November 29, 2023 • 23 mins
George Hill Hodel was a brilliant physician who rubbed elbows with the cream of Los Angeles society, but after the mutilated body of a 22-year-old woman named Elizabeth Short is found in the weeds of South Norton Avenue, suspicion falls on him. After planting a listening device in his neo-Mayan mansion at 5121 Franklin Avenue, investigators begin to learn sickening secrets about his life, but always seem to be one step behind the possible murderer of the Black Dahlia."
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Murder Holmes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
We were invited to go up with a TV production company.
They were trying to see if there was anything in
spirit there and they thought they'd start with us. So
as I'm walking up to the front door, I see
this guy dressed in period clothing from the nineteen forties
and he's like giving me the stink eye.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
That voice you just heard is Mark Nelson. He's a
psychic medium who specializes in cleansing stigmatized properties and ghost hunting.
I interviewed Mark and his wife Bob about their work,
including one notorious property they were asked to investigate for
a television show. Five one two to one Franklin Avenue
in Los Angeles. Five one two one Franklin Avenue is
(00:47):
historic for a number of reasons, but perhaps it is
known best for being the former home of George Hodell,
the prime suspect in the Black Dahlia murders. Here's Mark again.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
I'm seeing guy calling me a little pip squeak is
like what are you doing here? And it's like they
want to intimidate you because this is all they have
left intimidation. And then I just hear in my head, Oh,
he's a doctor. And then I just turned to the
producer and said, if a doctor lived in this house
at the time of the murder that you're investigating, he
did it. And then she was like, Okay, that's what
(01:20):
we're here for. We think a guy did it. And
he was like a small, intense looking guy with a
little pencil thin mustache, not unlike what you would see
in the nineteen forties. And he was trying to basically
berate me, intimidate Barb and other people who were with us.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
This is murder, Holmes. I'm Matt Marinovitch. In the early
(02:02):
morning of January fifteenth, nineteen forty seven, a mother was
taking her child for a walk in Lemerit Park in
Los Angeles, a place that was hardly as bucolic looking
as it sounds at the time. It was just a
dusty road with a dirty sidewalk running past vacant lots.
Up ahead, she thought she saw two parts of a
(02:22):
department store mannequin lying in the dry grass. When she
got closer, she realized it was the body of a
naked woman cut in half at the waist. The two
parts of the victim's body had been painstakingly laid precisely
one foot apart, and her intestines had been tucked neatly
beneath her buttocks. The corpse had been posed with her
(02:43):
hands over her head, her elbows bent at right angles,
and her legs spread apart. There was no sign of
blood at the scene, meaning the victim had been killed
elsewhere and then placed there. Investigators later determined she had
been killed ten hours before she was placed in the
grass on South Norton Avenue. Two plant based bristles were
(03:04):
found on her body, most likely from a brush that
had been used to scrub or clean. The only other
evidence found at the scene was a heel print and
some watery blood found in a cement sac. The killer
had drained the blood from the victim's body and then
performed a highly specialized surgical procedure that was taught in
the nineteen thirties called a Hemi corporrectomy. This is the
(03:27):
act of slicing through the lumbar spine, carefully avoiding the vertebrae.
There it's the only place where the body can be
severed in half without breaking bone. Detectives felt that the
murder was committed indoors, where water drainage and perhaps medical
equipment were available. There were other horrifying marks on the
victim's body. The corners of either side of her mouth
(03:50):
had been cut three inches deep, so that she appeared
to be gruesomely smiling. This is sometimes called the Glausgow smile.
When the autopsy performed afterwards, it was determined that the
killer had made these slits while she was still alive,
and most likely continued to torture the victim before she died.
The victim was fingerprinted and identified as Elizabeth Short, a
(04:14):
twenty two year old aspiring actress who had last been
seen on a payphone in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel.
On January twenty fourth, a suspicious Manila envelope was discovered
by a postal service worker, addressed to the Los Angeles Examiner.
A message written cut and pasted letters was found inside.
(04:36):
Here is Dahlia's belongings letter to follow. There would be
more correspondence from the killer, but the killer never turned
himself in. To this date, no one ex detectives, true
crime writers, armchair slews, ex FBI agents seems to agree
on anything about the Black Dahlia case. The closer it
comes to seemingly being solved, the farther it recedes from
(04:59):
any hope of closure. Even her nickname is in dispute,
with some claiming it was coined because an employee at
the drug store she frequented noticed her sheer black clothes
and compared her to the Blue Dahlia, the heroine in
a movie that was well known at the time. But
one thing that many followers of the infamous case agree
on is that the murderer possessed excellent surgical skills. He
(05:22):
had been careful to locate the lumbar vertebrae and then
carefully sliced through the disk space using a very sharp instrument.
