George Hodel: Black Dahlia Murderer?

 

George Hill Hodel Jr. (October 10, 1907 – May 16, 1999) was an American physician. After the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, a.k.a. the Black Dahlia, police came to consider Hodel a suspect. He was never formally charged with the crime and came to wider attention as a suspect after his death when he was accused by his son, Los Angeles homicide detective Steve Hodel, of killing Short and committing several additional murders. Prior to the Dahlia case, he was also a suspect in the death of his secretary, Ruth Spaulding, but was not charged. He was also accused of raping his own daughter, Tamar Hodel, but was acquitted for that crime. He fled the country several times, and spent time between 1950 and 1990 in the Philippines.

Personal life

George Hill Hodel Jr. was born on October 10, 1907, and raised in Los Angeles, California. His parents, George Hodel Sr. and Esther Hodel, were of Russian Jewish ancestry. Their only son, he was well-educated and highly intelligent (scoring 186 on an early IQ test). He was also a musical prodigy, playing solo piano concerts at Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium. Composer Sergei Rachmaninoff traveled to his parents' house to hear the boy play. Hodel attended South Pasadena High School, graduated at age 15 and entered the prestigious California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, but was forced to leave the university after one year, due to a sex scandal involving a professor's wife, though this is not the only account. He had impregnated the woman and wanted to raise their child together, but she refused. The affair between Hodel and the woman caused her marriage to fall apart.

By around 1928, Hodel was in a common-law marriage with a woman named Emilia and had a son by her, Duncan. In the 1930s he was legally married to a model from San Francisco, Dorothy Anthony, and had a daughter by her, Tamar.

Hodel graduated from Berkeley pre-med in June 1932. He immediately afterward enrolled in medical school at the University of California, San Francisco and received his medical degree in June 1936.

After the success of his medical practice and becoming head of the county's Social Hygiene Bureau, Hodel was moving in affluent Los Angeles society by the 1940s. He was enamored of the darker side of Surrealism and the decadence surrounding that art scene, befriending photographer Man Ray, film director John Huston and those who associated with them. With Ray and some other Surrealists, he shared an interest in sadomasochism and the darker side of art and philosophy; with the young men of the Hollywood scene, he shared a fondness for partying, drinking, and womanizing.

Hodel's second legal wife, whom he married in 1940, was John Huston's ex-wife, Dorothy Harvey. He called her "Dorero" to avoid confusion with his other wife, Dorothy Anthony, at least within their circle, but she is better known as Dorothy Huston-Hodel.

Hodel purchased the Sowden House in 1945 and lived there from 1945 until 1950. The structure, built in 1926 by Lloyd Wright (son of the noted American architect Frank Lloyd Wright), has since been registered as a Los Angeles historic landmark. Hodel was effectively a polygamist: in the late 1940s, around the time of the deaths of Spaulding and Short, Hodel was living with "Dorero" and their three children (including Steven, who would later make a case that his father was a murderer); his first legal wife Dorothy Anthony and their daughter Tamar; and, at times, his original common-law wife, Emilia, mother of Hodel's eldest child (by that time an adult). He was also prone to taking temporary lovers; multiple witnesses later suggested such a relationship between Hodel and Short.

Hodel left the United States in March 1950 for Hawaii, then a U.S. territory, where he married an upper-class Filipino woman, Hortensia Laguda (after another four children, they divorced in the 1960s; she was later a member of the Philippine Congress as Hortensia Starke). Hodel returned to the United States in 1990, and married (legally) for the fourth time, to a woman named June, in San Francisco, where he remained for the rest of his life. He died in 1999, at the age of 91.

Murder and rape suspect

Hodel first came under suspicion for murder in 1945, following the death of his secretary, Ruth Spaulding, by a drug overdose. He was suspected of having murdered her in order to cover up his financial fraud, such as billing patients for tests that were never performed, and to protect valuable secrets he had obtained about police and politicians from patients obtaining illegal abortions. At about this time, Hodel left briefly for China, where he worked with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. These events first came to public attention in 2004.

On January 15, 1947, the naked body of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short was discovered in an empty lot in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Short had suffered gruesome mutilation, notably her body being cut in half at the waist, as well as her mouth being cut ear to ear. The case earned major publicity and prompted one of the largest investigations in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department. The case was never solved. However, authorities at the time interviewed hundreds of suspects and focused on about 25, one of whom was George Hill Hodel Jr. Various aspects of the case have suggested a strong connection to Surrealism, including the works of Man Ray in particular.

