The Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

by Steve Hodel

  After detectives identified the victim and learned that she had filed for divorce, the initial thrust of their investigation focused on Jeanne's husband, Frank, as the likeliest suspect. Within several days of the murder, Captain Donahoe ruled him out: Frank French could not and did not drive a car, his shoe size was different from those found at the crime scene, and handwriting samples compared to those found on the body did not match. The police didn't report it, but it is assumed that the other physical evidence — hair samples and possible fingerprints found at the scene — also helped to eliminate Frank as the suspect.

  After they had initially linked the Lipstick murder to the Dahlia murder, police detectives theorized that whoever killed Elizabeth Short may have been infuriated by Corporal Joseph Dumais's "confession" and murdered Jeanne French to disprove his claim. This, police told the press, would also account for the "taunting obscene phrase written on her chest." One police official was quoted as saying, "For two days before Mrs. French was kicked to death, the newspapers had been full of Dumais' confessions that it was he who had killed Beth Short. We know that the killer is egotistical, and it's possible that the real killer resented the claims of Dumais and wanted to show that the real killer was still here." Thus, in a tragic and unintended way, Steve Fisher's strategy of smoking out the Black Dahlia Avenger with a false confession had proved to be chillingly effective.

  On February 12, 1947, the Herald Express ran a story under the headline, "Quiz Mystery Man Sharing P.O. Box of 'Lipstick' Victim," in which the reporter said that an unidentified male had shared a secret post office box with Jeanne French and was being questioned by detectives. No further details about his identity or his relationship to Jeanne French were ever released, nor have I found any information that would indicate that LAPD said anything more to the press about him in the weeks or months that followed.

  In the course of my investigation, I came across a reference to a book, Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective's Scrapbook, edited by Sean Tejaratchi, containing over a hundred photographs of unsolved crimes in the L.A. area during the years of LAPD homicide detective Jack Huddleston's service, from 1921 to 1950.

  The scrapbook was a compilation of Detective Huddleston's own photo collection of suicides, murders, and accidental deaths, clearly his own personal macabre fetish. Its pages contained pictures of tattooed men, nude drag queens, child homicides, murdered prostitutes, and even a decapitation caused by a train wreck, all packaged into an album of horrors. Next to many of the photographs the detective had written his personal observations and locker-room dark humor.

  In her introduction to the book, Katherine Dunn says that the collection of photographs, found at an estate sale after Huddleston's death, was eventually made into a video called Death Scenes. Although essentially a revelation of one person's fascination with the brutality of homicide, Death Scenes contains three photographs next to which Huddleston had typed the following information:

  "THE RED LIPSTICK MURDER."

  Mrs. Jeanne Axford French Age 40. (Nurse) of 3535 Military Ave, Sawtelle L.A. Killed by ???? Her body was found in a field near Grand View Ave, & National Blvd. L.A.

  She was stomped to death by a fiend who crudely printed an obscene phrase (FUCK YOU) on her chest.

  The three photographs were obviously from the 1947 LAPD investigation. One of them, a close-up, showed the victim lying supine in the vacant lot, completely nude, with the lettering clearly visible on her body. In large block printed lettering, the killer had written in red lipstick the following words across the midsection of her body: "FUCK YOU, B.D." What the LAPD had not revealed to the press, Detective Huddleston unintentionally revealed to the public through the bits and pieces of his own obsession years after his death.

  Exhibit 32

  Jeanne French, "Red Lipstick" murder, February 10, 1947

  Simultaneous and parallel to the "Red Lipstick" murder, the Dahlia investigation remained ongoing, as Captain Donahoe told the public that in his opinion the Dahlia and Lipstick murders were likely connected. In the month of February 1947, leads and additional evidence continued to pour in.

