memoir written by George Hodel’s granddaughter Fauna, which itself begat a prestige limited series, 2019’s I Am the Night, starring Chris Pine. For them, the Black Dahlia case has become a family business.
Now a robust, recently published book about the brief life of and historical context around Elizabeth Short, William J. Mann’s Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood, has done the humane work of retrieving Elizabeth Short the human from the muck of Black Dahlia whirlpools. It also can’t help but make its own bold claim about the real killer, one coincidentally echoed in a much-discussed podcast, Killer in the Code, that debuted just a month earlier, in December 2025.
Mann has written fiction and a previous book of true crime, Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood. But his generally strong biographies of legendary Hollywood figures have made his name. His books on Katharine Hepburn and John Schlesinger took fresh, unexpected angles on their subjects, and his epic 700-page biography of Marlon Brando was a bestseller. In many ways, Elizabeth Short is the least famous person he’s ever written about.
Why had he turned to such a case, given all the regrettable churn that’s come before? When I spoke to Mann about his book, he made his goals clear.
“I’m more interested in finding the victim than the killer. And telling Elizabeth’s story allowed me to tell the story of Los Angeles, and by extension America, in these postwar years. So much was changing in society, for the role of women in society,” he said.
Many books in the past have leaned on the idea that Short was secretly engaged with sex work, or a gangster moll. Mann told me that he too was fed those myths.
“I believed that she was somehow this creature that walked by night and seduced men, and maybe was deserving of her fate. I was so surprised when I started researching it that she was nothing like that,” he said. “Everything that had been written before was more interested in solving the case and finding the killer than in presenting an honest portrayal of this young woman whose life was ended.”
Many other Dahlia books, even some of the solid ones, open with the discovery of Elizabeth’s corpse. The first 100 pages of Mann’s book are about Short’s life. Her childhood and adolescence, with its intimacies and losses, is given proper treatment. Truly refreshing is the book’s careful documentation of Short’s group of friends in Los Angeles, other young women trying to make it in the city, names that until his work were largely lost to time.
“Marjorie Graham, Anne Toth—these were her friends, women with agency and with convictions and ambitions. They supported Elizabeth and defended her,” Mann said.
But then those first 100 pages end, and the investigation of the middle and argument of the end kick in. This final two-thirds hums along in clear, muscular commercial prose with a real interest in the second-tier historical figures: earnest detectives, siblings. But as it turns to the theory that landed the book in the headlines, it loses the fresh, humane views of its early chapters. Those flaws and limitations read like marketplace necessities. Yet the book should merit praise for how calmly it works through the genre’s obligation to name a killer and lands on a chief suspect: Marvin Margolis.
Born in the Midwest, Margolis was a college dropout who enlisted in 1943 to train and serve in the Navy Medical Corps. When discharged in 1946, he moved to Los Angeles to restart his college studies at the University of Southern California. He and Elizabeth Short first met that year. When initially interviewed by LAPD detectives after Short’s murder, Margolis did not tell them that he lived with Short briefly only months before her death.
Margolis was the only known person in Short’s life who had the medical training necessary to create the kinds of postmortem wounds found on Short’s body. Margolis was also not of sound mind. Mann relays the darkness inside Margolis thoroughly: A military psychiatrist, whose note Mann quotes in his book, described Margolis as “a resentful individual who shows ample evidence of open aggression.” In the Navy during World War II, Margolis was filled with resentment over being stuck in a dispensary when he craved operating-room experience. Then, after he was deployed, Margolis experienced deep suffering on the battlefield. In the Battle of Peleliu he was limited to “cleaning, bandaging and cauterizing wounds,” in Mann’s description. His service in Okinawa in 1945 was hellish. He assisted in emergency surgeries, “witnessed soldiers blown apart by bombs; part of his duties was to collect body parts,” Mann writes. His last days in the Navy were almost surreally horrifying. Margolis was stationed in a ridge in a small cave, and torrential rains created a mudslide that buried him up to his neck for 24 hours. He was discharged and sent for treatment at the same naval hospital where he once trained. As Mann puts it, “Suffering from nightmares, Marvin was easily startled and quick to anger.” He was also considered “50 percent disabled.”
There’s a tragic irony in that Margolis became his own sort of postwar Los Angeles trope: another transplant, another traumatized, untreated veteran. Less than a year after Short’s murder, Margolis returned to the Midwest and, in Mann’s telling, became a “shape-shifter,” moving from town to town, switching occupations, changing his name, and being arrested multiple times for petty theft, confidence games, and false advertising.
Mann arrives at the Margolis theory not with a definitive bluster, but by leaving Margolis the last man standing, the one with the fewest exculpatory facts. But the success of the book is a clear picture of Beth Short the woman. Mann does it as well as anyone could, and it tops out at 100 pages. Could you even get Black Dahlia content out on a major platform if you don’t propose a killer? Does the historical distance of the crime make that market force a little more tolerable?
