by Hodel, Steve
MF wrote:
The attached excerpt is from a book about Charlie Mingus, another bass player. The incident about Mattie apparently took place around 1960. “Knepper” in the book is Jimmy Knepper, who was Mingus’s trombonist.
From: Myself When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus by Gene Santoro (2001, Oxford University Press):
One night during the Hollywood gig, Mingus started riding Knepper onstage in front of women friends. One of them was one of Duke Ellington’s girlfriends, Mattie Comfort, wife of Mingus’s Watts friend and fellow bassist Joe Comfort. Mattie looked like Lena Horne, and was sitting with Pat Willard, a white Duke fan, in the front row.
Mattie called out, “Hey, Mingus, leave that white boy alone, he loves you.” He rasped, “You’re not black enough to talk to me like that.” She said coolly, “You’re lighter than I am, Mingus.”
Mingus spotted Knepper with the women in the lobby. When Mattie left to get her car, he followed her into the parking lot, then took out a thick pen filled with a charge to shoot pepper. He had no pepper, just charges. He had taken to firing it off in the club during his shows, but now he shot it off in her face.
Mattie was still shaking when she picked up the other two. In the rearview mirror, she watched Mingus follow them up Sunset Boulevard in the Cadillac. She turned right on Vine, right on Hollywood, and headed for the police station. No cops, no cop cars, and Mingus was right behind them. So she made a right on N. Bronson and ran a red light at Sunset, where a police cruiser parked there stopped them.
To the puzzled cop, Mattie explained that Knepper worked for Charles Mingus, who was chasing them. When the cop looked up, the limo wheeled into a U-turn and sped off. The cop shrugged, and let Mattie off with a warning. Relieved, they drove to Pat Willard’s house and listened to Ellington records.
The DA Secret Files
Black Dahlia Avenger originally published in April 2003. As a result of the heavy print and television coverage of my story, NBC’s Dateline, CBS 48 Hours Mystery, A&E Court TV, and Bill Kurtis’, Cold Case Files would all subsequently produce full hour television shows. Los Angeles District Attorney Steve Cooley gave Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez an interview, along with granting him permission to examine some previously secret DA files, which had been locked in the county vault and unexamined for over fifty-years.
Within days of the original publication, reporter Lopez, in two separate back to back LA Times articles, revealed some of the contents of these never-before-seen DA files. To the absolute shock of both LAPD and Angelenos in general, the reports fully documented the DA’s separate investigation into the original Black Dahlia murder and named Dr. George Hill Hodel as the prime suspect. This was huge news because it was a totally independent and external confirmation of my own findings.
A month later, in mid-May, I approached DA Steve Cooley and requested permission to view the secret files. To his credit, Mr. DA granted my request and I would spend a full day copying all the relevant Hodel-Black Dahlia Files. The DA investigation related to my father and the Black Dahlia investigation totaled approximately 600 pages. None of it had ever been seen or reviewed by anybody since it had been locked away in the DA vault in 1950!
It took me several months to thoroughly review the material, most of which has now been included as new evidence in two updated chapters of Black Dahlia Avenger, added to the July 2006 HarperCollins paperback publication.
In the “Aftermath” chapter of that book, I included the DA’s 1950 investigation which documented in detail the detective’s electronic surveillance and actual physical “bugging” of Dr. Hodel’s Hollywood residence.
Those files revealed that on February 15, 1950, DA detective, Lt. Frank Jemison and his partner arranged an appointment for my father to meet and be interviewed by them at their office in the downtown Hall of Justice.
While they detained him for questioning, separate officers from both the LAPD and the DA’s sound lab went to Dr. Hodel’s private residence, gained entry by shimming the front door, and installed microphones inside the walls in the living room/home office and the master bedroom. A hard line was then run from the basement of our home, outside to the street, and connected to Pacific Bell Telephone lines. These pole lines were then strung to the basement of the Hollywood police station, a distance of about two miles, where the live conversations could be monitored and recorded by detectives around the clock. [It is important to understand that these microphones were picking up “live conversations” and were not simply phone bugs.]
