The Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

by Steve Hodel

  In the early 1930s, Sexton went to Europe for a year or two, then returned to Los Angeles, married Gwain, and Mary was born. He pursued his artwork, gained some notoriety, and reportedly had several one-man shows, which received excellent reviews from L.A. art critics.

  Mary recalled that in 1938 George Hodel moved into the house next door to theirs. "We were neighbors on White Knoll for about a year," she recalled. It was at that time, Mary said, that the two Dorothys were living together with George. "Both Tamar's mother, Dorothy Anthony, and your mom were living with him next to us. Then, after about a year, the three of them moved not far away, to Valentine Street."

  During the war years Sexton, like my father, remained in Los Angeles:

  My dad was working at all the movie studios and he worked at the shipyards, then he drove a cab again in '43 and '44. My dad wasn't in the war because he had to take care of my mom, who was bedridden for many years. Your dad, who had known my mom and was a good friend for so long, also treated her and was her doctor.

  Fred Sexton had an art studio in a downtown building, at 2nd and Spring Streets. I learned from Mary that my father had an apartment on the top floor of the same building, where they could go upstairs onto the roof of a German beer-hall. According to her, this apartment was where George would "rendezvous" with all his girlfriends. Mary had been inside George's "apartment" with her father on one occasion around 1948, and remembered that the interior was beautiful and, in her words, had a "very fancy decor."

  I asked if she had any information or remembered an incident related to a woman, possibly a girlfriend of my father's, who had committed suicide during those years. Her response was:

  I think that the person you are talking about was your dad's office manager at the First Street Clinic. I'm not sure of her name, but it might have been Ruth Dennis. What I heard was that she didn't come to work one morning at the clinic, and your dad went to her apartment and found her dead. As I recall, it was a suicide, an overdose.

  Then Mary related a telling incident, which again involved both of our fathers.

  In the late '40s there was a woman named Trudy Spence, who at that time was my dad's girlfriend. Her husband found out about the affair and came after Fred at his Spring Street art studio, intending to kill him. To escape, Dad had to jump off the roof and landed in the parking lot. He tore up his leg really bad and was laid up for months. Your dad brought him a gun, which he kept hidden in a cigar box under his bed, because he thought the husband might arrive. The whole thing made me very nervous.

  Though Mary told me she did not know the details of the incest scandal, she did say there was no doubt in her mind that Tamar had told the truth. Her next revelation caught me completely off guard:

  I, like Tamar, was also a victim of incest. My own father sexually molested me from age eight to eleven. I know firsthand exactly what Tamar went through. When I was sixteen, a year before the trial, I had a bad argument with my father, because he tried again to have sex with me. I told him that if he didn't leave the house, I would. He left and went to live with John Huston and Paulette Goddard in West Hollywood. The next year, the Tamar thing happened. It took a long time, but Dad finally admitted the incest with me to my mom.

  "Tamar was an incorrigible teenager," Mary said, "and seemed obsessed with sex all the time." But Mary, without reservations, believed the story Tamar told the police about having had sex with Fred, Barbara Sherman, and my father.

  "When I was around your father," Mary admitted, "my dad never took his eyes off me. He was going to make sure that George never touched me. Dad was very protective of me around your father."

  She learned most of the facts about the scandal from her father, who had told her that Man Ray was also involved. "The police talked with Man Ray," her father had told her, "who would have been arrested and charged along with them, except he got a letter from his doctor saying that he couldn't have done anything to Tamar, because he was impotent." Mary noted that "Man Ray had lots of clout. I think my dad was a terrific artist and Huston was a terrific director, but they both were rotten people."

  After separating from his wife, Gwain, in the 1950s, Sexton traveled back and forth to Mexico. In the early 1960s, he remarried and lived in Palos Verdes for a short period, then divorced again. Sexton returned to Mexico in 1969, and in 1971, at age sixty-three, married his third wife, who was only a teenager. The two of them lived in Guadalajara until his death in 1995. Mary informed me that on his death, "his wife destroyed all of his papers." Mary said her father passed for either Spanish or Italian, and spoke both languages.

  Before his final return to Mexico, Fred gave his daughter a list of various bank accounts; he had used different names on different accounts. She said, "On his passport, he put the name of his brother Robert, who was dead. He also used another alias, 'Sigfried Raphael Sexton.'"

  In an attempt to further establish that my father and Sexton were lifelong friends, I showed Mary Moe a photograph of a young, dark-complexioned man that had been given to me by June after Father's death. It was one of a collection of photographs taken by my father in 1925. Though it was of poor quality, I believed it bore a resemblance to Sexton, who would have then been about eighteen. I initially e-mailed a copy of the photo to Mary, and then showed her the actual photograph during our second meeting. She said:

  I can't say for sure or not if it is a photo of my father. It's really hard to tell. It certainly could be, because the mouth and lips resemble his, but I'm unsure. Dad had the same dark complexion as in the picture. I know they knew each other back then, because it was the strangest thing. Guess who did an art review of my dad's work — it was your dad's ex-wife, Emilia Hodel! I came across this review from a San Francisco paper where she gave him this terrible review as an artist. Everyone else gave him great reviews, but Emilia wrote him this really bad review. I'll try and find a copy for you.

