Release Date: June 1st, 2016. Another Most Notorious classic episode, and one I get more feedback from than just about any other. People then and now are fascinated with the noir-ish Los Angeles murder of Elizabeth Short, and when the suspected killer is the father of the author, it makes the story even more intense. Steve told me afterwards that this was the best interview he’d ever done about his book, which of course pleased me to no end. Enjoy!
No case in Los Angeles crime history has been more discussed and speculated about than the January 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, aka The Black Dahlia. My guest, Steve Hodel, is a private investigator, former LAPD homicide detective, and author of Black Dahlia Avenger. In his book he documents his investigation into the murder, implicating his own father, George Hodel, in the process.
Part One Transcript (Note – this has been transcribed through an automated transcription software and isn’t 100% accurate. The best place to get the entire story is from the book itself!)
Erik: Welcome to the Most Notorious podcast. I’m Erik Rivenes. Our episode today is about the most notorious murderer in Los Angeles. The subject of countless books, movies, theories, lots of intense speculation. The victim is a woman who has gained far more infamy in death than she ever hoped to achieve in Hollywood.
Not only was her life taken in the most horrible way possible and her name and reputation slandered, but her mysterious killer has been almost glorified in American crime mythology. Well, my guest today has put together, Formidable evidence that makes a stunning argument for who the killer really was.
His father. I’m excited to be speaking to Steve Hodel, a private investigator and former Los Angeles homicide detective. He is also a New York Times and international bestselling author. His book, Black Dahlia Avenger, was nominated by the Mystery Writers of America as Best Fact True Crime book. It’s a great pleasure to have him with me here.
thank you so much for your time.
Steve: Oh, good to be with you, Erik.
Erik: Before we get to the actual Black Dahlia murder, there’s a lot more that we need to set up. This is a really complex story. It’s not only about solving a murder or even a series of murders, but it’s about you and the relationship with your father, who you have proven is the murderer of the Black Dahlia, aka Elizabeth Short.
But I want to ask you, before we get into that, if you wouldn’t mind talking about your own. How you grew up and how you came to join the LAPD.
Steve: Sure. Basically born in Los Angeles in 1941. I had two brothers and I kind of bounced all around The first 10 years of my life, we, we lived with my father who was a Dr. George Hill Hodel. He was a prominent physician in, in Los Angeles, head of LA County Health, and a little bit later we can, I can go into some heavy biographics on him because he obviously, To, to understand this whole story. It’s important to understand my father and his life. But basically my mother had been married to the famous film director John Houston, who many of your listeners may be familiar with.
He had a lot of African Queen Treasurer of Sierra Madre, Multipal, and all sorts of classic film. and my mother had been married to John, who had been a friend of my father’s as teenagers. And she divorced him after about seven years of marriage and married my father. And soon after that, four sons were born to her.
My older brother Michael. Was born in 39. He grew up to become a quite a well known radio announcer with kpk, a local FM station here. And kind of dedicated his life to public service and, and and the underdogs of life. Then I, I came along in 41, my younger. Kel came along at 42. Actually I was a twin.
John was born, only survived like three weeks. We were premature, three pound babies, so basically grew up in the LA Hollywood area. Lived in this wonderful kind of Mayan temple mansion in Hollywood. Then my father left for the Phil. Actually he left for Asia suddenly. And there were the three boys and mom.
And we kind of bounced around and I, I talk about this in my book is the gypsy years bounced around to different areas of Los Angeles. Kind of she was struggling to, to take care of three boys. She was an alcoholic, but also a screenwriter. So at 17 I did the, I decided I wanted to get off of my own and, and joined the Navy and right at 17, got her permission, was in for four years, got out.
Thought I, I was a medic. I was a corpsman in the Navy. And, and when I got discharged, I took a job at Kaiser Hospital here as an orderly, thinking maybe I’d go into medicine. But then the fates decided otherwise. And next thing I knew I was joining the lapd, and this would’ve been in the early sixties, 63.
I actually went through the police academy and from. Graduated and worked patrol, uniform patrol with LAPD for six years, then went into detectives at Hollywood, worked all the tables there, eventually graduated to, to homicide. And basically I spent my entire rest of my career the next 17 years working as a LAPD homicide.
Out of Hollywood division, which is like a, you call ’em precincts. We had 18 divisions in the city at that time, and that was one of the divisions. Hollywood, over 300 murder investigations during my career had a exceptionally high solve rate. I was running around 75, 80% solves. So I had a great reputation.
And basically retired from LAPD in, in 1986. After 20, almost 24. Became a private investigator, had a couple of sons, and at that point decided to get out of the main streets of LA and my boys were like five and seven and went north to Bellingham, Washington. And became a PI Criminal Invest defense investigator at that time.
