“After we are dead, the pretense that we may be protected against the world’s careless malice is abandoned,” Janet Malcolm wrote in her book The Silent Woman. She was referring to the poet and novelist Sylvia Plath, another beautiful young woman who died too soon, after which her life and words became grist for the biographical mill. But Malcolm’s words apply equally, even eerily, to the afterlife of Short—one of America’s most famous murder victims, and certainly among the most persistent subjects of the true-crime industrial complex.