The Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

by Steve Hodel

  She was still in a state of shock and emotional trauma. She still blamed herself, believing she could have done something to save him, torturing herself by asking, "What if I had checked on him sooner? What if I had taken him in for a checkup? What if he hadn't gone to have the arrhythmic procedure done? What if the paramedics had arrived sooner?" I had no words to console her. "It was his time, June," I repeated. "He lived a long and wonderful life. Ninety-one years filled with adventure and travel is much more than most men have. The thirty years you shared with him were much more than you could have expected. And they were only possible through your love and care."

  But I saw my words gave her no comfort. She wasn't functioning, and I realized I would have to make all the arrangements. My first priority was to notify the rest of his children, my sibling and half-siblings. Father had had ten children from four marriages. Seven of his children were still living. His eldest son, Duncan, now seventy and semi-retired, lived a short distance away in a San Francisco suburb. His second-born was a daughter, Tamar, who was now living in Hawaii. Then there were the four children from my mother. Michael, my older full brother, had died in 1986.I was a twin, and my brother John had died a few weeks after he was born, his death ascribed to "failure to thrive." Kelvin, eleven months my junior, was living in Los Angeles. Then there were Dad's children from his marriage in the Philippines: Teresa, Diane, Ramon, and Mark. Ramon had died of AIDS at age forty, just four years earlier.

  Each child was duly notified; still to be decided were the precise funeral arrangements. I asked June if my father had left any instructions; I found it hard to believe he had not. She looked at me blankly, then without saying a word handed me a paper she had pulled from her files. I read from the formally typed page on his attorney's letterhead:

  FUNERAL AND BURIAL INSTRUCTIONS

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

  I do not wish to have funeral services of any-kind. There is to be no meeting or speeches or music and no gravestone or tablet.

  I direct that my physical remains be cremated and that my ashes be scattered over the ocean. There are several crematories in San Francisco which provide these services.

  If I die in a foreign country, cremation and scattering of my ashes may be carried out in that country, or the ashes may be shipped to San Francisco for disposition, with the choice to be made by my wife JUNE, or if she is unavailable, as the executor of my will shall decide.

  /s/ George Hill Hodel

  DATED: June 16, 1993

  "Well, June, there is certainly nothing vague about that," I said. "No funeral services of any kind, no meeting, no speeches or music, no gravestone or tablet." That said it all. My father and I had never discussed religion or philosophical matters, so I asked June, "Was Dad an atheist?" She didn't answer.

  Dad's body had been transported to the mortuary, and his personal physician had already signed a death certificate indicating that the cause of death was "congestive heart failure due to ischemic cardiomyopathy." The cremation was scheduled for a few days later.

  "I'll tell my brothers and sisters of his stated wishes," I said to June. "And there will be no funeral of any kind.I guess each of us can in our own way and in our own time say our goodbye to Father." Again June didn't answer. It was almost as if she had become a robot, running on some computer program. As I read his words, a shiver had gone down my spine: I swear I felt Dad's presence in the room. I thought to myself that, even after death, he was dictating and controlling the situation. His will be done.

  Next on my list was to notify the various businesses: the banks, credit card companies, the Social Security Administration — all a part of the ritual of one's passing from this world. It didn't take me long to complete the notifications, at which point I turned to June again and asked, "What about notifying his personal friends? I will be happy to make those calls for you. I know you're not up to speaking to anyone right now." Her face remained blank as if, again, my words had not registered. "What personal friends need to be called?" I repeated.

  She shook her head. There were none. Not one. They had no personal friends. Oh, there were business associates, many of them over the years, who would be sorry to hear the sad news. But personal friends, social friends: none. While June did not seem to be upset by this, the news pained me deeply. The man had lived a long and remarkable life. After a distinguished medical career, he had also been publicly recognized as one of the world's leading experts in his field of market research. If I was to believe June, there was not one personal friend to notify.

  This was a revelation, underscoring the finality of the man's death. I realized that there would be no monument to his existence, no celebration of his life. No funeral, no family, no words, no gravestone, no shared remembrances, and no friends to give voice to the impact my father had had on their lives. Not even his children, separated by his serial marriages, by thousands of miles and a score of years, would ever share a moment of silence to respect the life of their father. Other than June, who had been all things to him — lover, friend, confidante, and caregiver — Dad had completely isolated himself from the world of human affection and emotion.

  In life, George Hill Hodel had been raised to mythic proportions by all of his children. Therefore it stood to reason that there was a common, if unvoiced, speculation about his wealth. Perhaps it ranged from a low of several million, to vast amounts of monies secreted in offshore accounts and hidden holdings. While I had indulged in my own speculative accounting based on my observations of their lifestyle during my father's last years, I still didn't know the truth of their financial state. Then June handed me a copy of the will. I had overestimated. His worth would not exceed a million. Comfortable, but, alas, a secret coffer of treasure from his lifetime's work, bulging with bags of gold and jewels from the ancient Orient, did not exist. Father had left a small amount of inheritance to each of his living children in equal shares, and the rest of his estate was to go to June. Probate would be simple, handled by Dad's longtime San Francisco lawyer, who had been named executor. His office was just minutes away and I scheduled an appointment to meet him the following afternoon.

