Tamar, Joe Barrett, and Duncan Hodel
MAYBE IT WAS MY own design and not simply the passage of time that kept the true story of Tamar and the family scandal a dark mystery to me for many years. Even in my adult mind, Tamar was the image of the adolescent temptress Lolita. She would go on to blaze a trail from the beat generation of the middle 1950s to the street generation of the late ’60s, bouncing off poets, folk singers, druggies, and hippies.
Tamar was described by singer Michelle Phillips in her book California Dreaming’: The True Story of the Mamas and the Papas as her “very best friend, who got me interested in folk music, or at least into folk music people.” Michelle’s description of Tamar is a snapshot of the young girl who, a decade earlier, unwittingly had come within a hair of playing a critical role in the Black Dahlia investigation. Phillips writes:
So, off we went to Tamar’s. As soon as I set eyes on her, I thought she was the most fabulous, glamorous girl I had ever met. She had a wonderful lavender colored room, with lavender pillows and curtains, lavender lead-glass ashtrays, all of that. I thought it was just great. She had just acquired a new pink and lavender Rambler, buying it on time.
She hung out with a very hip Bohemian crowd—Josh White, Dick Gregory, Odetta, Bud and Travis. Tamar was incredible. She gave me my first fake ID, my first amphetamines (“uppers” to help me stay awake in class after late nights). This was a girl after my own heart, and we became very close . . . and now she was my idol.
But everything Tamar Hodel would become by the 1960s, she already was during those few months in the summer of 1949 when, as an incorrigible teenager, she moved into my life and set into motion a series of events that would result in the breakup of the only family life I had ever really known.
In court, during my father’s incest trial, she was in the eyes of the prosecutors an innocent minor debauched by her sexually depraved father. In Robert Neeb’s brilliant cross-examination she was portrayed as a pathological and sinister liar, capable of twisting the truth to satisfy and manipulate the adults around her. After Dad’s acquittal, she grew up with the stigma of being just such a liar.
I think that, other than her own children, I was the only one who believed she was the victim. My mother, of course, knew the truth of what had happened that night but could not reveal what she knew to the police and ultimately took it with her to her grave. I know now that Mother lived in daily terror of what my father could do when he was crossed. So while Mother could never be a support, I could, once I knew the broad strokes of the scandal. And as we grew older I let Tamar know that I believed her, while at the same time I let Father think I believed him. The scandal was never discussed, never mentioned. It just hung there over the years like a cloud of unknowing, enveloping all of us, palpable, real, yet ignored because no one wanted to acknowledge it.
“Tamar the Liar” became Father’s established party line to all of us in his immediate family, all in the extended family, and to all of his women, past and present. “The scandal” was almost never talked about, but Father’s position was clear: he had been wrongfully accused by his fourteen-year-old, disturbed, deceitful, and sexually promiscuous daughter, who had lied to the police, lied to the prosecutors, and lied on the witness stand. Even though he had been acquitted, he made it clear to all of his children that our sister had tarnished his good reputation and high moral character. With most family members, her name did not even invoke pity, only disgust. Dad had made it an edict that Tamar was a pariah, our family’s bad seed, whose punishment for her crimes of lying and disloyalty was ostracism and banishment.
Following Father’s death, in my efforts to gain a deeper understanding of who he was and obtain more details about his life, I turned to Tamar for help because I believed that she knew more about him than any of us. More importantly in light of the investigation I had undertaken, I asked her to tell me all that she could remember about the Franklin House years, the incest trial—which we’d never actually talked about—and any other incidents in her past that involved Father and her relationship with him.
I found that even though she had just turned sixty-six, her memory of those early years was remarkably clear and strong, and though the big picture, which I was beginning to see, completely eluded her, her ability to recall isolated, anecdotally significant events painted an incredible picture of our father. The composite picture of his demeanor, personality, and psychology blended with elements of my clandestine criminal investigation and the powerful thoughtprints that became signposts along the trail to my stunning conclusion.
What Tamar told me were simply stories, communications between older sister and younger brother about a man we’d both held in awe but who had demanded nothing less than fear and worship from his children.
