BIZARRE (UK) LA Confidential
Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder
Elizabeth Short, whose bisected, mutilated body was
left on the corner of 39th and Norton on 15 January 1947, has become Los Angeles’
most celebrated grievous angel. A beautiful would-be starlet, whose life appears
to have been as mysterious as her death, met with just about the most depraved
end a woman could. No one ever found her killer.
But, in unquiet death, her power has grown. She haunts
the means streets still, in masterworks like James Ellroy’s “The Black
Dahlia” and John Gregory Dunne’s “True Confessions.” Like these two
authors, John Gilmore writes with the need to give the Dahlia a valediction.
Unlike them, however, he claims to have found it. This updated and revised
edition of “Severed” is not just the story of Elizabeth Short, but also,
Gilmore claims (with the back up of LAPD officers and forensic experts) of her
killer. A man who met the author ”because death was breathing on his neck”
in a seedy bar and told him details only the murderer could know. Gilmore’s
investigations began over 35 years ago and the story he recounts is as
spellbinding as the pictures from the LA morgue are truly, shockingly awful.
Here be monsters.
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