Most Evil
Page 8
The doctor returned to the master bath, lifted one-half of his victim’s body onto one of the cement sacks, carried it out to the rear garage, and placed it on the backseat of his car. He returned and did the same with the second half of the body, likely covering both with paper bags (later found near the body) for concealment.
The dapper physician backed his 1936 black Packard sedan out of the garage and into the alley that paralleled Franklin Avenue, then drove east the short 100 feet to Normandie Avenue. Hollywood’s Los Feliz neighborhood was still asleep.
After a right turn from the alley, he headed south to Santa Barbara Boulevard. There he made another right and drove west two short miles, smiling to himself as the street sign came into view—DEGNAN BLVD.
He turned right onto Degnan and drove north, looking for just the right spot. Too many houses. He continued north, edging off to the left as he approached the division ahead. The Packard crept north another block. Perfect! A large vacant lot, with the nearest house a block away.
Still facing north, he pulled the car to the west curb, quickly exited, and removed the body parts, one at a time. Carrying each piece on its separate paper sack he set them in the open field, just inches from the sidewalk. Working quickly, he would have posed the upper torso, placing the hands overhead, to mimic Man Ray’s famous photograph The Minotaur. Then the lower section, juxtaposed and offset a little to the east.
He pulled the empty cement sacks away from the body, throwing them to the north, away from his sculpture. Now, the final touches. Removing one of her earrings from his pocket he placed it loose inside her left ear. Finally, he took a man’s black-faced military wristwatch from his jacket pocket, ripped the wristband away from the body of the watch, and used his handkerchief to carefully wipe the face and band of telltale fingerprints.
Again, his sardonic grin appeared as he positioned the watch inside the gaping upper torso. Finished, and in such a short time.
7.1 Elizabeth Short’s posed body compared to Man Ray’s The Minotaur (1936)
Glancing west from Degnan across the empty lot, George thought he caught the profile of a man standing in the field, half a block away. Back in the car, he drove north on Degnan to Coliseum, then west one block to Crenshaw Boulevard. Back to the Franklin house. Halfway home he pulled to the east curb just south of Olympic Boulevard, where he removed Elizabeth’s empty purse and shoes from the floorboard and set them on top of a garbage can, outside a restaurant, which was just opening for the breakfast crowd. Thanks to an alert witness these items would later be recovered by LAPD and positively identified as belonging to the victim, Elizabeth Short.
Now all the Avenger had to do was wait for his evening newspaper and the headlines that were sure to come. He didn’t have to wait long.
The Los Angeles Examiner printed a special “Extra” afternoon edition with the front-page story that would consume Los Angelenos for the next full month:
WOMAN’S NUDE BODY FOUND IN LOVER’S LANE
FIEND TORTURES, KILLS GIRL; LEAVES BODY IN L.A. LOT
George Hodel was pleased, but also disappointed. Reporters, as usual, had gotten it wrong. According to their accounts the body had been found at Thirty-ninth and Norton. No! It was Thirty-ninth and Degnan. Incompetent fools had messed up his subtle message.
As it turns out, it was George Hodel who had gotten it wrong, not the press. George zigged when he should have zagged.
The Franklin house, at Franklin and Normandie (5121 Franklin Avenue), was just seven miles north of where Elizabeth Short’s body was posed. The most direct route was as I’ve previously described: south on Normandie, west on Santa Barbara (now renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard), then right on Degnan. Even sixty years later, maps show what was apparent at the time: Degnan divides in two a block north of what was then called Santa Barbara, becoming in effect two different streets altogether. One continues as Degnan, the other is called Norton Avenue.
Leimert Park residents found it so confusing that the city was eventually forced to post signs and arrows to clarify directions. If you want to stay on Degnan, bear to the right. Even Google Maps has placed arrowed instructions showing Degnan breaking off to the right.
