by Hodel, Steve
DA Lieutenant Walter Morgan—Biography
• 1939-Appointed a deputy with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. Highly skilled in firearms, became one of the sheriff’s department’s “crack shots” after qualifying as a “Distinguished Expert” marksman.
• 1940-1949-LA deputy sheriff for nine years. Assignments included: patrol car, vice, and detective bureau (Burglary Detail).
• 1949-Left the sheriff’s department and appointed a detective with the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, Bureau of Investigation.
• 1950-Selected by Lt. Frank Jemison to assist him in the Grand Jury ordered reinvestigation of the Black Dahlia case.
• February15, 1950-Morgan, ordered by Lt. Jemison to coordinate a meeting between DA crime lab electronics’ expert and LAPD detectives for the specific purpose of surreptitiously installing microphones inside the Franklin house residence of Dr. George Hill Hodel. Morgan accompanied by “bug men” and “high ranking LAPD officers” proceeded to 5121 Franklin Avenue and personally “shimmed” the front door of Dr. Hodel’s residence. [To prevent him from walking in on them, the “installation” was coordinated and done at the same time George Hodel was being detained for questioning by DA investigators at the Hall of Justice.]
• March 1970-Morgan, retired from the DA’s Office.
• April 2002-Interviewed by me related to my Black Dahlia investigation, and, for the first time in fifty-two years, disclosed his connections to the case and confirmed George Hodel as the prime suspect and the “bugging of the Hodel residence.”
• May 2004-Agrees to be interviewed on CBS 48 Hours, stated publicly his involvement in the investigation, acknowledged that he “shimmed the front door of Dr. Hodel’s residence, and “electronic experts placed bugs in the walls.” Morgan confirmed that he and Lt. Jemison were unexpectedly removed from the case and it was returned back to LAPD for further investigation. In an on-camera statement, Morgan indicated that in 1950, “a cover-up and payoff was suspected.”
• September 8, 2007-Walter fell ill and passed away in Los Angeles.
In my several meetings with Walter Morgan since our introduction in 2002, I became acutely aware that he was a man of many moods who held many secrets; most of them from a long time ago.
In his prime, Walter lived and breathed Chinatown and LA Confidential. He was LA Noir—only this gumshoe was no celluloid fiction—he was the real deal. As you will read below, he was Philip Marlowe [before Marlowe got fired from the DA’s Office for insubordination] and Dirty Harry rolled into one. And in 1944, a couple of street thugs would “make his day.”
In the mid-1940s, Walter was close to the power that influenced and ran Los Angeles: gangster Mickey Cohen, Florentine Garden’s owner; Mark Hansen and his “Mr. Show Business,” M.C. Nils Thor Granlund, better known as-“N.T.G.”
In 1945, Walter married the Florentine’s lead showgirl, Tanya “Sugar” Geise. Best man at his wedding was no less a luminary, than LA County’s top-cop, Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz. Tanya was good friends with Lavonne Cohen, Mickey Cohen’s wife, who also attended the wedding. Mickey Cohen was Bugsy Siegel’s lieutenant, who, in two short years, would take over as LA’s Numero Uno gangster after his boss was gunned down in Beverly Hills.
Below I’ve included just a few press clippings from Walter’s Feisty Forties, to give a sense of the man in his time.
In 1944, Walter, then still a deputy sheriff, was parked in a car with his fiancé, Sugar Geise on the Sunset Strip. The couple was approached by two armed robbers:
Excerpt from LA Times article on September 30, 1944:
Dead-Shot Deputy Foils Two Asserted Bandits
…
Suddenly one of them (Gallentine) shoved a pistol through a partly open window, rapped on the glass, and said, “O.K., give us the dough and the jewels”
Let “Jewels” Go
“I (Morgan) stepped out and said, “O.K., here are your jewels—and let go eight ‘little jewels’ from my automatic.”
Florentine Gardens Showgirl Tanya “Sugar” Geise
Walter Morgan weds Sugar Geise in June 1945
Sheriff Biscailuz “Best Man”
2004-48 HOURS BLACK DAHLIA CONFIDENTIAL
CBS investigative reporter, Erin Moriarty, questions Walter Morgan regarding the Black Dahlia case being closed down and turned back to LAPD:
Morgan: The only thing I can think is that some money must have transpired between people.
