Real Crime/Paranormal/Conspiracy Theories Book III

George Hodel: Black Dahlia Murderer?

George Hill Hodel Jr. (October10, 1907 – May 16, 1999) was an American physician. After the 1947murder of Elizabeth Short, a.k.a. the Black Dahlia, police came toconsider Hodel a suspect. He was never formally charged with thecrime and came to wider attention as a suspect after his death whenhe was accused by his son, Los Angeles homicide detective SteveHodel, of killing Short and committing several additional murders.Prior to the Dahlia case, he was also a suspect in the death of hissecretary, Ruth Spaulding, but was not charged. He was also accusedof raping his own daughter, Tamar Hodel, but was acquitted for thatcrime. He fled the country several times, and spent time between 1950and 1990 in the Philippines.

Personal life

George Hill Hodel Jr. was born onOctober 10, 1907, and raised in Los Angeles, California. His parents,George Hodel Sr. and Esther Hodel, were of Russian Jewish ancestry.Their only son, he was well-educated and highly intelligent (scoring186 on an early IQ test). He was also a musical prodigy, playing solopiano concerts at Los Angeles' Shrine Auditorium. Composer SergeiRachmaninoff traveled to his parents' house to hear the boy play.Hodel attended South Pasadena High School, graduated at age 15 andentered the prestigious California Institute of Technology (Caltech)in Pasadena, but was forced to leave the university after one year,due to a sex scandal involving a professor's wife, though this is notthe only account. He had impregnated the woman and wanted to raisetheir child together, but she refused. The affair between Hodel andthe woman caused her marriage to fall apart.

By around 1928, Hodel was in acommon-law marriage with a woman named Emilia and had a son by her,Duncan. In the 1930s he was legally married to a model from SanFrancisco, Dorothy Anthony, and had a daughter by her, Tamar.

Hodel graduated from Berkeley pre-medin June 1932. He immediately afterward enrolled in medical school atthe University of California, San Francisco and received his medicaldegree in June 1936.

After the success of his medicalpractice and becoming head of the county's Social Hygiene Bureau,Hodel was moving in affluent Los Angeles society by the 1940s. He wasenamored of the darker side of Surrealism and the decadencesurrounding that art scene, befriending photographer Man Ray, filmdirector John Huston and those who associated with them. With Rayand some other Surrealists, he shared an interest in sadomasochismand the darker side of art and philosophy; with the young men of theHollywood scene, he shared a fondness for partying, drinking, andwomanizing.

Hodel's second legal wife, whom hemarried in 1940, was John Huston's ex-wife, Dorothy Harvey. He calledher "Dorero" to avoid confusion with his otherwife, Dorothy Anthony, at least within their circle, but she isbetter known as Dorothy Huston-Hodel.

Hodel purchased the Sowden House in1945 and lived there from 1945 until 1950. The structure, built in1926 by Lloyd Wright (son of the noted American architect Frank LloydWright), has since been registered as a Los Angeles historiclandmark. Hodel was effectively a polygamist: in the late 1940s,around the time of the deaths of Spaulding and Short, Hodel wasliving with "Dorero" and their three children(including Steven, who would later make a case that his father was amurderer); his first legal wife Dorothy Anthony and their daughterTamar; and, at times, his original common-law wife, Emilia, mother ofHodel's eldest child (by that time an adult). He was also prone totaking temporary lovers; multiple witnesses later suggested such arelationship between Hodel and Short.