by Steve Hodel
Heady stuff. George dated an attractive fellow bohemian by the name of Emilia Lawson. His buddy John Huston squired a slim, petite intellectual named Dorothy Harvey. When John and Dorothy ran off to Greenwich Village, New York, to get married, George and Emilia opened a bookstore in downtown L.A.
Then for reasons unexplained (maybe it’s because he’d just turned twenty), George veered more mainstream. First, he took a job as a radio host for the Southern California Gas Company’s Music Hour, introducing classical music listeners to everything from Beethoven to Gilbert and Sullivan. Then, he and Emilia and their newborn son (named Duncan) moved to San Francisco, where George enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, and pursued a course of study in pre-med.
Berkeley led to medical school at nearby University of California, San Francisco. He supported his young family by driving a cab until he and Emilia landed something far better: They were hired by the San Francisco Chronicle to write a weekly column called “Abroad in San Francisco.”
It would seem as though George had a full plate. But somehow he found the time to get involved with another woman: Dorothy Anthony, a young art student/model who bore him a third child, a daughter named Tamar.
1.2 Young Dr. Hodel, circa 1937, Santa Fe, New Mexico
Medical school led to an internship at San Francisco General Hospital, then his first doctoring gig with the New Mexico State Department of Public Health attending to the medical needs of the Hopi and Navajo reservations and serving as a surgeon at the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) logging camp.
1.3 Me (far left) and my brothers Mike and Kelvin at the Franklin House, 1946
By the early ’40s, he’d returned to L.A., reunited with Dorothy Harvey Huston, recently divorced from John, married her, and quickly had four sons: Michael, John, me, and Kelvin.2 He was now the senior VD control officer for Los Angeles County and also operated his own private practice specializing in the treatment of venereal diseases in downtown L.A.
An esteemed, well-heeled physician with a wide range of interests, my father cultivated friendships with surrealist artist Man Ray, author Henry Miller, Beat poet Kenneth Rexroth, and others. I remember the mid-1940s as a fun time as a young boy, playing with my brothers and meeting my parents’ glamorous friends at the architecturally distinctive John Sowden House on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood.
1.4 Dr. George Hodel purchased the Lloyd Wright-designed “Franklin House” in 1945
It wasn’t until 1999 that I discovered my mom and dad had actually divorced in 1944. Nor did I have the slightest inkling that the LAPD was investigating my father in connection with the death of his twenty-seven-year-old girlfriend and secretary, Ruth Spaulding, who died from an overdose of barbiturates on May 9, 1945.
I knew from family lore that Dad had joined the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) and had become a military officer assigned to a billet in China at the end of World War II, but did not know of the details.
I have since discovered that in August 1945, while the LAPD was actively investigating George Hodel as a possible murder suspect in the death of Ruth Spaulding, George made the application to UNRRA. In his application he requested to be stationed “anywhere overseas, but would prefer Asia.” He was accepted and after conducting some research at the “home office” in Washington, D.C., during the fall and winter of 1945, he was assigned as “chief regional medical officer” to Hankow, China. He arrived in early February 1946 and was given the honorary rank of lieutenant general and assigned a military jeep, complete with a three-star flag, a driver, his own personal cook, and two administrative aides. Just seven months later, in September 1946, Father unexpectedly resigned his commission and resumed his medical practice in Los Angeles.
From my seven-year-old perspective, my dad, who had recently returned from China, was extremely cool. He sometimes drove a military jeep; was tall, suave, and good-looking; and had an endless stream of beautiful young women lined up outside his home-office waiting to see him. Sure, every once in a while he took me down to the basement to whale on my backside with his belt. But I knew I had it coming. He’d caught me smoking a cigarette on the front steps.
There were multiple compensations, such as spying on my fourteen-year-old half-sister, Tamar, and other young ladies sunning themselves nude in the courtyard. Life with Dad was good.
1.5 Tamar Hodel, age sixteen
Then suddenly, in 1950, just before my ninth birthday, the curtain came down. Mom packed my brothers and me into a friend’s pickup and drove us away from Hollywood. I didn’t learn the reason until ten years later, when I found out that my father had been accused of committing incest with Tamar.
The details were incredibly lurid, especially for the 1940s. Dad had sexual intercourse with his fourteen-year-old daughter in front of his friend Fred Sexton and two other adult women. After an abortion, Tamar ran away and was found by the police. During her detention and follow-up interview with LAPD Juvenile detectives, Tamar disclosed the details of the 1949 sex acts with her father, as well as the fact that he taught her how to perform oral sex several years prior, when she was just eleven.
Due to his high position as L.A. County’s chief VD control officer, Father’s 1949 arrest by the LAPD for child molestation and incest obviously made for front-page news.
At a preliminary hearing, witnesses, including Dad’s lifelong friend Fred Sexton and the two women who had been present, testified to the facts surrounding the charges and testified to observing the sex acts. Father was “held to answer,” and a full jury trial was scheduled for December 1949.
