Most Evil

by Steve Hodel

  It’s worth noting that the distance from George Hodel’s Jackson Street residence to the Stine murder is 1.3 miles; and it’s 2.7 miles from the Stine murder site to his UCSF Medical School.

  Police speculated that the Stine suspect seemed very familiar with the area, which helped explain how he was able to elude their massive search. They were right.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I have with me two gods, Persuasion and Compulsion.

  Themistocles

  We know that the Zodiac murders occurred on October 30, 1966; October 20, 1968; July 4, 1969; September 27, 1969; and October 11, 1969. The mailings, on the other hand, began in 1966 and lasted until 1990.

  Zodiac Mailings

  One of the first questions I asked myself when I started this investigation was, “Is it possible that my father was physically present in the United States to commit these crimes?” My initial response was, “No, probably not.”

  However, after examining the time intervals of the crimes and notes, coupled with the knowledge of my father’s high-frequency travel to and from the United States, I changed my mind. For decades, law enforcement and researchers have speculated that Zodiac could have been a member of the military or merchant marines, a man who spent long periods abroad punctuated by brief but frequent trips to the Bay Area. Instead of limiting his movements to the belly of a tanker or transport ship, isn’t it just as likely that Zodiac may have conducted his international travel in the first-class section of a Boeing jet?

  From the mid-1950s until 1988, George Hodel based his home and business in the Philippine capital of Manila. As the president of an international market research firm, International Research Associates (INRA) Asia, with clients that included Boeing, the World Tourism Organization, and major airlines and hotel chains, he traveled regularly and frequently to the United States, primarily San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.

  I remember my father showing me his passport on several occasions and smiling with pride. It was literally three inches thick because of the many entrance stamps, visas, and millions of miles he had accumulated in his travel to and from Europe, Asia, and the United States. As president of INRA-ASIA, all of my father’s worldwide first-class air travel and five-star hotel lodgings were gratis.

  His profession provided him with the perfect cover to carry out his crimes and then quietly return in comfort to his home base in Southeast Asia as a business executive.

  My attempts to establish and document the exact travel dates for my father’s regular and frequent trips to the United States have been hampered by lack of available records from the 1960s and ’70s. The financial, credit card, and medical records I’ve discovered only go back to 1990. U.S. entry/exit records from the period do not exist. My father’s personal passport, if it still exists, would be among the personal effects I do not as yet have access to.

  My father always kept his life cloaked in secrecy.

  I, like all his children, was never informed in advance of his trips to the United States. Instead, every so often I’d receive a phone call out of the blue: “Hello, Steven, this is your father speaking. I am in Los Angeles for just a day or so. Please contact your brothers and meet me at my hotel for dinner.”

  After talking with my half-sister Tamar, I’ve pieced together a chronology of those trips to the States when my father actually contacted us. They place him in California in the following years: 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1971, 1972, 1974, 1978, 1979, 1982, 1983, 1987, and 1988. He returned for good from 1990 to 1999. But I know there were many more occasions over the decades when my father passed through town on business without ever notifying members of his family.

  1965: Visit with Kiyo (my ex-wife) and me in Los Angeles at the Bilt-more Hotel.

  1966 or 1967: Visit with Tamar and Deborah, her eleven-year-old daughter, in San Francisco.

  1968: Meeting at Century City Hotel in Los Angeles. The following day, I took Father on a private tour of LAPD’s Parker Center Police Building, showing him the Scientific Investigation Division (SID) Unit, followed by a lunch at the Police Academy restaurant in Elysian Park.

  April 1969: George has a Beverly Hills luncheon with his daughter Tamar and then a later dinner with his granddaughter Deborah.

  July-August 1971: George visits with Tamar in Honolulu, Hawaii, while enroute either to or from the United States.

  1971 or 1972: George and his then girlfriend June are in Los Angeles.

  1974: Father is admitted to his alma mater hospital, UCSF, where his personal physician performed an operation on his gall bladder called a cholecystectomy.

  1978 or 1979: My father visits my family at our home in Eagle Rock, in northeast Los Angeles.

  June 28, 1982: George and June are secretly married in Reno, Nevada.

  1983: I receive an unexpected call from my father requesting I take a few days off and drive up from L.A. to meet him and June in San Francisco.

  1987 or 1988: San Francisco. I visit with George and June at their downtown hotel, by my recollection the St. Francis.

  1990: George and June Hodel relocate to the United States, choosing downtown San Francisco as their permanent residence.

  Comparing the years I know my father was in the United States against the years in which there was known Zodiac activity, there is only one year that doesn’t line up: 1970. As busy as my father was with international travel, it is my belief that he made many dozens or even hundreds of trips through California in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s without calling any of his children. Though this of course falls far short of any kind of proof, I believe it demonstrates enough opportunity to be consistent with the theory that George Hodel could have been behind the killings and mailings attributed to Zodiac.