An amateur would have made a mess looking for this
incredibly narrow space. Elizabeth Killer never second guessed his procedure.
He cut through layers of tissue precisely, never letting the
knife retreat, which would have caused feathering of the body tissue.
(05:45):
He would have had to withstand the overpowering smell of
human feces as he cut entirely through the body in bowels.
There were superficial cuts on her breasts and leg as
well ligature marks on her wrists, ankles, and neck. Three
bruises on her head that the medical examiner determined were
the blows that had actually killed her. Police at the
(06:07):
time were so certain that the killer was a surgeon
that they served a warrant to the University of Southern
California Medical School, which provided a full list of their students.
So who was this surgeon? Some armchair sleuic and ex
detectives think it was Leslie Hillan, but Dylan successfully sued
his accusers and was placed in San Francisco at the
(06:28):
time of the crime. But seven point five miles from
where Elizabeth Short's body was found, there lived another surgeon
who had an impeccable resume in over seven hundred and
sixty six hours of surgical practice. He lived in a
stunning six thousand square foot Neomian mansion at five point
two one Franklin Avenue. It had been designed by Lloyd Wright,
(06:50):
some of the most famous architect in American history. Frank
Lloyd Wright. In the Hollywood neighborhood of Las Feles, where
there are plenty of architectural masterpieces to gaucat the home
at five one two one Franklin stands out for its
unforgettable entryway, a facade featuring two mammoth blocks of concrete
and a tomblike entrance that resembles a giant set of jaws,
(07:12):
which would soon become the home's nickname. Once you were
let pass the massive copper gate that guards the home,
the bright desert sunlight almost instantly recedes behind you. Inside
the home, the feelings almost claustrophobic and dark, with rooms
tightly packed on either side of a narrow corridor that
leads to a courtyard in the back. There is a
(07:35):
scarcity of windows and light, as if the home belonged
more to the earth than the blue sky above it.
Between nineteen forty and nineteen forty five, George Hodell lived there.
Hodel easily moved in the highest circles of Los Angeles society.
He was a renowned doctor and surgeon who had held
a variety of impressive positions, including chief medical Officer at
(07:58):
the un But there was a darker side to Hodell too,
and will learn all about it after the break. We're
back with Murder Homes. George Hodell was entranced by the
surrealists and decadence that surrounded them. He befriended the famous
(08:19):
photographer Man Ray and together they shared a taste for
sado masochism. Five point two in Franklin even gained a
reputation as a place where cocktail parties devolved into all
night orgies that lasted until the dawn hours. But in
the bright light of day, there was always a price
to pay for excess, and Hodell soon became known as
the VD Doctor to the Stars. But all of that
(08:42):
decadence in that rabbit warren of rooms came to a
stop when his own daughter accused him of raping her
in nineteen forty nine. After a widely publicized trial, Hodell
would be acquitted, but he would also find himself in
the FBI's crosshairs, who added him to the list of
suspects in the Black Dahlia case. It didn't help that
(09:03):
a good friend of his, Lilian Lenorak, when questioned by
Detective Frank Jamison, admitted that Elizabeth Short was a sometime
girlfriend of doctor Hodell's. The FBI bugged his home and
late at night, an eighteen man surveillance team working in
shifts would listen to everything said at five Poet two
one Franklin. In one of the recordings they captured, this exchange.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
I suppose and I did kill the black doll. Yeah,
they can't move it now. They can't talk to much
secretary anymore because she's dead. They thought there was something
fishy anyway. Now they may have figured it out killed there.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
When I look at a picture of doctor George Hodell
in nineteen fifty two, I think he looked slightly smug,
with light black curly hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, and
a black dress visible underneath his jacket. He looks very
much the part of an arrogant doctor, someone who would
have very little time for small talk with distraught patients.
A few years ago, ghost hunter Mark Nelson, who you
(10:12):
heard at the beginning of this episode, and his wife
Bob were asked by a television production team to enter
five one two one Franklin Avenue to suss out any
potential paranormal presence. They wandered through the same rooms that
George Odell had once entertained his guests. Here's Mark and
Barb talking about what they.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Saw from the living room. You look around, there could
be like there's like four exits and entrances, and you
can't tell what's the front door.
Speaker 4 (10:42):
Yeah, if you were disoriented or drugged, you would get lost,
you would not know where how to get out. So
it was like the perfect murder house.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Parts of the house were even though ites on Franklin,
which is currently a pretty noisy part of town. It
was soundproof downstairs. You couldn't hear it. It was why
is the dead?
Speaker 3 (11:01):
So to speak.
