Sorry if this is a bit macabre, but I’ve wondered about this every since I first read about it. The woman who was murdered in hollywood in 1947, the famous Black Dahlia murder case, supposedly had some sort of genital defect which made it impossible for her to have intercourse in the normal way. I just wondered if anybody out there knew what kind of a defect she supposedly had, since I previously didn’t know women could have such defects.
I believe she had an incomplete vagina, but I’m too busy to check right now. Knock yourself out at the Black Dahlia site!
Oh, and welcome to the SDMB.
According to John Gilmore in his book Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder, on the day of the autopsy, January 16th, Dr. Newbarr, the chief surgeon who performed the autopsy spoke with Detectives Brown, Hansen and Willis. Among the things he told them at that meeting was,
“and she did not have fully developed genitals… The area is shallow indicating that she did not have a completed vaginal canal.”
Is this deformity supposed to have anything to do with her death? e.g. a rapist, enraged at his lack of success, decided to kill his victim?
well, that’s the 64$ question Arnold. Speculation has/had been that Ms. Short was a step above a street walker. The autopsy information seemed to have been kept quiet for quite some time, so much speculation had been to that effect. After folks realized that she wouldn’t have been having intercourse (although how that forbids you from having other sexual relations isn’t explained), they redid their speculation and came up with a similar vein, in that she was a ‘tease’ type of person and skipped out just at ‘the moment’ and then ran into some one who wouldn’t let her just go.
The cite that Scarlett posted (thanks by the way), offers up a potential murderer, whose motive seemed to have little to do with her personally (although he may have been stalking her ? ) in that the person had confessed to another earlier killing that had similarities (the person was found dead in the bathtub, implying that he’d have cut her up had he had the time or whatever). I don’t find that particularly compelling since (caution wild speculation ahead) generally folks prone to doing something like this don’t seem to be content with just doing it once. My suspicion is that she was not the murderers first victim (tho’ she probably was the first they managed to cut in half), but very likely was the last (due to either death or imprisonment), since there weren’t any (public) similar and/or more gruesome ones later.