Moriarty: It sounds like you think it may have been a cover-up of some sort?
Morgan: Well, everybody thought that.
Dr. George Hill Hodel Surveillance Transcripts 40 days—(146 pages)
DA investigator Walter Morgan in 1952 walking across the street from his office at the Hall of Justice. [Federal Court in background.]
To DA investigators Frank Jemison and Walter Morgan I want to take this opportunity to personally thank both of you for your service to the City of Angels and its people. Thank you for your honesty and integrity. You did what others could not. One of you preserved the truth and the other told it.
May you both –REST IN PEACE!
Chapter 10
Hollywood Roomers—Tree of Life, 1948
In 2001, after my relocation to Los Angeles, one of the potential witnesses I made contact with was an ex-roomer [perhaps lodger is more apropos] who had lived for several years at the Franklin house. For privacy’s sake, let’s call him Chris D. Chris was an artist, who, in 1948-1949, shared the rent in the north-wing studio with his friend and fellow painter, Joe Barrett.
I made phone contact with Chris who was living with his wife in a beach community several hours north of Los Angeles. We agreed to meet next time he came to LA.
Some months later, Chris called. He said he was in town and stopped by with his wife for a visit. We talked about “the old days” for about four hours, but nothing of any real consequence surfaced. Since my investigation at that time was sub rosa, naturally, I made no mention of the “Black Dahlia” or any other suspected criminality. It was obvious that Chris was saddened about my father’s passing and his memories of the man were seemingly filled only with fondness and respect. After listening to Chris talk about Dad for a number of hours, my sense was that he considered George his mentor.
I had no further contact with Chris for about two years. By then, my book had been published. In 2004, I received a letter informing me that he had read BDA and found it difficult to believe that the George Hodel he knew could have committed such crimes. He remained highly skeptical.
Also enclosed in his letter was the below copy of a photograph of some of the 1948 roomers then living at our home. The photograph was entitled “Tree of Life—Shangri-LA, 1948.” Chris identified each individual in the photo by hand writing their name next to their “branch” on the tree.
“Tree of Life-Shangri-LA 1948”
Franklin house tenants from top down:
1. Suzanne D’Albert
2. Gladys Krenek
3. Dorothy Bowman
4. Fuji Walker
5. Tony Walker
6. Chris D
7. George Hodel
8. Ellen Taylor
[1948 tenants: artist Joe Barrett and actress Carol Forman not in photograph.]
I have very few specifics on the various roomers living with us back in the late forties. I do know that Dad did not begin to rent any rooms out until 1948, which was at least one full year after the Black Dahlia murder.
I believe that most of the above named tenants were gone either before or soon after George’s arrest for incest in October 1949. We know that Joe Barrett is still there in February 1950, and that George was interviewing prospective tenants as late as March 1950. But based on the transcripts, it sounded as if conditions may have prevented any new occupancy.
I am going to provide a very brief and limited sketch of some of the named tenants because I think it is important to understand that George Hodel, in addition to being connecte
d to Hollywood’s elite—A-list writers and directors—also had direct “in-house” connections to its working actors and artists, which may well provide us with some future LINKAGE.
Let’s start at the top of the “tree” and work our way down.
Suzanne D’Albert
Suzanne D’Albert circa 1949
Suzanne D’Albert was born in France on May 12, 1927 and would have been just twenty-one when she moved into the Franklin house. She was reportedly discovered by Paramount mogul, Hal B. Wallis. Suzanne spoke five languages (French, English, German, Russian, and Spanish.) Her filmography credits her with twenty-seven acting parts in film and television. Tragically, she died from an apparent suicide from an overdose of sleeping pills in Paris in 1971 at the age of forty-three.
In the photo below, we see Suzanne posing with seven other young woman, including Marilyn Monroe and Enrica “Ricky” Soma in a 1949 Life Magazine article featuring up-and-coming Hollywood starlets. Monroe, at the time this photo was taken, was in Los Angeles shooting a small part as “Angela” in John Huston’s Asphalt Jungle. Ricky Soma would marry John Huston that same year and became his fourth wife. Bizarrely, this photo with Suzanne D’Albert appeared in the October 10, 1949 edition of Life Magazine, which was George Hodel’s forty-second birthday. [He had been arrested for incest just four days prior.]
