The Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

by Steve Hodel

  The murderer threw Elizabeth's empty purse and her shoes in the trash bin in front of 1136 South Crenshaw. This location is between where Elizabeths body was found and the Franklin house where Dr. Hodel lived. The purse and shoes were found 3 miles from the body and 4 miles from the Franklin House. The doctor could have easily thrown the evidence away on his way home from where he "posed" the body. Another strand.

  From everything Steve has told me about his father, he seems like just the type who would be capable of committing such a horrible crime. The doctor treated women like objects to be used and then thrown away.

  Until his last marriage, he went through women at a rapid clip and was obsessed with sex. He was an egomaniac who would not take kindly to anyone disagreeing with him or refusing him. According to Steve's mother, the doctor had a lust for blood. According to a girlfriend, he asked her to lock him in the bathroom after he smoked hashish because "Sometimes I do terrible things." We know he had a relationship with Elizabeth and that she must have done or said something to cause him to torture her in the most brutal ways possible.

  Jeanne French

  (The Red Lipstick Murder)

  I strongly believe that Dr. Hodel also murdered Jeanne French. There are many reasons for my opinion, not the least of which I have already discussed, and that is the fact that both Steve and Hannah McFarland identify the doctor's hand printing in lipstick on Jean French's body.

  The two murders were very close together in time. Elizabeth Short was murdered on January 15, 1947, and Jeanne French was murdered on February 10, 1947. Both bodies were found in vacant lots. Jeanne French's body was found 7 miles west of Elizabeth Short's body in a direct parallel line.

  Jeanne French's nude body had been kicked and stomped, as was Elizabeth Short's body. Foot and heel impressions were visible on Jeanne French's face, breasts and hands. Her mouth had been lacerated in what was described as a "werewolf fashion." Elizabeth Short's mouth had also been lacerated. One side of Jeanne French's mouth was almost cut to the ear.

  Captain Donahoe of the LAPD informed the press that the victim had been savagely beaten with a heavy weapon, probably a tire iron or a wrench, as she crouched naked on the highway. A large pool of blood was found in the highway near the crime scene. The body had been dragged from the highway to the lot.

  Again, vicious overkill, as with Elizabeth Short. However, Jeanne French was not tortured the way Elizabeth Short was. That could be due to the fact that Dr. Hodel had a more involved personal relationship with Elizabeth Short than he did with Jeanne French.

  Nevertheless, it appears that the doctor was the last one seen with Jeanne French before her murder. Witness Toni Manalatos at the Piccadilly Drive-in restaurant located at 3932 Sepulveda Blvd. served the victim her "last meal" between 12 and 1 a.m. This witness tells of seeing the victim accompanied by a "dark-haired man with a small moustache." They left from the restaurant together and Jeanne French's body was found 15 blocks from the restaurant. Dr. Newbarr, who also did the autopsy on Jeanne French, determined that she was murdered between midnight and 4 a.m. on February 10, 1947. The fact that LAPD was looking for suspects who had dark hair, small moustaches and were in the low 6' range in height fits Dr. Hodel to a "T."

  Captain Jack Donahoe, the original senior officer in charge of the Black Dahlia investigation, believed that the murders of Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French were connected. He unfortunately was removed from the investigation approximately 10 days after he made that connection. I fail to see why it was so hard to make a connection when the killer prints the initials B.D. on Jeanne French's body.

  I have had only three murder cases where the killers have written words in the victim's blood. Susan Atkins wrote the word "PIG" in Sharon Tate's blood on the front door of the Polanski residence. The next night Patricia Krenwinkel wrote the words "rise," "death to pigs," and "Healter (sic) Skelter," all in Leno La Bianca's blood. Krenwinkel also scratched the word "WAR" into Leno La Bianca's abdomen with the tines of a carving fork. Less than two weeks earlier, Manson Family member Robert Beausoleil wrote the words "political Piggy" in the blood of rock musician Gary Hinman.