Tamar did not know, of course, that I was actively conducting a criminal investigation of those years. I provided her with no information, and any references to the “Black Dahlia” came only from her. As far as she was concerned, I was simply a listener.
Tamar first came down to Los Angeles from San Francisco when she was eleven, but she returned to her mother, only to come down again when she was fourteen. It was about that second visit that she told me, “The only time I ever slept with George was on that one occasion. I thought that it was going to be this big romantic wonderful thing ’cause he promised me that when I was sixteen I would get to be a woman and he would make love to me. In the meantime, he was just training me for oral sex and stuff like that.”
But my father had not counted on his fourteen-year-old daughter’s getting pregnant.
“George said he was going to send me away to an unwed mothers’ home,” Tamar told me. “The fact that I was going to be sent away was horrible to me. I was scared to death. My girlfriend Sonia told me, ‘Oh, you have to have an abortion.’ I didn’t even know what an abortion was. Then I talked to a few more friends my age and they all said, ‘You have to have an abortion.’ So I went back to George and put the pressure on him, told him I had to have an abortion. He arranged it with a doctor. It was horrible. They didn’t give me any anesthetic, nothing. In the middle of it I was screaming, ‘Stop, stop!’ But you can’t stop in the middle. It was awful, the worst physical experience of my life. I was throwing up and in shock. This very strange man who was a friend of Dad’s drove me back to the house on Franklin.”
Tamar told my mother about the abortion, the pain and her fear, and Dad’s friend who drove her back to the house when the procedure was over. When she heard the story, Mother exploded.
Tamar then related to me a most incredible story told her by my mother, who was Tamar’s true and trusted friend and, for that brief period of time, her surrogate mother. The story involved a young woman who had worked, possibly as a nurse, for Father at his First Street Medical Clinic. She never learned the woman’s name, but as told by Dorero, “the girl was in love with George.” They had had an intimate relationship, and then Father, as was his nature, had moved on to other women. Soon after their breakup, the girl began to write a book, an “exposé” which would reveal hidden secrets about George, his life, and his activities. Mother told Tamar that late one night she received a telephone call from George. He ordered her to come immediately to the girl’s apartment, where George informed Dorero that the girl had “overdosed on pills.” Mother told Tamar it was clear that “the girl was breathing and still alive.” Father handed Dorero the secret books the girl had written and ordered her to “burn them.” Mother did as she was told, left the apartment, and destroyed the writings. According to Mother’s narrative to Tamar, George could have saved her but let his young ex-paramour die. Dorero’s story was later independently confirmed by the police, who, after taking Tamar into custody on the runaway charges, told her they “found the death suspicious, suspected George Hodel was involved in her overdose, but couldn’t prove anything.” Tamar never learned the girl’s name or any other information about her.
When Tamar was eleven, shortly after the Black Dahlia murder, she recalled, she was living at the Franklin House and her mother sent her a doll that had curly hair. Tamar took it to Father to have him name her because he had a knack for picking great names. “He told me to call her ‘Elizabeth Anne,’” she told me. “I thought that was really strange because he never picked names like that, he always picked unusual names. He did it kind of laughing, like it was a joke. So I called the doll Elizabeth Anne. Years and years later, I told a friend the story and she brought me a magazine, and I opened it and there was a very pretty face with this name, Elizabeth Anne Short. I went ‘Oh, my God.’ I never knew that was her name. I just heard it as the Black Dahlia.”
Tamar also revealed that Man Ray had taken portraits of my parents and was a frequent guest at Father’s wild parties. He and Father shared the same hedonistic tendencies, indulging themselves in their pleasures in clear defiance of the society in which they lived. Man Ray was living in Hollywood, just a mile from the Franklin House, when the incest scandal broke, but, according to Tamar, “He and his wife left the country at the time of the trial. He was afraid he was going to be investigated.”* Tamar also said that Man Ray had taken some nude photographs of her when she was thirteen.
