Black Dahlia Murder
That Wednesday morning, the fifteenth of January, was a dreary gray day that held little promise of improvement, but it didn't keep housewife Betty Bersinger from going outside. She and her three-year-old daughter left her home on Norton Avenue in the Leimert Park section of Los Angeles to the shoe repair shop. As they reached Norton and 39th Street, they passed by several vacant lots overgrown with weeds. In 1947, development of this area south of Hollywood had been slowed by the war.
In one of the vacant lots, Betty caught a glimpse of something near the sidewalk. It looked like part of a broken mannequin lying in the weeds. The lower half of the department store dummy had been separated from the upper half and twisted in a macabre way. The closer she got to the strange ghostly white object, the more she realized that it wasn't a department store dummy at all. She took her daughter away from ghastly sight and called the police at a house nearby.
Officers Frank Perkins and Will Fitzgerald were at the scene in minutes to find the naked body of a woman who had been cut in half. They called immediately for assistance. The dead woman seemed posed, lying on her back with her arms raised over her shoulders, her legs spread eagle. She had been cut in half at the waist and her face and body had been slashed viciously. Rope marks on her ankles, wrists and neck suggested a very nasty scene before she died.
She had clearly been killed somewhere else and dumped in the vacant lot during the night or early morning. There was no blood on the ground where she lay and it appeared as though her bruised and broken body had been washed clean of blood before it had been dumped onto the lot.
When Captain John Donahoe of LAPD's Homicide Division got wind of the murder, he assigned very senior men to the case, Detective Sergeant Harry Hansen and his partner, Finis Brown. Donahoe added Detective Herman Willis, a bright young man from the Metro Division, to work with the...
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