Can This Dog Solve the Black Dahlia Homicide?

One of the nation’s most gruesome unsolved murders now has a canine on the case—and Buster has sniffed out a clue that points to his colleague’s father. Christine Pelisek reports.

Now, almost 70 years after 22-year-old Elizabeth Short was found posed and mutilated in a downtown Los Angeles parking lot, her throat slit and her body sliced in half at the waist and drained of blood, one man and his dog think they may have sniffed out a clue.

No one has ever been charged with the gruesome slaying, despite years of police work, nearly 50 discredited confessions, and intense media attention—heck, there was even a movie. Original detective files have long been destroyed; theories linking the case to the Cleveland Torso Murders of the late 1930s and the Lipstick Killer murders in 1940s Chicago have come up short.

The most intriguing theory, though, may be the one posited by Steve Hodel, whose says his own father did the deed.

Hodel, a crime writer and former LAPD detective who has written two books about the Black Dahlia case (a nickname bestowed by the tabloid press), is convinced that his father, George Hodel, a surgeon, killed Short after a romance between the two turned ugly. He also believes his father killed close to a dozen women in the 1940s in his Hollywood home and then gruesomely posed them in different locales around the city.

The elder Hodel, it has been revealed, was indeed a suspect in the Short murder, but his son says he was never caught out of a combination of high-powered friends (who may have had dirt on the police) and inept detective work. The LAPD never closed the case, but they’re not actively pursuing it either.

Enter the dog.

more here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/03/can-this-dog-solve-the-black-dahlia-homicide.html