Most Evil
Page 17
On the surface, Dr. George Hodel lived a storybook life. Successful Hollywood doctor, friend to the rich and famous, beautiful and talented wife, architecturally significant house, lovely children. But something monstrously bitter lurked beneath the surface. It’s what compelled him to commit incest with his fourteen-year-old daughter and savagely butcher Elizabeth Short.
Who was this monster that he kept largely hidden? This murderous Mr. Hyde behind his Dr. Jekyll public face? Why did it peek out when it did? How did it operate within his persona? How could the erudite doctor justify the monster living inside him?
We know that as both the Black Dahlia Avenger and Zodiac, my father offered to turn himself in to authorities, but never did. That suggests that on some level he was aware of the terrible crimes he had committed. Yet he was able to live with himself. To kill by night and function as a sophisticated international businessman by day. How?
These were the questions that kept me up at night. The answers, I knew, lay in the intricately layered and terrifying mind of Dr. George Hodel. That’s where I needed to go.
I felt like I had no choice. I owed it to myself, my family, the victims, and the hundreds of other people my father had hurt.
To accomplish this, I relied on an investigative technique that identified the points of similarity between what was known about a suspect’s life, body of knowledge, and interests and compared it to the evidence the killer left behind. The result was something that I called a “thoughtprint”—a unique mental paradigm pieced together from an individual’s known thoughts, beliefs, and actions.
In a textbook by Dr. Richard H. Walton, Cold Case Homicides: Practical Investigative Techniques, I described thoughtprints this way:
While our actions may appear simple, routine and automatic, they really are not. Behind and within each of our thoughts is an aim, an intent, a motive. The motive within each thought is unique. In all our actions, each of us leaves behind traces of our self. Like our fingerprints, these traces are identifiable.19
Using the large body of evidence left by Zodiac, the Black Dahlia Avenger, the Lipstick Killer in Chicago, and the Jigsaw Murderer in Manila, I started to delve. My initial focus was the mysterious Zodiac symbol and name.
Why a circle and cross? Why Zodiac’s stated mission of collecting slaves for the afterlife? What did these mean to George Hodel?
Joe Barrett, an artist who knew my father well and rented a room in his house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood during the late 1940s, once told me that my father had a photographic memory but was not creative. Original ideas did not spring from his consciousness, Joe said. Instead, my father was expert at absorbing information and ideas and restating them to appear as his own.
20.1
As I’ve said before, my father exuded an air of self-importance and was highly educated, well read, and culturally sophisticated. His formal education lasted twenty-two years and was complemented by an abiding interest in music, literature, and film. Especially film. Dad loved movies and was a devotee—a cinephile. His tastes in film and literature leaned toward the intellectual, dark, and bizarre.
This penchant for the unusual was clearly expressed in the editorial statement of the debut issue of his literary magazine, Fantasia:
A Dedication By George Hill Hodel, editor
To the portrayal of bizarre beauty in the arts, to the delineation of the stranger harmonies and the rarer fragrances, do we dedicate this, our magazine.
Such beauty we may find in a poem, a sketch, or a medley of colors; in the music of prayer-bells in some far-off minaret, or the noises of a city street; in a temple or a brothel or a gaol; in prayer or perversity or sin.
And ever shall we attempt in our pages the vivid expression of such art, wherever or however we may find it—ever shall we consecrate our magazine to the depiction of beauty anomalous, fantasial.
Seeing himself as a young surrealist, George cultivated friends who shared his interest in exploring fantasies having to do with forbidden sex and violence. One of these was film director John Huston, who started his career as a screenwriter and wrote the dialogue for Universal’s 1932 adaptation of Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Huston’s wife, Dorothy—who later married George and became my mother—while married to John also worked on movie scripts for Universal, MGM, and RKO.