1.6 George Hodel booking photo for incest, October 1949
Father immediately hired L.A.’s two top-gun criminal defense attorneys, Jerry Giesler and Robert Neeb, to prepare his criminal defense. “Get Me” Giesler was legendary for his ability to obtain acquittals. His client list was a Who’s Who of Hollywood luminaries that included Alexander Pantages (rape), Errol Flynn (sex crimes with juveniles), Charles Chaplin, Bugsy Siegel, Greta Garbo, Edward G. Robinson Jr., Robert Mitchum, Busby Berkeley, and even the “Scopes Monkey Trial” attorney, Clarence Darrow. Now it was my father’s turn.
The three-week jury trial was held at the Los Angeles Hall of Justice, in December 1949. The People’s case was overwhelming. The witnesses testified to actually observing the sex acts between father and daughter. And the case was bolstered by the introduction of admissions made by George Hodel to the arresting detectives, in which he told them that he and his daughter “have been studying the mysteries of sex” and that “these things must have happened. I need to talk to my psychiatrist, but I am afraid he will find something wrong with me.” Incredibly, even with the prosecution’s airtight, slam-dunk case—the jury found him not guilty.
The defense team of Giesler and Neeb had worked their magic. Later police reports discovered in 2004 would document and suggest a possible $10,000 payoff may have been made during the trial, along with a separate police interview that established cash payoffs by Father to his abortionist accomplice, made just four days after the jury’s verdict. Regardless, Dad was acquitted. He and his attorneys were able to convince a jury that “the teenager had fantasized the whole thing.”
Tamar, branded forever in our family as “Tamar the liar,” was shipped back to San Francisco.
As summarized in my 2003 book, Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder, and supported by electronic surveillance stakeouts and tape-recorded admissions found in the secret 1950 Hodel-DA Files, we now know that my father by his own admission was “The Black Dahlia Avenger” and murdered both Ruth Spaulding and Elizabeth Short. In the spring of 1950, tipped by his friends in law enforcement of his imminent arrest for the Dahlia murder, Father quickly slipped out of the country and moved to Hawaii, where he obtained a degree in psychiatry.
My brothers and I were left to fend for ourselves and help prop up our mother, who had become an alcoholic and was barely able to cope. We moved from one cheap rental in the Valley to
another, trying to avoid the bill collectors, hoping our mother would stay sober enough to land a scriptwriting job with one of the film studios.
When I caught up with my father a decade later, in 1960, I had become a hospital corpsman in the U.S. Navy assigned to Subic Bay, Philippines, and he was as fabulous as ever. I’ll never forget our first reunion at Dad’s office/residence in Manila. Appropriately, he had leased Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s old World War II headquarters on Manila Bay. There he stood in front of his huge mahogany desk, larger than life, wearing his white sharkskin suit and chain-smoking Havana cigars. At age fifty-two, he’d exchanged his life in L.A., doctoring to the rich and famous, for that of an international marketing executive based in Manila. And he’d replaced Mom and my brothers and me with a high-society Filipina wife and four handsome new children.
I tried not to judge him. I told him I still loved him. Despite his stiff formality, I found myself captivated by his personal charm and charisma. A true man of the world. Listening to his beautiful speaking voice reciting one adventure after the next was spellbinding. With each weekend visit I became more enamored with my father’s lifestyle. During my two-year billet in the Philippines we wined, dined, and visited his favorite brothels on a regular basis. I learned that he and his Filipina wife, Hortensia, were living apart.
He eventually divorced her, too, after she sought an annulment from the Pope, and moved on to a succession of young Asian beauties that ended with him marrying his fourth wife, June, who at twenty-three was in charge of his Tokyo office.
1.7 June and George Hodel, Bush Street residence, San Francisco, circa 1997
The next thirty years of my life were focused on my career as an LAPD homicide detective, while during this same period my father continued to build his company and reputation. By the 1970s the protean Dr. George Hill Hodel had reinvented himself as the most respected market research expert in Asia.
In 1990, just three years after my retirement from the LAPD, my father and June (who by then had been married to him for twenty years) decided to relocate their lives and business to the United States. They chose downtown San Francisco and moved into an office/penthouse residence on Bush Street, in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district. For the next nine years I would be a regular visitor to their home and became very close to both my father and his most loving wife, June. My father died there of congestive heart failure in May 1999 at the age of ninety-one.
1.8 George Hodel, circa 1997
Chapter Two
There is nothing in itself which is wrong or evil, not even murder.
Henry Miller, The World of Sex
On the morning of June 2, 1999, as my father’s widow scattered his ashes over San Francisco Bay, I quietly bid farewell to the parent I barely knew. I believed he’d been a highly intelligent, accomplished man who’d lived an extraordinary life.
Hungry to learn more about this man I loved and admired, I started asking questions. One of the first people I reconnected with was my half-sister, Tamar. Minutes into our initial conversation she dropped a bomb: “Steve, did you know our father was a suspect in the Black Dahlia murder?”
Say that again?
“Steve, did you know our father was a suspect in the Black Dahlia murder?”
How did she know? Where had this come from?
Tamar claimed that LAPD detectives told her this as they transported her as a witness to and from court during the incest trial in 1949.
