Sisters in Death: The Black Dahlia, the Prairie Heiress, and Their Hunter

In January 1947, the bisected body of Elizabeth Short was discovered in an undeveloped lot in Los Angeles, completely drained of blood. The gruesome mutilations sparked widespread publicity, city-wide panic, and numerous LAPD investigations, all of which led nowhere. The Black Dahlia murder remained unsolved for over seventy years. Six years earlier, sixteen hundred miles away, another woman died in similarly horrific circumstances. Leila Welsh, an educated and socially connected woman raised on a Kansas prairie but heiress to her family's Kansas City wealth and status, was found butchered in her bedroom in 1941. While one victim faded into obscurity, the other became notorious. Eli Frankel, an award-winning producer and true-crime researcher, draws on newly discovered documents, law enforcement files, interviews with surviving participants, victims' letters, trial transcripts, and military records to connect these cases. He reveals a previously undisclosed key fact about the Black Dahlia crime scene that leads to the identification of a killer linked to both murders. This account closes the cold case and solves the greatest murder mystery of the twentieth century.