  Dr. George Hill Hodel—Horologist

  My father had a thing for watches. Throughout his life, he bought and collected expensive timepieces, including the expensive Breitling Navitimer, seen in Figure 17.1 that he gave me two years before his death. It was equipped with a navigational computer that allowed military pilots (and those few civilians with the mental know-how) to manually calculate the speed of the aircraft they were flying.

  17.1 Dr. George Hodel’s Breitling Navitimer watch believed worn by him at the time of the Zodiac killings

  What significance did watches hold for George Hodel? I’m not sure. What I do know is that melting, malleable watches figured prominently in the symbology of surrealist art, and that disabled watches were left at two Avenger/Zodiac crime scenes.

  In Black Dahlia Avenger I explained how Elizabeth Short’s body was carefully posed as a tribute to my father’s friend the surrealist artist Man Ray. As mentioned before, two of Man Ray’s works in particular, The Minotaur and The Lovers are paid homage to in the arrangement of the arms and the slashed smile. Could there be another surrealist homage connecting the Dahlia crime scene to the Cheri Jo Bates crime scene years later? I believe so.

  During my Dahlia investigation I discovered that a man’s military watch had been recovered from the crime scene on Norton Avenue. What I didn’t know but discovered later was that the watch had initially been placed inside the cavity of Elizabeth Short’s body, as a detailed examination of enlarged crime scene photographs made clear to me.

  This appears to be the same watch found by police recruits who canvassed the crime scene a week after the body’s removal.

  Quoting from The Washington News, January 21, 1947: “The police department’s homicide squad figuratively starting from scratch, was augmented by 100 additional policemen and began a widespread search for new clues to the girl’s murderer. Half of them combed the area where the bisected body was found . . . the search turned up a military-type watch, still unidentified.”

  Had the watch gone unnoticed and fallen into the grass when the body was moved to the coroner’s wagon? It seems so. We know that the LAPD found and recovered a man’s wristwatch at the Dahlia crime scene and booked it into evidence. In 2004 when asked about the watch, LAPD was force
d to acknowledge that the watch, along with the rest of the physical evidence, “had disappeared from the locked property room.”

  Why did my father place it there? It seems that disabled watches and other representations of time figure prominently in numerous surrealist works, including Man Ray’s Object of Destruction. Perhaps the most famous of these is Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory.

  17.2 The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dalí, 1931

  According to art critic Dawn Ades, “the soft watches [in Dalí’s painting] are an unconscious symbol of the relativity of space and time, a surrealist meditation on the collapse of our notion of a fixed cosmic order.” Certainly George Hodel, like his mentors Man Ray and Salvador Dalí, used his “art” to challenge our belief in a rational, orderly, rule-bound world.

  17.3-17.4 Bates crime scene watchband

  I believe George Hodel repeated this signature act some twenty years after the death of Elizabeth Short, when a second watch was ripped apart and left at the scene of the Bates murder in Riverside, California. According to Special Agent Melvin Nicolai of the California Department of Justice, “Evidence found at the scene of the crime consisted of a Timex wristwatch with the fastener on one side of the strap torn off. . . .”

  17.5

  Initially investigators speculated that the watch fell off the suspect’s wrist during the struggle. Figures 17.3 and 17.4 show Riverside detectives in October 1966 pointing to a portion of the watchband strap found at the Bates crime scene.

  One strap of the watchband appears to have been ripped from the body of the watch. In the evidence photo Figure 17.5, likely taken for identification purposes at the police station, the torn strap is seen in close-up.

  We know from our discussion of the Riverside investigation in chapter 6 that detectives were able to trace the watch to a military base PX overseas. Could it have been a PX in the Philippines, Dr. George Hodel’s home base from the mid-1950s to the 1980s?

  In 1966, there were two main U.S. military bases in the Philippines on the island of Luzon. One was the Navy base at Subic Bay, where I was stationed from 1959 to 1960, and the second was Clark Air Force Base. Most Americans, including civilian businessmen like my father who resided in Manila, regularly made their purchases from one of these two duty-free military bases. Clark AFB was only forty miles northwest of Manila and was the largest U.S. overseas military base ever constructed.

  In his Cheri Jo Bates investigative summary, Department of Justice special agent Melvin Nicolai made two other connections that should be noted:

  Mr. Sherwood Morrill concluded that the three envelopes and letters, along with the printed poem on the desk, had been prepared by the same person responsible for the Zodiac letters. . . .

  During the investigation, information was received to the effect that the concept that persons killed will be the killer’s slaves in the life hereafter originated in South East Asia and particularly in Mindanao in the southern Philippines. . . . Suspects from groups having similar beliefs were investigated, including all male members of the Charles Manson Family.

  Combined efforts by law enforcement agencies have failed to uncover the identity of the “Zodiac” killer. . . .

  Investigation continuing.

  Melvin M. Nicolai

  Special Agent

  Chapter Eighteen

  The map coupled with this code will tell you where the bomb is set.