A taskforce of eighteen (18) detectives, which included officers from both the DA’s Office and LAPD, conducted the stakeout 24/7. This audio surveillance lasted forty days.
As a result of their efforts, detectives obtained over forty spools of wire tape recordings which included statements from my father admitting to killing the Black Dahlia.
The DA tapes also contained admissions by George Hodel to committing the 1945 barbiturate overdosing of his personal secretary, Ruth Spaulding. That crime, while originally listed as an undetermined death and possible “suicide,” was actively investigated by LAPD as a suspected murder some eighteen months before the Dahlia crime. The Spaulding investigation was suspended when Dr. Hodel temporarily left the country in February 1946 to become chief medical officer in Hankow, China while working for the United Nations. He would unexpectedly return to Los Angeles and resume his medical practice in September 1946, four months before the murder of Elizabeth Short.
Several weeks later, one of the surveillance tapes captured Dr. Hodel admitting to performing abortions at his privately owned VD clinic in downtown Los Angeles. The taped transcripts also record him informing a confederate, “This is the best payoff between law enforcement agencies that I’ve ever seen. You do not have the right connections made. I’d like to get a connection made in the DA’s office.” Later he brags, “I’m the only person who knows how all these things fit into the picture.”
The detectives staked out in the basement of the Hollywood police station, and, while listening to the conversation in real time, overheard a woman crying as she attempted to call the telephone operator. The monitoring detectives heard George and a second man walk downstairs to the basement. The sounds of a pipe striking an object were heard. The woman cried out, more blows, she cried out again, and then went silent. Words were heard discussing “not leaving a trace”—then nothing but silence. Inexplicably, these two on duty officers, listening to what is obviously a serious felony assault, or worse, an actual murder in progress, were just two miles away and TOOK NO ACTION.
Much more is contained in the 146-page transcripts, which I have attached unaltered, and in their entirety, as an addendum to this book.
The stakeout was terminated in late March 1950, only because George Hodel had been informed by Dorothy [his ex-wife and my mother] that the detectives had some damning evidence and photographs, and she was sure that he was about to be arrested. Armed with that information, my father immediately left town.
Sample page of DA Transcript of Surveillance Tapes (1 of 146 pages)
LAPD Hollywood Division Basement. Detectives are monitoring live conversation from the Hodel residence, 5121 Franklin Ave, Hollywood, California. DA investigators Hronek & McGrath on duty. Verbatim transcript of Spool #2:
February 18, 1950
7:35 pm-Conversation between two men. Recorded. Hodel and man with a German acent [sic] had a long conversation; reception was poor, and conversation was hard to understand. The following bits of conversation, however, were overhead.
Hodel to German:
“This is the best payoff I’ve seen between Law Enforcement Agencies. You do not have the right connections made. I’d like to get a connection made in the DA’s office.”
…
“Any imperfections will be found. They will have to be made perfect. Don’t confess ever. Two and two is not four.” Much laughter. “Were just a couple of smart boys.” More laughter.
&nb
sp; Hodel to German:
“Supposin I did kill the Black Daliah. [sic] They couldn’t prove it now. They can’t talk to my Secretary anymore because she’s dead.”
Madi Comfort—The DA’s Secret Black Dahlia Witness
As I continued my careful review of the never before released 1950 DA Hodel-Black Dahlia Files, a new name surfaced. A name that had never appeared in any police reports, newspaper account, or the volumes of lore and mythology—Mattie Comfort.
Background
During the 1950 investigation and before installing any microphones at my father’s Frank Lloyd Wright Jr.-built home in Hollywood, DA Lt. Frank Jemison and his partner, Lt. Sullivan, contacted a young ex-navy man by the name of Joe Barrett.
They picked-up the twenty-five-year-old Navy veteran from his day job and brought him to their office for questioning. At the time of the interview, Barrett, discharged from the Navy in 1946 was a struggling artist. In 1948, he started renting a room at the north-end of our home. It was large and open, with great lighting that served as both his residence and art studio.
