Most Evil

by Steve Hodel

  Mr. Hodel,

  I recall seeing a picture in your book of your father in his later years with a view of the SF city skyline in the background. The picture looked familiar to me because I had a friend who lived in a condo in SF with a similar vantage point, that of looking out over the city and able to see the Transamerica pyramid and across the bay to Oakland.

  My father happens to be buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland with a fantastic view of the SF skyline across the bay. Then I learned Elizabeth Short rests in the same cemetery. Where the strange coincidence comes into play is the view from the slight hill where Elizabeth Short is buried. Attached are some photos from the hill where she rests. It appears your father may have had a commanding view, albeit from a distance of Elizabeth’s final resting place.

  Your book is quite compelling and for what it is worth has me convinced. It is surely a sad tale.

  Regards,

  S. M.

  Reno, NV

  It’s true that my father owned a high-powered telescope mounted on a tripod that stood in the window of his thirty-eighth-floor penthouse apartment in San Francisco in the final years of his life. It’s also true that he kept the telescope pointed in the general direction of the Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland across San Francisco Bay. How many times during his nine-year residency did he focus his telescope on Elizabeth Short’s gravesite? It’s impossible to tell.

  18.6 Elizabeth Short’s gravesite at Mountain View Cemetery, Oakland, California (Courtesy of S.M., Reno, NV). Photo of June and George in their 38th floor penthouse suite, taken by author in 1998.

  When and if he did, was he filled with a perverse, gloating pride to be looking down on his masterpiece? We can only wonder.

  But looking at Zodiac’s map in the context of his radian comments and Penn’s “Land Art” theory, something far more remarkable became clear. Elizabeth Short’s final resting place in Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery is precisely intersected by Zodiac’s lower radian (seen in Figure 18.7)—the same one that extends through the Paul Stine crime scene.

  18.7

  1. Blue Rock Springs (Ferrin/Mageau crime)

  2. Paul Stine crime scene

  3. Elizabeth Short (Black Dahlia) burial site (Mountain View Cemetery)

  4. Mt. Diablo

  Could it be a coincidence that Elizabeth Short happened to be buried along the radian line purposely established by Zodiac when he directed Paul Stine to his specific place of execution? The mathematical probability of it being coincidence is infinitesimal. The Zodiac murders and the murder of Elizabeth Short must have been connected.

  Clearly Zodiac knew what he was doing. He wasn’t simply offering authorities a geometric map of his crimes. He was providing them with a very telling and taunting clue that, if solved, would reveal a link to his identity as the 1947 Black Dahlia Avenger. The “bomb” mentioned in the letter was no literal bomb, but rather a bombshell of information that, if decoded, would have connected California’s two most famous and enduring sequences of serial killings as the work of the same man.

  Knowing that Paul Stine was directed to a specific location in the Presidio before being killed, and considering George Hodel’s penchant for choosing his precise landmarks using street names, I wondered whether there were further surprises left by Zodiac all those years ago for me to discover. As illustrated in chapter 7, the placement of Elizabeth Short’s body tied her bisection and murder in Los Angeles in 1947 to the murder/dismemberment of Suzanne Degnan in Chicago one year earlier. Twenty years later, Lucila Lalu’s cut-up body was dumped on or very near Zodiac Street in Manila, an eerie link to the murder of Cheri Jo Bates in Riverside and the Zodiac crimes that would follow.

  I was working on the theory that my father used street names to create a ghoulish forensic map to his crimes. The pattern was repeated too often to ignore:

  1. Victim Suzanne Degnan: After surgical bisection, body parts (arms bent at elbows and posed upward) placed in sewer at Hollywood Avenue.

  2. Victim Elizabeth Short: After surgical bisection, body parts (arms bent at elbows and posed upward) placed in vacant lot adjacent to Degnan Avenue.

  3. Victim Lucila Lalu: After surgical bisection, body parts placed at or near Zodiac Street.

  Did this peculiar signature end in Manila? Or did the San Francisco-area killer who called himself Zodiac place his victims in a way that referenced his other crimes?

  On the night of October 11, 1969, Zodiac flagged down Paul Stine’s cab in front of the St. Francis Hotel at Mason and Geary in downtown San Francisco and directed Stine to drive him to a specific location. We know that location to be Washington Street and Maple Street from the letter Zodiac sent (10/13/69) in which he takes credit for the murder. Arriving at that address, he apparently instructed Stine to proceed approximately four hundred feet west, which is where he committed the murder.

  Police were able to confirm this specific location a few days later when Zodiac mailed in a bloody swatch cut from the victim’s shirt. In the accompanying message he called out the address of the crime as “Washington St. & Maple St.”

  18.8

  Stine’s probable route after picking up Zodiac at Mason and Geary to Washington and Maple in Presidio Heights comprises a total driving distance of about three miles.

  What’s the significance of that address? And why was Zodiac so precise? Is there anything that specifically connects George Hodel to Washington and Maple other than the fact that he lived a mile away on Jackson Street in 1934?

  The answer is yes, and comes to us from one of the many bits of unexplained activity in the final weeks of Elizabeth Short’s life.