Although my sister appreciated Man Ray as an artist, she admitted that personally she disliked him. “He was another dirty old man.” Nor did she like my father’s good friend and my mother’s first husband, John Huston. “I don’t care how great John was, when I was eleven he tried to rape me. It was your mother, Dorero, who pulled him off of me. He was a big man. He had straddled me in the bathroom at the Franklin House, and he was very drunk. But your mother came in and pulled him off of me and saved me. The next time I saw him he was playing that man in Chinatown.”
Tamar remembered Kiyo as our father’s beautifully exotic young girlfriend, and recalled that the Franklin House was filled with women: “George had all of these women at the house just waiting to see him. They were literally standing in line at his bedroom. I felt lucky if I could get in to see him. He was a perfect example of an ego gone wild. I think Huston did sex stuff with Dad and Fred Sexton and all the women. I know for sure Huston filmed stuff at the house.”
She had this to say about Dad’s physical violence: “George was so terrible when it came to punishing you three boys. He was very cruel. Michael got it the worst. It broke my heart to see how he treated you three. Especially how he was with Mike. And he was so cruel with Dorero. I remember before Franklin, visiting you at the Valentine Street house, where I would see Dad pull her around the driveway by her hair.”
What was most important to me about Tamar’s memories of 1949 and the trial wasn’t the trial itself, which was a matter of public record, but the attitude of the prosecutors who interviewed her two years after the murder of Elizabeth Short. Here Tamar was, at the very center of one of the most scandalous news stories in Hollywood—a story that could well have wound up involving Man Ray and John Huston—and firmly under the control of prosecutors, who now believed they could nail my father for crimes they suspected him of having committed but couldn’t prove. Tamar was the key to getting George Hodel behind bars.
When she told my mother about the abortion—which, in 1949, was illegal—my mother realized that Tamar was a walking piece of evidence and believed Tamar’s life was in danger. My mother lived in deathly fear of George and knew that getting Tamar out of the house would probably save her life. So Tamar fled.
“I ran away,” Tamar told me. “And I was found because Dorero had called my mom and told her, ‘Tamar has run away and you had better come down here and help her.’ So my mom came down unannounced, and George just couldn’t say, ‘I don’t know where she is.’ So George put out a missing report. I wasn’t adept at running away because I had never done it before. I had just gone to friends’ houses.”
The parents of Tamar’s friend in whose house she was hiding were away in Europe, but her friends were living there with the servants. It seemed to be a safe haven. Tamar knew the police were looking for her, which frightened her, because she’d never had any dealings with the law. So her friends protected her. “This little gang of my friends took me from place to place, hiding me out. That’s how all this came about with all the boys. All the guys helped me out, hiding me from place to place.”
In talking with the various teenagers, the police found her hiding out with a girlfriend, and Tamar, taken to the police station as a “runaway,” was questioned, and quickly began to talk. “The police took me in and, because I had just had the abortion, I thought that they could tell that I had had an abortion. So I told them. Then one question led to another.”
Soon the entire story of the incest and the goings-on at the Franklin House were out in the open, and the prosecutors had their case. But they still needed Tamar to testify against her father. They needed her trust. As Tamar remembers it, a husband-and-wife team from the DA’s office brought her to court every day and promised her that they would protect her and take care of her. Tamar told me, “They said that I had never been loved and I didn’t know what love was and that when this trial thing was all over that they were going to adopt me. I guess that was just their way of handling it to get me to say everything. I really believed them when they told me they would adopt me and give me love.”
Adding political urgency to the incest trial and the prosecution of George Hodel was the fact that William Ritzi, the state’s lead trial attorney, was also running for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. And apparently Ritzi thought he knew more about my father than what was simply in the case he was prosecuting. As Tamar remembers it, “He told me that Dad might be a suspect in the Black Dahlia case. ‘We know all about your father and you,’ he said. That’s how they got me to talk to them.
“I know that the police did talk to George back in 1947 because George said, ‘We have to be careful about doing our nude sunbathing because the police are watching the place.’ I’m pretty sure it was the year the Black Dahlia was killed when the police came out to the house. George never mentioned anything to me about that case. My gut feeling is that he knew and had met the Black Dahlia, but I really can’t say for sure.”