  Tuesday, February 11, 1947

  Imagine the surprise of downtown Los Angeles cab driver Charles Schneider when he discovered a mysterious note in his cab, possibly written by the Black Dahlia Avenger. Schneider told police and reporters that he had gone to a restaurant in the 500 block of Columbia Street — ten blocks from the Biltmore — and when he returned to his parked cab he found a note in the glove compartment. Addressed to the Examiner; but not released to the public, the note, with a crude illustration of a knife and a pistol on it, read:

  Take it to Examiner at once. I've got the number of your cab.

  $20,000 and I'll give B.D. up. Is it a go?

  B.D.

  Police quickly lifted fingerprints from the glove compartment of Schneider's cab, which did not belong to him. They also checked similarities between the letter and the original envelope sent to the Examiner with Elizabeth Short's belongings and immediately eliminated Schneider's fingerprints from both the prints on the glove box and the original note. Those fingerprints remain unidentified to this date.

  Wednesday, February 12, 1947

  lca Mabel M'Grew, a twenty-seven-year-old resident of Los Angeles, reported a kidnapping and forcible rape that occurred in the early-morning hours of February 12 as she was leaving a South Main Street cafe in downtown Los Angeles. She reported that two men had forced her into their car and driven her to an isolated spot on East Road in Los Angeles, where both had raped her. After the attack one of the assailants had warned, "Don't tell the police, or I'll do to you the same as I did to the Black Dahlia." They then drove her close to her home in Culver City, only three miles away from where Jeanne French had been murdered. The only descriptions of the assailants released in the news article were "two swarthy men."

  Sunday, February 16, 1947

  By the middle of February, the LAPD said that it had "hit a stone wall" in its investigation of the murders of both Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French, announcing that the one remaining lead, a key to the two mysterious homicides, was their search for a dark haired man with a small mustache, who was known to have had dinner with Jeanne French just two hours before she was murdered.

  Police indicated they had a close watch on their important witness, Mrs. Antonia Manalatos, the waitress who had seen the dark-haired suspect dining with the victim.

  That same day, Otto Parzyjegla, a thirty-six-year-old linotype operator at a Los Angeles printing shop, was arrested for the bludgeoning murder of his seventy-year-old employer, Swedish newspaper publisher Alfred Haij. After confessing to police that he had "hacked the torso into six pieces and then crammed them into three boxes at the rear of the print shop," Parzyjegla told authorities that "the whole thing was like a dream," insisting to his interrogators that "he must be dreaming and was waiting to wake up."

  Captain Donahoe quickly entered the case, believing that Parzyjegla might possibly be the suspect in the Black Dahlia and Lipstick cases. Donahoe theorized that the violence that Parzyjegla had displayed in killing and mutilating his employer could well link all three murders. Donahoe informed reporters that Parzyjegla worked in a print shop, adding, "one of the letters received by the Black Dahlia suspect bore evidence of having been mailed by someone working in a printing establishment." After his preliminary investigation, Donahoe said, "Parzyjegla is the hottest suspect yet in the 'Black Dahlia' killing."

  Tuesday, February 18, 1947

  Captain Donahoe organized a live "show-up" of suspect Parzyjegla for 2:00 P.M. for Toni Manalatos. He wanted her to "attend the show-up of Parzyjegla," along with those witnesses "claiming to have seen Elizabeth Short with various men during the last six days of her life." Donahoe wanted to give Parzyjegla the largest exposure possible in front of the broadest array of witnesses, in the hope that someone who had seen either Elizabeth or Jeanne French in the company of a man would identify Parzyjegla as the person who ha
d been with one or both of the victims. The description given for Parzyjegla was "a tall 36-year-old male, of light complexion, with darkish blonde hair and powerful hands." Parzyjegla, however, while he readily admitted to slaying his employer, "vehemently denied any connection with the slayings of the two women," according to press reports.

