By February 1947, Los Angeles had begun to look like a city designed for disappearance. Its population had surged during the war, its streets spilled rapidly into undeveloped land and its newest neighborhoods ended abruptly in oil fields, drainage channels and vacant tracts where darkness arrived before the pavement did. A woman could leave a brightly lit restaurant and, within minutes, be somewhere no one would hear her scream.
The newspapers had already taught residents what might be waiting there. Less than four weeks earlier, the mutilated body of Elizabeth Short had been discovered beside a sidewalk in Leimert Park. Her murder had become a civic obsession, generating false confessions, taunting correspondence and increasingly frantic speculation about a sexual sadist loose in the city. Every unidentified man became suspicious. Every empty lot appeared capable of yielding another body.
Then, on the morning of February 10, a construction worker approaching a desolate patch of ground near Santa Monica Airport noticed a bundle of expensive-looking women’s clothing lying among the weeds. Beneath it was someone who had once crossed continents, flown aircraft and lived with a disregard for convention that had made her briefly famous. By the time police arrived, almost every recognizable part of that life had been stripped away.
What remained would be used to tell a different story about a “werewolf,” a message written on human skin and the possibility that Los Angeles had not one unsolved murderer, but a predator who had already decided to kill again.
