Born on July 29, 1924, in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, Short was one of five daughters born to Phoebe and Cleo. At some point during her childhood, the family moved half an hour north to Medford, a town famous for Paul Revere's midnight ride in 1775 and as the place where the "Jingle Bells" was written.

Cleo Short launched a successful business building miniature golf courses, but the 1929 stock market crash left him bankrupt. Unable to provide for his large family, Cleo left his car on local bridge to make it look as if he'd jumped into the river in despair, Pacios writes in her book, "Childhood Shadows." When he wrote his wife from California a few years later, saying he was saving up money to move the family there, his wife wanted nothing to do with him.

After Cleo's abandonment, the Short family moved into a meager apartment building next to Pacios, and Phoebe found a job as a bookkeeper. Elizabeth became a big sister of sorts to Pacios, 10 years her junior, taking her out for ice cream or to the movies. The two girls watched all the Ginger Roger and Fred Astaire flicks that were popular at the time as well as the debut of "Gone with the Wind." Perhaps it was in that small-town theatre where Short's Hollywood dreaming began.

Short was born with respiratory problems that developed into asthma and bronchitis as she got older. When she was 16, her mother started sending her to spend winters with family friends in Miami, where she found work as a waitress.

At 19, Short took a train cross-country to move in with her father, who was living in Vallejo, a city just above San Francisco, and working at the Mare Island Naval Station. She hoped the move to California would enable her to break into movies, Pacio writes.

From the beginning, Short's newfound relationship with her father was fraught with strife. She hadn't seen him for years. He was haunted by the regret. They were strangers living the same house, with clashing ideas of how things should be. Cleo Short expected his teenage daughter to serve him as a maid of sorts, cooking and keeping house. But Short was a free spirit who wanted nothing to do with domesticity.

She found a job in the mail room at Camp Cooke (now Vandenberg Air Force Base) in Lompoc, two and half hours north of Los Angeles.

At Camp Cooke, Short was surrounded by entire regiments of lonely soldiers on the verge of being sent to war. She left a trail of erotic longing in her wake wherever she walked. The young men clamored for her attention, voted her "camp cutie," and told her she was movie star quality.

Her idyll came to an end a few months later, however, when she was arrested at a Santa Barbara bar for underage drinking, and shipped home to Medford.

Over the next couple of years, Short drifted back and forth across the country, taking trains from Medford to Chicago, to Florida, to California and back to Massachusetts again. Waitressing gigs paid her way wherever she went and fed her compulsion to experience new places and people. Her lust for life was overwhelming.

She frequented night clubs where she swayed across the dance floor to swing jazz and bebop. She loved the music, the men, the atmosphere. She was never alone unless she wanted to be. But on the last day of December 1944, her playgirl lifestyle changed when she met a young man who stood out from the testosterone horde, a major with the Flying Tigers. She sent her mother a gushing letter, Pacios writes:

"I met someone New Year's Eve, a major, Matt Gordon. I'm so much in love, I'm sure it shows. He is so wonderful, not like other men. And he asked me to marry him."

After Short returned to Medford that summer, Pacios says she wore Matt's pilots wings pinned to her blouses and started a hope chest, filling it with hand-embroidered linens he sent her from the Philippines.

Elizabeth Short

When a Western Union bicycle messenger pedaled toward the Short residence in the late August heat, it was a fate to cruel to contemplate. The Japanese had surrendered on August 14, and Short had finally stopped worrying that Matt would be killed in combat. Instead she fantasized about her upcoming nuptials, about the silk wedding gown, the floral arrangements, what canapés to serve at the reception, how to wear her hair.

But the bicycle messenger did stop in front of the Short residence, delivering a terse missive from her fiancé's mother: "Matt killed in plane crash on way home from India. My sympathy is with you. Pray it isn't so."

Short spent the next days in a funk, reading and re-reading Matt's letters. When the Yankee air turned frosty, she returned to Miami, a copy of his obituary tucked into her suitcase.

In Miami, Short distracted her heartache with a parade of men. She enjoyed the company of men of every stripe — soldiers, entrepreneurs, older, younger — but the men she enjoyed best were the sort with plenty of spending money in their wallets.

Short knew the value of her beauty. As she sashayed down the sidewalk in peep-toed heels, she held her head high, primly aware of her effect on male passersby. They gawked, they whistled, they offered to buy dinner. Frequently, she accepted. They paid for her meals, bar tabs, rent, clothes. They gave her cash. What were a few greenbacks for the privilege of basking her dazzling aura? Some authors have suggested that Short took this behavior to an extreme and worked as a prostitute, but there is no evidence to back this up.

Whatever money she managed to accumulate on her own through waitressing she used to expand her wardrobe. She'd rather go hungry than wear outdated or worn clothing. When she stepped outside, she was always dressed to the nines, favoring tailored black suits, feminine ruffled blouses, high heels and long gloves. She embodied the cool sophistication of a 40's working gal.

Short had a particular fetish for men in uniform. In July 1946, she returned to Southern California to be close to Joseph Gordon Fickling, an intensely handsome air force lieutenant with sensual dark eyes. They'd met in California two years earlier, shortly before he was shipped overseas. It was a rocky relationship from the start. In their private letters — which were confiscated by the police and excerpted in newspapers after Short's murder — Fickling expressed impatience with Short's flirtations, wondering if he ranked higher in her heart than any other man.

Apparently she wasn't able — or didn't try — to convince him that he did. He moved to North Carolina to work as a commercial airline pilot, but they stayed in touch. And he continued sending her money, including a $100 wire transfer the month before she died. The last letter Fickling received from Short was dated January 8, 1947, seven days before her murder. In it, she told him she was moving to Chicago, where she hoped to become a fashion model.