  Zodiac

  An element that runs through all the murders I attribute to George Hodel, from the Black Dahlia Avenger to Suzanne Degnan to Zodiac, are the elaborate cat-and-mouse games he played with authorities. Probably the most perplexing of these was a mysterious Phillips 66 gas station map and compass diagram sent by Zodiac in 1970. Since its arrival at the San Francisco Chronicle, SFPD detectives and expert cryptographers have spent endless hours racking their brains, trying to figure out what it means.

  18.1

  The letter reads:

  This is the Zodiac speaking I have become very upset with the people of San Fran Bay Area. They have not complied with my wishes for them to wear some nicebuttons. I promiced to punish them if they did not comply , by anilating a full School Buss. But now school is out for the summer, so I punished them in an another way. I shot a man sitting in a parked car with a .38.

  - 12 SFPD - 0

  The Map coupled with this code will tell you where the bomb is set.

  You have untill next Fall to dig it up.

  18.2

  The code in this letter was never broken, and no bomb was ever found. But a month later, in his July 26, 1970, Mikado “little list” letter, Zodiac referenced the map again:

  PS. The Mt. Diablo code concerns Radians & # inches along the radians.

  18.3

  The map with its obscure notations was first brought to public attention in a November 1981 article published in California magazine, entitled “Portrait of the Artist as a Mass Murderer.” Author Gareth Penn, who wrote under the pen name George Oakes, is the son of an Army cryptographer who was a former employee of the California Attorney General’s Office. Gareth is a member of Mensa—the most famous high-IQ society in the world.

  18.4

  In his California magazine article, Penn theorized that Zodiac had used his crimes to create a form of land art. Land Art, also known as Earthworks, is a movement said to have been launched in October 1968 with the group exhibition “Earthworks” at the Dwan Gallery in New York. Zodiac’s first Bay Area murder occurred just one month later, in December 1968. If Zodiac was influenced by the Earthworks movement, it might mean he had carefully selected his murder sites and positioned his victims to create his own masterpiece. If George Hodel was Zodiac, working his crimes into a piece of art only he could fully understand would continue the tradition he began when he posed Elizabeth Short as his surreal masterpiece.

  As Penn (Oakes) states in the article:

  Seen from the perspective of outer space, the Zodiac murders make a certain kind of sense. They show, in fact, a degree of precision and a consistency of design that, combined with the savagery and viciousness of the crimes, is downright blood chilling.

  In a book he published in 1987, Times 17, Gareth Penn defined the term “radian.”

  A radian is a unit of angular measurement frequently used by engineers, mathematicians, and some people in the physical sciences. . . . In more familiar terms, it is 57.2957795131. . . . or 57 degrees, 17 minutes, 44 seconds.

  He then goes on to describe his process of discovery:

  I was curious to discover what the Zodiac had meant by this rather bizarre suggestion. I bought a sheet of clear acetate and a marking pen. Using a protractor and a straightedge, I drew an angle of between 57 and 58 degrees on the acetate and then laid the acetate over a map of the Bay Area. I placed the apex of the angle on Mount Diablo, then rotated the angle around until one leg passed through the scene of the murder at Blue Rock Springs. . . . The other leg of the angle went straight through Presidio Heights in San Francisco where the Zodiac had murdered the cabby. It was the most shocking experience of my entire life.

  Penn said he knew in an instant why cab driver Paul Stine was killed where he was—and why he, a cabdriver, had been chosen as Zodiac’s final known victim. Who would be easier to direct to a specific location before committing a murder than a cabdriver? Penn also understood why no one before him had grasped Zodiac’s plan. It had to be viewed from the perspective of outer space by someone with knowledge of what a radian is.

  Penn deemed Zodiac “a genius . . . coldly calculating and incredibly evil.”

  Then he concluded:

  I knew then that everything he had done or written, as mad as it might appear, had to have a discoverable sense.

  Figure 18.5, below, shows Zodiac’s original notations on the Phillips 66 map with dotted lines extended at an angle of one radian to visually represent Gareth Penn’s discovery. As you can see, the northern radian passes through the crime scene at Blue Rock Springs in Vall
ejo, and the southern line intersects Presidio Heights, where Paul Stine was murdered in his cab.

  18.5

  Using Zodiac’s 1970 letter and map, investigators searched the Bay Area for the “bomb” Zodiac claimed to have buried along the radian lines. Nothing was found. But was the “bomb” actually an oblique reference to something else of interest buried along the radians shown in Figure 18.5? I wondered if “bomb” was meant metaphorically and whether some other feature of the map intersected with the radian lines in any interesting way. This thought, when combined with a piece of information brought to light by my book Black Dahlia Avenger, would provide one of the most chilling details of my entire investigation.

  When I wrote Black Dahlia Avenger, my early research showed that Elizabeth Short had been buried near her sister’s home in Oakland, California.

  On October 10, 2006, I received the following e-mail and photos from a reader: