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Elizabeth Short's murder in January 1947 has generated a seemingly endless parade of wild suspects.

Who killed the young woman known as the Black Dahlia and left her bisected body in a

weedy lot in Limerd Park? Depending on the book you pick up, the killer was a bellhop, or maybe

a Skidro alcoholic, or maybe a venereal disease doctor. Other books make the case for the gangster

Bugsy Siegel or the filmmaker Orson Wells.

Short was a child of the Depression, a Boston native who'd come to Southern California to pursue a man,

and when the relationship ended, she drifted between friends and temporary lodgings,

hustling for meals and inventing stories to win sympathy.

She was homeless and jobless when she died at age 22.

Weirdly, one of the suspects' police originally found most promising was somehow memory-holed by history.

Despite the massive ink spilled on the case, the name Marvin

Margolis has had a minuscule presence on the lists of potential killers, until recently that is.

The condition of her body led police to speculate that her killer possessed surgical skill. Her body

had been drained of blood and left in two parts and neatly severed between the second and third

lumbar vertebrae, right where it was most efficient to do so. Margolis was 21 years old at the time,

and he was not a surgeon, but he was taking pre-med classes at USC with

ambitions of becoming a surgeon. In World War II, he'd worked as a naval corpsman during the

battle of Okinawa and was bitter that the military had not allowed him to pursue surgery.

He'd lived with Shorten Hollywood a few months before her death.

Well, when they first bring him in, he lies.

He says, I only knew her from outings, you know, clubs around the area.

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