Posted on 04/24/2026 7:04:08 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
Sitting on bench seats in a retrofitted old hearse, stuck in quintessentially choked Los Angeles highway traffic, I listened to a woman narrate the macabre details of an 80-year-old murder.
The guide, Blaze Lovejoy—whose business card identified her as a “dark storyteller” and “Manson specialist”—had already driven us through Hollywood. Now she was bringing us to downtown Los Angeles, the heart of this particular darkness. Lovejoy wore combat boots with flames across the toes and had a microphone headset on, her British accent giving the narration a Vincent Price vibe: “A Hollywood dream turned to a real-life nightmare, with a grim homicide!”
I was one of a handful of paying customers for Grave Line Tours and its drive-by greatest hits of the last moments of Elizabeth Short, the so-called Black Dahlia, a young woman whose final days and murder in January 1947 is the Book of Genesis for American true crime. Her killing, unimaginably brutal and enigmatic, spawned years of movies, novels, and nonfiction books attempting to piece together a dozen different overlapping theories and conspiracies about who might be responsible.
In my adolescence, the Black Dahlia story also ensnared me. I fell in love with crime fiction—I grew up in New England as Dennis Lehane was dropping classics like Gone, Baby, Gone and Mystic River—and was at the perfect age for L.A. Confidential, the 1997 Oscar-winning film adaptation of James Ellroy’s novel. I devoured Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet of novels soon after. The first in that set? 1987’s The Black Dahlia, which sent my own fascination with a bygone Los Angeles toward the killing that had immortalized it most.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
For fans of True Crime stories...
This one fascinated me as well. I don’t think he quit after this as there are several other murders not exactly like this in this time period.
Meandering but interesting. Thanks for posting.
The ‘tour’ started at an entertainment center complex where the HS couple were on a date and were abducted by a person they knew of from school. The ‘tour’ ended at two crosses next a road in the river bottoms.
Testimony at the murder trial was each of the two kids killed knew of the person from school and did not like him.
The first point of the ‘tour’ was that if you did not like a person during daylight, you really will not like them in nighttime.
The second point were Crime scenes #1 & #2…a person has to fight with everything they have to not be taken to Crime Scene #2.
The two crosses are no longer there in the river bottoms, but the facts remain forever.
The article claims they are the same guy. They quote retired LAPD detective, Rick Jackson, a man I went to school with, and trust.
Good post. The article was a good read. I’ve read a lot about the Short murder. My comment is that evil is territorial. And the PURE EVIL of this crime strikes me as much as trying to figure out the who.
During WWII there was a pilot in my Dad’s P-51 squadron who dated Short several times. The pilot and Short continued to correspond while the squadron was in India and Burma.
Because of that my Dad was always interested in her murder. I’ve followed the story and many of the twists and turns for a long time.
I found the TV series “I Am The Night” captivating.
trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcknCCOlH-E
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