Most Evil Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  PART ONE - DR. GEORGE HILL HODEL

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  PART TWO - CHICAGO

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  PART THREE - MANILA

  Chapter Eight

  PART FOUR - ZODIAC

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  PART FIVE - DR. GEORGE HILL HODEL’S SIGNATURE: MURDER AS A FINE ART

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Conclusion

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Authors

  ALSO BY STEVE HODEL

  Black Dahlia Avenger

  ALSO BY RALPH PEZZULLO

  At the Fall of Somoza

  Eve Missing

  Jawbreaker

  Plunging into Haiti

  The Walk-In

  DUTTON

  Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, September 2009

  Copyright © 2009 by Steve Hodel and Ralph Pezzullo

  All rights reserved

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-14035-2

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  For the victims, living and dead

  Introduction

  He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And when you stare persistently into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  My father, Dr. George Hill Hodel, was a monster.

  While a handsome, successful doctor living the good life in 1940s Hollywood, surrounded by beautiful women and esteemed artists such as Man Ray, John Huston, Henry Miller, and others, he committed a series of heinous murders. One of his victims was a former girlfriend named Elizabeth Short—cast in infamy as the Black Dahlia.

  The photos of her bisected, exsanguinated body lying in the weeds near Thirty-ninth and Norton have become a grisly centerpiece of Hollywood noir history. Sixty years later people are still shocked by the premeditated evil of the crime. To look at the photos is to realize that you’re staring into the abyss. One can’t help but ask (as I did): Who was the sicko who cut this poor woman in half? And what the hell was going on in his head?

  I was just a kid. Five years old at the time of the murder. Eight when my father abruptly closed his business and fled the country for Asia. He’d been tipped off by friends in the LAPD.

  Nobody told me that Dad was the chief suspect in a series of killings in a twenty-mile radius of our house on Franklin Street. Or that detectives from the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office had gone so far as to bug his bedroom and home office. Or that they were about to arrest him when he split.

  I grew up innocent of my father’s dark secrets. Then, irony of ironies: I chose to become a homicide detective. My first wife suggested it. I found out later she’d been my father’s girlfriend.

  Did she seduce me at nineteen as a form of revenge on Dad for dumping her? Probably. Did she want me to become a cop so I’d discover the horrific deeds committed by my father, ones that she only suspected? Maybe. I can’t ask her now. She’s dead.

  I worked the Hollywood beat for twenty-four years, in the same neighborhood where I grew up—my father’s killing ground in the 1940s. Over the decades, I had occasional, brief contact with Dad, who was living abroad and had remade himself into a very successful international marketing executive based in Manila. He was a sophisticated man of the world with a genius IQ—my mother claimed it was one point higher than Einstein’s.

  I retired in 1986. Dad died thirteen years later at the age of ninety-one.

  I knew very little about my father when his ashes were scattered near the Golden Gate Bridge. Naturally, I was curious about the man he had been. I wanted to know more. Gentle inquiries started with a book of photographs he kept with him until his death. Two of them reminded me of a TV movie I’d seen about the Black Dahlia starring Lucie Arnaz.

  My investigation widened and drew me into increasingly lurid and frightening territory. The result: my book Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder.1

  Then in 2003, Los Angeles head deputy district attorney Stephen Kay reviewed the evidence I’d collected and declared the Black Dahlia murder “solved.” Old District Attorney files and forensics told the story. Only after delving into my father’s dark mind was I able to explain why he posed Elizabeth Short’s body the way he did and carved the ghastly smile into her face.

  George Hodel did nothing by accident. He lived his life as a bizarre game that trumped even those of his hero, the Marquis de Sade, taunting and outwitting the police, seducing and brutally murdering innocent women.

  He didn’t stop in 1950. Nor did he begin in the ’40s. Nor was Elizabeth Short just an ex-girlfriend.

  I know now that my father was also responsible for a series of infamous murders in Chicago (where he was known for a time as the Lipstick Killer), Manila (where the local press dubbed him the
Jigsaw Murderer), and the Bay Area of California (where he called himself Zodiac).

  It’s a bizarre, terrifying, and surreal story that will alter criminal history, exonerate the innocent, and change the way we think about the motives and signatures of serial killers. Hang on.

