A Killer in the Family

11/9/2024

by M.P. Pellicer | Stranger than Fiction Stories
Most families resist the possibility that one of their members is not only a murderer, but a serial sexual sadist killer linked to one of the most infamous, unsolved murders of the 20th century.

The discovery of Elizabeth Short's bisected body in January 1947 brought her a fame that had eluded her in life.

On a January morning in 1947, Betty Bersinger accompanied by her 3-year-old daughter came upon what she thought was a mannequin, lying ten feet from the sidewalk. She assumed this because the human figure sprawled on the ground had been bisected at the waist and was inhumanely pale, what she didn't realize was that the body was exsanguinated. Once she realized it was a dead woman, she called police about what she had found on a vacant lot, in what was then an undeveloped area known as Leimert Park.

The murder victim was later identified as Elizabeth Short. Her face had been slashed at the mouth from ear to ear, giving her what is called a "Glasgow Smile". There were cuts all over her body, rope burns and defensive wounds on her wrists, hands, and ankles. One of her breasts had been cut off.

There was no blood around the corpse, leading police to believe she had been drained of blood somewhere else.

Once the body was examined it was determined that someone with medical expertise had killed her.

Shortly before the death of Elizabeth Short, The Blue Dahlia a noir film was released. Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd starred in the popular movie, which was still playing in the theaters. Photos of Elizabeth Short wearing a black dress were sent to the press after the notorious crime, and it was then the Herald-Express dubbed her "the Black Dahlia", a name that gave her the fame that eluded in her life.

Dr. George Hodel, mugshot from LAPD when booked for an unrelated charge

A name that was linked with the Black Dahlia was George Hodel.

George Hill Hodel was the only son born to Russian Jews, George Hodel Sr. and his wife Esther Leof in 1907. He grew up in Los Angeles, and graduated at the age of 15 from high school.

He enrolled at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), however a year later he was expelled due to a sex scandal. It turned out that the teenage Hodel had impregnated a professor's wife, and her marriage fell apart after it became known what had transpired.

When he was 20 years old he entered into a common-law marriage with a woman named Emilia Lawson, who used his surname of Hodel. They had a son named Duncan in 1928.

Starting in the 1920s Hodel over-indulged in alcohol, used hashish, opium and stronger drugs.

He graduated from Berkeley pre-med in 1932. Around this time he married Dorothy Anthony, and they had a daughter Tamar in 1935. He continued in his medical studies at the University of California where he received his medical degree in 1936.

He married Dorothy Harvey, John Houston's ex-wife in 1940. They would go on to have three children together: Michael, Steven and Kelvin.

In these years he became head of the county's Social Hygiene Bureau and moved in affluent L.A. social circles. He surrounded himself with those who were interested in partying, drinking, womanizing and sadomasochism. His good friend was surrealist photographer Man Ray.

Sowden House where Dr. Hodel lived from 1945 to 1950.

Designed by Lloyd Wright in 1926 in the manner of a Mayan temple, Sowden House became the Hodel residence in 1945. This was the same year, Ruth Spaulding, the secretary at Hodel's First Street Clinic, which treated cases of venereal disease, was found dead of barbital poisoning. The death of the 27-year-old was ruled a suicide, supposedly precipitated by the end of the affair she was having with Dr. Hodel, but police suspected she was murdered. The motive being that she knew his darker secrets, and whether she had threatened to divulge what she knew, or he feared she might, he had done away with her.

Not only was the patient information he held sensitive, it was later learned he performed abortions, which in 1950 was a felony, punishable by state imprisonment.

Considering what went on behind the walls of Sowden House for the five years Hodel lived there, perhaps it wasn't coincidental that it was modeled on a culture who were known to offer human sacrifices in order to propriate their deities with blood.

George Hodel's granddaughter and great-granddaughters refused to go inside the house in later years, claiming that they were afraid of the events that had transpired there, especially in the basement.