  At the same time Donahoe was organizing his witnesses to see Parzyjegla, the LAPD crime lab began conducting an examination of possible physical evidence that could potentially connect him to the other murders. LAPD police chemist Ray Pinker conducted an examination of "proof-sheet" paper taken from Haij's printing office, because, according to Captain Donahoe, "at least one of the notes sent in by the Dahlia killer in that case, used proof-sheet paper, of a type commonly found in printing shops." Donahoe was hoping the print shop would be the key that could link the three murders to the suspect, someone who would have had access to the blank proof sheets.

  Thursday, February 20, 1947

  Suspect Otto Parzyjegla was formally charged with his self-described "dream murder" of his employer, and the case was closed. At a police show-up conducted at the Wilshire Division station on February 19, the six women victims of attempted attacks, as well as other witnesses from the French and Dahlia investigations, eliminated Parzyjegla as a suspect.

  With Parzyjegla out of the picture, the search for the person(s) responsible for the Black Dahlia and the Red Lipstick murders turned back to San Diego, where apparently a new clue was discovered. Four detectives were assigned to San Diego, but LAPD and San Diego detectives kept secret, even from reporters, what that new clue might be.

  As indicated, initially Captain Donahoe publicly confirmed LAPD'S belief that the Dahlia and the French cases were connected. Within days of that announcement a strange and never-explained series of events occurred, all related to the investigation.

  First, Captain Donahoe was personally removed, by Chief of Detectives Thad Brown, as officer-in-charge of both investigations, and was summarily transferred from his position as commander of the Homicide Division and placed in charge of Robbery Division, then a separate entity. This effectively terminated his personal involvement in both murder cases. What was it about this case that made the LAPD brass nervous enough to remove the one commander who could have solved it? Was Donahoe getting too close to the truth?

  Next, as I saw it, there appeared to be a simultaneous lockdown of information in two separate and critical fronts of the investigation. First, the "San Diego connection" sounded as if LAPD had successfully traced Elizabeth Short's January 8 phone call to a man in Los Angeles. Second, relative to the recent newspaper reports of the "mystery man" who was sharing Jeanne French's P.O. box, again LAPD acknowledged they had identified, interviewed, and "eliminated" him. However, his identity, unlike other "non-involved" witnesses, was kept secret, and to this day remains a mystery.

  In addition, the police high command made another startling revelation. Immediately after Donahoe's removal from the case, LAPD revised their assessment of the Jeanne French murder. They no longer saw it as a second homicide by the same suspect, but rather as a "copycat murder." Within less than a year, the Lipstick murder became totally disassociated from the Dahlia case and quickly fell into obscurity. Now the official LAPD line was that the murder of Elizabeth Short was a standalone, unconnected to any other crimes of murdered, sexually assaulted, and bludgeoned women. That remains the official LAPD position to this day: Elizabeth Short's murderer never killed anyone before or after that brutal murder. Why did LAPD take such a hard line on this? Why was it that, immediately after Donahoe's transfer out of Homicide, the link between the two murders was officially severed? All of this was not a coincidence but, as will ultimately become clear, part of an organized conspiracy within the LAPD to protect the identity of the self-described Black Dahlia Avenger. In doing so, the conspirators were covering up one of the biggest corruption scandals in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department. These overt and deliberate actions by LAPD's highest-ranking officers would ultimately transform them from respected law enforcers to criminal co-conspirators, accomplices to murder after the fact.

  15

  Tamar, Joe Barrett,

  and Duncan Hodel

  MAYBE IT WAS MY OWN DESIGN and not simply the passage of time that kept the true story of Tamar and the family scandal a dark mystery to me for many years. Even in my adult mind, Tamar was the image of the adolescent temptress Lolita. She would go on to blaze a trail from the beat generation of the middle 1950s to the street generation of the late '60s, bouncing off poets, folk singers, druggies, and hippies.

