Some crimes present investigators with an obvious starting point. Somebody shoots another person during an argument. A robbery goes wrong. A jealous lover has an obvious motive. Others become labyrinths of statements, suspects and forensic clues, leaving police to determine which pieces matter and which lead nowhere.
Then there are murders like the killing of Louise Springer.
Nothing in Springer’s life suggested she was in danger. She had a husband, a young son, a successful career and no known enemies. On the night of June 13, 1949, she sat inside the family Studebaker in a busy, well-lit Los Angeles parking lot while her husband stepped away for a few minutes.
When he returned, his wife and the car had vanished.
Three days later, police found the Studebaker abandoned on a residential street. Louise was still inside. She had been strangled with clothesline and subjected to a grotesque act of postmortem sexual violence involving a 14-inch tree branch.
Los Angeles immediately thought of another murdered brunette.
Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, had been found mutilated less than two and a half years earlier, only a short distance from the area where Springer disappeared. Newspapers began asking whether the same killer had struck again. LAPD detectives openly considered the possibility.
Yet behind the lurid headlines was an even stranger mystery. Whoever killed Louise Springer seems to have entered the car, subdued or surprised her without attracting attention, murdered her without leaving obvious signs of a struggle, driven away in an unfamiliar vehicle and abandoned it within roughly an hour.
Then he disappeared.
