The Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

by Steve Hodel

But what about the other part of me, the part that felt? I entered this bizarre, strange, and, ultimately, horrifying investigation as I have many times in the course of my homicide detective career — strictly as a professional. It was the only way I could pursue this journey. My personal feelings would twist, confuse, and contaminate the evidence.

  In 2000, I was still living in Bellingham, Washington, at my house on the lake. It was a cold, rainy night, near midnight. Cedar logs were crackling in the fireplace. Seated on the couch, I had a dozen unopened envelopes before me on the coffee table. They had all arrived that day in the afternoon mail. Inside, I knew, were the death certificates I had ordered six weeks earlier, from the Los Angeles County Recorder, the Vital Statistics section. By then I had identified and was familiar with most of the details of the many specific crimes and had ordered the official documents for comparison with what I had read and researched.

  Pen and notebook in hand, I opened the first envelope, and began to read the cold, unfeeling statistics summarizing the cause of death for each of the victims, who, I now believed, had died at the mad sadistic hands of my father and, in several cases, his friend and accomplice Fred Sexton.

  Elizabeth Short. . . Georgette Bauerdorf. . .Jeanne French . . . Ora Murray ... I paused and looked around. I thought I had heard someone, or something, in the living room. I could see no one, but I felt a presence. No, several. It was they, the victims standing silently next to one another. I was surrounded by pain and sadness, as if they had been summoned from beyond, invoked by my reading the details of their deaths. I felt the sorrows of lives cut short, the loss their families and relatives had felt, thought of the long line of generations affected by their murders. They were there, I sensed, to help me find my way safely through the labyrinth of the Minotaur.

  The feelings that came next were overwhelming. For the first time since I had begun my investigation, I realized that all of this havoc, all of this pain, all of this misery, had come from one man: my father! Not from some unknown suspect, like the hundreds I had pursued during my career. No, this was my father, the man who had given me life, made my bones and sinew! His blood mingled with my own, pumped through my heart. I felt bitter anger and hatred.

  As these feelings were pouring over me, it was as if a light switch had suddenly been turned on: all the silent visitors had vanished. Gone! I was back in the rational. Real or imagined, at that moment I determined to make these silent victims my muses.

  What I have learned, what has been made real to me since embarking on this, my own personal voyage of discovery, is that there are no accidents in life. Each step I took was both meaningful and in sequence: our own thoughtprints can, if pieced together, reveal our individual puzzles, our destinies, as we move through life.

  My mother had named me Steven after her own personal hero in James Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus. As if in some self-fulfilling prophecy, my life had, like his, always been one of half-priest, halfpagan. My personal heroes were General George S. Patton and Mahatma Gandhi, men who achieved near-impossible goals at opposite ends of the human spectrum.

  But there is more to my personal odyssey. Like Telemachos in search of his father, I too had found mine. My discovery did not bring me the heroic Odysseus, come back to Ithaca as hero to his clansmen. Instead, I uncovered the true identity of a monster, calling himself an avenger but in truth a psychotic killer. My journey's end revealed to me a father who was evil incarnate, everything I had spent my career trying to remove from society. He was the amalgamation of selfishness, cruelty, and extreme brutality; a sadistic but brilliant and controlling megalomaniac who turned his hatred on a segment of society and tried to eradicate it. In the case of my father — a misogynist and serial killer — it was women. He tortured, cut, and bludgeoned his victims, then slowly strangled the life out of them for the pure lust and pleasure it brought him.

  I hated Father. I hated him for all that he had done to us, his family, and for what he had done to my mother, and my brothers Michael and Kelvin. I despised him for what he had done to Tamar. Now I would have to be the one to reveal what he had done to our family name, and I hated him for that as well. Try as I might to convince myself that after all these years I was still a cop, who had to depersonalize this like any other investigation, my entire being was filled with loathing for this man.