As Barrett would tell me in a 1999 interview, “Lt. Sullivan laid it on the line with me. He came right out and said, ‘We think Dr. George Hodel killed the Black Dahlia. You live there and we need your help. We want you to be our eyes and ears.’” Simply put, they wanted Joe Barrett to be their mole—their informant. With his free access on the INSIDE, he would be invaluable. Joe agreed to try and help.
With that as background, let’s examine a scanned excerpt from the police report exactly as found in the DA files
Actual scan of original DA documents referencing Mattie Comfort
Short and to the point. We learned that detectives obtained several photographs of Dr. Hodel. But, not just any portraits. In these, he is seen completely naked in the company of a “nude colored model,” later identified as MATTIE COMFORT. But, the critical information can be found in the last sentence which reads, “She [Mattie Comfort] was with Doctor Hodel sometime prior to the murder and that she knew about his being associated with victim. [Elizabeth “Black Dahlia” Short.]
In this document, we discovered that in 1950 detectives interviewed a new and critically important witness who actually placed Dr. George Hill Hodel and the victim, Elizabeth Short, as being together! Or did she?
Take a closer look at the scanned police report and you will see what I first discovered back in 2003. Some unknown writer at an unknown date and time has altered the report by inserting the word “nothing” within the text of that sentence. This simple act was obviously an attempt to reverse the meaning of the statement which now reads, “She said that she was with Doctor Hodel sometime prior to the murder and that she knew nothing about his being associated with victim.”
Enlargement showing word “nothing” inserted by hand
Based on Lt. Jemison’s report, what we do know for sure is that Mattie Comfort and George Hodel were on intimate terms sometime in the 1940s.
Was this document deliberately altered years or possibly decades later? Clearly, Lt. Jemison would not have allowed his typed final investigative report to be filed away uncorrected. Who changed it and when? What was the truth of it?
Lt. Jemison interviews Dorothy Hodel—“On the Record”
Dorothy Huston Hodel 1946
Later photo of Madi Comfort, circa 1954
On March 22, 1950, while the stakeout and bugging continued at my father’s home, Detective Jemison, accompanied by a DA stenographer, proceeded to my mother’s separate residence at an apartment located on Santa Monica Pier and conducted a follow-up.
This six-page interview was transcribed and placed in the secret files and only came to light upon my examination of the records in 2003, some fifty-three years later. I should note that while my mother, my two brothers, and I continued to live on-and-off with my father at the Franklin house well into 1950, my parents had been legally divorced in 1944.
While there is much of interest in the Lt. Jemison, Dorothy Hodel Q&A transcript, I will just include in here those portions that relate to the separate photographs which Lt. Jemison showed to Dorothy. It should also be noted that at the time of this interview, Lt. Jemison had seemingly not yet identified the photo of the “nude colored model” as Mattie Comfort. And it became apparent in his interview that he was hoping to obtain a name identification from Dorothy Hodel. (I will attach the complete interview as addendum.)
Excerpts from Lt. Jemison/Dorothy Hodel 3.22.50 Interview transcripts: Page-2
Lt. Jemison: I will now show you a photograph of Beth Short, Santa Barbara No. 11419 and ask you whether or not you have ever seen that young lady in your life?
Dorothy: No, I never have.
Elizabeth Short “Black Dahlia” booking photo shown to Dorothy Hodel
Lt. Jemison: Did you have a conversation with Dr. Hodel about the murder of Beth Short?
Dorothy: No, unless we mentioned it when it was in the papers, but I don’t like to read about things like that. I can’t say for sure that I have never mentioned her name to him, but it may have been in passing.
Lt. Jemison: Did he ever tell you, “They can’t pin that murder on me?”
Dorothy: No, to the best of my knowledge he didn’t and doesn’t know her.
Lt Jemison: On or about the date of her murder, January 15, 1947 do you remember being out until 4:00 in the morning with George Hodel and coming in slightly intoxicated? Now, that’s three years ago.
Dorothy: Well, I think I explained before we never went on drinking parties because I don’t drink because of certain tendencies to drink too much and particularly if I were near him I would not drink because from a medical point of view he does not approve of my drinking and I don’t know that I understood that question.
