Fauna Hodel is the daughter of Dr. George Hodel and his daughter, Tamar, who was 14 when he got her pregnant. John Huston is said to have hit that, too, among other celebrities and VIPs. John Philips of The Mamas and The Papas has talked about it and McKenzie Philips, the actress and his daughter, has discussed being friends with Tamar and some stories she was told about sex parties.
Fact is, Fauna doesn’t know and has refused DNA tests to find out. She’d rather just skip it and live as good a life as she can.
George Hodel, abortionist to the Hollywood high-end whores and low-end actresses, models, and wannabes, is the prime suspect in the Black Dahlia murder.
His son, Steve Hodel, half-brother to Tamar, served 24 years on the LAPD, 18 of them as a homicide detective. He has written four books detailing the evidence he’s gathered to charge and, he hopes, one day to convict his father, who fled the country ahead of arrest after somehow beating an incest charge. George Hodel fled to Hong Kong, where unsolved murders began happening once he got there.
Steve Hodel’s four books concerning his father’s guilt are: Black Dahlia Avenger; Black Dahlia Avenger II; Most Evil; Most Evil II. His website is: http://stevehodel.com/
The avant-garde artist Man Ray is linked to Hodel. Ray’s surreal photographs tended to be misogynistic; cut-up torsos, dismembered nudes, bound women, and the like. Hodel and Ray were pals. Ray was hosted at Hodel’s house. Some think Hodel bisected Elizabeth Short, now known as The Black Dahlia, as art, to compete with, and top, Man Ray.
Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder by Mark Nelson, Sarah Hudson Bayliss is a book connecting Liz Short’s displayed body to an image Ray called The Minotaur, which depicts a headless woman’s torso with arms raised, bent at the elbow, to suggest a bull’s horns. The minotaur is also a mythological image exploited by Picasso in at least one puzzling drawing that may feed into all this.
It is dark material to explore.
You see patterns leading to conclusions. You project meanings. Has retired detective Hodel projected murder onto his father? It’s common for cops to have father issues so sure, maybe. His lack of conclusive physical evidence — blood or DNA links, for instance — and the interpretive nature of of much of his circumstantial evidence combine to lead many to conclude he’s either throwing his father to history’s wolves in exchange for a seat in the Black Dahlia cottage industry, or he’s deluded. Wishful thinking and gratuitous notoriety-by-association could explain it, but then again, he’s managed to link more details to his father than other investigators have managed to link to other suspects.
Another red flag? He links his father to the Chicago area Lipstick murders, then to the Black Dahlia killing in LA, then to the Jigsaw Murders in Manila, the Philippines, and finally to the Zodiac Murders in the San Francisco, CA region. All these murders did happen in those places when George Hodel lived in them. All the murder clusters ceased gathering new bodies once he left. It’s indicative, tantalizing, but no conclusive.
Seems florid. Strikes many as simply too much. On the one hand, it sounds like a resentful, obsessed son trashing a hated father’s reputation. On the other hand, none of this is beyond the scope of a fully-formed psychopathic sadistic predator never brought to any kind of justice. Sadly, there is a litany of names who embody such base accomplishment. Gacy, Bundy, and Chikatillo are examples.
America is the serial killer factory and the world has seen a Hannibal Lecter explosion in the years since the Ratcliffe Murders and Jack the Ripper heralded a new crimson age.
Steve Hodel presents so many indicative links. Echoed names of places, over and over, come up as his father’s movements are traced, like coy breadcrumbs hinting at what big eyes grandma has. Does it go beyond coincidence? If so, does it stray into schizophrenia, a beautiful mind led into the minotaur’s maze?
Physical, conclusive evidence would sure be welcome.
Steve Hodel’s case is built as a homicide detective would build a case for the DA, step-by-step, tracing clues, chasing new leads. It’s systematic and it’s organized. Persuasive, yet lacking the key physical links that would bring it home.
So we ask, who else is there?
I’ve read a sensible book blaming the gangster Bugsy Siegel. It is: The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul, and the Murder That Transfixed Los Angeles by Don Wolfe. It’s great on the corruption in LA and the ambience of the late 1930s through the 1950s. Liz Short was found bisected in 1947, by the way. Wolfe proposes she was a good-time girl who met the mayor of LA at a mobbed-up club and took him for a ride until, when he began tiring of her, she announced she was pregnant and tried to extort either more than he wanted to give, or enough money for a (George Hodel?) abortion.
