Cracking the Black Dahlia Code
Los Angeles is an abstraction. An Hollywoodland, where the very streets spin, and dodge and dance, up, down, and around the hills, and in, and out of the canyons like crazed damselfish. All our comfortable Cartesian order is bent, and subuducted in the shimmering summer haze, or forgotten on foggy winter nights. It's easy to get lost in L.A. The Big Tarpit has taken in all comers for four hundred years now, only a few have ever escaped from it's infernal corners. The terminator, one end of the line that would cut poor Betty Short right in two as it passed on right through her hacked, naked body, and continues, dead down east, as the crow flies, from her dumpsite in a vacant lot a bit North of 39th. & Norton to S. 24th. St. & S. Alameda St., a place called Clement Junction. The other end of the Black Dahlia line.
The Hollywood Sign
The Elizabeth Short Show premiered early in the morning of Jan. 15th., 1947, when her surgically-severed carcass, drained of all it's blood, sadistically mutilated, tortured and toyed with, was positioned with the utmost of care and mathematical precision in that vacant lot. A moving picture show, but Betty wasn't moving anymore, she was just a place now, part of the scenery, X marks the spot.
"What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died, or where you fell."--Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939).
Well, she didn't exactly fall there. She had been killed elsewhere and her body was transported, probably in a car, to the dizoma, where the dead Dahlia diarama dallies in the Dallis grass, damonosa hereditas. A short life and a cruel fate for Betty, to wind up as that most Californian of all dwellings, the duplex. An house sub-divided. Let's see, even address are on West side of the street, the odd numbers to the east...Let's call her 3839 A. & B. Norton Ave. and while we're at it let's get her up-to-date map coordinates for her ghostly GPS:
Latitude: 34.01149/Longitude: -118.3330
The three rules of real estate are; location, location, location. The killer has given us one location, the one he wanted everyone to share with him, for reasons that hopefully soon will become apparent, we'll call it location #2, with location #1 being the actual crime scene where Beth was killed, which is unknown, and we may presume the killer does not want us to know, and location #3 which I discovered yesterday by placing a ruler over location #2 aligned east to west, and following it until I hit something solid, location #3. Clement Junction:
Latitude: 34.01149/Longitude: -118.212
La Reina de Los Angeles Queen of the Cow Counties
A coincidence out to the fifth decimal place? I wonder? Is it important? I think so, time will tell. How about this one? The Dalhia's purse and shoes were found at 1819 E. 25th. St. in Vernon, but don't be fooled, the Google map shows it to be immediately East of Clement Junction on an arc of 34°01'148" of latitude.
Latitude, which in this case means Clement, see? And clement means merciful, so have mercy on me, for I have begun still another look up. Show me some respect, and leave a comment below. Tell me what you think.
"Come to Los Angeles! The sun shines bright, the beaches are wide and inviting, and the orange groves stretch as far as the eye can see. There are jobs aplenty, and land is cheap. Every working man can have his own house, and inside every house, a happy, all-American family. You can have all this, and who knows... you could even be discovered, become a movie star... or at least see one. Life is good in Los Angeles... it's paradise on Earth." Ha ha ha ha. That's what they tell you, anyway." --James Ellroy, LA Confidential (1990).
7:11:52 PM
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