Life Magazine October 10, 1949
(1) Marilyn Monroe (2) Laurette Luez (3) Lois Maxwell
(4) Suzanne Dalbert (5) Ricky Soma (6) Dolores Gardner
(7) Jane Nigh (8) Cathy Downs
Gladys Nordenstrom-Krenek
Gladys Krenek was born in Mora, Minnesota on May 23, 1924. I have little information on her life. She was an accomplished composer, and, shortly after residing at the Franklin house, married world renowned Austrian composer, Ernst Krenek in 1950.
Dorothy Bowman
At the time Dorothy Bowman was renting a room at the Franklin house, she was twenty-one and already had become a recognized and respected Los Angeles artist. Her works had been shown at galleries throughout the Southland and she most certainly would have been a friend and acquaintance of fellow artist and regular houseguest, Fred Sexton and his wife, Gwain.
Dorothy attended LA’s Chouinard Art Institute where she met fellow painter, Howard Bradford. The two also studied together at the Jepson Art School in Los Angeles. [This is the same school where Fred Sexton was an art instructor and was fired, because according to Joe Barrett, who also attended the school, “He [Sexton] was hitting on all the young girls and half the class left, so Herb Jepson fired him.”]
Dorothy Bowman and Howard Bradford relocated to the California coast of Big Sur circa1950, where they became part of that community and befriended writer Henry Miller, another Franklin house visitor. The two artists eventually married. Both Dorothy and Howard became internationally respected and their paintings and serigraphs can be found in museums throughout the world.
Dorothy Bowman art shows 1950
[Los Angeles Times]
Fuji and Tony Walker
I have no biographical information on Fuji or her son, Tony, but I’m sure, like all the others, there’s is a story just waiting to be found and told.
Ellen Taylor
Ellen was the maid. I am not sure exactly when she began working for Dad. Perhaps in mid-to-late 1947. From the photograph, we know she was there in 1948 and remained until the spring of 1950.
We also know from the DA tapes that she was a “full-service maid.” Sex with George was, from the sound of the explicit recordings, a part of her regular duties. To quote the eloquence of the detective’s log, “Sounds like Ellen just gave George another blow-job.” It is also clear from the tapes that she wanted and demanded sex and became very upset when George told her, “No, not tonight.”
In BDA, in the chapter, “The Franklin House Revisited,” I made mention of an interview I conducted with “Bill Buck” [not his real name] who owned and had been living in the house for thirty years, and whose father, a medical doctor, bought the home from Dad back in 1950.
It’s worth retelling here, since I am sure his descriptions coupled with Joe Barrett’s separate comments clearly suggested that the person they were describing was Ellen Taylor.
BDA page 263:
Another strange incident: Buck told me about the appearance of a “bag lady” who came to the door back in the 1970s or early ’80s. “She looked quite old,” he said, “but with street people it’s hard to tell.” I spoke with her and she said, ‘This house is a place of evil’.” He said that normally he would have simply dismissed her, but then she continued to describe the interior of the house. “It was very scary,” he said. “She obviously had been inside this place before we owned it. She described in detail to me: the great stone fireplace, and your father’s gold bedroom, and the all-red kitchen that your father had painted. No question that she was very familiar with the house when your dad had lived here. She looked at me and said again, ‘This is a house of evil.’ God knows what connection she had with this place. She left, and I never saw or heard from her again.”
Based on a conversation I had with former tenant Joe Barrett, it is my belief that the person Buck described as a “bag lady” was most probably our former maid, Ellen Taylor, Father’s live-in housemaid/girlfriend, who lived at Franklin House from 1945 to 1950. In later years, Joe Barrett had run into Ellen on the street in downtown Los Angeles and discovered that she had been in and out of mental hospitals. Joe Barrett described her as “living on the fringe, delusional, claiming she had had affairs with a number of prominent and locally famous personages.” (Knowing what we now know, perhaps Ellen was not as delusional as Barrett thought.)