This shake-down attempt prompted the mayor to turn to a mobster who wanted into the Hollywood corruption system in a big way, and who was known to be more than a little crazy, Bugsy Siegel. She was trying to shake down the mayor of LA? This little nothing from Massachusetts? She’d whored, got knocked up, probably on purpose, and was trying to strong arm a buck off him. Wrong move.
Siegel supposed had her grabbed and taken outside town, where he kept her a few days before flipping out the way he did and killing her, then going really wild and cutting the baby out of her, and cutting her in half. Whether he did this himself or brought in a mob doctor to do it, no one can or will say. It is known that she was bisected in a manner taught back then, the one way possible to cut a body in half without having to cut bone. Hint: Third & fourth vertebrae. If you can find ‘em.
While the book is excellent in detailing LA’s deep corruption, it’s less convincing about Short’s murder. That kind of favor any mayor can do without, after all.
Then again, Bugsy didn’t last long, did he? A snipped loose end?
Then there is Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia by John Gilmore, if you like your gore straight and your grit coarse. He favors Jack Wilson, a drunken no-account type, as having been the killer. Red Manley is mentioned in many of these books, too; he was the last known guy to have dated her. Or given her a ride. Or what ever happened.
There is Childhood Shadows: The Hidden Story of the Black Dahlia Murder by Mary Pacios, who was a childhood friend of Elizabeth Short. Rich on period and personal detail, the suspect she presents is a bit hard to swallow, citizen Orson Welles himself. Rosebud, indeed.
In Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer, Janice Knowlton recounts, with ghost writer Michael Newton’s help, recovered childhood memories she believes pegs her father, another George, as the culprit who so mistreated Liz Short.
Naturally, there are quite a few more, some of which I’ve also read, but the above offers a typical sampling.
Steve Hodel’s books are more convincing, even as they range wider afield. Certainly he paints a portrait of the kind of guy who could, and would, do the heinous crimes left unsolved to this day.
His postulate is that his father was a sadistic psychopath who liked killing and who liked the adventure of taunting authorities. Anywhere he went, the bodies stacked up. This much seems to hold sturdily true.
Further, George Hodel’s writing seems to match that on both the gasoline-soaked package containing Liz Short’s purse and effects, (gas eliminates body oils, so no prints or other traces are possible), and the taunting Zodiac letters.
You’ll recall the Zodiac communicated in taunting letters full of encoded messages. Few have ever been deciphered, until Hodel’s 2015 book, Most Evil II, in which he presents decoded the plain text that is actually signed George Hodel. Is this to be disputed, too? Cottage industries thrive on disputes.
George Hodel had been a child prodigy who toured Europe as a concert pianist at a young age. He spoke several languages fluently. This is a perfect kind of mind for cryptography. Brainy, worldly, cultured, multilingual, and with neither conscience nor compunction, George Hodel was an off-the-rack model for Hannibal Lecter.
Politics strutted in, too. Remember, Hodel did then-illegal abortions for rich, connected men. His main contract was with the near-by Hollywood film studios. He worked in the dark for rich, powerful men, handling potentially shattering secrets for them discreetly and efficiently, for a steep price. Good old reliable George had them over a barrel of blood.
This could explain the unsolved status of the murder clusters Steven Hodel accuses his father George Hodel of having committed. No one in power particularly wants certain details coming out, which would be inevitable if the real solution were put to trial. Careers would flame out in so many places, perhaps even to this day.
George Hodel refused to allow knives of any kind in his apartment once he returned from Manila. He lived out the rest of his days in San Francisco, ground zero for the Zodiac killings. His son became a cop, then a homicide detective, retired, and one day made a connection between a photograph of his father’s and Elizabeth Short. This set him on a long journey he continues to pursue, one with the goal of convicting his father of having been one of the worst serial killers known.
We can’t know if Steve Hodel is 100% correct but we can know, by a survey of the Black Dahlia cottage industry books and theories, solutions and suspects, that George Hodel is the best fit by far, and very likely was the killer of Elizabeth Short, nicknamed The Black Dahlia because she wore black so often, in imitation of Veronica Lake’s character in THE BLUE DAHLIA, a noir thriller that was, ironically, playing at the theater, its name on the marquis, visible from the then-vacant lot where her nude, bisected body was found that awful morning in 1947.
History not only leaves marks on us, it lives with us whether we talk to it or not.
/ ERS
