The Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

by Steve Hodel

  The Trial

  Joe's was an intimate view of the activities at the Franklin House for almost two years, from 1948 to 1950. He told me that Father was gifted with a perfect photographic memory that permitted him to absorb ideas from other people and make them sound as if they were his own. He was super intelligent, but not particularly original.

  Joe was not an invitee to my father's parties, but he saw a lot of human traffic going through the house and lots of heads bobbing around in that large middle room between the living room and Dad's bedroom. These were parties, he said, where there was a great deal of intense sexuality and there were lots of people in attendance. Joe reminded me that my father's venereal disease clinic on First Street downtown was also frequented by lots of important people. These were the days before modern drugs, when venereal disease was rampant and those who could afford private treatment were very dependent on the doctors who could provide it. My father was one of those doctors.

  Barrett told me that he also knew Man Ray, who was often at the Franklin House. Joe saw him there the last day Man Ray was in Hollywood. He came to visit Dad, and he also visited Joe in the studio, where they talked for an hour or so. Joe said, "Man Ray was leaving town that day, probably going back to Europe, after the shit hit the fan, at the end of' 49 or maybe it was into 1950. He and Juliet were living over by the Hollywood Ranch Market." The trial had just concluded, and though Dad had been acquitted everyone in his circle had fallen under the scrutiny of the district attorney. Man Ray's reputation was already such that he did not want to be caught in the web. He must also have been doubly concerned that Tamar might reveal that he had taken nude photographs of her at the Franklin House, or that the prints had been discovered by the police.

  Another of Dad's acquaintances, and Man Ray's as well, was the novelist Henry Miller, whom Joe remembered seeing talking to Father in his library. The Franklin House had become, in those days, almost like a salon, where artists flouting convention and social mores gathered around my father, who had the means to entertain them.

  Joe told me, "Tamar had named so many names to the district attorney that lots of people got arrested." Even my father's close friend Fred Sexton was offered a deal by the DA if he would testify against George and his relationship with Tamar. But, Joe told me, "Man Ray was somehow kept off the list of witnesses." Joe said that Dad's defense attorneys, Giesler and Neeb, had cost him a fortune, and that to raise the needed money he had to sell all of his rare and imported art objects. "I remember that a well-known jockey of the time named Pearson bought most of George's artwork," he told me.*

  The Black Dahlia Murder

  Joe Barrett remembered that a Dr. Ballard was arrested for performing the abortion on Tamar. He was acquitted, partly because of my father's acquittal and because of the credibility of Tamar's testimony. Out of the blue Barrett also said, "Did you know that your dad was a suspect in the Black Dahlia case? I know that for a fact. She had been murdered a year or so before I moved into the Franklin house. From what I heard, your dad had apparently known her."

  After the trial, when Joe was picked up by the DA investigators and taken to their office downtown, "they were really pissed," he remembered. "'God damn it, he got away with it!' they exclaimed, referring to the Tamar trial, adding 'We want this son of a bitch. We think he killed the Black Dahlia.' I'm sure it was investigators from the district attorney's office and not LAPD. They wanted me to spy on George for them. I remember one of the DA investigators was a man named Walter Sullivan. I think these investigators also tried to get a couple of gals that George knew to spy on him and report back to them."

  Joe was also present when the police served a search warrant on Dad at the Franklin House after he was arrested for incest. "Thad Brown was out there standing around at the house with these DA investigators. I remember him from the newspapers. He was a police big shot back then."

  Duncan Hodel's Memories of the Franklin House

  I was stunned by my conversations with Tamar and Joe Barrett. Their incredible revelations about what went on at the Franklin House around the time of Elizabeth Short's murder, and in the following two years, filled in many of the blank spots in my own life during that period.

  Encouraged by what I had gained from Tamar and Joe Barrett, I decided to pursue a third source.

  My eldest half-brother, Duncan, now seventy-one years old, had been another actual living witness at the Franklin House through the late 1940s, and he had testified at the Tamar trial.

  In an October 1999 meeting in San Francisco, Duncan provided me with many details of our father's early life, before I was born.

  Duncan had made regular visits to the Franklin House in the years preceding Dad's arrest and was twenty-one when the scandal broke. To this day, Duncan believes that Tamar invented the incest charges in an attempt to ruin Father's life. Although he apparently never questioned that Tamar might have been telling the truth, his interview would provide a damning revelation about another murder that took place shortly after Elizabeth Short's body was discovered. Duncan provided me with a thoughtprint so powerful that, had there been a murder trial in the Jeanne French "Red Lipstick" murder, he would doubtless have been called by the prosecution to testify against Father. In our conversation, Duncan linked him to a critical element in the crime:

  Dad had some very wild parties at the Franklin House. After Dad bought the house, I used to go down with my buddies from San Francisco and stay there, and Dad would fix my friends and me up with women. It was funny, when I was there Dad told me to tell all the women I was his brother. When women were around us at the Franklin House, he didn't want them to know he was old enough to have a son my age. I was twenty then.

