Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

by Steve Hodel

  Ms. Hazelton's website also had photo links to the crime and various photos that had been taken by the police or newspaper photographers at the Norton Avenue site. First there was a close-up photograph depicting the victim's body, neatly bisected, the torso placed just a foot or so to the left of and above the lower half. In other photos I could see the incisions and mutilations on both halves of the body as well as extensive lacerations to both sides of the mouth. It looked as if the killer had carved a hideous grin on her face for some reason, which only he could understand. As I clicked through the different photos, I tried to understand how a detective could have leaked or sold these photos to the public or press. But there they were: detailed shots of the brutalized, desecrated body of a twenty-two-year-old woman, on display for the world to view. I was outraged, even though I realized that these photos had been taken over fifty years ago, long before the Internet, long before digital computers, even a year before the transistor was invented.

  But my rage was short-lived, quickly overtaken by the enormity of what I had discovered in my father's photo album. First, those two photographs of Elizabeth Short appeared to be more or less contemporary with other photos of her just prior to her disappearance and murder. In both pictures her eyes were downcast and closed. It was clear that she had agreed to be posed this way. But why had Father kept these two photographs for more than fifty-two years in an album, where Elizabeth Short held a place of honor with the rest of those he loved?

  Fragments of memory started to fit together. I remembered his overwhelming need to dominate and assert control, especially when it came to the many women in his life. He had left each of them in turn: first Emilia, then Dorothy Anthony, then my mother, whom he nicknamed "Dorero," and then his wife in the Philippines, before he finally settled down with June. He had obviously controlled June, who now seemed completely incapable of taking care of herself.

  I knew there might be, and doubtless were, perfectly innocent answers to all of my questions. He could have known Elizabeth Short in the weeks or months before her murder and even taken the photographs of her. Maybe they had even been lovers, which Father had never revealed after she was murdered because he was afraid of becoming a suspect for a crime he didn't commit. There were, I was sure, rational answers to all my questions, and I determined to be objective in resolving them. I could not allow my emotions to come into play.

  What would I do as a private investigator if a client came to me with a similar set of circumstances? How would I proceed? The obvious answer: handle it just like I had all of the other homicide investigations I had conducted during my career. It would require a simultaneous, two-pronged strategy: a thorough background check into all available information on the possible suspect, and a parallel check on the victim. There was a lot I didn't know. First, what was Father's real background? I knew generalities, but few specifics. What could I discover about his activities over fifty years ago? Who was left to tell the story? Could I find witnesses and records? What was still available?

  I needed to figure out just how much June knew about her husband. I remembered her response when I asked her who the woman was in the two pictures. "Just someone your father knew from a long time ago." She only spoke of Father as a loving, compassionate man.

  But June surely would have known something about Father's earlier life. He must have shared with her at least some of his experiences in their long years together. She could help me in my background search, help plot a timeline of his life. My questioning of his past would not be a form of interrogation, but would come from my sincere desire to know the man. If she sensed or suspected that I was looking for something more than that, I knew I would get nothing from her. My search must proceed slowly, with great caution.

  The second approach was to find out all I could about the real Elizabeth Short, not just the newspaper creation named the Black Dahlia. I had to track her movements through Los Angeles and California as far back as I could, to connect her to the murderer through mutual friends, relatives, or surviving witnesses. Maybe there was still some physical evidence. Maybe I could find fingerprint evidence or even come up with a DNA match.

  I began my investigation by reviewing everything that was publicly known and available, including every old newspaper article, magazine, and book. But I was at a disadvantage relative to my other homicide investigations, because I had not been at the crime scene, nor could I review the investigative notes of the officers who had. I also did not have access to the LAPD homicide file, called a "murder book," that is started on every murder in Los Angeles. I was no longer an active detective, simply one of thousands of retired L.A. cops, so I would not benefit from any of the special privileges, free access, or any of the other door-openers that came from carrying a badge and a gun. But I also knew I had a lot going for me on this one. I had a real advantage: a hot lead in the form of two pieces of evidence that quite possibly had never surfaced in the original investigation.

  On June 2, 1999, June Hodel carried out her husband's final instructions. Holding in her lap a green urn containing the ashes and sole worldly remains of the man she had loved for thirty years, she cried as the small ocean craft, the Naiad, powered through the fog, passing under the Golden Gate Bridge. A mile more and it was finished. Father's ashes cast to sea, his body returned to the elements. She called me in Bellingham early that afternoon to inform me it was accomplished, just as he had instructed her, alone and without ceremony or words.

  At the same time June was scattering Father's ashes, I was setting off to see what I could discover about his mysterious past. I was confident that if I looked long and hard enough, I would find answers to the many questions that were nagging me.

  My initial search for information about Elizabeth Short on the Internet would eventually be expanded to include personal interviews with some of Dad's friends and acquaintances from that time, along with my own family members, some of whom I had not spoken to in many years. I would read published statements of credible witnesses who claimed to have actually seen Elizabeth Short in the week she had been presumed missing. Additional interviews with witnesses in Los Angeles would provide me with some actual physical evidence, which, I believe, relates to the crime. Eventually, I would review hundreds of archival microfilm articles from all the major newspapers of that time and request and receive FOIA material, including the complete dossier on Elizabeth Short, which included FBI interviews of 1947 witnesses and her associates.

