Los Angeles, The Black Dahlia, James Ellroy and Brian De Palma: “You would rather fuck me than kill me.”

Her body was found cut clean in half. On her back, in the dirt, her arms raised above her head in an almost perverse victory salute. Her mouth extended by a 10-centimetre gouge, giving up a grotesque clown-like smile.

The lower half of her body was lying 30-centimetres from her upper torso. Her legs were broken, spread like a sex doll. She was drained of blood. Her intestines were missing. So were many facts. But one thing was sure: Betty Short met a messy, almost unspeakable, end.

Elizabeth Short’s broken body was discovered in a vacant Los Angeles lot on January 15, 1947. Almost 60 years later, cops are still clueless as to who killed the 22-year-old want-to-be actress. That lack of resolution has added to her death being one of the most headline-grabbing murders of the 20th century: The Black Dahlia.

Short’s murder was a case with few clues but many questions. For cops, the first mystery was the identity of the victim. Battered and apparently tortured before her life was brutally snuffed out, the FBI needed fingerprints to put the name Elizabeth Short to the corpse.

They got the juice. She was originally from the east coast, near Boston. A Gone With The Wind fan, the film was maybe the…