CONTENT ADVISORY: This story discusses, in detail, a brutally violent murder that took place in Los Angeles in 1947. It contains descriptions of extreme violence with language taken directly from official reports. The Courier has included this description, not to sensationalize the crime, but to underscore the very real tragedy of the crime, while also laying the groundwork for a later discussion of the possible murderer, who was never officially identified. Furthermore, the information in this is compiled from numerous sources, all of which are cited in the story. To access any source, click on the link in the citation.

The third and final installment in a multi-part exploration of the most iconic “cold case” in L.A. history.

Read Part 1 Here

Read Part 2 Here

Why do you kill her? Why do you kill her like that? How do you do it? How do you get away with it?

You don’t steal anything from her, meaning you don’t do her in for any financial gain, not that there was much to gain at all, as Beth was broke and jobless in January of 1947. You don’t rape her, meaning that you’re not motivated purely by lechery. You bind her at the hands and feet but you don’t torture her, at least not heavily nor for a long period. You concuss her with some medium weight object, causing her to die of shock and hemorrhage [3]. All things considered, a fairly merciful death. You don’t torture her while she’s alive, but you mutilate her after death. Was it an accident? Was it easier? Easier to stomach? Definitely easier to work with. No argument necessary that it’s harder to saw through someone when they’re wailing in agony, crying for their life.

You bisect her with a clean, straight, sterilized cut across the stomach. You separate her, carefully extract all of her major organs and drain her completely dry of blood. Adrenaline and dopamine hit you like a shotgun BLAST between the eyes. You get excited, like a child with a new toy; you doodle with the blade. You lacerate the large and small intestines as well as both kidneys. You leave her ovaries, tubes, and uterus unharmed but you’re starved for humble pie, you want to show off for your inevitable audience. So, you cut criss-crossed lacerations into her suprapubic region, extending smoothly into the soft tissue of her bisection. You remove a small piece of skin from her upper waist and carve more criss-cross lacerations into it [3]. You are not any ordinary hacksawing-hillbilly. You’re proving it. Your knowledge of anatomy, your knowledge of surgery, you’re putting it on full display. 

The inside of her body is dry. You now place the removed organs back into their anatomically proper locations. It’s not enough. You need to hit another high before the ant hill burns out, before the dame is all used up. Something that really lights up your brain like a switchboard, something that gets your rocks off, something sexual, something sadistic. Using a series of metal rods, you dilate her anal cavity to a final diameter of 1 and 1/4th inches. 

You place a blend of human feces into her stomach, of course without touching or ruining any other part of your work. She’s almost done but she needs something else to finish her off. Something grand, something classic. Your signature, your final stamp of style. A last flash of artistic flair. The last test of your abilities, the make-or-break moment for your dead-girl-living-doll-display. You incise under her left ear and masterfully carve a chelsea grin, three inches deep evenly across the face, to a symmetrical damming point under her right ear [3]. She’s beautiful, she’s finalized. You scrub her in gasoline, cleaning her of all the mess of construction. You wrap her or encase her in some way to keep all of her pieces in their home spaces. You place her in the back of a car. Do you drive? Are you alone? Maybe, maybe not, either way I can’t imagine you’d allow anyone to conduct the installation of your big debut.

In the early hours of the morning, just as the rain drizzles-to-a-dry, you take her to an abandoned lot in Leimert Park. You place her in the grass a few feet from the sidewalk. She looks better in the grass, but you want to assure her to be seen by the passerby. You place both halves of her corpse oppositely indented by a few inches, with a gap of about a foot between her lower and upper body. You spread her legs wide and fold her arms above her head, bending at the elbows into a symmetric, wide angled triangle. Making sure to leave no fingerprints, you leave her [3]. You don’t account for the mud though and leave a boot print, luckily the boot won’t give up any leads. You drive away sometime around dawn. You stop a few feet down the road to shove those woman’s garments down the drain, the ones the police will find in a few days [9]. Were they hers or just meant as another false hope? Everything’s going exactly as it’s supposed to, isn’t it?

Enter scene: Dr. George Hodel.