Launched a few weeks before Mann’s book published, the podcast Killer in the Code takes a different tack. Based on the findings of a self-described amateur cold-case investigator named Alex Baber, the podcast takes up Baber’s investigation into both the Black Dahlia case and the Zodiac killer. Baber analyzed the infamous Zodiac letters and other documents from the two cases with cryptography and artificial intelligence to yield a provocative claim: The same man who killed Elizabeth Short was also the notorious serial killer whose unpredictable crimes infected late-’60s California and who inspired both the first Dirty Harry movie and David Fincher’s masterpiece Zodiac. He, too, posited that that man was Marvin Margolis.
Enter the podcast. It’s unlikely that Baber’s work would have seen the light of day without the support of heavily credentialed veteran law-enforcement officers and one of America’s most successful crime writers. The latter is novelist Michael Connelly, who hosts the show. He started his career as a crime reporter in Florida, which eventually led him to Los Angeles and to writing crime novels. He has written almost 40 novels about crime in Los Angeles, beginning with 1992’s The Black Echo. Two of his books, Blood Work and The Lincoln Lawyer, have been adapted to film. The number and consistency of his novels have also been a perfect fit for the streaming era. His most famous creation, LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch, became the star of an Amazon show, Bosch, that streamed for seven seasons and spawned two spinoffs; The Lincoln Lawyer also became a Netflix series.
Connelly’s 2024 novel The Waiting was the first of his novels to take up the Black Dahlia explicitly. In it, Connelly centers two of his major female characters, Detective Renée Ballard and Bosch’s own daughter Maddie, a young patrol officer in the LAPD. Running alongside their investigation of an active serial killer is a cold-case dive into the Dahlia.
When I spoke with Connelly over the phone, he linked his own career journey from journalist to novelist to his reading Ellroy’s singular 1987 novel, which uses Short’s murder as a springboard into a macabre, unsettling Southern California picaresque involving stag movies, Tijuana, aristocratic psychos, and the Hollywood sign. Ellroy has written that his mother’s own murder stoked his interest in Beth Short. That resonated with Connelly.
“Here’s a guy who has had this trauma in his life and is working it out psychologically by writing novels about murdered women. And I was a struggling or would-be novelist at the time I read that article and created a detective named Harry Bosch, who has a similar history,” he said.
Connelly told me he “didn’t want to put off the air like I’ve been living and breathing Black Dahlia for 30 years,” but he has taken up the central role in the podcast, albeit while using amateur investigator Baber’s material. He was introduced to the Margolis theory by two people with whom he has a professional relationship: retired LAPD cold-case Detective Mitzi Roberts, the inspiration for Connelly’s character Renée Ballard, and Detective Rick Jackson, whose own relationship with Connelly and with consulting for scripted entertainment in general has merited its own coverage. These distinguished pros vouched for Baber. Connelly saw the grand jury files for the first time when he began working with Baber, Jackson, and Roberts last spring. Connelly then wrote, produced, and hosted Killer in the Code.
As a listening experience, the podcast is solid, if of a certain generation. Everyone’s voice is even and sober on the show, the kind of podcast that millennials and Gen Z would listen to at 1.25x speed. It’s well segmented, like when Connelly helps break down the basics of cryptography while explaining Baber’s method with noted National Security Agency code breaker Ed Giorgio. In another episode, Roberts offers a convincing discussion of Margolis, that troubled veteran who was traumatized during his service in the Pacific.
Though he said general response has been favorable, Connelly noted that the fallout has been surprising to him: He “wandered into a hornet’s nest of people who have invested amazing amounts of time and effort into these cases. The moment you suggest somebody else did it, and it’s not their guy, you get crushed. It’s a really interesting phenomenon.”
Connelly cited the credentials of the people who had vetted Baber’s work and contrasted them with “the small number” of “keyboard warriors who have really done nothing in terms of investigating real cases.”
The Black Dahlia has that effect. There are conspiracies about the crime itself—that mobster Bugsy Siegel killed Short because she was carrying their child, for instance—and conspiracies about how other conspiracies turned one single circumstantial piece of evidence ever so slightly and accused the wrong person. For almost everyone, to discuss the Black Dahlia is to demand definite answers.
Years ago, Connelly held a different conviction about Short’s killer. He has a blurb on the cover of the paperback edition of Steve Hodel’s book that originally published in 2003. It reads: “Thoroughly and completely convincing … As far as I am concerned, this case is closed.”
Asked about this, Connelly offered a lengthy response about how he was initially “totally convinced” by Hodel’s memoir, but “when the book came out and got a lot of attention, somebody high up in the LAPD told the cold-case unit to investigate the claims.”
