Most Evil

by Steve Hodel

  21.3

  the forest—suggesting a kidnap and the probable rape and murder of an innocent woman.

  Zaroff forecasts Eve’s fate in no uncertain terms by reciting a Russian proverb, “Hunt first the enemy then the woman.” With lustful eyes focused directly on Eve, he says, “It is after the chase only that man revels.”

  Being a man who plays by the rules, Zaroff makes it clear that he will only have his way with Eve after he’s tracked down and slain her mate.

  The style of the 1932 film is surreal. The location, the sets, the characters are all otherworldly and bizarre. Danger and eroticism are omnipresent.

  21.4 Salvador Dalí, 1936; Count Zaroff, 1932

  In appearance, Count Zaroff strongly resembles the famous surrealist artist Salvador Dalí.

  Salvador Dalí was born in Catalonia, Spain, in 1904 and was two years older than George Hodel. The photograph seen above (Time magazine, December 1936) was taken by Man Ray in Paris in 1929. Man Ray was a good friend to both Dalí and my parents, Dorothy and George Hodel. Simultaneous to the release of The Most Dangerous Game, Dalí’s painting The Persistence of Memory (featuring his famous melting clocks) was shown at New York’s Julien Levy Gallery. The following year, that same gallery opened Dalí’s first one-man show. Art collectors and fans worldwide, which certainly included both Man Ray and George Hodel, formed a group to subsidize the Catalan artist. They named their organization Zodiaque—The Zodiac Group.

  None of this would have been lost on young George Hodel—modernist, avant-garde intellectual, poet, and publisher of “bizarre beauty” and “stranger harmonies.” My father was a devotee of the surrealist movement in art and literature and shared its goal “to spit in the eye of the world.” Like them, he was attracted to the physical and psychological power of the Minotaur myth. He read and collected their official magazine, Le Minotaure (1933-39), named in homage to the half-man, half-beast.

  In my opinion, The Most Dangerous Game is essentially a modern retelling of the ancient Greek myth. Count Zaroff represents the Minotaur; and his jungle island is the labyrinth. Rainsford stands in for Theseus. Stalked and hunted by the Minotaur, he must survive by his wits. In the film version of the story, Eve is the equivalent of Ariadne, daughter of King Minos, who falls in love with Theseus and is determined to help him escape.

  In the final reel of the film, Theseus, as Rainsford, survives the leap into the ocean, slays the Minotaur (Zaroff), and gets the princess.

  21.5 Theseus slaying the Minotaur

  In real life, however, the story had a different ending. Dr. George Hodel cast himself in the role of Zaroff-Minotaur-Avenger. Throughout the 1940s, he stalked, played with, and eventually slew young maidens. As a macabre homage to his fellow surrealists he even went as far as to re-create Man Ray’s 1933 photograph of the Minotaur (himself) using victim Elizabeth (Black Dahlia) Short’s body as his subject in 1947.

  But the Minotaur was neither captured nor slain. Instead, he discarded his Avenger persona and fled to a foreign land. After years of exile, the aging beast emerged from his island hideout and chose San Francisco and its Bay Area as his new killing labyrinth. There he resumed the hunt, tracking and murdering his prey and broadcasting the Minotaur’s new identity to the public with the words: “This is the Zodiac speaking.”

  Zodiac’s strange and unique “introduction” has taken on a special and very personal significance. During my childhood years (age five to eight) at the Franklin house while my brothers and I and our half-sister Tamar were playing in our “castle,” Father would on occasion get on the intercom and in a loud, melodious voice announce, “This is God speaking . . .” This would be followed by specific orders such as, “Children, you all must be dressed and ready to go at five forty-five p.m. God will be taking you to hear Burl Ives sing at the Hollywood Bowl. Those not ready will be left behind.” During his always-unexpected phone calls to me, even up until his death in 1999, my father would invariably begin his call with “Hello, Steven, this is your father speaking . . .” and follow with something like “I’m in town for just a day or two. I would like you to call your brothers and we can all meet at my hotel. . . .” After five years of Zodiac research my father’s unique introduction has become a very personal and powerful thoughtprint.