Dad’s statutory rape of Tamar notwithstanding, he was still cautious about how he treated her at the house. Tamar confirmed that the testimony at the incest trial, about what had happened on the night of July 1, 1949, was all true. She remembered it clearly. Even the witnesses Corrine and Barbara had told the truth to the police investigators and the prosecutors, but Dad’s sharp defense attorneys were still able to make it seem as if the entire event was a figment of Tamar’s imagination.
In my conversations with her it became obvious to me that Tamar has no current memory of the questions she was asked by attorney Robert Neeb relating to her accusing Dad of being the killer of the Black Dahlia and having a lust for blood. Nor did she remember telling anyone of her being afraid that, in her words fifty-two years ago, “My father is going to kill me and all the rest of the members of this household.” Moreover, because she had been detained in Juvenile Hall during the entire trial, she had had no access to newspapers, and so to this day remains unaware of what Neeb said about her in the courtroom after his cross-examination of her. I do believe that the “lust for blood” statement and the Black Dahlia original accusations attributed to Tamar by Neeb and Giesler had originally been told to her by Dorero, because those are the identical references, “blood-lust” and “insanity,” that Mother said to me in her drunken state when we lived in Pasadena.
It is probable that Mother, while intoxicated, told Tamar about her fears or suspicions that Dad had killed Elizabeth Short after Tamar made her initial disclosure to Mother about Dad’s having had sex with her. Mother was clearly fearful that if George discovered that Tamar had told anyone about their incestuous relationship, he would most likely have murdered his daughter before she could have an opportunity to reveal it to the authorities. Mother knew that Dad was capable of killing anyone, including a family member who might reveal his deepest secrets. Genuinely fearful for Tamar’s safety, Mother told her of her suspicions, and may well have encouraged her to run away, to get her away from the house. That set into motion the search for the missing Tamar, the arrest of Father, the trial, and Dad’s flight from Los Angeles after his acquittal.
Tamar, Dad, Michelle Phillips, and the Mamas and the Papas
Tamar remembered a night in 1967 when Dad visited her in San Francisco at the same time Michelle Phillips and the Mamas and the Papas were coming into town to perform their first live concert at the Pan Pacific. Tamar took George and the two beautiful Asian women he had brought with him to the St. Francis Hotel where Michelle was staying. “I introduced them to her,” she told me, “and she almost fainted, and her eyes rolled back in her head and she curtsied and said to George, ‘I feel like I’ve really known you since I was twelve.’ It was because of all the things I had told Michelle about him.”
Father took over like an impresario, Tamar said. After discovering they had ordered a large dinner to be brought up by room service before the scheduled concert, Father stepped in and took control, informing them that they “shouldn’t eat a large meal before a big concert.” She added, “Dad had the waiters take everything back and changed it all to just appetizers, like pupu and stuff. They all began smoking hash, and Dad passed it around, but he didn’t smoke it.”
Afterward, Tamar remembers, “I met Dad and his two girlfriends and we went out to Enrico’s for dinner. George got quite drunk and I was supporting him as we walked up the hill. That’s when he said to me, ‘Why did you do it?’ I was so stupid. I didn’t know what he was talking about because I always loved him. I thought he meant why had I always pursued and loved him. So I said, ‘I always loved you, that’s why.’ Which, of course, was a very strange answer to someone who is really asking me, ‘Why did you tell on me?’ He was so drunk; we never really understood each other.”
Later on, Tamar asked one of the Asian women whom Dad had brought along why he hadn’t smoked the hash pipe. Tamar told her he’d always smoked it in the past, that’s why his refusal was so strange. And the woman said, “Oh no, he doesn’t do that anymore.” She explained, “Before when he smoked hash, he made me lock him in his bathroom. He always made me lock him in there and told me not to let him out. George said to me that when he smokes it sometimes he does terrible things. He would make me lock him in the bathroom and he would cry and stay there all night.”
“It made my hair stand on end,” Tamar said. “I was so afraid of him because I do believe he has done so many terrible dark things.”
