The Dead Giveaway

New clues in the Elizabeth Short murder are where you find them these days. Sometimes you even have to bash a few rocks together to find the fossils within. Set in molten lead type, rather than in stone, the Los Angeles Times March 15, 1947 put forth the story figurative of an end to the tragic tale of the Black Dahlia with an handwritten, purported suicide note found stuffed into one of a pair of brown moccasin loafers at the foot of Breeze Ave. in Venice and subsequently turned over to the West L.A. Sheriff's sub-station.

Along with the foolscap note and shoes were socks, jockey shorts, a brown shirt, and a blue suit made of a wool herringbone tweed. No neck tie, no wristwatch, no keys and no wallet, which is not saying the lifeguard didn't get those, no labels or laundry marks, nothing. People want more today. Murder/suicide are interesting but after a steady diet of serial and mass murders, why should such an old killing with such a low body count still be of any interest?

It was a singular crime, unlike any before or since and he got away with it and seemingly never killed again, taking his own life, the coward's way out, as he put's it in his short and final goodbye. Overly archaic, rather than cunning and elusive, Ed Burns thought he had provided far more evidence than any modern investigation would need, but dumb-dumbs Watson and Crick didn't describe the structure of DNA until 1953. Who knew? How's Alley Oop find his dinosaur dinner? Him follows some big tracks. The photo strip here reproduced shows Elizabeth Short in the company of one Edwin F. Burns at the NU-Pike Amusement park in Long Beach, Ca. sometime in the fall of 1946. Ed's looking relaxed and casual, the Black Dahlia is entirely in character, and looking suitably divine, as if she were attending the funeral of a loved one.

Ed morphs from scary to sinister and back to creepy in three black and white snapshots for a buck. He plays the big spender and buys another set for himself. No cheapskate, Ed. He's a clothes horse who likes having his picture taken, he's sure he looks good for 38 and still has all his hair. He keeps in shape chasing the really young ones like 22 yr. old Bette from Massachusetts. Well-enough dressed for the hot evening he's already shun his necktie, but still looking cool in his blue hounds tooth tweed suit...Wait there! How do we know it's blue? That's black and white film. Prove it or be damned! Wicked witchcraft.

That's right, now we're going to need many and various high tech computer programs to filter the true colors out utterly and while we're at it we'll have to carbon date the jockey shorts for trace evidence and wait months for the results to prove nothing, or we could look at the photo strip more carefully and notice that the background is a reproduction of trees and sky which, for our purposes, are brown, green and blue, which gives us a simple register with which to compare the jacket and we observe that the branches are very dark, the leaves are much lighter and the intermittent sky, which is lighter still, about the same shade as the jacket, ergo blue. There you have it. An hounds tooth tweed is a light woolen pattern suitable for the California climate, the style is correct down to the sunglasses case in the left breast pocket. Of course the truly characteristic button hole tag on the left lapel is snipped away carefully, thus kept out of frame. No hat.