  In order to put the case in a historical context, I read the three most relevant published books on the Dahlia case: Severed, by John Gilmore (1994), Daddy Was the Black Dahlia Killer, by Janice Knowlton and Michael Newton (1995), and Childhood Shadows, by Mary Pacios (1999). I later read James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia, even though it is a work of fiction, because Ellroy based it on fact, using some real names. I felt it was important to review each of these authors' theories and evidence, to determine if any of them had a real suspect.

  After carefully reviewing the contents of each book I can say with authority that none of the three nonfiction works provide any hard evidence pointing to a viable suspect. The authors' conjectures and efforts at building circumstantial cases against their three separate suspects are exceptionally weak, devoid of any physical evidence linking them to the murder. Mary Pacios's book was the most helpful to me as I began my investigation, because her extensive documentation of sources and references permitted me to check and recheck many of the facts I had discovered through my own investigation.

  Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the Black Dahlia case is the many distortions of fact that have surrounded the few kernels of truth from the very beginning of the 1947 investigation.

  The LAPD's official position on the murder of Elizabeth Short is that the case remains "open." Though it may be a cold case — one in which there has been no activity for decades — it remains on the books and is handed off to one of the division's newest transferees into Robbery-Homicide. As far as the public is concerned
, the LAPD, after interviewing hundreds of witnesses and spending thousands of man-hours, is no closer now to identifying any suspect(s) than it was after the first few months of intensive searching, which back in 1947 involved a thousand Southern California lawmen.

  Harry Hansen remained on the investigation from January 15, 1947, until his retirement twenty-three years later. In March 1971 Hansen granted an interview, which was published in the Los Angeles Times, entitled "Farewell, My Black Dahlia," in which he confided that over the decades he eliminated hundreds of potential suspects and false confessors by asking a "key question." Hansen was convinced the suspect might be a male with medical training.

  It was a clean, definitely professional job. You have to know exactly how and where or you just can't do it. When I asked medical authorities what kind of person could have performed that bisection, they said "someone with medical finesse."

  The killing seemed to be based on unbelievable anger. I suppose sex was the motive, or at least the fact that the killer was denied sex.

  Insofar as the victim was concerned, Hansen made these surprising and professionally uncharacteristic observations:

  She didn't seem to have any goals or standards . . . she never had a job all the time she lived in Los Angeles. She had an obviously low IQ, lived hand to mouth, day to day. She was a man-crazy tramp, but she wasn't a prostitute. There were all kinds of men in her life, but we were only able to find three that had any sexual experience with her. She was a tease. She gave a bad time to quite a few guys. There wasn't very much to like about her.

  Regarding his failure to solve the crime he admitted the Black Dahlia case was his biggest disappointment:

  Being objective didn't mean that we didn't want that killer. I never wanted anything more. Every now and then there'd be some new development, a lead would pop out of nowhere and we'd think, here it is, this is it! But it never really was. Looking at it in perspective right now, the killer did his thing and got away with it. Most homicides, I think the figure is 97 percent, are solved. A very few aren't. This is the biggest one I ever knew of. You really can't win them all.

  Asked why this crime had such a tremendous impact on the public and whether that impact might have been attributed to its savagery or to the youth and beauty of the victim, Hansen said:

  There were crimes that same year that were at least as heinous and victims at least as pretty and none of them got anywhere near the same attention. It was that name "Black Dahlia" that set this one off. .. just those words strung together in that order turned Elizabeth Short's murder into a coast-to-coast sensation. Black is night, mysterious, forbidding even; the dahlia is an exotic and mysterious flower. There could not have been a more intriguing title. Any other name wouldn't have been anywhere near the same.

  After Hansen's retirement, the case was inherited by a chain of senior homicide detectives in Robbery-Homicide Division, each one passing the baton upon his retirement to the next senior detective in line. Initially Chief Thad Brown assigned the case to detective Danny Galindo, who had assisted with the case in 1947. Then it went to Pierce Brooks, who was the lead detective assigned to the "Onion Field" case, later immortalized by Joseph Wambaugh, after which John "Jigsaw John" St. John and his partner Kirk Mellecker took over. Mellecker had been my partner more than a decade earlier at Hollywood Homicide.

  The truth is, the case only remained active because of its legendary status. By the 1980s there was no real investigation being conducted, with the exception of an occasional writer wanting to sell his or her book as a whodunit based on some pet theory. Detectives would provide information that might, for a few weeks, speculatively stir the pot, but these were only theories. The writer could then go to the newspapers with the speculations, hoping to generate publicity for a book or article. Often, particularly around the anniversary of the murder, the press itself would initiate its own articles on the case. Every five or ten years, again around the anniversary of Elizabeth's death, the press would run a feature story, reviewing the case and interviewing the currently assigned detective for some new information.

