A photograph framed by Elizabeth Short Luce, on the bite, in one of the halls of the Biltmore hotel in Los Angeles. It is considerably large and surrounds it snapshots of other celebrities who, unlike shorts, were in life. Gloria Swanson, Shirley Temple, Judy Garland. In the image, Short, who was sectioned in two by his murderer in 1947, smiles. Under the portrait, I know presume that “they left her in the Biltmore – a subject without specifying – to meet with her sister, who visited her from Boston.” Also, that the hotel staff remembered having seen it “using the hall of the lobby before its disappearance.” Of course, next to its name appears the name that deleted it. The nickname that made the 22 -year -old girl disappeared who never went to pick up her luggage to the bus station because someone crossed her way, killed her and dismembered her: Black Dalia. The protagonist of tours Holistic for the city and an endless collection of theories.
The Biltmore is not a motel from three to the room. It is a luxurious enclave in which, according to tourist guides, the first outline of the Oscar statuette was made. And it was done in no less than a linen napkin. But all in this story, like everything in angels, is pure mirage, or fiction that is intended made. Elizabeth Short arrived accompanied by Red Manley, a commercial of red -haired pipes, on January 9, 1947, and only made a couple of calls. With luck, he also used the bath, says Beatriz García Guirado (Badalona, 41 years old), the writer who last year traveled to Los Angeles to take the pulse to the legend, the mystery that, “like a spider web,” catches everyone who approaches the account, irremediably changing life. Suartefacto literary The favorite dead girl of everything s (KO books) makes it very clear, because it is not limited to updating the case, but at the same time it tracks and “decosifies” the victim, tries to try to understand The mystery.
How do you do it? Part of the investigations of a real writer of the present called Larry Harnisch, who has been working in a book on the case, a kind of “Quixote of the 21st century” determined to demonstrate that there “where everyone sees giants” there is only “stupid mills”, and that it meets monthly through its YouTube channel with their followers, amateur researchers and obsessed with the case like him. Harnisch has traveled to each corner related to the crime, from the place where the body was found, in the South Norton Avenue, to the lavish Museum of Death, in which someone has made Un Warhol con Beth Shorta screen printing of bright colors with the repeated face of the victim. But in his Harnisch reconstructions he also travels in time, in order to rebuild the moment in which he occurred to fit the pieces, so that his readers can elaborate his own theory and passionate about it.
Beatriz García Guirado’s story, built with a pulse hard-boiled high, accounts for a context in which journalism misinforms, elucubra, Sensation From data that were never data, but assumptions or direct errors. “There are countless names, typographic errors, nothing is reliable,” says the writer, who believes that at that time when the journalism of events was a spectacle “everything was worth.” The book contains juicy details based on all the theories refuted by Harnisch, among which George Hodel’s shines, whose son, Steve has been trying to convince the world that his father and Man Ray turned the murder into a work of art to which an infinity of other creators have “winking his eye” since then. Hodel was a surgeon, lived in the sinister Sowden House of Frank Lloyd Wright and was a fan of Baudelaire. Short’s body was drained all his blood, cut a chest and introduced meat from the thigh in his vagina.
But the author does not limit himself to exploring the crime. Through that story, García Guirado also psychoanalyzes the city of Los Angeles, which more than a city considers “a mental state.” “I promised Larry that I would not try to solve the crime, and I have not done it. Although I am clear that it was a feminicide, for more theories that there could be a woman, and even confessions. There was a time when, it is said, the police hung a sign to make the guilty assumptions through another door: there were 316 suspects, including 19 confessed to having done so. It is also possible that there was more than one involved and that one of them knew it; If not, there would not have been that tenderness, ”says García Guirado, while passing a handful of black and white photographs of his mother -” to which the press forced the pose receiving the alleged call in which they first told her that her daughter had won a beauty prize to get information and then confessed that she had died ” – and a lot of other protagonists, who took the archives of John Gilmore, the author of John Gilmore, the author of John Gilmore, the author of John Gilmore. Severedthe first true crime On the case, published in 1994, and that fascinated David Lynch, one of the most illustrious researchers in the event.
The favorite dead girl of all
Beatriz García Guirado
KO books, 2025
The case has permeated the American culture and the fictional culture of the crime without remedy, and obsessively. It is not just that the dark genius of the writer James Ellroy leads, from the murder of his own mother in the same angels, turning the subject, and that he would publish the most famous novel about the case – Black Dalia-, that Brian Depalma led to the cinema. Is that Michael Connelly has put the daughter of its detective Harry Bosch, Maddie, to investigate the case in Waithis latest novel – with a result, in the words of the fact-checker Larry Harnisch, disastrous not in regard to the quality of the novel, but to the likelihood of the theory it throws. Lynch himself has done anything other than giving surroundings around Elizabeth Short – especially in Lost road— Since, as García Guirado tells, he met one of the researchers and he showed him a photograph of the body made with flash; Therefore, during the night, that is, a photograph of the murderer.
Which The favorite dead girl of all He contributes is not so much new light on the victim – who is still a mystery, “she was a girl without much pasta, with a worry gothic appearance, who lived in Los Angeles, and on which he has fabulated everything, but of which nothing is known in reality, not even if she wanted to be an actress,” says the writer – as on those who, since the body was found, threw themselves over him to take a game. What has been called “the detective of the crowd”, or the humanity that understands the victim as entertainment. “The victim is just what he needs a crime to get going. He forgets it with a veryy ease, ”says García Guirado. I know the strength, like a character in a plot, to fit in as many versions of history as narrators exist. “In the case of Black Dalia, fiction has eaten the facts, I don’t think it is ever resolved,” he adds. And as a legend, mystery, necromito Gazether, it will try hunt to curious and lock them in your maze forever.