  Tamar was described by singer Michelle Phillips in her book California Dreamin': The True Story of the Mamas and the Papas as her "very best friend, who got me interested in folk music, or at least into folk music people." Michelle's description of Tamar is a snapshot of the young girl who, a decade earlier, unwittingly had come within a hair of playing a critical role in the Black Dahlia investigation. Phillips writes:

  So, off we went to Tamar's. As soon as I set eyes on her, I thought she was the most fabulous, glamorous girl I had ever met. She had a wonderful lavender colored room, with lavender pillows and curtains, lavender lead-glass ashtrays, all of that. I thought it was just great. She had just acquired a new pink and lavender Rambler, buying it on time.

  She hung out with a very hip Bohemian crowd —Josh White, Dick Gregory, Odetta, Bud and Travis. Tamar was incredible. She gave me my first fake ID, my first amphetamines ("uppers" to help me stay awake in class after late nights). This was a girl after my own heart, and we became very close . . . and now she was my idol.

  But everything Tamar Hodel would become by the 1960s, she already was during those few months in the summer of 1949 when, an incorrigible teenager, she moved into my life and set into motion a series of events that would result in the breakup of the only family life I had ever really known.

  In court, during my father's incest trial, she was in the eyes of the prosecutors an innocent minor debauched by her sexually depraved father. In Robert Neeb's brilliant cross-examination she was portrayed as a pathological and sinister liar, capable of twisting the truth to satisfy and manipulate the adults around her. After Dad's acquittal, she grew up with the stigma of being just such a liar.

  I think that, other than her own children, I was the only one who believed she was the victim. My mother, of course, knew the truth of what had happened that night but could not reveal what she knew to the police and ultimately took it with her to her grave. I know now that Mother lived in daily terror of what my father could do when he was crossed. So while Mother could never be a support, I could, once I knew the broad strokes of the scandal. And as we grew older I let Tamar know that I believed her, while at the same time I let Father think I believed him. The scandal was never discussed, never mentioned. It just hung there over the years like a cloud of unknowing, enveloping all of us, palpable, real, yet ignored because no one wanted to acknowledge it.

  "Tamar the Liar" became Father's established party line to all of us in his immediate family, all in the extended family, and to all of his women, past and present. "The scandal" was almost never talked about, but Father's position was clear: he had been wrongfully accused by his fourteen-year-old, disturbed, deceitful, and sexually promiscuous daughter, who had lied to the police, lied to the prosecutors, and lied on the witness stand. Even though he had been acquitted, he made it clear to all of his children that our sister had tarnished his good reputation and high moral character. With most family members, her name did not even invoke pity, only disgust. Dad had made it an edict that Tamar was a pariah, our family's bad seed, whose punishment for her crimes of lying and disloyalty was ostracism and banishment.

  Following Father's death, in my efforts to gain a deeper understanding of who he was and obtain more details about his life, I turned to Tamar for help because I believed that she knew more about him than any of us. More importantly, in light of the investigation I had undertaken, I a
sked her to tell me all that she could remember about the Franklin House years, the incest trial — which we'd never actually talked about — and any other incidents in her past that involved Father and her relationship with him.

  I found that even though she had just turned sixty-six, her memory of those early years was remarkably clear and strong, and though the big picture, which I was beginning to see, completely eluded her, her ability to recall isolated, anecdotally significant events painted an incredible picture of our father. The composite picture of his demeanor, personality, and psychology blended with elements of my clandestine criminal investigation and the powerful thoughtprints that became signposts along the trail to my stunning conclusion.

  What Tamar told me were simply stories, communications between older sister and younger brother about a man we'd both held in awe but who had demanded nothing less than fear and worship from his children.

  Tamar did not know, of course, that I was actively conducting a criminal investigation of those years. I provided her with no information, and any references to the "Black Dahlia" came only from her. As far as she was concerned, I was simply a listener.

  Tamar first came down to Los Angeles from San Francisco when she was eleven, but she returned to her mother, only to come down again when she was fourteen. It was about that second visit that she told me, "The only time I ever slept with George was on that one occasion. I thought that it was going to be this big romantic wonderful thing cause he promised me that when I was sixteen I would get to be a woman and he would make love to me. In the meantime, he was just training me for oral sex and stuff like that."