Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder - Softcover

Gilmore, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1878923102 ISBN 13: 9781878923103

Publisher: Amok Books, 1998

Synopsis

The Black Dahlia murder hit post-War Los Angeles like a bombshell and this impenetrable mystery was the haunting crown jewel of LAPD’s unsolved murders. Even before her savage death, beautiful 22-year old Elizabeth Short, an aspiring starlet and nightclub habitu‚, was known as the Black Dahlia. Since her horrible demise, she has become a magnetic icon in American pop culture, a mythical symbol of noir Hollywood. In this new, expanded edition, John Gilmore plumbs to the dark core of this terrifying story that he argues can never be truly solved and delivers to us the real Elizabeth Short, the girl who became the enigmatic Black Dahlia. He ushers the reader into her world and her life in intimate, searing, explosive, first-hand revelations.

The most satisfying and disturbing conclusion to the Black Dahlia case. After reading Severed, I feel like I truly know Elizabeth Short and her killer. -- David Lynch

The most uncanny evocation of LA during and after the war... His portrait of Elizabeth Short as a strange, unknowable somnambulist sleepwalking through that unique junction of time and space is permanently haunting. -- Gary Indiana

About this title

About the Author

John Gilmore was born and raised in Hollywood and has worked as a child actor, a stage and motion picture player, poet, screenwriter, low-budget film director, journalist, true-crime writer and novelist. He has headed the writing program at Antioch University.

From Publishers Weekly

Gilmore, whose father was an LAPD cop at the time of Elizabeth Short's murder, delves deeply into one of Hollywood's most celebrated murder cases. His true-crime procedural unfurls like a hard-boiled film noir and plays the victim's femme fatale persona to the hilt. Nicknamed "the Black Dahlia" by fellow barflies taken with her jet-black hair, black dresses and exotic looks, small-town Massachusetts beauty queen Short went to Hollywood seeking stardom. In 1947, she was brutally murdered at age 22, her naked, mutilated body found hacked in two in a vacant lot. Gilmore presents evidence that strengthens the LAPD's case against chief suspect Jack Wilson, a reclusive, alcoholic burglar and possible serial killer. In an afterword, Gilmore describes his early 1980s interview with Wilson, who divulged details of the crime that only the killer could have known. Wilson, who died in a hotel fire just days before his pending arrest, also made what could be an indirect admission of his involvement in the murder of promiscuous Hollywood socialite Georgette Bauerdorf months before the Short slaying. That case, charges Gilmore, was hushed up by the LAPD and the media under pressure from William Randolph Hearst, who was a friend of Bauerdorf's father. Gilmore's book has all the elements of a gritty movie: a sexual psychopath; a dedicated police detective pursuing the killer for decades; Short's reported anatomic anomaly, underdeveloped sex organs, which may have prevented her from having intercourse. It's no wonder that Severed has been optioned for film by David Lynch. 32 pages of photos.

Copyright 1998 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Amok Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 1878923102
• ISBN 13: 9781878923103
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 288