The Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

by Steve Hodel

  Each day following this introduction, beginning with April 24, featured a brief biographical sketch of historical geniuses listed alphabetically, many of whom suffered either physical or mental maladies, including frequent listings of insanity. The list of geniuses included most of the literary heroes from my father's youth. A partial naming from the calendar: Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Napoleon Bonaparte, Nero, Nietzsche, Peter I (the Great), Poe, Richard Porson, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, A. C. Swinburne, Tchaikovsky, van Gogh, Paul Verlaine, and François Villon.

  Handprinted by my father was the entry:

  Poisons: 402 et seq.

  This page read:

  SYMPTOMS AND TREATMENTS OF POISONING

  Unless otherwise stated, oral poisoning is to be understood. The lethal dose — taken in a single dose — is of course an indefinite figure. It is to be understood that smaller doses have been taken with lethal effect, while larger quantities have not proved fatal.

  The following pages provided a chart of most of the known poisons, listing each one's lethal dosage, symptoms, and treatment.

  All the following were dated entries in my mother's handwriting:

  November 7, 1943 — Seaman School. Gelka Scheyer for Children's pictures.

  November 8, 1943 — George 10-11 am 727 [Presumably this notation refers to Father's downtown office address, which was 727 W. 7th St.]

  November 9, 1943 — George 7-10:30 pm Eye lecture Gen. Hosp November 11,1943 — George 2-6 pm Heart [Presumably four hours set aside for testing and examination by specialist relating to George's heart condition.] November 11, 1943 -8-11pm Calif Club

  November 12, 1943 — 12-2 Committee Meeting Chamber of Commerce

  November 13, 1943 — KFI-Syphilis Show

  Two of the last three entries are important because they reveal that Father was associated with both the prestigious California Club, originally established by the Chandler dynasty, and its offshoot, the L.A. Chamber of Commerce. The back-to-back meetings are of particular interest, because they show Father's close connection to some of the most influential men in Los Angeles at the time, the men who were running the city.

  As for the final entry, KFI was the NBC outlet in Los Angeles. Mother, in conjunction with Bob Purcell, David Eli Janison, Karl Schlichter, and producer Jack Edwards, wrote a series of radio dramas called 13 Against Syphilis: The Unseen Enemy, which were sponsored by city, county, and state public health departments in an effort to "disperse the fog of ignorance" surrounding venereal disease. Because of his position as the Los Angeles County Health Department's venereal disease control officer, Father served as technical adviser to the show.

  I believe both the bill of lading and the 1943 calendar I discovered in the basement of the Franklin House in 1999 are valuable pieces of evidence. The former establishes that Dad's Chinese artifacts, his spoils of postwar Hankow, arrived in mid-October 1946. The latter establishes Dad's 1943 interest in the lethal dosage of numerous poisons. It also demonstrates his fascination with genius and his need to satisfy himself that many men of genius led troubled and dysfunctional lives and tortured themselves emotionally, often to the point of violence either upon themselves or others. There is also independent verification of Father's serious heart condition.

  When I moved back to Los Angeles in July 2001,1 saw an article in the Sunday, July 8 edition of the Los Angeles Times, featuring the Franklin House as the "Home of the Week," on sale for $1.5 million. The house was on the market. So I made another appointment with Bill Buck for a final conversation and some more photographs.

  When we met, I explained to Buck that I was writing a book about my father that dealt with his mysterious past, adding that my research over the past two years had connected him to some Hollywood underworld figures from the 1920s through the 1940s.

  Although Buck had no information regarding the connections of previous owners of the house to any underworld crime cartels in Los Angeles, I did get a chance to take photographs of the secret room, the light fixture in the den, and Father's shipping crate from China, which was still in the basement.

  Buck also told me that our fathers had known each other, at least professionally, because both were prominent medical doctors in Los Angeles. They had met at the Franklin House back in the 1940s when Dad called a meeting of a group of six physicians in connection with the L.A. County Department of Community Health. Buck said, "As my father described it to me, after the meeting was over, your father clapped his hands loudly and out came these two geisha girls dressed in full regalia. I guess it was 'party time' or whatever. My father nervously looked at his watch, thanked your dad, and promptly left. I guess some of the other physicians stayed."

  Buck said that after his father bought Franklin House from my father, he found some pornography and pictures of naked women hidden there. "It was about a year after he had moved into the place," Buck said, which would have made it 1951 or 1952. "He was changing some light bulbs over that glass fixture above the fireplace and discovered a box wedged and hidden in a far corner. He brought it down and it contained what he called 'kinky pictures.' I'm pretty sure he destroyed them."