  On January 12, 1947, three days before the bisected body of Elizabeth Short was found in the vacant lot, a man fitting my father’s description and calling himself Mr. Barnes checked into a hotel in downtown Los Angeles a mile south of my father’s medical office. Accompanying Mr. Barnes was an attractive young woman. Barnes told manager William Johnson that they “were married and had just moved from Hollywood.”

  Mrs. Barnes was never seen again by either the manager or his wife, both of whom were present when the couple checked in.

  Late in the morning of January 15, Mr. Barnes returned to the hotel alone. Mr. Johnson, upon seeing his guest, remarked that he “hadn’t seen him or his wife in three days” and joked, “We thought you must be dead.”

  Upon hearing these words, Mr. Johnson reported that Mr. Barnes became visibly flustered and quickly left the hotel. On that same morning (January 15, 1947) simultaneous to the eleven a.m. Johnson and Barnes conversation at the hotel, LAPD homicide detectives were arriving at a new crime scene. The vacant lot at Thirty-ninth and Norton/ Degnan was just two miles southwest of the hotel—a short five-minute drive. It would be more than a week before detectives would make the link and establish that the victim, Elizabeth Short, and Mr. Barnes had checked into the Washington Boulevard Hotel on January 12, some three days before her body was found. A week into the Black Dahlia investigation, police investigators showed the Johnsons photographs of Elizabeth Short. Both husband and wife identified her as the woman who had checked into their hotel as Mrs. Barnes. They also positively identified Mr. Barnes from one of the photographs found in Elizabeth’s luggage.

  Since the LAPD contends that this photograph and others have “disappeared from the files,” it’s impossible to know or establish if it was my father. But we do know from law-enforcement files released after the publication of Black Dahlia Avenger that my father dated Elizabeth Short and witnesses saw them together shortly before her murder.

  The downtown hotel that “Mr. and Mrs. Barnes” checked into in January 1947 still remains intact. Sixty years later it’s an apartment building known as the Hirsh Apartments at 300 East Washington Boulevard, near the intersection with Santee Street, approximately four hundred feet west of Washington and Maple.

  Figure 18.9 shows aerial maps of both the San Francisco (Paul Stine) and Los Angeles (Elizabeth Short) Washington
and Maple locations.

  18.9 (top) Location of victim Short’s Los Angeles Hotel stay, 400º west of the intersection of Washington and Maple; (bottom) location of victim Stine’s San Francisco murder, 400º west of the intersection of Washington and Maple

  Coincidence, many will say. Unlikely. Instead it seems that the Los Angeles hotel near the intersection of Washington and Maple was the last place my father stayed with Elizabeth Short before he took her life.

  Twenty years later, as Zodiac, he needed to position his last murder in San Francisco’s Presidio Heights District according to the grid of radians he’d previously worked out. He’d plotted them carefully to intersect the cemetery where Elizabeth Short is buried. With one last flourish, he would complete his forensic map with signposts linking his crimes in Chicago, Los Angeles, Manila, and San Francisco.

  As a former San Francisco cab driver, my father was familiar with Presidio Heights. He knew it contained a Washington-Maple intersection just like the one in L.A.

  Enjoying his own cleverness, I believe he instructed Paul Stine to take him to Washington and Maple, and then had him pull forward half a block, approximating the location of the Los Angeles hotel. His pawn now in place, Zodiac coolly removed his 9mm handgun from his jacket pocket, placed it against Paul Stine’s head, and pulled the trigger. Another feature of his macabre map was complete.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

  Carl Jung, On the Psychology of the Unconscious

  The term “serial killer” didn’t enter the popular vernacular until the mid-seventies when the crimes of Ted Bundy and David Berkowitz (Son of Sam) made the evening news. A serial killer is generally defined as a person, usually a man, who murders more than three people with a cooling-off period between each murder and who is motivated by a variety of psychological factors, primarily power and sexual compulsion.

  FBI profilers separate this type of criminal into two categories: organized /nonsocial offenders and disorganized/asocial offenders. The latter are often of low intelligence and commit their crimes impulsively. They tend to be extremely introverted people with few friends and a history of mental problems. When captured they often have little insight into their crimes and sometimes, even, block out memories of having committed the murders.

  Generally, organized/nonsocial offenders are of high intelligence and plan their crimes methodically. Armed with knowledge of forensics and maintaining a high degree of control over their crime scenes, they’re able to skillfully cover their tracks. They often regard their crimes as some sort of grand project and follow them proudly in the media. When they’re caught, it’s often discovered that they’ve been leading a somewhat normal social life with friends, lovers, and even a wife and children.

  Without question, the Black Dahlia Avenger, Zodiac, and the Lipstick Killer in Chicago all fall into the category of organized offenders, as the murders were carefully planned to disguise the identity of the killer. But even within that classification there are specific MOs that make each serial murderer unique and that are used by law enforcement to develop a specific profile of each killer.