  Steve Hodel December 2008

  PART ONE

  DR. GEORGE HILL HODEL

  Chapter One

  The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries.

  Marquis de Sade

  Who was George Hodel really? My half-sister, Tamar—who over the course of her fascinating, peripatetic life befriended many illustrious men, including Lenny Bruce, Jim Morrison, Harry Belafonte, Otis Redding, John Phillips, and others—describes him as the most powerful, intelligent, handsome man she’s ever known. This despite the fact that he taught her how to perform oral sex at eleven, had sex with her at fourteen in the presence of three other adults, and branded her a liar the rest of her life.

  Tamar’s best friend, Michelle Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas, remembers opening a hotel room door in San Francisco in 1967 and seeing George for the first time. “I almost fainted,” she said. “The aura of evil he gave off was so strong and palpable, it almost knocked me off my feet. That’s the first and only time anything like that has ever happened to me.”

  As Tamar tells the story, George entered the Mamas & the Papas’ suite at the St. Francis Hotel with two beautiful, young Asian women and immediately took over, ordering around the waiters and telling the band what they should and shouldn’t eat before a concert. Tamar likens him to the charismatic ballet impresario Boris Lermontov in the movie The Red Shoes—impeccable clothes, sophisticated European manners, a deep, cultivated voice.

  Later that evening a hash pipe was passed. Dad didn’t partake. Tamar, who knew he’d smoked in the past, asked one of his Asian companions why. “Before when he smoked hash, he made me lock him in his bathroom,” the young woman explained. “He always made me lock him in there and told me not to let him out. George said that when he smokes, sometimes he does terrible things. He would make me lock him in the bathroom and he would cry and stay there all night.”

  Dad left Los Angeles in 1950 after the very public incest trial involving his relationship with Tamar—he was declared innocent—and thereafter blew into town every six months or so unannounced. My brothers and I would be summoned to the lobby of some glamorous L.A. hotel and made to wait hours for the privilege of sharing a few minutes with the great man, who was on some important business and usually had to run to an urgent meeting. During one such visit he presented me with a Tinkertoy set for my birthday. I was sixteen years old.

  In a drunken rage, my mother had once called him “a monster.” She said, “He’s a terrible man and he’s done terrible things!” The next day she denied it.

  After forty years of living the life of an expatriate in Asia, Dad retired to San Francisco and moved into a modern apartment overlooking the bay with his fourth wife, June. Once when I visited, I brought a loaf of bread but couldn’t find a knife in the kitchen. When I asked June for one, she answered, “No. No. The great man doesn’t allow any knives in the house.”

  Tamar wanted all her life to confront Dad with the painful truth of who he really was so he might begin to save his soul. But she never did. Why? “I was afraid of what he might do to me,” she explained. “I knew he could kill me.”

  In 1969 when George was in town on business, he met a pregnant Tamar for lunch at a Beverly Hills hotel. As they passed through the lobby, Dad stopped and pointed to a pattern in the carpet. “What does that remind you of ?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Tamar answered. “Some kind of flower or something. Maybe rhododendrons.”

  “Look again,” George said, tracing the outlines with the toe of his shoe. “It’s a vagina and lips.”

  He then stomped hard in the middle of the design and asked, “Did that hurt?”

  Tamar learned later that while she was in bed resting, days before the birth of her third child, George took her thirteen-year-old daughter, Deborah, out to dinner. Years later, Deborah confessed that while they were eating, she became groggy and passed out. She came to on a bed in a hotel room, completely nude with her legs spread open. Looking up, she saw her grandfather snapping pictures.

  Joe Barrett, who knew Dad in the 1940s when Joe was a young artist renting a room in our house on Franklin Avenue, said he liked my father and described him as “surrounded by people, but close to no one.” They spent hours shooting the breeze in my dad’s office. “George was brilliant,” Joe remembered, “but not original. I think that bothered him.”

  Dad’s last instructions: “I do not wish to have funeral services of any kind. There is to be no meeting or speeches or music and no gravestone or tablet. I direct that my physical remains be cremated and that my ashes be scattered over the ocean.”

