In January 1947, reporters phoned a mother in Boston to say her daughter had won a beauty contest in California. They pumped her for charming details, then dropped the act: there was no contest, and her daughter had been brutally murdered. That daughter was 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia.

This episode strips away decades of Hollywood mythmaking around Los Angeles’s most famous unsolved murder to look at the real human being at its center. It examines the media corruption that crippled the investigation and how a victim’s humanity was erased and replaced with a sensationalized character we still consume today.

• The hard life behind the ‘starlet’ myth: childhood illness, a father who faked his own suicide, and a fiance killed in a plane crash
• The surgical crime scene, including a hemicorporectomy that led police to suspect someone with medical training
• How the LA Examiner deceived and effectively held Short’s grieving mother captive for an exclusive scoop
• The true origin of the ‘Black Dahlia’ nickname from a Long Beach drugstore, not flowers in her hair
• The cruel, debunked myths about her personal life, and how 500 false confessions gave the real killer cover