Black Dahlia Confidential

Black Dahlia Confidential 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Elizabeth Short, twenty two year old female from Medford, Massachusetts.
Beautiful girl came out to Hollywood, California to fall in
love and live happily ever after.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
It's la on VJ Day. Revelers pour down Hollywood Boulevard.
Girls lean out of cars, Soldiers and sailors run up
and grab kisses. There's a pretty, dark haired girl caught
in close up. It's Betty Short. She's young, she's vibrant,
she lives. The crime scene looked like this. We'd covered

(00:56):
lots north the south. The body on a west side,
mid block.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
It was a horrific site. The body was surgically cut
in half, bisected.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
There are people out there who are only aroused when
they're killing. She met someone a lot time.

Speaker 1 (01:16):
This was a huge story in nineteen forty seven. It
was headlines for thirty days straight. They had one thousand
law enforcement officers working on the case. This is Los
Angeles's most notorious unsolved murder. My name is Steve Hodell.
I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
Steve Odell. He grows up to join ONPD.

Speaker 1 (01:35):
It's been twenty four years with the police.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Moreover, he becomes a homicide detective.

Speaker 1 (01:39):
I've had three hundred murder investigations in my career, nothing
at a level of this kind of horror.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
He starts investigating his father's life.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
Dad was a man of mystery. Obviously, this is somebody
Dad knew intimately.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
There's what we know.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
This is my home, this was the palace. My father
was the king.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
There's what we sense.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
My mother said, you don't understand your father's got lust
for blood. You don't know anything about your father.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
And there's how we revise our own memory.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
I'd have never dreamt that Dad could be it had
actual suspect of this crime.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
This is Steve O'Dell's journey through his most forbidding memories.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
For me, this is a search for the truth, searching
for the truth of my father, and searching for the
truth of who killed Elizabeth.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Short Black DOUBTUA confidential. She's Elizabeth Short, a romer, a

(03:04):
sweet kid. She's a ghost and a blank page to
record our fears and desires.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
To crime writer James Elroy, the brief life and horrific
death of Elizabeth Short is a classic American tragedy known
as the Black Dahlia Case.

Speaker 2 (03:23):
Opposed to Warmona Lisa a l e quit Essential.

Speaker 3 (03:27):
A story about love and loneliness, murder and madness played
out in the City of Dreams, Los Angeles.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
A body in a vacant lot, and an apparition called
the Black Dahlia.

Speaker 3 (03:45):
It's the most famous unsolved murder in Los Angeles history.
A beautiful young victim, a cunning psychopathic killer, A real
life mystery that's inspired countless movie makers and Riya from
Double Indemnity to Chinatown to La Confidential. Even the nickname

(04:07):
the Black Dahlia is straight out of the movies. The
Blue Dahlia was a nightclub in a nineteen forty six
crime film. Newspapers adapted that title to fit the Elizabeth shortcase,
and the Black Dalua legend was born. The mystery behind
the legend continues to inspire great storytellers. Director Brian de

(04:31):
Palma and a cast that includes Hillary Swank, So.

Speaker 4 (04:35):
Have to two to keep my name out of the papers,
Scarlet Johansson, You're Scared, and Josh Hartnett once again brings
the twisted tale of the Black Dahia to the big screen.

Speaker 3 (04:47):
Say you, this is a.

Speaker 5 (04:50):
Very sad scene.

Speaker 1 (04:51):
Beautiful Hollywood wannabe.

Speaker 3 (04:54):
That's the News director Brian de Palma.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
And of course the questions always when something like that
hades that beautiful girl which you've seen pinup shots of become.

Speaker 6 (05:06):
This and who did that to her and why? And
it's one of these mysteries that will go on forever.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Nothing stays buried, forever. Nothing. It's the great La murder
in LA's had some doozies.

Speaker 1 (05:21):
Well, it's up here a weighs more.

Speaker 3 (05:23):
Steve O'Dell was just five years old when Elizabeth shot
was murdered.

Speaker 1 (05:28):
The crime scene. We're just coming up here now.

Speaker 3 (05:31):
As a cop, he worked the same Hollywood streets Elizabeth
once knew.

Speaker 1 (05:37):
You know, I had lots of murders where you had
young runaways and within weeks they'd have a needle in
their arm and they'd be doing tricks on Hollywood Boulevard.

Speaker 3 (05:47):
For over seventeen years, he investigated three hundred murders. The
Black Dahlia case was just another cold case. But after
he retired it would come to haunt him.

