SEVERED The True Story of THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER links around the net

... the narrative that Gilmore constructs is powerful, seductive and forcefully argued. He harnesses eyewitness testimony, contemporary police documents, interviews with key players and more marginal figures, and extensive, sometimes exclusive material turned up from decades of research. His credentials are impeccable (a family connection with the "Dahlia," a meeting with her "in late '46 when I was 11 years old … she talked to me about magic," a father in the LAPD, a career writing true crime and neo-noir fiction). He critiques with clarity and incision what one LA councillor called the "high-handed bungling and illegal methods" used in the re-opened investigation, and is well aware of the pitfalls of "the obsession developed by men with the Black Dahlia in death." As documenter of the case, he is prepared, and able, to look further and harder than most into the dark night of the Dahlia's life.

And looking, it turns out, is what this narrative version of the case revolves around. Just as the photographs of the corpses of Elizabeth Stride and Mary Jane Kelly somehow bring the victims of Jack the Ripper closer to us by letting us see them, so Elizabeth Short exists now as an image, the victim of what Gilmore calls "crime as a spectacular act." The crime scene, he suggests (reversing a famous adage of Walter Benjamin), resembles "a work of art, a reflection of a mind and personality" with its own "signature" testifying ownership. Gilmore comments that the prime suspect, "horribly frustrated artist and dreamer that he was, had devised the most horrendous picture to thrust back at an unappreciative world."

And yet, this pictorial metaphor gets muddied by the continual implication that the picture is both obscure, and, in part, contains a key element constructed by the victim, which is, of course, herself. "It seemed impossible," writes Gilmore, "for detectives and newsmen to get a clear picture of the girl." Most men interviewed about the victim comment on her excessive makeup: Gilmore notes that Phillip Jeffers, the "war bond boy wonder," "wanted to shake her and tell her to wipe all that makeup off her face," and Martin Lewis, who had a brief affair with her, comments that a woman in a pornographic movie he's shown, alleged to be Elizabeth Short, "had heavy makeup like a black mask over her eyes." Gilmore twice cites descriptions of her resembling a Geisha: "With her mass of black hair and the bright red lipstick," he writes elsewhere, "she had given herself the look of something like a porcelain China doll." 

http://www.popmatters.com/books/reviews/s/severed.shtml

...  The closest that the case ever came to being solved came in the form of author John Gilmore's own investigation into the life and death of The Black Dahlia. His investigations turned up one Jack Anderson Wilson. Wilson, who also went by the name Arnold Smith, had knowledge of the murder that only the killer could have. Wilson claimed to have "known who did it", and maintained that although he had the details, he wasn't the killer. Wilson also showed Gilmore a scarf that he had with an embroidered "E", as well as a photo of himself in a group of people including The Black Dahlia. In the photo, she is wearing the very same scarf. But as Gilmore took his story to the police, Anderson checked into the Holland Hotel in L.A. ...

http://www.grimsociety.com/archives/blackdal.html

... Exhaustively researched and compellingly written, Gilmore's account unearths the truth about the life and death of Elizabeth Short. In the process, he explodes some of the myths concerning the Dahlia case: Short was not a hooker, a lesbian, or a porn actress.

Gilmore is the only writer to portray her truthfully, as she was in real life, through extensive interviews with those who knew her. And possibly, Gilmore is the only writer to discover the true identity of the man who dumped her corpse in a vacant Hollywood lot, neatly sliced in two.

"Severed" is the last word on the Black Dahlia murder. "Who Killed the Black Words Dahlia?" To anyone who lived in Los Angeles in January 1947 the name The Black Dahlia brings back memories of one of the most brutal, bizarre and puzzling s murders of the time.

http://www.handsoftime.com/crime/dahlia.html