The Los Angeles Hotel, 1969
About two years after the Mamas and the Papas concert, Dad saw Tamar again in Los Angeles when he was making one of his business trips through town from Manila. Tamar was pregnant when Dad took her to lunch at one of the Beverly Hills hotels. As they were walking through the lobby, George suddenly stopped and pointed to a design on the carpet. He asked Tamar, “What does that remind you of?” She looked at the carpet and said, “I don’t know, some kind of flower or something. Maybe rhododendrons?” George said, “No,” and pointed around the edges with his finger. Then he said, “No, look again, it’s a vagina and lips.” He said, “They are nether lips.” Then he stomped hard on the design and he said, “Did that hurt?” “God,” Tamar told me, “I couldn’t believe it. It sent chills down my spine. ‘Nether lips.’ He never used that word before.”
The next day, George took out Tamar’s daughter, Deborah, who was then thirteen. Deborah is Tamar’s second daughter, born from her marriage to folk singer Stan Wilson.
Deborah kept secret for many years what happened that night, only telling her mother about it after she had become an adult. At dinner, Deborah suddenly became groggy, attempted to stand up, and almost collapsed on the floor. As she described it to Tamar, both the waiter and George rushed to her side, Dad catching her before she fell. Dismissing the waiter, he then helped her walk out of the dining room. The next thing Deborah recalled was waking up in a hotel. She was lying on a bed, completely nude, having been undressed while she was unconscious. Her legs had been spread open, and George was taking pictures of her with a camera. Deborah was convinced she had been drugged.
Tamar was stunned at hearing her daughter’s disclosure. Now, she thought, with Deborah’s supportive testimony, maybe Tamar’s mother would believe her. But it was not to be. “We both went to my mother and told her the story, thinking that finally it might make her believe the truth of what happened to me back at the Franklin House,” Tamar told me. “Well, she didn’t believe either one of us, and said she never wanted to see either of us again. She refused to believe her granddaughter just as she refused to believe her daughter.” To this day. Deborah told her mother, she “still hopes that the truth about what happened to her in that hotel room with her grandfather would be believed.” As for Tamar, since her truth has been buried for more than fifty years, I suspect she has by now given up all hope of ever being vindicated.
Joe Barrett and the Franklin Years
In early 1948, a year after the murder of Elizabeth Short, a talented twenty-year-old artist named Joe Barrett rented the studio at the north end of the Franklin House, became friends with my father, and lived in the studio through the entire incest trial. Even after the family broke up when Dad left the country, Joe remained a good friend to my mother and kept in touch with her through the years, whenever he could find our gypsy encampment in L.A. He and my mother remained good friends until her death in 1982.
Joe and I saw each other only a few times during my years in the LAPD and we lost touch after I retired and moved to Washington State. But he had kept in occasional contact with my brother Kelvin in Los Angeles. And when the time came for me to talk to him about the past, it was through Kelvin that I was able to reach him in 1999, shortly after my father’s death and at the early stages of my investigation.
Joe was an important window to the past. He was a young adult living there right at the time of the rape and the trial, the DA’s investigation into my father’s behavior, and the comings and goings of Man Ray. In the same way that I approached my interviews with Tamar, I did not tell him I was conducting an investigation. I merely talked with him in the hope of gaining deeper understanding about a father I had just lost and wanted to know more about. I told him I wanted to get an accurate picture of my father as he really was, as Joe knew him from the Franklin years.
Barrett’s insights were astonishing, because in addition to providing me with detailed descriptions of Dad, he also informed me, long before I discovered it through my own independent sources and research, that he himself was officially solicited by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office to assist them in their investigation of my father as “the prime suspect in the Black Dahlia murder.” I would discover through my interviews with Joe Barrett that in early 1950, Barrett was picked up by the DA’s detectives, taken to their office, and actively solicited to be their mole inside the Franklin House—“to be their eyes and ears there” was how they put it—in their effort to establish that Dr. Hodel was indeed the Black Dahlia Avenger.
The Trial
Joe’s was an intimate view of the activities at the Franklin House for almost two years, from 1948 to 1950. He told me that Father was gifted with a perfect photographic memory that permitted him to absorb ideas from other people and make them sound as if they were his own. He was super intelligent, but not particularly original.