  Another strange incident: Buck told me about the appearance of a "bag lady" who came to the door back in the 1970s or early '80s. "She looked quite old," he said, "but with street people it's hard to tell." I spoke with her and she said, 'This house is a place of evil.'" He said that normally he would have simply dismissed her, but then she continued to describe the interior of the house. "It was very scary," he said. "She obviously had been inside this place before we owned it. She described in detail to me: the great stone fireplace, and your father's gold bedroom, and the all-red kitchen that your father had painted. No question that she was very familiar with the house when your dad had lived here. She looked at me and said again, 'This is a house of evil.' God knows what connection she had with this place. She left, and I never saw or heard from her again."

  Based on a conversation I had with former tenant Joe Barrett, it is my belief that the person Buck described as a "bag lady" was most probably our former maid, Ellen Taylor, Father's live-in housemaid/girlfriend, who lived at Franklin House from 1945 to 1950. In later years, Joe Barrett had run into Ellen on the street in downtown Los Angeles and discovered that she had been in and out of mental hospitals. Joe Barrett described her as "living on the fringe, delusional, claiming she had had affairs with a number of prominent and locally famous personages." (Knowing what we now know, perhaps Ellen was not as delusional as Barrett thought.)

  Bill Buck also told me that another man who had visited the house on three different occasions over the years was a photographer named Edmund Teske, "a local photographer and sort of a fixture here in old Hollywood. He had a home just down the street on Hollywood Boulevard. He visited here three separate times over the years and told me he was a good friend of both your father and Man Ray."*

  The overhead fixture where Dad's photographs had been hidden and obviously not discovered during LAPD Juvenile detectives' 1949 search of the house after Father's arrest but only a year or two after his departure would most likely have included Man Ray's nude studies of my then thirteen-year-old sister Tamar as well as other damning photographic evidence.

  I thanked Bill Buck for his openness and many courtesies over the years and left the Franklin House in what I fully expect was my final visit. I exited the massive stone structure and paused near the top of the steps in the same spot where I had, as a naive and innocent boy of eight, smoked my first cigarette with Tamar and been caught by Father. I turned and gazed one last time at this Mayan temple, which for me had now been transformed into a haunted house of horror, and in a final reflection paused to wonder how many other unsolved mysteries would forever remain buried in the belly of this beast.

  * Teske would in later years become a highly acclaimed L.A. photographer. He was dubbed a romantic surrealist, and some of his works are currently on display locally, in the J. Paul Getty Museum.

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  The Watch, the Proof-Sheet Papers, the FBI Files, and the Voice

  The Dahlia Military Watch

  Exhibits 43a and 43b

  George Hodel watches, (a) 1946 and (b) 194 7

  The 1946 Man Ray photograph of my father embracing Yamantaka (exhibit 43a) reveals what appears to be a black-face military watch, commonly worn by officers during the war years, on Father's left wrist. As we know, George Hodel loved to portray himself as a military officer, displaying the power and prestige associated with his three-star rank. His officer's watch was another accessory of his former status, and he treasured it. We know that this photograph was taken by Man Ray, after father's return from China, most likely after his Yamantaka statue arrived in mid-October 1946. This means he was wearing the military watch just weeks before Elizabeth's murder.

  In 43b, Father is posing in a family picture probably in the spring or summer of 1947, but in any event shortly after the Elizabeth Short murder. On his left hand, resting on my brother Kelvin's shoulder, he is wearing a different wristwatch, this one with a white face.

  We know that "50 LAPD recruits" in their re-canvass and search of the 39th and Norton crime scene on January 19, 1947, found a "man's military-type wristwatch on the vacant lot close to where the victim's body was originally discovered." The watch discovered at the crime scene was "a military-style 17-jewel 'Croton' with a leather-bound, steel snap band. Engraved on it are the words 'Swiss made, water proof, brevet, stainless steel back.'" There was no further mention in the press concerning police efforts to locate the owner of the watch.

  To date, my attempts to locate a similar Croton watch for comparison to the one described in the article have proved futile. In 1946 the Croton Watch Company was located on 48th Street in New York City, but apparently the company is no longer in business. Other than the one newspaper article referring to the police finding the watch, I have found no other references. This would be considered extremely important physical evidence in the crime, and normal police procedure would be to photograph the item, contact the manufacturer, and attempt to identify and trace the item through potential witnesses. That no further information or follow-up were forthcoming is of serious concern. Apparently LAPD made no public appeal for assistance in helping identify the item. It does not appear that any special police bulletin was prepared or circulated within the confines of the local law enforcement agencies throughout Southern California.

  Based on Father's apparent loss of his military-style watch matching the description of the Dahlia watch found at the crime scene, and his simultaneous documented wearing of a new watch, there is a strong possibility that it was Father's watch found near the body. Moreover, the watch in the Man Ray photograph did not turn up among my father's possessions after his death. It simply disappeared, possibly at the 39th and Norton Black Dahlia crime scene. Does this watch still remain hidden in a secure LAPD evidence vault, awaiting inspection and identification?

  The Proof-Sheet Papers

  We know that LAPD's chief criminalist, Ray Pinker, forensically examined "proof-sheet paper" in the murder case of Otto Parzyjegla and compared them to the proof-sheet paper sent to the newspapers by the Black Dahlia Avenger. Parzyjegla's papers were eliminated as not being the same.