  Mary Moe's candor revealed a man chillingly similar to my own father. The two men had been practically inseparable for thirty years, from boyhood until my father's departure in 1950. Except during Father's medical training years, both had lived within a few miles of each other and both had offices in downtown Los Angeles. When trouble came stalking Sexton, my father unhesitatingly provided him with medical aid and a gun. They shared sexual favors with women, and in the case of my father, he even shared his teenage daughter. Clearly these men held each other in the closest confidence, and one protected the other.

  With my own investigative insights, Joe Barrett's brief but telling story of Sexton's sexual obsession with the young female art students, coupled with the biography I had learned from Mary Moe, I was now focused on Fred Sexton as Suspect Number 2.

  Most of the crimes I researched involved two mysterious and unidentified suspects. The primary suspect was a suave and polished, tall, thin, well-dressed man who had been seen with the victims just before they were either killed or disappeared. The second man, of similar physical build, was more often referred to simply as "swarthy complexioned."

  I believe it's important to see exactly how these two men appeared in the mid- to late 1940s, to compare them to the victim and witness descriptions we have already heard and those yet to come. Following are photos of each man as he looked in the late 1940s, along with his overall physical description, and character traits:

  George Hodel, circa 1952

  In 1947, Dr. George Hill Hodel was thirty-nine years old, tall at six foot one, trim at about 165 pounds, with black curly hair, an olive complexion, and a well-trimmed mustache that made him look Mediterranean or Middle Eastern. He had a soft, educated, and deeply resonant voice that was partially the result of his training and experience as an announcer on public radio.

  A meticulous and stylish dresser, he was very aware of how he looked and how important his looks were as a method of control. His physical demeanor demanded respect. He sought a position of dominance in all situations; he sought to exercise control, and he was an intellectual, sophisticated, and cha
rismatic personality. He was also an experienced, accomplished, and self-professed womanizer.

  Exhibit 34

  Fred Sexton, circa 1947

  Fred Sexton's swarthy looks would easily have allowed someone to take him for an Hispanic, Italian, or Portuguese. A self-educated and intelligent bohemian, Sexton had penetrating eyes and a menacing cold stare.

  We have been told he was fluent in both Italian and Spanish. With his smoldering good looks and brooding demeanor, he looked a lot like one of the stars of the silent movie era. At thirty-nine years old, six foot one, 180 pounds, and with sleek, slicked-back hair, Sexton, who also wore a mustache and a goatee from time to time, was as much of a womanizer as my father.

  17

  LAPD Secrets and the Marquis de Sade

  Crime is the soul of lust. What would be pleasure if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, rather the idea of evil.

  — Marquis de Sade

  RELATING TO THE BLACK DAHLIA INVESTIGATION, the LAPD possessed and was actually able to keep some "key questions" confidential, away from the press and public, for forty years, until they were finally leaked. Some of these secrets were learned from the unaltered photographs of Elizabeth Short's body. Others came from police and coroner's files, and were alleged to be "hand copied reproductions of originals."* All of this "secret information" related to the autopsy findings, the horrific details that fully described exactly where and how the sadistic killer(s) tortured the victim.

  Once I learned of these atrocities, I was shaken to my core. A hardened veteran who personally attended hundreds of postmortems, I thought I had seen everything. But I was wholly unprepared for what I learned. I believe for the sake of truth, accuracy, and above all, relevance, that the details, however gruesome, of the autopsy findings need to be disclosed.

  Dr. Newbarr's autopsy report describes a victim who endured a horrific and painful death at the hands of a suspect or suspects who took the infliction of physical punishment to the extreme. The young woman was trussed and bound by her hands and feet, was tortured initially by the killer's inflicting minor cuts to her body and to her private parts, then cutting away her pubic hairs, which he would later insert into her vagina. She was then beaten about her entire body. She was forced to endure the overwhelming humiliation of being made to eat either her own or their fecal excrement. Finally, she was beaten to death, and her face and body were viciously lacerated and defiled. The killer(s) cut large pieces of flesh from her body, which they inserted into her vagina and/or her rectum. Her killer sliced her mouth from ear to ear into a bloody grin, lacerated her breasts, and cleanly and surgically bisected her body. To a trained forensic pathologist, of even greater significance was the four-inch gaping laceration cut into the victim's lower torso from her umbilicus down to the suprapubic region, a spot right above her pubic area, with numerous crisscross lacerations cut into that region as well. This incision in length, description, and location is consistent in every respect with that made by a skilled surgeon performing a hysterectomy. After the operation was performed, the body was drained of blood — exsanguinated — and her hair and skin were washed clean. Dr. Newbarr found fibers on the body that he believed to have originated from a scrub brush, and later told one of the newspapers, "From the nature of the knife cuts the girl was probably in a semi-recumbent position in a bathtub."

