The Watch, the Proof-Sheet Papers, the FBI Files, and the Voice
The Dahlia Military Watch
George Hodel watches, (a) 1946 and (b) 1947
The 1946 Man Ray photograph of my father embracing Yamantaka (exhibit 43a) reveals what appears to be a black-face military watch, commonly worn by officers during the war years, on Father’s left wrist. As we know, George Hodel loved to portray himself as a military officer, displaying the power and prestige associated with his three-star rank. His officer’s watch was another accessory of his former status, and he treasured it. We know that this photograph was taken by Man Ray, after father’s return from China, most likely after his Yamantaka statue arrived in mid-October 1946. This means he was wearing the military watch just weeks before Elizabeth’s murder.
In 43b, Father is posing in a family picture probably in the spring or summer of 1947, but in any event shortly after the Elizabeth Short murder. On his left hand, resting on my brother Kelvin’s shoulder, he is wearing a different wristwatch, this one with a white face.
We know that “50 LAPD recruits” in their re-canvass and search of the 39th and Norton crime scene on January 19, 1947, found a “man’s military-type wristwatch on the vacant lot close to where the victim’s body was originally discovered.” The watch discovered at the crime scene was “a military-style 17-jewel ‘Croton’ with a leather-bound, steel snap band. Engraved on it are the words ‘Swiss made, water proof, brevet, stainless steel back.’” There was no further mention in the press concerning police efforts to locate the owner of the watch.
To date, my attempts to locate a similar Croton watch for comparison to the one described in the article have proved futile. In 1946 the Croton Watch Company was located on 48th Street in New York City, but apparently the company is no longer in business. Other than the one newspaper article referring to the police finding the watch, I have found no other references. This would be considered extremely important physical evidence in the crime, and normal police procedure would be to photograph the item, contact the manufacturer, and attempt to identify and trace the item through potential witnesses. That no further information or follow-up were forthcoming is of serious concern. Apparently LAPD made no public appeal for assistance in helping identify the item. It does not appear that any special police bulletin was prepared or circulated within the confines of the local law enforcement agencies throughout Southern California.
Based on Father’s apparent loss of his military-style watch matching the description of the Dahlia watch found at the crime scene, and his simultaneous documented wearing of a new watch, there is a strong possibility that it was Father’s watch found near the body. Moreover, the watch in the Man Ray photograph did not turn up among my father’s possessions after his death. It simply disappeared, possibly at the 39th and Norton Black Dahlia crime scene. Does this watch still remain hidden in a secure LAPD evidence vault, awaiting inspection and identification?
The Proof-Sheet Papers
We know that LAPD’s chief criminalist, Ray Pinker, forensically examined “proof-sheet paper” in the murder case of Otto Parzyjegla and compared them to the proof-sheet paper sent to the newspapers by the Black Dahlia Avenger. Parzyjegla’s papers were eliminated as not being the same.
In January 1947, my father did have a printing press in the basement of the Franklin House. It was the same press he had had since his teens when he printed the first edition of Fantasia in January 1925. He also had proof-sheet paper of a size and type similar to those mailed in by the Dahlia suspect in January 1947, a sample of which I possess because he returned to me my original childhood drawings in 1995. Specifically, exhibit 44, the “Chinese Chicken” I drew and Father subsequently inscribed “Steven April 1949,” was from that stock.
Exhibit 44
“Chinese Chicken-Mountains-Sun”
A second sample of this proof-sheet paper came into my possession from an original sales brochure Father designed and printed in late 1949 or early 1950, in connection with his marketing of the Franklin House.
Both samples should be considered potential physical evidence, and while the possibility exists, because two years had elapsed between the Dahlia murder and my father’s writing on my drawing and his sales brochure, that they may not be from the same stock as the Dahlia proof sheets, a chemical and spectrographic analysis and comparison of my original copies could verify whether the stock is identical or similar. The state of the art is much advanced, and I believe the comparison would be conclusive. I suspect the pasted evidence notes retained in police custody are identical to Father’s proof stock and could possibly match the Avenger notes in size, shape, and fiber content. LAPD booked into evidence these original notes mailed to the papers by the Black Dahlia Avenger. Those original proof-sheet notes correspond to our exhibit numbers 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 30, and 31. These original pasted notes should still exist in police custody in the evidence lockers, because any destruction of physical evidence known to have been connected to the LAPD’s most notorious unsolved murder case would have to have been deliberate. The destruction or “accidental loss” of evidence would tend to further substantiate a cover-up to protect the perpetrator(s) of the Dahlia and French murders.
The FBI Files
As I had for Elizabeth Short, I requested via the Freedom of Information Act any and all available information on my father. It was a slow process, but eventually I received the following information from the FBI.
No investigation has been conducted by the FBI concerning the captioned individual (George Hill Hodel) or his father. However, our files reflect the following information, which possibly relates to captioned individual.
I. A confidential informant of unknown reliability advised in October, 1924, that [redacted] . . . was a member of The Severance Club. The informant described The Severance Club as being composed of the leading “Parlor Bolsheviks” and “Pinks” of Pasadena, Los Angeles, and Hollywood, California, and its membership was limited in the club members’ own language to “The Cream of the Intellectual Radicals.”
