Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

by Steve Hodel

  That same day, Otto Parzyjegla, a thirty-six-year-old linotype operator at a Los Angeles printing shop, was arrested for the bludgeoning murder of his seventy-year-old employer, Swedish newspaper publisher Alfred Haij. After confessing to police that he had "hacked the torso into six pieces and then crammed them into three boxes at the rear of the print shop," Parzyjegla told authorities that "the whole thing was like a dream," insisting to his interrogators that "he must be dreaming and was waiting to wake up."

  Captain Donahoe quickly entered the case, believing that Parzyjegla might possibly be the suspect in the Black Dahlia and Lipstick cases. Donahoe theorized that the violence that Parzyjegla had displayed in killing and mutilating his employer could well link all three murders. Donahoe informed reporters that Parzyjegla worked in a print shop, adding, "one of the letters received by the Black Dahlia suspect bore evidence of having been mailed by someone working in a printing establishment." After his preliminary investigation, Donahoe said, "Parzyjegla is the hottest suspect yet in the 'Black Dahlia' killing."

  Tuesday, February 18, 1947

  Captain Donahoe organized a live "show-up" of suspect Parzyjegla for 2:00 P.M. for Toni Manalatos. He wanted her to "attend the show-up of Parzyjegla," along with those witnesses "claiming to have seen Elizabeth Short with various men during the last six days of her life." Donahoe wanted to give Parzyjegla the largest exposure possible in front of the broadest array of witnesses, in the hope that someone who had seen either Elizabeth or Jeanne French in the company of a man would identify Parzyjegla as the person who had been with one or both of the victims. The description given for Parzyjegla was "a tall 36-year-old male, of light complexion, with darkish blonde hair and powerful hands." Parzyjegla, however, while he readily admitted to slaying his employer, "vehemently denied any connection with the slayings of the two women," according to press reports.

  At the same time Donahoe was organizing his witnesses to see Parzyjegla, the LAPD crime lab began conducting an examination of possible physical evidence that could potentially connect him to the other murders. LAPD police chemist Ray Pinker conducted an examination of "proof-sheet" paper taken from Haij's printing office, because, according to Captain Donahoe, "at least one of the notes sent in by the Dahlia killer in that case, used proof-sheet paper, of a type commonly found in printing shops." Donahoe was hoping the print shop would be the key that could link the three murders to the suspect, someone who would have had access to the blank proof sheets.

  Thursday, February 20, 1947

  Suspect Otto Parzyjegla was formally charged with his self-described "dream murder" of his employer, and the case was closed. At a police show-up conducted at the Wilshire Division station on February 19, the six women victims of attempted attacks, as well as other witnesses from the French and Dahlia investigations, eliminated Parzyjegla as a suspect.

  With Parzyjegla out of the picture, the search for the person(s) responsible for the Black Dahlia and the Red Lipstick murders turned back to San Diego, where apparently a new clue was discovered. Four detectives were assigned to San Diego, but LAPD and San Diego detectives kept secret, even from reporters, what that new clue might be.

  As indicated, initially Captain Donahoe publicly confirmed LAPD'S belief that the Dahlia and the French cases were connected. Within days of that announcement a strange and never-explained series of events occurred, all related to the investigation.

  First, Captain Donahoe was personally removed, by Chief of Detectives Thad Brown, as officer-in-charge of both investigations, and was summarily transferred from his position as commander of the Homicide Division and placed in charge of Robbery Division, then a separate entity. This effectively terminated his personal involvement in both murder cases. What was it about this case that made the LAPD brass nervous enough to remove the one commander who could have solved it? Was Donahoe getting too close to the truth?

  Next, as I saw it, there appeared to be a simultaneous lockdown of information in two separate and critical fronts of the investigation. First, the "San Diego connection" sounded as if LAPD had successfully traced Elizabeth Short's January 8 phone call to a man in Los Angeles. Second, relative to the recent newspaper reports of the "mystery man" who was sharing Jeanne French's P.O. box, again LAPD acknowledged they had identified, interviewed, and "eliminated" him. However, his identity, unlike other "non-involved" witnesses, was kept secret, and to this day remains a mystery.

