When Elizabeth Short was born on July 29, 1924, in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, a working-class Boston suburb, her family’s prospects were on the upswing. Her father, Cleo, a skilled mechanic and World War I vet, and mother, Phoebe, smart and business-minded, had started a new venture building miniature golf courses, which were hugely popular at the time. They soon moved to a stately home in Medford, about 15 miles north but a world away in terms of upward mobility. Then the Great Depression hit in 1929, derailing the lives of the Shorts, as it did millions of others.
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In 1930, after their construction business faltered, someone found Cleo’s car abandoned near the Charlestown bridge. The police suspected suicide. In reality, Cleo had abandoned his wife and five daughters. Phoebe and her children struggled, moving back down the social ladder from one cheap dwelling place to another. Just days after Betty Short’s gruesome murder, the press located Cleo Short — he’d been living in LA. Whether Betty knew this is uncertain. “If Betty knew her father was here, she never told me,” Phoebe told the Los Angeles Times in January 1947.