While we cannot be positive that the “bag lady” was Ellen, all the pieces fit together quite well. The discovery and reading of the DA files established that Mother and we three boys were not at the house during the weeks preceding and after the murder of Elizabeth Short. But now, a new question arises—was Ellen? She was talked to by DA investigators in 1950, but unfortunately, her and many of the other George Hodel acquaintance interviews—while conducted—were not included in the DA papers secured in the vault. And, as we know, LAPD’s copies have all “disappeared.”
Carol Forman
Carol Forman was also a roomer at the Franklin house; she was just not at home when the Tree of Life photo was taken. [Unless she took it.]
Carol was born June 19, 1918 and would have been thirty at the time she was renting a room at the Franklin house. According to her filmography, her first part was in the 1946 RKO film, From this Day Forward. That same year, Carol had a bit part as a secretary in the noir-thriller, Nocturne, a story written by Rowland Brown, who, in 1946, was involved in an ongoing romance with my mother, Dorothy Hodel.
Carol Forman secretary scene in Nocturne (1946)
In 1947, Carol played Sombra in The Black Widow, establishing herself as a leading villainess. True to form, in 1948, she starred as Spider Lady, taking on mild mannered reporter, Clark Kent [Kirk Alyn], in Columbia’s big screen serialization of Superman.
1948 clips of Carol Forman as Spider Lady in Superman
As if written for a Twilight Zone episode, Carol Forman was selected and appeared on this January 1947 calendar, which was the same month Elizabeth “Black Dahlia” Short was brutally murdered at George Hodel’s Franklin house. Then one year later, the unsuspecting actress rented a room and moved into and resided at the crime scene.
Carol, Tim Holt, and my Bro
My younger brother, Kelvin “Kelly” Hodel, was born in October 1942, just eleven months after the birth of my twin, John, and I. He would be Dorothy and George’s fourth and final son. Kelly, from an early age, “loved the girls,” and believe me—the girls LOVED him. A 1949 Franklin house Kelvin anecdote is appropriate:
At the time Carol was living with us at the Franklin house, she was dating film star Tim Holt. The two actors had worked together in a number of B-Westerns, including the 1947 Under
the Tonto Rim and again in 1948 on Brothers in the Saddle. Tim Holt [who had just received huge critical acclaim for his role as the down-on-his -luck drifter, Bob Curtin in John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre], naturally, came and visited Carol at the house on a regular basis.
Brother Kelly, then aged six or seven had a terrible crush on Carol. And whenever Tim showed up to take her on a date, Kelly would object, informing Holt in no uncertain terms, “She’s my girlfriend.” Finally, Holt could take it no longer and took Kelly into the center courtyard, mano-a-mano, and came up with the following suggestion:
“Look Kelly. You’re too young to be with Carol now. I will date her only until you get old enough. And then you and Carol can get married. And I will get on my horse and ride off. Fair enough?”
Kelly agreed. Holt and Hodel shook hands, and the battle for Carol’s heart was ended—without having to fire a shot and find out which of the two was the fastest gun alive.
My brother, Kelly, [left] and I in the courtyard of Franklin house circa 1949
Carole Forman, after appearing in more than twenty-four separate films, then turned her acting skills to television and theatre. She died in Burbank, California in 1997.
The short peek behind the door and into the lives of these five Franklin house tenants gives us a much broader understanding of just how eclectic and far-reaching was George Hodel’s—web of connections.
In the 1940s, his hand was either directly ON or at least only one-degree-away from the power and the politics that was Los Angeles. As he told Baron Harringa on the DA tape:
“I’m the only one that knows how all these things fit together.”
Edmund Teske
“Bill Buck,” the former Sowden/Franklin house owner, who I interviewed in 2001, after telling me about “the bag lady,” went on to mention a second visitor.
BDA, pages 263-264:
Bill Buck also told me that another man who had visited the house on three different occasions over the years was a photographer named Edmund Teske, “a local photographer and sort of a fixture here in old Hollywood. He had a home just down the street on Hollywood Boulevard. He visited here three separate times over the years and told me he was a good friend of both your father and Man Ray.”