My Father the Murderer
George Hodel
Born in Los Angeles, California, in 1907, George Hodel was chief of social hygiene for the Los Angeles County Department of Health from 1939 to 1945. He had eleven children. After his death at age ninety-one in 1999, he became a prime suspect in the infamous murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles in 1947, commonly known as the Black Dahlia murder.
late spring 1949, Los Angeles, a perfect day. The sun broke through the clouds as our family climbed into the squeaky-clean Willys MB military jeep Dad had purchased the year before. Mother got into the passenger seat while my two brothers and I—Mike, nine; me, seven; and Kelvin, six—scrambled into the back. Dad cranked up the engine, and we were off, headed to Pismo Beach for a day of swimming in the ocean and digging for clams near the shore.
The drive from Hollywood, where we lived and where Dad had once served as the head of the Los Angeles County Department of Health, was about four hours, so we arrived near the pier at noon. Dad put the jeep in low gear, and down onto the sandy beach we went, headed south to the clam beds. After driving about two miles, we came to a small stream. Dad had timed it perfectly. We arrived at low tide and easily crossed the stream.
Dad continued south, passing the large posted sign that read, “Baby Clam Fields. No Digging. Fifty-Dollar Fine Per Clam.”
“All right, boys, everyone out. Let’s find out where they’re hiding.”
I paused for a moment to register how easily he’d disregarded the posted rules. Clam shovels and pails in hand, we three boys spread out, each of us staking out our own territory in the wet sand.
Dad, standing next to the jeep, lit a large cigar and yelled out, “A dollar goes to the boy who finds the most clams.” Within a half hour, each of our buckets was filled. We had collected maybe seventy-five clams all told. Dad placed the buckets behind the rear seat, covering them with a blanket, and broke out the inflatable rubber raft, which we boys took turns blowing up.
We enjoyed another two hours of fun in the sun, swimming and riding the waves to shore in our bright yellow “landing craft.” High tide was approaching. We dried off, changed out of our wet swim trunks, dressed, and started back to the pier. As we approached what earlier had been a small stream, we saw what now was more like a raging river.
My father confidently edged the jeep into the water. We got almost all the way across before the engine coughed, sputtered, and stopped about ten feet from dry sand. We were stuck. In the distance, we could see a truck moving toward us. It stopped on the hard sand and two uniformed men, fish and game wardens, got out.
Dad took out his wallet, flashed a silver badge, and yelled to them, “I am Dr. Hodel, head of the LA County health department. We seem to be stuck. Can you give us a tow?”
The older of the two responded, “Sure, Doc. Hang on. We’ll get you out.”
Dad turned to Mother and the three of us and said, “Don’t say a word. Not a word.” Our haul of baby clams underneath the towel could have resulted in $3,750 worth of fines. In today’s dollars, that’s nearly $40,000. The younger man waded out into the water to the front of the jeep and attached a heavy chain, and we were pulled out in a flash.
Dad smiled and shook their hands. “Took the boys swimming and lost track of time. The tide came in faster than I expected. Here’s my card. If you get down to LA, lunch is on me.”
We stopped halfway home, in Santa Barbara. Dad pulled the jeep to the rear of a fancy seaside restaurant, gave us a stern “Wait here,” and strolled to the front of the restaurant. Five minutes passed, and out he came with a man in a white apron and tall chef’s hat. He took him to the rear of the jeep and removed the blanket, and the man said, “You’ve got yourself a deal.”
A few minutes later, we were seated at a large table with a great ocean view. Dinner was served: a large Caesar salad followed by linguini with a rich white clam sauce.
Dad had brokered a “trade.” The chef agreed to cook and serve us some of our baby clams—a free dinner—and the restaurant got to keep the rest of the haul.
Fifty years later, when my father died, I held on to this day as if it were encased in amber. Here was a man so cool under pressure and debonair he could get away with anything. But I had no idea how much he had actually gotten away with. In his lifetime, Dad was well-acquainted with scandal. In 1949, the same year we had gone clamming at Pismo Beach, he was arrested for molesting my older half sister, Tamar. Shortly after the trial—during which he was acquitted despite there having been three witnesses to his acts—he fled the country. He wouldn’t return until 1990.
George (back left) with his sons (clockwise from back right) Duncan (fifteen years old), Mike (four years old), Kelvin (one year old), and Steve (two years old), 1943
After he died, Tamar started talking to me about our father. During one of our conversations, she told me he had been a suspect in the Black Dahlia murder, the 1947 death of twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Short. It was Los Angeles’s most infamous unsolved case. After a twenty-four-year career as an LAPD detective, seventeen years of which were spent in the homicide division, I was familiar with the case. But I had never heard my dad’s name associated with it. My immediate response was, “Tamar, what the hell are you talking about? Where is this coming from?”
“Well, the detectives that took me to court told me they suspected him of killing the Black Dahlia back then,” she replied. “I don’t think he did it, but that’s what they said.”
I was shocked. I loved my father. He was never warm or fuzzy, but he was a truly remarkable man who had lived an amazing life.
I was confident I could quickly clear my father of any suspicion. I knew I could exonerate him. And so I started to do the detective work I had spent my career undertaking. My initial investigation, much to my surprise, revealed that two years prior to the Black Dahlia murder, in May 1945, my father had been investigated by LAPD detectives for the suspected forced overdose (drugging by pills) of his twenty-seven-year-old personal secretary and lover, Ruth Spaulding. However, the evidence was insufficient to formally charge him, and when my father left to work as a doctor in China, authorities were forced to shut down the investigation and rule the suspicious death a suicide. I had never known.
A year and a half after I began looking into the Black Dahlia case, after interviewing dozens of witnesses, reviewing thousands of pages of investigative research, and separating the wheat (facts) from the chaff (fiction), I had my answer. I assembled the results of my investigations and presented them in secret to an active LA head deputy district attorney. He reviewed the materials and provided me with his legal opinion: “The Black Dahlia is solved and the crime was committed by Dr. George Hill Hodel.” However, since my father had died, there was no formal investigation.
Two decades have passed since I established my father’s guilt. I wrote a book about it and have, since then, discovered twenty-four other likely victims of my father’s reign of terror. During those two decades, I have been through every conceivable emotion. Disbelief gave way to depression, followed by anger, hatred, and rage. Now those emotions have all melded together into sadness.
I still love my father. After all, he created me, gave me life and breath. His blood is flowing through my veins at this very moment. How can I not love him? But he was, without a doubt, a monster.
I love my father. I hate my father. He was a true-life Jekyll and Hyde. I look back on those memories of Pismo Beach, at the arrogance and ease with which my father disregarded the rules, and wonder if that was perhaps a sign of his darker self. Charming. Manipulative. Callous. Cruel. Daring. Charismatic. I shudder to think how else my father deployed those traits when he wasn’t with us. But I can’t lie, either. I hold those early childhood memories dear, like baby clams, best left undisturbed and protected, and wrong to pry open.