And kind of became the only, it was a small town just near the border of Canada, in Washington state, and raised my boys there. And basically got that 3:00 AM phone call informing me that my father had died. And he was, at that time he was living in San Francisco and high. and I flew down and did all the things that a son has to do to take care of a father’s passing.
And from there that started me into my investigations.
Erik: So you get the call, go back to California, and you meet with your father’s widow June there. You’re pretty much assigned the task of going through your father’s personal belongings. Belongings. He had actually asked his wife to destroy after he had died.
And one of those things was a small photo book and one photo in particular. Inside kind of sets things in motion for you. Doesn’t it?
Steve: It does. And maybe it’s, it would be best to give your listeners some background on my father. He was, without question the most remarkable man I’ve, I’ve ever known in my life.
And his background was so varied and so eclectic that you really understand what comes next. You really kind of have, have to understand the man himself. And if you like, I can go into detail as to his his, his background.
Erik: Absolutely. So let’s start with your father.
Steve: Okay. So, George Hodel was born in Los Angeles in 1907.
He was an only child born in downtown LA at Fifth and Olive of all places Clara Barton. He was, his, his parents were Russian Jews. My grandfather George Sr. Had was born in Odessa. And my grandmother was also born in Russia and they, they met in Paris to turn the century. My, my grandfather fled Russia just as he was about to be called into service for the Army.
And he managed to get out because. Jews were treated almost like slaves in the service at that time, at the turn of the century. And he managed to escape on a train dressed up, got fancy luggage, and, and said he was visiting his sick grandmother and got out of the country, went to Paris where he actually met Esther, my grandmother, who was there as a dentist.
Very unusual. You imagine a woman dentist in. Oh one Paris. Right. Very unusual, Brilliant woman. Anyway, they fell in love and got married, came through Ellis Island about 1902 or three, and came out west to Los, was were in New York for a year or two. Then they came west to LA and George was born in 19 Oh.
Quickly. At age six or seven, he was identified as being highly gifted. He was a musical prodigy playing his own piano concerts at the Shrine Auditorium at the age of nine, beating out adult pianists, highly gifted musical genius. They then soon discovered that he was also intellectually superior.
Tested out at 186 iq, one point above Einstein. Incidentally, that skips a generation, so , but my, my boys are in good shape. Anyway, the he went to South Pasadena Junior High, graduated there at the age of 14. And went to Cal Tech, which was one of our top technical universities here in highly respected in Pasadena.
So, S Caltech at the age of 14. And not only is he intellectually gifted and, and musically a musical prodigy, but he’s also sexually precocious, let’s say has an affair with one of the professor’s wives at Caltech when he is 15 and she gets pregnant. , he’s that breaks up her marriage.
She goes back east to the east coast and has the. And George follows her back and says, I want to marry you. I love you. And she says, George, you’ve ruined my life. You’re a kid yourself. You know, go home. You know, get outta my life. So he comes back, and of course, Caltex says, you know, because of the scandal, he’s, he was forced to leave after a year, and he hooks up and he, and he becomes a cab driver in la in the, we’re now into the early twenties, mid Twentie.
And he gets a job. He passes himself off at 17 as 21, gets a chauffeur’s licenses driving yellow cab. And then he gets a job with the one of the top LA newspapers, the LA record, which was here in LA and, and becomes a crime reporter, . And he is riding arrests during Prohibition. He’s riding around with the LAPD Vice.
And they’re kicking doors and he’s going in and taking names and writing these kind of tabloid articles in the newspaper. The judges was seen with the young blonde about drinking at the bar and stuff, and then he graduates and starts writing around with homicide, lapd, homicide guys the big boys, and writes again, these tabloid stories.
The, on these murders in the, in 1924, 25. Does that for about a year or so, and then he starts double dating. With John Houston, who was at that time, of course, not the famous director, but at that time he was just the son of a, his father, Walter Houston was a very famous actor, stage and screen, one of the a-list actors of the day.
And he was his son. So dad and he were friends as teenagers and they were double dating a. Girls, women, young women, teenagers, 18 and 19. And one was named Dorothy and the other was Emily. Well, John and Emily were dating and George and Dorothy were dating. And then at some point, after a number of months they switched and John fell in love with Dorothy.
They ran off to Greenwich Village and got married at 1819. And Emily and, and George. Looking at each other and I said, I guess it’s you and me. She gets pregnant and George and Emily go north to San Francisco where dad starts medical school pre-med at Berkeley. Four years there. He then goes across the bay to U C S F San Francisco at, to get his md and he’s going through there and he gets a job with the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper as a columnist.