In late 1949, Hodel's teenage daughter Tamar accused him of incestuous sexual abuse and impregnating her (after which she was given a back alley abortion). He was acquitted after a widely publicized trial. There had been three witnesses present during and who participated in the sex acts. Two testified at the trial, and the third recanted her earlier testimony and refused to come forward, the theory being that Hodel had threatened her into silence. The trial had caused Tamar to look like a liar who had fabricated the abuse allegation for attention.

Hodel came to police attention as a suspect in the Elizabeth Short murder in 1949 after the sexual abuse trial; known or suspected sex criminals in the area were being investigated first, and it had come out in that trial that Tamar had allegedly claimed her father was the Dahlia killer. Hodel's medical degree also aroused suspicion, given the hypothesis that whoever bisected Short's body had some degree of surgical skill. At least eight witnesses claimed first-hand knowledge of a 1946 relationship between Short and Hodel, then back in Los Angeles from China. The full details of the investigation came to light only in 2003, when a "George Hodel–Black Dahlia File" was discovered in the vault at the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office. The file revealed that in 1950, Hodel was the prime suspect of the Dahlia murder. His private Hollywood residence was electronically bugged by an 18-man DA/LAPD task force between February 15 and March 27, 1950. Transcripts of conversations revealed Hodel's references to performing illegal abortions, giving payoffs to law enforcement officials, and to his possible involvement in the deaths of his secretary and Short. The DA tapes recorded him saying:

Supposin' I did kill the Black Dahlia. They can't prove it now. They can't talk to my secretary anymore because she's dead. They thought there was something fishy. Anyway, now they may have figured it out. Killed her. Maybe I did kill my secretary.

Hodel was also interviewed as a suspect in the nearby June 1949 murder of Louise Springer, the "Green Twig Murder", though evidence to support this accusation was not publicly available until July 2018.

In October 1949, Hodel's name was mentioned in a formal written report to the grand jury as one of five prime suspects in the Short murder, but none of the named suspects were submitted to the grand jury for consideration for indictment, as the investigation was still "ongoing". By April 1950, Jemison had gathered enough evidence to charge Hodel and was about to arrest him for the Short murder, when Hodel again left the United States. He obtained a degree in psychiatry and counseled prisoners in the Territorial prison in Hawaii for three years, then moved on to the Philippines, where he started a new family, and appears to have remained until 1990, finally dying in 1999 in San Francisco without charges ever being filed. However, his son Steve has written that he believes Hodel re-entered the United States multiple times each year from 1958 through 1988 and specifically in 1966–1969 to commit more murders, and then returned to the Philippines after.

Reactions

After Hodel died in 1999, his son Steve Hodel, a former LAPD homicide detective, wanted to learn more about his father. During that process he uncovered information that led him to believe his father was in fact Short's killer. His investigation began with the discovery of a photo album owned by Hodel, which contained a portrait of a dark-haired young woman whom Steve Hodel believed was Short. During Steve Hodel's investigation, he learned that his father may have been responsible for more than one murder. Steve Hodel also suspected his father of being the Chicago "Lipstick Killer" of the late 1940s, the Manila "Jigsaw Murderer" of 1967, and even the San Francisco "Zodiac Killer" of the late 1960s, among other such crimes.

A September 2006 episode of Cold Case Files, hosted by Bill Kurtis, illustrates the mixed reaction to Steve Hodel's hypothesis as outlined in his first book, Black Dahlia Avenger (2003). Head Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay described himself as highly impressed by Steve Hodel's research and conclusions and even went so far as to declare the case had been solved. Others have noted that Kay, who has since retired, formed this conclusion by treating Steve Hodel's many disputed assertions as established fact. Less impressed was active Detective Brian Carr, the LAPD officer then in charge of the Black Dahlia case which was still officially open. Carr's opinion was that Hodel's theory was based on a few intriguing facts linked together by unsubstantiated supposition. Short's relatives also disagreed that the photos in Hodel's album were of Short. Carr added that if he ever took a case as weak as Steve Hodel's to a prosecutor he would be "laughed out of the office". C arr, admitting that he had not read all of Steve Hodel's materials, added, "I don't have the time to either prove or disprove Hodel's investigation. I am too busy working on active cases." Steve Hodel has since produced two additional books on the Dahlia case, and several books on the Zodiac killer and other cases, attempting to link them to his father.

