Sisters in Death: The Black Dahlia, the Prairie Heiress, and Their Hunter, by Eli Frankel, Citadel Press, 400 pages, October 28, 2025. $29.

Yet another book that treats the murder of Elizabeth Short as a game of Clue in which an author thumbs through a list of suspects and produces a half-baked “solution” using torturous leaps of logic and fraudulent claims as necessary. A zealous but amateurish project that attempts to link two murders separated by five years and 1,600 miles that have nothing in common, implicating a man who committed neither murder. Only for “true” crime fanatics who are unconcerned with reality.

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Sisters in Death is evidence of the dismal state of the “true” crime genre (truly there is no bottom to this market) and further proof, if any were necessary, that unsolved murders exert a powerful magnetism on one another in the public imagination. Cold cases separated by years, hundreds of miles and completely different methods miraculously become “just like” one another, the work of a shrewd serial killer who is always one step ahead of the hopelessly incompetent police. At least for the purposes of a devious author who isn’t shy of fabricating facts – and there is something about the Black Dahlia case that fosters lying among writers.

The accused “murderer” in question is Herman Carl Balsiger, who has been linked through crackpot internet theories to the March 9, 1941, killing of Leila Adele Welsh in Kansas City and the January 15, 1947,  murder in Los Angeles of Elizabeth Short, better known as the Black Dahlia. Continue reading →