Most Evil

by Steve Hodel

  It sounded good. Divorced, with no children and few responsibilities, I took the bait and after obtaining special permission from the LAPD to take an extended vacation, I spent the next two months with my father traveling through Asia as he explained his vision for his new company.

  Instead of joining his market-research company INRA-ASIA, he wanted me to take the helm of his new company, Landgrowth, and manage the sale of several hectares of vacation property in Tagaytay—a resort situated some thirty miles south of Manila, adjacent to an active volcano known as Lake Taal.

  The offer was tempting. Exotic lands, beautiful women, a handsome living, and I could start at the top.

  But my mind was flooded with second thoughts. First, I enjoyed working homicide and the challenge of solving crimes. And the prospect of early retirement was hard to pass up.

  But my main concern was dear old Dad. Though I loved and respected him, I couldn’t ignore his tremendous need to control and dominate. And I couldn’t help noticing how he frequently kept visitors waiting two hours or more and constantly moved employees around like pieces on a chessboard. I passed.

  Though disappointed, my father proceeded with his plan without me. Landgrowth was his baby, and he supervised everything, from formulating the entrepreneurial concept to writing the business plan and designing the letterheads and logo. Then he introduced the investment opportunities Landgrowth would offer to the public in a full-page ad (Figure 23.2).

  23.2

  The ad included a rather attractive company logo—a cross within a circle. Take a closer look.

  My father had this variation of the Zodiac symbol printed on his stationery, envelopes, and business cards. It is as if Zodiac were saying, “There it is, right in front of you, but you don’t have eyes to see it.”

  23.3

  Consider the audacity: He was offering his son, the LAPD homicide cop, a job as president of Landgrowth Corporation, which had as its logo a variation of the symbol he used as the serial killer Zodiac who, at that very time, was mailing taunting notes to the SFPD.

  INTRI-San Francisco

  To give himself an added thrill, he publicly displayed his Zodiac logo a second time, seventeen years later.

  In 1989, at age eighty-two, Dr. George Hodel decided that he needed a change. Most people would have kicked back and retired after a demanding life filled with exotic travel and eighteen-hour workdays.

  Ever the entrepreneur, my father chose to relocate and work full-time in San Francisco. So, in 1990, George and June, then living in Hong Kong, packed their bags and moved to a thirty-eighth-floor condominium on Bush Street, in the heart of the downtown financial district.

  After securing his business license and designing his logo, my father mailed me the particulars. He’d named his new company INTRI—International Travel Research Institute. Home office: 333 Bush Street West, Suite 3808, San Francisco, California.

  23.4

  No stretch of the imagination is needed here. This time the megalomaniacal Dr. George Hodel had placed the Zodiac logo resting on top of the world.

  I came across these logos in July 2005 as I was looking for samples of my father’s handwriting. When I’d first seen them thirty-three years earlier, they had no meaning. Only after I was deeply immersed in the Degnan/Zodiac investigations and my father’s pathological need to conceal clues as purloined signatures was I able to comprehend another of his inside jokes.

  The Medicine Wheel

  We’ll probably never know what the cross with a circle emblem meant to my father. But I do think I know where he found it. Anthropologists refer to the symbol as the “sun cross” or “solar cross” and it appears in Asian, American, European, and Indian religious art from the dawn of history.

  As mentioned in chapter 1, my father’s first assignment as a doctor in 1936-37 was as a district public health officer, assigned to the Indian reservations in New Mexico and Arizona. He served as physician to the Hopi and Navajo tribes and established a friendship with Tom Dodge, chief of the Navajo Nation.

  Later in his life, Dad regaled me with stories about his drinking bouts with the Native Americans and how he used to race his twelve-cylinder touring car up and down the deserted Arizona highways. During his stay in the Southwest, Dad accumulated an enormous collection of authentic Hopi Kachina dolls, which he proudly displayed at the Franklin house in Hollywood.

  My mother told my brothers and me how she and my father were granted the special privilege of witnessing the secret tribal sun and rain dance rituals, as well as the creation of beautiful Navajo sand paintings. Featured at the center of most Navajo sand paintings is a medicine wheel (seen in Figure 23.6), which symbolizes the four movements or phases of a person’s life—birth, childhood, adulthood, and death.

  Back in 1937 when my father worked on the Navajo and Hopi reservations, he would have seen medicine wheels like the one shown in

  23.5 and 23.6 Navajo dream catcher and medicine wheel

  Figure 23.6 worn by tribal members to restore and protect their good health. In fact, he probably saw them countless times every day.

