The Black Dahlia: Wednesday Addams’ Favorite Flower (and Unsolved Murder)
In “Wednesday” episode 1 (Netflix, 2022), Marilyn Thornhill (the teacher, played by Christina Ricci) gives Wednesday Addams a Black Dahlia flower, named after her favorite unsolved murder. Let’s have a look at Wednesday Addams’ favorite flower and see if we can get to the bottom of her favorite unsolved murder, too.
Black Dahlia (Wednesday Addams’ Favorite Flower)
The Black Dahlia is a flower that comes in many colors — sometimes black, sometimes with a deep reddish tint. It grows out of a bulb (like onions do, and many other flowers), and has a hollow stem.
Dahlias are gothic, somber looking flowers that evoke mourning and darkness. It’s a perennial plant, so instead of dying every year in the winter, it goes into hibernation, only to bloom again in the spring.
It’s no wonder Wednesday Addams’ favorite flower is the Black Dahlia.
The Dahlia is originally from Central America, where its original name was “Cocoxochitl,” denoting its hollow stem (source).
Black Dahlia (Wednesday Addams’ Favorite Unsolved Murder)
If you like Sam Raimi movies like I do, you don’t mind a little gore in your horror stories. But if you’re squeamish, you won’t want to read about the Black Dahlia murder. I am warning you now, it was a brutal, grisly scene.
1947, Los Angeles, California – a mother out for a walk one morning sees someone posed neatly by the sidewalk. At first, the mother thinks it’s just a mannequin, but as she gets closer, she realizes to her horror that she has discovered the body of a 22-year-old woman.
Cut in half at the waist, drained of blood, with a gruesome Joker smile carved into her mouth.
The victim was a 22-year-old woman who was trying to make it as an actress who was known for wearing black clothes. The popular movie out at the time was called “Blue Dahlia.”
The Black Dahlia was Elizabeth Short
Given the zeitgeist and the actress’ – Elizabeth Short’s – habit of wearing sheer black clothing, the murder case was dubbed, “Black Dahlia.”
The FBI was able to identify The Black Dahlia as Elizabeth Short with two copies of her fingerprints – one from an application she had filled out, and another from an arrest for underage drinking.
Presumably, the killer had skills in dissection because of how he or she was able to cut Elizabeth Short so cleanly. Despite this, the potential lead didn’t end up going anywhere. The Black Dahlia murderer was never caught. (That’s all according to the FBI’s website.)
The Black Dahlia was also addressed in the American Horror Story series:
Speaking of which, I posted a little review of Vietnamese Horror Story which is now available.
Black Dahlia in Wednesday: Final Details
I’ve given you the “unsolved murder” as the FBI tells it, but the Daily Mail tells a different story. Posted in 2017, the article claims that, despite the fact no one was ever officially caught, we basically know who the killer was in the Black Dahlia case.
The murder victim used to hit up Mark Hansen, “a wealthy and powerful Hollywood man with ties to the police,” in whose house she lived, for money. Apparently Mr. Hansen got sick of Ms. Short’s shenanigans, because he hired this guy, Leslie Dillon, to “take care of her.”
In 1948 — just a year after the brutal murder — Dillon was coaxed into revealing that he knew some intimate details about the case. Specifically, he knew that a rose tattoo had been cut from one part of her body and inserted…well, somewhere else (Source: Dailymail).
Thank You For Reading
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