He, he has a joint co byline. And Alia, and they’re writing these columns actually it’s called abroad in San Francisco, where they’re writing about stories about different sections of San Francisco and the different ethnic communities and, and cultures and stuff. So he does that. He gets, gets through medical school and while he’s in medical school with all of his other gifts, he also.
A natural ability as a surgeon. He’s, he has incredible eye hand coordination, so his professors are vying for him to be their assistant because he’s so naturally skilled in, in surgery. He graduates in 36, well before that he’s actually the child. A child is born Toea, which is Duncan in 1928. He then has an affair with another woman at the same time.
And a second child is born to. By the name of Tamar in 1935. He graduates in 36, so he’s got these two small children and he decides to take off and he gets a job with the US Health Department doctoring to the at a actually at a logging camp as a surgeon. So he does that for a year or so.
Then he goes and, and doctors to the Hopi and Navajo Indian reservations in New Mexico and. Does that for a few years and then comes back to la joins the health department. LA Health Department quickly rises to the top specializes in vd venereal disease control rises to the top and becomes the VD control officer for LA County.
At this point, Dorothy, who had John Houston’s Dorothy had been married to him for seven years. They break up, she comes back, hooks back up with George. And my older brother Michael, is born in 39. I come along in 41 and my younger brother Kelly, is born in 42. So they’re, they get married and dad buys a Frank Lloyd Wright Junior home in Hollywood.
It’s a, a Mayan temple. It’s been used in quite a few of the, the films La Confidential and, and Aviator and, and it’s easily recognizable. It’s literally a huge stone castle in the heart of Hollywood. Look, looks exactly like a May temple. So that is now head of LA County Health vd. He has his he has his children there.
And from 1945 to 1949. We, we have these incredible, he’s having these incredible parties. The rich and famous are coming and he’s entertaining a lot of the film people and a lot of them politicos of the day. And then at, at in 1949, there’s a knock at the door of the, this, of our home and it’s lapd and they say, Dr.
George Hodel. And he says, And they said, you’re under arrest for incest, and they take him into custody. Well, you recall the Tamar that was born in 35. She’s now 14, and she came down that summer to live with us. And she runs away from home while she’s living with us, and the police pick her up and she they said, Why did you run away from home?
And Tamar says, Well, because my life is so messed up. And I say, What do you. She says Well, and then she reveals that her father had sexual intercourse with her, with two or three other adults in the bedroom. So big scandal, newspaper articles, LA head of LA County Health, arrested for child molestation, incest.
Well, dad, he’s case is filed in court and he’s held to answer. And then there’s a jury trial and dad hires Jerry Geis. Who some of your listeners may be familiar with was the top criminal attorney in the nation at that time. He was kind of a Johnny Cochran of his day, and he hires him.
There’s a three, three week trial and they come back and the jury comes back in about 45 minutes and kind of an OJ decision. Not guilty with that. Dad shortly after that leaves the country. and goes to Asia. Well, he actually goes to uh, Hawaii, which was a territory at the time. Gets, becomes a psychiatrist then goes on remarries, goes on to Asia, and uses Manila Philippines as his home base and gets into market research, kind of reinvents himself as a market research genius, becomes the leading authority in, in all of Asia on market research, which, Kind of born at about that time in the, in the fifties, and has four more children.
Marries a wealthy Filipino, actually she becomes a senator and has four more children. Divorces her after about four years, five years. Hooks up with his young one of his young assistants secretary, June, a Japanese. Who will spend the next 30 years with him. So he travels all over the world doing these market research for a lot of the top airlines and hotels and stuff.
And eventually, in 1990 comes back to San Francisco after 35, 40 years. Although he was coming here every year or every six months, or every year for short trips, business trips and stuff, he finally relocates to San Francisco in 19. And I make contact with him. I start seeing him on a regular basis.
I’m in Bellingham, Washington. I go down, he comes up and we develop a very close relationship. At this point in his life. He’s got 11 children by five different women, and he’s living on the 39th floor of a high rise in downtown San. So we see each other for the next decade. I spend quite a bit of time with him back and forth.
We become quite close and then I get that 3:00 AM call from June saying your father’s collapsed. The paramedics are here. They just pronounced him dead. I fly down and start to do what all sons do in the passing of a parent and, and that pulls me into my investigation, .
Erik: Was it difficult getting close to him, knowing what he did to your sister? Were there ever any conversations about that?
Steve: Well, you know, the, this course, the, the, the story was that I mean, what he presented to the world and to everybody else, including all the other extended family, was that it never happened. That was his position and that, you know, they, they painted, basically his attorney painted Tamar with.
