Black Dahlia Killer Trail Leads to My Father, Says Ex-cop

Few murders have cast a longer, darker shadow over Los Angeles than the Black Dahlia case. The killing and mutilation of would-be actress Elizabeth Short in 1947 led to endless speculation as to who was the likely murderer and around 500 "confessions". The mystery has been the subject of numerous books and films, including True Confessions, starring Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall.

Now a former LAPD homicide detective, Steve Hodel, claims to have solved the mystery and has published his findings in a new book, Black Dahlia Avenger. The most remarkable aspect of Hodel's claim is the identity of the supposed killer: Dr George Hodel, the detective's own father.

He had been a wealthy LA doctor who was also, according to his son, a Jack the Ripper figure who probably murdered many other women but was protected by connections within the LA police.

Short, a 22-year-old from Massachusetts, had come to Los Angeles to pursue a movie career, but wound up waitressing and living in cheap apartments. After her death, she was nicknamed the Black Dahlia by the press, because she had jet black dyed hair and often dressed in black.

The nature of her murder was horrific: the body was clinically bisected and arranged in a naked pose in a vacant lot. But although the city was outraged, the murder went unsolved.

Steve Hodel, who served 17 years in the homicide department of the LA police, only began researching the crime after his father's death four years ago when he found what he believed were personal pictures of Short in his father's photo album.

He started excavating his father's past and found him to be a sadistic misogynist who had committed incest with his daughter, Steve Hodel's half-sister, Tamar.

Dr Hodel had been a crime reporter in LA before he trained as a doctor in San Francisco. He had led an unconventional life, fathering children by different women, living in menages a trois and being friends with the film director, John Huston, and the surrealist photographer, Man Ray. In 1949, he was prosecuted for incest and oral copulation with the then 14-year-old Tamar. She gave evidence that he had made her take part in orgies at their home.

Shortly after the acquittal, Dr Hodel left first for Hawaii and then for the Philippines where he settled for the next 40 years. He abandoned his then wife, Steve Hodel's mother after a brief and stormy marriage. A series of sadistic murders that had been taking place in LA at that time ceased.

The Black Dahlia murderer taunted the police with notes, some written in capital letters, others made up from newspaper headlines, which were sent to the press. Steve Hodel took some of his father's notes to a handwriting expert who concluded that Dr Hodel had probably written the original taunts. Another part of the case is that Short's body was posed in the same way as a famous Man Ray photograph called the Minotaur and that Dr Hodel was a devotee of the Marquis de Sade.

In fact, Dr Hodel had been one of about 20 suspects, not least because the clinical bisection pointed to a surgeon.

His house had even been bugged by police but there had never been enough evidence to charge him. He had once run a venereal disease clinic and knew many of the LA establishment's secrets. Steve Hodel suggests that his father effectively blackmailed his police connections to evade capture.

He also decided that his father had killed another woman, Jeanne French, whose body was found a month after Short's, also in a vacant lot, with the letters BD scrawled on it in lipstick.

"My journey's end revealed to me a father who was evil incarnate, everything I had spent my entire career trying to remove from society," writes Hodel. He suggested many other unsolved murders of women could have been carried out by his father.

The book has won some converts. Deputy district attorney Steve Kay, looking at the findings in a personal capacity, concluded that he "would have no reservations about filing two counts of murder against Dr George Hodel".

But John Gilmore, author of a previous book on the case, Severed: the True Story of the Black Dahlia Murder, has said that the photos in George Hodel's album that supposedly started the hunt are not even of Short. The current DA is planning no action.

"The book is interesting," said Sandi Gibbons, the DA's spokeswoman yesterday. "But it's not conclusive." She said the DA's office would not spend time and resources pursuing a case in which the chief suspect was long dead.