Hodel - Most Evil II

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Set in Georgia

ePub ISBN: 978-1-942600-52-7

Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication data

Hodel, Steve, 1941
Most evil : presenting the follow-up investigation and decryption of the 1970 Zodiac cipher in which the San Francisco serial killer reveals his true identity / by Steve Hodel.
338 pages
ISBN 978-1-942600-45-9
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Serial murdersCalifornia. 2. Serial murder investigationCalifornia. 3. Serial murderersCalifornia. 4. Serial murderersUnited StatesBiography. 5. Serial murdersUnited States. I. Title.

HV6248.H462 H63 2015
364.15/23/0979461dc23

For The Victims, Living And Dead,
and SFPD Patrolman Eric Zelms,
Killed In The Line Of Duty On January 1, 1970

Also by Steve Hodel

Most Evil

Black Dahlia Avenger II

Black Dahlia Avenger

A Genius For Murder:
A Historical Dramatization In Three Acts

O n a balmy summer day in June of 1936, George Hill Hodel, a tall, handsome man of twenty-eight, stood on the campus of UCSF, raised his right hand into the air, and, with his classmates, took the following Hippocratic Oath:

I swear by Apollo the physician, and Aesculapius, and Health, and All-heal, and all the gods and goddesses, that, according to my ability and judgment, I will keep this Oath and this stipulation.

...I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion. With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practice my Art.

...Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick, and will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption; and, further from the seduction of females or males, of freemen and slaves.

At the completion of those ceremonies, he was bestowed with the respected and time-honored title of Medical Doctor. His life was now dedicated to the preserving and healing of human life. He was now charged with one of mans highest callings, and it would now be his duty forthwith to assist in the removal of pain and suffering from his humankind.

George Hill Hodel, MD San Francisco Medical School photo, 1935.

Contents

Introduction

T his is the sequel to Most Evil: Avenger, Zodiac, and the Further Serial Murders of Dr. George Hill Hodel , published by Dutton Penguin Group in September 2009.

During the past five years, some of the investigative findings included here have been discussed both on my author website and in my sequel Black Dahlia Avenger II (Thoughtprint Press, 2012; updated in 2014.)

For those readers who might not be familiar with that work, I have decided to include some of the relevant Zodiac information, in the addendum to this book.

From the back cover of Most Evil (Dutton, 2009):

When veteran LAPD homicide detective Steve Hodel discovered that his late father had known the victim in the infamous Black Dahlia murder case in 1947 Los Angeles, the ensuing three-year investigation became the New York Times bestseller Black Dahlia Avenger . Publication led directly to the discovery of a cache of hidden documents, covered up for decades, that confirm George Hodel had long been law enforcements number one suspect in Elizabeth Shorts grisly death. A lurid murder mystery that had endured for more than fifty years was finally solved.

But for Steve Hodel, that revelation was only the beginning. With twenty-five years of experience investigating homicides as an LAPD detective, Hodels instincts told him that a man capable of bisecting Elizabeth Shorts body, arranging it in a gruesome and public tableau, and taunting the police and the public with notes and phone calls, did not begin or end his killing career with the Black Dahlia. A chance encounter in the wake of Black Dahlia Avenger s publication led Steve to consider a question as preposterous as it is compelling:

Twenty years after shocking the world in Los Angeles, could Dr. George Hill Hodel have returned to terrorize California as the killer known as Zodiac?

In Most Evil (2009), I presented my four-year follow-up investigation (2005 to 2009) pointing to the possibility that my father, Dr. George Hill Hodel, might have committed more crimes in Chicago, Illinois; Manila, Philippines; and Riverside, California, as well as the seven crimes in the San Francisco Bay area attributed to Zodiac in 1968 through 1969.

Unlike my Black Dahlia investigation, I did not claim that these out-of-state, out-of-country, and Zodiac crimes were solved.

In the conclusion ( Most Evil , 281-2), I wrote:

As a homicide investigator who has been called upon to collect sufficient evidence to press formal charges and ultimately convince a jury, I realize that the chain of evidence linking my father to Zodiac and the Chicago Lipstick murders is largely circumstantial. But, as was found in the case of the Black Dahlia investigation, I believe that detectives possess and are still holding forensic evidence that links Dr. Hodel to the Zodiac killings and possibly even to one or more of the sixty-year-old Chicago Lipstick Murders.

As with Black Dahlia Avenger , I expect new witnesses will come forward, new evidence will come to light, new links will be established.

Here, I present the anticipated new witnesses, new evidence, and new linkage.

The new findings are dramatic and compelling and, for most readers (my jury), I believe they will likely move them across the evidentiary threshold from Most Evil s strong circumstantial case to beyond a reasonable doubt, which is the proof required to arrive at a guilty verdict.

As I write this introduction it is August 2015.

In November of 2014, I mailed letters to the concerned law enforcement agencies (San Francisco Police Department, Solano and Napa Sheriffs, and Vallejo Police Department) requesting a confidential meeting with their cold case detectives.

In that letter, I offered to present, on my time and my dime, a three-hour PowerPoint presentation to provide them with an overview of all of the evidence that I believe links my father, Dr. George Hill Hodel, to their unsolved crimescollectively known as the Zodiac Murders.

My purpose was to convince law enforcement to proceed with an attempt to obtain confirmed Zodiac DNA.

I originally made this offer (absent the new and increasingly compelling evidence found in this edition) back in 2009. At that time, I informed law enforcement that I was in possession of my fathers full DNA profile and it was available for comparison when and if they obtained a confirmed Zodiac DNA sample.

The general public, along with a few self-appointed Zodiac experts and most journalists, remains under the impression that Zodiac DNA exists and that various suspects have been eliminated because their DNA did not match that of the actual suspect.