7.2
But in 1947 there were no posted signs or warnings—just the divided street. Unmarked, it was a fifty-fifty guess. George Hodel guessed wrong and bore left, thinking he was still on Degnan. He had rolled onto Norton Avenue instead.
7.3
As he set aside the evening paper, George might have thought to himself, “No matter. Perhaps it’s better to play my cards closer to my vest.”
Elizabeth had gone to Chicago and discovered aspects of his secret. She had to die, but not without honor. A part of him respected her ingenuity. He’d wanted to reward and memorialize her in death.
Something very special, fitting, another clue—in plain sight, yet fiendishly hidden. He searched his sick, brilliant mind. Then it came to him. The perfect grave marker:
7.4
As we’ll see, my father’s street name messages didn’t begin or end with Degnan Boulevard.
On Tuesday, February 19, 1946, six weeks after six-year-old Suzanne Degnan was murdered, Chicago electrical workers made a ghastly discovery. Opening a manhole cover three blocks from the Degnan residence, they found the last parts of Suzanne’s body—her arms—eerily preserved with little or no decomposition, as if stored in underground refrigeration, due to Chicago’s cold winter weather.
As I read the 1946 Chicago Tribune’s gruesome description of the discovery, I saw it. The paper had even unwittingly capitalized the message making it impossible to miss. It read:
The arms were found bent at the elbows in an alley just off HOLLYWOOD St.
Another diabolical signpost—the killer’s “message” confirming for me his special signature. I believe George Hodel, the Hollywood physician, after placing little Suzanne Degnan’s body parts in underground storm drains throughout Chicago’s north side, then deliberately selected a street name as his grave marker and compass. He set it to secretly point westward to “Hollywood.” A year later, as the Black Dahlia Avenger, he would repeat his surgical crime, only this time with louder taunts and longer headlines. As before, he would use his victim’s body parts as his directional compass, this time pointing eastward, back to Chicago, back to—Degnan.
7.5 Position of Degnan’s arms as posed in sewer
As our investigation continues we shall soon see how all of this was an intrinsic part of my father’s plan.
For me, the answer came when I found more murders; or more murders found me. And then the pieces of the ghastly, psychopathic game my father had played his entire adult life started to fit together. It gets stranger and darker still.
PART THREE
MANILA
Chapter Eight
The truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long.
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
Following the publication of Black Dahlia Avenger in 2003 I received hundreds of e-mails and letters. Some called me a nutjob, others commended my courage. Several readers in the Philippines alerted me to the fact that the murder-bisection of Elizabeth Short bore a very strong resemblance to a high-profile murder-dismemberment that occurred in Manila in 1967.
From the mid-1950s until 1988 George Hodel based his home and business in the Philippine capital of Manila. He moved there after fleeing Los Angeles, married a young woman from a prominent Filipino family, reinvented himself as an international market research expert, and quickly sired four more children.
An American contact in Manila helped me assemble the details of the case. On Tuesday, May 30, 1967, residents of Manila awoke to shocking front-page news in the Manila Times:
PAIR OF GIRL’S LEGS FOUND ON TRASH PILE
Was anybody—probably an 18-year-old girl—murdered in Manila these past few days? This question is bothering Manila police homicide investigators after a garbage collector found a pair of legs, severed neat
ly into four parts at the knees and hip joints and wrapped in old newspapers, on a trash pile on Malabon St., and Rizal Ave., Sta. Cruz, at 11:25 last night.
A day later, the nude, dissected torso of the young woman was found in a vacant lot, not far from the Guadalupe Bridge, in Manila’s Makati Rizal business district. Like little Suzanne Degnan, the woman’s head and legs had been removed. Her head was never found.
For a few hours, the woman remained a Jane Doe. Then, just as had occurred in the Black Dahlia murder police identified her from fingerprints. In this case, the prints were on an application she’d filled out to be a restaurant waitress.
