by Hodel, Steve
As stated elsewhere, though, both Jemison and Finis Brown were seemingly unaware of the identity of Elizabeth Short’s “unidentified downtown doctor.” With the information they had, they certainly had to consider and suspect that he was or could have been Dr. George Hill Hodel.
The surveillance and bugging of George Hodel’s residence, which resulted in his recorded confessions and admissions to payoffs to police, performing abortions, and the murders of Elizabeth Short and Ruth Spaulding, occurred just six weeks after Finis Brown’s testimony which focused on a “Hollywood doctor.”
Finally, there can be no doubt that Sgt. Finis A. Brown, as the lead detective in the initial Black Dahlia investigation and brother to Thad Brown, LAPD’s top detective and the man who said, “We solved the Black Dahlia murder. He was a doctor, living on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood” ALSO HAD TO KNOW AND TOOK THE SECRET WITH HIM TO HIS GRAVE.
After retirement, Finis Brown moved to West, Texas, where he died in 1990 at the age of eighty-four.
Finis A. Brown 1906-1990
R.I.P.
Finis A. Brown, West, Texas gravesite
[Photo courtesy of true-crime author, Ron Franscell]
Chapter 21
People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed—a knife—a purse—and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature…
Like Aeschylus or Milton in poetry, like Michael Angelo in painting, he has carried his art to a point of colossal sublimity; and, as Mr. Wordsworth observes, has in a manner “created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.” To sketch the history of the art, and to examine its principles critically, now remains as a duty for the connoisseur….”
The Society of Connoisseurs in Murder
From Thomas De Quincey’s—Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1842)
Dr. George Hill Hodel– A Surrealist Serial Killer—
With the publication of my sequel, Most Evil: Avenger, Zodiac and the Further Serial Murders of Dr. George Hill Hodel, the weight of evidence that surrealism was the primary motivator of and signature to my father’s three decades long killing spree is, I believe, established beyond any doubt.
Understanding how his many crimes are linked to this most unique signature is the key to understanding both the man and his madness.
We have come a long way in exploring the surreal linkage since my early ruminations written in 2002, where I first explored the possibilities in BDA in the chapter, “The Final Connections: Man Ray Thoughtprints.”
In that chapter, I explored the various links both in the posing of Elizabeth Short’s body in imitation of his surrealist friend, Man Ray’s two famous works: The Minotaur and Les Amoureux, (The Lovers Lips).
On pages 241-242, I wrote:
The killer had to make her death extraordinary both in planning and execution. In his role as a surreal artist, he determined that his work would be a masterpiece of the macabre, a crime so shocking and horrible it would endure, be immortalized through the annals of crime lore. As avenger, he would use her body as his canvas, and his surgeon’s scalpel as his paintbrush
…
George Hodel, through the homage he consciously paid to Man Ray, was provocatively revealing himself to be the murderer of Elizabeth Short. Her body, and the way she was posed, was Dr. George signature—both artistic and psychological—on his own surreal masterpiece, in which he juxtaposed the unexpected in a “still death” tribute to his master, using human body parts!
The premeditated and deliberate use of those two photographs—one symbolizing my father and Elizabeth as the lovers in Les Amoureux, and another my father as the avenger, the Minotaur himself, the bull-headed beast consuming and destroying the young maiden, Elizabeth, in sacrifice—is my father’s grisly message of his and Man Ray’s shared vision of violent sexual fantasy. Given George Hodel’s megalomaniacal ego, it was also a dash of one-upmanship.
I went on to enumerate the additional surreal connections to his crime.
The comparison of a 1945 Man Ray photograph, Juliet in Silk Stocking, showing his wife wearing a stocking mask to that of the Black Dahlia Avenger’s mailing to the press of a photo of the teenager Armand Robles, where my father drew an identical stocking mask over his face in imitation of Man Ray’s photograph.
I continued by explaining and publishing a painting George Hodel had commissioned by a Manila artist, Fernando Modesto, which was an erotic imitation of the same Man Ray, Lovers Lips painting, but in George Hodel’s version the lips appear to be dripping blood and overhead are seen three male phalluses, a vagina and spermatozoa. This my father hand delivered to Juliet Man Ray in Paris in the late 1980s. [His good friend, Man Ray had died there a decade earlier, in 1976.]
There was more. Man Ray’s 1946 photograph of George Hodel posed holding a statue of the Tibetan deity, Yamantaka, in which the god is in the “yab-yum” position, having sexual intercourse with his consort as dad looks on in what appears to be a sort of worshipful reverence.
I closed the chapter with a reference to the importance of the dream state to all surrealists and show a 1929 group photograph of many of the major surrealists in Paris, including Andre Breton, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dali and many others, all posing with eyes closed, affirming their support and preference for the subjective dream state in defiance of the conscious and rational.
Here is what Andre Breton had to say about it in his original 1924 Surrealist Manifesto:
The mind of the man who dreams is fully satisfied by what happens to him.
The agonizing question of possibility is no longer pertinent. Kill; fly faster, love to your heart’s content. And if you should die, are you not certain of reawaking among the dead? Let yourself be carried along, vents will not tolerate your interference. You are nameless. The ease of everything is priceless…
I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.