  Given my father’s lifelong fascination with dreams, I expect he was also familiar with the dream catcher seen in Figure 23.5. Dad, like his Dadaist contemporaries Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Max Ernst, and others, believed in the efficacy of dreams. In the first Surrealist Manifesto, issued in 1924, the movement’s spokesman, André Breton, placed the dream world at the center of their core beliefs:

  The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him. The agonizing question of possibility is no longer pertinent. Kill; fly faster, love to your heart’s content. . . . I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.20

  After his arrest for committing incest with his fourteen-year-old daughter in 1949, my father told LAPD detectives, “Everything is a dream to me, I believe someone is trying to hypnotize me. I want to consult my psychiatrist, but I don’t trust him. He might find something wrong with me. If this is real and I am really here, then these other things [the incest, oral sex, and child molestation he had been accused of] must have happened.” This statement is a powerful clue to his disassociation from the real world of emotion, love for others, and the pain that comes with unexpected death.

  A Star Called “Dr. George Hill Hodel”

  In our many talks during the final decade of his life (1990-99), my father dismissed astrology as quackery. In his opinion its only useful purpose was to pick the pockets of the gullible. The field that interested him was astronomy, especially as it related to Zuni and Hopi cultures.

  In October 1998, seven months before his death, he diagnosed his own congestive heart disease. Shortly after his ninety-first birthday, knowing that his health was failing and fearing the real possibility of a major stroke that could leave him an invalid, he prepared to take his own life.

  Still in possession of a valid medical license, he wrote out several prescriptions in his wife, June’s, name for sleeping pills (barbiturates). After he’d accumulated enough pills to ensure a lethal dose, he wrote (in his block printing) “June Hodel conference notes,” which were to be his final instructions.

  But over the next several months, his strength rebounded. So he stashed the notes away in his desk, where they were found by June after his death.

  Figure 23.7 is a copy of that note. Several of his cryptic notations are relevant to this investigation. For example, the eighth line from the bottom reads:

  LAST ACT OF LV DISP. ALL EFFECTS

  Here my father is reminding himself to tell June that as a last act of love he wants her to dispose of all his personal effects. In what can be considered the most fateful ironies of all, she didn’t carry this out. June didn’t find my father’s note until after she had given me his photo album of loved ones that contained the photograph of Elizabeth Short, which was one of the catalysts f
or my Black Dahlia Avenger investigation. What other “personal effects” did June also find and not show me?

  23.7

  The third line from the bottom reads:

  L = CONC. ON EXCRETA

  In a previous entry, my father had used “L” as an abbreviation for the word “life.” In light of that, the phrase can be translated as, “Life is nothing but a concentration of excreta.” Or, to be more profane, “Life is shit.”

  The most relevant notation is ten lines from the bottom:

  RSRVD PL. IN CNST AQUILA

  After my father’s death, June explained that shortly after deciding to permanently relocate from Hong Kong to San Francisco in 1990, he had purchased a permanent memorial to himself in the heavens located in the 8-degree belt on the ecliptic known as Zodiac. In other words, he had bought a star and had it registered in his name.

  The star—known as Dr. George Hill Hodel—can be found by pointing a telescope at the Zodiacal constellation Aquila (the eagle) and aligning the sight to RA (right ascension) 19hrs 56mins 53secs at declination 8’16 mins. The registration is placed in a vault in Switzerland and “is recorded in a book which will be registered in the copyright office of the United States of America.” This practice is not recognized in the scientific community, but is more like buying a plot of land on the moon. Nevertheless, my father must have chuckled to himself at his private, heavenly memorial to his crimes.

  It’s another manifestation of his enormous ego, an immortal mocking of humanity fixed and registered in the Zodiac’s constellation, Aquila.

  Even after its namesake’s death, star George Hill Hodel shines its sardonic, dark light on us, and will forever.

  23.8 Constellation Aquila

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The next job I do I shall clip the ladys [sic] ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly. PS—They say I’m a doctor now. Ha-ha.

  Jack the Ripper, 1888

  After years of focused investigation, I’ve developed a better, albeit disturbing, understanding of my father. On the surface, he exuded supreme power and control. Every element of his public persona was carefully chosen to convey the highest sense of authority—from the cut of his expensive clothes to his carefully groomed appearance to his deeply modulated radio-announcer’s voice.

  Like Count Zaroff, he was a man of lofty tastes who reserved the best for himself—flying first class, marrying and bedding many beautiful women, drinking the finest wines, and sleeping in five-star hotels.

  Tall, trim, and debonair, Father cut an impressive figure. People deferred to him, granting him license they would never confer on those they deemed lesser mortals. As part of his professional mystique and party-game repertoire, my father practiced hypnosis on beautiful young women. They always seemed to flutter around him like butterflies, attracted by his aura of authority.

  In his worldview, humility was weakness. He reveled in the role of genius, doctor, surgeon, and man of science, and he believed he lived in a special realm, removed from the rabble. The rules of society didn’t apply to him.

  For example, my father never expressed the slightest remorse for schooling my half-sister Tamar to be his personal sex toy and introducing her to oral sex at the age of eleven. When he impregnated her at age fourteen, he urged her to see the pregnancy through and have their baby. He was upset with her when she refused.

