Above is a photograph documenting one of the most important moments in crime history—the discovery of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short’s mutilated corpse, found in a Los Angeles vacant lot early one morning by a woman walking with her three-year-old daughter. Along with a few other murders, such as those committed by Jack the Ripper, the Black Dahlia killing (as it came to be known) began as a case, then became a national obsession, and finally developed into a full-blown industry, as evidenced by the hundreds of millions of dollars made on movies, television shows, books, and websites. All of it began today in 1947. You can see our previous posts on the subject here and here.
1912—Missing Explorer Robert Scott Found
British explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his men are found frozen to death on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, where they had been pinned down and immobilized by bad weather, hunger and fatigue. Scott’s expedition, known as the Terra Nova expedition, had attempted to be the first to reach the South Pole only to be devastated upon finding that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them there by five weeks. Scott wrote in his diary: “The worst has happened. All the day dreams must go. Great God! This is an awful place.”