In 1939, while dating my mother, George Hodel returned to UCSF’s Parnassus campus to take a postgraduate course in the treatment of venereal disease. As a means of supplementing his income, he worked as attending physician at the San Francisco World’s Fair on Treasure Island. Also known as the San Francisco Golden Gate Fair, it was an international exhibition that honored the building of the world’s two largest suspension bridges, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Oakland Bay Bridge. Located on man-made Treasure Island, the fair featured architectural structures representing many of the world’s countries. Most prominent was the Tower of the Sun, with a separate statue placed at each of its four cardinal points (north, south, east, and west), representing: science, agriculture, industry, and art.
I found out that soon after my father joined the fair’s staff, attending to the medical needs of visiting tourists from around the world, 20th Century Fox began filming an installment of its popular Charlie Chan detective film series. This one was to be called Charlie Chan at Treasure Island. They used the fairground with its dramatic architecture and Pacific Ocean backdrops as a colorful on-site location. I have no doubt that as a film buff and astute observer, my father took a serious interest in a film being shot on location where he worked.
What did he learn? The movie Charlie Chan at Treasure Island opens aboard a China Clipper flight from Hawaii to San Francisco. As the famous private detective Charlie Chan (Sidney Toler) and his son, Jimmy Chan (Victor Sen), prepare to land, a flight attendant discovers that Chan’s good friend and novelist Paul Essex has been found dead in his seat. Chan learns that during the flight, Essex received a radiogram message that read:
SIGN OF SCORPIO INDICATES
DISASTER IF ZODIAC OBLIGATIONS IGNORED.
UNSIGNED
Essex then dispatched the following in-flight radiogram to his wife:
CAN’T ESCAPE ZODIAC. GOOD-BYE MY LOVE.
PAUL
Chan concludes that Essex took his own life. The question is: why? And who is the mysterious Dr. Zodiac, and what is his connection to Charlie Chan’s good friend? As Charlie Chan ponders these questions, the world-famous detective flags down a Yellow Cab taxi to take him to the St. Francis Hotel.
The connections are too comprehensive to be coincidence. George Hodel as a young student in both Los Angeles and San Francisco was a taxicab driver for Yellow Cab. Zodiac preselected one of his victims to be a Yellow Cab taxi driver, Paul Stine, hailing him just outside the same St. Francis Hotel. Zodiac then ordered Stine to drive to a specific location, where he shot and killed him.
Back to the movie plot. When Chan gets in the cab, he’s surprised to find two men already occupying the backseat. They order him to get in. Chan thinks he’s being kidnapped, but soon discovers that the “thugs” are San Francisco Police detectives pulling a joke on him, on behalf of their chief.
The detectives tell Chan that Dr. Zodiac is a renowned San Francisco psychic and seer, who claims to have the ability to channel three-thousand-year-old Egyptian high priestesses from the Great Beyond. The master sleuth doesn’t buy it.
Next the film introduces Peter Lewis (Douglas Fowley), a reporter for a local San Francisco newspaper, and the “Amazing Rhadini,” a professional magician who is headlining a show at the Treasure Island Fair. He’s played by a young, debonair Cesar Romero. Rhadini and reporter Lewis are united in their desire to expose Dr. Zodiac as a fraud.
To that end, Rhadini publicly challenges Dr. Zodiac to a showdown. Reporter Lewis writes the challenge and his paper headlines the story:
RHADINI CHALLENGES DR. ZODIAC TO TEST!
PSYCHIC TO WIN $5,000 IF MAGICIAN CANNOT EXPOSE DOCTOR’S CLAIM<
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Based on what he’s heard about Dr. Zodiac’s personality, Charlie Chan concludes:
Dr. Zodiac is a man of great ego. He enjoys using power to dominate lives of others.
In diagnosing Dr. Zodiac’s psychological disorder, detective Chan describes him as suffering from “Pseudologia Fantastica.” From a book in the film entitled History of Psychiatry, Chan reads the following definition:
Pathological liars and swindlers suffer from exaggerated fantasy, unleashed vanity, and great ambition, which robs them of caution known to saner men.
