Black Dahlia Avenger II: Presenting the Follow-Up Investigation and Further Evidence Linking Dr. George Hill Hodel to Los Angeles’s Black Dahlia and other 1940s LONE WOMAN MURDERS

by Hodel, Steve

  While no definitive answer to these many questions is found, Exquisite Corpse enumerated a myriad of opportunities both direct and “one-degree-of-separations” between my father and the surrealist community that, in the end, it becomes difficult for me to believe these associates did not or could not have known, or, at the very least, strongly suspected George Hodel’s involvement in the murder.

  The chapter, “William Copley: Surrealist Confidant” introduced us to the birth of the friendship between William Copley and Man Ray that began in Los Angeles in 1946.

  Copley, a wealthy art collector, opened his own gallery in Los Angeles, dedicated exclusively to surrealism. He befriended and displayed many of the movements major artists’ works, including: Man Ray, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, and Yves Tanguy.

  According to Exquisite Corpse, while Copley’s LA art gallery was not a financial success, his friendship with Man Ray was. In 1951 Copley along with his girlfriend, Gloria de Herrera, relocated from Los Angeles to Paris with Man Ray and his wife, Juliet

  Corroborating the Who?

  Looking at Exquisite Corpse with an investigator’s eye, it is my belief that the most singularly important and circumstantially compelling contribution was the book’s inclusion of a 1961 painting by William Copley entitled:

  Il est minuit Dr. ______. [It is Midnight Dr. ____.]

  “It is Midnight Dr. ______.”

  Oil on canvas by William Copley, 1961

  [permission to use painting courtesy of Billy Copley]

  Exquisite Corpse, page 144:

  That same year, as Man Ray was nearing completion of Self Portrait, Copley created a significant artwork. Like many of his other paintings, Il est minuit Dr. _____. (It Is Midnight Dr. _______), 1961, portrays a nude woman and a fully clothed man. The male figure appears at the upper left holding a medical bag. The woman reclines near the bottom of the canvas like an odalisque. It is a classical pose, reminiscent of Ariadne and so many other nudes in art history. She has closed eyes, a hint of a smile, and one hand resting on her forehead. Above her is an array of instruments, including a scalpel and two saws. It suggests that Copley, distanced from the crime scene by fourteen years and thousands of miles, had not forgotten it.

  This painting, created some fourteen years after the Black Dahlia murder supports the suggestion that William Copley (and, by extension Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp) may have suspected Hodel of the crime.)

  Further, keeping in mind that surrealists loved to conceal secret messages and cryptograms in their works—“riddles, wrapped in mysteries, inside enigmas,” let’s take a closer look at Copley’s painting.

  [Note: The following observations are not offered as “proofs.” They are theoretical and speculative and were sent to me in the past few years, as e-mails, from several of my readers. I believe they may have merit and for that reason present them here for your consideration.]

  Back to the William Copley painting:

  To the immediate right of the doctor there are five oversized surgical tools each placed in a vertical position. Below them is a sixth instrument laid out horizontally.

  In a 2009 e-mail from “D.M.” he suggested the possibility that the oversized vertical surgeon’s tools might conceal and actually spell out the name—H O D E L.

  [Compare to original William Copley painting shown previously]

  To be clear, this additional “letter decryption” was not something presented or suggested in the Nelson/Bayliss book, but rather came from, “D.M.” as summarized in a website blog I wrote on September 27, 2009, “A Letter from Dada & Moma - A Surrealist Word Game?” [Note: In addition to the vertical letters, spelling out the doctor’s name—HODEL, others have speculated that Copley may have used the horizontal tool to spell out the doctor/killer’s profession as —“M.D.”]

  Art is totally subjective. As to whether these hidden letters exist or not, I’ll leave it to you, the reader to make your own call. I’m open to the possibility, but would need to see further corroboration and confirmation, perhaps in the form of a “lost letter” or Copley family document.