Born into a wealthy family of Russo-Jewish descent outside Los Angeles in 1907, from an early age Hodel showed his academic prowess scoring an 186 IQ test, one point higher than Einstein, before the eighth grade. He was declared a boy genius, and treated as such. Hodel graduated from South Pasadena high school in his sophomore year in the spring of 1923 and enrolled in CalTech later that year. While undeniably a gifted student, Hodel’s increasingly licentious fascination with the fairer sex would get him kicked out within a year when a campus wide scandal came to light; Hodel, aged 16, had impregnated his professor’s wife [14] [15] [4].

For the better part of a decade Hodel would drift around California led by his pursuit of a medical degree and his libido. Hodel would have another son in 1928 with his common-law wife Emilia, who he’d leave by the end of the year-though not without losing contact-and move to San Francisco. Hodel graduated from Berkeley pre-med in June 1932. Immediately after graduation, Hodel enrolled in Med School. Around this time Hodel met fashion model Dorothy Anthony who he would marry in 1934. Dorothy gave birth to Hodel’s first daughter, Tamar, in 1935. In 1936 at the age of 29, George Hodel received his medical degree from UC San Francisco [15] [4].

In 1938 Hodel moved back to LA to begin working for the Los Angeles Board of Health. How exactly it came about is unclear but quickly Hodel became the top ranking specialist in the darker side of Board’s work-venereal diseases and backroom abortions [4]. Housewives, mistresses, unlucky rollers, and inebriated adolescents all desperate with open pocketbooks. All beggars under the blade of the medical maestro, George Hodel [15].

In 1940, Hodel developed an infatuation with surrealism, an artistic movement sutured from the battle scars of post-World-War-one France as an outgrowth of “dadaism,” an anti-authoritarian, absurdist movement in art and culture. The goal of surrealism was to disobey, or outright disregard, all rules of art and of nature. Expressing the inherent illogical reasoning of the unconscious mind and human life [16]. Hodel would quickly become infatuated with the art style, befriending surrealist painter and photographer Man Ray [15] [4].

Man Ray had been living in Paris for the better part of the decade where he entrenched himself in the guts of sadomasochism. Back in LA, Man Ray was eager to share his inspiring tales of debauchery with his fellow Hollywood hedonists, like Hodel [19] [15].

Jump to 1946.

George Hodel has risen through the ranks of the local medical industry becoming head of Los Angeles county’s Social Hygiene Bureau. Along with his ascension through the medical world, came his social ascension through the affluence of old Hollywood. Hodel lives as a polygamist and sex fiend in his neo-Mayan mansion the ‘Sowden House’ with his new wife Doreo, his previous wife Sally, and his common-law wife Emillia, along with all his children. At the Sowden House, Hodel would host exclusive, lavish parties of sadomasochism, drugs, and ‘surrealism’. By this point Hodel has become a fanatic for the art, particularly for the art of his dear friend Man Ray who has become Hodel’s personal hero and his art Hodel’s most cherished possessions. Hodel reportedly admitted to Man Ray his desire to pursue art. He was obsessed. He asked Man Ray to take nude photographs of his eleven-year-old daughter Tamar as a means of surrealistic expression. Man Ray agreed [15] [4].

While the arrangement of their relationship is unknown, George Hodel met Elizabeth Short around this time. At least eight friends and acquaintances witnessed firsthand some kind of relationship between Hodel and Elizabeth Short throughout 1946, as well as a photo of Elizabeth Short discovered in one of Hodel’s albums. Elizabeth Short likely met Hodel as one of the thousands of other women who passed through Hodel’s clinic for venereal diseases. It should be clarified, while it is true that Hodel’s clinic performed backroom abortions, the long storied rumor that George Hodel performed an abortion on Elizabeth Short prior to her murder is impossible, as at the time of discovery Elizabeth Short’s uterus showed no sign of fertilization or abortion [4] [7] [2].

January 15th, 1947. Elizabeth Short’s remains are discovered and madness ensues. Over 150 men are questioned in their relationship to Short, all yielding no leads. Hodel was not one of those men. Hodel wouldn’t be put under suspicion at all until two years later in 1949 [9].

