Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

by Steve Hodel

  In talking with the various teenagers, the police found her hiding out with a girlfriend, and Tamar, taken to the police station as a "runaway," was questioned, and quickly began to talk. "The police took me in and, because I had just had the abortion, I thought that they could tell that I had had an abortion. So I told them. Then one question led to another."

  Soon the entire story of the incest and the goings-on at the Franklin House were out in the open, and the prosecutors had their case. But they still needed Tamar to testify against her father. They needed her trust. As Tamar remembers it, a husband-and-wife team from the DA's office brought her to court every day and promised her that they would protect her and take care of her. Tamar told me, "They said that I had never been loved and I didn't know what love was and that when this trial thing was all over that they were going to adopt me. I guess that was just their way of handling it to get me to say everything. I really believed them when they told me they would adopt me and give me love."

  Adding political urgency to the incest trial and the prosecution of George Hodel was the fact that William Ritzi, the state's lead trial attorney, was also running for the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office. And apparently Ritzi thought he knew more about my father than what was simply in the case he was prosecuting. As Tamar remembers it, "He told me that Dad might be a suspect in the Black Dahlia case. 'We know all about your father and you,' he said. That's how they got me to talk to them.

  "I know that the police did talk to George back in 1947 because George said, 'We have to be careful about doing our nude sunbathing because the police are watching the place.' I'm pretty sure it was the year the Black Dahlia was killed when the police came out to the house. George never mentioned anything to me about that case. My gut feeling is that he knew and had met the Black Dahlia, but I really can't say for sure."

  Dad's statutory rape of Tamar notwithstanding, he was still cautious about how he treated her at the house. Tamar confirmed that the testimony at the incest trial, about what had happened on the night of July 1, 1949, was all true. She remembered it clearly. Even the witnesses Corrine and Barbara had told the truth to the police investigators and the prosecutors, but Dad's sharp defense attorneys were still able to make it seem as if the entire event was a figment of Tamar's imagination.

  In my conversations with her it became obvious to me that Tamar has no current memory of the questions she was asked by attorney Robert Neeb relating to her accusing Dad of being the killer of the Black Dahlia and having a lust for blood. Nor did she remember telling anyone of her being afraid that, in her words fifty-two years ago, "My father is going to kill me and all the rest of the members of this household." Moreover, because she had been detained in Juvenile Hall during the entire trial, she had had no access to newspapers, and so to this day remains unaware of what Neeb said about her in the courtroom after his cross-examination of her. I do believe that the "lust for blood" statement and the Black Dahlia original accusations attributed to Tamar by Neeb and Giesler had originally been told to her by Dorero, because those are the identical references, "blood-lust" and "insanity," that Mother said to me in her drunken state when we lived in Pasadena.

  It is probable that Mother, while intoxicated, told Tamar about her fears or suspicions that Dad had killed Elizabeth Short after Tamar made her initial disclosure to Mother about Dad's having had sex with her. Mother was clearly fearful that if George discovered that Tamar had told anyone about their incestuous relationship, he would most likely have murdered his daughter before she could have an opportunity to reveal it to the authorities. Mother knew that Dad was capable of killing anyone, including a family member who might reveal his deepest secrets. Genuinely fearful for Tamar's safety, Mother told her of her suspicions, and may well have encouraged her to run away, to get her away from the house. That set into motion the search for the missing Tamar, the arrest of Father, the trial, and Dad's flight from Los Angeles after his acquittal.

  Tamar, Dad, Michelle Phillips, and the Mamas and the Papas

  Tamar remembered a night in 1967 when Dad visited her in San Francisco at the same time Michelle Phillips and the Mamas and the Papas were coming into town to perform their first live concert at the Pan Pacific. Tamar took George and the two beautiful Asian women he had brought with him to the St. Francis Hotel where Michelle was staying. "I introduced them to her," she told me, "and she almost fainted, and her eyes rolled back in her head and she curtsied and said to George, 'I feel like I've really known you since I was twelve.' It was because of all the things I had told Michelle about him."

