Author's note -- Introduction: The key question -- Part I: Leila Welsh. Heiress of the prairie -- Love triangle -- Prowler -- An awkward but fiendish amateur -- Revenge of the machine -- Frontier justice -- To hell and back -- Part II: Elizabeth Short. The mystic river -- Vivid women -- The climate was warm. It was the people who were cold -- He's waiting for me -- Swallowed up by the city -- Fade to zero -- The city doesn't pay for geniuses. It pays for detectives. -- Hollywood babylon -- Part III: Carl Balsiger. Blue baby -- My own little hatchet -- Destiny in the dirt -- Unusual manners at unusual hours -- Arid soil -- Crestview 1-4666 -- How they were bound -- Werewolf -- Acknowledgments -- Source notes -- Index

"In January 1947, the bisected body of Elizabeth Short, completely drained of blood, was discovered in an undeveloped lot in Los Angeles. Its gruesome mutilations led to a firestorm of publicity, city-wide panic, and an unprecedented number of investigative paths led by the LAPD--all dead ends. The Black Dahlia murder remained an unsolved mystery for over seventy years. Six years earlier and sixteen hundred miles away, another woman's life had ended in a similarly horrific manner. Leila Welsh was an ambitious, educated, popular, and socially connected beauty. Though raised modestly on a prairie farm, she was heiress to her Kansas City family's status and wealth. On a winter morning in 1941, Leila's butchered body was found in her bedroom bearing the marks of unspeakable trauma. One victim faded into obscurity. The other became notorious. Both had in common a killer whose sadistic mind was a labyrinth of dark secrets. Eli Frankel reveals for the first time a key fact about the Black Dahlia crime scene, never before shared with the public, that leads inexorably to the stunning identification of a criminal who was at the same time amateurish and fiendish, skilled and lucky, sophisticated and brutish. Drawing on newly discovered documents, law enforcement files, interviews with the last surviving participants, the victims' own letters, trial transcripts, military records, and more, this epic true-crime saga puts together the missing pieces of a legendary puzzle. In Sisters in Death, the Black Dahlia cold case is finally closed."--Amazon.com