  Man Ray Letters Hidden in Plain Sight for Seventy-Years

  Interestingly, and somewhat on-point, I came across an article from the Smithsonian Magazine written by, Abby Callard, entitled, Man Ray’s Signature Work. (November, 2009)

  The article details photographer, Ellen Carey’s discovery of Man Ray’s secret writing, hidden for over seventy-years which she found in one of his early photographs. Man Ray unbeknownst to anyone had concealed the letters in plain sight by reversing and disguising his signature and incorporating it as abstract lines in the photograph. Here are some significant excerpts from the Smithsonian article referencing Ellen Carey’s decryption:

  Artist Man Ray mischievously scribbled his name in a famous photograph, but it took decades for the gesture to be discovered.

  …

  In 1935, the avant-garde photographer Man Ray opened his shutter, sat down in front of his camera and used a penlight to create a series of swirls and loops. … As a self-portrait—titled Space Writings—it seemed fairly abstract.

  …

  But now Ellen Carey, a photographer whose working method is similar to Man Ray’s, has discovered something that has been hidden in plain sight in Space Writings for the past 74 years: the artist’s signature, signed with the penlight amid the swirls and loops.

  …

  It might have taken seven decades and a like-minded photographer to see the disguised signature, but the evidence is clear. “Oh, it’s definitely there,” Carey says. “It’s saying, ‘Hello, how come no one noticed for 70 years? I think [Man Ray] would be chuckling right now. Finally, somebody figured him out.”

  Did William Copley, close personal friend to Man Ray, follow his mentor’s lead and for the past fifty-years disguise and conceal his own secret letters and words as his own riddle wrapped in a real life mystery?

  Corroborating the Where?

  “From the nature of the cuts the girl was probably in a semi-recumbent position in a bathtub.”

  Chief Autopsy Surgeon, Dr. Frederick Newbarr, January 1947

  [Public statement to the LA Press on his Elizabeth “Black Dahlia” Short autopsy findings]

  In Chapter 5, Scene of the Crime, we examined in-depth the evidence pointing to and linking the Sowden/Franklin House as being the probable crime scene.

  In that review I also theorized that the most logical location for George Hodel to perform his “operation” was in the tub/shower in the master bathroom. [That the crime occurred in a bathtub was independently supported by the very public knowledge, printed in most of the Los Angeles newspapers, on January 22, 1947, quoting both LAPD Captain Jack Donahoe and Coroner Newbarr, “that the bisection probably was done in a bathtub.”]

  In a just received [November 1, 2011] e-mail question from, Jess Mayeux, one of my readers, in referencing the background squares in the Copley painting, asks:

  “Could the grid represent the tiles in the master bathroom of the Sowden House?”

  George Hodel’s Franklin house, tiled master bathroom as it would have appeared in 1947. As detailed in Chapter Five, this is the probable location of bisection.

  William Copley, artist, art-dealer, patron and close friend of Man Ray, and living in Los Angeles from 1946-1951, would very likely have known and socialized with Dr. George Hodel and attended talks and parties at the Franklin house.

  Additionally, Copley probably knew and shared acquaintances with many of George Hodel’s other friends, including the doctor’s1950 caught-on–tape-accomplice, Baron Ernst Harringa. Copley and Harringa must have been acquainted considering the fact they both owned and operated two of Los Angeles’ upscale art galleries, located within just a few miles of each other.

  In the title of his 1961oil-painting Copley has reminded the doctor [regardless of whether he suspects it is Dr. Hodel or another] that, “It is midnight,” the witching hour, a time for demons and devils to be about their work. By la
ying out the surgeon’s tools Copley suggested exactly what that work would be—an “operation.” With the surgeon standing adjacent to the body, he next introduced us to “the patient/victim.” She is young, attractive and is either unconscious or dead and is lying supine on what appears to be a tiled floor. She is carefully posed, with her right arm bent at the elbow

  Post-operative upper torso of Elizabeth Short [airbrushed] as actually posed by killer in vacant lot. Compare this to Copley’s reclining nude [victim] on what appear to be bathroom tiles.

  So many questions:

  In his singular 1961 art work, It is Midnight Dr. ____., has William Copley represented Los Angeles’ most infamous crime-1947 Black Dahlia Murder?

