by Steve Hodel
The Trial
Duncan testified briefly at the trial as a defense character witness for Dad, or, he thinks, to talk about Tamar's promiscuity. But after the trial was over, he recalled, Dad told him something strange.
Dad told me that the district attorney had said to him, "They were going to get me." They were out to get him, and so I think that is why Dad left the country right away and went to Hawaii. That is what he told me at the time, just before he left the U.S.
Tamar's, Joe Barrett's, and Duncan's independent knowledge of Father's activities corroborated that Dad was suspected at the time not only of committing incest with his daughter but also of murdering Elizabeth Short. Both Tamar and Joe Barrett stated that the police believed Dad killed the Black Dahlia. Duncan, while apparently unaware of any Dahlia connections, had unintentionally and inadvertently become a witness linking our father to the Jeanne French murder.
These interviews were shattering. Till now I had proceeded cautiously, as I had hundreds of times before. Conducting my investigation as an objective and impartial homicide detective, amassing facts and evidence, I slowly and carefully built my case. But now a terrible, undeniable truth was hitting deep within me: my father, the man I had looked up to, admired, and feared, this pillar of the community, this genius, was a cold-blooded, sadistic killer. Probably a serial killer.
Having come to this horrific conclusion, I suddenly wished I had never begun the journey. Part of me wanted to close Father's tiny album, destroy the photographs, and run from the truth. I felt fear and omnipotence. A few simple, undiscoverable acts by the son, and the father's sins would be destroyed — like him, reduced to ashes. The Hodel name and reputation would remain intact. A few simple acts, and his crimes would never be known. I could cheat infamy. A cover-up for the good of the family. I could easily do what the LAPD command had done, only better. This time the cover-up would be permanent. But the other part of me knew I could not, and would not, run or hide the truth.
* Billy Pearson was a prominent jockey in the 1940s, who was an art connoisseur and also a close friend of John Huston's. In Lawrence Grobel's biography The Hustons, the author writes that Pearson, one of the first contestants to win the grand prize on the infamous 1950s quiz show The $64,000 Question, helped Huston smuggle rare pre-Columbian art pieces out of Mexico.
16
Fred Sexton: "Suspect Number 2"
FROM THE MANY WITNESS SIGHTINGS and descriptions relative to both the Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French murders and the separate kidnappings and sexual assaults of Sylvia Horan by "the Dahlia suspect" and lca M'Grew by "two swarthy men," both within days of the French murder, it seemed apparent there were two men committing these crimes, and I suspected the two were operating together and separately, at their whim. If George Hodel was Suspect Number 1, who was his accomplice? Based on his overall physical description, his close friendship with my father going back to 1924, and the fact that he had, in his own words, admitted to being my father's accomplice in the 1949 statutory rape of Tamar, Fred Sexton was, obviously and logically, the most likely candidate for Suspect Number 2.
Realizing I could no longer conduct a long-distance investigation, and needed to talk face to face with whatever witnesses I could find, I moved back to L.A. in June 2001. Joe Barrett, due to his personal familiarity with Sexton, was at the top of my list of people to question. Once I settled into my new Hollywood apartment, I called, made the short drive north to Ventura, and we met for lunch.
I asked his impressions of Sexton from the Franklin years, telling him the truth, which was that I hardly remembered the man. From Joe's description, though they were fellow artists, they were not kindred spirits. Joe did not like Sexton, and he said so. Here is the picture he gave me:
Fred was tall and thin, like your dad. He had a dark complexion. I think he was Italian. He was good friends with your dad and spent a lot of time at the Franklin House. Sexton and I actually worked together for a short time, at the Herb Jepson Art School, downtown at 7th and Hoover Streets. Sexton lasted there only about two months. He had a bad attitude. He was hitting on all the young girls in class. Half or more of them actually left his class because of it. He had many complaints from the kids in class, and so many dropped out because of him that Herb Jepson fired him.
