July 5, 1937

John Gilmore's father was one of the Los Angeles Police Department officers investigating the gruesome murder of starlet wannabe Elizabeth Short in 1947. Gilmore, born on Jyly 5, 1937, had a successful career as a writer of true-crime accounts before he finished researching his own investigation into the killing of the woman who became known as The Black Dahlia. Gilmore says we will never know for sure who the murderer was. His own accomplishment he says was to focus on who the victim was. So he includes in his Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia (1994) details like this, which quotes a fellow party-goer of Short's:

I disliked the man she came to the party with -- he chased a cat off the arm of the sofa by blowing cigar smoke in its eyes.

"One can see the origins of the blood-fueled feeding frenzy rituals surrounding subsequent high profile victims...in the hypocritical newspaper flogging of the deceased Elizabeth Short." the book says, and Gilmore
supports this apercu with details such as that, during the investigation, reporters hung around the police station and grabbed phones ringing on cops' desks. If someone was reporting a clue, then the reporter might well not give the police the message in his hurry to follow up the clue himself, in hopes of a scoop.