  In his mailings, Zodiac left what I believe were three separate references to his “most dangerous game.” The first was pre-Zodiac and found in “the confession” mailed to Riverside police and the press on November 29, 1966. After recounting his murder of Cheri Jo Bates, he wrote:

  I AM NOT SICK. I AM INSANE. BUT THAT WILL NOT STOP THE GAME.

  On the five-month anniversary of the crime, April 30, 1967, the killer dispatched a sadistic hand-printed note to the victim’s father signed with a simple “Z,” which suggests that the Zodiac persona wasn’t fully realized. Perhaps the killer was paying homage to another hunter and a stalker. A man who, like himself, knew the game and played it with precision: Zaroff, the Minotaur’s alter ego.

  The second reference to both the short story and the film arrived three years later, hidden in the Zodiac’s three-part cryptogram mailed to San Francisco newspapers. Deciphered by the high-school teacher Donald Harden and his wife, the excerpted portion reads:

  I LIKE KILLING PEOPLE BECAUSE IT IS SO MUCH FUN IT IS MORE FUN THAN KILLING WILD GAME IN THE FOREST BECAUSE MAN IS THE MOST HONGERTUE ANIMAL OF ALL TO KILL . . .

  The third and final reference is found in Letter 19, mailed in 1971 and printed in the May 8, 1994, San Francisco Chronicle article “On the Trail of the Zodiac, Part I,” along with a cipher that remains unbroken. Zodiac wrote:

  I’LL DO IT TO BECAUSE I DONE IT 21 TIMES I CANT STOP BECAUSE EACH THAT I KILL MAKES IT WORSE AND I MUST KILL MORE MAN IS THE MOST PRIZED GAME ILL NEVER GIVE MY NAME BECAUSE YOU DONT UNDERSTAND NEXT TIME I WILL SEND A PATCH OF HUMAN SKIN IF THEIR IS SOME LEFT OVER.

  Finally, there’s the matter of Zodiac’s costume and choice of weapons, especially in his September 27, 1969, Lake Berryessa assault on Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard. Most of the items worn and used by Zodiac are borrowed from either author Richard Connell’s original story or the 1932 film adaptation. They include:

  21.6 Leslie Banks “in uniform” as Count Zaroff with knife in sheath

  All-black clothing, a long-bladed knife worn at his side in a sheath, hunting boots [only possible, as shoe print could also be foreign import], the use of .22 caliber weapon and a 9mm German Luger [used in the film version].

  The only things missing were the executioner’s hood and the cross and circle sewn or drawn on the chest. But George Hodel didn’t have the luxury of owning a private island like Zaroff. He had to reinvent his labyrinth in the midst of modern society with its police watchdogs.

  As the psychopath played out his mad fantasy, he hid behind masks and elaborate codes so as not to get caught. Unlike Zaroff, Dr. George Hodel was both hunter and hunted. In his October 5, 1970, postcard to the Chronicle, he boasted: “I’m crackproof.”

  It was all part of the game.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  A cryptogram is a piece of writing to which a meaning exists but is not immediately perceptible; its intelligibility is concealed, hence mysterious or occult.

  William F. Friedman, The Index of Coincidence and

  Its Application in Cryptography

  The Gold Bug

  In addition to his love for fine art, my father was also a man of literature and letters, a true scholar with a voracious appetite for reading. He loved both poetry and prose.

  One of his favorite authors was Edgar Allan Poe, the dark genius of American literature who died under mysterious circumstances in October 1849 at age forty. Poet, editor, literary critic, and inventor of detective fiction, Poe, like Zodiac, was obsessed with codes, cryptograms, puns, and hidden meanings. During his lifetime he was called “the most profound and skillful cryptographer who ever lived.”

  Poe claimed he could solve any cryptogram or cipher devised
by the human mind, and published a challenge in several popular magazines, including Alexander’s Weekly Messenger and Graham’s magazine.

  His interest in the subject is most notably represented in the 1843 short story “The Gold Bug,” which I believe is the fictional blueprint for an elaborate game my father played with San Francisco Bay Area investigators 127 years later.

