Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder by John Gilmore
Textbook (Paperback)
- Publisher: Amok Books
- Pub. Date: September 1998
- ISBN-13: 9781878923103
- 230pp
- Edition Number: 2
Synopsis
The grisly 1947 murder of aspiring starlet and nightclub habitue Elizabeth Short, known even before her death asthe "Black Dahlia," has over the decades transmognified from L.A.'s crime of the century to an almost muthical symbol of Hollywood Babtlon/film noir glamour-cum-sordidness. SEVERED the first true-crime book published on the strangest of all "unsolved" murders in the annals of modern crime, offers the documented solution to the case as endorsed by law enforcement and forensic science experts. It is appropriate that hard-boiled, Hollywood-born author John Gilmore, whose father was an Lapd officer at the time of the murder, should be the one to unravel the mutilayered mystery of this archetypal Los Angeles slaying, having begun his painstaking investigations into the case over thirty-five years ago.
One is the tale of Victim Elizabeth Short, Small-town beauty queen with big hopes, who seemed to float through her tragically furtile life as an alluring yet doomladen enigma. Another is the tangled inside story of the police investigations and the remorseless, Hearst-stoked press hoopla that paralleled it. Finally, Gilmore reveals the twisted psychology and down-and -out-life story of the actual murderer---as well as the startling circumstances and gruesome details of the killer's indirect confessions to him.
Customer Reviews
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Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murderby Anonymous
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December 19, 2005: This book makes you feel bad for Elizabeth Short but only because she was incapable of being a prostitute, in every other way she was but you still feel for her. She really wanted to be a STAR in Hollywood and lived that dream that we all deep down inside wish for and still want. She wanted to be discovered, she was beautiful but the wrong person found her. By the end of this book you will know who killed her and why. There is NO doubt as to who her killer was. It is a shame that the forensics of today wasn't available then.
Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murderby Anonymous
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May 06, 2005: I took someone at his word and decided to search the internet for any verification that Gilmore's source, LAPD Detective Herman Willis, really existed. Guess what? The only references out there to any Herman Willis who had anything do with law enforcement are referring to Gilmore's book, not to anything outside it. According to Gilmore, this guy was a key player in the Black Dahlia murder investigation, and yet there is no trace or him as a real-world person. It sure looks to me like Detective Herman Willis is a fictional character created by John Gilmore. If Gilmore made up Herman Willis for his book, what else did he make up? If this book was being sold as fiction, I would not have a problem with it. But there is a word for passing off a fictional story as actual fact. I think we all know what that word is.
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