  These were not random acts of violence and torture but were part of a discrete set of procedures carried out to gratify the killer's (or killers') enjoyment of the suffering of their victim. They reduced their victim, through such specific and defined stages as degradation, humiliation, terror, torture, and defilement, to a state of complete and abject surrender of her humanity. Then they killed her and began a new round of postmortem procedures.

  These actions, unique in their execution, clearly demonstrated an intellectual familiarity with the philosophies and practices of a classical sadist.

  Finally, by posing the body for discovery, the killer(s) intended to sustain themselves through the ensuing investigation and public horror over the discovery. At least one of the killers was not only possessed of surgical skill and a psychotic ability to enjoy the pain of others, but was also someone who might have known exactly how the police investigation would play out and how the newspapers would handle the story. What did the killer know?

  For anyone experienced in homicide investigations or in the literature about homicide investigations, one thing is clear: this was not a random or one-time-only crime. This was a whole different category of homicide, far removed from the vast majority of homicides that are the result of uncontrolled passions, random acts of violence deriving from another felony, or deliberate murders in which the killer wants the crime hidden from the police and the public. Both violent sexual and physical assaults upon the victims are not unusual in these types of homicides. What is unusual here is that what the killer did far outstrips any normal pattern of abuse. These were ritualistic, systematic, specifically defined, and volitional acts of torture, all of which indicate the pure focus of a highly sophisticated, skilled, and practicing sadist.

  A powerful influence on my father, as well as on Man Ray, was the Marquis de Sade, a man whose life and writings are important to this case because of the tremendous influence his philosophy of the violent subjugation of others held over the four people I see at the center of the events that took place at the Franklin House: my father, Man Ray, John Huston, and Fred Sexton. Most people have a general understanding of who Sade was and what "sadism" means. But it's not until one reads some of Sade's actual material that one can truly understand the nature of the psychosexual deviancy that characterizes his thinking. This is a form of sexual nihilism that redefines the borders of deviant human behavior.

  The Marquis de Sade's published writings and descriptions of his violence-driven, sexually psychopathic visions are unparalleled in literature, as are his vivid descriptions of the specific forms and types of sexual depravity and torture he advocates inflicting upon his victims. His images of sexual delights, which he calls "pleasures," are so dark and malignant that they surely were meant to disgust and outrage his contemporaries, a blueprint for evil.

  A quick comparison of Sade's manuscript The 120 Days of Sodom with the coroner's findings of Elizabeth Short's death goes a long way toward explaining what her killer was doing: he was following Sade's details of sexual atrocities as closely as he could. I submit as evidence Sade's entry on January 15 — the date of Elizabeth's murder — from which one recognizes that what Sade prescribed — including bloodletting — the killer(s) executed. (Another Sadean entry of that same date — "He writes letters and words upon her breasts" — was inflicted upon his subsequent victim Jeanne French.)*

  It's clear from even a cursory review of Sade's manuscript that he was the source of inspiration to my father, Man Ray, and their friends. Even the description of the castle as an enclosed fortress opening onto an inner courtyard is an exact description of the Franklin House and might even have been the reason, consciously or not, that George Hodel bought the property. That Father, like Man Ray, read and studied all of Sade's writings seems clear. And Father, being endowed with what roomer Joe Barrett described as "his perfect photographic memory," no doubt retained each and every one of those six hundred savage images in his mind.

  Even my father's funeral instructions in his last will and testament echo Sade's own last will:

  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.

  Sade's written funeral instructions:

  Finally, I absolutely forbid that my body be opened upon any pretext whatsoever.

  I would have it laid to rest, without ceremony of any kind.

  Dad's friends John Huston and Fred Sexton were also in the circle of friends under the intellectual influe
nce of Sade. Huston's love for Sade is well-known and well documented. He enjoyed Sade's writings and he indulged himself in living his legend as "a genius and a monster." The lightly veiled characterization of John Huston as sadistic egotist in Peter Viertel's novel White Hunter, Black Heart is one indication. Describing Huston's personality and, for our purposes, his fondness for sadism, Lawrence Grobel, in his book The Hustons, referring to a conversation between Huston and screenwriter John Milius (Apocalypse Now), who had written the script for Huston's movie Judge Roy Bean, recounted:

  When Milius asked him what was the best part of being a director, John answered in one word: "Sadism." He recommended that Milius read the Marquis de Sade at night and Jim Corbett during the day. "If you read Corbett at night," he warned, "it will scare the holy shit out of you. De Sade you can read anytime."

  When Milius asked John about women, John's advice was, "Be anything they want. Mold to their caresses. Tell them anything. Just fuck 'em! Fuck 'em all!" (p. 641)

  Fred Sexton, we know, was a close friend of Father's, so close in fact that the two of them frequently shared sexual experiences, experiments, and fantasies with their women at the Franklin House. Sexton was also a longtime school chum and friend of Huston's, and sold him some of his artworks. Sexton's friendship with Man Ray derived from their shared passion as artists and their relationships with my father. From the perspective of such eyewitnesses as my sister, I can represent with absolute certainty that this "gang of four" socialized with one another, partied together, and, in the case of my father, Fred, and John, even shared women.