“I don’t want to act like I was in there with them, but I was privy to their conclusion,” he said. Of his blurb, he said, “If that hurts my credibility, I guess it does.” He added: “I was wrong.”
The Killer in the Code podcast is circuitous, but it is compelling that both this apparent cold-case savant and a well-regarded journalist biographer have overlapping conclusions (though I can’t get there with the podcast’s Zodiac claim). Indeed, now the two trains of the Margolis theory have met: Mann was interviewed on one of the latter episodes of Killer in the Code.
Yet both Connelly’s podcast and Mann’s stately, thoughtful book fall into this familiar trap: the need, the endless drive, for resolution. It’s easy to see why. Their theory of the case, which dovetails in many ways and diverges in others, has been what has spawned the headlines, podcast deals, and book sales. No matter how rigorous their research or admirable their intent and restraint, they ultimately find themselves trying to answer the same question that hundreds of others have before them, the foundational imperative of so much true crime. For all their unique contributions to this progenitor of a case, they can’t escape the simple reality no genre true believer wants to face: We will never actually know who killed Elizabeth Short.
At the apex of my own wayward Black Dahlia journey, I tried a different kind of Los Angeles tour.
When I arrived at the parking lot of the Lazy Acres grocery store in Los Feliz, I saw a crowd of about 30 clustered around an energetic, chatty middle-aged woman with a scarf, Panama hat, and dark clothes fit for the east side of L.A. She was alongside a more laconic but still welcoming man in California Western wear—bone-white cowboy hat, stylish hiking boots—toting a hand dolly with a water jug strapped to it.
They were Kim Cooper and Richard Schave, a married couple and founders of Esotouric, a tour company dedicated to Los Angeles history. Both are charming, overwhelmingly knowledgeable, committed locals. They are the kind of people who, when asked a question about the case, offer three other contacts, primary sources, and granular dismissals of competing theories.
I was there for their “Los Angeles Noir” tour, which promises to provide real-life material that inspired decades of art, entertainment, and, depending on your comfort with the word, content. Before the tour began, a QR code linked us to a clean, organized slideshow providing facts and historical photos. We walked for three hours in the afternoon sun through Los Feliz and Thai Town.
We stopped by a water substation and talked about Chinatown, the 1974 masterpiece that loops together L.A.’s perpetual water crises with the sexual violence of the city’s most powerful man like intertwining images in a poem. Later, our group would stop on a wide, grassy boulevard, as noted novelist and screenwriter Howard Rodman—former president of the Writers Guild of America West, who just happened to be taking the tour that day—read a few pages from the script of Double Indemnity while two volunteers from our tour acted out a scene.
The crowd was much larger than Grave Line’s, and much older, as one would expect for people interested in the factual history underneath their stories. We all had tags on with our names and our hometowns. Almost every participant was from Southern California.
As we moved into the Black Dahlia portion of the tour, Cooper walked us past an apartment complex where Short essentially couch surfed during her last days. Cooper began talking about Marvin Margolis’ experiences in the Pacific Theater in World War II through her microphone, though she hardly needed the help: “He spent a day up to his neck in mud,” she said, “and he lost his mind. There are two theories that he’s the killer going around, but I don’t buy them.” (Cooper and Schave later told me they agreed with retired Los Angeles Times copy editor and longtime Black Dahlia scholar Larry Harnisch’s theory, which argues that a surgeon named Walter Alonzo Bayley, who lived only a few blocks from where Short’s body was found, and whose family noted serious aberrations in Bayley’s personality in the months before Short’s murder, was the likely killer.)
A young woman walking a dog asked what we were all doing outside her apartment building. No one knew what to say.
Also taking the tour that day was crime writer Duane Swierczynski. When we spoke, he stressed that as both someone who tries to take a nuanced approach to true crime and a writer of crime fiction, he finds that efforts like Esotouric’s offer “an increased connection between the present and the past” but fight the mythologizing: “It almost takes the gloss out of that. It shows the real time and place.”
A day later, I had a private tour with Cooper and Schave focused exclusively on Elizabeth Short, a private Black Dahlia tour. We started at Pershing Square, the historic center of downtown Los Angeles, adjacent to the Biltmore Hotel, one of the last places Short was seen. We then took a few tight loops around downtown, pausing outside bars where other sources claimed that Short was last seen alive.
Cooper put meaningful context to the death of Short. She said she saw Short’s plight as a product of the perpetual youth housing crisis in Los Angeles, a theme with obvious contemporary relevance. She described Short bouncing from de facto boardinghouses, where rooms filled with bunk beds accommodated “eight women, a dollar a night, and if there wasn’t room, she’d take her bag and sleep on the fire escape. That’s the crux of this whole awful story.”