It is commonly accepted as a fact that George Hodel raped and impregnated his oldest fourteen-year-old daughter Tamar in the summer of ‘49. He would perform her abortion some weeks later. In the Fall Tamar went back to school and made acquaintances with a boy. George found out about said boy and raved mad with jealousy. He swung a loaded gun in Tamar’s face and beat her with it. Tamars’ mother told her that she needed to run away that night. She told Tamar that her father was a dangerous man. She told her that he’d killed his secretary. Tamar went into hiding but was eventually found by police. Tamar remembered the police telling her “we know all about your father” [15] . 

Tamar took her father to court for incestious abuse and impregnation. During a highly publicized trial, three eye witnesses testified to Hodels guilt. However shortly after the testimony, one of the witnesses recanted her statement as a lie, and claimed that the other two eyewitnesses were also committing perjury. She refused to come forward and disappeared from all records. On December 23rd, George Hodel was acquitted of all charges. Tamar was torn apart in the tabloids as a liar and nymphet. She was then remanded to a juvenile detention facility [4] [9] [15].

While technically a victory for Hodel, the trial placed him on a county-wide list of suspected sex offenders. In 1950 the Black Dahlia investigation was briefly reopened following a false lead.  During that investigation, known sex criminals in the area were questioned, Hodel being one of them. During the investigation into Hodel it came to light that during the incest trial, Tamar had claimed her father killed the Black Dahlia, but like all of Tamar’s claims it was discredited by the court as girlish libel [15]. 

Also notably, this was the second homicide investigation into Hodel in two years. The first was in June of 1949 after the discovery of Louise Springer. Springer, a thirty-five year old cosmetologist, was discovered in the back of her husband’s convertible Sedan. She’d been strangled with a clothesline, garroted around her neck, knotted under the ears. Her face was black and bloated. Her waist had been cinched with shreds of her own clothing, and a stick 14 inches in length and ½ inches in width had been violently rammed up her vagina. The murder bares a shocking resemblance, albeit as a lackluster sophomore release, to the Black Dahlia murder. Hodel became one of the top five suspects in the murder but for one reason or another no charges were ever pressed [17] [4].

The following year in the Elizabeth Short investigation, Hodel entered the top twenty suspects, ever ascending, as his surgical knowledge became of particular interest. The smooth craftsmanship and anatomical knowledge necessary to achieve that level of mutilation certainly made the case stand out from the dime-a-dozen dimestore stickups. Once investigators discovered that Hodel actually knew Short in 1946, he became among the primary suspects. Between February 15th and March 27th, 1950 an 18 man task force assigned by the DA, electronically bugged and wire tapped Hodel’s “Sowden House” in Hollywood. The DA tapes recorded him saying: “Supposin’ I did kill the Black Dahlia. They can’t prove it now. They can’t talk to my secretary anymore because she’s dead. They thought there was something fishy. Anyway, now they may have figured it out. Killed her. Maybe I did kill my secretary.” Hodel’s last quote referring to the apparent suicide by hanging of his twenty-seven-year-old clinical secretary Ruth Spaulding in 1945. Tamar Hodel reports the last thing her mother said to her the night she ran away was that her father was dangerous and had killed his secretary [15] [9] [7].

In March 1950, George Hodel left Los Angeles for Hawaii. While there he engaged a Filipino woman named Hortensia Laguda. Hodel would move with her back to the Philippines where they would marry and have four children together. They would get divorced in the 1960s. Hodel returned to California in 1990. He lived in San Francisco with his last wife June Hodel until May 16th, 1999 when he peacefully passed away in picture-perfect luxury surrounded by loved ones [4].  A Hollywood Happy ending.

The Theory:

Dr. George Hodel murdered Elizabeth Short in January 1947 as a means of surrealistic artistic expression. Beth was just another one of the other pretty faces in Hodel’s life. He bound her while she was alive to feed his sadism, but that wasn’t the point of it. The point wasn’t pure lechery, if it was there would be evidence of sexual trauma whilst the victim was alive [3]. Instead, Beth wasn’t even human to him, she was a beautiful canvas. The Black Dahlia was created to be an art piece, so Hodel did what artists do, he stole. His library of references to rob was limitless, but the most significant came from his very own idol, Man Ray. 