Joe was not an invitee to my father’s parties, but he saw a lot of human traffic going through the house and lots of heads bobbing around in that large middle room between the living room and Dad’s bedroom. These were parties, he said, where there was a great deal of intense sexuality and there were lots of people in attendance. Joe reminded me that my father’s venereal disease clinic on First Street downtown was also frequented by lots of important people. These were the days before modern drugs, when venereal disease was rampant and those who could afford private treatment were very dependent on the doctors who could provide it. My father was one of those doctors.
Barrett told me that he also knew Man Ray, who was often at the Franklin House. Joe saw him there the last day Man Ray was in Hollywood. He came to visit Dad, and he also visited Joe in the studio, where they talked for an hour or so. Joe said, “Man Ray was leaving town that day, probably going back to Europe, after the shit hit the fan, at the end of ’49 or maybe it was into 1950. He and Juliet were living over by the Hollywood Ranch Market.” The trial had just concluded, and though Dad had been acquitted everyone in his circle had fallen under the scrutiny of the district attorney. Man Ray’s reputation was already such that he did not want to be caught in the web. He must also have been doubly concerned that Tamar might reveal that he had taken nude photographs of her at the Franklin House, or that the prints had been discovered by the police.
Another of Dad’s acquaintances, and Man Ray’s as well, was the novelist Henry Miller, whom Joe remembered seeing talking to Father in his library. The Franklin House had become, in those days, almost like a salon, where artists flouting convention and social mores gathered around my father, who had the means to entertain them.
Joe told me, “Tamar had named so many names to the district attorney that lots of people got arrested.” Even my father’s close friend Fred Sexton was offered a deal by the DA if he would testify against George and his relationship with Tamar. But, Joe told me, “Man Ray was somehow kept off the list of witnesses.” Joe said that Dad’s defense attorneys, Giesler and Neeb, had cost him a fortune, and that to raise the needed money he had to sell all of his rare and imported art objects. “I remember that a well-known jockey of the time named Pearson bought most of George’s artwork,” he told me.*
Joe Barrett remembered that a Dr. Ballard was arrested for performing the abortion on Tamar. He was acquitted, partly because of my father’s acquittal and because of the credibility of Tamar’s testimony. Out of the blue Barrett also said, “Did you know that your dad was a suspect in the Black Dahlia case? I know that for a fact. She had been murdered a year or so before I moved into the Franklin house. From what I heard, your dad had apparently known her.”
After the trial, when Joe was picked up by the DA investigators and taken to their office downtown, “they were really pissed,” he remembered. “‘God damn it, he got away with it!’ they exclaimed, referring to the Tamar trial, adding, ‘We want this son of a bitch. We think he killed the Black Dahlia.’ I’m sure it was investigators from the district attorney’s office and not LAPD. They wanted me to spy on George for them. I remember one of the DA investigators was a man named Walter Sullivan. I think these investigators also tried to get a couple of gals that George knew to spy on him and report back to them.”
Joe was also present when the police served a search warrant on Dad at the Franklin House after he was arrested for incest. “Thad Brown was out there standing around at the house with these DA investigators. I remember him from the newspapers. He was a police big shot back then.”
Duncan Hodel’s Memories of the Franklin House
I was stunned by my conversations with Tamar and Joe Barrett. Their incredible revelations about what went on at the Franklin House around the time of Elizabeth Short’s murder, and in the following two years, filled in many of the blank spots in my own life during that period.
Encouraged by what I had gained from Tamar and Joe Barrett, I decided to pursue a third source.
My eldest half-brother, Duncan, now seventy-one years old, had been another actual living witness at the Franklin House through the late 1940s, and he had testified at the Tamar trial.
In an October 1999 meeting in San Francisco, Duncan provided me with many details of our father’s early life, before I was born.
