L.A.’s Fatal Attraction : Angelenos have seen a fair share of captivating criminal acts. Beautiful victims and monstrous (or moneyed) suspects keep us enthralled. Yet few have the intrigue of the ‘Black Dahlia.’

Headlines scream. Much louder, at times, than sirens. And there the showdown begins.

A rite here in the Southland, far more regular than rain, ensures that no one is left without at least a supporting role. As press and police assume their opposing positions, the public settles in ringside.

Neither new to the scene nor out to pasture, the unruly child sensationalism shows no sign of ebbing. Not one to shrink from poised pen or telephoto lens, Los Angeles is once again in the throes of a circus as only this city could host it. Forever ready for its close-up.

The Southland has seen its share of captivating crimes. They waft in like starlets in show-stopping ball gowns, garnering a succession of trumpeting headlines--sexy ones, grisly ones, surreal ones, horrifyingly macabre ones. From Fatty Arbuckle’s deadly sex romp to the Tate-LaBianca murders, from the Hillside Strangler to the Nightstalker, L.A.’s cross streets and canyons echo with cautionary lore.

The more beautiful the victim, the more monstrous (or moneyed) the accused, the more tragic the twist of the American dream, the more rapt our collective attention.

The latest addition to the roster--the goings on in Department 103 at the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Building--is what Judge Lance A. Ito would like to contain as the “Simpson matter.”

Much of the critical writing about our incessant obsession focuses on how media tend to spin out of control, striving to further illuminate what is already blindingly spectacular.

And thus, this media-proclaimed “Trial of the Century,” supported by TV graphics worthy of movie-poster display, proves only this: The show inevitably will go on.

Just one glimpse from the not-too-distant past serves as proof: The mystery around one of L.A.’s most notorious murders--the heinous severing of Elizabeth Short, the “Black Dahlia”--still reverberates with its own matinee magnetism.

Whatever the motivation for that act, one thing is clear, says John Gilmore, author of the latest exploration of that much disputed crime:

“She encountered somebody who absolutely believed she had to die. And, in so doing, left this parcel on the doorstep of popular culture that we will never, ever, ever forget.”

*

They called her the Black Dahlia, and for nearly 50 years--until last June 12--hers was the Los Angeles Police Department’s “crown jewel” case: carefully guarded, glaringly high-profile and frustratingly unsolvable.

Jack Smith, the veteran Times columnist, was working rewrite at the Daily News that January morning in 1947 when an early police-beat call came in.

“Within the minute I had written what may have been the first sentence ever written on the Black Dahlia case,” he recalled years later. “My lead went pretty much like this: ‘The nude body of a young woman, neatly cut in two at the waist, was found early today on a vacant lot near Crenshaw and Exposition boulevards.’ ”

But when Smith opened the paper, he noted a small but significant addition--a beautiful placed between the a and the young.

“Our city editor, of course, no more knew what the unfortunate young woman had looked like than I did. But the lesson was clear. On the Daily News, at least, all young women whose nude bodies were found in two pieces on vacant lots were beautiful. I never forgot it.”

From evocative locale to enigmatic heroine, the components of a compelling drama were there.

“Her looks make the story, are part of the element of drama,” says Leslie Hope, professor of English at Los Angeles Valley College. Considering the case now, “It’s almost like an icon of our times--pinpointing the idea of date rape, domestic violence. If she were an older woman, or someone not as attractive, I don’t think the story would play just the same way.”

The Dahlia’s story came ready-fit. Born in Hyde Park, Mass., her mother and sisters abandoned by her father, Elizabeth Short made the trek across country to seek her fortune--although not quite certain of just what it might be, nor of the most direct route.

At 22, a natural beauty with sky-blue eyes and a cloud of jet hair ratted into a crown reminiscent of a blossom, Short took her nickname from a feature film of the day--”The Blue Dahlia.”

Armed with vague aspirations of becoming an actress, she fashioned herself accordingly--lipsticks in deep shades, dramatic hats, frothy though form-fitting dresses. Work somehow never materialized; to friends, her searches always appeared halfhearted.

The Dahlia easily made the acquaintance of men, in Hollywood or Downtown bars, who eagerly promised to make introductions, but the promises never held water. Nor did call-girl rumors that lingered long after she was gone. Undeniably, however, wherever she went she made an indelible impression. The perfect femme fatale .