When Sexton refused to leave the art school, Jepson and a couple of his "big friends" forcibly evicted him from the premises. Barrett concluded:
I ran into Fred a year or two after that in downtown L.A. He was living in a second-story apartment on Main Street. He tried to avoid talking to me, probably feeling sheepish because he had testified as a witness for the prosecution in your dad's trial. That day was the last time I ever saw or heard from him.
Joe's knowledge of Fred Sexton and his association with him were limited, although he corroborated Sexton's predatory sexual habits and the "swarthy" description so often connected with the crimes. Public information about Sexton was also limited, but I discovered that he was born in the small mining town of Goldfield, Nevada, on June 3, 1907, just four months before my father. He was the second child born to Jeremiah A. Sexton and Pauline Magdalena Jaffe, who had two other sons and three daughters. Fred Sexton married his first wife, Gwain Harriette Noot, on June 13, 1932, in Santa Monica, California.
Sexton made an application to the Social Security Administration on May 23, 1939, listing his place of employment as "Columbia Pictures Corp., 1438 N. Gower Street, Hollywood, California," and at that time he gave his residence as White Knoll Drive in the Elysian Park district of Los Angeles, just a mile from downtown. The house is still owned by his surviving first wife.
Sexton died at eighty-eight, on September 11, 1995, in Guadalajara, Mexico. All I knew about the man was what I had been told by Tamar and Joe Barrett. Now it was time to see what Sexton's own surviving relatives could tell me.
I spoke to Sexton's daughter in two separate meetings, the first of which took place in Los Angeles in October 1999. At that time I was in no position to confront her with any suspicions I harbored about her father and his possible criminal involvement with mine. In the spring of 2000, five months after our initial meeting, Sexton's daughter mailed me two photographs of Fred, which she told me had been taken in Los Angeles in the mid-1940s. In this mailing, she also included pictures of herself shown playing with an eight- or nine-year-old Tamar. She was three years older than Tamar, and they were friends from the early 1940s until Tamar's arrest and detention in 1949. She had known Kiyo during the time Dad was having an affair with her, and the pictures she sent me were, ironically, taken shortly after their "breakup," and showed the two children playing in front of Kiyo's beachside home in Venice.
I contacted her again in August 2001, informed her I was now living in Los Angeles, and scheduled a second interview to meet her at her home, telling her I had some important information to discuss. At this meeting, realizing that what I was about to tell her would be very similar in effect to the many death notifications I had made to family members during my long career in Homicide, and knowing she would need some emotional support, I requested that her husband be present, and she agreed. I opened our conversation with the shocking revelation that, based on my two-year investigation, it was my professional opinion that our fathers had been crime partners and had committed a series of abductions and murders of lone women in Los Angeles during the mid- to late 1940s. I informed her that all of my research and investigation was well documented, that the full story would be revealed in a book I was writing. I did not provide her with the names of any victims and was circumspect in my references to the crimes. Specifically, I did not indicate that the case focused on Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia.
Understandably, Sexton's daughter was profoundly shocked by my news. She found it difficult to believe that her father could ever have been involved in such violent crimes. She doubted my assertion that he, like my father, was a practicing sadist. Even though she acknowledged that he was a controlling person, she felt he was in
capable of physically harming women to that extent.
In this interview, she disclosed a wealth of information. She was specific and provided much deeper insight into her father's personality and character, underscoring and increasing the probability that he was in fact the partner-in-crime of his close friend George Hodel.
Mary Moe
"Mary Moe," which is the name I have given Sexton's daughter to protect her identity, was sixty-five at the time of our first conversation. She had known our family since before I was born, and in another incredible twist of fate, as an eight-year-old girl had come with her father to the hospital to visit my mother on the day my twin brother John and I were born.