  In that painting did he reveal he had suspicions of the WHO—Dr. George Hill Hodel, and the WHERE—the Franklin house bathroom?

  Had William Copley seen the crime-scene photos? Was he privy to the inner-circle’s rumors and the not so secret knowledge, shared by Lillian Lenorak, Madi Comfort, Joe Barrett and many others? Was he part of the, “We all knew that he had done it. There was no doubt.”

  At the very least we can be confident that William Copley, living and working in Los Angeles in 1949, and friend and patron to Man Ray, would certainly have known that Dr. George Hodel, was on trial for incest and in December, 1949, had been publicly accused, by his own daughter, of having committed the Black Dahlia murder.

  “My father is the murderer of the Black Dahlia. My father is going to kill me, and all the rest of the members of this household, because he has a lust for blood. He is insane.”

  Tamar Hodel, December 17, 1949 [as reported in court testimony and headlined in below daily newspapers]

  On the morning of December 17, 1949, in Los Angeles, two separate articles [seen above] “hit the streets.” Published in the Los Angeles Daily News and the Los Angeles Mirror, both accounts reported that Dr. George Hodel had been accused by his fourteen-year-old, daughter, Tamar, of having committed the Black Dahlia murder. What was not made public was the fact that Tamar, who at the time was being held in protective-custody at Juvenile Hall, had been informed by the very police detectives who were transporting her to-and-from court, that her father “was the prime suspect in the Dahlia murder.”

  Henry Miller and George Hodel

  We know that Man Ray and Henry Miller, the novelist/painter/surrealist were good friends. That the two of them, along with Beat Generation poet/author Kenneth Rexroth hung out from time to time at Miller’s home in Big Sur.

  During the 1940s, the three were also friends with George Hodel and visited him at the Franklin house where all could intellectualize and share a free and open discussion, without having to fear any restraints from the bourgeois.

  In later years, my mother talked of Henry Miller being a family acquaintance and of having visited him on numerous occasions at his home in the beautiful coastal community of Big Sur in central California.

  Though I was aware of Henry Miller’s “Tropics” books, banned in the US until the 1960s, I had never previously read any of his writings, and only knew him through his reputation as being highly unconventional, and that many considered his erotic writings both amoral and obscene.

  I have no intention here of attempting to make any moral judgment on Mr. Miller’s writings, either pro or con. My intent is to examine, as we have with Man Ray, what influence Miller may have had on my father’s thinking during that period?

  A few years back, I discovered a Henry Miller book entitled, The World of Sex. The book’s front page read, “Printed by J.H.N. for friends of Henry Miller. 1000 copies printed. New York, 1940”

  In reading the below passages, I would have to say that HENRY MILLER and GEORGE HODEL obviously shared a kindredness of thought as it relates to sex, incest, and their own unconventional sense of morality.

  From what MILLER revealed in his privately published book, it is easy for me to imagine the two men sharing a lively discussion at the Franklin house.

  Here are some selected excerpts from Henry Miller’s World of Sex:

  page 12

  But what is normal and healthy for the vast majority leads us nowhere in seeking a clue to the rules of behavior which govern men of genius. The man of genius, wittingly or unwittingly, through his work and by his example seems to struggle to establish the truth that every man is a law unto himself and that the only way to liberation is through the recognition and the realization that he is a unique being.

  page 52

  Sex is only one of millions of ways of expressing oneself. The important thing is the expression, not what is expressed. If it would help men to liberate themselves I would recommend them to have intercourse with animals or to fuck in public or to commit incest, for example. There is nothing in itself which is wrong or evil, not even murder. It is the fear of doing wrong, the fear of committing murder, the fear of acting, or expressing oneself, which is wrong.

