The Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

by Steve Hodel

  Essential to the nature of a true "avenger," the killer had to inflict pain on the person, but it differs in that the acts were seen by the avenger as retribution and were, in the avenger's mind, therefore morally justified. The avenger likened himself to a state-sanctioned executioner, who takes the life of a prisoner in the name of the people, exacting retribution for a capital offense. As his pasted message to the press announced, "Dahlia killing was justified."

  What distinguishes the crime of Elizabeth Short from the murder of many other lone women in L.A. in the 1940s is the manner of her execution, the horrible mutilation of her body, and the posing of her corpse.

  Through the years, one of the most intriguing and frustrating questions the police had never been able to answer was: why had the killer gone to such extraordinary lengths to "pose" his victim? Surely this was a thoughtprint, a message for the world to read, if only it could. It was surreal, fiendishly surreal.. . There was clearly a method to the killer's madness, a reason he posed the body the way he did. In his game of cat and mouse with the police and public, the "avenger" was, by that bizarre pose, leaving a message, as if he was challenging police to pick it up — a riddle, a test of wits, with himself as the master criminal.

  Given George Hodel's relationship to and love of Man Ray's work, I examined hundreds of photographs in all of Man Ray's books. Just as I was about to give up, I found what I was looking for: a painting, Les Amoureux (The Lovers) (1933-34), and a photograph, The Minotaur (1936), two of his most celebrated pieces. The former portrays a pair of lips as two bodies entwine and stretch across the horizon from end to end, the latter shows a victim of the mythological monster, which had the head of a bull and the body of a man. The Minotaur was kept imprisoned in the labyrinth on the island of Crete, where it was fed young maidens to satisfy it and keep it alive.

  In Man Ray's Minotaur, we see a woman's naked body with her arms raised over her head, the right arm placed at a forty-five-degree angle away from the body and then bent at the elbow to form a ninety-degree angle. The left arm is similarly bent at the elbow to form a second ninety-degree angle. This positioning recreates the horns of the bull-headed beast. The body is bisected at the waist so that only the upper torso is in frame. One can easily imagine the two breasts as a creature's ghoulish eyes and the shadow above the stomach as the creature's mouth, as if the face of the carnivorous beast is superimposed on the body of its victim.

  I pulled from my file the crime-scene photo of Elizabeth Short as she was discovered by police on the morning of January 15, 1947, in the vacant lot on Norton. The positioning of Elizabeth's arms precisely duplicates the position of the subject's arms in Man Ray's photograph! In this precise posing of the arms, the killer had replicated the horns just as Man Ray intended them in his original photograph. But there's more. The excised piece of flesh below Elizabeth's left breast imitates the shadow below the victim's breasts in the Man Ray photograph. I offer as evidence exhibits 35a and 35b.

  Exhibits 35a and 35b

  a) Elizabeth Short crime scene b) Man Ray's Les Amoureux and Minotaur

  From the view in exhibit 35a we cannot see whether Elizabeth's right side was also excised in similar fashion. Perhaps most tellingly, the laceration the killer cut into Elizabeth's face extends her mouth from ear to ear, and her lips appear grotesquely identical to the lover's lips extending across the horizon in Man Ray's Les Amoureux.

  The killer had to make her death extraordinary both in planning and execution. In his role as a surreal artist, he determined that his work would be a masterpiece of the macabre, a crime so shocking and horrible it would endure, be immortalized through the annals of crime lore. As avenger, he would use her body as his canvas, and his surgeon's scalpel as his paintbrush!

  Much as I wanted to deny it to myself or to look for other possible explanations, I now realized the facts were undeniable: George Hodel, through the homage he consciously paid to Man Ray, was provocatively revealing himself to be the murderer of Elizabeth Short. Her body, and the way she was posed, was Dr. George signature — both artistic and psychological — on his own surreal masterpiece, in which he juxtaposed the unexpected in a "still death" tribute to his master, using human body parts! The premeditated and deliberate use of these two photographs — one symbolizing my father and Elizabeth as the lovers in Les Amoureux, and another my father as the avenger, the Minotaur himself, the bull-headed beast consuming and destroying the young maiden, Elizabeth, in sacrifice — is my father's grisly message of his and Man Ray's shared vision of violent sexual fantasy. Given George Hodel's megalomaniacal ego, it was also a dash of one-upmanship.

  Another instance of the morbid influence of Man Ray's photographs on my father is exhibit 36: Man Ray's 1945 photograph of his wife, Juliet, beneath a silk stocking mask. I maintain that photo was the inspiration for Father's altering the photograph of his assault victim, seventeen-year-old Armand Robles (exhibit 36):

  Exhibit 36

  In the early 1970s, after having lived and practiced in Manila for twenty years, George Hodel attended a one-man show at the Philippines Cultural Center called the Erotic and Non-Erotic Drawings of Modesto, where he discovered the promising young artist Fernando Modesto. Father was instantly drawn to the twenty-two-year-old artist's erotic works and to what he would later term "the brilliant style of the artist's approach." From that first showing until his return to the United States from Asia in 1990, Father would be Modesto's patron, buying virtually everything he created. And Modesto was prolific. By 1990 Father had amassed a personal collection of over 1,600 Modesto works, 95 percent of which would have to be considered erotica.