As a pathological liar and, and she was making it all up. It was all fantasy and I was one of the few, and most family members believed, kind of believed it was maybe made up that, you know, dad didn’t do it. Certainly all of the Filipino family believed that. My brother and I both believed that it happened and because, you know, I.
I, I would, I considered myself a fair judge of, of people and dad was very eccentric and I knew that he was, you know, obviously, you know, obsessed with sex. And so I, I was in full belief. I, I had no, never had any doubts that he, he did commit it. But a lot of others didn’t believe it. So it was kind of a mixed bag for Tamar.
And she had, and it of course, impacted. Even though, you know, the amazing thing was there were three adults present in the room during the sex acts, and they testified in court, and yet he beat. He beat it. We would later, later discover in my investigation that there were indications of a payoff.
Erik: From what you write in your book. The prosecution had an absolute slam dunk. Witnesses galore. Actual witnesses who were there in the bedroom testified but his defense attorney. Really pulled off a coup.
Steve: Well, he really did. And, and we also learned that apparently at $15,000, and you also gotta remember back then in, in, in 49, LA was a real life LA confidential.
I mean, there was a lot of corruption. All a lot of the cops, everybody, a lot of the politicals, a lot of, in the DA’s office, everybody was getting payoffs. So it wasn’t all that. And she was, you know, she was this beautiful me. I mean, you look at pictures of my half sister Tamar, and she, she looks like a little Marilyn Monroe, and she was ab absolutely, you know, 14 going on, you know, 25 or whatever.
And, and so tragically and, and her life because of that, I mean because of those, those, those allegations and, and that she was labeled and painted with this pathological liar, brush. Her life kind of spun outta control. And she went to San Francisco and became, you know, one of the original bohemians and, and, and hippies and kind of sex drugs, rock and roll type thing.
So we, I had almost no contact with Tamar really for the first 50 years of our life. I mean, we just didn’t, I, I, you know, she went on to Hawaii and, and to have for. Children for, for, for children and all different fathers and stuff. So the only time I really connected with her was after dad’s death, you know, like 40 years.
And then we started talking and, and and, and comparing notes because she still loved her father, you know. And I had become close. So after dad’s death, in the weeks following that, we started conversations for the first time and. That also contributed. So maybe I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll let your listeners get an idea of what kind of the, the point is that this investigation came to me.
I didn’t go to it. Oddly enough, I knew very little about the black da. I didn’t even know the black Dahlia’s name, Elizabeth Short. I knew it was a famous whodunit from the forties. But as a, as a young homicide detective, I, I was concerned with the sixties and seventies and eighties, not the, not the past.
And there was never any indication that there was any connection or to my family or anything while I was on the job. It was only 14 years into, into retirement that I would, I would start to discover things.
Erik: So to bring it around again to that pivotal moment, you’re going through your father’s things and you find this little book of photographs. And as you’re skimming through the book, you’re shocked to find a picture who you later discovered to be Elizabeth Short.
Steve: Right. So, so what happened was, I go down and, and June is in, of course a deep depression. They’ve been married 30 years. She was actually, she was suicidal. She was gonna take her life.
And so I spent, you know, the first few days dealing with that and saying, No, you’re younger than me, June, you’ve got a lot to live. You know and kind of talking her through that. And then we’re sitting there one evening and, and she comes out and she actually hands me this little book that belonged to my father.
And it’s like three by five inch book. It was wooden bound and it had a bunch of pictures in it. Small pictures of my mother my brothers and I my grandfather. and I’m leafing through this book and turning the pages. And there were photos by Man Ray, who plays an important part in the story, who was a famous surrealist photographer and he was our, actually our family photographer back in the forties.
And they’re pictures by man, Ray of my mother and, and us boys and stuff. And I’m going through and I look and I see this photograph of a dark haired young woman, semi reclining, and she was, and I turned to June and I said, Who is this? And she looked at it and she says, I don’t know somebody your father knew from a long time ago.
But the face looked familiar, and I think, Why do I know this face? Well, it clearly looked like a photo from the forties, but I, I couldn’t pull it in. And then for some strange reason, Black Dahlia comes to mind. And to this day, I can’t say for sure why that, why Black Dahlia came to mind. There was a film in the, in the mid seventies, a television movie called Who Is The Black Dahlia?
And Lucy Ez played the part of Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia. And the picture was almost picture perfect to her. It looked just like her. So I’m thinking, well, maybe that was the source of it. The, the Cuz I had seen that movie. But anyway, it just kind of, it was a passing. But then three or four days later, I’m on the phone with Tamar, who’s in Hawaii, and I’m talking to her and we’re talking about Dad and, and reflecting on memories and what a great man he was and all of this.