  page77

  In fact, it is our dream life which affords a slight cue to the nature of that life which is in store for us. In our dream life we live indiscriminately in past and future. It is the potential, indestructible man who comes to life in the dream. For his being there is no longer a censorship; taboos, laws, conventions, customs are annihilated. In the realm of sex it is the only true freedom he ever knows. He moves toward the object of his desire unimpeded by time, space, physical obstacles or moral considerations. He may sleep with his mother as naturally and easily as with another woman. He may take an animal in the field and satisfy his desires without the slightest revolt. He may fuck his own daughter and find it extremely pleasurable. In the waking world, crippled and shackled by all kinds of fetters, everything is wrong or evil except that which has been prescribed by fear. The real, inner being knows that these things are not wrong, not evil: when he can close his eyes he gives himself up to all these practices and pursuits which are prohibited. In his dreams he follows out his true desires. These desires are not only valid and legitimate but must be realized; if they are thwarted or frustrated the world becomes ugly and death-like.

  page 79

  A certain amount of killing, plundering, raping, and so on, inevitably occurs whenever there is a burst of freedom. Some kind of crude justice has to be dealt out when the scales are tipped and seek to return to balance. Some specimens of the human race ought, out of decency, kindness and reverence for those to come, be wiped out. Some bastards should be buggered and thrown over the fence for the wolves and hyaenas to finish off. Some females ought to be raped to death and left lying on the spot for all to see. Some mean, miserly cowards and traitors to the race ought to be stripped of all they possess and sent naked into the hills.

  A man’s prick and a woman’s cunt will not need to have a name and address tied to it.

  page 83-84

  Now and then in the evenings, I pass a show window where a manikin is being dressed. The manikin is standing there nude and the window-dresser is just in the act of putting his arms around the figure to move her an inch to the left or right. Every time this happens I have the same reaction—I feel that the manikin is more alive than the man who is dressing her. Why it is I don’t know, but the manikin always seems sexually alive. The window-trimmer, on the other hand, is just an indescribable bundle of animate flesh wrapped in meaningless clothes. His movements are utterly senseless. He is going to take the live sexual manikin and make her seductive to the passer-by by putting clothes around her and making her look like the people in the street. He makes the sexual thing dead, just as the undertaker, is ticking up a corpse, makes death look inviting. On every side I see people tampering with the natural order of things, trying to galvanize the inanimate into the semblance of life or else rigidifying the live thing into some death-like pose. Dead or alive, whatever is bare, stark, nude, frightens the shit out of them. A wax cunt in a show window can terrify them even more than a live cunt, so it seems. Even turkeys have to be dressed after the slaughter.

  It is one thing to sit ar
ound drinking Bordeaux with your fellow outsiders and see which one can cast himself in the role of chief nihilist using his pen or paintbrush. But it is quite another to actually step outside the world of words and pictures and TAKE ACTION.

  That was the danger and difference between a Man Ray or Henry Miller and Dr. George Hill Hodel.

  His friends talked a good game about how there was no difference between the waking and the dream state, but when the wine wore off, they went home to their comfortable beds in the objective real world.

  George Hodel DID NOT. He drank the Kool-Aid and BELIEVED.

  He heard the words preached by his surrealist gurus like Andre Breton, Man Ray, and Henry Miller, and took them to heart and to action!

  George made Breton’s words, “Kill, fly faster, love to your heart’s content”—REAL.

  George made Man Ray’s, Lover’s Lips bleed and the Minotaur come to life in the savage torture-sacrifice of a young woman, a surgical murder made REAL.

  George read Henry Miller’s instructions, “to commit incest,” and slept with his teenage daughter. And more, through the decade of the forties committed horrendous acts with woman, “raped to death and left lying on the spot”—all made REAL.

  This was the method of his madness. This is what made George Hodel so dangerous and his surrealist signature crimes—so unique.

  SPELLBOUND

  In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 classic psychological thriller, Spellbound, the original movie poster shows Gregory Peck [John Ballantyne] embracing Ingrid Bergman [Dr. Constance Petersen] as he holds an open straight edged razor in his right hand. The tag line reads:

  “Will he kiss me or kill me?”

  The story centers on a young amnesiac’s search to find who he is and whether or not he has committed a murder. On a parallel track is the romance, which has him, falling in love with his Freudian therapist. Pursued by the police, the two lovers flee to New York City where they seek out the aid of Dr. Constance Peterson’s old school professor, Dr. Brulov [Michael Chekov] to help them with a little dream analysis, hoping to find some answers of the who and why.