  That evening was spent reminiscing. June's tears would not, could not, subside, as if they were cleansing a pain that would not leave her. As we talked, I was amazed at how hungry I was for information about Father, anything that would tell me more about the man as opposed to the myth. I realized that June was my only source. She alone knew the truth or truths. She alone could help me bridge the gap to intimacy with him

  I felt our friendship, and our mutual need for emotional support, could possibly open the door that had been locked for over five decades. I knew that only June had the key to his heart, and I wanted it. Badly.

  June was cautious. As we spoke about him and their shared lives over the decades, I could sense how tentative she was, as if she were trying to avoid a real conversation. I knew this wasn't her nature. I could feel she wanted to open up, share her innermost feelings. But the reluctance, foreign as it was to her personality, remained dominant, and I quickly got the impression that her responses to me were conditioned. As if she had been programmed not to speak about things personal and private. As she spoke, I could feel Dad's presence coming through her. She was hesitant, secret, aloof, and cautious with me. Was this an Asian cultural response to dealing with grief that kept mourners from sharing emotions? I'd never seen it before, particularly when as a P.I. I worked with my Japanese colleagues on criminal cases. Maybe it was only specific to widows. I didn't know, but I also sensed there was something deeper — and it didn't have anything to do with grief.

  I walked to the corner of the living room with its wall of glass. It was almost midnight now, and the evening was clear and in sharp focus. The tall buildings below us shone, even with just a few of the many offices still lit. Behind the buildings the dark bay reflected the lights on the broad spans of the suspension bridges, and headlights still moved across them, hundreds of people going on with their lives as I
tried to figure out what to ask June next.

  I turned back to the room at the sound of June's footsteps across the carpet as she approached and handed me a small object I had not seen before. It was a tiny, palm-sized wood-bound photo album, with twelve golden fleurs-de-lys imprinted on the front. It appeared quite old; my guess was at least nineteenth-century. I hefted it, thinking how much heavier it was than it looked. The little book in my hand had a power to it, almost like a talisman. I took it over to a coffee table where I sat down and opened it and paused as my eyes fell upon a picture of Father and me. June saw me smile and looked away, allowing me a moment of privacy.

  Exhibit I

  George Hodel's private photo album

  I was looking at a picture I had never seen before. I was two years old, sitting on my father's knee. The photograph would have been taken in Hollywood sometime in 1943 and had been cut from a larger photo to fit the small size of the page in the album. Across from it was another picture of my two brothers, Michael and Kelvin. It was the other half of the photograph of Father and me, and both Michael and Kelvin were sitting on our half-brother Duncan's knee. Duncan was a strikingly handsome young man of about seventeen then. He must have been down visiting us from San Francisco, where he was living with his mother and stepfather.

  Exhibit 2

  Steven, Father, and Kelvin . . . Kelvin, Duncan, and Michael

  The next page held a portrait photo of my mother, strikingly beautiful and exotic. Yet one could see the sadness in her face. It had always been there. Rarely had I seen a photo of her that did not capture that terrible sadness, her soul crying out from within her, as her eyes revealed the truth of her unhappiness.

  Exhibit 3

  Dorothy Hodel

  I paused and wondered; was it the unhappiness within her that had made her into the alcoholic she became, or was it her alcoholism that made her eyes so sad? She too was dead, and it grieved me to think about the shipwreck of her life, wasted as it was, all its enormous potential cast away. I turned the page.

  The next picture was of my grandfather, George Hill Hodel Sr., who died in Los Angeles sometime in the early 1950s, after our father had left for Asia. Years later, Mother described his funeral. She said she was amazed that so many strangers and people she did not know had come to pay their last respects. "It was as if a movie star or some celebrity had died, except he was not a celebrity." She hadn't known any of these people nor why they had come.

  Exhibit 4

  George Hodel Sr.

  When I turned the page again, I froze, gazing at two photographs of a very young Eurasian woman. In one she was wearing what looked like Native American clothing. These two pictures were of my ex-wife, Kiyo, taken when she was barely out of her teens, years before she met me at a Hollywood party. Mother, who had introduced me to Kiyo, had mentioned that they had known Kiyo during the war, but why would my father include her pictures here?

  Exhibit 5

  Kiyo

  Two more women. Another Asian woman, a Filipina, also taken in her youth. The picture resembled his ex-wife, Hortensia — whom I'd met in Manila in the early '60s. This must have been a photograph taken at an earlier time, perhaps when they lived in Hawaii, in the early 1950s.

  The facing page showed a young woman and her dog.

