Black Dahlia Case May Have Major Break After Bloodstain Found in Old LA Motel

For more than eight decades, the murder of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, better known as the Black Dahlia case, has lingered as one of the darkest unsolved cases in American history.

Now a filmmaker says new findings could put the decades-old mystery back under fresh scrutiny. Jeff Thomas and producer Kimberly Lupini of Talestorm Productions say their years-long investigation for the film has done what generations of detectives could not.

Digging back into one of the most picked-over cold cases in American history, Thomas believes a single buried secret, and blood hidden behind an old Los Angeles motel wall, could crack it open.

“We believe we know who the killer is,” Thomas said in an interview with People published Wednesday, July 1. “We believe we know where the murder was committed. We believe we know what the murder weapon was.”

Thomas said that while studying the case for the documentary, a tip eventually led his group, which he calls The Deconstructing Team, to a specific motel.

He described it only as “an open and operational motel in Los Angeles that has been there since the 40s.”

The team also obtained thousands of pages of case files that had never been made public.

Thomas now believes that these records could help them trace possible movements connected to both the killer and Short. “A lot of these reports give us a great idea of the comings and goings of the killer, but also of Elizabeth Short as well,” Thomas told the outlet.

According to him, those details became even more significant once the team examined the room with an LAPD agent in 2022. “Every place in the files of where eyewitnesses saw blood is where we found blood in the room,” he said.

The investigation became the basis for the upcoming docuseries Deconstructing Dahlia, which does not yet have a release date.

Thomas said the project was driven by a desire “to help try to bring some type of closure for this victim and also for her family.”

He also stressed that the series is not meant to simply revisit the killing. “This is not a documentary about Elizabeth’s murder,” Thomas told the outlet. “It’s an investigation into what happened to deconstruct it starting off with that one piece of information that we had.”

According to official FBI records, Short’s body was discovered in the Leimert Park area of Los Angeles on Wednesday, January 15, 1947. Her body lay just feet from the sidewalk, severed at the waist and marked by a Glasgow smile, both corners of her mouth cut toward her ears. The absence of any blood, despite the gruesome scene, led the FBI to conclude she had been killed elsewhere.

Now, years later, Thomas’ team is hoping to break the LAPD’s silence and publicly release the autopsy report. They have set up a petition on Change.org titled “Justice for Elizabeth” and are calling on the public to sign.

Thomas believes the transparency could lead to justice for the Short family, which has been long overdue. The team has successfully received 2,312 verified signatures.