  Poe’s story written in 1843 is set on Sullivan’s Island, near Charleston, South Carolina—a sliver of sea sand three miles long and a quarter mile wide.

  There are only three characters. The narrator is an anonymous physician and friend of the protagonist, Mr. William Legrand. Legrand, a thinly disguised stand-in for Poe, is described as a once-wealthy man from an ancient Huguenot family, who “through a series of misfortunes was reduced to want.”

  Legrand lives in a small hut with an old black man named Jupiter. According to the story:

  His [Legrand’s] chief amusements were gunning and fishing, or sauntering along the beach and through the myrtles, in quest of shells or entomological specimens; his collection of the latter might have been envied by a Swammerdamm.

  Poe describes Legrand as well-educated and brilliant, but infected with misanthropy and subject to perverse moods of alternating enthusiasm and melancholy.

  The plot centers around Legrand’s discovery of a gold bug, a rare scarabaeus, in the island’s sand. The scarabaeus in Legrand’s estimation is not just a bug but a clue to real treasure. As he tells the narrator-physician, “Since fortune has thought fit to bestow it on me, I have only to use it properly, and I shall arrive at the [real] gold of which it is an index.”

  Both Jupiter and the physician believe that Legrand might have been bitten by the bug and is going insane. But he proves them wrong and, with the help of Jupiter and a piece of parchment that he uses to wrap the bug, finds a vast fortune of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and gold buried on the island by the pirate Captain Kidd.

  The narrator, now “dying with impatience for a solution to the riddle,” asks Legrand to explain how he knew where to find the treasure. It all started by accident, Legrand says, when he held the piece of parchment in which he used to wrap the bug up to a candle. At first, the drawing of a skull appeared, then a goat.

  He speculated that the goat might be some sort of pun or hieroglyphic signature for Captain Kidd, since a baby goat is a “kid” and according to local legend, Captain Kidd and his pirates had roamed the area and possibly even buried their valuable plunder. For more than a hundred years, people near and around Charleston had searched the coast for clues.

  Then Legrand heats the ancient parchment further and holds it up to his friend. Magically, a series of symbols and notes appear in reddish ink midway between the skull and the goat:

  22.1

  Poe, through the character of William Legrand, goes on to explain in minute detail just how he deciphered the code using a secret alphabet he discovered by combining deductive reasoning with numeric probabilities. This is precisely how high school teacher Donald Harden and his wife, Bettye, broke the Zodiac cryptogram, which had mystified both military and civilian experts.

  In Poe’s story, the enigmatic message reads:

  A good glass in the bishop’s hostel in the devil’s seat twenty-one degrees and thirteen minutes—northeast and by north—main branch seventh limb east side—shoot from the left eye of the death’s-head—a bee-line from the tree through the shot fifty feet out.

  Next, Legrand explains how he spent several days “making diligent inquiry, in the neighborhood of Sullivan’s Island,” which resulted in his discovering some historical references that, when pieced together, ultimately solved the riddle. In speaking to one of the oldest women on the island, he learned that the reference to “bishop’s hostel” was actually a long-forgotten location, some four miles distant, near the northern tip of the island, once known as Bessop’s Castle, which was neither a castle nor a tavern, but a high rock.

  I made no doubt that here was the ‘devil’s-seat’ alluded to in the MS., and now I seemed to grasp the full secret of the riddle. . . . Of course, the ‘twenty-one degrees and thirteen minutes’ could allude to nothing but elevation above the visible horizon, since the horizontal direction was clearly indicated by the words, ‘northeast and by north.’ This latter direction I at once established by means of a pocket-compass; then, pointing the glass as nearly at an angle of twenty-one degrees of elevation as I could do it by guess, I moved it cautiously up or down, until my attention was arrested by a circular rift or opening in the foliage. . . . Adjusting the focus of the telescope, I again looked, and now made it out to be a human skull.