  In addition, the police high command made another startling revelation. Immediately after Donahoe's removal from the case, LAPD revised their assessment of the Jeanne French murder. They no longer saw it as a second homicide by the same suspect, but rather as a "copycat murder." Within less than a year, the Lipstick murder became totally disassociated from the Dahlia case and quickly fell into obscurity. Now the official LAPD line was that the murder of Elizabeth Short was a standalone, unconnected to any other crimes of murdered, sexually assaulted, and bludgeoned women. That remains the official LAPD position to this day: Elizabeth Short's murderer never killed anyone before or after that brutal murder. Why did LAPD take such a hard line on this? Why was it that, immediately after Donahoe's transfer out of Homicide, the link between the two murders was officially severed? All of this was not a coincidence but, as will ultimately become clear, part of an organized conspiracy within the LAPD to protect the identity of the self-described Black Dahlia Avenger. In doing so, the conspirators were covering up one of the biggest corruption scandals in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department. These overt and deliberate actions by LAPD's highest-ranking officers would ultimately transform them from respected law enforcers to criminal co-conspirators, accomplices to murder after the fact.

  15

  Tamar, Joe Barrett,

  and Duncan Hodel

  MAYBE IT WAS MY OWN DESIGN and not simply the passage of time that kept the true story of Tamar and the family scandal a dark mystery to me for many years. Even in my adult mind, Tamar was the image of the adolescent temptress Lolita. She would go on to blaze a trail from the beat generation of the middle 1950s to the street generation of the late '60s, bouncing off poets, folk singers, druggies, and hippies.

  Tamar was described by singer Michelle Phillips in her book California Dreamin': The True Story of the Mamas and the Papas as her "very best friend, who got me interested in folk music, or at least into folk music people." Michelle's description of Tamar is a snapshot of the young girl who, a decade earlier, unwittingly had come within a hair of playing a critical role in the Black Dahlia investigation. Phillips writes:

  So, off we went to Tamar's. As soon as I set eyes on her, I thought she was the most fabulous, glamorous girl I had ever met. She had a wonderful lavender colored room, with lavender pillows and curtains, lavender lead-glass ashtrays, all of that. I thought it was just great. She had just acquired a new pink and lavender Rambler, buying it on time.

  She hung out with a very hip Bohemian crowd —Josh White, Dick Gregory, Odetta, Bud and Travis. Tamar was incredible. She gave me my first fake ID, my first amphetamines ("uppers" to help me stay awake in class after late nights). This was a girl after my own heart, and we became very close . . . and now she was my idol.

  But everything Tamar Hodel would become by the 1960s, she already was during those few months in the summer of 1949 when, an incorrigible teenager, she moved into my life and set into motion a series of events that would result in the breakup of the only family life I had ever really known.

  In court, during my father's incest trial, she was in the eyes of the prosecutors an innocent minor debauched by her sexually depraved father. In Robert Neeb's brilliant cross-examination she was portrayed as a pathological and sinister liar, capable of twisting the truth to satisfy and manipulate the adults around her. After Dad's acquittal, she grew up with the stigma of being just such a liar.

  I think that, other than her own children, I was the only one who believed she was the victim. My mother, of course, knew the truth of what had happened
that night but could not reveal what she knew to the police and ultimately took it with her to her grave. I know now that Mother lived in daily terror of what my father could do when he was crossed. So while Mother could never be a support, I could, once I knew the broad strokes of the scandal. And as we grew older I let Tamar know that I believed her, while at the same time I let Father think I believed him. The scandal was never discussed, never mentioned. It just hung there over the years like a cloud of unknowing, enveloping all of us, palpable, real, yet ignored because no one wanted to acknowledge it.