A group of people walked on the street near the Biltmore Hotel, men in gabardine suits and women in ankle-length cocktail dresses. It was the aftermath of an Art Deco Society of Los Angeles event. A few people knew Schave and Cooper, and were they not taking me on this tour, I get the sense that they might have chatted with the men and women in period clothing for some time.
The author and L.A. historian Nathan Marsak was among the Art Deco crowd. When I asked him about the Black Dahlia, he told me his move and introduction to Los Angeles had come along with an interest in the city’s murders: “I had other friends who were similarly diseased in the brain, and they asked me if I wanted to go to this murder site or that murder site.” Cooper interrupted him with the names of specific L.A. murders that he had failed to mention.
I finished my private tour with Cooper and Schave near what used to be the downtown bus station, another one of the last places Short was seen alive, with Cooper’s fount of information and Schave’s kind urgings to her not to get bogged down in any one detail echoing in my ears.
Days later, when I spoke to Connelly, he talked about the digital hornet’s nest that the podcast had stoked. He mentioned that Harnisch was taking “potshots at, getting personal about,” Jackson and Roberts, the LAPD cold-case detectives. I was struck that once you get close to the burning core of the Black Dahlia content—whether journalism or theorizing or aestheticizing—it’s like a small town, where everyone knows everyone else.
The desire to police the police, and the journalists, and online commenters, and the constant churn of suspects and narrative speaks to what Rachel Monroe, whose book Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession examines America’s true-crime fixation, called “the Law & Order effect—where people on the internet always assume, when there’s a mystery, that the ultimate culprit who will be revealed is a character we’ve already been introduced to in the 15th minute.”
In a way, it’s understandable. Two things can be true: We will never know who really killed Beth Short. Many people desperately want to know who killed Beth Short. And if you read enough and watch enough, you will become part of the second group.
You can smell the real underside of true-crime content when you encounter it. The long-running bros-bantering-about-murder podcast Last Pod on the Left began its four-episode Black Dahlia series in 2024 with the hosts chuckling and unable to contain their horniness when talking about how hot Short was. They spent the rest of the six-plus hours of content working through the various facts and theories and myths, speaking in tones both archly spooky and keyed up, Vincent Price brought to you by DraftKings.
On the Grave Line tour, the one time we all got out of the car was when the car parked across from the house in American Horror Story: Murder House. Everyone got out, took photos, and swapped thoughts on their favorite moments from that season. Not long after, as we were winding down, Lovejoy pitched us on the company’s other tours, including the new “Westside Gory” offering, which focuses on O.J. and the Menendez brothers. You wonder what the living relatives and friends of Nicole Brown Simpson, Ron Goldman, and the Menendez family might feel about that paid entertainment.
When Swierczynski and I talked about the best possible version of true crime, the kind that does what he described as “the writers, the historians, the tour guides trying to save the past,” he offered me a paraphrased quote from neuroscientist David Eagleman: “There are three times a person dies: The first time is when your physical body dies; the second time is when you are buried; the third is when someone speaks your name for the last time.”
After all this, I wondered what it might be like to put Elizabeth Short down for a while. Or at least put the Black Dahlia down, to put aside my own enduring fascination with the case. But I had one more place to visit.
One of the first books I read in preparation for this story was Piu Eatwell’s Black Dahlia, Red Rose, from 2017. It argues that Short might have been murdered by two men at the Aster Motel, a motor court flophouse near what has become the University of Southern California’s campus. Though the motel has been renovated—to put it generously—it remains in the same location, and the rooms have had their bones untouched. It’s called New Aster Motel now.
The idea of the room had stuck in my mind. I went there on my own, after my sets of tours. The motel is gnarly and sad in the way that only the last generation of American motor court hotels can be, doors opening directly to the parking lot, parking lots next to the highway, thick plastic shield and a tray for cash marking the office.
The manager would not let me see any of the potential rooms. She didn’t speak English. She grabbed a notepad and wrote “PEST CONTROL.”
I walked across the parking lot toward the room that used to be Cabin 3, the room Eatwell argues was the likely site of Short’s murder. The door was unlocked, and when I nudged it open, I saw a dirty bed piled high with caked sheets, truly dirty walls, and a stark bathroom in white tile, little more than a toilet and a shower wand.
It looked like the end of the line. I don’t know what I expected to find, but I wanted to glean my little sliver of awful Black Dahlia detail, something both true and insignificant.
I saw nothing in my five minutes in that hotel room. I gained no new perspective about the brutal end to Beth Short’s life. I understood, through Mann’s book and through the admirable work at Esotouric, that her life mattered more than her death. But now, standing in the room where she might have been killed but probably wasn’t, I could not refine my ideas and sentiments about why so many people had been chasing her ghost. Some intrusive thoughts about the grimy tile at the corner of my eye brought me nothing. I was no closer to anything more than a keyhole glance of a Los Angeles and an America gone by. I took my photos of the room and walked back out onto the street.