Speaker 4 (11:02):
The walls were really sick. The walls were really sick,
so you couldn't hear You couldn't hear any of the
traffic outside.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
It's like he wasn't afraid of showing us like a
lot of blood and visuals of things that he was
responsible for and giving us terrible feelings. I got these flashes,
and Barber had other images too. I feel like I
must have started to experience the fear that one of
the victims went through, because I feel like I'm being
chased and I don't know how to get out of here.
(11:31):
And yet what's odd about this house is that you
can look out during the day and there's sunlight and
there's palm trees, but you see up You're in a
sealed courtyard, so there's no one there to see what's
happening to you. You can look out and see other
parts of the house no one else can see.
Speaker 4 (11:49):
In the center of the house was open and it
had an atrium, so it was basically a series of corridors.
And I could totally understand why some of the women
that were there could not find their way out and
were trapped. I totally could see.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Did you go to the basement at all in that house?
Do you remember?
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Yes? Yes, it was sound proof that it looked almost
like a religious environment with all of the religious iconography removed.
It's like, why do you have this in your basement?
It's set up to be like a viewing platform where
other people are supposed to watch. You could make the
case that is at a sacrificial table. Why is that
(12:33):
table there? I guarantee you don't have a table that
could be used for human sacrifice in your basement. And
it was just creepy as all get up. But it's
almost like this, okay, service is over. Everyone take everything down.
Feel the shape of the place is still intact, but
the purpose of it has been masked.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Imagine for a moment that you sorde Hodell has finished
laboring over the body of Elizabeth's short in the basement.
It's approximately one am in the morning, and over the
course of several hours, no one has heard her scream
for help. Now, wiping his forearm over his perspiring forehead,
he carefully washes the last of the blood off her
(13:18):
torso and wraps both parts of her body and blankets.
Transferring the corpse to the trunk of his car. He
leaves for now her possessions behind, the purse, the high
heeled shoes, the driver's license, the business cards in her wallet,
which he will later wipe clean with a rag soaked
in gasoline to remove his fingerprints. He starts the car,
(13:42):
easing down Franklin. The shimmering lights of the Hollywood Hill
is visible in the distance. It's a relatively cold night,
and as he drives, the sweat soaking his shirt dries up.
When he takes a left on North Wilton, he can
hear a muffled thump in the trunk as the body
rolls to the side. He takes a slower right onto
(14:03):
West Third, and then soon he's on Crenshaw, easily blending
into the early morning traffic there and driving at the
exact speed limit for twenty eight minutes until he reaches
Colosseum Street. Then one more quick turn, and he's in
the middle of nowhere, a field essentially, with a few
tracked homes visible in the distance. Imagine Hodell dragging the
(14:26):
bottom half of Elizabeth Short's body eleven inches from the
upper half. He feels heightened, but not rushed. The erotic energy,
which dissipated hours before, has just started to come back,
in small, little riplets, then bigger waves. He takes more
shallow breaths as he touches her for the last time,
(14:47):
carefully arranging her arms at right angles to her body
so that it almost looks like she's surrendering. He stares
down at her for one more moment, not seeing her
through his eyes now, but through the eyes of others
who will soon find her, and that gives him pleasure too,
forcing them to see the darkest side of the world
for just a few minutes, just as he does, Just
(15:09):
like visitors are forced to walk the claustrophobic corridor toward
a distant blaze of sunlight. At five one two one, Franklin,
we'll be back after a short break. We're back with
(15:29):
murder homes, the architecture of Elizabeth Short's death and the
architecture of five one two went Franklin. The home that
George Odell will return to have parallels. The murderer and
the architect were both control freaks, and they both believe
they created masterpieces. Some consider five one two one Franklin
(15:49):
to be Lloyd Wright's best work, but others say it's overbearing, manipulative,
and with its banishing of outside light, even sadistic in
some ways. After Short's murder, Hodell spent three more years
at five one two in Franklin. Then, in October nineteen
forty nine, Hodell's name would be mentioned in a formal
written report to a grand jury as one of five
(16:13):
prime suspects in the Short murder, but he and four
other suspects would never be submitted for indictment. But what
if five one two in Franklin, as dark and brooding
a home that it is wasn't the home where Elizabeth
Short was murdered. The evidence implicating Hodell is all circumstantial,
and though he was connected to sex party sadomasochism, incests, suicide,
(16:36):
and two murders, he was never indicted. He fled La
to work as a doctor in a territorial prison in
the Philippines. What if all that Hodell was guilty of
was a taste for kink in a home that seemed
built for it. Mark Nelson and his wife Barb, however,
are convinced something terrible happened at five one two in Franklin.