  In the months prior to his death, George Hodel was preparing to market his private collection to the public, which required that he develop a strategy and promotion campaign. His first step would be to tell the world something about the artist, who by that time had developed a reputation in Europe and Asia but was less known in the States. Included in this marketing program would be a description of the artist and his developing vision, which had evolved over his twenty-year career through various stages. A sampling of the works from Modesto's different periods of development were included in Father's brochure, along with relevant catalog descriptions. This catalog copy was not comprised of Modesto's interpretations of his own art, but rather those of his patron, a pioneer in marketing, a businessman, and a psychiatrist.

  FERNANDO MODESTO

  by Dr. George Hodel

  Page 2, 1976 —(Examples 17-21)

  They seem to have several levels of meaning. One level appears to reflect the artist's views on the universality of the erotic drive, which impels all creatures and unites them in a cosmic identity.

  Page 3, 1982 — (Examples 35-36)

  Homage to Man Ray. Modesto has always greatly admired, and has been inspired by, the work of Man Ray. He has collected many books on Man Ray, and often looks at these photos, paintings, and sculptures.

  From Father's private collection of these artworks, there is only one piece that specifically relates to the investigation of the murder of Elizabeth Short. I call it Modesto's Lovers (exhibit 37). It is displayed here in comparison to its inspiration, Man Ray's 1934 Les Amoureux. I came across it only after Father's death while I was helping June photograph and catalog the entire collection.

  Top: Man Ray's Les Amoureux; Bottom: Modesto's Lovers

  June told me that she and George had traveled to Paris in 1986 or 1987, where Father had presented an identical work to Juliet Man Ray.

  Did George Hodel specifically commission this drawing and provide the artist with all of the details to be included, or did Modesto merely use his own creative energies and imagination, independent of his patron? The answer may be hidden in the work itself and what it appears to represent. First, the work is a form of flattery: it's an imitation of Man Ray's "lovers' lips" that extend across the horizon. However, unlike the Man Ray work, the lips in the Modesto are not full red, and the bottom lip is only partially covered. Als
o, the irregularity of the bottom line in the Modesto suggests dripping blood rather than lipstick. And directly above the lips are three human phalluses. To the left of the lips is a blue canal the shape of a vagina, above which a squadron of nine yellow and ten blue oval-shaped objects seems to be flying, each with its own trailing spermlike tail. Do the two different colors represent George Hodel and Fred Sexton? These were some of the questions I asked myself when I looked at this painting again in the context of what I had just discovered. I am also convinced that my father's trip to Paris was no simple visit hut a pilgrimage, a formal presentation of Modesto's Lovers to Juliet Man Ray to honor the memory of her late husband and Father's friendship with him.

  In and of itself, the Modesto painting is at best tangential to the case I'm building. But, Modesto's Lovers actually becomes an integral part of the suspect/psychiatrist's own Rorschach blot, revealing his personality and emotions in the context of Father's using lipstick at a Franklin House party, writing in lipstick on the body of Jeanne French at her crime scene, cutting Elizabeth Short's lips, and interpreting a pattern on a hotel floor as a pair of lips that need to be stomped out. In that context, the violent erotica expressed in Modesto's Lovers is a variation on a theme that ran throughout George Hodel's life and becomes important and relevant evidence in evaluating his culpability in the Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French murder cases.

  In former Los Angeles crime reporter Will Fowler's 1991 book Reporters: Memoirs of a Young Newspaperman, the author closes his chapter on the Black Dahlia by saying:

  Intense interest lingers regarding this murder mystery simply because it remains a mystery. And by this fascination, it has earned its niche in the annals of crime history as being the most notorious unsolved murder of the twentieth century.

  Elizabeth Shorts slaying might be solved in the distant future, but I sincerely hope not. It's like an unopened present. The present always remains a wondrous thing, as long as it remains unopened.

  The Black Dahlia murder still remains "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."

  I take strong exception to Fowler's comparing the unsolved torture-murder of a young woman to "an unopened present" and "a wondrous thing." It is his statement, however, that "the Black Dahlia murder still remains 'a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma'" that has become almost a signature quote for the entire Black Dahlia murder investigation. Most people think the quote originated with Winston Churchill, who in a 1939 radio broadcast used the phrase to describe Russia. When I first read the quote in Fowler's book during my early research on the case, I knew I'd heard it before but couldn't recall where. The next time I read it, I was able to pinpoint the source and put together a pattern of thoughtprints that led me directly back to my father and Man Ray.

  The memory link for the "riddle wrapped in a mystery" quote dates back to the winter of 1980, when I became the senior field homicide detective at Hollywood Division. Only months away from turning forty, I had mellowed and I could see my father on a gray scale instead of a stark black and white. I reached out to him.

  On January 27, 1980, I mailed a highly personal letter to him in the Philippines. In it, I communicated my current thoughts and reflections in many areas of my life, and how in maturity I had come to realize, despite our physical separation, how much I loved and respected him. I enclosed an article and photographs from the Hollywood Independent that mentioned me and my then partner Rick Papke after we'd been chosen to receive the "Inspector Clouseau" Award for solving a Hollywood murder case in which veteran film actor Charles Wagenheim, age eighty-three, had been murdered at his residence.