In BDA, I listed several different instances of how the importance of dreams reconnected to my father:
First, there was the description of George Hodel in the 1925 Los Angeles Evening Herald article, “The Clouded Past of a Poet,” by Ted Le Berthon in which he gives this description:
…
George drowned himself at times in an ocean of deep dreams. Only part of him seemed present.
He would muse standing before one in a black, flowered dressing gown lined with scarlet silk, oblivious to one’s presence.
Suddenly, though, his eyes would flare up like signal lights and he would say, “The formless fastidiousness of perfumes in a seventeenth century boudoir is comparable to my mind in the presence of twilight.”
…
Then, there are the posed photographs taken in 1946 at the Franklin house where, on two separate occasions, George photographed his subjects with “eyes closed.”
In 2006, I identified the one photograph whom we now know was his friend, Marya Marco. The second, the nude may or may not be Elizabeth Short, and she may or may not be dead, but, regardless, she [like Marya] is posed with eyes closed as if “in dream.”
Thirdly, are the “dream” references made by George Hodel at the time of his October 1949 arrest for incest and child molestation, which were published in the newspapers where he told the officers:
“We were delving into the mystery of love and the universe.
These acts of which I am accused are unclear, like a dream.
I can’t figure out if someone is hypnotizing me or I am hypnotizing someone.
If I am really here, then these things must have happened.”
Finally, is Father’s “Parable of the Sparrows” letter written to me in 1980, with its mystical questioning:
…
But are there only three of us? The bir
ds, the glass, and we? Or is there a fourth? Who is standing behind our glass, invisible to us, incommunicable to us, gravely watching our brave attacks against the walls we cannot see? Is there a fifth presence, watching all the others? And a sixth, and others, hidden in mysteries beyond our dreams?
L’inconnue de la Seine—
It wasn’t until the spring of 2006, just prior to making my trip to Paris to speak at the Pompidou Centre that I learned of L’inconnue de la Seine.
A woman who had read L’Affaire du Dahlia Noir, the excellent French translation of BDA by Robert Pepin, contacted me by e-mail and provided me details on the story.
I say story, but it really was much more than that. L’inconnue had become a mystery and legend throughout Europe, far outstripping that of our own—Black Dahlia.
The body of the L’inconnue, an attractive young woman, was found floating in the Seine sometime near the close of the nineteenth century. The date was uncertain; some believe it was around 1880. Apparently, there were no signs of major trauma. So, while murder could not be ruled out, most suggested she was a suicide.
As was the custom of that time, in hopes that she might be identified, her body was laid out for public display at the Paris Morgue, which was then located behind Notre Dame.
The open-air morgue, apparently, was like a bizarre bazaar, a public marketplace where hundreds of the curious came daily to view the dead.
The young woman remained unidentified, and a death mask—a plaster casting—was reportedly made of her face, which was then sold to the public.
By the 1920s, this mask of L’inconnue de la Seine, which many claimed had an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile, found its way inside the home and onto the hearth of many Europeans. It was especially popular in France and Germany.
From there, L’inconnue found her way into literature, with many books and stories, some major bestsellers, each claiming to offer forth the secret of just how she met her fate.
One of the most famous of those works was Aurelien, written by novelist, Louis Aragon, first published in 1944. Aragon collaborated with Man Ray, who at the time was living in Hollywood with his wife, Juliet. And both were regularly socializing with George and Dorothy Hodel.
Louis Aragon, like Man Ray, was a fellow Dadaist and in 1924 had been a founding member of surrealism, along with Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault.
Man Ray created eight photographs of the L’inconnue de la Seine for Aragon’s 1944 novel. A grateful Louis Aragon had this to say about Man Ray’s contribution:
“But in truth it is Man Ray who wrote the novel, playing in black and white with the mask of the Inconnue de la Seine.”
That George Hodel in his youth knew about this story and the legend, we can be certain. He would have been one of the many Bohemians cum surrealists who adopted and owned the legend in the 1920s and 1930s. It would not surprise me if he even owned his own mask.
In the 1940s, Dad would have discussed and explored the legend of the L’inconnue de la Seine with Man Ray, Juliet, and their friends, even as Man prepared his photographs for publication for the Aragon novel.
But I suspect there was more to it than parlor conversation. Based on my father’s photographs in his personal album, all taken by him during that time period, I believe his was an OBSESSION with L’inconnue de la Seine. Perhaps, a longstanding one that reached all the way back to his Bohemian and surrealist teens.
In the photographs below found in George Hodel’s album of “loved ones,” we see four different women. Each taken at a different time in the 1940s. Each woman he has posed with head tilted forward and looking down with eyes closed.
Compare these to the original photograph of L’inconnue de la Seine. I believe this was no “coincidence” but was a conscious, intentional posing by George Hodel in imitation of her original death mask.
In some twisted, psychopathological way, Dad connected to her story. The when of it is not so important. It could have been early in his teens or as late as 1944, with the legend first introduced to him by way of his friend, Man Ray, who was then actively working, researching, and photographing the L’inconnue for inclusion in Aragon’s novel.