Speaker 4 (16:56):
Myself and the producer behind me, we were walking down
the hall past the bathroom where supposedly the actual drugging
the women, and I just felt like this disoriented vertigo
came over me and I had to lean up against
the wall. And then I turned around and the producer
was She did the same thing, and I go, did
(17:17):
you just feel that? And it was really weird. It's
just all of a sudden, you felt like this dizziness
and you couldn't. You had to like shake yourself.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
They'd never been to a place where evil seemed to
cling to them, following them back to their car, to
their home where they had a terrible argument.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
The spirit seemed to want to intimidate men and then
to harass women. And the worst thing about this experience
quite our. I mean, it was the most intense thing
that Barbara and I have experienced after we left. You know,
you've heard about spirits following you home. Well, this was
a circumstance, Well, we really believe it did when we
(17:56):
weren't home where a serial killer had killed a number
of women, as we understood it. And then we get
home and Barbara and I have been married over thirty years,
and this we got into, like late at night, into
like one of the most intense, screaming arguments that we've
ever had.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
And it's like I thought Mark was possessed, and I
thought that.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
You had missing a few But anyway, but just the
idea that this isn't how we usually function. This is
why there's there's possession, and then there's also oppression. Oppression
is that can cause you to behave in ways that
are not consistent with your normal day to day behavior.
And we both recognize that we're acting out of sorts.
(18:43):
And who would probably take pleasure in taunting, hurting, damaging
us in some way, shape or formal. I had to
think of doctor George.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Odell And I won't ask what the argument was specifically,
better it.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
Was irrational, you know, you didn't take the trash. No,
it was just really dumb, and it was like, wow,
what just happened?
Speaker 1 (19:06):
You know?
Speaker 4 (19:07):
And so we figured it out that he followed us
home and he was oppressing us.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
There are other homes, motels, apartments, even funeral homes where
investigators believe Elizabeth Short may have been murdered. What the
many followers of this crime do, for the most part,
agree on, is that the end of her life did
take place inside four walls. There's only one thing more
harrowing than knowing the exact location of a murder home,
and that's not knowing one. It could be anywhere an
(19:35):
in dingius part of la or high up in the
Hollywood Hills at a funeral home after hours where the
only sound is an assistant scrubbing a woman's body with
a brush. Elizabeth Short, with her nickname, with a faint
desperation and shiftlessness of her life at the time, a
woman familiar with lobbies and hotels and terrible pickup lines,
(19:57):
always seems to elude us. Her transience seems to be
perfectly matched with something as monumental and permanent as five
one two on Franklin and an overly confident doctor who
had everything to lose. If she walked up the steps
with him, it was doubtful that she would have been
holding his hand. She would have been repelled and fascinated
(20:18):
by this rich man's tomb, but she could have easily
walked into a room at the Astor Hotel on Flower
Street as well, where detectives in nineteen forty seven interviewed
witnesses who placed her there and found a bloody mess. Elizabeth, Short,
determined and self reliant, lays one step ahead of anybody
who would trap and weigh her down. Is still shrugging
(20:39):
all of us off, refusing to be tied down. She
travels lightly through each theory, through hotels, rooming houses, lobbies,
even the dark corridor of five one two on Franklin,
where Hodel pours her a drink in the living room
with a concealed door, The grisly blueprint of her last
evening on Earth taking form in his head. What if
(21:01):
she wasn't there at all? In all likelihood there will
never be an answer, even if this is the home
that Mark and Bob Nelson, the ghost hunters, feel certain
that something terrible happened, and when they left, doctor George
Hudell wasn't done with them for what they said were
many months long after that first irrational argument they had
with one another.
Speaker 4 (21:22):
He was with us for about three months, like I'd
wake up at three in the morning and I would
just feel him at the foot of the bed. I
can't tell you how, but I would see him there
and I just turned to Mark. It's like he's here again.
And so we did a lot of blessing the room,
clearing the house, you know, did all that. But I
(21:45):
think in the end, his energy kind of faded and
went away after like three months. But I think what
really kind of got him was he couldn't break our bond.
He couldn't break our connection to each other, and so
he just finally kind of threw up his hands and
he gave up. He said, ah, you know, and so
(22:07):
you could just feel like that heavy energy was gone.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
I was going to ask, if you had been able
to break the bond, then hypothetically what happens then.
Speaker 4 (22:17):
I think we probably would have gone for some type
of spiritual help or you know, sought out some of
our friends who are in the religious build and can
help with that, because we did say a lot of prayers.
And I think that that definitely it's a positive and
energy that you're putting out. That's all you really can do,
(22:41):
you know. But it was hard. You have to be
very self aware, spiritually aware to be able to fight
something that demonic. Basically, I mean, I've never faced what
a serial killer was until we faced him, and it's
really bad.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
In twenty twelve, soil samples were taken from the courtyard
at five point two in Franklin, and they tested positive
for the chemical markers for human decomposition, but the infamous
mansion still sold for six million, one hundred and sixty
three thousand dollars in twenty twenty two. This is Murder Holmes.