  "Tamar the Liar" became Father's established party line to all of us in his immediate family, all in the extended family, and to all of his women, past and present. "The scandal" was almost never talked about, but Father's position was clear: he had been wrongfully accused by his fourteen-year-old, disturbed, deceitful, and sexually promiscuous daughter, who had lied to the police, lied to the prosecutors, and lied on the witness stand. Even though he had been acquitted, he made it clear to all of his children that our sister had tarnished his good reputation and high moral character. With most family members, her name did not even invoke pity, only disgust. Dad had made it an edict that Tamar was a pariah, our family's bad seed, whose punishment for her crimes of lying and disloyalty was ostracism and banishment.

  Following Father's death, in my efforts to gain a deeper understanding of who he was and obtain more details about his life, I turned to Tamar for help because I believed that she knew more about him than any of us. More importantly, in light of the investigation I had undertaken, I asked her to tell me all that she could remember about the Franklin House years, the incest trial — which we'd never actually talked about — and any other incidents in her past that involved Father and her relationship with him.

  I found that even though she had just turned sixty-six, her memory of those early years was remarkably clear and strong, and though the big picture, which I was beginning to see, completely eluded her, her ability to recall isolated, anecdotally significant events painted an incredible picture of our father. The composite picture of his demeanor, personality, and psychology blended with elements of my clandestine criminal investigation and the powerful thoughtprints that became signposts along the trail to my stunning conclusion.

  What Tamar told me were simply stories, communications between older sister and younger brother about a man we'd both held in awe but who had demanded nothing less than fear and worship from his children.

  Tamar did not know, of course, that I was actively conducting a criminal investigation of those years. I provided her with no information, and any references to the "Black Dahlia" came only from her. As far as she was concerned, I was simply a listener.

  Tamar first came down to Los Angeles from San Francisco when she was eleven, but she returned to her mother, only to come down again when she was fourteen. It was about that second visit that she told me, "The only time I ever slept with George was on that one occasion. I thought that it was going to be this big romantic wonderful thing cause he promised me that when I was sixteen I would get to be a woman and he would make love to me. In the meantime, he was just training me for oral sex and stuff like that."

  But my father had not counted on his fourteen-year-old daughter's getting pregnant.

  "George said he was going to send me away to an unwed mothers' home," Tamar told me. "The fact that I was going to be sent away was horrible to me. I was scared to death. My girlfriend Sonia told me, 'Oh, you have to have an abortion.' I didn't even know what an abortion was. Then I talked to a few more friends my age and they all said, 'You have to have an abortion.' So I went back to George and put the pressure on him, told him I had to have an abortion. He arranged it with a doctor. It was horrible. They didn't give me any anesthetic, nothing. In the middle of it I was screaming, 'Stop, stop!' But you can't stop in the middle. It was awful, the worst physical experience of my life. I was throwing up and in shock. This very strange man who was a friend of Dad's drove me back to the house on Franklin."

  Tamar told my mother about the abortion, the pain and her fear, and Dad's friend who drove her back to the house when the procedure was over. When she heard the story, Mother exploded.

  Tamar then related to me a most incredible story told her by my mother, who was Tamar's true and trusted friend and, for that brief period of time, her surrogate mother. The story involved a young woman who had worked, possibly as a nurse, for Father at his First Street Medical Clinic. She never learned the woman's name, but as told by Dorero, "the girl was in love with George." They had had an intimate relationship, and then Father, as was his nature, had moved on to other women. Soon after their breakup, the girl began to write a book, an "expose" which would reveal hidden secrets about George, his life, and his activities. Mother told Tamar that late one night she received a telephone call from George. He ordered her to come immediately to the girl's apartment, where George informed Dorero that the girl had "overdosed on pills." Mother told Tamar it was clear that "the girl was breathing and still alive." Father handed Dorero the secret books the girl had written and ordered her to "burn them." Mother did as she was told, left the apartment, and destroyed the writings. According to Mother's narrative to Tamar, George could have saved her but let his young ex-paramour die. Dorero's story was later independently confirmed by the police, who, after taking Tamar into custody on the runaway charges, told her they "found the death suspicious, suspected George Hodel was involved in her overdose, but couldn't prove anything." Tamar never learned the girl's name or any other information about her.