  Exhibit 6

  It seemed as if time itself was out of place in this photo album. There were photos of my mother, looking exotically Eurasian in her setup for the picture, then a photo of Kiyo, who was Eurasian, dressed as a Native American. What was my ex-wife doing among these family photos? I had no idea, but I found it disturbing. And then I turned the page.

  Here were two photographs, both of a vividly beautiful dark-haired woman. She was as young and vivacious, her presence reaching out to you across the years, making you believe for a moment that you could step through the frame and be there with her. The right-hand photo was apparently a nude, artistically taken, from her shoulders up. Her eyes were closed as if in a delicate sleep, a sleep of light dreams. In the other photo she was standing next to a Chinese statue of a horse, her eyes also closed, but now she was fully clothed. How exquisite she looked, with two large white flowers in her swept-back black hair and wearing a collarless black dress. I couldn't take my eyes off her. As if she were calling out to me from a moment in time most likely at the end of World War II. I could almost hear the music of a big band. Maybe I could ask her to dance, and she would say yes.

  Exhibit 7

  I turned the open album around to June's eyes and asked, "Who is this?" She glanced at the photograph. "I don't know. Someone your father knew. Someone your father knew from a long time ago." June rose from the table, hands shaking, reached for the box on the glass table, and withdrew several white tissues. She turned and walked out of the living room back toward her bedroom. "I'll see you in the morning, Steven," she said. "Goodnight, and thank you for being here."

  I was gripping the small album as tightly as I could, not wanting to let it out of my sight. I hadn't figured out how or why, but the album had opened a door into some strange past, almost like a parallel world that had mingled with my own. I felt like a voyeur, as if I were looking directly into another man's heart. In these pages Father had clearly assembled those who were most dear to him. His father, my brothers, myself, two of his four wives, and Duncan his firstborn. But who were these other women? What were my ex-wife Kiyo and this unknown woman's photographs doing here?

  As I walked the slow mile back to my hotel through the early-morning fog that covered San Francisco, I tried to understand but could not.

  The feelings that were beginning to take shape in my mind were of an old familiar nature. I had felt them hundreds of times in the past. They were very real and very strong and they spoke to me directly. They were my intuitions, and I knew by their strength and power that they were centered in reality. I couldn't identify what reality. But I knew I was only feeling what had already been perceived and understood by some other mind. We were in touch, maybe even across the boundary of death, linked by the photos in my father's secret album. My mind refocused on those two posed photographs of the beautiful dark-haired young woman.

  The Sir Francis Drake Hotel loomed up over me out of the fog and darkness. What was it about those pictures? Now she was almost a remembrance. Her hair, the flowers, her dress and style from the forties — all were aspects of someone I strained to remember. But nothing came. But I felt I did know her and had seen her somewhere in the past. Where?

  As if in a dream, I walked through the empty lobby of the hotel to the elevators. I entered the waiting car as the doors closed behind me and I felt no motion and heard no sound until the bell rang for the eighteenth floor.

  I unlocked the door and a shaft of light from the hall illuminated a cobalt vase of freshly arranged white flowers on my bedside table. A sweet smell of lavender filled the room. I stared at the white flowers caught in the shaft of light, white flowers against the black of night.

  I tried to fight the meaning that was trying to break through to tell me what my father's photographs meant. My cop's mind grabbed onto it like a bulldog and wouldn't let go. Were these photographs of her — the one with her stylized black dress and white flowers, and the other one nude — taken by my father? Why had he kept them all these years in his private album?

  Then, quietly, softly, as if a breeze were carrying an image from long ago, I remembered the white flowers against the jet-black hair, white flowers set off against a black dress. These were dahlias.

  And like a bouquet of flowers overpowering the confines of a narrow room, the realization suddenly filled my conscious mind: it was she, the Dahlia. The Black Dahlia.

  4

  A Voice from Beyond the Grave

  I HAD TO LEAVE SAN FRANCISCO because of my upcoming testimony in court for a case that I was working on as a private investigator. There was nothing more I could do in California, because Father had been specific about how he wanted his remains to be handled, and
his wishes, bizarre as they seemed, would be respected. The Neptune Society would take his ashes to sea on their next scheduled burial, and his final wish would be satisfied. All that remained of him would be dispersed, as if he thought that would erase all marks of his presence on earth.

  I said my final goodbye to June and promised her I would return within the month to help her get through what for her was a catastrophe. I had seen death visit many lives, but I'd never seen anyone so alone and lost as June.

  As I waited for Father's regular limo driver to take me to the airport, June handed me a piece of white paper that contained a full page of Father's handwriting. "This was written by your father about the time of his last birthday," she said. "They are his notes to me. Last October he believed his heart was about to quit and he prepared these notes. They were for a talk he was going to have with me but never did, because his health improved. I found them in his desk. Some I understand, others I do not. You're a good detective, maybe you can help me decipher them. It is important that I know everything he wanted to say to me."