The horrific crime was quickly named Manila’s “crime of the century” and was described by police as “the most brutal murder in our department’s history.” Like the murder of Chicago’s Suzanne Degnan and L.A.’s Black Dahlia, the murder of Lucila Lalu y Tolentino commanded page-one headlines for months. Because of the bisection and scattered body parts, press dubbed the crime “The Jigsaw Murder.”
8.1 and 8.2 Lucila Lalu y Tolentino
The victim—Lucila Lalu y Tolentino—was an attractive twenty-nine-year-old Filipina born in the fishing and farming community of Candaba in Central Luzon’s Pampanga province. Lucila, or Lucy as her friends called her, had recently started two businesses at the same location—Lucy’s Beauty Shop and the Pagoda Cocktail Lounge at 1616 Mayhalique Street in Manila.
She was last seen in the beauty shop by her brother, Cesar, at about ten p.m. on May 28, 1967. Peering through the locked glass window, he saw her sleeping on a couch. Police later speculated that she might have already been dead at the time.
Investigators determined that Lucila Lalu’s hands had been tightly tied behind her back with rope before she was severely beaten, then strangled. The suspect used newspapers, some of which were two weeks old, to wrap pieces of her body.
The police follow-up investigation provided little new information. One witness came forward who’d heard Lucila arguing with a man at her beauty shop on the night of her murder. She’d heard Lucy yell out, “Bakit! Bakit!” (“Why? Why?”) Then ten minutes later, “Ayoko! Ayoko!” (“I don’t want to! I don’t want to!”)
Another witness claimed she saw Lucila dragged from her place of business and forced into a car and driven away. No description of her abductor was ever publicly released. But Manila police did tell the press they thought “a possible suspect is a wealthy man who is an expert in the use of knives.” Driving one’s own car in Manila in 1967 would have been a sign of some wealth. They also suspected the motive was “jealousy” and revealed that the victim had a number of different boyfriends.
The most telling evidence came from the report by the coroner and medical experts, which stated:
The dismemberment was surgical in nature—the bones were not cut but were “disarticulated,” i.e.,“the bone ligaments were cut thus loosening the bones from their sockets (hip and knee joints). . . .”
The skin incision on the points of amputation were surgical in nature and expertly done with the use of a very sharp bladed instrument.
According to the autopsy, the victim was also “one month pregnant.”
Lucila Lalu had previously given birth to a son, fathered by her boyfriend, Pat Vera, a veteran police officer with the Manila Police Department. Vera was arrested along with four or five other men, who were all eventually released.
Then the Manila police zeroed in on a first-year dental student named Jose Luis Santiano, who rented a room above Lucila’s shop. After extensive grilling, the suspect “confessed.” But as soon as he was transferred from police custody, he retracted his confession, claiming it had been given under duress.
Despite the public outrage, Santiano was prosecuted and convicted. The case then went to the Court of Appeals, which found that the young man’s confession was inconsistent with the known facts of the crime. Furthermore, the judges didn’t believe that Santiano had the skill to perform the dismemberment. The evidence, in their opinion, pointed to a trained physician rather than a first-year dental student with no experience in surgical procedures.
Santiano was acquitted of the charges and set free. Forty years later, the murder remains unsolved.
The facts show that the Lucila Lalu murder was strikingly consistent in MO to both the Black Dahlia and Degnan crimes—a forcible abduction of a female, the binding of the victim’s hands and feet with rope, followed by ligature strangulation. Then came the skilled bisection of the body by what law enforcement officers in all three crimes opined was “performed by a highly trained surgeon” who, after his “operation,” then washed clean and towel-dried the body parts. Finally, we see the killer’s deliberate placement of his victims’ bodies on the public streets of three major cities: Chicago, Los Angeles, and Manila. His acts revealed his clear intent—which was to so shock and outrage the public that his killings would generate the maximum publicity and sensationalism. It worked!
