Black Dahlia
Severed: The True Story Of The Black Dahlia Murder...continued
He also has a personal link to the Dahlia case. Gilmore writes that he met Short in late 1946 when he was 11, and she visited his grandmother's house to inquire about the "Short" side of his family. She was "dressed in black, including black gloves. Her face was patted over with a kid of white, almost Geisha-like powder and her lipstick was blood red. She talked to me about magic — one of my childhood interests — and I shared with her my posters of famous magicians I had seen at L.A.'s Shrine Auditorium and elsewhere."
A few months later, his father would be part of the fleet of cops that fanned across the neighborhood where her body was dumped to ask residents if they'd heard "screams" and show them a composite sketch of her face printed by the coroner's office.
Now, his suspect: Gilmore contends that Short's killer was Jack Anderson Wilson, an alcoholic drifter and petty criminal. A gawky 6'4 cripple who walked with a marked limp, Wilson was 27 at the time of the murder. His long rap sheet included sodomy, robbery and lewd behavior.
When Gilmore arranged to meet Wilson at a Los Angeles bar, Wilson blamed the murder on another man, then proceeded to tell Gilmore what this mystery man had done to Short in explicit terms. Gilmore soon intuited that Wilson the murderer were one and the same man. He became even more certain of his hunch after Wilson showed him a box that contained several of Short's belongings, including a photo of herself with Wilson. (Gilmore awkwardly refers to himself "the informant" when writing about his contact with the suspect.)