By the time of Elizabeth Short's death, Hodel though legally married to Dorothy "Dorero" Hodel, had brought to his home, Emilia his first common-law wife with their now adult son Duncan, as well as Dorothy Anthony and Tamar. He also had casual lovers, one of them being the unfortunate Elizabeth Short. It's theorized they met when she visited his First Street Clinic.

In 1949, Hodel was accused by his daughter Tamar of sexually molesting her, and impregnating her with a child that was aborted. He was acquitted when Tamar's mother testified that her daughter was a liar, despite three witnesses testifying that they saw Dr. Hodel engaging in intercourse with his daughter. Afterward, the 14-year-old Tamar was sent to a juvenile detention home.

Having escaped the accusations of his daughter, LAPD intensified their investigation against him for the murder of Elizabeth Short, which was fast approaching its third anniversary. He was already a suspect, but now authorities planted recording devices to capture evidence they could use to indict him.

It wasn't until many years later that his son Steve came across the transcripts of what was recorded, which included a woman screaming and his father stating to an unknown person, "Supposin’ I did kill the Black Dahlia. They couldn’t prove it now. They can’t talk to my secretary anymore because she’s dead."

In 1950, as these events swirled around George Hodel, his wife Dorothy had grave doubts about her husband, and according to Steve Hodel she sent a telegram to her ex-husband John Houston which read:

Your hunch about George true, can you help children and me get out of the house, today if possible.

LAPD poster regarding Elizabeth Short c.1947

Sensing that his luck and protection in the City of Angels was coming to an end, in August, 1950 he left to Hawaii.

He married Hortensia Laguda in 1951, and by 1953 he was living in the Philippines, which he would call home for the next 40 years. His marriage with Hortensia produced four children, but it also ended in divorce.

He traveled regularly back to the United States, maintaining ties with his sons.

In 1990, he returned to the United States and married June Hirano, who was 39 years younger than him.

Dr. George Hodel died in 1999, at the age of 91.

Ironically one of George Hodel's son, Steve Hodel went on to become an LAPD homicide detective. After his retirement he started to investigate the story that his father had been the killer, with the hopes of clearing his father of suspicion, however the more information he uncovered, the more he realized he was finding clues that inevitably led to his father being a very dangerous individual.

Steve Hodel believed his father slaughtered the Black Dahlia in the basement of the Sowden House. He later verified that his mother and brothers were absent for three weeks visiting his uncle during the time of the murder. He also linked him to murders that occurred in Manila after his father moved there, which involved corpses that were dissected and posed the same as the Black Dahlia's.

Steve Hodel has written books concerning his years of research which convinced him that his father was the person who killed Elizabeth Short. He described a telling clue based on the way she was killed:

The killer had performed a hemicorporectomy on her. It’s a unique procedure that was taught at medical school in the 1930s, when he was there, where you cut between the second and third lumbar vertebrae. It’s the only way you can divide a body without cutting through bone.

Article about the Chicago Lipstick Murders c.1946

Steve Hodel believes that based on his research his father is linked to the Chicago "Lipstick Murders" that were committed in 1945-1946. One of the victims was a 6-year-old girl who was bisected the same as Elizabeth Short.

All these murders pointed to someone with a knowledge of human anatomy.

Throughout the years, Steve Hodel has come across more and more evidence confirming that his father was a true-life Jekyll and Hyde. In 2008, he found documents dated from 1947 in which "a direct link between 50-pound cement sacks left at the [Sowden] House by workers, contracted by Lloyd Wright for renovations, to identical paper cement sacks used by Elizabeth Short’s killer to transport her body parts to the vacant lot, just five days later. This is hard physical evidence connecting items from the Hodel residence used to transport the body to the dump site."

Steve Hodel believed that his father was a "nihilist, a misogynist and a sadist of the highest order" who identified with surrealism as an expression of his inner world.