  I have never even heard of a killer writing on the body of a victim in lipstick. With this in mind, I noted with great interest something that Steve's half brother Duncan Hodel said. Duncan said that he visited the Franklin House in 1947, 1948, and 1949. "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 woman's breasts with the lipstick. She had these big beautiful breasts and Dad took the lipstick and drew these big targets around each one, and we all laughed and had a good time." Since I consider writing on a woman's body with lipstick unusual (we are not talking about drawing on a little child's face for Halloween), I would definitely try to get Duncan's incident in front of the jury.

  Unfortunately, there will be no jury trial or death penalty for Dr. George Hodel. One could easily say that he got away with at least two murders. However, thanks to some great detective work by his courageous son Steve, the name of Dr. George Hodel will live in infamy. I do consider Steve's work exposing his father to be courageous, especially since Steve and his dad had a good relationship at the time Dr. Hodel died at the age of 91.

  Sincerely,

  Stephen R. Kay

  The Final Thoughtprint

  MY INVESTIGATION HAD BEEN COMPLETED for some four months. I was working on the final editing of the manuscript when on April 24, 2002, my phone rang. It was my sister Tamar. "Steven," she said, "I have the most amazing news. FaunaI[her eldest daughter] has just spoken with a man named Walter Morgan." (I immediately recognized his name as a district attorney investigator, Lieutenant Jemison's partner from the 1950 investigation, and swallowed hard at hearing his name come from her lips.) "He was a private detective or something back in the 1940s," she said. "He was involved in investigating, guess who: Dr. George Hodel! He told Fauna that they put a bug in the Franklin House to listen in on Dad's conversations. Can you call Fauna and find out what this is all about?"

  I assured Tamar I would check it out immediately. Contacting Fauna, whom I had not spoken to for ten years, I learned she was working in the San Fernando Valley and had been visited in her place of work by a casual acquaintance, Ethel. In her seventies, Ethel was with her boyfriend, whom she introduced as Walter Morgan. Walter shook Fauna's hand, and said, "'Hodel?' That's an unusual name. I once worked a murder case on a Dr. Hodel. Any relation?" Fauna and Walter compared notes, and quickly learned that Morgan's suspect and Fauna's grandfather were one and the same.

  Two days later, on April 26,1 called Walter Morgan and told him my name was Steven Hodel, the uncle of Fauna Hodel, and the son of Dr. Cieorge Hill Hodel, who had died in 1999 at the age of ninetyone. I also informed him that I had retired from LAPD after working most of my career as a homicide detective in Hollywood Division.

  Morgan greeted me warmly, in that unspoken bond that exists cop to cop, and proceeded to reminisce about the Hodel story.

  Morgan, now eighty-seven, said he had worked for the sheriff's department from 1939 to 1949 on radio car patrol, in vice, burglary, and in other details. Then he left LASD and became a DA investigator in 1949, where he remained until retirement in 1970. He worked homicide on temporary assignment for a few months back in 1950. He was sent over to help out Lieutenant Frank Jemison, who he said "had picked me to be his sidekick."

  Walter Morgan remembered well the day they had installed listening devices at the Franklin House, which he authoritatively informed me "was built by Frank Lloyd Wright."* Morgan continued:

  We had a good bug man, a guy that could install bugs anywhere and everywhere. He worked in the DA's crime lab. So the chief assigned me to take him over to the house on Franklin, and he was going to install a bug system at the Hodel residence. My chief at the DA's office had me take him over there and we met the LAPD at Dr. Hodel's house. It was during the daytime and nobody was home. I remember there were some ranking LAPD off
icers outside, and no one could figure out how to get in. I suggested, "Well, have any of you officers tried a card to see if it would open the door?" They laughed, so I pulled out my wallet, and took out some kind of a credit card or whatever card I had, slipped it through, and the front door popped right open! They couldn't believe it. Anyway, our man went in and installed some bugs there. That was our job, to get the bugs installed so we could listen in.

