After bouncing from Massachussetts to California to Florida over the previous few years, Short finally landed in Los Angeles sometime in 1946. Her first known residence in the greater metropolitan area was this downtown Long Beach hotel, where she was put up for roughly two weeks by Gordon Fickling, an Army Air Force lieutenant. “He was probably living on the military base, but he got her an apartment for awhile,” says Cooper, who indicates the two were romantically involved. “I think it might have been like a short-term hotel, beach hotel type place.”

While the building at 53 Linden Avenue still exists, the neighboring drugstore where customers dubbed Short the “Black Dahlia” (a play on the 1946 film The Blue Dahlia) due to her jet-black hair and habit of wearing black clothing, is unfortunately long gone.

The surviving images from Short’s amateur photo shoot at this oft-filmed high school in Los Feliz have long fed the idea of her supposed Hollywood aspirations. But Cooper says the casual nature of the photographs suggests Short was merely having a little fun.

“She’s posing in the way that a pretty woman would pose, not the way that a would-be actress would pose,” she says. “They’re not closeups... they’re landscape shots. She’s in the environment. If you look at images, for example, of Marilyn Monroe when she was first starting out... it’s much more she is the centerpiece of that photo. And that’s the kind of photograph that you might show to an agency.”

Short crashed for a short time in a residence located behind Hollywood’s Florentine Gardens nightclub, both owned by wealthy businessman (and confirmed lothario) Mark Hansen.

“My sense is that it was like a bungalow, house-type thing which had a number of bedrooms,” says Cooper. “It was just sort of a backstage area [where] the women who worked at the Gardens hung out and watched television.” Short was fond of hanging out in Hollywood’s trendiest night spots, so it’s assumed she spent time inside the Gardens, which opened in 1938 and was designed by architect Gordon Kaufmann.

In September 1946, Short stayed for a brief period in this now-revamped hotel that opened in 1926 as a safe haven for solo women travelers. It is here where she engaged in a brief affair with an unidentified U.S. Army soldier, an episode that was outlined in Short’s FBI file.

An 800 Degrees Pizzeria and a Kabuki Japanese Restaurant now occupy the site of the former Tom Breneman’s, a popular eatery that hosted broadcasts of the eponymous host’s wildly-popular radio series Breakfast in Hollywood. According to the soldier whom Short met at the Figueroa, she was well-known enough by the Breneman’s staff to skip the line when the two stopped there for dinner.

Like so many LA newcomers, Short apparently enjoyed attending live tapings of broadcast shows, which, in those days, entailed a trip to CBS Columbia Square on Sunset Boulevard. “Different people who socialized with her talked about going to CBS to see broadcasted radio shows,” says Cooper. Designed by architect William Lescaze and completed in 1937, the building was recently renovated and now hosts the members-only co-working space NeueHouse Hollywood.

This anonymous apartment building on Cherokee (once known as the Chancellor) is one of Short’s final known residences. While there, she shared a unit with several other women “who were all living in bunk beds,” says Cooper.

Short left LA sometime in the late fall of 1946 for San Diego, where she ended up briefly rooming with the family of a woman she met at an all-night movie theater. When Short returned to Los Angeles on January 9, it was in the company of Robert “Red” Manley, a young (and married) traveling salesman who had picked her up on a San Diego street corner.

The story from here grows convoluted. Suffice it to say, after dropping Short’s luggage at a nearby Greyhound station, Short and Manley landed at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel, where Short claimed to be meeting her sister (a lie in order to shake her would-be paramour). In an apparent attempt at chivalry, Manley refused to leave Short’s side until her sister arrived, only relenting after waiting with her for several hours in the hotel’s ornate lobby.

When Short finally departed the Biltmore, the Downtown streets were dark and more dangerous, particularly for a young woman alone. “If [Manley had] just dropped her at the Greyhound station, she would’ve been alone in daylight, she would’ve done something different,” says Cooper. “Maybe she wouldn’t have died.”

Multiple eyewitnesses claim to have spotted Short at this now-defunct bar and restaurant on the night of January 9, which would make it the last place she was seen alive. Located at Eighth and Olive, the venue’s reputation as a gay nightspot made it the perfect place for clandestine meetings with a secret lover. It is believed Short accompanied friend and sometime-roommate Ann Toth here on dates with Toth’s married boyfriend. Says Cooper: “If you don’t want to be seen by your wife or any of her friends, or you don’t want anyone to say anything, you go to a gay bar Downtown.”

To get a feel for what the Crown Grill may have been like, Cooper suggests dining at the Italian restaurant Colori Kitchen, which is located on the site of the former establishment (along with a Dunkin Donuts and dive bar Ham & Eggs).

On the morning on January 15, 1947, Short’s bisected body was discovered by local resident Betty Bersinger in a grassy, vacant lot in Leimert Park located at what is now 3825 Norton Avenue. As Cooper notes, the careful positioning of the corpse in a residential neighborhood was clearly designed to terrorize Angelenos.

“A more typical crime of that time, you know, a woman may be taken somewhere remote and be killed and abandoned, that’s not what happened to her,” says Cooper. “The body was left in the most prominent place imaginable. Somebody who put the body there knew that people walked the sidewalks and that she would be found.”

While Short herself likely never entered the headquarters of Hearst-owned newspapers the Los Angeles Examiner and the Los Angeles Herald-Express (which later merged to form the Herald Examiner), the papers were key players in reporting early developments in the case. “That’s where the majority of the investigation done by the media was happening,” says Cooper. “They devoted more energy to figuring out who she was than anyone.”

As documented in his extensive blog, former LA Times columnist Larry Harnisch pegs LA surgeon Dr. Walter Bayley as the most likely suspect in Short’s murder. Harnisch backs up his theory by citing a number of compelling factors, including Bayley’s career as a prominent surgeon; his deteriorating mental state around the time of Short’s murder; a home address located just one block from where Short’s body was discovered; and, most pertinently, a connection to Short through his daughter Barbara Lindgren (an apparent acquaintance of Short’s sister Virginia). Additionally, his private practice was located at 1052 West 6th Street, only a few blocks from the Biltmore Hotel.

Harnisch is currently writing a book on the case.