Speaker 1 (06:01):
We're standing just at the location or the body would
have been placed. Now, this would have been a large
vacant lot. The upper torso was juxtaposed just off to
the left, about twelve inches.

Speaker 3 (06:13):
Do you I have any idea why the body would
be left here?

Speaker 1 (06:16):
Because the killer was sure that it would be found
fairly quickly as it was clearly he wasn't trying to
hide it. He wanted the notoriety.

Speaker 3 (06:25):
The killer got what he wanted. For weeks, a terrified
city watched as the search for the murderer unfolded. There
were dozens of false confessions, hundreds of other suspects questioned
and cleared. The killer even wrote letters taunting the police,
and also sent Elizabeth Short's personal address book to a

(06:47):
local newspaper. But after the biggest manhunt in LA history,
the murder was listed officially unsolved. It stayed that way
for fifty eight years.

Speaker 7 (07:02):
That's Elizabeth when she was between ten and eleven.

Speaker 3 (07:07):
Mary Passios has never forgotten Elizabeth. Elizabeth was her babysitter
and idol in their working class neighborhood of Medford, Massachusetts,
outside Boston.

Speaker 7 (07:19):
She was black Irish. She had the dark hair, the
translucent blue green eyes, and a flawless complexion. She had beautiful.

Speaker 3 (07:28):
Skin, A vibrant young woman growing up in a dark,
drab time the height of the depression. Did she ever
talk about her dreams.

Speaker 7 (07:38):
To you, just that she was going to Hollywood.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
That was the Hollywood Boulevard. The business in theater center
of the.

Speaker 8 (07:48):
Film happened.

Speaker 3 (07:50):
Post war Los Angeles was a boomtown, overrun with ex
serviceman starstruck wannabes.

Speaker 1 (07:58):
Here's a gorgeous number in blue knitted.

Speaker 3 (07:59):
And hustlers, then as now a place where pretty faces
were a dime a dozen, and life could be tough.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
Most of the girls are applauded, thanked, and then quickly
forgotten till the next contest comes along.

Speaker 7 (08:17):
She was broke and she was borrowing money.

Speaker 3 (08:21):
Elizabeth became a Hollywood hanger on, going out on the
town each night, usually with a different guy, to places
like the Frolic Room, which looks pretty much the same
now as it did back then.

Speaker 7 (08:35):
Prince said they would get her a date so that
she'd eat. It was pretty common for women to do that,
dating for dinner, dating for dinner.

Speaker 3 (08:47):
Her last night on earth was January fourteenth, nineteen forty seven.
It's a Wonderful Life was playing at Hollywood's Pantagious Theater.
Around dawn the next day, a mysterious black car was
seen at the spot where Elizabeth's body was later found

(09:09):
a black car very similar to the nineteen thirty six
packard owned by Steve Hodell's father, doctor George Hodell.

Speaker 1 (09:20):
Here's a photograph of me sitting on father's lap.

Speaker 3 (09:24):
And that's you here, yeah, and that's your father, right.
George Hodell was a brilliant man, with an IQ of
one eighty six, a point higher, he would say, than Einstein's.
He began as a child musical prodigy, studying in Paris
with Madame Montassori. After a stint as a newspaper reporter

(09:46):
at the age of sixteen, he sailed through medical school,
studying surgery. He settled in Los Angeles, running the county's
venereal disease clinic, where it was rumored he treated some
of La top Brass a man with family money who
lived in an exotic house in the middle of Los

(10:08):
Angeles that was as eccentric as its owner.

Speaker 8 (10:12):
I would describe it as looking like a Mayan temple
really did. It was a fortress from the world.

Speaker 3 (10:21):
Tam Mar Hodell was one of eleven children the doctor
had by five different women. She and her half brother
Steve remember their father's house as a place where artists
and movie people came for flamboyant parties presided over by
the dynamic George Hodell.

Speaker 8 (10:40):
Anyone that's ever met this man will tell you the
kind of charm and power that he Yet.

Speaker 3 (10:47):
George Hodell's charm was certainly not lost on his son, Steve.
The two remained close until nineteen ninety nine, when the
doctor died in his high rise apartment in San Francisco
at the age of ninety one.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
I flew to San Francisco. I'm sitting there with June,
my stepmother, who had been with my father for thirty years.
And June said, I think your father would want you
to have this, and she handed me this small album.
I looked at it and I said to June, June,
who is this? And June said, I don't know somebody
your father knew from a long time ago. I was

(11:24):
trying to pull it in. Where do I know this picture?
Why do I know this woman? Somewhere deep within me,
I made the connection the Black Dahlia, the Black Dahlia.

