THIS ARCADE 2015 EDITION is an update to the original 2003 Arcade hardback edition. (Arcade is now an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing.)
The two updated chapters (Aftermath and New Investigation: Hard Evidence and Forensics) included in the July 2006 HarperCollins paperback edition have been added here with some slight modifications and revisions. The main one being my location, identification, and elimination of Photo Number 2, “Maganda,” as not being Elizabeth Short.
In addition, to what has been included in the new chapters, more evidence has surfaced and new witnesses have come forward. New discoveries have been found inside the pages of the Los Angeles District Attorney 1950 transcripts, and new documents from the UCLA archives have established and confirmed my belief that my father’s Sowden/Franklin House was the actual “Black Dahlia” murder location.
Chief among this new evidence:
1. DA Files documenting that in 1950, Lt. Frank Jemison was actively investigating the possibility that bodies may have been buried in the basement of George Hodel’s residence as well as his reopening and reinterviewing of witnesses in the LAPD’s original 1945 investigation of George Hodel as the possible killer of his personal secretary, Ruth Spaulding.
2. Newly discovered DA file tape-recorded admissions by Dr. George Hodel confirming he performed abortions, “lots of them,” at his downtown First Street Clinic.
3. The most important and damning new evidence was discovered in 2008 and relates to letters and receipts found at UCLA archives in the Frank Lloyd Wright Jr. Papers. These original 1947 documents establish a direct link between fifty-pound cement sacks left at the Franklin House by workers (contracted by Lloyd Wright) on January 10, 1947, to identical paper cement sacks used by Elizabeth Short’s killer to transport her bisected body parts to the vacant lot at 39th & Norton just five days later. (LAPD confirmed at the 1947 Coroner’s Inquest that these fifty-pound paper cement sacks seen and photographed next to the body were used to bring the body to the scene.)
For a full discussion on all of the above and additional investigative findings, I refer my readers to my website: www.stevehodel.com.
May 2014—A sequel to this book entitled, Black Dahlia Avenger II: Presenting the Follow-Up Investigation and Further Evidence Linking Dr. George Hill Hodel to Los Angeles’s Black Dahlia and other 1940s-LONE WOMAN MURDERS (Thoughtprint Press, Los Angeles 2014) has just been published.
BDA II contains all of the above listed summaries and much more, including my entire follow-up investigation from 2006 to 2014.
Steve Hodel
October 2014