  I wanted him to suffer as greatly as his victims had. And I wanted to be the one to make him suffer. I would inflict the same slow tortures on him he had inflicted on others. Let me be my father's executioner, in the name of Elizabeth Short, Jeanne French, Georgette Bauerdorf, Gladys Kern, Mimi Boomhower, Jean Spangler, Ora Murray, and all those who were never discovered and whose names will never be known. Let me serve as the hand of retribution, to become the "Black Dahlia Avenger."

  Throughout my investigation, as the linkage was made from victim to victim, I asked myself the same question — Why? What was the trigger?

  Then I recalled the story of Folly.

  For more than fifty years Folly's existence had been a whispered family rumor. Mother had told me bits and pieces of the story when I was in my twenties: a vague reference to Father having had an early affair as a teenager, which resulted in the birth of a child; somewhere out there another Hodel, a half-sister, predating Father's acknowledged firstborn son Duncan, born in 1928.

  In the summer of 1997, Father and June visited me in Bellingham for a three-day tour of the San Juan Islands. We had returned from our ferry crossing, having tilled our day with spectacular vistas, and an early dinner on Orcas Island. The three of us sat in my bay-front apartment as the sun began to set late in the evening. I had noticed that Father was especially mellow and the three of us, sated with the beauty around us, felt close and comfortable. He reminisced about how quickly time had passed, remarking that he was just months away from his ninetieth birthday!

  It was then I broached the subject of the family rumor and Folly. "Was it true, Father? Is there a Folly out there? A sister I've never met?" He paused, and I could almost see him turn back the pages of time in his mind. "The rumor is true," he said. "I was very young, a boy of fifteen, and very much in love." As I listened intently, Father told the story of Folly.

  In Los Angeles, while attending Cal Tech, he had had an affair with a much older married woman. Her husband discovered the infidelity and they separated. She moved to the East Coast and gave birth to the child, a girl whom she christened Folly. "I followed her east," Father continued, "found where she was living in a small town, and told her I wanted to marry her and raise the child. She wouldn't have it. She laughed at me and said, 'You're just a child yourself. Go away, George. This has all been a terrible mistake. Just go away from me. I never want to see you again.'" Father said he remained in the East and tried to convince her that they should be together, but to no avail. In the end he left, returned to Los Angeles, and never again attempted to make contact with mother or daughter.

  As follow-up to his story, and by way of demonstrating the new computer software I had recently purchased for searching and locating witnesses and individuals nationwide, I suggested we check to see if Folly was "in the system." He provided me with the mother's last name, and the name of the small town in the East where she was last known to be living, some seven decades past. I input the information and pressed "enter." Incredibly, there she was! First initial "F," same last name, with her address and telephone number. Gazing at the screen in disbelief, Father paled. I suggested that maybe it was now time to make contact. Wouldn't he like to see and meet a daughter he had never met? For the third time in my life, I saw him visibly shaken. In a firm voice that bordered on anger, he said to me, "No! You must destroy this information. She must never know. There must never be any contact. Do you understand?" I didn't, but I said I did. That was the last words ever spoken about Father's "Folly."

  Now, some four years later, filled with a knowledge of his serial killings, I wondered: was this the trigger? George Hodel's ardent love for a woman, most likely
his "first love." His passionate pursuit east to marry her, only to be laughed at and rejected with a stinging "you're just a child."

  Was this why he had become the "Avenger"? In his twisted mind, had his hatred of women begun here, with a proud fifteen-year-old boy insulted for trying to be a man? Would all future women who dared reject him pay the price? Elizabeth Short rejected him and she suffered the most brutal of deaths. Georgette Bauerdorf also rejected him and paid the price. How many others had said no? Certainly "Folly" was a piece of the puzzle. A big piece, I suspected. But there was more.