And she comes out of nowhere and says, Well, you know, he was a, you know, he was a suspect in the Black Dahlia murder. And I said, What are you talking about? And she says, Yeah, well, he didn’t do it, but he was a suspect back then in the murder. And I said, Where is this coming from? She says, Well, when I was picked up by LAPD on the runaway and made my disclosure, they told me, and we were going to court back and forth.
They told me that, you know, he was a suspect in the murder. . And of course, you know, you think, Well, why would this have never come up? Well, I, I don’t think I had more than 30 minutes of conversations with Tamar in the previous 50 years. So we had, you know, gone on our separate roots in life and stuff. So anyway, there was that, and then I started looking into it and I start researching, get online and start looking at the case itself.
And the next thing I. So that’s the first or second blinking red light. And then I discover that a crime was committed by a surgeon. Well, dad was a skilled surgeon in his, in his early doctoring days, but still, I, it never occurred to me that he might be the suspect. I thought, Well, you know, what’s the, what’s the deal here?
Well, then what the, the real turning point was maybe a couple of weeks later, my girlfriend, who’s living in Los Angeles. I had her send me up stuff from the LA newspapers, articles, original articles and stuff from the UCLA library, and she sends me one that’s a front page and it’s a note. Well, turns out the black, the killer Elizabeth Shorts killer, the Black Dahlia started sending in these notes, cut and paste notes, like ransom notes and disguised handwriting and, and printings and.
And he sent in maybe a dozen in the two or three weeks following her murder to the press, taunting them, taunting the police, taunting the press signing at Black Dahlia Avenger. And in one of these notes, he which was, there was most of the handwriting was disguised, but this one, one note wasn’t, and it was on the front page of the newspaper and it said, turning myself in on January 20.
Had my fun at the police, signed Black Dahlia Avenger. And I look at the handwriting and it’s my father’s handwriting. I mean, no doubt about it. You know your parents’ handwriting, your listeners know theirs. And I know my father’s and I still said, Well, wait a minute. This can’t be, what’s the deal here? Is he pretending to be, Does he know the killer?
What’s going on here? And at that point I said, You know, I, I need. Follow this up. So at that point, I, I basically decided to relocate back to LA and do a full bore, realizing I couldn’t do an absentee investigation from Bellingham, Washington. And I had been divorced and stuff, and my boys were off to school and college and, and out of high school.
So I relocated back to LA in 2000 and, and began my investigation would spend the next three years. Two and a half, three years, putting it all together, interviewing people, and eventually, I, I went to the la in secret. I went to the DA’s office to district head DA by the name of Steve K, who was one of the top, He was like the number three man in the DA’s office.
He had he, he, he was probably the, the best prosecutor that they’ve ever. . He worked with Glisi on the Manson murders and just was a top-notch guy who I totally respected. We met in secret. I gave him all of my files and exhibits and said, Here’s the evidence, Take a look. So he did for a couple of months, got back to me and said, You know, unbelievable.
He said, You know, were your father still alive? I would file at least two counts of murder on him. One. Black Dahlia murder Elizabeth Short in 1947. And then the second one for a murder that actually occurred three weeks afterwards, which was a, a, a woman by the name of Gene French, which is known as the Red Lipstick murder where she was, you know, beaten to death, strangled, beaten to death, body posed on a vacant lot, just like Elizabeth Shorts three weeks afterwards, and the killer used lipstick and wrote a pro profanity on her.
Conning the police. And actually what I had discovered as if it wasn’t enough that dad was connected to the Dalia murder and the French, but what I discovered was there were a series of lone woman murders that occurred in the forties, all in a very tight geographical area in LA from Hollywood to downtown to west side, about nine murders.
And basically put, I. Each of them together in different ways and felt he was responsible for, for at least those nine, if not more. So the da basically says, you know, I would file these two. At that point I said, Okay, I’ll go public with this. And I wrote up my, and I wrote the book and, and it came out in oh three and basically, Yeah, as you know, it, it, you know, gained a lot of publicity.
It was, you know, it was featured on Dateline and, and 2048 hours and, and they’ve done five or six different hour shows on my investigation over the years for the last 14, 15 years now.
Erik: So let’s talk about Elizabeth Short, who she was, how she ended up in Los Angeles, and how she was eventually found.
Steve: Sure. So Elizabeth Short was a, a young woman 22 years old who came out to Hollywood from Medford, Massachusetts. She was born in Medford, Massachusetts. She was, it was war time. Second World War was in full swing and. She dropped out of high school and basically came out to LA to, to meet Lieutenant Wright.
Basically, she wanted to fall in love with a military man during the war and get married and live happily ever after. And she came out to, to Los Angeles and was living oh, in Long Beach for a while. She was dating some servicemen down. and then she came to Hollywood and was, were was dating men and stuff and, and going to the military, the USOs and stuff.