Fred Sexton was of Irish, Jewish, and Italian descent. When he was about thirteen years old, the police arrested his father on Christmas Eve and dragged him out of the house, an incident that instilled in Fred a lifelong hatred of the police. The family was then living in California, but his dad had been bootlegging in Nevada during the '20s and '30s.
Sexton had been John Huston's close friend at high school in L.A., and they remained friends through the years. As a child, Mary remembered Huston as a kind of "godfather" who would suddenly appear with extravagant presents for her, then vanish. Mary also thought her father had been acquainted with the notorious gambler Tony Cornero, but was not absolutely sure. She did know that Fred's father had been a gambler and bootlegger like Cornero.
I learned that, like my father, Sexton had a secret and mysterious past and had concealed important early truths from his daughter. For instance, from her mother Mary discovered that her father had had an affair with a married newspaper reporter in San Francisco in the 1920s. The newswoman became pregnant and gave birth to a son. Growing up, Mary was shown pictures of a small, dark-complexioned boy, and was told these were pictures of her father. Only as an adult did she learn the truth: the pictures were not of her father but her half-brother! To this day she knows nothing further about him, has never met him, does not know if he is living or dead, nor does she even know his name.
She remembered that her father ran a "floating crap game" in Los Angeles, where he reportedly "made very good money." Like my Father, Fred drove taxis during his youth, both in Los Angeles and in San Francisco.
Regarding Sexton and his women, Mary told me, "My dad had lots of different girlfriends when I was young. He was very much like your father when it came to women. He had so many women, one after the other."
In the early 1930s, Sexton went to Europe for a year or two, then returned to Los Angeles, married Gwain, and Mary was born. He pursued his artwork, gained some notoriety, and reportedly had several one-man shows, which received excellent reviews from L.A. art critics.
Mary recalled that in 1938 George Hodel moved into the house next door to theirs. "We were neighbors on White Knoll for about a year," she recalled. It was at that time, Mary said, that the two Dorothys were living together with George. "Both Tamar's mother, Dorothy Anthony, and your mom were living with him next to us. Then, after about a year, the three of them moved not far away, to Valentine Street."
During the war years Sexton, like my father, remained in Los Angeles:
My dad was working at all the movie studios and he worked at the shipyards, then he drove a cab again in '43 and '44. My dad wasn't in the war because he had to take care of my mom, who was bedridden for many years. Your dad, who had known my mom and was a good friend for so long, also treated her and was her doctor.
Fred Sexton had an art studio in a downtown building, at 2nd and Spring Streets. I learned from Mary that my father had an apartment on the top floor of the same building, where they could go upstairs onto the roof of a German beer-hall. According to her, this apartment was where George would "rendezvous" with all his girlfriends. Mary had been inside George's "apartment" with her father on one occasion around 1948, and remembered that the interior was beautiful and, in her words, had a "very fancy decor."
I asked if she had any information or remembered an incident related to a woman, possibly a girlfriend of my father's, who had committed suicide during those years. Her response was:
I think that the person you are talking about was your dad's office manager at the First Street Clinic. I'm not sure of her name, but it might have been Ruth Dennis. What I heard was that she didn't come to work one morning at the clinic, and your dad went to her apartment and found her dead. As I recall, it was a suicide, an overdose.
Then Mary related a telling incident, which again involved both of our fathers.
In the late '40s there was a woman named Trudy Spence, who at that time was my dad's girlfriend. Her husband found out about the affair and came after Fred at his Spring Street art studio, intending to kill him. To escape, Dad had to jump off the roof and landed in the parking lot. He tore up his leg really bad and was laid up for months. Your dad brought him a gun, which he kept hidden in a cigar box under his bed, because he thought the husband might arrive. The whole thing made me very nervous.