(11:52):
I knew that it was a famous unsolved case from
long ago, but I didn't know any of the details.
I didn't even know her name.

Speaker 3 (12:00):
To this day. Steve O'Dell isn't sure what it was
that made him compare pictures of the black Dahlia to
snapshots his father had saved of a mystery woman.

Speaker 1 (12:13):
Maybe it was because the black Dahia always wore a
flower in her hair and looked like that. Maybe that
was the connection.

Speaker 3 (12:21):
The search for answers became an obsession. Steve spent months
coming through newspaper accounts, talking to old timers, and traveling
back to his childhood.

Speaker 1 (12:40):
This is our backyard.

Speaker 3 (12:41):
Steve revisited the exotic house on Franklin Avenue in Hollywood.

Speaker 1 (12:46):
The three of us were standing right about here where he.

Speaker 3 (12:50):
And his brothers lived off and on with their father
in the late nineteen forties.

Speaker 1 (12:54):
When we were living here, there was nothing but a
large white polar bear rug in here respects.

Speaker 3 (13:00):
One of the pictures from his father's album was taken here.

Speaker 1 (13:05):
There's a Chinese statuary that you can see in the picture,
and it looks very much like the statuary that Dad
had here at the house.

Speaker 3 (13:14):
It was literally a house of secrets.

Speaker 1 (13:17):
Off in this direction we have what was Dad's study.

Speaker 3 (13:21):
Complete with a secret room where the children were never
allowed to go. Oh and behold, what did your father use.

Speaker 9 (13:36):
This room for?

Speaker 1 (13:37):
We just a storage And the truth was far different
and far more terrible.

Speaker 3 (13:44):
It was in this fortress of a house. Steve says
that his father could do what he wanted, no matter
how immoral or illegal.

Speaker 8 (13:57):
I have seen my father's cruelty. When I was eleven,
he you want to teach me or all sex?

Speaker 3 (14:06):
When you were eleven eleven, your own father, grandfather assured
that sex between father and daughter was normal. Tamar had
anything but a normal childhood. She remembers the doctor's friends,
among them famous photographer Man Ray.

Speaker 8 (14:28):
He was a dirty old man. He took pictures of everybody.

Speaker 3 (14:33):
Man Ray became the family photographer, a perverse family photographer.

Speaker 8 (14:39):
He took pictures of me and they were nudes.

Speaker 3 (14:42):
But how old were you when he was taking these pictures?

Speaker 8 (14:44):
Twelve maybe twelve.

Speaker 3 (14:48):
A frequent HouseGuest was John Houston, the famous movie director.

Speaker 8 (14:53):
I had an experience with him. He came in after me,
and he lunged and put me down on the floor
and was definitely going to rape me. And my stepmother
came in and she pulled him off. Saint John John,
stop it.

Speaker 3 (15:09):
And there were always women, Tamar remembers a constant stream
of young beautiful women.

Speaker 8 (15:16):
There were there always a line of beautiful women waiting
to see my father or to go into his quarters,
into the Golden bedroom.

Speaker 10 (15:25):
I met Tamar when I was fourteen and she was
twenty three.

Speaker 3 (15:32):
Michelle Phillips, former singer with The Mamas and the Papas,
has been Tamar's friend since nineteen fifty eight.

Speaker 10 (15:40):
This is how she'd grown up in this crazy environment
with her father, and she had obviously been used as
a sexual object with him and his friends. He was
all amazing to me.

Speaker 3 (15:58):
It wasn't until some years later, after one of her
concerts that Michelle Phillips met George Odell.

Speaker 10 (16:05):
For herself, I felt a chill, and a lot of
it was because I knew that he knew that she
had told me, and I recently started thinking about the
way he looked at me. I think he wanted to

(16:26):
kill me.

Speaker 3 (16:31):
Tamar Hodell must have felt a similar chill when, as
a teenager in nineteen forty nine, she ran away from
her father's home. She told police what had been going
on there.

Speaker 1 (16:43):
Within the next day, there's a knock on the door
at the Franklin House. LAPD juvenile detectives. Doctor George Hodell,
you're under arrest for incest.