  Morgan, though not personally involved in listening to the secret recordings or transcribing conversations, confirmed that they existed. He knew that others had listened in, but didn't know the context, only that they never filed any charges against Dr. Hodel.

  Morgan said he had worked, or, in his words "rehashed," the Black Dahlia case with Lieutenant Jemison, and then they had turned their attention to the Jeanne French murder. "But we ran into problems with the investigation," he said. "On the Jeanne French murder, Jemison accused the LAPD of hiding some bloody clothes, or getting rid of some bloody clothes from a locker. They called that the Black Dahlia number two. The accusation made headlines the next day, so the DA just took him right off the case. The DA didn't give a damn if we knew who murdered Jeanne French at that point. We thought we were making some progress, and Jemison thought he had a good suspect, but when he said that about LAPD, that was it."

  Morgan remembered that my father had been suspected of "doing away some young girl," as he put it. "A youngster — nineteen, twenty, or twenty-one — something like that."

  Morgan recalled that his chief in the DA's Bureau of Investigation back then was I I. Leo Stanley. I asked him if he remembered an investigator by the name of Walter Sullivan (the DA investigator who picked up Joe Barrett and took him to their office in the spring of 1950) and Morgan said that of course he did.

  Morgan offered that he retired from the DA's office in March 1970, but Lieutenant Jemison remained on the job for some years longer.

  Two articles from the spring of 1950 corroborate what Morgan told me, namely that Lieutenant Jemison was about to make an arrest of a prime suspect. From our previous investigative summary we know that the suspect was Jemison's "wealthv Hollywood Man," Dr. George Hill Hodel.

  In an AprilIarticle, the Los Angeles Times reported:

  MURDER CASES REOPENED

  BY DISTRICT ATTORNEY

  INVESTIGATORS START AGAIN ON SLAYING

  OF NURSE AND 'BLACK DAHLIA' BRUTALITY

  District Attorney's investigators are now searching for a man they believe to be a "hot suspect" in the three-year-old murder of Mrs. Jeanne French.

  The investigators, Frank Jemison and Walter Morgan, also have reopened the notorious Black Dahlia murder case and are completing a list of persons to be interviewed.

  H. Leo Stanley, chief investigator for Dist. Atty. Simpson, said that his investigators remain unconvinced that a bloody shirt and trousers found in the home of an acquaintance of Mrs. French have been fully eliminated as a clue to the murder.

  Suspect Not Named

  Morgan and Jemison declined to name the man they are seeking as the prime suspect, but indicated that he is the owner of the mysterious bloody clothing which has disappeared from police evidence lockers.

  The status of the Black Dahlia murder of twenty-year-old [sic] Elizabeth Short, whose nude, bisected body was found Feb. 15, 1947, in a vacant lot on Crenshaw Blvd., remained in the preparatory stage.

  Jemison and Morgan were assigned to investigate the unsolved murder cases at the request of the 1949 grand jury.

  The grand jury of last year, in its final report, indicated that jury members felt that a complete investigation had not been made by the Police Department and that important clues or evidence may have been overlooked.

  A second article, from the Los Angeles Daily News of the day before, March 31, 1950, supports the fact that Lieutenant Jemison was "stalking the mutilation killers," implying that there may have been more than one suspect involved in what sounds like an imminent arrest.

  D.A. AIDE STALKS

  MUTILATION KILLERS

  Dist. Atty. William E. Simpson said today one of his investigators is making "very good progress" in a renewed investigation of the unsolved mutilation murders of Jeanne French and Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia.

  Simpson disclosed investigator Frank C. Jemison has been working several months on the cases, independent of the Policedepartment. Jemison was assigned to the task at the request of the 1949 County Grand Jury.

  The district attorney added his aide will continue with his inquiry "until he thinks he has sufficient evidence against a party or parties, and then will ask for formal murder complaints."

  The bisected body of Elizabeth Short, 22, was found Jan. 15, 1947, in a vacant lot in the southwest sector.