  Beginning to believe that these three killers were the same man, I developed a list of MOs for each and then combined them into one master list to see how much overlap I would find. The list of shared characteristics is remarkable:

  1. Geographically preselects specific crime-scene location by plotting coordinates on a map, then randomly murders victim(s) who by happenstance enter his “killing zone,” or

  2. Geographically preselects specific crime-scene location by plotting coordinates on a map, then has unwitting victim (taxi driver) drive him to that location, where victim is then shot and killed, or

  3. Forcibly kidnaps female victim, strangles her to death, and dismembers body with surgical skill and precision. Then poses body parts in public view at a specific location (street name) that provides taunting clue related to the crime or suspect.

  4. In three separate murders medical coroner’s office declares suspect to be a “skilled surgeon.” Suspect performs a “hemicorpectomy” surgical operation on the victims. Using a scalpel, he bisects the bodies between the second and third lumbar vertebrae.

  5. Uses ruse and abduction.

  6. Brutal assault and overkill, particularly savage with female victims.

  7. Taunting notes, hand-printed and/or cut-and-pasted and typed, sent to press and police. Extremely sadistic in nature, with threats of additional harm to specific named victims, and/or children and the community in general. Includes cryptograms, puns, and “word games” in his public messages.

  8. Places taunting telephone calls to press and police after the crime is committed. Written taunts continue for decades.

  9. Suspect’s taunting communications indicative of a suspect of high intelligence and reveal he possesses extensive knowledge of and familiarity with math, science, literature, music, modern art, language (fluent in French), and military tactics and weaponry. Overall profile could be considered that of a “Renaissance Man.”

  10. Egomaniacal personality, demanding constant media publicity and front-page coverage under threat of additional killings.

  11. Mails victims’ personal property, taken during the crimes, to newspaper offices, to prove he was the killer.

  12. Identifies himself as an “avenger” claiming he was wronged by the female victim or was getting revenge for being spurned and ignored by victim. Informs public in separate messages that the killing was “divine retribution” or “justified.”

  13. Some victims stabbed with a long-bladed jungle or bayonet-style knife.

  14. Brings precut lengths of clothesline, which he uses to tie or strangle victims.

  15. Writes hand-printed taunting message to police at crime scene, either on wall of residence, on nearby post, on victim’s body, or on victim’s vehicle.

  16. Manually rips away band from a man’s wristwatch and leaves both band and watch at separate crime scenes—on or near the victim’s body.

  17. Leaves white handkerchief at crime scenes, or uses it to wipe away his fingerprints from inside victims’ vehicles or his weapon.

  18. In contacting victim, killer is known to pose as a military man, law-enforcement officer, FBI agent, or prospective buyer of a “house for sale.”

  While a few of these patterns, if isolated, could be considered generic, in combination they become exceedingly rare. In my twenty-four years with the LAPD, I investigated more than three hundred separate homicides. None of the murders included an MO where the suspect mailed in a taunting note to the press or police.

  In fact, I can’t find a single modern-day serial killer before Zodiac’s 1966 Riverside killing who has used the specific MO of taunting the police with letters containing obvious misspellings. The single exception: my father in the 1940s, calling himself the Black Dahlia Avenger.

  Before we begin to examine my father’s criminality as it relates to his own disturbed mind and motives, I want to express my opinion regarding where I believe the facts and evidence have taken us with respect to the Ross-Brown-Degnan and Zodiac murder investigations. Based on the specificity, uniqueness, and similarity of the enumerated MOs, coupled with the new facts and evidence about to be presented, it’s my educated opinion as a veteran homicide detective that these murders were not committed by many separate suspects. Rather, all of them were the butchery of one man. I am convinced that one man killed little Suzanne Degnan, Josephine Alice Ross, and Frances Brown in Chicago. Then, just twelve months later, he brutally murdered Elizabeth Short, Jeanne French, and a series of other single women in Los Angeles. In the 1960s, this same suspect brutally murdered Cheri Jo Bates in Riverside, strangled and dismembered Lucila Lalu in Manila, and, calling himself Zodiac, extended his trail of savagery and terror into the San Francisco Bay Area.

  Now, after five years of carefully following
the evidence, reviewing the witness statements and descriptions, and studying the relevant facts, it is my firm conviction that this one man—responsible for serial crimes spanning nearly three decades—was my father, Dr. George Hill Hodel.

  PART FIVE

  DR. GEORGE HILL HODEL’S SIGNATURE: MURDER AS A FINE ART

  Chapter Twenty

  I’d say yes, but facts say maybe.

  Charlie Chan, Charlie Chan at Treasure Island

  I felt confident at this point that the circumstantial case linking Dr. George Hodel to Zodiac was strong. The facts and signatures were overwhelming. But I had to probe deeper and try to establish motive. Because I wanted to understand better how my father’s sick mind worked and what compelled him to kill.

  I knew that the only way to accomplish that was to get inside his head. It’s something I’d trained myself to do over decades of working the Hollywood beat as a homicide detective. As I tracked down suspects, I’d learned to think like a wife beater, a street pimp, a jealous boyfriend, a hype in withdrawal from heroin in need of a fix.

  But this wasn’t just another suspect. It was my father—the man who gave me life—who claimed to love me and called me his favorite son.