Speaker 3 (16:56):
The well known doctor was put on trial, charged with
offering his fourteen year old daughter to several of his
friends at an orgy.

Speaker 8 (17:05):
My father had intercourse with me. It wasn't loving. He
acted guilty ridden. That's how he acted ashamed. It was
very bad.

Speaker 3 (17:17):
But in the courtroom, a parade of family members testified
that Tamark made up the story.

Speaker 10 (17:24):
No one wanted George Hodell to go to jail because
George Hodell was the one who was making all the
money first of all, and he was supporting all the
people surrounding this tale.

Speaker 1 (17:36):
They parade all of these witnesses. The jury comes back
in a kind of an oj decision real quick. In
forty five minutes. He said, not guilty.

Speaker 3 (17:45):
What was your reaction when the verdict was acquittal.

Speaker 8 (17:50):
I didn't know what to think. I didn't do anything,
but I became the criminal after my father was acquitted.

Speaker 3 (18:00):
George Hodell's troubles with the law were far from over.
During the incest investigation, police got a tip that Hodell
had known Elizabeth Shore before her murder. Tamar believes her
father knew he had become a suspect.

Speaker 8 (18:18):
He said, we were being investigated or watched.

Speaker 3 (18:23):
When all of this was going on, Steve was just
a kid, but as an adult it began to make sense.
It's when he began sorting out the details of his
father's past and the Black Dahia case that he found
the two stories merging.

Speaker 1 (18:41):
I see strong similarities in the mouth and the nose,
the hair.

Speaker 3 (18:45):
Steve Odell was convinced the photos in his father's album
were indeed of the Black Dahlia.

Speaker 1 (18:51):
It wasn't all that surprising that my father knew Elizabeth Short.
She was hanging out in Hollywood at the same time,
going to parties. Dad was famous for throwing these parties.

Speaker 3 (19:02):
But what did catch Steve Hodell by surprise was one
of the many taunting cards and letters the killers sent
to newspapers. It was this one written by hand turning
in Wednesday, January twenty ninth, had my fun with police,
Black Dahlia Avenger.

Speaker 1 (19:21):
That's my father's handwriting. I know my father's handwriting. There
was no question about it, So at that point I thought,
oh my god, this is the real deal.

Speaker 3 (19:31):
Steve Odell took his suspicions to an old friend, Deputy
District Attorney Stephen.

Speaker 2 (19:37):
Kay Steve K speaking.

Speaker 5 (19:39):
When Steve called me and told me what he had concluded,
you could have knocked me off my chair.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
It was just wow.

Speaker 3 (19:51):
Hey, track down the Black Dalia file in the DA's office,
a box of investigative notes and transcripts that no one
had touched for over half a century.

Speaker 1 (20:02):
I sit down and I open the box and I
started going through it, and outfalls a picture of George Hodel.
This is the smoking guns. This is the proof that
I've been looking for.

Speaker 8 (20:24):
The first thing they said to me was doctor Hodell's daughter.
Oh yes, we know all about doctor Hodell.

Speaker 3 (20:34):
When investigators for the Los Angeles DIA's office began questioning
Tamar Hodell about her father, it was clear there was
more than the nineteen forty nine orgy on their minds.

Speaker 8 (20:50):
They also suspected that he had committed the murder of
the Black Dahlia.

Speaker 3 (20:54):
They told you that, They told me that, but she
never told her younger half brother, Steve. So years later,
when going through the DA's file on the Black Dallia case,
Steve Hodell got the shock of his life. In nineteen
forty nine, two years after Elizabeth Short was murdered. The

(21:17):
district attorney had begun to zero in on a suspect.

Speaker 5 (21:21):
You could just tell by the wealth of material that
doctor Hodell was their prime suspect.

Speaker 3 (21:28):
Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay says that in the file
is information from a female witness who told authorities that
George Odell definitely knew Elizabeth Short. Do you remember the
Black Dallia case?

Speaker 2 (21:43):
Yes, I do, Yes, I remember.

Speaker 3 (21:46):
And then there's Walter Morgan. He's ninety years old now,
but back in the day, he was a young investigator
working for the LA District Attorney who took over the
Black Daly investigation. In night eighteen forty nine.

Speaker 4 (22:01):
We tailed doctor George Odell, but I never did get
to see his face.

Speaker 1 (22:08):
I only saw the back of him.