  Father took over like an impresario, Tamar said. After discovering they had ordered a large dinner to be brought up by room service before the scheduled concert, Father stepped in and took control, informing them that they "shouldn't eat a large meal before a big concert." She added, "Dad had the waiters take everything back and changed it all to just appetizers, like Po Po and stuff. They all began smoking hash, and Dad passed it around, but he didn't smoke it."

  Afterward, Tamar remembers, "I met Dad and his two girlfriends and we went out to Enrico's for dinner. George got quite drunk and I was supporting him as we walked up the hill. That's when he said to me, 'Why did you do it?' I was so stupid. I didn't know what he was talking about because I always loved him. I thought he meant why had I always pursued and loved him. So I said, 'I always loved you, that's why.' Which, of course, was a very strange answer to someone who is really asking me, 'Why did you tell on me?' He was so drunk; we never really understood each other."

  Later on, Tamar asked one of the Asian women whom Dad had brought along why he hadn't smoked the hash pipe. Tamar told her he'd always smoked it in the past, that's why his refusal was so strange. And the woman said, "Oh no, he doesn't do that anymore." She explained, "Before when he smoked hash, he made me lock him in his bathroom. He always made me lock him in there and told me not to let him out. George said to me that when he smokes it sometimes he does terrible things. He would make me lock him in the bathroom and he would cry and stay there all night."

  "It made my hair stand on end," Tamar said. "I was so afraid of him because I do believe he has done so many terrible dark things."

  The Los Angeles Hotel, 1969

  About two years after the Mamas and the Papas concert, Dad saw Tamar again in Los Angeles when he was making one of his business trips through town from Manila. Tamar was pregnant when Dad took her to lunch at one of the Beverly Hills hotels. As they were walking through the lobby, George suddenly stopped and pointed to a design on the carpet. He asked Tamar, "What does that remind you of?" She looked at the carpet and said, "I don't know, some kind of flower or something. Maybe rhododendrons?" George said, "No," and pointed around the edges with his finger. Then he said, "No, look again, it's a vagina and lips." He said, "They are nether lips." Then he stomped hard on the design and he said, "Did that hurt?" "God," Tamar told me, "I couldn't believe it. It sent chills down my spine. 'Nether lips'. He never used that word before."

  The next day, George took out Tamar's daughter, Fauna 2, who was then thirteen. Fauna 2 is one of Tamar's five children from five different fathers, and is her second daughter, born from her marriage to folk singer Stan Wilson. She was originally named Deborah, but decided to change her name to Fauna as an adult. But her older sister, from a different father, is also named Fauna. So the children differentiated themselves by calling themselves Fauna 1 and Fauna 2.

  Fauna 2 kept secret for many years what happened that night, only telling her mother about it after she had become an adult. At dinner, Fauna 2 suddenly became groggy, attempted to stand up, and almost collapsed on the floor. As she described it to Tamar, both the waiter and George rushed to her side, Dad catching her before she fell. Dismissing the waiter, he then helped her walk out of the dining room. The next thing Fauna 2 recalled was waking up in a hotel. She was lying on a bed, completely nude, having been undressed while she was unconscious. Her legs had been spread open, and George was taking pictur
es of her with a camera. Fauna was convinced she had been drugged.

  Tamar was stunned at hearing her daughter's disclosure. Now, she thought, with Fauna 2's supportive testimony, maybe Tamar's mother would believe her. But it was not to be. "We both went to my mother and told her the story, thinking that finally it might make her believe the truth of what happened to me back at the Franklin House," Tamar told me. "Well, she didn't believe either one of us, and said she never wanted to see either of us again. She refused to believe her granddaughter just as she refused to believe her daughter." To this day, Fauna 2 told her mother, she "still hopes that the truth about what happened to her in that hotel room with her grandfather would be believed." As for Tamar, since her truth has been buried for more than fifty years, I suspect she has by now given up all hope of ever being vindicated.