And basically she was kind of naive, young, naive, you know, 22 going on 14, maybe not at already for the shark infested waters of Los Angeles and Hollywood, and. She dated different guys and stuff. And then on the morning of January 15th, 1947, a woman was taking a stroller, taking her small child daughter to market, and she’s in an area called the Laer Park area of Los Angeles, which is about five miles south of Hollywood.
And she looks over and she sees this, what she thinks is a man. On the vacant lot in this neighborhood. And then she looks closer and, and realizes that no, it’s, it’s actually a, a body. So she goes quickly, goes south to the first home, not door knocks at nobody home. She goes to another home of a Dr.
Walter Bailey and his wife, and she asks to use their phone. She calls the police reports what she’s seen. Please respond. And this begins what become. LA’s most notorious murder of, of, of the century, and which is, will become known as the Black Dahlia. Please get there. They’re horrified with what they see.
They see it at the crime scene. There’s a body, a woman’s body, young woman, she’s a Jane Doe. No identification, and sh the body is carefully posed. It’s, it’s surgically, bisected at the waist, skillfully, there’s no blood. Clearly the crime didn’t occur. Body has been washed clean. It’s a horrendous sight.
These are veteran seasoned homicide detectives there, and they’re, they’ve never seen anything like it. Hands over the head are posed in a careful poi in a special position. The bo, the lower torso is juxtaposed just off the sidewalk, just below the upper torso. Signs of extended torture cuttings to the body, ligature marks on the neck and the ankles and the.
A hysterectomy has been performed on the, on the woman and cuttings. And then when they get to the coroner’s office and they, they do the actual autopsy and protocol, they dis discover some horrendous things. She was actually forced to eat feces. She was, they found some of her private parts in her rectum and just on and on this, this horrible, horrible murder, which is really what made it stand out from the others because, Extreme sadism involved in it, and, and they estimate that it probably was three or four hours of torture.
And the one thing they were sure of that this was a skilled surgeon, not some meat cutter or, you know, that the, whoever had this had to be a trained, skilled medical doctor, or, you know, highly skilled in anatomy. She was a Jane Doe for just 24 hours and, and then they sent her fingerprints back to the fbi.
And they came back with a name and a positive id. They learned her name was Elizabeth Short, She was 22. She had worked at a military base about 40 miles north of La Camp Cook. She had worked at the PX there store, military store. And with that they, they located her parents back, back in Medford and her mother.
And they learned her name was Elizabeth Short and she was 22. And they started backgrounding checking her and they discovered actually the newspapers were vying for headlines. This actually became one of the most media it was a media, huge media coverage, 30 days above the fold on all five or six of the major newspapers here in LA at the time.
It was just before, you know, this was before tele, just before television, so to speak, caught on and it was kind of like the, the last major print story. And one of the reporters called a pharmacy. She was known to hang out Soda Place in Long Beach, and discovered that the military guys there called her the Black Dahlia.
And that name came. A film that was out that previous summer called the Blue Dahlia, which was a noir murder mystery. And she would come in there and, and stuff, and they just kind of named her the Black Dahlia. So you’ve got this, this gr mysterious name, the Black Dahlia. You’ve got this beautiful young woman, you’ve got this horrible crime, and they all came together to make headlines and it, it just spun on and, and remained.
So for the next. 60 days headlines not only locally but across the nation. So that’s kinda what started the investigation and, and it went from there.
Erik: The police had a lot of suspects to talk to, a lot of leads to follow up on because as you’ve mentioned, she dated a lot of guys, seemed to be constantly going out on dates at various nightclubs and restaurant. Staying in different hotels, staying with friends when she was short on cash, which seemed to be frequent. So there were plenty of people to sort through for the police. And in addition, as you’ve already said, the killer was sending out notes to taut the police and the newspapers. It’s just pure chaos now. The killer even calls the editor of one of the newspapers one night to chat with him, one on one. Doesn’t he?
Steve: That’s right. The city editor receives a phone call from the actual suspect and the killer says, you know, I understand you’re having, you hit a block, you know, a dead end. Well maybe I could help you out.
And city editor James Richardson was his name. So, so how, so he says, Well, how about if I send in a, some of her personal effects? Maybe that’ll help you, and I’ll send in. I I’ll send in a letter and her personal effects and, and maybe that’ll he help you move forward on it. And the city editor’s signals to his secretary there to try and track the phone call.
And , the killer says, I, I think I’ll hang up now. I’m sure you’re gonna try and track my phone and he hangs. Well, within two or three days, the city editor Richardson, gets this package and it’s her per, and it’s not her purse, it’s her personal ID cards, social security cards, birth certificate, and some photographs from her purse.
