It was today in 1947 that Elizabeth Short, aka The Black Dahlia, was found dead in Leimert Park in Los Angeles, sparking a massive investigation that ultimately came up empty. Short’s may be the most famous unsolved murder in Los Angeles history. It’s certainly one of the most grotesque. She had been beaten, mutilated in numerous vicious ways, cut in two, drained of blood, and arranged in an explicit, spread-legged pose.

The killer is always thought of as a man. Safe assumption. The crime just screams hatred and fear of women. The poet Robert Burns wrote famously of man’s inhumanity to man, but he could have added that there seems to be a special type of inhumanity reserved for women. Dahlia material fills the web, so we don’t really need to add much more. But we’d have been remiss in not noting this day, because Short's influence has been strong on crime fiction, and it would not be quite the same without her.