Duncan had made regular visits to the Franklin House in the years preceding Dad’s arrest and was twenty-one when the scandal broke. To this day, Duncan believes that Tamar invented the incest charges in an attempt to ruin Father’s life. Although he apparently never questioned that Tamar might have been telling the truth, his interview would provide a damning revelation about another murder that took place shortly after Elizabeth Short’s body was discovered. Duncan provided me with a thoughtprint so powerful that, had there been a murder trial in the Jeanne French “Red Lipstick” murder, he would doubtless have been called by the prosecution to testify against Father. In our conversation, Duncan linked him to a critical element in the crime:
Dad had some very wild parties at the Franklin House. After Dad bought the house, I used to go down with my buddies from San Francisco and stay there, and Dad would fix my friends and me up with women. It was funny, when I was there Dad told me to tell all the women I was his brother. When women were around us at the Franklin House, he didn’t want them to know he was old enough to have a son my age. I was twenty then.
I remember one party where everybody was laughing and having a good time and Dad got this red lipstick and wrote on one of the women’s breasts with the lipstick. She had these big beautiful breasts, and Dad took the lipstick and wrote these big targets round each one, and we all laughed and had a good time. I remember meeting Hortensia, his future wife from the Philippines at the Franklin House. She was visiting the U.S. and came to Dad’s parties at the house. I guess that’s where he first met her. Then after the trial they got married.
I asked Duncan if he remembered or was acquainted with any of Dad’s girlfriends from that time, and after pausing for reflection, he noted:
I remember one of his girlfriends was murdered. Her name was Lillian Lenorak. She was a dancer and artist. But the murder didn’t happen until many years after she broke up with Dad. I think her young boyfriend killed her in Palm Springs or something.
I recognized her name from the court records of the trial and knew she had been on the prosecution’s witness list. I then asked Duncan if he remembered any other names. He answered, “I remember after Dad stopped seeing Kiyo in 1942 or so, he started dating this other woman. I think her name was Jean Hewett. Jean was this drop-dead beautiful young actress. She really looked like a movie star. I don’t know whatever happened to her.”
Duncan testified briefly at the trial as a defense character witness for Dad, or, he thinks, to talk about Tamar’s promiscuity. But after the trial was over, he recalled, Dad told him something strange.
Dad told me that the district attorney had said to him, “They were going to get me.” They were out to get him, and so I think that is why Dad left the country right away and went to Hawaii. That is what he told me at the time, just before he left the U.S.
Tamar’s, Joe Barrett’s, and Duncan’s independent knowledge of Father’s activities corroborated that Dad was suspected at the time not only of committing incest with his daughter but also of murdering Elizabeth Short. Both Tamar and Joe Barrett stated that the police believed Dad killed the Black Dahlia. Duncan, while apparently unaware of any Dahlia connections, had unintentionally and inadvertently become a witness linking our father to the Jeanne French murder.
These interviews were shattering. Till now I had proceeded cautiously, as I had hundreds of times before. Conducting my investigation as an objective and impartial homicide detective, amassing facts and evidence, I slowly and carefully built my case. But now a terrible, undeniable truth was hitting deep within me: my father, the man I had looked up to, admired, and feared, this pillar of the community, this genius, was a cold-blooded, sadistic killer. Probably a serial killer.
Having come to this horrific conclusion, I suddenly wished I had never begun the journey. Part of me wanted to close Father’s tiny album, destroy the photographs, and run from the truth. I felt fear and omnipotence. A few simple, undiscoverable acts by the son, and the father’s sins would be destroyed—like him, reduced to ashes. The Hodel name and reputation would remain intact. A few simple acts, and his crimes would never be known. I could cheat infamy. A cover-up for the good of the family. I could easily do what the LAPD command had done, only better. This time the cover-up would be permanent. But the other part of me knew I could not, and would not, run or hide the truth.
* Tamar’s source regarding Man Ray was Joe Barrett, a young painter who in the mid-1940s rented a room in the Franklin House.
* Billy Pearson was a prominent jockey in the 1940s, who was an art connoisseur and also a close friend of John Huston’s. In Lawrence Grobel’s biography The Hustons, the author writes that Pearson, one of the first contestants to win the grand prize on the infamous 1950s quiz show The $64,000 Question, helped Huston smuggle rare pre-Columbian art pieces out of Mexico.