  When Tamar was eleven, shortly after the Black Dahlia murder, she recalled, she was living at the Franklin House and her mother sent her a doll that had curly hair. Tamar took it to Father to have him name her because he had a knack for picking great names. "He told me to call her 'Elizabeth Anne,'" she told me. "I thought that was really strange because he never picked names like that, he always picked unusual names. He did it kind of laughing, like it was a joke. So I called the doll Elizabeth Anne. Years and years later, I told a friend the story and she brought me a magazine, and I opened it and there was a very pretty face with this name, Elizabeth Anne Short. I went 'Oh, my God.' I never knew that was her name. I just heard it as the Black Dahlia."

  Tamar also revealed that Man Ray had taken portraits of my parents and was a frequent guest at Father's wild parties. He and Father shared the same hedonistic tendencies, indulging themselves in their pleasures in clear defiance of the society in which they lived. Man Ray was living in Hollywood, just a mile from the Franklin House, when the incest scandal broke, but, according to Tamar, "He and his wife left the country at the time of the trial. He was afraid he was going to be investigated."* Tamar also said that Man Ray had taken some nude photographs of her when she was thirteen.

  Although my sister appreciated Man Ray as an artist, she admitted that personally she disliked him. "He was another dirty old man." Nor did she like my father's good friend and my mother's first husband, John Huston. "I don't care how great John was, when I was eleven he tried to rape me. It was your mother, Dorero, who pulled him off of me. He was a big man. He had straddled me in the bathroom at the Franklin House, and he was very drunk. But your mother came in and pulled him off of me and saved me. The next time I saw him he was playing that man in Chinatown."

  Tamar remembered Kiyo as our father's beautifully exotic young girlfriend, and recalled that the Franklin House was filled with women: "George had all of these women at the house just waiting to see him. They were literally standing in line at his bedroom. I felt lucky if I could get in to see him. He was a perfect example of an ego gone wild. I think Huston did sex stuff with Dad and Fred Sexton and all the women. I know for sure Huston filmed stuff at the house."

  She had this to say about Dad's physical violence: "George was so terrible when it came to punishing you three boys. He was very cruel. Michael got it the worst. It broke my heart to see how he treated you three. Especially how he was with Mike. And
he was so cruel with Dorero. I remember before Franklin, visiting you at the Valentine Street house, where I would see Dad pull her around the driveway by her hair."

  What was most important to me about Tamar's memories of 1949 and the trial wasn't the trial itself, which was a matter of public record, but the attitude of the prosecutors who interviewed her two years after the murder of Elizabeth Short. Here Tamar was, at the very center of one of the most scandalous news stories in Hollywood — a story that could well have wound up involving Man Ray and John Huston — and firmly under the control of prosecutors, who now believed they could nail my father for crimes they suspected him of having committed but couldn't prove. Tamar was the key to getting George Hodel behind bars.

  When she told my mother about the abortion — which, in 1949, was illegal — my mother realized that Tamar was a walking piece of evidence and believed Tamar's life was in danger. My mother lived in deathly fear of George and knew that getting Tamar out of the house would probably save her life. So Tamar fled.

  "I ran away," Tamar told me. "And I was found because Dorero had called my mom and told her, 'Tamar has run away and you had better come down here and help her.' So my mom came down unannounced, and George just couldn't say, 'I don't know where she is.' So George put out a missing report. I wasn't adept at running away because I had never done it before. I had just gone to friends' houses."

  The parents of Tamar's friend in whose house she was hiding were away in Europe, but her friends were living there with the servants. It seemed to be a safe haven. Tamar knew the police were looking for her, which frightened her, because she'd never had any dealings with the law. So her friends protected her. "This little gang of my friends took me from place to place, hiding me out. That's how all this came about with all the boys. All the guys helped me out, hiding me from place to place."