Personal photographs of her with some other guys and stuff with a note saying, Here it is promised to mail this to you. And, and here are some of her personal belongings and he signs a Black Dahlia. So Richardson, you know, he, he, he kept that secret. Nobody actually knew that the killer called in. He kept it until about seven years later when he wrote his memoirs.
And he has a chapter on that in there. And, He says, I’ll never forget that soft, sly voice, he says if he ever calls in again. But he never did. He, he thought he might call in again, but, but the, the killer never did call back. And again, a lot of the accounting notes were cut and paste and stuff, and mailed to both the police and, and the press.
It, it was very active. I mean, you know, hugely active for the first six months or so of the investigation. Then it. Faded off and every, oh, every anniversary, like every five year anniversary on January 15th, the newspapers would, you know, resurrect the crime and remains an unsolved and stuff. And, and then of course from there they, a number of books were written, fictional books.
Probably the most famous is Elroy Black Dahlia, James Elroy, which is totally fiction. It has nothing very little to do with the crime itself, except he use. Her name, Elizabeth Short and the location. But other than that, it’s, it’s total fiction. It has nothing to do with a real story. But tragically over the decades, you know, there’s so much myth arises from it and they turned her into a, a prostitute and a junkie, and a, a dope themed.
And, and all of these, you know, terrible to terrible stories were created by hack writers. In fact, I spent a whole chapter in the book, you know, rehabilitating her reputation because she wasn’t a prostitute. She wasn’t, she, she barely drank. She mostly drank just soda Cokes. And she was a bit of a tease.
She, you know, date a guy and stuff. But but other than that, she, you know, none of the things that were ascribed to her in all of these very dark, fictional books and, and, and in the films and stuff were, were. One of the things that I, I do in, in the follow up version is that there are a number of myths that I try and de myth.
One of the big things that still stands to this day, to many people is her so-called missing week. Supposedly from January 9th when she was brought up to Los Angeles and dropped at the Biltmore Hotel, which is downtown at Fifth and Olive. Supposedly there’s a missing week from the ninth until the body was found on the 15th of January.
And, you know, legend has it that she walked out the door of the Bilmore Hotel on the ninth and was never seen again, walked into the fog. Well, that’s all totally, totally untrue. And I, I was able in my investigation to locate and actually put together 14 different witness. Who saw her during that so-called missing week in Hollywood, in downtown.
And seven of those 14 actually knew her personally, so they couldn’t have been mistaken. So I was able to establish that there was no missing week that, that actually the last person to see her was an LAPD woman downtown who talked to her, had a conversation with her. What we do know is that Elizabeth Short, in the last month or so of her began running. She was in fear of a man that was going to kill her. And she fled to San Diego. Spent quite a few weeks down there and then came back and this police woman actually saw her on the 14th, the day before the body was found coming out of a bar. Oh. She ran out of a bar and said, There’s a man in there that’s threatened to kill and the police woman goes back in. The man’s not there, but they get her purse and stuff, and she talks to her. I was actually able to locate that woman. You imagine 50, So 50 years later. Wow. That, that retired, that was one of my most amazing, amazing interviews was with this actual police woman who was the last to see her alive before the murder.
And there was no doubt in her mind, I mean, this, it’s not like, this might have been Elizabeth Short, this was Elizabeth. .
Erik: So that was one of the myths, was this missing week. The other, the second myth that came along was the department’s position was, Oh, it’s a standalone murder. None before. None after one of a kind.
Steve: Totally untrue. And, and as I’ve, we’ve talked a little bit about the, the lone woman murders, there were at least nine. That, that I’m absolutely. Considered definites two of those. Of course, I mentioned that Kay said he would file, he liked the other ones, but he said there’s not enough there to actually file except on the two.
Anyway, there was a bunch of these, these murders that and, and it wasn’t like Steve Odell was just saying this, it was actually LAPD at the time, back then was actively investigating these as related. They didn’t, they didn’t have the term serial murder back. But serial killer. But they, but they, they called them in that, what was the thing?
Oh, they called them chains, . And, and they were definitely you know, they definitely had many of them, four or five of them connected. They even put out a, a in the newspaper. They printed a 11 point paper on why they believed many of these were connected, listing 11 points. Wanted to leave to, it was the same suspect.
So again, that was another myth that became, you know, was lost in over the decades. And the other, and, and this we can get into later perhaps, is that the, that LAPD never solved the crime. And of course, they did solve the crime. And, and that’s a whole section in itself that we would discover after my book comes out.
So normally what was interesting about this case and my investigation was, Normally in all my other murders, you start with a kind of a clean plate, a tabula rowell, if you will, and you, and you move forward. Well with this, I had to, you know, separate the wheat from the shaf and, and figure out what was real and what wasn’t, because there was so much myth and legend stacked upon it.