  Exactly one month later the body of Mrs. French, 45, obscenely marked with lipstick, was discovered in a field in West Los Angeles.

  Chief of Detectives Thad Brown meanwhile discounted reports that vital evidence in the French slaying, in the form of blood-stained clothing, had disappeared from the West Los Angeles detective bureau.

  Brown said the clothing, belonging to a short-lived suspect in the case, never was recorded as evidence because its owner was absolved of any connection with the crime two weeks after it occurred.

  Hidden in the last sentence of this 1950 article was the answer to a question I had been asking for three years. When was the bloody clothing found? What year? Thad Brown was quoted as saying, "its [pants and shirt] owner was absolved of any connection with the crime two weeks after it occurred." This supports my theory that LAPD had identified George Hodel, possibly as the "mystery man sharing a P.O. Box with Jeanne French," and interviewed him at the Franklin House, in February 1947.

  The article clearly establishes Chief Brown's further complicity in the ongoing 1950 cover-up of George Hodel. Brown knew full well that George Hodel had, just two months earlier, finished a three-week incest and sexual molestation trial, was the surgeon boyfriend of Elizabeth Short, and was on intimate terms with Jeanne French, sharing her P.O. box. Brown also knew he had been named by the 1949 grand jury as the prime suspect in both murders; nevertheless, in the days immediately before Dr. Hodel fled the country, Brown informed the press and public that the wealthy Hollywood mystery man "was a short-lived suspect and was absolved two weeks after the Red Lipstick Murder occurred."

  Incredibly, in what would normally be an impossible scenario, Lieutenant Jemison's surviving partner, now eighty-seven years old, has, fifty-two years later, stumbled into the family of the very man his partner was stalking, and given us information not only implicating but naming Dr. George Hodel as the prime suspect in both the Black Dahlia and Jeanne French murders. Moreover, he was present at the Franklin House with a number of "ranking" LAPD officers, and Morgan himself personally "shimmed" the locked door, after which an electronics specialist from the DA's crime lab entered the house and placed listening devices to monitor Dr. Hodel's conversations in the hope of incriminating him.

  In 1950, Walter Morgan was a rookie investigator, with only one year on the job. As, in his own words, a "sidekick" to Lieutenant Jemison, he would not have been privy to detailed specifics related to this highly sensitive investigation. But from what he told me we know that both the DA's office and LAPD were conducting a joint investigation and possessed surreptitiously taped conversations of my father from inside our home. Standard operating procedure would have been to make transcripts of these conversations, as well as investigative follow-up reports documenting the findings. Where are these transcripts? Where are these reports? What do they say?

  What guided Walter Morgan, a hitherto unknown survivor and witness of the truth, to the Hodel doorstep to tell his story, defies all the laws of probability. I neither knew he was alive nor did I seek him out. He came to me! Like so many other witnesses to these crimes, Morgan was unaware of his story's real import. Just another "anecdote." This is what many would call a "coincidence." It was not. There are no "accidents." There
are no "coincidences." Like the night watchman discovering the burglars at the Watergate, Walter Morgan brought home the final pieces of the Dahliagate, to help prove that both city and county law enforcement officers were complicit in the cover-up and obstruction of justice.

  When Lieutenant Jemison discovered that Dr. George Hodel was the Black Dahlia Avenger and had killed both Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French, and attempted to reveal those facts, he was immediately removed from the case and forced into silence. Morgan's unwitting revelation to me, the son of the killer and the solver of his crimes, closed a circle that had been broken for over fifty years. For the Black Dahlia investigation, it was the final thoughtprint.

  Epilogue

  I STAND IN THE PRESENT, and my mind, my intellect, the objective, analytical part of me, looks back through the recent past. Thirty months! So many pieces of the puzzle, so many thoughtprints, have fit into place. Most of the riddles and enigmas relating to this strangest of murder cases have been solved. My role as homicide detective is finished.