In the years following George Hodel's leaving the country, investigators from both the LAPD and the District Attorney office privately stated that they believed Black Dahlia case was "solved" and that Hodel was the killer, though they did not have enough evidence to go to trial. Specific quotes from the top brass include the following:

Chief of Detectives Thad Brown: "The Black Dahlia Case was solved. He was a doctor who lived on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood."

LAPD Chief of Police William H. Parker: "We identified the Black Dahlia suspect. He was a doctor."

LASD under-sheriff James Downey: "The Black Dahlia Case was solved, but it will never come out. It was a doctor they all knew in Hollywood involved in abortions."

DA Lt. Frank Jemison: "We know who the Black Dahlia killer was. He was a doctor but we didn't have enough to put him away."

The DA Files confirmed that the doctor referred to was George Hill Hodel. Head Deputy DA Steve Kay reviewed the case and provided a legal opinion that "the case was solved", then presented it to then active LAPD Chief of Detectives James McMurray in 2004. McMurray, after reviewing the investigation, gave the following order to the Robbery/Homicide detectives under his command: "Unless you can find some major holes in [Steve] Hodel's investigation, go ahead and clear the Black Dahlia Murder." In 2014, Detective II Mitzi Roberts, the currently assigned LAPD Black Dahlia case detective, stated in an interview with KMEX Univision television newsman Leon Krauze, "I actually agree with you. I think he [Steve Hodel] has made a very compelling theory. I think there is a lot of things that look like it, and his dad could actually be responsible for the murder of the Black Dahlia."

W. Glenn Martin's "Dying Declaration Letter"

In July 2018, Sandi Nichols of Indianapolis, Indiana, while going through her recently deceased mother's personal effects, discovered a "Dying Declaration Letter" written by her grandfather, W. Glenn Martin, some 70 years before (October 26, 1949). The handwritten envelope read, "In case of Margaret Ellen's or Glenna Jean's Death" and was initialed "WGM";  the letter was written out of fear that one or both of his teenage daughters might be killed. The three-page letter identified W. Glenn Martin as a paid LAPD police informant working for a "Sgt. McCawley" (Sgt. McCauley, LAPD Internal Affairs Division). He described his activities as working undercover for LAPD detectives to help them identify and arrest corrupt police officers; in his words, "... it was to try and see if other officers could be inveigled into crime." The Martin letter, reproduced in full in the chapter "Afterword" in Black Dahlia Avenger III, went on to name "GH" on 17 separate occasions identifying him as a personal acquaintance of Martin's as well as of McCauley's, and named him as the killer of both Short and of a second lone woman, Louise Springer, the "Green Twig Murder" victim. Martin's letter claimed that both he and "GH" personally knew Springer and that he believed "GH" had also killed her. LAPD at that time was actively investigating the Springer and Black Dahlia murders and had publicly identified them as "probably connected". Springer was garroted on June 13, 1949, just two blocks from where Short's body was found in 1947.

Included in the letter was the fact that LAPD, after being informed that "GH" knew victim Springer, brought "GH" in to be "grilled about the Springer murder." The Martin letter made it clear that "GH" was known and protected by law enforcement officers, and that they "let him go." Martin's instructions were that his letter was to be opened only in case of harm coming to either of his daughters. No harm came to either of them so the letter remained unreported and in the family's possession for 70 years until discovered and read by Martin's granddaughter.

Comparisons to the Zodiac killer

In 2009, Steve Hodel's book Most Evil: Avenger, Zodiac and the Further Serial Murders of Dr. George Hill Hodel was published. This follow-up work examined the possibility that Hodel had also committed crimes outside of Los Angeles: in Chicago (the 1945–1946 "Lipstick murders"), in Manila, Philippines (the 1967 "Jigsaw murder" of Lucila Lalu), and in the San Francisco Bay Area (the 1968-1969 "Zodiac murders").