  Clearly Father's own seeds of insanity grew to become his Flowers of Evil. Did nurture and nature conspire to unhinge the mind of this child prodigy? Was he also avenging himself for the terrible wrongs he had suffered as a boy, he who was viewed as an "intellectual freak" by his schoolmates? Had he grown to adulthood with the mind and potential of an Einstein, locked inside the emotions of a child? Time and time again, in his crimes, we heard and saw the voice of this emotionally arrested genius. His childish notes and drawings with their misspelled words, mailed to the police and press. Though he was a brilliant professional, and a man of forty, he could not conceal the psychotic child that hid just below the surface: "We're going to Mexico City — catch us if you can." "The person sending those other notes ought to be arrested for forgery! Ha Ha!" Father's childlike arrow pointing to the photo of Armand Robles, saying, "Next." His stocking drawing over the face of Robles: "Here is a picture of the werewolf killer's. I saw him kill her."

  As briefly noted earlier, these Avenger Mailings also clearly demonstrate that Father was well versed in Jack the Ripper lore. He used and demonstrated this knowledge not just in the Dahlia murder but in others. The Gladys Kern note, mailed and received by authorities before her body was discovered, uses the same kind of odd words and made-up slang found in some of the 1888 Ripper letters, which were also mailed before the victims' bodies were found.

  Further, I submit that George Hodel lifted the term "Avenger" from the 1926 Alfred Hitchcock silent movie The Lodger.; based on the life of Jack the Ripper. Originally, Hitchcock wanted — and surely George Hodel knew this — to title the film Avenger, but was forced to change it before its release. In it, the "Jack the Ripper" character referred to himself as "the Avenger," a term that clearly lodged itself in George Hodel's young, increasingly perverted mind, to surface twenty years later with the Black Dahlia. By then, I suspect, Father saw himself in competition with the world's most infamous serial killer, and in his "mad ego," believing himself, in the words of James Richardson, "a superman incapable of making a mistake," he set out to "out rip" the Ripper.

  In the future, the "experts" will weigh in with their varied theories as to why George Hodel was motivated to kill. There is no simple answer, nor can any one reason suffice. There are many. We each view and interpret life and people through our own unique lenses.

  As for myself, I see the confluence of a number of causes. First and foremost was his high genius, a mental aberration, accelerating his intellect far beyond the ability of his emotional self to keep pace, and perhaps in some strange way actually causing its arrest at an age of eleven or twelve. Congenital insanity appears obvious.

  Next came the disassociation with his peers, and the teasing because he was so "different," forcing him into a world of older men and women, with his attendance at Cal Tech at the young age of fifteen.

  Father was clearly sexually precocious, with a satyr-like appetite for women; at age fourteen or fifteen he found himself fathering a child. It was at this precise point that Father asserted himself as an "outsider." His magazine Fantasia was born, with its dedication to "the portrayal of bizarre beauty ... in a temple or a brothel or a gaol; in prayer or perversity or sin." In 1925 (the same year he was rejected by Folly's mother) he reviewed Hecht's Fantazius Mallare and praised the story, whose protagonist beats and strangles to death his black-haired mistress Rita, avenging himself for her teasing, rejection, and laughter at him, as she tauntingly seduces his malformed manservant, Goliath, in front of him.

  From here Father quickly moved into association with the underworld figures of Los Angeles, ruthless killers and drug smugglers. He himself began using alcohol, hashish, opium, and most likely stronger drugs. Already long recognized throughout Los Angeles and Southern California as a musical prodigy, from his FBI file we that learn he freely associated with the Severance Club, aligned himself with communist and leftist causes, and developed a distinguished reputation as a charismatic ladies' man and bold intellectual. He became a top debater and regular insider frequenting the elite parlors of wealthy Pasadena and South Pasadena's polite and not-so-polite societies.

  It was at that time, I believe, that all these separate influences converged, and Father became Fantazius Mallare, with his schoolmate Sexton playing the initial role of Goliath, his omnipresent manservant, who would eventually become semi-independent from his master and learn to kill on his own time, in his own way.

  I have been trained to deal with facts and to analyze the known. I have the added insight that comes from being the son of George Hodel. My contact with killers has always been divided by a cell door. On the outside, looking in, cop to suspect, detective to defendant.