This information also provides us with additional dramatic circumstantial evidence and gives more weight to the theory, examined in an earlier chapter, that the nude photograph, believed to be of Elizabeth Short, could well be a “trophy death mask.” George Hodel’s own L’inconnue de la Maison Franklin.
The below photograph of the Inconnue casting was taken by portrait photographer, Albert Rudomine in Paris in 1927. Rudomine, like my grandmother, was from Kiev, Russia, and, also like my grandparents, fled to Paris at the turn of the century. Rudomine, became a prominent portrait photographer [a number of his works now hang in the Getty museum] and he could well have known my grandparents who lived in Paris and were close friends with the Russian count and sculptor, Paul Troubetzkoy and his family.
L’inconnue de la Seine photo of death mask by Albert Rudomine, 1927
George Hodel photographs – An obsession with L’inconnue de la Seine?
Four women posed a la L’inconnue and photographed by George Hodel.
1. Unknown woman, possibly Elizabeth Short, taken at Franklin house, circa 1946
2. Marya Marco, taken at Franklin house, circa 1946
3. Kiyo, George Hodel’s former mistress and author’s future wife, taken circa 1944
4. Unknown woman, believed to be Filipina, taken unknown date and location, possibly early fifties
Exquisite Corpse
In September, 2006, literally on the eve of my television appearance on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, while I was making many of the surrealist connections between the Black Dahlia murder and my father, as well as publicly eliminating the one photograph in his album as not being Elizabeth Short, a new book was published. Combining the genres of true crime and art history, it added new information in support of my original surrealism chapter in BDA, as well as offering additional thoughts as to why “the murder may have been directly linked to surrealist art and ideas.”
The book, Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder (Bulfinch Press, 2006, New York) was co-written by Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss, two New York writers and art-researchers.
The book’s “Web of Connections” is an invaluable aid in helping map out many of George Hodel’s links to the art world and fellow surrealist’s then living in 1940s Los Angeles.
It also attempts to examine the core question of what were the surrealist’s relationships to the Black Dahlia murder. Who knew what and when did they know it?
Did Man Ray and his close circle of friends, in the days and weeks immediately following the crime, learn that their kindred spirit, and wannabe Dadaist, George Hodel was the prime suspect in her murder?
Did these men with their connections to LA’s “inner circle,” which included A-list screenwriter, Gene Fowler, acquire their own set of Black Dahlia crime scene photographs?
In his book, Reporters: Memoirs of a Young Newspaperman, [preface written by Ben Hecht] Will Fowler, son of Gene Fowler, described his 1947 involvement in the Black Dahlia investigation, as a then young crime reporter for the Los Angeles Examiner .
In his chapter on the Black Dahlia, Fowler described how he and his staff photographer, Felix Paegel, were the first to arrive at the vacant lot. He claimed that with their radio tuned to the police frequency, they had heard the call broadcast and being just a short distance away, “were the first to arrive.” Fowler goes on to detail how he examined the body, as his “partner,” Felix Paegel, took photographs of the body using his “Speed Graphic.”
From pages 74-75 of Will Fowler’s book, “Reporters”:
…
While I was kneeling next to the body, Paegel took a picture documenting that absolutely no one was in the immediate area. His two principal photos showed the body alone in the barren field, and the second of me stooping beside the body. Before it was published on the front page, it
was necessary for an Examiner artist to airbrush a large blanket covering all but the upper arms and lower legs. He also removed the deep slashes on either side of her face.
After Paegel photographed the body, Fowler described how the first two LAPD patrol officers arrived at the scene and seeing the two men standing adjacent to the corpse immediately drew down on them with their service revolvers. Fowler identified himself as a press reporter and continued his narrative. Page 75:
They [officers] gave me permission to leave the scene and I ran for a public phone. I stuck a nickel in the slot and dialed the desk, and when he heard me say, “cut in half,” Richardson [Los Angeles Examiner’s City Editor] told me to get the hell in with the negatives.
The city room was already buzzing about the story as Paegel disappeared into the photo lab to develop the negatives. When he emerged, he was carrying a large dripping wet 11x14 print of the body. Several people gathered around to get a first look.
Based on my follow-up investigation and review of police reports I have found that there is much in Will Fowler’s book that is simply NOT TRUE.
His chapter on the Black Dahlia is filled with inaccuracies, self-aggrandizement and hyperbole. But, none of that has to do with the point I am making here.
What IS TRUE and factual is: Will Fowler, was at the crime scene and did have his press photographer, Felix Paegel obtain overall original photographs depicting the location and condition of the body. Copies of these photographs were in his possession and also easily accessible to numerous other Los Angeles Examiner employees.
Will’s father, Gene Fowler and his close circle of friends, which included Ben Hecht, Rowland Brown [Dorothy Hodel’s then lover] Steve Fisher, and many more would have seen and very likely obtained copies of these pictures. They were simply too hot, not to handle.
Were copies of these Dahlia crime scene photos given to Man Ray and did he pass them on to his closest friend, Marcel Duchamp, who would use them as the inspiration for his final secret twenty-year art project, Etant Donnes?