Tamar Hodel

George Hodel's peculiar actions continued even though he had moved to another country.

Tamar Hodel who accused her father of molesting her at the age of 16, went on to have a child out of wedlock, and gave her away claiming that her baby was fathered by a black man. The child named Fauna Hodel did not discover that this was a total fabrication, and that both of her biological parents were white, until many years had passed.

Fauna grew up in poverty in a town named Sparks which is just outside of Reno, Nevada. Her adopted parents were a maid and a shoe shine man. Her black mother was named Jimmie Lee, who was an alcoholic and was in and out of jail for fighting and prostitution. She was described by Fauna Hodel as being abusive, spurred by the fact that she knew her baby was only white, but nonetheless loving her.

Fauna became pregnant when she was sixteen and gave birth to a biracial daughter she named Yvette. By then she was haunted by knowing her true origins, since Jimmie Lee had showed her a copy of her birth certificate with the name Tamar Hodel filled in as her mother.

When she was in her twenties Fauna Hodel was working at Saint Mary's Hospital in Reno. She confided the circumstances of her birth to Sister Hillary, a nun she had befriended while working there. Sister Hillary went to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in San Francisco where Tamar had been born, and went through their records, discovering that Tamar's grandfather was Dr. George Hodel.

Fauna Hodel

By then George was living in the Philippines and Fauna spoke to him by phone. She told him that she wanted to speak to her real mother, and he tried to talk her out of it, but eventually let her know that Tamar was living in Hawaii.

In 1974, Fauna finally tracked down her mother in Hawaii and visited her there. She told Fauna about an incestuous relationship she had with her father George Hodel. She had become pregnant by him when she was 12 years old, but went on to abort the baby. She told Fauna that she was the product of a rape by a white man, that was not George.

Tamar's own children and mother warned Fauna that her birth mother was a compulsive liar and manipulator, which made her doubt if indeed her biological father was not George Hodel, and she never knew the true identity of the man that fathered her.

Tamar Hodel might have moved on from the daughter she gave away, but her father George appeared to keep tabs on this member of his family throughout the years. Fauna Hodel wrote a memoir titled One Day She'll Darken. She described where she noticed she was being followed on different occasions. One time she saw a man exit a limo and stare at her and her daughter Yvette, and then turn and leave. Later when she saw a picture of him she realized it was George Hodel.

During the mid-1970s Fauna and her husband William "Billy" Sharp, not only suspected she was being followed but also that their phone was being bugged, as they would hear strange clicking and echoes during calls. This suspicion became even more pronounced after an event that involved Fauna's cousin Johnny. She had not seen him in several years, and he unexpectedly called her asking if he could visit. She was surprised when he kept calling her "baby" and "sugar" and that he wanted to "feast his eyes on a sexy thang like herself". His speech was slurred and he kept referring to when they used to play under the bed. Despite her misgivings she agreed to his visit. During the call she heard the strange clicking noises she had noticed before, as if someone was listening in.

True Detective Magazine c.1948

The day of Johnny's visit arrived, but Johnny didn't. Fauna then got a call from Johnny's sister Barbara telling her that Johnny had been murdered by drowning. At the funeral she thought it was odd that the casket was closed, until she found out that his body had been mutilated, and his penis had been shoved in his mouth. Fauna and her husband wondered if the person eavesdropping on their calls was Johnny's murderer. Was this the work of George Hodel trying to protect Fauna? Or was George Hodel worried that she would uncover the secret that he had indeed fathered her, and would confirm him as the murderer of Elizabeth Short and others?

Fauna Hodel died in 2017 and her mother Tamar in 2015.

For the Hodel family it was something acknowledged as the truth of who their patriarch, George Hill Hodel was. Even George Hodel's great grandchildren grew up being told that he had been the one to kill the Black Dahlia.

As of 2024, Steve Hodel still believes his father was a serial murderer, who killed not only Elizabeth Short but numerous other people before and after her death.