  Joe Barrett and the Franklin Years

  In early 1948, a year after the murder of Elizabeth Short, a talented twenty-year-old artist named Joe Barrett rented the studio at the north end of the Franklin House, became friends with my father, and lived in the studio through the entire incest trial. Even after the family broke up when Dad left the country, Joe remained a good friend to my mother and kept in touch with her through the years, whenever he could find our gypsy encampment in L.A. He and my mother remained good friends until her death in 1982.

  Joe and I saw each other only a few times during my years in the LAPD and we lost touch after I retired and moved to Washington State. But he had kept in occasional contact with my brother Kelvin in Los Angeles. And when the time came for me to talk to him about the past, it was through Kelvin that I was able to reach him in 1999, shortly after my father's death and at the early stages of my investigation.

  Joe was an important window to the past. He was a young adult living there right at the time of the rape and the trial, the DA's investigation into my father's behavior, and the comings and goings of Man Ray. In the same way that I approached my interviews with Tamar, I did not tell him I was conducting an investigation. I merely talked with him in the hope of gaining deeper understanding about a father I had just lost and wanted to know more about. I told him I wanted to get an accurate picture of my father as he really was, as Joe knew him from the Franklin years.

  Barrett's insights were astonishing, because in addition to providing me with detailed descriptions of Dad, he also informed me, long before I discovered it through my own independent sources and research, that he himself was officially solicited by the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office to assist them in their investigation of my father as "the prime suspect in the Black Dahlia murder." I would discover through my interviews with Joe Barrett that in early 1950, Barrett was picked up by the DA's detectives, taken to their office, and actively solicited to be their mole inside the Franklin House — "to be their eyes and ears there" was how they put it — in their effort to establish that Dr. Hodel was indeed the Black Dahlia Avenger.

  The Trial

  Joe's was an intimate view of the activities at the Franklin House for almost two years, from 1948 to 1950. He told me that Father was gifted with a perfect photographic memory that permitted him to absorb ideas from other people and make them sound as if they were his own. He was super intelligent, but not particularly original.

  Joe was not an invitee to my father's parties, but he saw a lot of human traffic going through the house and lots of heads bobbing around in that large middle room between the living room and Dad's bedroom. These were parties, he said, where there was a great deal of intense sexuality and there were lots of people in attendance. Joe reminded me that my father's venereal disease clinic on First Street downtown was also frequented by lots of important people. These were the days before modern drugs, when venereal disease was rampant and those who could afford private treatment were very dependent on the doctors who could provide it. My father was one of those doctors.

  Barrett told me that he also knew Man Ray, who was often at the Franklin House. Joe saw him there the last day Man Ray was in Hollywood. He came to visit Dad, and he also visited Joe in the studio, where they talked for an hour or so. Joe said, "Man Ray was leaving town that day, probably going back to Europe, after the shit hit the fan, at the end of' 49 or maybe it was into 1950. He and Juliet were living over by the Hollywood Ranch Market." The trial had just concluded, and though Dad had been acquitted everyone in his circle had fallen under the scrutiny of the district attorney. Man Ray's reputation was already such that he did not want to be caught in the web. He must also have been doubly concerned that Tamar might reveal that he had taken nude photographs of her at the Franklin House, or that the prints had been discovered by the police.

  Another of Dad's acquaintances, and Man Ray's as well, was the novelist Henry Miller, whom Joe remembered seeing talking to Father in his library. The Franklin House had become, in those days, almost like a salon, where artists flouting convention and social mores gathered around my father, who had the means to entertain them.