II. During May, 1947, one George Hodel, 5121 Franklin Avenue, Hollywood, California, was in contact with the Soviet Embassy, Washington, D.C., concerning the “Information Bulletin” of the U.S.S.R.
The FBI further indicated that they were withholding from release two additional pages that related to an inquiry dated October 8, 1956, from an unnamed agency related to George Hodel.
Based on the timing of the 1956 inquiry, I suspect it may have simply been a routine background check from the Manila office of the Department of Defense or possibly the United States Information Agency, both of whom Father had contracted with to perform market research. Of primary interest, however, is Father’s timely and clandestine inquiry to the Soviet Union, shortly after the murder of Elizabeth Short.
Though the killers’ taunting note to the press on January 29, 1947, stated that they were leaving the country for Mexico, it is possible that Father was also considering seeking a safe haven in the country of his family’s beginnings—Russia.
The Department of Justice FBI file on “Elizabeth Ann Short, The Black Dahlia” contains almost two hundred pages of previously classified material. Included in these files is the important interview their agents conducted with “Sergeant Doe,” who dated and dined with Elizabeth Short in late September 1946 and then spent the night with her at the Figueroa Hotel.
Her dossier contains other important and hitherto unknown investigative facts:
People were led to believe from local newspaper reports and police statements in the days immediately following Short’s murder that no fingerprints of the suspect existed because (a) the suspect in mailing Elizabeth Short’s personal effects to the press “soaked the materials in gasoline,” and (b) while fingerprints were found on the notes, “they belonged to postal inspectors who touched the materials.”
The FOIA documents I received clearly establish that the FBI possessed four readable fingerprints, obtained from one or more of the suspect notes, and that they were actively comparing these original prints to potential suspects as late as 1949. Due to redaction of individual suspect(s) they cannot be identified by name. Regarding the suspect fingerprints, Special Agent Hood of the FBI’s Los Angeles office said in a letter to the Bureau’s Fingerprint Section in Washington, D.C.:
January 31, 1947
Director, FBI
Re: Elizabeth Short
Dear Sir:
There are enclosed herewith three photographs of fingerprints removed from an anonymous letter addressed to the Los Angeles Police Department concerning the mutilation murder of ELIZABETH SHORT. It is requested that these prints be checked through the single Fingerprint Section and if an identification is made that this office be notified by teletype immediately. In the event an identification is not made from these prints, it is requested that same be retained in the Single Fingerprint Section for possible future identification.
Very Truly yours,
P. B. Hood (Special Agent, Los Angeles)
The Bureau’s Washington Fingerprint Section responded to Agent Hood in Los Angeles on February 15, 1947.
Reference is made to your letter of January 31, 1947, submitting three photographs of latent fingerprints for examination in connection with the above entitled matter, your file #62-2928. You are advised that the four latent fingerprints appearing in the photographs were searched through the single fingerprint file, but no identifications were effected. The photographs are being retained for any future comparisons, which might be desired.
Documents reveal that fingerprint comparisons were being conducted as late as January 19, 1949, which means that these unidentified prints were not those of the postal inspectors, whose prints would already have been on file. Whether these were actual suspect prints or not and whether they yet remain in existence for comparison is not known.
The file also contains extensive memorandums between LAPD and the FBI verifying that they were in fact looking for a suspect with surgical knowledge. LAPD obtained the names of three hundred students from the University of Southern California Medical School, and requested they all be compared by the FBI against the lifts obtained from Avenger notes. LAPD further advised the Bureau that their own experts were in the process of conducting handwriting comparisons of some of these students to Avenger notes. Additional memorandums from J. Edgar Hoover show that he was attempting to utilize the high-profile status of the Black Dahlia case as a means of accessing Social Security Administration files on private citizens. His request to SSA to obtain information on Elizabeth Short’s associates was denied. The director of SSA reminded Hoover that the files on private citizens were sacrosanct, the only exception being wartime, where the national security was at risk.
The Voice
Los Angeles Examiner city editor James Richardson was the only person ever to hear the voice of the person who identified himself as Elizabeth Short’s killer. He described the voice as that “of an egomaniac, that had a soft sly sound I will never forget.”
After the intense interest in the Dahlia case had faded away, Richardson said it was still his dream and hope that one day the Dahlia killer would pick up the telephone, dial his city desk number, and again ask for him.
That never happened, but from the description of other people who heard a voice that matched Richardson’s description, I believe it is one that I know very well—my father’s educated and professionally trained voice.
Various witnesses in separate crimes have described the killer’s voice as “suave and cultured.” Even in his youth, his colleagues and friends had mentioned the distinctiveness of his voice when they were describing him to the drama critic Ted Le Berthon, who wrote the 1925 “Clouded Past of a Poet” article in the Evening Herald. What had they told Le Berthon?
“It’s not George’s gloom, his preference for Huysmanns, De Gourmont, Poe, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Hecht that pains us,” these friends said, “but his stilted elegance, his meticulous speech!” Le Berthon himself commented on “the voice” later in the same article, a voice that due to its distinctiveness, allowed him to recognize the speaker even before he turned and saw Father in his taxi uniform.
Knowing my father’s voice, from its resonance at the Franklin House dinner table, from his authoritative manner in his executive offices in Manila, and even during his final years in San Francisco, I can recognize both Le Berthon’s and Richardson’s descriptions as being more than just reminiscent of how my father sounded. They and I heard the same voice.