UNSOLVED HOMICIDES & MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCES OF WOMEN IN LOS ANGELES DURING THE 1940s

On January 15, 1947, Betty Bersinger, a Leimert Park homemaker, found the body of a young woman in the weeds of a vacant lot on S. Norton Avenue.

The woman was nude, bisected and obscenely posed. Within a few days the victim was identified as twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short. We know her now as the Black Dahlia. Hers is the most notorious unsolved homicide in the city's history.

It wasn’t only the homicides that puzzled and frustrated the police. In 1949, two high-profile disappearances made headlines.

In August, Mimi Boomhower, a 48-year-old socialite, told her business manager she was going to meet a gentleman. No one ever saw her again.

Two months later 26-year-old actress Jean Spangler left her mid-Wilshire home to meet with her ex-husband to discuss an increase in child support for their daughter. She told her sister-in-law that following the meeting with her ex-; afterward she was going to a night shoot for a new film. She vanished.

Join me for an in-depth examination of the unsolved murders of Ora Murray, Georgette Bauerdorf, Jeanne French, and Elizabeth Short, and the mysterious disappearances of Mimi Boomhower and Jean Spangler.

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