I had to kind of clean the plate, so to speak, before I could move forward. So that added a unique twist to my, my investigation which. Well, the first part of it lasted three years.
Erik: So as the police investigation continues, a man suddenly steps forward claiming to be the murderer of Elizabeth Short. The newspapers, of course, trumpet the confession in their headlines.
You write your book that this confession from this kid might actually have been the catalyst for the red lipstick murder. A murder that you’ve already talked about, the victim, Jean French. Can, can you talk about that connection?
Steve: Absolutely. So January 15th of 47 was the Black Dahlia murder and the body was found.
And then three weeks later as I mentioned earlier, there was this body of gene French. That was found in West la, which was about five miles west of the Dalia crime scene in a, almost in the same parallel spot, directly West spot, five miles. And the body was found on a vacant lot. It it was nude.
Covered with her clothing. She’d been, she wasn’t surgically bisected, but she was had been strangled and, and beaten to death with a, probably a tire iron. And the obscenity was written in lipstick. It was f you black consigned bd for obviously Black Dahlia. And what had happened was there were a lot of confessing, what they were calling confessing Sams back then people wanted 15 minutes of fame and they would say, I killed Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia. So they were running around trying to, to interview and, and, and talk to these various false confessions. And then they got a, a guy in a military based back east private Duma and he claimed he killed her and the military police back.
Interviewed him and he wrote out like, I don’t know, 25 page confession. And LAPD jumped on it and it, as you say, it was, it was six inch headlines in the newspaper Duma. Private Duma confesses or corporal, I guess he was Duma confesses to killing the Black Dahlia. And they had this lengthy confession all in print and stuff.
It was huge. And case solved. And basically two days after that appeared. And LAPD kind of went along with it and, and what had happened was one of the mystery writers, well known mystery writers of the day, I’m blanking on his name right now, but he wrote into the, an article into the newspaper because they were asking different experts on their opinions on the, the Dalia murder.
And this one mystery writer wrote in saying, you know, basically what I would do if, if I were the police, I would claim that we’ve got a confession from a, a man. And he’s confessed to the crime. And he says, This would so enr the real killer that he would turn himself in to, to give, give himself up because he didn’t want someone else claiming his, his.
Well, unbelievably, the, the newspapers, actually three days after this article, they did exactly that. They knew that this Duma was not the true killer because they LAPD had established, he was actually in his military base back east at the time of the murder. But they went ahead and printed this anyway, following this mystery writer’s advice, thinking maybe the killer would turn himself in.
Erik: So what does the killer do? Does he turn himself in?
Steve: What he does is he commits a murder, and this is the, this is in response to the so-called confession. He writes on the body F U B D, and it’s in response to their claiming, you know, rather than turning himself in, he just kills again to prove he. That they’ve got the wrong killer.
So that was pretty shocking. And, and the handwriting on the body. We haven’t talked a lot about the evidence, but, but one of the, one of the things I did was I had a handwriting, a court certified handwriting expert, analyze my father’s handwriting against many of the Dalia mailing. And, and along with this one on the body, which was very clearly printed in a very unique, again, my father’s unique printing.
Anyway, she came back with highly probable that George Hodel wrote the message on the body. And basically this was his, his way of, of again, taunting the police by killing again. And he would, he would do it in other ways and other, other forms later. And then there’s a whole bunch of other things that ties him to it.
The car that was Gene French was last seen, was identical to his 37 Packard Black Packard. The description, he was seen eating with her at a restaurant at late around midnight that night before. Fit his description perfectly. On and on a whole bunch of reasons. I just couldn’t believe that he would, that the newspapers would actually knowingly do this.
And, and in a way you could say they were indirectly responsible for the tragic murder of a, of a woman. Just, just because they were following this crime writer’s crazy idea of getting him to confess.
Erik: So this episode today with Steve Hodel covers a good part of his first book, The Black Dahlia Avenger.
Although of course there’s a ton that we were not able to cover in this week’s episode. So this interview will continue next week, and in it we talk about some of the evidence Steve has gathered that points to his father, George as the killer of the Black Dahlia and other murders as well, murders in other cities, even other c.
We discuss motive too, so stay tuned.
So, I’ve helped fill your weekend and you can feel good knowing you’ve helped me and my little one man operation. Stay afloat, , and keep this podcast going strong. This has been the most notorious podcast, broadcasting to every dark and cob webbed corner of the world. I’m Erik Rivenes. We’ll continue this discussion with Steve Hodel next week on the Black Dahlia.
And in the meantime, have a safe tomorrow.
