Image: Shutterstock.com | Above: A stock photo of professional mannequins used for sewing alterations.
Date
On 15 January 1947 a Los Angeles housewife, Betty Bersinger, found what she wrongly assumed to be a discarded mannequin lying in the road near her home.
Walking her three-year-old daughter into town, she had in fact discovered the brutally mutilated body of Elizabeth Short.
Short, a young woman – pretty, but something of a loner – had, from a very early age, nurtured aspirations of fame and glamour.
Her gruesome murder, somehow more shocking given her fresh appearance, would grip the American public and nonplus detectives investigating the case for decades to come, earning her the nickname 'The Black Dahlia' and ensuring that, in some way at least, she did find the fame that she had craved.