Though Mary told me she did not know the details of the incest scandal, she did say there was no doubt in her mind that Tamar had told the truth. Her next revelation caught me completely off guard:
I, like Tamar, was also a victim of incest. My own father sexually molested me from age eight to eleven. I know firsthand exactly what Tamar went through. When I was sixteen, a year before the trial, I had a bad argument with my father, because he tried again to have sex with me. I told him that if he didn't leave the house, I would. He left and went to live with John Huston and Paulette Goddard in West Hollywood. The next year, the Tamar thing happened. It took a long time, but Dad finally admitted the incest with me to my mom.
"Tamar was an incorrigible teenager," Mary said, "and seemed obsessed with sex all the time." But Mary, without reservations, believed the story Tamar told the police about having had sex with Fred, Barbara Sherman, and my father.
"When I was around your father," Mary admitted, "my dad never took his eyes off me. He was going to make sure that George never touched me. Dad was very protective of me around your father."
She learned most of the facts about the scandal from her father, who had told her that Man Ray was also involved. "The police talked with Man Ray," her father had told her, "who would have been arrested and charged along with them, except he got a letter from his doctor saying that he couldn't have done anything to Tamar, because he was impotent." Mary noted that "Man Ray had lots of clout. I think my dad was a terrific artist and Huston was a terrific director, but they both were rotten people."
After separating from his wife, Gwain, in the 1950s, Sexton traveled back and forth to Mexico. In the early 1960s, he remarried and lived in Palos Verdes for a short period, then divorced again. Sexton returned to Mexico in 1969, and in 1971, at age sixty-three, married his third wife, who was only a teenager. The two of them lived in Guadalajara until his death in 1995. Mary informed me that on his death, "his wife destroyed all of his papers." Mary said her father passed for either Spanish or Italian, and spoke both languages.
Before his final return to Mexico, Fred gave his daughter a list of various bank accounts; he had used different names on different accounts. She said, "On his passport, he put the name of his brother Robert, who was dead. He also used another alias, 'Sigfried Raphael Sexton.'"
In an attempt to further establish that my father and Sexton were lifelong friends, I showed Mary Moe a photograph of a young, dark-complexioned man that had been given to me by June after Father's death. It was one of a collection of photographs taken by my father in 1925. Though it was of poor quality, I believed it bore a resemblance to Sexton, who would have then been about eighteen. I initially e-mailed a copy of the photo to Mary, and then showed her the actual photograph during our second meeting. She said:
I can't say for sure or not if it is a photo of my father. It's really hard to tell. It certainly could be, because the mouth and lips resemble his, but I'm unsure. Dad had the same dark complexion as in the picture. I know t
hey knew each other back then, because it was the strangest thing. Guess who did an art review of my dad's work — it was your dad's ex-wife, Emilia Hodel! I came across this review from a San Francisco paper where she gave him this terrible review as an artist. Everyone else gave him great reviews, but Emilia wrote him this really bad review. I'll try and find a copy for you.
Mary Moe's candor revealed a man chillingly similar to my own father. The two men had been practically inseparable for thirty years, from boyhood until my father's departure in 1950. Except during Father's medical training years, both had lived within a few miles of each other and both had offices in downtown Los Angeles. When trouble came stalking Sexton, my father unhesitatingly provided him with medical aid and a gun. They shared sexual favors with women, and in the case of my father, he even shared his teenage daughter. Clearly these men held each other in the closest confidence, and one protected the other.
With my own investigative insights, Joe Barrett's brief but telling story of Sexton's sexual obsession with the young female art students, coupled with the biography I had learned from Mary Moe, I was now focused on Fred Sexton as Suspect Number 2.
Most of the crimes I researched involved two mysterious and unidentified suspects. The primary suspect was a suave and polished, tall, thin, well-dressed man who had been seen with the victims just before they were either killed or disappeared. The second man, of similar physical build, was more often referred to simply as "swarthy complexioned."
I believe it's important to see exactly how these two men appeared in the mid- to late 1940s, to compare them to the victim and witness descriptions we have already heard and those yet to come. Following are photos of each man as he looked in the late 1940s, along with his overall physical description, and character traits: