Built on the Bodies of Women: How the Black Dahlia Murder Established the Legacy of True Crime

Summary of the lecture:

On the morning of January 15, 1947, a passerby discovered the body of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short in a vacant lot in Southwest Los Angeles. In what has now become the stuff of legend, Short’s body had been carefully prepared and displayed for maximum impact. Her face had been sliced open from the corners of her mouth to her ears, leaving her with a too-wide gash of a smile, while her body had been cut cleanly in half. Her killer had inexplicably removed pieces of flesh from her breasts and thighs and positioned her lower body on top of her intestines, a foot away from the upper part of her body. Her hands were raised above her head, as if in surrender. She had been drained of blood and cleaned with gasoline, rendering it impossible to find any fingerprints. The separated body parts and the whiteness of the blood-drained body drew comparisons by both police and the public to a disassembled mannequin. This comparison is ironic because Short lost not just her life but her humanity that day. She became a doll with no history or identity of her own, a symbol for how female victims and true crime itself would be commodified and consumed in the decades to follow, and perhaps, above all else, a celebrity corpse.

 About the lecturer: Dr. Dahlia Schweitzer  

An associate professor and Film and Media Department chair at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York. Her latest book, Haunted Homes (Rutgers University Press, 2021), explores how haunted homes have become a prime stage for dramatizing anxieties about family, gender, race, and economic collapse. Her previous books include L.A. Private Eyes (Rutgers University Press, 2019), Going Viral: Zombies, Viruses, and the End of the World (Rutgers University Press, 2018), and Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer: Another Kind of Monster (Intellect, 2014). Dahlia has published articles in various academic journals, including Cinema Journal, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Jump Cut, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Journal of Popular Culture.

March 31, 2025, from 6:15 PM to 7:45 PM.