  Roughly four months later, in June of that year, I received the following reply. This was the only time Father ever communicated with me on such a personal level.

  Dear Steve:

  It was good to get your last letter with its long perspectives. To communicate is such a mysterious process, at any level. And to truly communicate is rare. I am glad that you made the effort, and that you succeeded. That you succeeded in beginning to make a breakthrough. One of these days, if time permits, let's try together, to push through further.

  It is not easy to explain what I mean. But let me give you an example. A parable. But a true example. When you visit here in Manila again I'll show you the birds, and the glass, and the watchers (we), and we can try together to unlock the secrets of the three. Or is it four?

  Safely hidden away from harm, in the overhead roof rafters of my penthouse in the Excelsior, are a tribe of small birds. Perhaps they are sparrows, house sparrows. They build their nests there, slip between the curves of the galvanized roofing into their separate havens, mate there, and raise their young.

  Each season a generation of brave new little birds squeeze out through the curves of the roofing, and survey their cosmos. They practice hopping about, and pecking at each other, and winging along the balcony. They even discover a tiny swing which I have put up for them (birds love to play, you know) and they jump from the window frames to the metal swing, push back and forward, and hop back delightedly to their take-off place.

  And then, somewhere along the line, and usually pretty soon, they make a discovery. A discovery based on advanced technology. A discovery which is totally incomprehensible, but which fills them with joy, and hope, and high excitement.

  In Manila, as you may remember, my penthouse apartment faces out toward the west, onto Manila Bay. All through the afternoon, and until the sun sets behind the mountains of Bataan and the island of Corregidor, the sun's rays beat relentlessly on the glass west wall of my apartment. Air conditioners find it hard to compete with this heavenly barrage.

  Therefore, in self-defense, we put up synthetic plastic coating-a mirror film-on all the western windows, to reflect the sun's rays and help to cool the rooms. It works quite well, and cuts down on heat and glare. Through the glass, we look out on the bay and the mountains and the sunset with slightly bluishly tinted glasses. And they look fine; they look all the better for this bit of blueness.

  But to anyone on the outside (and we come back now to our brave young sparrows) the plastic-coated glass is a mirror. It is meant to be a mirror so as to turn away light and heat. It was not designed to deceive little birds. But they are deceived, and aroused, and delighted.

  What do they see in the tinted mirror? They see beautiful young birds, amazingly like themselves, hopping about like they do, and full of life, and curiosity. Above all else, our little sparrows yearn to join their companions, and to sport with them, fly with them, even mate with them and continue their flight through eternities of love and time.

  But there is a barrier to all these hopes. They do not know and cannot believe that the barrier, the wall of glass, can never be surmounted. There must be a way, they say, to break through somehow, into this paradise of beautiful young birds who await them, who tempt them, and who respond dancer-like to their every movement. How to enter this paradise which is right here, right at hand? How, they ask? Surely there must be a way, if they only persist. Surely they will somehow prevail, they say. Paradise will be theirs. Paradise awaits the brave, the strong, the pure in heart, they say.

  And so, for hours on end, our little birds dash against the silent glass. Foray after foray, swooping from a vantage point (the Chinese lanterns near the roof) the little birds strike against the glass. The braver and more patient ones may go on all day, in their assault. The tinted glass is flecked with a thousand marks where little beaks have crashed against it, hour after hour after hour.

  And then there is the third partner in this mystery. Ourselves. The tireless birds, the silent glass, and we. We stand wonderingly behind the glass, and contemplate the battle. We are like the gods, watching all and knowing all, knowing that the battle is fore-ordained. But how can we communicate our knowledge to the brave battalions of the birds? How can we warn them, console them? Send them off on other more hopeful missions?

  Sadly, as we contemplate the glass and the determined little birds we mus
t settle with the truth. And the truth is that we cannot warn them, cannot tell them, and can only feel for them, and love them for their courage.

  But are there only three of us? The birds, the glass, and we? Or is there a fourth? Who is standing behind our glass, invisible to us, incommunicable to us, gravely watching our brave attacks against the walls we cannot see? Is there a fifth presence, watching all the others? And a sixth, and others, hidden in mysteries beyond our dreams?

  When you visit in Manila, I'll show the countless marks on the glass to you. If you come at the right season, you'll see the brave little birds themselves, and their efforts to break through.

  There are other ways, too, in which life's secrets are shadowed forth. Have you ever watched the insect who flies back and forth in the jetliner, seeking a tiny crumb or wanting out? How can I inform him that he is flying from Amsterdam to Tokyo, and that his life is joined with the lives of us who see beyond the crumb. But not too far beyond. We know as little about our real voyage as the insect knows about the trans-polar flight.

  It is good to know that you love me, for this is not easy to achieve, for you, for many reasons. Some of the reasons you have stated, and it is fine that you are able to begin to understand and overcome them. Some of the other reasons, for our love, may be harder to understand, for they may be shrouded in mysteries, like those of the birds and the glass.