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George Hill Hodel (October 10, 1907 – May 17, 1999) was an American physician, and a suspect in the murder of Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia. He was never formally charged with the crime but, at the time, police considered him a viable suspect, and two of his children believe he was guilty. He was also accused of rape his daughter, Tamar Hodel, but was acquitted of that crime. He lived overseas several times, primarily in the Philippines between 1950 and 1990.
Hodel attended South Pasadena High School and graduated early, at age 15. He enrolled at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, but was forced to leave the university after one year, due in part to a sex scandal involving a professor's wife. He had impregnated the woman and wanted to raise their child together, but she refused. The affair between Hodel and the woman caused her marriage to fall apart.
By around 1928, Hodel was in a common-law marriage with a woman named Emilia, and they had a son, Duncan. In the 1930s, Hodel was legally married to Dorothy Anthony, a fashion model from San Francisco, with whom he had a daughter, Tamar.
Hodel graduated from Berkeley pre-med in June 1932. Immediately afterward, he enrolled in the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, and received his medical degree in June 1936.
In 1940, Hodel married Dorothy Harvey, John Huston's ex-wife. He called her "Dorero" to avoid confusion with his other wife, Dorothy Anthony, at least within their circle, but she was better known as Dorothy Huston-Hodel. Hodel purchased the Sowden House in 1945 and lived there from 1945 until 1950. The structure, built in 1926 by Lloyd Wright, the son of the noted American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, has since been registered as a Los Angeles historic landmark.
By the late 1940s, Hodel was effectively a polygamy. Around the time of the death of Elizabeth Short, and the suspected suicide of his clinical secretary, Ruth Spaulding, he was living with "Dorero" and their three children, as well as his first legal wife, Dorothy Anthony, and their daughter Tamar and, at times, his original common-law wife, Emilia, the mother of Hodel's eldest child, who was an adult by that time. Hodel was also prone to taking temporary lovers, and witnesses later suggested such a relationship between him and the "Black Dahlia", Elizabeth Short, who was found murdered on January 15, 1947.
In March 1950, Hodel left the United States for Hawaii, then a U.S. territory, where he married an upper-class Filipino people woman, Hortensia Laguda. After having four children, they divorced in the 1960s. Laguda later became a member of the Philippines Congress, as Hortensia Starke.
In late 1949, Hodel's teenage daughter Tamar accused him of sexual abuse and impregnating her. He was acquitted after a widely publicized trial. Two witnesses to the alleged abuse testified at the trial. A third recanted her earlier testimony and refused to come forward, with one theory being that Hodel threatened her into silence.
Hodel came to police attention as a suspect in the Elizabeth Short murder in 1949 after the sexual abuse trial. Known or suspected sex crime in the area were being investigated for the Short case, and it had come out in that trial that Tamar had allegedly claimed her father was the Dahlia killer. Hodel's medical degree also aroused suspicion, given the hypothesis that whoever bisected Short's body had some degree of surgical skill. At least eight witnesses claimed first-hand knowledge of a 1946 relationship between Short and Hodel, then back in Los Angeles from China. The full details of the investigation came to light only in 2003, when a "George Hodel–Black Dahlia File" was discovered in archives at the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office. The file revealed that in 1950, Hodel was a suspect of the Dahlia murder. His Hollywood residence was electronically bugged by an 18-man DA/LAPD task force between February 15 and March 27, 1950. The DA tapes recorded him saying:
Hodel was also interviewed as a suspect in the nearby June 1949 murder of Louise Springer, the "Green Twig Murder", though evidence to support this accusation was not available publicly until July 2018.
In October 1949, Hodel's name was mentioned in a formal written report to the grand jury as one of five prime suspects in the Short murder, but none of the named suspects was submitted to the grand jury for consideration for indictment, as the investigation was still ongoing.