Speaker 3 (22:10):
But that's not all he did. In fact, he did
something then he couldn't do today, at least not legally. Morgan,
along with police detectives, came here to the Franklin house
using a plastic identification card to open the door. The
cops slipped into the house and surreptitiously planted eavesdropping devices

(22:31):
in here. For the next forty days, twenty four hours
a day, detectives listened to hundreds of doctor Hodell's private conversations.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
This was actually live microphones hidden in the house.

Speaker 3 (22:45):
How unusual was that?

Speaker 1 (22:46):
That was very unusual.

Speaker 3 (22:47):
While the recordings no longer exist, the transcripts are in
the DA's file.

Speaker 5 (22:53):
Sometimes you'd have a DA investigator in the basement of
the Hollywood Division Police station, and sometimes it would be LAPD.

Speaker 3 (23:00):
At one point, George Odell is heard saying.

Speaker 5 (23:03):
Supposing I did kill the black Dahlia, they couldn't prove it.
Now they can't talk to my secretary anymore because she's dead.
I just can't believe that an innocent man would say.

Speaker 3 (23:15):
That the secretary was Ruth Spalding. Her death certificate blames
a drug overdose. Despite the statements captured on wire recordings,
in the spring of nineteen fifty, the DA abruptly stopped
investigating George Hodell. Even more surprising, the chief investigator of

(23:36):
the case, Frank Jemison, summed up the evidence, saying it
tends to eliminate this suspect. Do you believe that at
least the lieutenant in charge Jemison, really thought that George
Odell should have been eliminated as a suspect.

Speaker 5 (23:52):
No, I don't believe that. How can you say that
those tapes clear doctor Hodell? If anything, I think they
sound like a guilty man who is ready to take
it on the lamb.

Speaker 3 (24:07):
So why did the DA stop looking at George Hodell?
Perhaps the answer is also in those secret recordings. At
one point, George Odell is heard saying.

Speaker 5 (24:19):
This is the best payoff I've seen between law enforcement agencies.
I'd like to get a connection made in the DA's office.

Speaker 3 (24:27):
What do you think he's referring to there? Paying off
someone in the DA's office.

Speaker 5 (24:32):
That's what he would like to do. Yeah, And obviously
I can take from this that he's done it before.

Speaker 8 (24:41):
The only thing I can think is, so money must
have transpired between people.

Speaker 3 (24:46):
It sounds like you think there may have been a
cover up of some sort.

Speaker 4 (24:50):
Well, everybody thought that.

Speaker 3 (24:52):
In fact, forty eight Hours has learned that in nineteen
fifty both the DA and the LAPD stop pursuing the
Black Dahia case, even though several investigators later told their
relatives that they knew who the killer was.

Speaker 2 (25:10):
This is the city, Los Angeles, California.

Speaker 3 (25:13):
And actor Jack Webbs. My name's Friday, who played a
cop on television and had close friends on the force.
Told an acquaintance that the chief of Detectives had specifically
described the Black Dalia killer as.

Speaker 5 (25:29):
Say doctor in Hollywood who lived on Franklin Avenue, the.

Speaker 3 (25:35):
Very street where George Hodell lived. And it's important to
remember that back in nineteen forty nine, the LAPD was
a dirty department, rocked by scandals involving cops and gangsters, prostitutes,
and payoffs. A time and a place. Crime writer James

(25:56):
Elroy knows well.

Speaker 2 (25:58):
Reports recommending whether or not to find charges to the
district Attorney were on sale for five hundred bucks a pop.
The Detective Bureau was a repository of drunks and cronies
of high ranking LAPD officers. At the time of Elizabeth
Short's death, it was a very corrupt institution.

Speaker 3 (26:18):
Did the LAPD allow a killer to go free?

Speaker 1 (26:22):
I'm sure that the powers that be said you got
to get out of Dodge.

Speaker 3 (26:26):
Can modern technology help with the mystery of the Black Dahlia?

Speaker 11 (26:32):
The headline is the same, I think the nose is
the same, los Angelo.

Speaker 8 (26:49):
Being from one of its many hi.

Speaker 1 (26:57):
This is Cherokee Avenue in the heart of Hollywood, just
a block north of Hollywood Boulevard, and Elizabeth during forty
six lived in this apartment building here, which is the
Chancellor Apartments.

