Table of Contents
ALSO BY STEVE HODEL
Black Dahlia Avenger
ALSO BY RALPH PEZZULLO
At the Fall of Somoza
Eve Missing
Jawbreaker
Plunging into Haiti
The Walk-In
For the victims, living and dead
Introduction
He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And when you stare persistently into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
My father, Dr. George Hill Hodel, was a monster.
While a handsome, successful doctor living the good life in 1940s Hollywood, surrounded by beautiful women and esteemed artists such as Man Ray, John Huston, Henry Miller, and others, he committed a series of heinous murders. One of his victims was a former girlfriend named Elizabeth Shortcast in infamy as the Black Dahlia.
The photos of her bisected, exsanguinated body lying in the weeds near Thirty-ninth and Norton have become a grisly centerpiece of Hollywood noir history. Sixty years later people are still shocked by the premeditated evil of the crime. To look at the photos is to realize that youre staring into the abyss. One cant help but ask (as I did): Who was the sicko who cut this poor woman in half? And what the hell was going on in his head?
I was just a kid. Five years old at the time of the murder. Eight when my father abruptly closed his business and fled the country for Asia. Hed been tipped off by friends in the LAPD.
Nobody told me that Dad was the chief suspect in a series of killings in a twenty-mile radius of our house on Franklin Street. Or that detectives from the Los Angeles District Attorneys Office had gone so far as to bug his bedroom and home office. Or that they were about to arrest him when he split.
I grew up innocent of my fathers dark secrets. Then, irony of ironies: I chose to become a homicide detective. My first wife suggested it. I found out later shed been my fathers girlfriend.
Did she seduce me at nineteen as a form of revenge on Dad for dumping her? Probably. Did she want me to become a cop so Id discover the horrific deeds committed by my father, ones that she only suspected? Maybe. I cant ask her now. Shes dead.
I worked the Hollywood beat for twenty-four years, in the same neighborhood where I grew upmy fathers killing ground in the 1940s. Over the decades, I had occasional, brief contact with Dad, who was living abroad and had remade himself into a very successful international marketing executive based in Manila. He was a sophisticated man of the world with a genius IQmy mother claimed it was one point higher than Einsteins.
I retired in 1986. Dad died thirteen years later at the age of ninety-one.
I knew very little about my father when his ashes were scattered near the Golden Gate Bridge. Naturally, I was curious about the man he had been. I wanted to know more. Gentle inquiries started with a book of photographs he kept with him until his death. Two of them reminded me of a TV movie Id seen about the Black Dahlia starring Lucie Arnaz.
My investigation widened and drew me into increasingly lurid and frightening territory. The result: my book Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder.
Then in 2003, Los Angeles head deputy district attorney Stephen Kay reviewed the evidence Id collected and declared the Black Dahlia murder solved. Old District Attorney files and forensics told the story. Only after delving into my fathers dark mind was I able to explain why he posed Elizabeth Shorts body the way he did and carved the ghastly smile into her face.
George Hodel did nothing by accident. He lived his life as a bizarre game that trumped even those of his hero, the Marquis de Sade, taunting and outwitting the police, seducing and brutally murdering innocent women.
He didnt stop in 1950. Nor did he begin in the 40s. Nor was Elizabeth Short just an ex-girlfriend.
I know now that my father was also responsible for a series of infamous murders in Chicago (where he was known for a time as the Lipstick Killer), Manila (where the local press dubbed him the Jigsaw Murderer), and the Bay Area of California (where he called himself Zodiac).
Its a bizarre, terrifying, and surreal story that will alter criminal history, exonerate the innocent, and change the way we think about the motives and signatures of serial killers. Hang on.
Steve Hodel December 2008
PART ONE
DR. GEORGE HILL HODEL
Chapter One
The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries.
Marquis de Sade
Who was George Hodel really? My half-sister, Tamarwho over the course of her fascinating, peripatetic life befriended many illustrious men, including Lenny Bruce, Jim Morrison, Harry Belafonte, Otis Redding, John Phillips, and othersdescribes him as the most powerful, intelligent, handsome man shes ever known. This despite the fact that he taught her how to perform oral sex at eleven, had sex with her at fourteen in the presence of three other adults, and branded her a liar the rest of her life.
Tamars best friend, Michelle Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas, remembers opening a hotel room door in San Francisco in 1967 and seeing George for the first time. I almost fainted, she said. The aura of evil he gave off was so strong and palpable, it almost knocked me off my feet. Thats the first and only time anything like that has ever happened to me.
As Tamar tells the story, George entered the Mamas & the Papas suite at the St. Francis Hotel with two beautiful, young Asian women and immediately took over, ordering around the waiters and telling the band what they should and shouldnt eat before a concert. Tamar likens him to the charismatic ballet impresario Boris Lermontov in the movie The Red Shoesimpeccable clothes, sophisticated European manners, a deep, cultivated voice.
Later that evening a hash pipe was passed. Dad didnt partake. Tamar, who knew hed smoked in the past, asked one of his Asian companions why. Before when he smoked hash, he made me lock him in his bathroom, the young woman explained. He always made me lock him in there and told me not to let him out. George said that when he smokes, sometimes he does terrible things. He would make me lock him in the bathroom and he would cry and stay there all night.
Dad left Los Angeles in 1950 after the very public incest trial involving his relationship with Tamarhe was declared innocentand thereafter blew into town every six months or so unannounced. My brothers and I would be summoned to the lobby of some glamorous L.A. hotel and made to wait hours for the privilege of sharing a few minutes with the great man, who was on some important business and usually had to run to an urgent meeting. During one such visit he presented me with a Tinkertoy set for my birthday. I was sixteen years old.
In a drunken rage, my mother had once called him a monster. She said, Hes a terrible man and hes done terrible things! The next day she denied it.
After forty years of living the life of an expatriate in Asia, Dad retired to San Francisco and moved into a modern apartment overlooking the bay with his fourth wife, June. Once when I visited, I brought a loaf of bread but couldnt find a knife in the kitchen. When I asked June for one, she answered, No. No. The great man doesnt allow any knives in the house.
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