I'm Matt Mirinovich. Murder Homes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
(23:35):
For more shows from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Murder Holmes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
We were invited to go up with a TV production company.
They were trying to see if there was anything in
spirit there and they thought they'd start with us. So
as I'm walking up to the front door, I see
this guy dressed in period clothing from the nineteen forties
and he's like giving me the stink eye.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
That voice you just heard is Mark Nelson. He's a
psychic medium who specializes in cleansing stigmatized properties and ghost hunting.
I interviewed Mark and his wife Bob about their work,
including one notorious property they were asked to investigate for
a television show. Five one two to one Franklin Avenue
in Los Angeles. Five one two one Franklin Avenue is
(00:47):
historic for a number of reasons, but perhaps it is
known best for being the former home of George Hodell,
the prime suspect in the Black Dahlia murders. Here's Mark again.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
I'm seeing guy calling me a little pip squeak is
like what are you doing here? And it's like they
want to intimidate you because this is all they have
left intimidation. And then I just hear in my head, Oh,
he's a doctor. And then I just turned to the
producer and said, if a doctor lived in this house
at the time of the murder that you're investigating, he
did it. And then she was like, Okay, that's what
(01:20):
we're here for. We think a guy did it. And
he was like a small, intense looking guy with a
little pencil thin mustache, not unlike what you would see
in the nineteen forties. And he was trying to basically
berate me, intimidate Barb and other people who were with us.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
This is murder, Holmes. I'm Matt Marinovitch. In the early
(02:02):
morning of January fifteenth, nineteen forty seven, a mother was
taking her child for a walk in Lemerit Park in
Los Angeles, a place that was hardly as bucolic looking
as it sounds at the time. It was just a
dusty road with a dirty sidewalk running past vacant lots.
Up ahead, she thought she saw two parts of a
(02:22):
department store mannequin lying in the dry grass. When she
got closer, she realized it was the body of a
naked woman cut in half at the waist. The two
parts of the victim's body had been painstakingly laid precisely
one foot apart, and her intestines had been tucked neatly
beneath her buttocks. The corpse had been posed with her
(02:43):
hands over her head, her elbows bent at right angles,
and her legs spread apart. There was no sign of
blood at the scene, meaning the victim had been killed
elsewhere and then placed there. Investigators later determined she had
been killed ten hours before she was placed in the
grass on South Norton Avenue. Two plant based bristles were
(03:04):
found on her body, most likely from a brush that
had been used to scrub or clean. The only other
evidence found at the scene was a heel print and
some watery blood found in a cement sac. The killer
had drained the blood from the victim's body and then
performed a highly specialized surgical procedure that was taught in
the nineteen thirties called a Hemi corporrectomy. This is the
(03:27):
act of slicing through the lumbar spine, carefully avoiding the vertebrae.
There it's the only place where the body can be
severed in half without breaking bone. Detectives felt that the
murder was committed indoors, where water drainage and perhaps medical
equipment were available. There were other horrifying marks on the
victim's body. The corners of either side of her mouth
(03:50):
had been cut three inches deep, so that she appeared
to be gruesomely smiling. This is sometimes called the Glausgow smile.
When the autopsy performed afterwards, it was determined that the
killer had made these slits while she was still alive,
and most likely continued to torture the victim before she died.
The victim was fingerprinted and identified as Elizabeth Short, a
(04:14):
twenty two year old aspiring actress who had last been
seen on a payphone in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel.
On January twenty fourth, a suspicious Manila envelope was discovered
by a postal service worker, addressed to the Los Angeles Examiner.
A message written cut and pasted letters was found inside.
(04:36):
Here is Dahlia's belongings letter to follow. There would be
more correspondence from the killer, but the killer never turned
himself in. To this date, no one ex detectives, true
crime writers, armchair slews, ex FBI agents seems to agree
on anything about the Black Dahlia case. The closer it
comes to seemingly being solved, the farther it recedes from
(04:59):
any hope of closure. Even her nickname is in dispute,
with some claiming it was coined because an employee at
the drug store she frequented noticed her sheer black clothes
and compared her to the Blue Dahlia, the heroine in
a movie that was well known at the time. But
one thing that many followers of the infamous case agree
on is that the murderer possessed excellent surgical skills. He
(05:22):
had been careful to locate the lumbar vertebrae and then
carefully sliced through the disk space using a very sharp instrument.
An amateur would have made a mess looking for this
incredibly narrow space. Elizabeth Killer never second guessed his procedure.
He cut through layers of tissue precisely, never letting the
knife retreat, which would have caused feathering of the body tissue.
(05:45):
He would have had to withstand the overpowering smell of
human feces as he cut entirely through the body in bowels.