  Naïve about much of his terrible history and about many of these family legends, I spent a good deal of time with Dad toward the end of his life. We became friends, to a point, but he never really opened up, and I know now that I didn’t really know him.

  Most of what I’ve learned about my father came after his death in 1999. Up until then, except for a couple of shadows, he seemed to have lived a full, privileged, and highly productive life. But in order to fully understand this complicated man and the activities he’d kept hidden for so long, I have to start again at the beginning, with the official narrative of his life.

  George Hill Hodel entered this world in Los Angeles on October 10, 1907, the only son of well-educated, Russian-born parents. His mother, Esther, a smart, no-nonsense woman, had worked as a dentist in Paris before emigrating to the United States in 1905. His father, George, was a banker who had escaped from mandatory military conscription in Russia by changing his last name from Goldgefter to Hodel and posing as a wealthy traveler on a temporary visit to see his ailing grandmother. With expensive luggage and his first-class train ticket in hand, he managed to cross the Polish border, then on to Paris and freedom.

  Despite the fact that they settled in South Pasadena, French was the primary language spoken at home. The house built in 1920 was a handsome estate designed by Russian architect Alexander Zelenko in the style of a Swiss chalet. It included a detached guesthouse, where George Jr. pursued his intellectual and musical studies without distraction.

  His parents had reason to believe their son was special. At an early age, tests showed that little George had a genius IQ of 186. At age six, he was identified as a musical prodigy. By age nine “Georgie” was playing solo piano concerts at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium, and even the great Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff traveled to my grandparents’ house in Pasadena, accompanied by the Russian minister of culture, to hear him play.

  In 1921, at age thirteen, the boy genius’s scholastic test scores were the highest ever recorded in California’s public school history. Following his graduation from South Pasadena High School at fourteen, he entered the California Institute of Technology to pursue studies in chemical engineering. George Hodel wasn’t your average kid.

  1.1 George Hodel, 1917

  A year into his studies at Caltech, another precocious tendency reared its head. The sixteen-year-old had an affair with a faculty member’s wife and got her pregnant. The woman left her husband and moved east, where she had the baby—a girl aptly named Folly. It’s here that my father’s life seemed to take a rebellious left. Though Caltech administrators were able to keep the sex scandal from becoming public, they quickly and quietly demanded my father’s withdrawal from the university. Father complied, and after drifting for a year or two, at age seventeen, was able to obtain fake ID showing him to be twenty-one. After obtaining a chauffeur’s license, he immediately got a job hacking for the Los Angeles Yellow Cab Company at night.

  But his real interest seemed to be the crime reporting he did for the Los Angeles Record, which in the 1920s was one of Los Angeles�
�s major newspapers.

  Prohibition was in full swing, and Dad would ride along with the LAPD vice squad officers and follow them in at midnight as they kicked down the doors to South Central speakeasies. He was there to record the lurid details as pimps, prostitutes, and johns—including the occasional “slumming” Beverly Hills couple and maybe the odd Superior Court judge—were hauled off. The precocious kid from Pasadena was now L.A.’s youngest crime reporter, rubbing shoulders with hoods, murderers, and corrupt officials.

  The latter, like oranges, seemed to grow on trees.

  Among my dad’s cohorts was a lawyer named Kent Kane Parrot, who reputedly owned most of the officers on the Los Angeles Police Department.

  This murky moral setting served as fodder for his best friend and future film director John Huston. One of their pals was a brooding artist named Fred Sexton, who later sculpted the bird that was fought over by Sydney Greenstreet, Humphrey Bogart, and Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon.

  They acted like young existential bohemians in the ’20s, smoking hashish and frequenting opium dens in Chinatown. It was a perfect set of conditions in which to launch a literary magazine. George’s avant-garde rag was called Fantasia.

  In a December 9, 1925, article in the Los Angeles Evening Herald, drama critic Ted Le Berthon provided his readers with an up-close-and-personal look at George Hodel. In his article “The Clouded Past of a Poet,” he described the young writer/editor as “tall, olive-skinned, with wavy black hair and a strong, bold nose. His eyes are large, brown, somnolent.” According to Le Berthon, “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.’”