Early one winter morning, a mother out walking her young child saw something strange in a vacant lot. She thought it was something bad, and so she hurried to a nearby house and called the police. The cops arrived and found the body of Elizabeth Short, who would become infamously known as the Black Dahlia. It was 1947. The place was Los Angeles.

The Black Dahlia murder shocked the city. It was a combination of the victim and the crime. Elizabeth Short was a beautiful, young white woman whose future had been annihilated. She had been brutally tortured and posthumously mutilated.

The media scrambled to tell the story. Thanks to FBI fingerprint technology, the victim’s name was soon made public. Elizabeth Short hailed from Medford, Massachusetts. She was 22 years old.

In the new book, Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood, historian William J. Mann offers a new take on this much parsed-over crime. He proceeds from an important point: the Black Dahlia murder has become a “myth.”

The myth is that the murdered woman was “a sex worker, a gangster’s moll, or a movie extra yearning to become Lana Turner.” In fact, Elizabeth Short was a young woman who wanted to see more of the world than her hometown offered. She had suffered abuse from her father and dreamed of making a new........

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