Who killed her?
There are so many theories out there that point to one person or another. We've listed some but you be the judge...
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Dillon
former L.A. resident Leslie Dillon, living in Florida, contacted the police. Believing Dillon to be the actual killer with a split personality, LAPD psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Paul De River lured him west and had members of the department's notorious "Gangster Squad" detain him to extract a confession. The illegal act was caught after Dillon tossed a note out a window. It ended up with the result of a grand jury in 1949. The jury examined what law enforcement had by way of evidence. In the end though, they weren't able to indict, and the mystery of who killed Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, went the way of cold cases. Unsolved. But does that really free Leslie Dillon from being the killer? Whoever committed the crime obviously had the skill to stay out of being convicted for the crime.
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British author Piu Eatwell later took a stab at cracking the case with 2017's "Black Dahlia, Red Rose". Eatwell went back through the evidence against Dillon and the possibility of an LAPD cover-up. And wasn't there a theory that Dillon may have had an alternate personality?
George Knowlton
Janice Knowlton, a Boston native, one-time professional singer, and public relations business owner, said she witnessed her rage-filled father beat Short to death with a claw hammer in the detached garage of the family home in Westminster.
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News of Ms. Knowlton's death in March, at age 67, was reported over the weekend.
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Her father, Ms. Knowlton had asserted, had been having an affair with Short, and Short was staying in a makeshift sleeping room in their garage, where she had suffered a miscarriage. Ms. Knowlton further asserted that she was later forced to accompany her father when he disposed of the body.
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In "Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer," Ms. Knowlton is depicted as often accompanying her father to Short's apartment in Hollywood, where George Knowlton began bringing in "visitors" who raped his daughter.
After her father allegedly killed Short, whom Ms. Knowlton called "Aunt Betty," he had her accompany him to serve as a "cover" when he disposed of Short's blanket-wrapped remains, Ms. Knowlton wrote. She said he first tried dumping the corpse in the ocean by the Seal Beach, Calif., pier, but it didn't sink. She said he later disposed of it in Los Angeles.
Along with her memories, Ms. Knowlton and co-author Newton turned up circumstantial evidence, including the fact that police initially were seeking a suspect named George and a tan car. George Knowlton, his daughter said, drove a tan LaSalle.
The two co-authors also said Ted Driscoll, a now-deceased actor who claimed he dated one of Short's roommates, remembered meeting a man who introduced himself as Georgie at the apartment.
"The physical description he gave to several of his neighbors before he passed on fits George Knowlton to a T, right down to the fact of the compulsive deer hunting, the work in a foundry, and having come from a New England town near where Short was born," Newton told The Times in 1993. "To have another George who fit that description to me would be almost coincidental beyond the realm of possibility."
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Ms. Knowlton maintained the insistence and belief that her father had perpetrated the crime but unfortunately, Ms. Knowlton died March 5 in her home in Anaheim Hills, Calif. The Orange County coroner's office classified her death as suicide due to the combined effect of five drugs, so never got to find out if her assertion was true or not.
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She had a stepsister that later told officials that the book her sister wrote had strained family relations, and that the accusations Janice had been untrue.
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Then again, none of us were there, so what happens in the shadows is only known by those that were there.
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source||note: the article does have derogative statements made by the author's stepsister and was not included here because it's of a personal nature.
Hodel
Former LAPD detective Steve Hodel presented a more convincing argument in Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story (2003) after discovering that his father, George, had been a suspect in the case. Not everyone believed what he wrote/claimed and worked to poke holes in what he claimed. But he does bring up some very valid points. Steve Hodel even pointed out there were aspects that made him believe his father was the Zodiac Killer.
Harnisch
Larry Harnisch has spent 24 years researching the Dahlia case and dispelling myths. Has he finally found an answer of his own?
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Harnisch has studied the case off and on for twenty-four years. He has interviewed more than one hundred-fifty people, ranging from the first officer on the scene, to family members of Short, to a former boyfriend, to detectives assigned to the investigation, to the woman who discovered the body. The office in his small South Pasadena home is crammed with five metal file cabinets, twenty boxes of file folders, and four bookcases lined with hundreds of books, all focused on the Short homicide or Los Angeles history. Harnisch is writing a book about the case, but the homicide and the investigation are only part of his focus. His research began when he was a copy editor at the Los Angeles Times and he was writing a 1997 fiftieth anniversary story on the killing. He had so much additional material that when the story ran, he decided to write a book. After three drafts, engaging in countless online battles with people writing about the case whom he constantly fact-checks, and struggling to find a publisher, there are days, he says, when he wished he never heard of the case. His initial outline for the book was narrowly focused. He simply wanted to tell a good crime story and to create an accurate biography of Short, tracing her life from small town Massachusetts, to California, to her death. He never imagined that he would unearth a murder scenario and a suspect who would intrigue LAPD detectives.
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Harnisch did not grow up in Los Angeles with iterative reminders of the Dahlia case. He was raised in Illinois and Arizona and moved to Southern California when he was hired by the Los Angeles Times. In the summer of 1996, he was conducting research for a detective novel he intended to write and was looking for a “random, nasty old crime” he could employ as a plot device. During his search he recalled reading something about the Black Dahlia years earlier. He didn’t know her name and this was the pre-internet days, so he couldn’t simply Google her. After conducting some initial research at a local library, he realized that the fiftieth anniversary was coming up in January. He passed along the tip to a Times assistant city editor, expecting him to assign the story to a reporter. The editor, however, asked, “Do you want to do it?” Harnisch, who had always wanted to be a writer, responded, “Hell, yeah.”
Welles
Mary Pacios who grew up near Short in Massachusetts and wrote Childhood Shadows, suggested that Orson Welles, who appeared to saw a woman in half during a magic trick, was the killer.
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note: we couldn't find any evidence to support this, but it was a theory back in the day