Opinion: Bronson Canyon murder, meet the Black Dahlia

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Sixty-five years before that severed head turned up in Bronson Canyon, and about eight miles south, the most famous dismembered corpse in L.A. history was found.

‘Girl Victim of Sex Fiend Found Slain’ was the L.A. Times headline, the first of scores of headlines.

The victim was a woman named Elizabeth Short, who survives in crime lore as the Black Dahlia.

A bunch of dogs on a walk found the severed head in Bronson Canyon; a woman walking to a nearby shoe repair shop found Elizabeth Short’s body.

That woman was named Betty Bersinger -– ‘Mrs. John Bersinger’ in the style that newspapers used then for married women -– and not until I was talking to my colleague Andrew Blankstein about his accounts of the Bronson Canyon body parts case did I remember:

As a Times intern, I once interviewed Betty Bersinger for one of those occasional check-in stories that city editors love to assign on the still-unsolved Black Dahlia case. [My colleague Larry Harnisch has made a serious study of the case.]

Betty Bersinger told me she hadn’t ‘thought of that for years,’ and I can’t blame her. Who would want to have that image taking up residence front and center in your cranium for the rest of your life -– the body cut in half and lying unclothed in an empty lot, with a thatch of winter grass sprouting between the halves, the body gashed and hacked.

The Bersingers had lived in the Leimert Park house for four or five years, and Betty Bersinger was pushing her young daughter in a stroller to the shoe repair shop in a shopping center, walking through a place where ‘kids rode their bikes,’ when she saw … something.

‘At the time I wasn’t quite aware it was a real person -– maybe somebody playing a trick.’

When she realized it was no trick, it was ‘so frightening,’ a corpse lying ‘separated, like you’d expect a mannequin to be.’ She thought the sight of it would frighten her daughter, so she hustled her along, and from the second house she came across, she made the call that started the enduring notoriety of the Dahlia case.

At the time, any reasonably good-looking single young woman within a 20-mile radius of the studios could be tagged with the descriptor ‘’starlet,’’ which is how the FBI website still identifies her.

It became so infamous that even men who weren’t born at the time of the killing confessed to it; in the grotesque status hierarchy of the criminal world, the Dahlia murder was at the top of the homicidal heap.

One reader letter arrived from a man who had been in medical practice at the time of the 1947 murder, and who expressed his ‘astonishment’ that the police had let one major suspect go. The doctor had treated the man and at the time had assured detectives that he was indeed the killer. He wrote to suggest that I try to get my hand on the patient’s hospital records from decades before.

Many unsolved murders –- and a few solved ones -– have cranked up their own cottage industry of experts and amateurs, but few as much as the Dahlia.

As we learned again from the Bronson Canyon body-parts story, which conflated the location and the gruesomeness to make for a ‘’grisly Hollywood murder’’ in worldwide news accounts, there’s something about a dismembered human body -– even the word ‘dismembered’ -– that carries equal weights of the horrific and the irresistible in the imagination.

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-- Patt Morrison