  Joe told me, "Tamar had named so many names to the district attorney that lots of people got arrested." Even my father's close friend Fred Sexton was offered a deal by the DA if he would testify against George and his relationship with Tamar. But, Joe told me, "Man Ray was somehow kept off the list of witnesses." Joe said that Dad's defense attorneys, Giesler and Neeb, had cost him a fortune, and that to raise the needed money he had to sell all of his rare and imported art objects. "I remember that a well-known jockey of the time named Pearson bought most of George's artwork," he told me.*

  The Black Dahlia Murder

  Joe Barrett remembered that a Dr. Ballard was arrested for performing the abortion on Tamar. He was acquitted, partly because of my father's acquittal and because of the credibility of Tamar's testimony. Out of the blue Barrett also said, "Did you know that your dad was a suspect in the Black Dahlia case? I know that for a fact. She had been murdered a year or so before I moved into the Franklin house. From what I heard, your dad had apparently known her."

  After the trial, when Joe was picked up by the DA investigators and taken to their office downtown, "they were really pissed," he remembered. "'God damn it, he got away with it!' they exclaimed, referring to the Tamar trial, adding 'We want this son of a bitch. We think he killed the Black Dahlia.' I'm sure it was investigators from the district attorney's office and not LAPD. They wanted me to spy on George for them. I remember one of the DA investigators was a man named Walter Sullivan. I think these investigators also tried to get a couple of gals that George knew to spy on him and report back to them."

  Joe was also present when the police served a search warrant on Dad at the Franklin House after he was arrested for incest. "Thad Brown was out there standing around at the house with these DA investigators. I remember him from the newspapers. He was a police big shot back then."

  Duncan Hodel's Memories of the Franklin House

  I was stunned by my conversations with Tamar and Joe Barrett. Their incredible revelations about what went on at the Franklin House around the time of Elizabeth Short's murder, and in the following two years, filled in many of the blank spots in my own life during that period.

  Encouraged by what I had gained from Tamar and Joe Barrett, I decided to pursue a third source.

  My eldest half-brother, Duncan, now seventy-one years old, had been another actual living witness at the Franklin House through the late 1940s, and he had testified at the Tamar trial.

  In an October 1999 meeting in San Francisco, Duncan provided me with many details of our father's early life, before I was born.

  Duncan had made regular visits to the Franklin House in the years preceding Dad's arrest and was twenty-one when the scandal broke. To this day, Duncan believes that Tamar invented the incest charges in an attempt to ruin Father's life. Although he apparently never questioned that Tamar might have been telling the truth, his interview would provide a damning revelation about another murder that took place shortly after Elizabeth Short's body was discovered. Duncan provided me wi
th a thoughtprint so powerful that, had there been a murder trial in the Jeanne French "Red Lipstick" murder, he would doubtless have been called by the prosecution to testify against Father. In our conversation, Duncan linked him to a critical element in the crime:

  Dad had some very wild parties at the Franklin House. After Dad bought the house, I used to go down with my buddies from San Francisco and stay there, and Dad would fix my friends and me up with women. It was funny, when I was there Dad told me to tell all the women I was his brother. When women were around us at the Franklin House, he didn't want them to know he was old enough to have a son my age. I was twenty then.

  I remember one party where everybody was laughing and having a good time and Dad got this red lipstick and wrote on one of the women's breasts with the lipstick. She had these big beautiful breasts, and Dad took the lipstick and wrote these big targets round each one, and we all laughed and had a good time. I remember meeting Hortensia, his future wife from the Philippines at the Franklin House. She was visiting the U.S. and came to Dad's parties at the house. I guess that's where he first met her. Then after the trial they got married.

  I asked Duncan if he remembered or was acquainted with any of Dad's girlfriends from that time, and after pausing for reflection, he noted:

  I remember one of his girlfriends was murdered. Her name was Lillian Lenorak. She was a dancer and artist. But the murder didn't happen until many years after she broke up with Dad. I think her young boyfriend killed her in Palm Springs or something.

  I recognized her name from the court records of the trial and knew she had been on the prosecution's witness list. I then asked Duncan if he remembered any other names. He answered, "I remember after Dad stopped seeing Kiyo in 1942 or so, he started dating this other woman. I think her name was Jean Hewett. Jean was this drop-dead beautiful young actress. She really looked like a movie star. I don't know whatever happened to her."