Speaker 3 (27:09):
Before she was known only as the Black Dahlia. Elizabeth
Short was just another struggling young.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
Woman, and she actually lived at the top floor. She
shared an apartment there with six other girls, so there
were seven girls each paying a buck for rent.

Speaker 12 (27:25):
Hollywood's motion picture industry reckoning thousands with stars in their eyes.

Speaker 3 (27:31):
She was, says Steve Odell, like so many dreamers before her,
who had come to post war Los Angeles.

Speaker 12 (27:37):
Willingness to do almost anything to crash the movie.

Speaker 3 (27:42):
How did she support herself?

Speaker 1 (27:43):
Well, basically she lived off her friends, didn't have a job.
She'd go out on dates with men, but she wasn't
a prostitute, and she didn't drink.

Speaker 3 (27:56):
But that clean cut image of Elizabeth Short did not
sell newspapers. Crime novelist James Elroy, how was Elizabeth Short
portrayed in these years since she was killed?

Speaker 2 (28:09):
Portrayed as a prostitute, it isn't true. Portrayed as a
movie mad girl who got parts in a lot of
movies of the time, including Cass blacka it certainly isn't true.

Speaker 7 (28:24):
I believe she's been victimized twice, brutally murdered, and then
the person who was murdered was so badly smeared. That
would be how I'd first remember her smiling. She smiled
a great deal.

Speaker 3 (28:44):
Mary Passio's was a neighbor of Shorts back in her
hometown of Medford, Massachusetts.

Speaker 7 (28:50):
I want people to know she was a very nice person.
She was not just beautiful outside, she was beautiful inside.

Speaker 3 (29:00):
Her beauty certainly entrance men. After Short was murdered, a
lot of the men she knew became suspects, among them
Mark Hanson, a nightclub owner reportedly obsessed with Elizabeth Short,
and Glen Wolf, one of Short's landlords, described to police
as a sexual maniac. But they can be eliminated, says Hodell,

(29:27):
for one simple reason, the condition of Elizabeth Short's body.

Speaker 1 (29:34):
I started looking at the crime itself, and what I discovered,
to my surprise, was that the killer was a surgeon,
not a meat cutter, not a butcher, A skilled professional surgeon.

Speaker 3 (29:46):
Forty eight hours decided to put the theories of Steve Hodell,
the former homicide detective, to the test.

Speaker 12 (29:52):
The person who committed this horrible crime, cut across the
bone in order to separate one half of her body
from the other half of her body.

Speaker 3 (30:02):
We asked doctor Mark Wallat, chief of surgery at Saint
Vincent's Hospital in New York, to look at the crime
scene photos as well as the autopsy.

Speaker 12 (30:12):
You don't get this kind of training where you can
actually invade a human body unless you've had some surgical experience,
in my opinion, So.

Speaker 3 (30:20):
You're saying you think it must have been a doctor.

Speaker 1 (30:23):
In my opinion, yes.

Speaker 3 (30:25):
While Steve Odell's father didn't actually practice surgery, he excelled
at it in medical school.

Speaker 1 (30:31):
He was a surgeon. She was killed by a surgeon.
That really is a limiting pool of suspects.

Speaker 3 (30:36):
There are other pieces of the puzzle that convince Steve
Hodell his father was the killer. Take the handwritten notes
the killer sent newspapers right after Elizabeth schwartz murder.

Speaker 1 (30:49):
I'm not saying it similar. I'm saying this is my
father's handwriting.

Speaker 9 (30:52):
Let's take a look at the uppercase forms of the
letter in nookiy.

Speaker 3 (30:55):
We then asked John Osborne, one of the most respected
document examiners in the field, to compare letters that killers
sent to the newspapers with examples of handwriting from doctor
George Hodell.

Speaker 9 (31:07):
In this example, you'll note that the ends are written
almost in a technical printing style. However, if you take
a look at the ends that appear in the questioned writing,
you'll note that it's a narrow form of the letter.
There is simply not enough evidence to prove one way
or the other whether his father was the writer or

(31:28):
not the writer.

Speaker 1 (31:30):
Then I came to these two pictures.

Speaker 3 (31:31):
And what about the photographs of the mystery woman found
in the album, the ones that started Steve Hodell on
his investigation in the first place.

Speaker 1 (31:41):
The diamond shaped face, the high forehead, the thick hair, is.

Speaker 3 (31:45):
This in fact Elizabeth Short?

Speaker 11 (31:48):
Initially I did think that they were very very close.