*

“People are generally intrigued with aspects of high drama, deep drama, whether it is fact or fiction,” says Sherrie Mazingo, associate professor of journalism at USC. “And the higher and the deeper the elements of drama, the more we are drawn to it.

“I think it’s a little unfortunate,” she suggests, “but should the murder have been solved, it would take some of the dramatic sheen off this beautifully dramatic story.”

This drama--Short’s wandering trail, Hollywood aspirations, arresting looks and unspeakable demise--has tantalized many a Los Angeles mythologist and screenwriter, who have fleshed out the skeletal facts in myriad ways.

Her image has been ghosting John Gilmore for at least 40 years. His book, “Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder” (Zanja Press, 1994), is the latest in an ever-broadening circle that includes James Ellroy’s fictional reworking, “The Black Dahlia,” and John Gregory Dunne’s “True Confessions,” as well as numerous articles and think pieces purporting to solve the case.

Through years of police-record research, interviews and some old-fashioned gumshoe work, Gilmore professes to topple all other theories and to prove who indeed killed the Black Dahlia.

“The fascination stems from that girl’s body,” says Gilmore, 59, sitting in a quiet corner of a Hollywood Boulevard restaurant. Glowing above like some ever-waxing moon, the ubiquitous O.J. Simpson trial, audio muted, proceeds along its circuitous course.

“There really wasn’t any other story there,” Gilmore shrugs, the palms of his hands suspended like scales. “That’s where it all begins.”

Casually hip in corduroy blazer and work boots, his hair a cotton-white tsunami, Gilmore glances up periodically at the proceedings, alternating between talk about his book and re-creating the old boulevard stretched before him.

He did his share of pavement-pounding to find a publisher too. The larger houses “felt the book was too peculiar and idiosyncratic.” It is, he would quickly agree.

Berkeley-based Zanja Press released it as a quirky ‘zine-like trade paperback, cluttered with rambling, sometimes tangential testimonies, disquieting autopsy and police photographs, and moody, Raymond Chandler-style scenarios. And Gilmore wasn’t willing to compromise any of that--the story had to be told, he felt, in a manner as singular and unsettling as the murder itself.

An ex-actor who grew up in Silver Lake and now lives in Albuquerque, N.M., Gilmore came from a family of fringe industry types. His mother was a bit player at MGM who palled around with Jean Harlow; his father worked for Technicolor for a time.

He began work on his book in the early ‘60s as part of an ill-fated foray into film. Even after that project unraveled, he continued his investigation aided by an inside track: his father, one of many LAPD officers assigned to the case.

Yet even with that entree, Gilmore grew frustrated.

“The cops got cagey. They were not supposed to be talking about this thing,” he recalls. “And some of the people outside the force were so intimidated by the press and police that they would never talk to people about it.”

Before long, immersed in how equations wouldn’t square, how leads wandered into nowhere, Gilmore found himself as obsessed with the case as some of the detectives who had headed the investigation and ultimately thrown up their hands.

“There was nothing that I could learn from the newspapers. Because the cops wouldn’t give them leads, they had nowhere to go except to speculate. So they went wild with speculation.”

*

But something else fueled this search, beyond Gilmore’s police connection or native curiosity. A nagging recollection of an event that occurred a year before the Dahlia’s body peeked up among the weeds.

Gilmore, who at the time was 10 years old and living with his grandmother, Sarah Short, remembers a stranger who paid a visit one afternoon.

“My grandmother took in boarders,” Gilmore carefully unfolds the memory. “And this boarder, an actor, brought a young woman over who wanted to discuss her relationship with the Shorts. And . . . looking back at all this, I realize this was Elizabeth Short, who was trying to trace her father. The girl was there for a long time. I remember talking to her. I remember her very clearly.”

Soon after the murder made headlines, Gilmore’s father was put on the case. “He had these photographs of this girl’s face inside this portfolio. My grandmother made me promise that I would not tell my father that that person had been in the house. They thought that it might reflect badly and he would have gotten into trouble with the LAPD. ‘Why would a murder victim come to the house?’ ”

In “Severed,” Gilmore concludes that Short unwittingly slipped into the same orbit of a killer--a shadowy outcast who had taken a life at least once before. Extensive investigation pointed to a suspect--Jack Anderson Wilson, a.k.a. Arnold Smith--who died in a hotel fire before the police could take him in. To the LAPD, the case remains officially open.