  Despite the case's open status, little if anything has been done in the way of active investigation for the past fifty-plus years. What is done is solely reactive in nature, in response to a letter that may have been mailed to the department by someone who had a dream or experienced recovered memories of being present while the murder was committed.

  The case has also become something of a joke, particularly when the on-call detective at Robbery-Homicide receives a phone call from a would-be informant with a tip. The detective taking the call will put his hand over the mouthpiece as he bellows to his partner, "Hey, Charlie, I've got a witness on the line who says he can solve the Black Dahlia murder for us." His partner will usually respond, "Okay, let's roll!" at which point the detectives in the squad room roar with laughter.

  Today, most of the detectives in LAPD's Robbery-Homicide Division hadn't even been born when the crime occurred. Just the mention of the name "Black Dahlia" makes detectives grimace. It serves as an irritating reminder that the department's biggest murder investigation, assigned to LAPD's best detectives, remains unsolved.

  Three days after my return from San Francisco, I opened my briefcase and pulled out the notes June had asked me to help her analyze. I readily recognized Father's unique handwriting, block print instead of script, even when signing his name. His handwritten notes appeared a bit more frail and spidery than usual; he had written this just a few days after his ninety-first birthday. June had attached the following typed note to my copy:

  I was looking through his pending papers and found the attached. His notes for an intended talk with me, which never occurred. I understand most of them but some are like riddles.

  Over the years I was able to sense what he was thinking, when he would speak, and what he needed even before he opened his mouth. So I knew that he was preparing for the worst by collecting various kinds of sleeping pills. But from that October day he gained back energy and strength.

  He was working on a proposal and artwork marketing plan this year, through April. He never initiated this "intended conversation" with me. He was not supposed to go that night.

  He did talk about the patients with congestive heart failure he saw as an intern at Laguna Honda. Maybe you can help me by figuring out some items in the list?

  June

  Here is a facsimile of the note my father wrote to June on October 15, 1998:

  Exbibit 8

  I began deciphering the note and most of the message was clear to me. He was planning to take his own life, using the sleeping pills he had saved from prescriptions he had written for his wife. He had also decided that he "must act quickly, lightning may strike, act swiftly before it's too late." He indicated he had "absolutely no regrets." He had lived "91 long years," and had had a "wonderful life and wonderful love."

  Most of his wording appeared to be a justification for his intended suicide. But also included were two rather curious notations, the first of which was capitalized as if to emphasize its importance and underscored further by his dramatic use of the shorthand words. He wrote to June, "As your last act of love for me you must dispose of all my effects." Then he scribbled an even stranger message in a bolder hand: "L = conc. on excreta." He had used the letter "L" earlier in his notes to refer to "life," so by inference I assumed he meant, "Life= conc. on excreta." Could he have meant, "Life is a concentration of excrement," or, in plain talk, "Life is nothing but shit"? But this hardly seems in line or character or tone with the rest of what he said.

  Further, why would Father ask June so dramatically to destroy all of his personal effects by equating the request to her "last act of love"? Obviously, he expected that such a demand would compel her to do what he said. But June never carried out his instructions, because, as she had told me, Father's health took a turn for the better and he decided he had no need to have a final talk with her, as he had planned.

  Seven months after he
had written these instructions, Father had, as he had anticipated, suffered a severe stroke. It did not incapacitate him, as he had feared, but came to him as a blessing that took his life. There would be no suffering, no infirmity, no prolonged hospitalization, no loss of dignity or self-respect. Now, however, with the discovery of his notes, fate would insure that his private final wishes were revealed, and that he would speak to June from beyond the grave. She would find the note while looking through his pending papers, a final order, an act of control — proffered in the name of love — to destroy all of his personal effects.

  In my career as a homicide detective, I have seen the worst of men's and women's passions unleashed as desperate acts against each other. In crime scene after crime scene I have witnessed the aftermath of this violence. But even with the experiences of six thousand nights as a homicide detective behind me, I was unprepared for what would be revealed to me over the course of my investigation. What I would uncover were horrors far beyond what I could even have imagined. What I would ultimately discover would take me to places I had never dreamed of, or expected to go: deep inside my own psyche, to my private heart of darkness.

  Dr. George Hill Hodel Jr.,

  1907-1999

  Dad's father, George Hodel Sr., whose family name was Goldgefter, was born in 1873 in Odessa on the Black Sea, the son of Eli Goldgefter, an accountant and a German scholar. In 1894, at age twenty-one, George Sr., facing mandatory conscription into the czar's oppressive military, where Jews were treated only slightly better than slaves, prepared a plan to escape Russia. Using a fictitious name and a forged passport, my grandfather somehow succeeded in obtaining a pass, claiming he was going to visit his sick mother in Vienna. Once across the Polish frontier, he boarded a train to Vienna and freedom, just barely escaping the interest of the suspicious officer who interrogated him. But my grandfather's first-class ticket and expensive luggage convinced the officer he was legitimate, and he was able to cross the border. From Vienna he traveled to Paris, where he assumed the name Hodel (a fairly common Swiss surname) and began a new life.