Emerging clues may shine a new light on Hollywood’s darkest tale: the shocking 1947 death of Elizabeth Short. On January 15, 1947, an aspiring 22-year-old actress named Elizabeth Short was found brutally murdered in a vacant lot near Leimert Park in Los Angeles, California, her nude, posed body cut in half and severely mutilated. “It was pretty gruesome,” Brian Carr, a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department who worked on Short’s case, later said. It was an understatement; Short’s killer had also drained her corpse of blood and scrubbed it clean. “I just can’t imagine someone doing that to...