  Not so with this investigation. I have watched my Father through many eyes. Watched him through the innocent eyes of a child. Watched him with the naivete of an adolescent about to become a man. In my twenties, we drank, whored, and played high-stakes poker. I watched him charm, manipulate, and control his many women. In my thirties, I sat with him in business interviews, saw him misjudge men and misread their abilities. Finally, as he became old, I saw our relationship change, and as he weakened, he softened. It was evolutional. Only in his eighties did I become the stronger, quicker animal: such was the power of this man.

  In all of our years, in our in-and-out existence, broken as it was by decades of time, never once did I glimpse Father's evilness. In a Sexton you could see it. The evil was etched in his face and in his eyes, the windows of his tortured soul. But not in George Hodel. Vanity, megalomania, womanizing, and even the emotional instability— all could be found with relative ease. But never his evil. And that is precisely what made F ather so terribly dangerous.

  In all my years dealing with the evil that men do, I have never known such a man. From my old Hollywood murder investigations, two separate murderers, two "dead men walking," await their executions on Death Row. Both are terribly evil men, but their crimes pale when compared to my father's psychotic mayhem.

  Can it not be argued that to some degree all of us may have a capacity for evil? Does this dark side not lie hidden in us all, held in check by a moral gyroscope and a healthy respect for the law?

  My father was a prodigy. A genius. In the chaos that roiled Asia in the years right after the war, he saved many peoples' lives. He also perpetrated one of the most infamous and bloody crimes in the history of Los Angeles, and kept right on killing. I have just returned from the horrors of my father's private hell and now know and am convinced that nothing more than a hair trigger separates the heaven of a Dr. Schweitzer from the hell of a Dr. Hodel.

  Author's Postscript

  I HAVE JUST COMPLETED THE FINAL REVISIONS of this manuscript. Within the past few months, new evidence and new information, new thoughtprints have been found. I will follow those leads from without, as I continue to be guided from within.

  Steve Hodel

  December 2002

  Hollywood, California

  Reference no.:

  2244-wALDTBEASRFTDSMT-SD3036-LFVLDHMWACRMCDBBTBCK-CM2446-MMRGPS-BHBR44

  Acknowledgments

  THE PREPARATION OF THIS BOOK has been most difficult, not only because of the obvious personal conflicts that arose from the discovery of each new murder, which like distress beacons kept rising to the surface in a sea of crimes, but also because of my new and unexpected role as narrator, and the sub rosa nature of the investigation, which required the strictest secrecy.
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  A number of people need to be recognized for their help in telling the story. Most were unaware of their assistance, but all should now know that their individual contribution, small or large, aided me in piecing together the many scattered thoughtprints.

  First is Roberta McCreary, who as friend/confidante/researcher was at my side and in the loop from the very beginning. Roberta shared my shocks and sorrows, and her diligence and careful review of hundreds of microfilm articles at UCLA and other Los Angeles libraries unquestionably resulted in many murders being found that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. No crime investigator could ask for a better "partner."

  In Sydney, Australia, my deep gratitude goes to the constant and true friendship of Murray and Jodi Rose, who sent their strength and love from Down Under.

  In Bellingham, Washington, a special thanks to my good friends: Dennis, Dave, Debra, Ruth, Barbara, and Joanie at the law firm of Anderson, Connell, and Murphy, for their mutual support. Dennis's dual role as personal friend and objective counselor provided much necessary balance. A big hug and thank you to attorney Jill Bernstein for her further support and encouragement along the bumpy road. To my ex-wife, Marsha, the mother of my children, who kept her word and respected my need for confidentiality, my heartfelt thanks. To longtime friend and mystery writer Mark Schorr in Portland, many thanks for the jump-starts. Professional kudos to my forensic expert Hannah McFarland in Seattle, who, along with her handwriting analysis, provided me with new insights into her specialized field.

  In Los Angeles, to Head Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay, whom I have known and respected as a professional colleague for thirty years, I say: Stephen, your contributions to the case have been inestimable. Thank you for your time, objectivity, ethics, and decades of dedicated public service to our city.