Page 3—
Lt. Jemison: Well, the information that I have is that he was quite intoxicated himself and at that time on that occasion stated that they couldn’t pin the Black Dahlia murder on him. [Note: In Lt. Jemison’s follow-up investigation and final report prepared in 1951, he corrected George Hodel’s quote to read, “They will never be able to prove I did that murder.”] [Black Dahlia]
Dorothy: No. No, that isn’t true.
Lt. Jemison: Do you remember ever telling Tamar that? [Note: Tamar was my then twelve-year-old half-sister and George Hodel’s daughter by another woman.]
Dorothy: No.
Lt. Jemison: Did you ever tell Tamar that Dr. George Hodel was out the night before the murder with Beth Short at a party?
Dorothy: No, I was living at my brother’s house at the time. We were not living at the same house. I wouldn’t know what he was doing.
Page 5—
Lt. Jemison: Now in view of the fact that the District Attorney’s office is interested in contacting all persons that might know something about whether or not Dr. Hodel had anything to do with this murder, I now show you a photograph of a nude girl and ask you if you recognize who that girl is. In other words, we want to know her name and where we can contact her?
Dorothy: There is something familiar about her face. I think she may have been some model or something.
Lt Jemison: Would you say she is a colored girl or half Indian, do you know?
Dorothy: No.
Lt. Jemison: I show you another photograph of the same girl with a man. Do you recognize that man in that photograph?
Dorothy: I would say that was Dr. Hodel.
Lt. Jemison: Do you know the person who owns the cat that they are holding between them?
Dorothy: No, I don’t.
Lt. Jemison: In other words, I am sincerely interested in contacting this girl for information.
Dorothy: No, I don’t know her I have seen her face. I have seen photographs that George has of her.
Lt. Jemison: Would you have any idea where we could find her?
Dorothy: No.
Lt. Jemison: I show you the third picture. Dr. Hodel and the colored girl. You still can’t place any person that might know where I
can find her?
Dorothy: No, I don’t know. I can’t think.
Lt. Jemison: Let me advise you that we do have information that he [George Hodel] did associate with Beth Short…[Emphasis mine]
Entries by detectives in the surveillance transcripts reveal that, immediately, following this interview, my mother went directly to George’s home the very next day and informed him of being questioned by Lt. Jemison, as well as providing him with all the questions asked of her, and, most importantly, that she was shown photographs of both Elizabeth Short and Mattie Comfort. While my parents’ actual conversation was apparently out of range of the microphones and not recorded, we do know that she told him everything based on the following conversation, THAT WAS RECORDED.
DA Transcripts—Franklin House
March 23-7:45 pm-Hodel came in with Dorothy. (Phone rang, recorded)
…
March 25 11:10 pm
Hodel and Baron (man with accent) came in talking low (can’t hear) …Sounded like Hodel said something about Black Dahlia. Baron said something about F.B.I. Then talked about Tibet. Sounds like Hodel wants to get out of the country. Mentioned passport. Hodel giving Baron dope on how to write to Tibet. Hodel talking about Mexico. Going down and take pictures and write a story. Hodel seems afraid about something. Hodel says his Sanitarium, if he gets it started in Mexico would be “Safe”.
March 26 12 a.m. (spool 39)
Spool ran out. Changing. Talking about woman. Hodel says “he wants money and power. “Talking about China. Talking about selling some of Hodel’s paintings or something. Hodel talking about picture police have of him and some girl-thought he had destroyed them all- (wire quit at 50-new one going on) Not much talk.
This was the final night of the surveillance tapes. The next day, George Hodel left town, leaving the DA and LAPD detectives in the lurch, literally sitting there with their microphones up his walls. Lt. Jemison was forced to terminate the stakeout.
As summarized in the transcripts in the final hours before George Hodel left LA, he had conversed with Dorothy Hodel and obviously was made aware that the police now had photographs of Mattie Comfort [“I thought I had destroyed all of them”]. And despite Mother’s best efforts at withholding her name, the cops were sure to discover it in short order. The stakeout detectives referenced that “Hodel seems afraid of something.” Hodel mentioned the “Black Dahlia,” “the FBI,” and, the following day, he is “in the wind.”