For the San Francisco cases, thirty-one unique MOs and criminal "signatures" were presented, along with a questioned document expert (QDE) testimony that "the George Hodel and Zodiac handwriting samples were written by one and the same person." The California Department of Justice (DoJ) conducted their own independent handwriting examination and while the results were not 100% positive, their QDE expert stated: "I am unable to eliminate George Hodel as Zodiac. I would request additional samples of his lowercase handwriting." (Currently, lowercase handwriting samples have not been found.) While police often use document examiners during investigations, court rulings on the scientific validity of handwriting analysis have been mixed to negative. This investigative sequel, while not claiming "case solved", did request that law enforcement obtain and compare DNA samples. As of 2019, no confirmed Zodiac DNA exists that can be compared with Hodel's known DNA.

Another suspect, William Heirens, was convicted of the “Lipstick Murders” in Chicago in 1946, but professed his innocence (despite confessing). A second major suspect was a man named Richard Russell Thomas, originally of Phoenix, Arizona. George Hodel was never considered a suspect until Steve Hodel interviewed Heirens in 2003, thought him innocent, and proposed George Hodel as the killer in the 2009 book. According to the book, information in the district attorney's Hodel/Black Dahlia files, released in 2003, documented that victim Elizabeth "Black Dahlia" Short traveled to Chicago six months before her murder in June 1946 and began her own investigation into the "Lipstick Murders" while her acquaintance and possible lover George Hodel was in China on behalf of the UN. The files indicate that the Chicago coroner believed that the killer of one victim, six-year-old Suzanne Degnan, "had to have been a skilled surgeon as a hemicorporectomy was performed on the child's body by cutting between the 2nd and 3rd lumbar vertebrae;.... This was a fine piece of surgery." Steve Hodel's hypothesis is that his father was responsible for both murders: George Hodel discovered that Short was investigating the Chicago murders, so he quit his job and returned to the US to put a stop to it; Short was dead within two months. Steve Hodel's view is that her killer performed surgery too closely comparable to that in the Degnan case to be coincidental. Short's body was also placed off a street named Degnan, matching the surname of the Chicago child.

In September 2015, Steve Hodel published a six-year follow-up under the title Most Evil II. The new volume offered additional allegations that linked George Hodel to the San Francisco Bay Area "Zodiac" murders, and presented evidence that George Hodel may have been the writer of the legitimate 1970 Zodiac coded cipher mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle and turned over to SFPD. The proposed solution was posited by M. Yves Person, a high-school teacher in Paris. According to Person, George Hodel, using Ogham (an ancient Celtic alphabet) signed his real name, H O D E L, placing it both as the return address on the envelope and as a signatory inside the card which read, "You Ache to Know My Name...I'll Clue you in...".

In popular culture

In January 2019, the American TV network TNT simultaneously aired two "companion" productions. The first, a six-part limited television miniseries entitled, I Am the Night, is a fictionalized drama focusing on the life of Fauna Hodel and her discovery that her grandfather, Dr. George Hill Hodel (played by actor Jefferson Mays) was the prime suspect in the Black Dahlia Murder (in real life, Fauna Hodel never met or spoke to her grandfather). Scenes for the were shot on location at Dr. Hodel's 1945-50 residence, the historic Frank Lloyd Wright Jr.-built John Sowden House at 5121 Franklin Avenue, Hollywood, California.

The second project was an eight-part documentary podcast, entitled Root of Evil: The True Story of the Hodel Family and the Black Dahlia, a Cadence13/TNT production using archival audio and interviews with Hodel family members. The podcast includes many of the actual investigative findings and linkage of Dr. George Hodel to the Black Dahlia murder, establishing that according to secret police records he, in fact, knew and had dated the victim in the 1940s.

Both series suggest that Fauna might be both the granddaughter and the daughter of Hodel. In 1949, George Hodel had been arrested and tried for incest by LAPD; his 14-year-old daughter Tamar accused him of raping her, resulting in a pregnancy she aborted. Dr. Hodel obtained criminal defense attorney Jerry Giesler and was acquitted after a three-week jury trial.

The Root of Evil producer Zak Levitt was able to obtain DNA analysis and a review of the results by one of the world's leading experts, which positively eliminated Dr. George Hodel as the biological father of Fauna Hodel.

The Root of Evil podcast attained a No. 1 ranking in the United States following its debut in February 2019.