  Finally, Legrand recounts how he instructed Jupiter to climb the ancient tree to its seventh limb and pass the gold bug through the hol-loweye of the skull so that it fell on the exact spot where Captain Kidd buried the treasure.

  22.2

  Now, let’s fast-forward 125 years to San Francisco, California. Zodiac has recently shot and killed cabdriver Paul Stine and is threatening to bomb a school bus and shoot the children as they get off the bus. In separate letters he attaches clues like the aforementioned Phillips 66 map, and goes as far as to draw, mark, and highlight points along the arc of his now infamous cross-and-circle symbol. And what does he do? He instructs authorities to go to the apex of Mt. Diablo (Devil Mountain)—Poe in his story uses “the devil’s seat”—and, with the help of a compass, find true north.

  Zodiac says that by calculating radians and inches along the radians, we can discover the thing that he’s buried. But in this case it’s not pirates’ gold and doubloons. Nor is it an actual bomb. As we’ve already discovered, it’s a bombshell: his surreal masterpiece, Elizabeth Short.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio (Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness.)

  Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter”

  In 1983, I received an unusual call from my father. He and his fourth wife, June, were in San Francisco on business and wanted to know if I could join them for a few days and possibly drive them back to Los Angeles.

  At the time I was a senior detective at Hollywood homicide and had just reached my twenty-year mark with the LAPD. Anxious to see my father and wanting to road test a new car, I accepted his invitation.

  Soon after I arrived in San Francisco, my father announced, “I have a surprise.” He went on to tell me about a hot-air-balloon trip he’d arranged for the following morning.

  “A balloon trip?” I asked. To my knowledge, my father had never taken a hot-air-balloon trip before and had never expressed the slightest interest.

  “Yes, a balloon trip. We have to leave the hotel at six a.m.”

  My father had always been a hard person to read. And he rarely, if ever, explained himself. For some reason he was excited about the upcoming trip.

  The next morning greeted us with perfect weather. As we went aloft, the view from the balloon was spectacular.

  For more than an hour my father, June, and I glided silently across the Napa/Sonoma valley. From our high vantage point we could see the entire Bay Area, with Vallejo and Mt. Diablo to the southeast and the Presidio and downtown San Francisco to the southwest.

  I gazed down at the bay, the bridges, and the valley’s patchwork-quilted wineries, then up at my father’s very satisfied expression. Seeing how much he was enjoying himself pleased me, too.

  More than two decades later, armed with the fuller knowledge of who my father was and how his mind worked, I now see the balloon trip for what it was. Not an unusual way for a father to share time with his son but rather a cat-and-mouse game and his private joke. The satisfaction I saw on his face that day was actually the gloating smile of a serial killer. My father was giving his son, the big-city homicide detective, a tour of his Zodiac killing fields!

  According to the popular expression, a picture is worth a thousand words. The photo below of that day speaks them eloquently. I’m the one in the middle
wearing the down vest and sunglasses. I appear proud to be with my father. My father’s Japanese wife, June, stands smiling for the camera to my left, unaware of her husband’s sinister agenda. My father looms to my right in an elegant tweed jacket with a handkerchief in the pocket, a fancy turtleneck sweater, and an expensive watch.

  How would you describe his expression? The cat that ate the canary? Or, even better, the man who knows he’s gotten away with murder?

  Or maybe Zodiac saying to himself, “There, Steven, right in front of you, but you don’t have the eyes to see it! I’m crackproof!”

  23.1 Author wearing sunglasses (center) between George and June Hodel, circa 1983 (pilot and copilot unidentified)

  Landgrowth

  The 1983 balloon tour wasn’t the first time my father had tried to involve me in his ruse. A decade earlier, in 1972, I was approaching my ten-year anniversary with the LAPD. In a few months, I would be halfway to my goal of retiring with 40 percent of my police pension, at the relatively young age of forty-one.

  I would have been young enough to have begun a new career.

  Knowing this, my father contacted me from Manila, where he had reinvented himself as an international marketing expert. He told me he was developing some “new and exciting opportunities” and needed someone he could trust to serve as president of a fledging company with responsibilities throughout Asia and the potential to make millions.