Hodel obtained a degree in psychiatry and counseled prisoners in the Territorial prison in Hawaii for three years, then moved on to the Philippines, where he started a new family, and appears to have remained until 1990, finally dying in 1999 in San Francisco without charges ever being filed. However, his son Steve has written that he believes Hodel re-entered the United States multiple times each year from 1958 through 1988 and specifically in 1966–1969 to commit more murders, and then return to the Philippines. (2025). 9780525951322, Dutton. ISBN 9780525951322
A September 2006 episode of Cold Case Files, hosted by Bill Kurtis, illustrates the mixed reaction to Steve Hodel's hypothesis as outlined in his first book Black Dahlia Avenger (2003). Head Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay described himself as highly impressed by Steve Hodel's research and conclusions and even went so far as to declare the case had been solved. Less impressed was active Detective Brian Carr, the LAPD officer then in charge of the Black Dahlia case, which was still officially open. Carr's opinion was that Hodel's theory was based on a few intriguing facts linked together by unsubstantiated supposition. Short's relatives also disagreed that the photos in Hodel's album were of Short. Carr added that if he ever took a case as weak as Steve Hodel's to a prosecutor he would be "laughed out of the office". Carr, admitting that he had not read all of Steve Hodel's materials, added, "I don't have the time to either prove or disprove Hodel's investigation. I am too busy working on active cases." Steve Hodel has since produced two additional books on the Dahlia case, and several books on the Zodiac killer and other cases, attempting to link them to his father.
In July 2018, Sandi Nichols of Indianapolis, Indiana, while going through her recently deceased mother's personal effects, discovered a "Dying Declaration Letter" written by her grandfather, W. Glenn Martin, dated October 26, 1949. The handwritten envelope read, "In case of Margaret Ellen's or Glenna Jean's Death" and was initialed "WGM"; the letter was written out of fear that one or both of his teenage daughters might be killed. The three-page letter identified W. Glenn Martin as a paid LAPD police informant working for a "Sgt. McCawley" (Sgt. McCauley, LAPD Internal Affairs Division). He described his activities as working undercover for LAPD detectives to help them identify and arrest corrupt police officers; in his words, "...it was to try and see if other officers could be inveigled into crime." The Martin letter, reproduced in full in the chapter "Afterword" in Black Dahlia Avenger III, went on to name "GH" on 17 separate occasions identifying him as a personal acquaintance of Martin's as well as of McCauley's, and named him as the killer of both Short and of a second lone woman, Louise Springer, the "Green Twig Murder" victim. Martin's letter claimed that both he and "GH" personally knew Springer and that he believed "GH" had also killed her. LAPD at that time was actively investigating the Springer and Black Dahlia murders and had publicly identified them as "probably connected." Springer was garroted on June 13, 1949, just two blocks from where Short's body was found in 1947.
Included in the letter was the fact that LAPD, after being informed that "GH" knew victim Springer, brought "GH" in to be "grilled about the Springer murder." The Martin letter made it clear that "GH" was known and protected by law enforcement officers and that they "let him go." Martin's instructions were that his letter was to be opened only in case of harm coming to either of his daughters. No harm came to either of them so the letter remained unreported and in the family's possession for 70 years until discovered and read by Martin's granddaughter. The information in the Martin letter reestablishes the timeline and the fact that LAPD undercover agent Martin named George Hodel to LAPD detectives in June/July of 1949. The letter established that LAPD suspected and brought Hodel in for questioning and "grilled" him on both the Louise Springer and Elizabeth Short murders some three months prior to his incest arrest of his daughter in October of that same year.
The second project was an eight-part documentary podcast, entitled Root of Evil: The True Story of the Hodel Family and the Black Dahlia, a Cadence13/TNT production using archival audio and interviews with Hodel family members. The podcast includes many of the actual investigative findings and linkage of George Hodel to the Black Dahlia murder, establishing that according to secret police records he, in fact, knew and had dated the victim in the 1940s.
Both series surmise that Fauna might be both the granddaughter and the daughter of Hodel, though there is no evidence as to who her real father is. In 1949, George Hodel had been arrested and tried for incest by LAPD; his 14-year-old daughter Tamar accused him of raping her, resulting in a pregnancy she aborted. Hodel obtained criminal defense attorney Jerry Giesler and was acquitted after a three-week jury trial.
The Root of Evil producer Zak Levitt was able to obtain DNA analysis and a review of the results by one of the world's leading experts, which positively eliminated George Hodel as the biological father of Fauna Hodel.
There was also a twenty-minute segment summarizing all these different theories, on the Discovery Channel documentary series The Expedition Files hosted by Josh Gates, on April 23, 2025.
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