  I remember one party where everybody was laughing and having a good time and Dad got this red lipstick and wrote on one of the women's breasts with the lipstick. She had these big beautiful breasts, and Dad took the lipstick and wrote these big targets round each one, and we all laughed and had a good time. I remember meeting Hortensia, his future wife from the Philippines at the Franklin House. She was visiting the U.S. and came to Dad's parties at the house. I guess that's where he first met her. Then after the trial they got married.

  I asked Duncan if he remembered or was acquainted with any of Dad's girlfriends from that time, and after pausing for reflection, he noted:

  I remember one of his girlfriends was murdered. Her name was Lillian Lenorak. She was a dancer and artist. But the murder didn't happen until many years after she broke up with Dad. I think her young boyfriend killed her in Palm Springs or something.

  I recognized her name from the court records of the trial and knew she had been on the prosecution's witness list. I then asked Duncan if he remembered any other names. He answered, "I remember after Dad stopped seeing Kiyo in 1942 or so, he started dating this other woman. I think her name was Jean Hewett. Jean was this drop-dead beautiful young actress. She really looked like a movie star. I don't know whatever happened to her."

  The Trial

  Duncan testified briefly at the trial as a defense character witness for Dad, or, he thinks, to talk about Tamar's promiscuity. But after the trial was over, he recalled, Dad told him something strange.

  Dad told me that the district attorney had said to him, "They were going to get me." They were out to get him, and so I think that is why Dad left the country right away and went to Hawaii. That is what he told me at the time, just before he left the U.S.

  Tamar's, Joe Barrett's, and Duncan's independent knowledge of Father's activities corroborated that Dad was suspected at the time not only of committing incest with his daughter but also of murdering Elizabeth Short. Both Tamar and Joe Barrett stated that the police believed Dad killed the Black Dahlia. Duncan, while apparently unaware of any Dahlia connections, had unintentionally and inadvertently become a witness linking our father to the Jeanne French murder.

  These interviews were shattering. Till now I had proceeded cautiously, as I had hundreds of times before. Condu
cting my investigation as an objective and impartial homicide detective, amassing facts and evidence, I slowly and carefully built my case. But now a terrible, undeniable truth was hitting deep within me: my father, the man I had looked up to, admired, and feared, this pillar of the community, this genius, was a cold-blooded, sadistic killer. Probably a serial killer.

  Having come to this horrific conclusion, I suddenly wished I had never begun the journey. Part of me wanted to close Father's tiny album, destroy the photographs, and run from the truth. I felt fear and omnipotence. A few simple, undiscoverable acts by the son, and the father's sins would be destroyed — like him, reduced to ashes. The Hodel name and reputation would remain intact. A few simple acts, and his crimes would never be known. I could cheat infamy. A cover-up for the good of the family. I could easily do what the LAPD command had done, only better. This time the cover-up would be permanent. But the other part of me knew I could not, and would not, run or hide the truth.

  * Billy Pearson was a prominent jockey in the 1940s, who was an art connoisseur and also a close friend of John Huston's. In Lawrence Grobel's biography The Hustons, the author writes that Pearson, one of the first contestants to win the grand prize on the infamous 1950s quiz show The $64,000 Question, helped Huston smuggle rare pre-Columbian art pieces out of Mexico.

  16

  Fred Sexton: "Suspect Number 2"

  FROM THE MANY WITNESS SIGHTINGS and descriptions relative to both the Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French murders and the separate kidnappings and sexual assaults of Sylvia Horan by "the Dahlia suspect" and lca M'Grew by "two swarthy men," both within days of the French murder, it seemed apparent there were two men committing these crimes, and I suspected the two were operating together and separately, at their whim. If George Hodel was Suspect Number 1, who was his accomplice? Based on his overall physical description, his close friendship with my father going back to 1924, and the fact that he had, in his own words, admitted to being my father's accomplice in the 1949 statutory rape of Tamar, Fred Sexton was, obviously and logically, the most likely candidate for Suspect Number 2.

  Realizing I could no longer conduct a long-distance investigation, and needed to talk face to face with whatever witnesses I could find, I moved back to L.A. in June 2001. Joe Barrett, due to his personal familiarity with Sexton, was at the top of my list of people to question. Once I settled into my new Hollywood apartment, I called, made the short drive north to Ventura, and we met for lunch.

  I asked his impressions of Sexton from the Franklin years, telling him the truth, which was that I hardly remembered the man. From Joe's description, though they were fellow artists, they were not kindred spirits. Joe did not like Sexton, and he said so. Here is the picture he gave me:

  Fred was tall and thin, like your dad. He had a dark complexion. I think he was Italian. He was good friends with your dad and spent a lot of time at the Franklin House. Sexton and I actually worked together for a short time, at the Herb Jepson Art School, downtown at 7th and Hoover Streets. Sexton lasted there only about two months. He had a bad attitude. He was hitting on all the young girls in class. Half or more of them actually left his class because of it. He had many complaints from the kids in class, and so many dropped out because of him that Herb Jepson fired him.

  When Sexton refused to leave the art school, Jepson and a couple of his "big friends" forcibly evicted him from the premises. Barrett concluded:

  I ran into Fred a year or two after that in downtown L.A. He was living in a second-story apartment on Main Street. He tried to avoid talking to me, probably feeling sheepish because he had testified as a witness for the prosecution in your dad's trial. That day was the last time I ever saw or heard from him.

