Black Dahlia
"Camp Cutie"
From the beginning, Short's newfound relationship with her father was fraught with strife. She hadn't seen him for years. He was haunted by the regret. They were strangers living the same house, with clashing ideas of how things should be. Cleo Short expected his teenage daughter to serve him as a maid of sorts, cooking and keeping house. But Short was a free spirit who wanted nothing to do with domesticity.
She found a job in the mail room at Camp Cooke (now Vandenberg Air Force Base) in Lompoc, two and half hours north of Los Angeles. In the two black-and-white photographs taken for her civilian employee ID — in one she's facing the camera, in the other, she's in profile — she isn't smiling. Her unpainted lips are slightly parted and her abundant black hair looks uncombed. Nevertheless, the natural beauty radiating through the images is unmistakable. The photos on her ID card would mesmerize Examiner reporters after her corpse was found a few years later, and alert them that they were on to a fantastic story.
At Camp Cooke, Short was surrounded by entire regiments of lonely soldiers on the verge of being sent to war. She left a trail of erotic longing in her wake wherever she walked. The young men clamored for her attention, voted her "camp cutie," and told her she was movie star quality.
Her idyll came to an end a few months later, however, when she was arrested at a Santa Barbara bar for underage drinking, and shipped home to Medford.