According to police reports, the victim’s arms and legs had been wrapped in newspapers and placed atop a trash can at Malabon Avenue and Rizal Boulevard, six blocks north of Lucila’s beauty salon and the Pagoda Club bar. A current map shows that the trash can was located directly across the street from Manila’s Department of Health.
Like the Black Dahlia murderer in 1947, Lucila Lalu’s killer had performed the operation elsewhere, though Manila police never discovered the murder site, then drove a few miles away and placed the torso in a vacant lot, posing it just off a roadway. The Manila Times described the location as being “in Makati District, on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, approaching the Guadalupe Bridge.”
8.3 Map showing the Makati District of Manila, Philippines
I haven’t been able to ascertain the exact spot where the dissected torso was placed, but the general vicinity was easy to locate on a map. The above map shows the Makati District. The vacant lot was on “Epifanio de los Santos Avenue approaching Guadalupe Bridge.”
I’ve marked the bridge as number 3. The body was placed somewhere between markers 1 and 2 just off a highway named Epifanio de los Santos, immediately south of the bridge and abutting and running parallel to a street named Zodiac. Interestingly, the street immediately above Zodiac is Libra, which was George Hodel’s astrological Zodiac sign.
In the 1950s, before his papal annulment from his third wife, Hortensia, my father’s family residence was in Makati, in Forbes Park, less than a mile away from Zodiac and Epifanio de los Santos Avenue. He traversed these streets many times. He would have known their names.
8.4
1. Dr. Hodel’s INRA-ASIA Office/Penthouse residence on Manila Bay, 1967
2. Hodel family residence in Forbes Park, Makati District
3. Location Lucila Lalu’s body parts found in Makati District
4. Guadalupe Bridge, Makati District
Distances: Hodel office (1) to Hodel residence (2) = 3 miles; Hodel residence to victim’s body = 1/2 mile
In 1967, my father, now more than ten years single, was living as a bachelor in the Admiral Apartment on Manila Bay. His ex-wife and their four children, my half-brothers and half-sisters, continued to reside in the Makati District in the ultrawealthy Forbes Park neighborhood, the Beverly Hills of Manila. I visited them occasionally on weekend liberty, during 1960-1961, when I was stationed at nearby Subic Bay Naval Base.
During my frequent weekend liberties to Manila, Father and I would regularly go drinking at the casinos and nightclubs scattered along Dewey Boulevard on Manila Bay. These clubs featured dancing girls and young prostitutes. It is possible that some of these same “working girls” would have frequented Lucila Lalu’s nearby Pagoda Club. In the mid- 1960s, did George Hodel have a relationship, amorous or otherwise, with Lucila Lalu? Did he know her, perhaps as a patron at her Pagoda Club or as a financial supporter of her business? Did Lucy at one point approach the wealthy American doctor with a disturbing announcement: “I am pregnant with your child!”?
Little direct evidenc
e of George Hodel’s involvement in Lucila Lalu’s death has yet to come to light. But once again we have tantalizing circumstantial evidence: As in the Dahlia and Degnan cases, a beautiful, disarticulated victim is found scattered around a city for maximum impact and horror. Living nearby is George Hodel.
And what was the significance of his placing Lucila Lalu’s torso on or near Zodiac Street? I would soon find out. As with Degnan and Dahlia, the answer would come from yet another series of crimes, a connection so preposterous as to be unbelievable—until I became convinced it was true.
PART FOUR
ZODIAC
Chapter Nine
Bates had to die. There will be more.
Z
Up until three years ago, my sole contact with anything having to do with Zodiac occurred back around 1972, while I was still working as a detective at Hollywood Homicide. Inspector William “Bill” Armstrong—one of the two San Francisco homicide detectives assigned to the Zodiac case—blew into town to try to locate a witness related to his investigation. I helped him find some source information and check a few addresses. Then the two of us went out for drinks.
As we shared whisky at VJ’s, a cop bar on Sunset, Bill sounded optimistic that the Zodiac case would be solved.