Synopsis
The sun rose over Los Angeles that Wednesday morning in 1947, and a light breeze from the southeast ruffled the hair of Betty Bersinger and her three-year-old as they took a walk down South Norton Avenue in the Leimert Park neighborhood in southern Los Angeles.
It was just two weeks into a new year, January 15, 1947. WWII had been over for almost two years, and dawn was breaking on the cold war. Harry Truman was president. He’d taken charge of the country after Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in 1945, and the country was beginning the push back against the communist ideals of the USSR.
It’s a Wonderful Life had just debuted at Christmas 1946, and nobody knew it would grow to be a classic. The Old Lamplighter by Sammy Kaye and his Orchestra was at the top of the Billboard charts, but swing music was on its way out, soon to be replaced by doo-wop, pop, and rock and roll.
Los Angeles was in a real estate boom. G.I.s home from the war were using the new G.I. Bill to buy vacant lots waiting to be transformed into subdivisions with houses to raise the children who would become the Baby Boomers. Betty Bersinger noticed a white discarded store mannequin laying in a scraggly, undeveloped lot near the side walk, its top half separated from the bottom half.
A closer look revealed two things. The discarded mannequin was actually the naked body of a woman who’d been cut cleanly in half, and the discovery would become one of the grisliest, most notorious murders ever committed in the United States.
It’s been some 70 years, and still—no one knows who did it.