Even though I’d been a Hollywood homicide detective for twenty-four years, this was news to me. Given my professional background and the fact that my father might have been a suspect in one of the most infamous murders in California history, I probed further. And as I did, I found myself looking deeper and deeper into something I didn’t want to see.
Three years of investigation yielded my first book, Black Dahlia Avenger, and its horrible conclusion: My father wasn’t just flawed; he was evil. He was a serial killer, responsible for the death of Elizabeth Short and at least six other women.
I was more stunned than anyone else. Mystery writer James Ellroy, in his moving foreword, wrote:
Steve Hodel convinced me. His knowledge is conclusively cataloged in this book. I began the book unimpressed, and came away converted. Black Dahlia Avenger is a densely packed evidence exhibit and a treatise on the aesthetic of evil.
In the months immediately following Black Dahlia Avenger’s publication, my life turned upside down. My father’s widow was horrified. Other family members objected to the way they’d been portrayed. Some felt vindicated and cheered me on. Strangers came forward with bits of information that added to the bitter legacy of George Hodel—one that I carried with sadness and guilt.
He was my father, after all. He’d passed on genes, blood, personality imprints, God knows what else. I carried his painful legacy like a load of rocks.
I had two choices: Crawl into a hole and hide, or continue to pursue the truth. I chose the latter. Call it a natural impulse. It’s the thing I’d been trained to do: follow leads wherever they take me, present the evidence. I’d been a professional investigator all my adult life.
But was I also pulled by forces that operated on a deeper psychic level, somewhere beyond my comfort zone? My mother and father had named me after my mother’s favorite fictional character, Stephen Dedalus from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.
Dedalus, too, was a seeker of truth and one who sought to fly away from constraints. According to Greek mythology the original Daedalus constructed a pair of wings for himself and his son, Icarus, to escape the island of Crete, where they were imprisoned by King Minos. Earlier, he’d been ordered by King Minos to build a labyrinth to hold the Minotaur.
I wasn’t the only one of my dad’s children auspiciously named. He told my half-sister Tamar that he’d named her after a poem by Robinson Jeffers about an incest victim, then slept with her when she was fourteen.
Is it possible that I’d been preordained to play the role of truth-seeker? Had I been cast by my father (the Minotaur) to capture him in infamy by revealing his dark deeds?
Weird. But not as far-out as it sounds. My father, a self-described surrealist and devotee of the Marquis de Sade, identified with the Minotaur. He even posed Elizabeth Short’s dead body as a tribute to a photographic representation, The Minotaur (1936), by his friend Man Ray.
According to Greek mythology, the Minotaur possessed the head and tail of a bull and the body of a man. He was kept trapped in a labyrinth on the Isle of Crete and fed young virgins.
It all played perfectly into my father’s fantasies. Dad viewed himself in grandiose terms as psychopaths often do. He cast a wide, very powerful spell. You’ll see.
I consider myself a somewhat shy, self-effacing man, one who used to spend a good deal of his time hiding behind a shot glass. Suddenly, with the publication of my first book about the Black Dahlia murder, I was thrust into the spotlight’s glare.
But Dad’s story had to be told. It was too important. And I felt I owed it to the victims and their families, to my half-sister Tamar, to my brothers, to myself.
Opportunists and crackpots who carefully guarded their own Black Dahlia theories took their shots. I was called a liar, a fantasist, and even a serial killer myself. The lesson: don’t tread on other people’s myths.
Meanwhile, Black Dahlia Avenger had sprung to the top of national bestseller lists, climbing to number two in Southern California. The story of my family became national news, with print articles in News-week, People, and the Associated Press as well as radio and television coverage, including segments on Dateline NBC, CNN, CBS’s The Early Show, and ABC’s The View.
It was a thick tome, heavy with evidence. By page 600 I’d presented evidence connecting either George Hodel or his accomplice, Fred Sexton, to thirty-one separate crimes committed in the 1940s. Those thirty-one fell into three categories: (1) Definites, (2) Probables, and (3) Possibles.
The data linking my father to the
eight crimes in the Definites category was especially compelling. Los Angeles head deputy district attorney Stephen Kay agreed. After reviewing my entire Black Dahlia Avenger investigation and all related photos and exhibits, he sent me a ten-page written opinion. Here are two brief extracts:
September 30, 2001
To Whom It May Concern:
The most haunting murder mystery in Los Angeles County during the twentieth century has finally been solved in the twenty-first century. . . .
I have personally read all of Steve’s written account of his father’s life and crimes and I have no doubt that his father not only murdered Elizabeth Short (the Black Dahlia) but also murdered Jeanne French less than one month after the Black Dahlia murder.
But there was more. Much more. You see, my father didn’t stop killing when he left L.A. in 1950. He left a gruesome trail of more horror, more blood spilled, and more young lives ended in shockingly brutal ways.
But before we talk about the murders that continued in this country and abroad into the late 1960s, we need to examine the MOs for the crimes my father committed in the ’40s. Because even the cleverest of criminals leaves behind clues, which when analyzed carefully yield a unique signature. My father, who was devious enough to never be caught, took this a step further—sending notes and evidence and deliberately taunting the police.
