Elizabeth Short (July 29, 1924 - January 14 or 15, 1947), known posthumously as "the Black Dahlia", was an American woman who was found murdered in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Her case became highly publicized due to the graphic nature of the crime, which entailed her corpse having been mutilated and severed at the waist. A native of Boston, Short had spent her early life in Massachusetts and Florida before relocating to California, where her father lived.

In late 1942, Phoebe received a letter of apology from her presumed-deceased husband, which revealed that he was in fact alive and had started a new life in California. In December, at age eighteen, Elizabeth relocated to Vallejo to live with her father, whom she had not seen since she was six years old. At the time, he was working at the nearby Mare Island Naval Shipyard on San Francisco Bay. Arguments between Short and her father led to her moving out in January 1943. Shortly after, she took a job at the base exchange at Camp Cooke (now Vandenberg Air Force Base), near Lompoc, California, living with several friends, and briefly with an Air Force sergeant who was reportedly abusive to her. Short left Lompoc in mid-1943 and moved to Santa Barbara, where she was arrested on September 23, 1943 for underage drinking at a local bar. The juvenile authorities sent her back to Medford, but she returned instead to Florida, making only occasional visits to Massachusetts.  While in Florida, she met Major Matthew Michael Gordon, Jr., a decorated US Army Air Force officer at the 2d Air Commando Group. He was training for deployment to the China Burma India Theater of Operations of World War II. She told friends that he had written to propose marriage while he was recovering from injuries from a plane crash in India. She accepted his offer, but Gordon died in a second crash on August 10, 1945, less than a week before the Japanese surrender ended the war.  She relocated to Los Angeles in July 1946 to visit Army Air Force Lieutenant Joseph Gordon Fickling, whom she had known from Florida. Fickling was stationed at the Naval Reserve Air Base in Long Beach. Short spent the last six months of her life in Southern California, mostly in the Los Angeles area; shortly before her death, she had been working as a waitress, and rented a room behind the Florentine Gardens nightclub on Hollywood Boulevard. Short has been variously described and depicted as an aspiring or "would-be" actress. According to some sources, she did in fact have aspirations to be a film star, though she had no known acting jobs or credits.

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