  Joe's knowledge of Fred Sexton and his association with him were limited, although he corroborated Sexton's predatory sexual habits and the "swarthy" description so often connected with the crimes. Public information about Sexton was also limited, but I discovered that he was born in the small mining town of Goldfield, Nevada, on June 3, 1907, just four months before my father. He was the second child born to Jeremiah A. Sexton and Pauline Magdalena Jaffe, who had two other sons and three daughters. Fred Sexton married his first wife, Gwain Harriette Noot, on June 13, 1932, in Santa Monica, California.

  Sexton made an application to the Social Security Administration on May 23, 1939, listing his place of employment as "Columbia Pictures Corp., 1438 N. Gower Street, Hollywood, California," and at that time he gave his residence as White Knoll Drive in the Elysian Park district of Los Angeles, just a mile from downtown. The house is still owned by his surviving first wife.

  Sexton died at eighty-eight, on September 11, 1995, in Guadalajara, Mexico. All I knew about the man was what I had been told by Tamar and Joe Barrett. Now it was time to see what Sexton's own surviving relatives could tell me.

  I spoke to Sexton's daughter in two separate meetings, the first of which took place in Los Angeles in October 1999. At that time I was in no position to confront her with any suspicions I harbored about her father and his possible criminal involvement with mine. In the spring of 2000, five months after our initial meeting, Sexton's daughter mailed me two photographs of Fred, which she told me had been taken in Los Angeles in the mid-1940s. In this mailing, she also included pictures of herself shown playing with an eight- or nine-year-old Tamar. She was three years older than Tamar, and they were friends from the early 1940s until Tamar's arrest and detention in 1949. She had known Kiyo during the time Dad was having an affair with her, and the pictures she sent me were, ironically, taken shortly after their "breakup," and showed the two children playing in front of Kiyo's beachside home in Venice.

  I contacted her again in August 2001, informed her I was now living in Los Angeles, and scheduled a second interview to meet her at her home, telling her I had some important information to discuss. At this meeting, realizing that what I was about to tell her would be very similar in effect to the many death notifications I had made to family members during my long career in Homicide, and knowing she would need some emotional support, I requested that her husband be present, and she agreed. I opened our conversation with the shocking revelation that, based on my two-year investigation, it was my professional opinion that our fathers had been crime partners and had committed a series of abductions and murders of lone women in Los Angeles during the mid- to late 1940s. I informed her that all of my research and investigation was well documented, that the full story would be revealed in a book I was writing. I did not provide her with the names of any victims and was circumspect in my references to the crimes. Specifically, I did not indicate that the case focused on Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia.

  Understandably, Sexton's daughter was profoundly shocked by my news. She found it difficult to believe that her father could ever have been involved in such violent crimes. She doubted my assertion that he, like my father, was a practicing sadist. Even though she acknowledged that he was a controlling person, she felt he was incapable of physically harming women to that extent.

  In this interview, she disclosed a wealth of information. She was specific and provided much deeper insight into her father's personality and character, underscoring and increasing the probability that he was in fact the partner-in-crime of his close friend George Hodel.

  Mary Moe

  "Mary Moe," which is the name I have given Sexton's daughter to protect her identity, was sixty-five at the time of our first conversation. She had known our family since before I was born, and in another incredible twist of fate, as an eight-year-old girl had come with her father to the hospital to visit my mother on the day my twin brother John and I were born.

  Fred Sexton was of Irish, Jewish, and Italian descent. When he was about thirteen years old, the police arrested his father on Christmas Eve and dragged him out of the house, an incident that instilled in Fred a lifelong hatred of the police. The family was then living in California, but his dad had been bootlegging in Nevada during the '20s and '30s.

&nb
sp; Sexton had been John Huston's close friend at high school in L.A., and they remained friends through the years. As a child, Mary remembered Huston as a kind of "godfather" who would suddenly appear with extravagant presents for her, then vanish. Mary also thought her father had been acquainted with the notorious gambler Tony Cornero, but was not absolutely sure. She did know that Fred's father had been a gambler and bootlegger like Cornero.

  I learned that, like my father, Sexton had a secret and mysterious past and had concealed important early truths from his daughter. For instance, from her mother Mary discovered that her father had had an affair with a married newspaper reporter in San Francisco in the 1920s. The newswoman became pregnant and gave birth to a son. Growing up, Mary was shown pictures of a small, dark-complexioned boy, and was told these were pictures of her father. Only as an adult did she learn the truth: the pictures were not of her father but her half-brother! To this day she knows nothing further about him, has never met him, does not know if he is living or dead, nor does she even know his name.

  She remembered that her father ran a "floating crap game" in Los Angeles, where he reportedly "made very good money." Like my Father, Fred drove taxis during his youth, both in Los Angeles and in San Francisco.

  Regarding Sexton and his women, Mary told me, "My dad had lots of different girlfriends when I was young. He was very much like your father when it came to women. He had so many women, one after the other."