Severed

"The most satisfying and disturbing conclusion to the Black Dahlia case. After reading SEVERED, I feel like I truly know Elizabeth Short and her killer. " --David Lynch

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 multi-layered mystery of this archetypal Los Angeles slaying, having begun his painstaking investigations into the case over thirty-five years ago.

With his hard-boiled, yet hauntingly evocative prose, Gilmore tells several previously unrevealed stories at once, each filled with its own bizarre elements which transcends the true crime genre. One is the tale of victim Elizabeth Short, small-town beauty queen with big hopes who seemed to float through her tragically futile life, already an alluring yet doom-laden enigma. Another is the tangled inside story of the police investigation and remorseless Hearst-stoked press hoopla which 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. SEVERED contains a thirty-two page photo section with many never-before-published photos from the life of Elizabeth Short and from the case, including graphic crime scene and postmortem police photos.