There were superficial cuts on her breasts and leg as
well ligature marks on her wrists, ankles, and neck. Three
bruises on her head that the medical examiner determined were
the blows that had actually killed her. Police at the
(06:07):
time were so certain that the killer was a surgeon
that they served a warrant to the University of Southern
California Medical School, which provided a full list of their students.
So who was this surgeon? Some armchair sleuic and ex
detectives think it was Leslie Hillan, but Dylan successfully sued
his accusers and was placed in San Francisco at the
(06:28):
time of the crime. But seven point five miles from
where Elizabeth Short's body was found, there lived another surgeon
who had an impeccable resume in over seven hundred and
sixty six hours of surgical practice. He lived in a
stunning six thousand square foot Neomian mansion at five point
two one Franklin Avenue. It had been designed by Lloyd Wright,
(06:50):
some of the most famous architect in American history. Frank
Lloyd Wright. In the Hollywood neighborhood of Las Feles, where
there are plenty of architectural masterpieces to gaucat the home
at five one two one Franklin stands out for its
unforgettable entryway, a facade featuring two mammoth blocks of concrete
and a tomblike entrance that resembles a giant set of jaws,
(07:12):
which would soon become the home's nickname. Once you were
let pass the massive copper gate that guards the home,
the bright desert sunlight almost instantly recedes behind you. Inside
the home, the feelings almost claustrophobic and dark, with rooms
tightly packed on either side of a narrow corridor that
leads to a courtyard in the back. There is a
(07:35):
scarcity of windows and light, as if the home belonged
more to the earth than the blue sky above it.
Between nineteen forty and nineteen forty five, George Hodell lived there.
Hodel easily moved in the highest circles of Los Angeles society.
He was a renowned doctor and surgeon who had held
a variety of impressive positions, including chief medical Officer at
(07:58):
the un But there was a darker side to Hodell too,
and will learn all about it after the break. We're
back with Murder Homes. George Hodell was entranced by the
surrealists and decadence that surrounded them. He befriended the famous
(08:19):
photographer Man Ray and together they shared a taste for
sado masochism. Five point two in Franklin even gained a
reputation as a place where cocktail parties devolved into all
night orgies that lasted until the dawn hours. But in
the bright light of day, there was always a price
to pay for excess, and Hodell soon became known as
the VD Doctor to the Stars. But all of that
(08:42):
decadence in that rabbit warren of rooms came to a
stop when his own daughter accused him of raping her
in nineteen forty nine. After a widely publicized trial, Hodell
would be acquitted, but he would also find himself in
the FBI's crosshairs, who added him to the list of
suspects in the Black Dahlia case. It didn't help that
(09:03):
a good friend of his, Lilian Lenorak, when questioned by
Detective Frank Jamison, admitted that Elizabeth Short was a sometime
girlfriend of doctor Hodell's. The FBI bugged his home and
late at night, an eighteen man surveillance team working in
shifts would listen to everything said at five Poet two
one Franklin. In one of the recordings they captured, this exchange.
Speaker 3 (09:30):
I suppose and I did kill the black doll. Yeah,
they can't move it now. They can't talk to much
secretary anymore because she's dead. They thought there was something
fishy anyway. Now they may have figured it out killed there.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
When I look at a picture of doctor George Hodell
in nineteen fifty two, I think he looked slightly smug,
with light black curly hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, and
a black dress visible underneath his jacket. He looks very
much the part of an arrogant doctor, someone who would
have very little time for small talk with distraught patients.
A few years ago, ghost hunter Mark Nelson, who you
(10:12):
heard at the beginning of this episode, and his wife
Bob were asked by a television production team to enter
five one two one Franklin Avenue to suss out any
potential paranormal presence. They wandered through the same rooms that
George Odell had once entertained his guests. Here's Mark and
Barb talking about what they.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Saw from the living room. You look around, there could
be like there's like four exits and entrances, and you
can't tell what's the front door.
Speaker 4 (10:42):
Yeah, if you were disoriented or drugged, you would get lost,
you would not know where how to get out. So
it was like the perfect murder house.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Parts of the house were even though ites on Franklin,
which is currently a pretty noisy part of town. It
was soundproof downstairs. You couldn't hear it. It was why
is the dead?
Speaker 3 (11:01):
So to speak.
Speaker 4 (11:02):
The walls were really sick. The walls were really sick,
so you couldn't hear You couldn't hear any of the
traffic outside.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
It's like he wasn't afraid of showing us like a
lot of blood and visuals of things that he was
responsible for and giving us terrible feelings. I got these flashes,
and Barber had other images too. I feel like I
must have started to experience the fear that one of
the victims went through, because I feel like I'm being
chased and I don't know how to get out of here.