One of the challenges facing Chan is revealing the conjurer’s true identity. Dr. Zodiac keeps his face hidden behind a mask, turban, and beard.
One night Detective Chan decides to break into Dr. Zodiac’s residence /office. He’s joined at the last minute by reporter Lewis and magician Rhadini, who offer to help him search for clues.
Chan discovers a vault, which leads to a secret room that contains hundreds of files on Zodiac’s clients. Inside the files are dark secrets about his clients’ pasts. Chan learns that Zodiac has been blackmailing them. Four of his clients, including Chan’s friend Paul Essex, have already committed suicide out of fear of being exposed.
In Zodiac’s personal file on Essex, Chan finds Essex’s secret:
PAUL ESSEX GETS 3 YEARS FOR SWINDLE
Determined to put an end to Zodiac’s extortions, Chan removes the client files from the metal cabinets and stacks them on the floor with the following Chan-ism: “In humble opinion, suicide induced by blackmail is murder.”
Then, striking a match, he sets the client files ablaze, and says, “We are destroying web of spider; now let us find spider.”
And find him he does, by issuing a challenge in the San Francisco newspapers, to which Dr. Zodiac responds with a handwritten, anonymous note. In the closing scene, back at the World’s Fair on Treasure Island, the truth is revealed. Detective Chan unmasks Dr. Zodiac as the man we least suspected: the Amazing Rhadini!
It seems to me that my father would have been fascinated by the filming of this movie, especially its themes of duplicity and hidden identity. The dark deeds of Rhadini/Dr. Zodiac, witnessed at close range during filming, must have appealed to him on a deep psychic level. Could this film have planted the seeds that grew into Zodiac’s methods years later? Could it have inspired other behavior in my father’s life?
During the course of my Black Dahlia investigation and as summarized in Black Dahlia Avenger, I learned from Joe Barrett that my father was involved in the extortion of his clients and patients. In addition to being the venereal disease control officer for all of Los Angeles County, Father owned and operated the First Street Clinic in downtown Los Angeles, where in the years before penicillin (pre-1945), call girls, cops, politicians, and people from the film world came to be treated for their indiscretions. DA surveillance captured George Hodel admitting to performing abortions—“lots of them.” Clearly, he had the key to the skeleton closet of the rich and famous and would certainly use it if necessary.
Barrett revealed that during a conversation with my mother in 1949, prior to Father’s arrest for incest, she said, “Yes, the clinic made for some interesting income.” According to Joe Barrett, she was suggesting that George was using highly sensitive medical information about his patients as a form of blackmail or extortion, just like Dr. Zodiac.
My father often spoke knowingly of mysteries wrapped in enigmas. Is Charlie Chan at Treasure Island one of them? Did he draw his inspiration for the murderous Zodiac from the 1939 film?
I strongly suspected so. And as I probed further and found that he was influenced by other 1930s movies and popular stories, I became even more convinced.
Chapter Twenty-one
Only after the kill does man know the true ecstasy of love.
Count Zaroff
I believe a fairly strong case has been made that George Hodel could well have obtained his inspiration for the name Zodiac (as well as some of his signature acts) from the 1939 film Charlie Chan at Treasure Island. Especially considering the fact that he was physically “on location” at Treasure Island the entire time it was being filmed in San Francisco Bay.
Let’s stay with this premise and examine a second period film, the 1932 classic The Most Dangerous Game. That film was adapted from a short story by the same name written by Richard Connell.
In 1924, the year it was first published, it won the prestigious O.Henry Memorial Award for short fiction and was quickly recognized as a literary adventure classic and compared with the work of Jack London and Rudyard Kipling. It was reprinted in the June 7, 1925, Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times, where it would have been seen and probably read by hundreds of thousands of people, including George Hodel, who on that same date was a young investigative crime reporter working across town at the Los Angeles Record, one of the Times’s chief competitors.