Speaker 3 (31:52):
Sunny Chapman is a forensic artist who uses and distributes
e fit facial identification software that helps create the detailed
sketches of suspects for police investigations.

Speaker 11 (32:04):
If it was actually developed for Scotland.

Speaker 3 (32:07):
Yard Chapman was able to compare one of the photos
of the Mystery Woman to a picture of Elizabeth Short,
and initially saw a lot of similarities.

Speaker 11 (32:18):
The hairline is the same. I think the nose tip
is the same. I think the nostrils have a strong likeness.

Speaker 3 (32:25):
But upon closer examination.

Speaker 11 (32:28):
Where I don't think there's a strong similarities in the bridge.

Speaker 5 (32:32):
Of the nose.

Speaker 3 (32:33):
And then there's the chin.

Speaker 11 (32:34):
Elizabeth Schortz photograph, although she has quite a long chin,
the photograph of the other woman has a very very strong,
sort of half moon shape and a much shorter chin.

Speaker 3 (32:46):
After measuring the facial features in both photos, Chapman says.

Speaker 11 (32:52):
I'm eighty five percent sure that these two photographs are
not of the same woman.

Speaker 3 (32:58):
But none of these expert opinions changes Steve's.

Speaker 1 (33:02):
Even if those are not Elizabeth Schwortz.

Speaker 3 (33:04):
I mean, you actually entertained the possibility that those two
pictures that started you on this investigation might not be Elizabeth.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
A lot of people look at them and say, I
don't see it, but.

Speaker 3 (33:13):
You still then you, even if you started for the
wrong reason, you ended with the right result exactly. That's
because Steve Hodell says he's uncovered yet another clue that
points to his father as the killer. This photo done
by doctor Hodell's close friend, the artist Man Ray.

Speaker 1 (33:31):
He wanted to be like Manray. He wanted to be
an artist, and I think this was his masterpiece. The
body was positioned north to south, so this is this
is north. It was carefully placed. You you're not going
to get this positioning. The hands were positioned over the
head as if almost to form horns.

Speaker 3 (33:50):
Steve believes his father posed Elizabeth Short's body to mimic
this classic art photo titled the Minotaur, the mythical be
that devoured young maidens. Her arms were positioned like the horns.

Speaker 5 (34:05):
The way her arms were up like this at the
same angle above her head. Now, I've tried lots of
murder cases and I've only had one other case where
the victim has been posed.

Speaker 3 (34:16):
Deputy District Attorney Stephen Kay not only agrees with Steve
Hodell's theory, he thinks the cuts found across the victim's
mouth and face were meant to mimic another man ray work,
the Lovers.

Speaker 5 (34:30):
I know that that is a bizarre thing, but this
was a bizarre man.

Speaker 3 (34:34):
After Steve Odell published a book, the LAPD was willing
to hear his theories, but not to open the original
police files on the case until.

Speaker 13 (34:45):
Now unknown Elizabeth Short compared to my father's picture again,
we all see through different lanes Jesus.

Speaker 3 (35:00):
Steve Odell's theory continues to fascinate and intrigue readers, despite
the questions raised by forty eight hours.

Speaker 9 (35:08):
There is simply not enough evidence to prove one way
or the other whether his father was the writer or
not the writer.

Speaker 11 (35:16):
I'm eighty five percent sure that these two photographs are
not of the same women.

Speaker 3 (35:22):
Hodell still has powerful allies. Assistant District Attorney Stephen k
believes Hodell's father was the killer.

Speaker 5 (35:30):
He was a despicable human being. I mean the way
he treated women. It was like a piece of Kleenex
that he would blow his nose and throw it away
in the trash.

Speaker 2 (35:41):
In the DA's office.

Speaker 3 (35:42):
Then crime novelist James Elroy is also convinced.

Speaker 2 (35:46):
I think Steve Hodell is a good and noble guy.
I think he saw the black guy murdered cass.

Speaker 3 (35:51):
But there are also plenty of skeptics. Do you believe
that Steve Hodell has solved the murder of Elizabeth Short Now? No?
Mary Posso's believes that Hodell relies too much on speculation
in the case against his father.

Speaker 7 (36:07):
He could probably go in a list of about half
a dozen good suspects.