  This was a man who claimed the Marquis de Sade as one of his heroes. He believed as Sade did that, “It is only by enlarging the scope of one’s tastes and one’s fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that that unfortunate individual called man, thrown despite himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering a few roses.”21

  He agreed with Sade that “certain souls seem hard because they are capable of strong feelings, and they sometimes go to rather extreme lengths; their apparent unconcern and cruelty are but ways, known only to themselves, of feeling more strongly than others.”22

  My father used people, including his own children and wives, as if it were his right. His aversion to rules and convention attracted him to the philosophy of the surrealists that, in the words of founder André Breton, “proposed to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.”

  In other words, anything that interfered with one’s desire to express oneself had to be pushed aside and squashed. My father took this revolutionary idea to its limits, unleashing sadistic urges that led to torture, bisection, and unthinkable murders.

  He believed he was taking surrealism to a whole new level. He dared do what others only talked about. And thus was carrying out the bold design of another of his philosophical heroes, Thomas De Quincey.

  De Quincey, like my father and Edgar Allan Poe, frequented opium dens as a young man. He’s best remembered for the autobiographic Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, published in 1822. But it’s a later essay of De Quincey’s in Blackwood’s magazine, entitled “MURDER, Considered as one of the Fine Arts,” that seemed to have made the strongest impression on young George Hodel.

  In it, De Quincey introduced his readers to the Society of Connoisseurs in Murder, who meet to critique homicides “as they would a picture, statue, or any other work of art.”

  With wit and irony, De Quincey wrote:

  Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature. Mr. Williams has exalted the ideal of murder to all of us; and to me, therefore, in particular, has deepened the arduousness of my task. Like Aeschylus or Milton in poetry, like Michael Angelo in painting, he has carried his art to a point of colossal sublimity; and as Mr. Wordsworth observes, has in a manner “created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.”

  Eleven years later, Blackwood’s readers were treated to a De Quincey story, “The Avenger,” set in a small town in northern Germany. There, “with tiger passion,” a madman commits a series of violent seemingly random murders for a full year and suddenly stops. Only at the end of the story do we learn the Avenger’s identity and that he was acting with “the wrath of God.” The murderer concludes:

  Yet, if you complain of the bloodshed and the terror, think of the wrongs which created my rights; think of the sacrifice by which I gave a tenfold strength to those rights; think of the necessity for a dreadful concussion and shock to society. . . .

  In the 1940s, George Hodel announced himself to a terrified Southern California as a new manifestation of the Avenger—The Black Dahlia

  24.1

  Avenger. In his notes to the press and police, he also explained his motives. Recall, for example:

  “Dahlia killing was justified.”

  “Georgette Bauerdorf was Divine Retribution.”

  Two decades later following the Cheri Jo Bates murder, the Avenger continued to justify his vengeful wrath against those who had rejected him, this time signing his handwritten letters “Z.” As mentioned earlier, he wrote:

  I LAY AWAKE NIGHTS THINKING ABOUT MY NEXT VICTIM. MAYBE SHE WILL BE THE BEAUTIFUL BLOND THAT BABYSITS NEAR THE LITTLE STORE AND WALKS DOWN THE DARK ALLEY EACH EVENING ABOUT SEVEN. OR MAYBE SHE WILL BE THE SHAPELY BLUE EYED BROWNETT THAT SAID NO WHEN I ASKED HER FOR A DATE IN HIGH SCHOOL. . . .

  BUT ONLY ONE THING WAS ON MY MIND. MAKING HER PAY FOR THE BRUSH OFFS THAT SHE HAD GIVEN ME DURING THE YEARS PRIOR. . . .

  BEWARE . . . I AM STALKING YOUR GIRLS NOW.

  BATES HAD TO DIE. THERE WILL BE MORE.

  You see, my father didn’t think of himself as a mere murderer. He considered himself an artist. And as an artist, he studied the history of his medium, and after determining the best practitioners, real and fictional, borrowed liberally from their techniques.

  Perhaps his strongest influence was another serial killer known as Jack the Ripper. The number of crimes attributed to Jack, who is one of the most notorious murderers in history, vary from fou
r to nine, depending on who is counting. All of his victims were believed to be prostitutes. He carried out his blood crimes in a tight geographical pattern in and around the Whitechapel district of London, between late August and early November 1888.

  He strangled his victims and cut their throats. The victims’ bodies were then mutilated and their organs removed (a kidney from one victim, and sexual organs from a second). Investigators at the time surmised that the suspect had some anatomical knowledge and probably was a doctor or surgeon.

  Like his acolyte George Hodel, Jack mailed taunting postcards and letters (cursive, block-printed, and cut-and-paste) to the press and police, which appear to contain deliberate misspellings. In them, he threatened to expand his killing spree to include “men, and boys and girls.” After slashing the throat of one prostitute, he mutilated her body, removed her kidney and uterus, then cut away a portion of her bloody apron and left it in a nearby doorway. Above it he wrote in chalk:

  THE JUWES ARE THE MEN THAT WILL NOT BE BLAAMED FOR NOTHING.

  24.2 Jack the Ripper Letters/Postcards 1888