Most noticeably, Ray’s oil-murals “Observatory Time: The Lovers” depicting a naked woman lying in a field of grass with a smile in the sky above her, “Black Widow” depicting an all black figure diagonally slashed across the body in a with its arms up and legs apart,as well as his negative-photograph “Minatour” of a nude woman’s torso, arms up and bent at the elbows to form a wide-angled triangle. The original “Minotaur” print was owned by Hodel throughout the 1940s [4]. Much of surrealism leans into sex, violence, and bodily disarrangement. In 1961, L.A. local artist and friend of Man Ray, William Copley released a painting titled “It’s Midnight Dr.” depicting a doctor, standing above a sprawled, naked, dead girl. The doctor stands next to six surgical instruments of torture, some claim to spell out the name “Hodel MD”.

NOTE: There many theorists out there including retired LAPD detective and third born of Geroge Hodel himself, Steve Hodel, who believe that George Hodel not only committed the Black Dahlia murder but also is responsible for twelve other unsolved murders known as the “Lone Woman murders” [4] throughout Los Angeles in the thirties and forties all of which involved sever post-mortem mutilation of women, including Jeanne French (The Lipstick Murder) [13] in February of 1946 and Louise Springer (The Green Twig Murder) [17] in 1949 for which Hodel was investigated. There are also tangible theories linking Hodel to the Cleveland Torso murders of the nineteen thirties, as well as possible personal connections to Eliot Ness, the prohibition agent who brought down Al Capone [4] [18].

Epilogue: Bloody Kisses

You’ve claimed all this time that you would die for me

Why then are you so surprised when you hear your own eulogy…

To ascend you must die

You must be crucified

For our sins and our lies

Goodbye

 -Maynard James Keenan

The bleak realization that I’ve come to whilst working through this piece is that it doesn’t matter who killed Elizabeth Short. I knew from the jump that it didn’t matter on a judicial level as whoever did cut up Beth is likely long since dead. But more isolating is the acknowledgement that it doesn’t matter on a morally conceptual level. It doesn’t matter because Elizabeth Short isn’t a person, and she hasn’t been for the better part of a century. She is the old, blackened blood clot sucked by the original breed of vicarious-vampyrs that pumped life into the first generation of the so-called national ‘true crime’ obsession. She is the damaged perforated-pulmonary for thousands of jonesing-junkies, brain dead, underfed, and led by their T.V. Eyes to their euphoria of voyeurism. She is a martyr for misery, the gold standard for tabloid titillation, an Azreal for the City of Angels.

Elizabeth Short’s story is a spit in the face of glamour, a dark representation of what it truly means to be famous. The price of true infamy is the loss of your humanity, even in death. It’s to become an object of reverence, that belongs to the public. Beth Short was dead on arrivial in 1947. She was torn apart by the media frenzy that surrounded her, she was swallowed by the headlines, she doesn’t even exist anymore.

Sex and death. 

The only two things I believe to be of truly national admiration and titillation. If every human psyche operates as a type of venn diagram from the preacher to press-whore, conservative to libido libertarian, moral-marauder to amoral maneater, then sex and death are the only true intersection of union.

The fascination seems natural as the fuse of every human life is sparked in sex and put out in death. Without sex or death almost every secular profession vanishes and the same goes for near-all medical, legal, artistic, and journalistic professions or personal obsessions. We are all fascinated and all desire, secretly or publicly, to see more of it and learn more about it. Which is why ‘true crime’ is one of the most fanatically popular forms of media that’s ever existed. It combines the most devious and graphic acts of human depravity and puts it on a silver platter for you to enjoy. Everyone looks at the car accident, everyone wants their own little piece of the snake’s apple, everyone wants their bloody kisses. 

I say none of this to point my finger or cast myself above true crime. I say this because I believe it should be fully acknowledged that at one point in time Elizabeth Short was a real woman who had her real life really taken away from her at a young age. As years have gone by, Beth has faded further and further into an urban legend, a fantasy, a modern mystery. She was transformed into the Black Dahlia. An alter ego that was born in her casket, still lives to this day and always will. It will never end. The fascination will never burn out. The downward spiral will forever continue to unravel.

The Black Dahlia will never die.