Speaker 3 (36:14):
And the Los Angeles Police Department agrees. A year and
a half after the District Attorney opened his files, the
LAPD finally revealed in an off camera briefing the secrets
of its own Black Dally investigation. No surprise, doctor George
Hodell was at one point a major suspect, but police

(36:37):
say he was only one of twenty two major suspects,
seven of whom were doctors. Police also contradicted Steve Hodell
and claimed there was no proof that his father even
knew Elizabeth short But the Los Angeles Police Department has
its own credibility problems. The LAPD now admits that in

(36:59):
the years since Elizabeth Schwartz murder, virtually all the physical
evidence in this case has disappeared. The police aren't sure how,
but it has simply vanished from the files. The bottom line,
LA's most famous unsolved murder may never be solved.

Speaker 1 (37:19):
How can you lose all of the physical evidence in
the most important crime that Laped's ever had. And it's
not just the physical evidence, it's the interviews, it's the
wire recordings of my father. Everything has disappeared.

Speaker 3 (37:33):
Shocked and angered by the LAPD's response. Steve Odell also
dismisses the findings of two handwriting experts, our own and
the Lapds, who both said they were not convinced that
the handwriting in the killer's letters match doctor George Hodell's.

Speaker 1 (37:50):
It is my father's handwriting. I don't have to be convinced.
I don't need an expert to tell me. I know
it is a fact.

Speaker 3 (37:56):
Most people would be happy to hear that the Lapd
doubts that his father is a killer. Why aren't you?
Why are you so determined to prove that he was,
in fact the Black Dahlia.

Speaker 1 (38:08):
Killer, because it's the truth.

Speaker 3 (38:09):
Whatever the truth about doctor George Odell, he is still
causing pain for the people closest to him. There is Steve,
the son, struggling with conflicting emotions for the man he
believes is both a monster and his father.

Speaker 1 (38:27):
This hasn't been an easy thing, people saying, oh, this
is just a son who hates his father and stuff.
You know this is a daddy, dearest thing.

Speaker 3 (38:35):
Was there any sense of revenge against your father by
publishing this?

Speaker 1 (38:41):
None at all? No. I mean, I love my father,
I love him to this day.

Speaker 8 (38:46):
I loved him too, even though I was very hurt
by him and kept waiting for him to be a
good guy.

Speaker 3 (38:53):
And there is Tamar, Steve's have sister, who never got
over the trauma of being molested at age fourteen by
her father, Tamar's old friend Michelle Phillips.

Speaker 10 (39:04):
The relationship was just so monstrous and sad for her.

Speaker 3 (39:10):
And if Steve Odell is correct, the ultimate victim of
his father was Elizabeth Short.

Speaker 7 (39:21):
She was missed. That's what I like people to understand.
She was gorgeous inside and out.

Speaker 3 (39:35):
You miss her even fifty seven years afterwards.

Speaker 7 (39:38):
Yeah, I mean it. I never know when it will
creep up.

Speaker 3 (39:47):
Until that I am very photogenically and again almost six
decades after her brutal killing. The Black Dahlia the Future
film is set to play upon a mystery in the
imagine nations of millions of Americans and now real movie
stars like Scarlett johanssa Mark, Hilary Swang.

Speaker 14 (40:12):
You know, not being able to solve a murder of
that caliber, I think was a pretty big deal. And
I think that was the infatuation that that people have.

Speaker 3 (40:23):
Okay fan by Plaid Wow and Josh Hartnett, anybody who
was around California area at that time.

Speaker 6 (40:30):
Knew you know, the whole saga was in the newspapers
every day. It was a big deal. I guess you're
kind of liken it too. Maybe the you know jan
Vaname Ramsay case, they will.

Speaker 3 (40:44):
Become part of a news story that's already a Hollywood legend.

Speaker 6 (40:49):
She was young and beautiful, determined to be famous, but
destined to be infamous.

Speaker 3 (40:56):
We may never know for sure who killed Elizabeth Schwart
or whether George Hodell was the Black Dalia killer. He
fled the United States just days after the district attorney
stopped investigating him in nineteen fifty, not to return until
forty years later when the search for the killer had
long gone cold.

Speaker 1 (41:17):
This case, this investigation, has been described as a riddle
wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. And I can't
think of a more perfect description than that a mystery.

Speaker 3 (41:27):
But to crime writer James Elroy won with a perfect ending.

Speaker 2 (41:33):
It's divine providence that the mad doctor spawns us On
who becomes an LPD homicide detective who sees photographs that
are not even Elizabeth short and it turns out that
his old man did the job. Anyway, I dig it,

(42:05):
b