  In January 1947, my father did have a printing press in the basement of the Franklin House. It was the same press he had had since his teens when he printed the first edition of Fantasia in January 1925. He also had proof-sheet paper of a size and type similar to those mailed in by the Dahlia suspect in January 1947, a sample of which I possess because he returned to me my original childhood drawings in 1995. Specifically, exhibit 44, the "Chinese Chicken" I drew and Father subsequently inscribed "Steven April 1949," was from that stock.

  Exhibit 44

  Chinese Chicken-Mountains-Sun

  A second sample of this proof-sheet paper came into my possession from an original sales brochure Father designed and printed in late 1949 or early 1950, in connection with his marketing of the Franklin House.

  Both samples should be considered potential physical evidence, and while the possibility exists, because two years had elapsed between the Dahlia murder and my father's writing on my drawing and his sales brochure, that they may not be from the same stock as the Dahlia proof sheets, a chemical and spectrographic analysis and comparison of my original copies could verily whether the stock is identical or similar. The state of the art is much advanced, and I believe the comparison would be conclusive. I suspect the pasted evidence notes retained in police custody are identical to Father's proof stock and could possibly match the Avenger notes in size, shape, and fiber content. LAPD booked into evidence these original notes mailed to the papers by the Black Dahlia Avenger. Those original proof-sheet notes correspond to our exhibit numbers 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 30, and 31. These original pasted notes should still exist in police custody in the evidence lockers, because any destruction of physical evidence known to have been connected to the LAPD's most notorious unsolved murder case would have to have been deliberate. The destruction or "accidental loss" of evidence would tend to further substantiate a cover-up to protect the perpetrator(s) of the Dahlia and French murders.

  The FBI Files

  As I had for Elizabeth Short, I requested via the Freedom of Information Act any and all available information on my father. It was a slow process, but eventually I received the following information from the FBI.

  No investigation has been conducted by the FBI concerning the captioned individual (George Hill Hodel) or his father. However, our files reflect the following information, which possibly relates to captioned individual.

  I. A confidential informant of unknown reliability advised in October, 1924, that [redacted] .. . was a member of The Severance Club. The informant described The Severance Club as being composed of the leading "Parlor Bolsheviks" and "Pinks" of Pasadena, Los Angeles, and Hollywood, California, and its membership was limited in the club members' own language to "The Cream of the Intellectual Radicals."

  II. During May, 1947, one George Hodel, 5121 Franklin Avenue, Hollywood, California, was in contact with the Soviet Embassy, Washington, D.C., concerning the "Information Bulletin" of the U.S.S.R.

  The FBI further indicated that they were withholding from release two additional pages that related to an inquiry dated October 8, 1956, from an unnamed agency related to George Hodel.

  Based on the timing of the 1956 inquiry, I suspect it may have simply been a routine background check from the Manila office of the Department of Defense or possibly the United States Information Agency, both of whom Father had contracted with to perform market research. Of primary interest, however, is Father's timely and clandestine inquiry to the Soviet Union, shortly after the murder of Elizabeth Short.

  Though the killers' taunting note to the press on January 29, 1947, stated that they were leaving the country for Mexico, it is possible that Father was also considering seeking a safe haven in the country of his family's beginnings — Russia.

  The Department of Justice FBI file on "Elizabeth Ann Short, The Black Dahlia" contains almost two hundred pages of previously classified material. Included in these files is the important interview their agents conducted with "Sergeant Doe," who dated and dined with Elizabeth Short in late September 1946 and then spent the night with her at the Figueroa Hotel.

  Her dossier contains other important and hitherto unknown investigative facts:

  People were led to believe from local newspaper reports and police statements in the days immediately following Short's murder that no fingerprints of the suspect existed because (a) the suspect in mailing Elizabeth Short's personal effects to the press "soaked the materials in gasoline," and (b) while fingerprints were found on the notes, "they belonged to postal inspectors who touched the materials."

  The FOIA documents I received clearly establish that the FBI possessed four readable fingerprints, obtained from one or more of the suspect notes, and that they were actively comparing t
hese original prints to potential suspects as late as 1949. Due to redaction of individual suspect(s) they cannot be identified by name. Regarding the suspect fingerprints, Special Agent Hood of the FBI's Los Angeles office said in a letter to the Bureau's Fingerprint Section in Washington, D.C.:

  January 31, 1947

  Director, FBI

  Re: Elizabeth Short

  Dear Sir:

  There are enclosed herewith three photographs of fingerprints removed from an anonymous letter addressed to the Los Angeles Police Department concerning the mutilation murder of ELIZABETH SHORT. It is requested that these prints be checked through the single Fingerprint Section and if an identification is made that this office be notified by teletype immediately. In the event an identification is not made from these prints, it is requested that same be retained in the Single Fingerprint Section for possible future identification.