On the morning of Jan. 15, 1947, a woman walking with her daughter spotted what she thought was a body in a Los Angeles vacant lot.

She raced to a nearby house and called police, but a Los Angeles Examiner reporter and photographer who had been monitoring police broadcasts beat the patrol car to the scene, a common occurrence in those days.

What they found was the naked body of a woman, who had been cut in half. The woman”s face had been slashed on both sides of her mouth. The two halves of the body appeared to have been carefully placed as if being posed.

The chief autopsy surgeon for Los Angeles County determined the cause of death was “hemorrhage and shock from a concussion of the brain and lacerations to the face.” He concluded that the victim”s body had been bisected by something similar to a surgical scalpel probably by someone with surgical training and found evidence the body had been scrubbed and cleaned before being moved to the vacant lot.

The grisly scene in the vacant lot would become an overnight legend known as the Black Dahlia murder. The Los Angeles newspapers would report the murder and subsequent investigation in great detail for months, and the story would then be retold countless times in motion pictures, books, television programs and, more recently, Web sites.

But, the murder would never be solved, perhaps until now.

Steve Hodel, a retired Los Angeles homicide detective who worked more than 300 murder cases during his 24 years on the police force, says he has solved the case. The murderer was his father, Dr. George Hill Hodel Jr., a prominent Los Angeles physician. Fred Sexton, a close friend of George Hodel, was an accomplice.

Further, Steve Hodel says the murder was most likely committed in the family home, a Hollywood landmark known as the Sowden House. The house had been designed and built by Lloyd Wright, son of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Steve Hodel says he was provided a vital clue and impetus to solving the case in 1999 following the death of his father at age 91. His father”s widow gave him a small personal album his father had kept. At the front was a photo of Steve Hodel, his two brothers and his father.

While browsing through the album he came across two pictures of a woman he thought looked familiar. Later, he realized the woman in the pictures was Elizabeth Short, who was eventually identified as the murder victim.

Steve Hodel then began a personal inquiry into the relationship between his father and Elizabeth Short. His inquiry and conclusions are laid out in elaborate detail in “Black Dahlia Avenger,” the name used by a person who sent letters to the newspapers and police taunting them and confessing the crime.

During his personal inquiry, Steve Hodel discovered accounts of a series of crimes against women in Southern California that were never solved and may have been committed by George Hodel and Fred Sexton. The crimes included two mysterious disappearances, 12 murders, one attempted murder and two rapes. Two of the women were movie actresses, and two were prominent socialites.

He also uncovered two unsolved murders committed in the 1950s that he thinks were the work of Sexton. One of the victims was the mother of author James Ellroy, who wrote “L.A. Confidential” and, ironically, “The Black Dahlia.”

“Black Dahlia Avenger” is as good a read. Just don”t expect to see George Hodel get his comeuppance in the final chapter. The first part of the book is especially good as Steve Hodel describes the initial murder investigation and the Hodel family life.

Elizabeth Short was 22 at the time of her death. She had come to California from the Boston area a few years earlier, then returned to the East Coast. After spending some time in Florida, she came to Los Angeles in 1946.

Through the years, writers and commentators have called her a prostitute, but Steve Hodel thinks she was just a confused young woman. She was good looking and usually dressed well so that men found her very attractive.

Steve Hodel believes George Hodel was attracted to her and wanted to marry her. Steve Hodel thinks George Hodel may have beaten, humiliated, mutilated and murdered her during a jealous rage.

In piecing the puzzle together, Steve Hodel airs the family laundry.

Dr. George Hodel was the only child of Russian emigrants who settled in Pasadena and prospered. He was a child prodigy who began studies at the California Institute of Technology at the age of 15, but dropped out after a year.

As a teen-ager, he had a variety of jobs, including crime reporter, poet, literary magazine publisher, taxi driver and public radio announcer.

During Prohibition, George Hodel ran in a fast crowd that included John Huston, the director and screenwriter; surrealist photographer Man Ray; Sexton, an artist who created the Maltese Falcon statute for Huston”s movie of the same name; and Tom Evans, the chief lieutenant of a Los Angeles gangster who ran a number of drinking and gambling establishments on ships anchored offshore.

In the mid 1930s, George Hodel moved the San Francisco area where he received a degree from the University of California and a medical degree from the University of California Medical School. After serving as a public health officer, he returned to Los Angeles and established himself as an expert in the treatment of venereal diseases.

George Hodel then married Steve Hodel”s mother, who had previously been married to Huston. She was George Hodel”s third wife. They had Steve Hodel and his two brothers, but the marriage appears to have been on shaky ground.

In 1946 following service in China with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, George Hodel bought the Sowden House and moved his family into it.

Steve Hodel recalls that the house was the site of many loud, boisterous parties. “I also remember lots of people — grown-ups, men and women — laughing late into the night,” he writes.

In 1949, the 14-year-old daughter from George Hodel”s second marriage claimed that George Hodel, Sexton and other party guests had had sex with her.

George Hodel was tried, but acquitted. He promptly dumped Steve Hodel, his mother and two brothers and moved to Hawaii where he married and had another family. He later moved to Manila, married again and had another family. He also founded a marketing research company in Manila and became a market research guru in the Far East. Even later, he married a Japanese woman, nearly 40 years his junior.

Steve Hodel doesn”t spare himself from close examination. He admits resenting his father and acknowledges that he had a drinking problem when he was younger. There is no discussion of whether he ever was able to solve the problem.

The book begins to unravel as Steve Hodel tries to pull together the things he has learned. The narrative becomes disorganized, confusing and distracting. Steve Hodel points out that Elizabeth Short spent the last few months of her life telling both friends and strangers that she was soon to be wed to a serviceman who was in the hospital. She also told several people she feared an ex-boyfriend. Steve Hodel believes George Hodel was both the serviceman and ex-boyfriend.

During the week before her death, Elizabeth Short checked into a motel with a man. They registered as man and wife. The couple that owned the motel later identified Elizabeth and her companion from photos shown them by the police.

Steve Hodel is convinced the police showed the couple a photo of George Hodel, but there is no available record who the owner and his wife identified. Steve Hodel is positive that this is the vital bit of evidence linking George Hodel to the murder.

Steve Hodel is also convinced that the top officials of the Los Angeles Police Department conspired to cover up what had been discovered in the murder investig
ation. He believes they felt if his father was arrested he would start talking about bribes the police were taking from local doctors performing illegal abortions. Illegal abortions apparently were a booming business.

His rambling discourse on a possible cover-up contains not one shred of evidence, just speculation, when he advances the theory. Only later on does he disclose a conversation he had with a former partner who once had access to the official Black Dahlia file. The partner did not remember George Hodel being mentioned in the file or any mention of several other clues Steve Hodel felt were proof of his father”s guilt. Because his former partner was unaware of the clues he felt were important, Steve Hodel concludes the police department had “sanitized” the file.

Almost as an afterthought, he mentions an interview with a former investigator for the Los Angeles County District Attorney. The investigator told Steve Hodel he had helped break into the Sowden House so it could be bugged.

The investigator was convinced the District Attorney”s Office felt George Hodel was guilty of something more than the statutory rape of his 14-year-old daughter, of which he was acquitted.

If these two interviews had been brought into the narrative sooner, the book would have been much easier to read, and some of Steve Hodel”s ranting would have made more sense.

Despite his numerous assertions to the contrary, Steve Hodel does not make a case.

However the book is just the thing for hot weekends when you have no desire to venture out of the house. —

Black Dahlia Avenger

By Steve Hodel

Published by Arcade Publishing, April 2003

504 Pages