An unsolved murder has long been enshrouded by mythic storytelling.
A Crime, A Mystery, And The Power of Storytelling
Early one winter morning, a mother out walking her young child saw something strange in a vacant lot. She thought it was something bad, and so she hurried to a nearby house and called the police. The cops arrived and found the body of Elizabeth Short, who would become infamously known as the Black Dahlia. It was 1947. The place was Los Angeles.
The Black Dahlia murder shocked the city. It was a combination of the victim and the crime. Elizabeth Short was a beautiful, young white woman whose future had been annihilated. She had been brutally tortured and posthumously mutilated.
The media scrambled to tell the story. Thanks to FBI fingerprint technology, the victim’s name was soon made public. Elizabeth Short hailed from Medford, Massachusetts. She was 22 years old.
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In the new book, Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood, historian William J. Mann offers a new take on this much parsed-over crime. He proceeds from an important point: the Black Dahlia murder has become a “myth.”
The myth is that the murdered woman was “a sex worker, a gangster’s moll, or a movie extra yearning to become Lana Turner.” In fact, Elizabeth Short was a young woman who wanted to see more of the world than her hometown offered. She had suffered abuse from her father and dreamed of making a new life for herself in Los Angeles. The mythical “Black Dahlia,” on the other hand, is a femme fatale who is partly guilty of her own demise.
What is interesting about this mythmaking process is how it relates to our human need to order events into narratives, the more dramatic the better. Numerous studies show this. There is a good evolutionary reason for this. As argued in one study, “Cooperation and the Evolution of Hunter-Gatherer Storytelling,” the act of storytelling “may have played an essential role in the evolution of human cooperation by broadcasting social and cooperative norms to coordinate group behavior.”
Storytelling, another scholar asserts, allows the receiver to feel as if “they were there” when past events occurred. They can then vicariously learn from the storyteller’s experiences. Perhaps this may help if a similar event happens in the future. There is also a therapeutic aspect. “By telling and retelling a story, we can find meaning in traumatic events,” says Fritz Breithaupt, author of The Narrative Brain. “It allows us to find meaning, create collective mourning, or even assign blame. This process helps us process and integrate difficult experiences.”
The heinous murder of Elizabeth Short triggered this narrative response viscerally. Here was a “beautiful” woman, out alone in a big city, who met a brutal demise. How can we avoid this fate ourselves? The newspapers crafted a narrative reflecting this need. They pinned her death on her own “dangerous” habits, and labeled her killer a “werewolf” who preyed on women who transgressed social norms of domesticity. Elizabeth Short was said to “prowl the boulevard.” In reality, what she liked to do was go out window shopping during the day.
The name “Black Dahlia” was assigned to her by the son of a drug store owner, who said they called her that because of “her appearance and dress.” Notably, this “appearance and dress” is not described in the article. It is left to the imagination.
What the reader’s imagination undoubtedly summoned back in 1947 was a recent movie, The Blue Dahlia. It is a noir thriller based on a Raymond Chandler novel, in which the title comes from a nightclub. But nobody called Elizabeth Short “Black Dahlia” to her face.
Like most of us, Elizabeth had friends, lovers, and acquaintances. She tried to make it in a tough town. But after she died, papers did not hesitate to call her “a man-crazy adventuress.” Even today, many people who know “The Black Dahlia” could not tell you what her real name is.
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The newspapers did not have all of the information. But they did not need it. They knew what sold copy: tragic, gory events that triggered the human need to make sense and learn from trauma. Unfortunately, as Mann correctly argues, the myth has effectively erased the real victim.
This is the downside of our narrativizing impulse. Stories are vital and useful, but they can also harm, especially when moneymaking. Original traumas can get erased in the service of something titillating and marketable. In the case of Elizabeth Short, an unsolved murder became the story of a femme fatale going outside of her proper gendered boundaries.
In reality, we do not know when Elizabeth met her killer, where she was killed (her body was dumped), or who her killer was. The killer’s motives, if any, are still unknown. Instead, what we have is a myth. Sadly, it is one only partly tethered to reality.
References
Breithaupt, F. (2025). The Narrative Brain: The Stories Our Neurons Tell. New Haven: Yale University Press.
In new book “The Narrative Brain”, IU professor explores the power of storytelling in the human mind: College of Arts + Sciences : Indiana University.
Mann, W. J. (2026). Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood. NY: Simon and Schuster.
Smith, D. et al. (Dec. 2017). “Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling.” Nature Communications.
Written by Troy Rondinone Ph.D.
Originally Appeared On Psychology Today
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