At the time, the Gilmore family had its own theories, as did everyone else. Around the city, speculation was popping like flashbulbs. And like the carloads of curious who now make their trek to a pair of suddenly infamous Brentwood streets, families would idle in front of an otherwise nondescript lot on Norton Avenue, wild with weeds.

“There was all kinds of talk . . . extremely colorful conversation about murder,” Gilmore recalls. “There were always spinoffs from the newspapers, pretty soon you have full concepts about things that weren’t even related to the truth whatsoever.”

What was needed was cooperation--but press and police chafed at the notion of alliance.

“The newsmen went on a lot of rumor and very little stuff that had to do with actual fact. And some of them outright lied about some of their involvement and really glamorized what they did.”

One of the more horrendous tales in “Severed” is how Los Angeles Examiner reporter Wain Sutton locked up an exclusive phone interview with the victim’s mother. Editor Jimmy Richardson concocted a cruel ruse: Tell the mother her daughter had won a beauty contest, and that he was calling for background.

Deed done, Sutton remembers, “It was time to bring the charade to a close and tell the woman the truth. I did it smooth. I told her I had to make sure I was talking to the right person . . . and I did in fact have some news. . . .’ ”

Not long before she died, veteran Herald Express reporter Aggie Underwood--who stood on that vacant lot during the first hours of sun that January morning--offered not a defense but this explanation: “A good story is a good story. And you fill the holes with putty if you can’t make it hold together.”

Neal Gabler, biographer of gossip columnist and agitator Walter Winchell, underscores how inexorably one force feeds another.

“It’s what the public expects and what the press provides,” he says. “I think there are some basic desires on the part of readers; they want certain things out of the breadth of the coverage,” following tangents and side issues wherever they lead.

In the Simpson case, Gabler notes, “Once the story became a story, it just picked up more and more speed. It’s more than a train. . . . God knows what it is.”

*

For the Black Dahlia, what hovers in the balance is a memory. An eerie form of fame.

“If that hadn’t happened to her, Elizabeth Short would just be another searching waif,” says Mark Humphrey of Zanja Press. “A victim of what they used to call, in the ‘40s, a bus murder. A random event that was very powerful.”

It was an event with an awesome trajectory nearly 50 years later as yet another generation of Angelenos becomes transfixed by the Dahlia’s allure. Halloween parties sometimes scare up a particularly bent reworking of Elizabeth Short. Local poets have written odes. Tattoos of her visage scar arms.

Stewart Swezey, owner of Amok Bookstore in Los Feliz, sees devotees walking into his store on the northern edges of Vermont. There, “Severed” is snapped up eagerly, while impromptu speculative sessions brew in the aisle.

“We get people who are, like, ‘Oh, I’m obsessed with the Black Dahlia,’ ” Swezey says. He tells of a clerk who conducted his own curiosity tour of sites revealed in Gilmore’s book, and of an artist who, upon spotting a woman of a certain age loitering in some dimly lit bar, would speculate quietly: “Do you think that woman knew the Dahlia?”

Graphic photos and the case’s unsolved status aside, Swezey surmises that the sustained interest in the Dahlia murder, and now in Gilmore’s book, has to do with an inherent nostalgia for anything remotely linked to Hollywood.

“It’s a glimpse at what Hollywood was like then, sorta seedy, sorta similar to now. . . . It’s become this symbol of glamour and sordidness--movie stars and night clubs--that intense vortex.”

Consequently, it might be the ultimate irony that a film is in the works (the last was a TV movie starring Lucie Arnaz as Dahlia). Further entrenching Short’s ineffaceable memory.

“The most important thing was not who killed the Black Dahlia, but who was the Black Dahlia,” says Alessandro Camon of Edward Pressman Films, who optioned Gilmore’s “Severed.” “There was a lot of blaming the victim; we never knew the real story. John’s book tries to tell the real story of who this person was.”

For Camon, it is a sociological and historical tableau, framed by the horror, that makes for a riveting story. “It is a murder that was sort of a litmus test of the social changes at the time. Like the Jack the Ripper murders, which occurred in the 1800s at the time women were gaining their independence--those murders were a reaction against that.”

And, too, Elizabeth Short’s symbolic significance does not fade. Her story fuels discussions about a range of social conundrums--violence against women, the responsibility of the press, snags and logjams in the legal system.

But, Gilmore says, focusing momentarily on the soundless TV hanging above, his voice losing momentum, slowed by the weight of the story.

“It’s the same situation,” he says, head gently listing toward the hovering screen.