(11:31):
And yet what's odd about this house is that you
can look out during the day and there's sunlight and
there's palm trees, but you see up You're in a
sealed courtyard, so there's no one there to see what's
happening to you. You can look out and see other
parts of the house no one else can see.
Speaker 4 (11:49):
In the center of the house was open and it
had an atrium, so it was basically a series of corridors.
And I could totally understand why some of the women
that were there could not find their way out and
were trapped. I totally could see.
Speaker 1 (12:07):
Did you go to the basement at all in that house?
Do you remember?
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Yes? Yes, it was sound proof that it looked almost
like a religious environment with all of the religious iconography removed.
It's like, why do you have this in your basement?
It's set up to be like a viewing platform where
other people are supposed to watch. You could make the
case that is at a sacrificial table. Why is that
(12:33):
table there? I guarantee you don't have a table that
could be used for human sacrifice in your basement. And
it was just creepy as all get up. But it's
almost like this, okay, service is over. Everyone take everything down.
Feel the shape of the place is still intact, but
the purpose of it has been masked.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Imagine for a moment that you sorde Hodell has finished
laboring over the body of Elizabeth's short in the basement.
It's approximately one am in the morning, and over the
course of several hours, no one has heard her scream
for help. Now, wiping his forearm over his perspiring forehead,
he carefully washes the last of the blood off her
(13:18):
torso and wraps both parts of her body and blankets.
Transferring the corpse to the trunk of his car. He
leaves for now her possessions behind, the purse, the high
heeled shoes, the driver's license, the business cards in her wallet,
which he will later wipe clean with a rag soaked
in gasoline to remove his fingerprints. He starts the car,
(13:42):
easing down Franklin. The shimmering lights of the Hollywood Hill
is visible in the distance. It's a relatively cold night,
and as he drives, the sweat soaking his shirt dries up.
When he takes a left on North Wilton, he can
hear a muffled thump in the trunk as the body
rolls to the side. He takes a slower right onto
(14:03):
West Third, and then soon he's on Crenshaw, easily blending
into the early morning traffic there and driving at the
exact speed limit for twenty eight minutes until he reaches
Colosseum Street. Then one more quick turn, and he's in
the middle of nowhere, a field essentially, with a few
tracked homes visible in the distance. Imagine Hodell dragging the
(14:26):
bottom half of Elizabeth Short's body eleven inches from the
upper half. He feels heightened, but not rushed. The erotic energy,
which dissipated hours before, has just started to come back,
in small, little riplets, then bigger waves. He takes more
shallow breaths as he touches her for the last time,
(14:47):
carefully arranging her arms at right angles to her body
so that it almost looks like she's surrendering. He stares
down at her for one more moment, not seeing her
through his eyes now, but through the eyes of others
who will soon find her, and that gives him pleasure too,
forcing them to see the darkest side of the world
for just a few minutes, just as he does, Just
(15:09):
like visitors are forced to walk the claustrophobic corridor toward
a distant blaze of sunlight. At five one two one, Franklin,
we'll be back after a short break. We're back with
(15:29):
murder homes, the architecture of Elizabeth Short's death and the
architecture of five one two went Franklin. The home that
George Odell will return to have parallels. The murderer and
the architect were both control freaks, and they both believe
they created masterpieces. Some consider five one two one Franklin
(15:49):
to be Lloyd Wright's best work, but others say it's overbearing, manipulative,
and with its banishing of outside light, even sadistic in
some ways. After Short's murder, Hodell spent three more years
at five one two in Franklin. Then, in October nineteen
forty nine, Hodell's name would be mentioned in a formal
written report to a grand jury as one of five
(16:13):
prime suspects in the Short murder, but he and four
other suspects would never be submitted for indictment. But what
if five one two in Franklin, as dark and brooding
a home that it is wasn't the home where Elizabeth
Short was murdered. The evidence implicating Hodell is all circumstantial,
and though he was connected to sex party sadomasochism, incests, suicide,
(16:36):
and two murders, he was never indicted. He fled La
to work as a doctor in a territorial prison in
the Philippines. What if all that Hodell was guilty of
was a taste for kink in a home that seemed
built for it. Mark Nelson and his wife Barb, however,
are convinced something terrible happened at five one two in Franklin.
Speaker 4 (16:56):
Myself and the producer behind me, we were walking down
the hall past the bathroom where supposedly the actual drugging
the women, and I just felt like this disoriented vertigo
came over me and I had to lean up against
the wall. And then I turned around and the producer
was She did the same thing, and I go, did
(17:17):
you just feel that? And it was really weird. It's
just all of a sudden, you felt like this dizziness
and you couldn't. You had to like shake yourself.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
They'd never been to a place where evil seemed to
cling to them, following them back to their car, to
their home where they had a terrible argument.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
The spirit seemed to want to intimidate men and then
to harass women. And the worst thing about this experience
quite our. I mean, it was the most intense thing
that Barbara and I have experienced after we left. You know,
you've heard about spirits following you home. Well, this was
a circumstance, Well, we really believe it did when we
(17:56):
weren't home where a serial killer had killed a number
of women, as we understood it. And then we get
home and Barbara and I have been married over thirty years,
and this we got into, like late at night, into
like one of the most intense, screaming arguments that we've
ever had.