The story revolves around two characters. The protagonist, Sanger Rainsford, is a world-class big-game hunter from New York who, in the opening pages, while returning from a power-yacht cruise in the Caribbean, accidentally falls overboard. He yells for help but isn’t heard, and saves himself by swimming toward the sound of gunshots echoing in the distance. Though exhausted, he manages to swim ashore, and he finds himself on a remote jungle island.
There, Rainsford finds .22 casings on the ground and shoe prints left from a man’s hunting boot. Through a clearing, he sees a palatial chateau with pointed towers, perched on a high bluff overlooking the sea.
21.1 Los Angeles Times, June 7, 1925
Inside, Rainsford meets the lord of the manor and antagonist of the story, Count Zaroff. Zaroff, like Rainsford, is a highly skilled professional hunter. He’s described this way in the text:
Rainsford’s first impression was that the man was singularly handsome; his second was that there was an original, almost bizarre quality about the general’s face.
The cultured Zaroff provides Rainsford with clothing and shelter. After an elegant dinner, the men discuss their favorite pastime, hunting.
Zaroff says that he’s hunted everything, “grizzlies in your Rockies, crocodiles in the Ganges, rhinoceroses in East Africa . . . even jaguar in the Amazon.” The sport now bores him, he says, because wild animals are no match for a hunter with his wits about him and a high-powered rifle. In desperation he’s invented a new game.
Again, from the original story:
“I wanted the ideal animal to hunt,” explained the general.
“So I said, ‘What are the attributes of an ideal quarry?’ And the answer was, of course, ‘It must have courage, cunning, and, above all, it must be able to reason.’”
“But no animal can reason,” objected Rainsford.
“My dear fellow,” said the general, “there is one that can.”
Later in the conversation, Zaroff offers his philosophy:
Life is for the strong, to be lived by the strong, and, if needs be, taken by the strong. The weak of the world were put here to give the strong pleasure.
Zaroff promises that if Rainsford can elude him in the jungle for three days, he’ll grant him his freedom and safe passage from his island. The game begins.
In the closing scene, Rainsford, after eluding Zaroff and his rifle for nearly three days, is finally cornered on a ridge. With Zaroff and his dogs closing in, Rainsford jumps from the cliff into the sea, presumably to his death.
Zaroff looks down at the vast green-blue expanse, shrugs his shoulders, then takes a shot of brandy from a silver flask, lights a cigarette, and hums of few bars of Madama Butterfly.
With the game over, the madman returns to his castle, where he enjoys a sumptuous solitary dinner in the paneled dining hall, complete with “a bottle of Pol Roger and half a bottle of Chambertin,” and finally “soothes himself by reading from the works of Marcus Aurelius.”
Eight years later, in 1932, The Most Dangerous Game was made into a motion picture and released in the United States. In the Hollywood adaptat
ion, the character of Eve Trowbridge (played by actress Fay Wray) was introduced to provide Rainsford with a love interest.
I have no doubt that by the end of 1932, George Hodel, an erudite, twenty-five-year-old medical student and part-time San Francisco newspaper columnist, had both read and seen The Most Dangerous Game. Its surreal, fatalistic theme was right up his alley.
The film version makes it clear from the get-go that Count Zaroff is a full-blown psychopath, who first psychologically tortures his guests and then ritualistically stalks them through the forest like animals.
After cornering his prey, the mad hunter slays them using his weapon of choice: a rifle, handgun, or bow and arrow. Then, he dresses down his kills and mounts their heads on the walls of his trophy room.
Strong sexual fetishes are presented the moment Rainsford approaches the castle. The movie still shown below left focuses the viewer’s attention on the unusual doorknocker, which depicts a Minotaur-like demon with an arrow piercing his heart. In his arms he holds an unconscious woman. The still to the right shows Rainsford grasping hold of the female captive’s supine body in order to announce himself.
21.2
A second, more ominous fetish is introduced when Rainsford climbs the stairway, escorted by Count Zaroff’s mute manservant, and gazes at an unusual wall hanging. Woven into the tapestry is a Minotaur-like monster, half-man, half-beast, carrying an unconscious maiden through