Speaker 4 (18:14):
And it's like I thought Mark was possessed, and I
thought that.
Speaker 2 (18:19):
You had missing a few But anyway, but just the
idea that this isn't how we usually function. This is
why there's there's possession, and then there's also oppression. Oppression
is that can cause you to behave in ways that
are not consistent with your normal day to day behavior.
And we both recognize that we're acting out of sorts.
(18:43):
And who would probably take pleasure in taunting, hurting, damaging
us in some way, shape or formal. I had to
think of doctor George.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
Odell And I won't ask what the argument was specifically,
better it.
Speaker 4 (18:57):
Was irrational, you know, you didn't take the trash. No,
it was just really dumb, and it was like, wow,
what just happened?
Speaker 1 (19:06):
You know?
Speaker 4 (19:07):
And so we figured it out that he followed us
home and he was oppressing us.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
There are other homes, motels, apartments, even funeral homes where
investigators believe Elizabeth Short may have been murdered. What the
many followers of this crime do, for the most part,
agree on, is that the end of her life did
take place inside four walls. There's only one thing more
harrowing than knowing the exact location of a murder home,
and that's not knowing one. It could be anywhere an
(19:35):
in dingius part of la or high up in the
Hollywood Hills at a funeral home after hours where the
only sound is an assistant scrubbing a woman's body with
a brush. Elizabeth Short, with her nickname, with a faint
desperation and shiftlessness of her life at the time, a
woman familiar with lobbies and hotels and terrible pickup lines,
(19:57):
always seems to elude us. Her transience seems to be
perfectly matched with something as monumental and permanent as five
one two on Franklin and an overly confident doctor who
had everything to lose. If she walked up the steps
with him, it was doubtful that she would have been
holding his hand. She would have been repelled and fascinated
(20:18):
by this rich man's tomb, but she could have easily
walked into a room at the Astor Hotel on Flower
Street as well, where detectives in nineteen forty seven interviewed
witnesses who placed her there and found a bloody mess. Elizabeth, Short,
determined and self reliant, lays one step ahead of anybody
who would trap and weigh her down. Is still shrugging
(20:39):
all of us off, refusing to be tied down. She
travels lightly through each theory, through hotels, rooming houses, lobbies,
even the dark corridor of five one two on Franklin,
where Hodel pours her a drink in the living room
with a concealed door, The grisly blueprint of her last
evening on Earth taking form in his head. What if
(21:01):
she wasn't there at all? In all likelihood there will
never be an answer, even if this is the home
that Mark and Bob Nelson, the ghost hunters, feel certain
that something terrible happened, and when they left, doctor George
Hudell wasn't done with them for what they said were
many months long after that first irrational argument they had
with one another.
Speaker 4 (21:22):
He was with us for about three months, like I'd
wake up at three in the morning and I would
just feel him at the foot of the bed. I
can't tell you how, but I would see him there
and I just turned to Mark. It's like he's here again.
And so we did a lot of blessing the room,
clearing the house, you know, did all that. But I
(21:45):
think in the end, his energy kind of faded and
went away after like three months. But I think what
really kind of got him was he couldn't break our bond.
He couldn't break our connection to each other, and so
he just finally kind of threw up his hands and
he gave up. He said, ah, you know, and so
(22:07):
you could just feel like that heavy energy was gone.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
I was going to ask, if you had been able
to break the bond, then hypothetically what happens then.
Speaker 4 (22:17):
I think we probably would have gone for some type
of spiritual help or you know, sought out some of
our friends who are in the religious build and can
help with that, because we did say a lot of prayers.
And I think that that definitely it's a positive and
energy that you're putting out. That's all you really can do,
(22:41):
you know. But it was hard. You have to be
very self aware, spiritually aware to be able to fight
something that demonic. Basically, I mean, I've never faced what
a serial killer was until we faced him, and it's
really bad.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
In twenty twelve, soil samples were taken from the courtyard
at five point two in Franklin, and they tested positive
for the chemical markers for human decomposition, but the infamous
mansion still sold for six million, one hundred and sixty
three thousand dollars in twenty twenty two. This is Murder Holmes.
I'm Matt Mirinovich. Murder Homes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
(23:35):
For more shows from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
Matt Marinovich
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