'Black Dahlia Avenger'

On Jan. 15, 1947, the body of a woman, later dubbed the "Black Dahlia," was found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles.

For 50 years, the murder of the "Black Dahlia," Elizabeth Short, was a mystery. But now a retired 26-year LAPD detective has seemingly solved one of the the most notorious crimes of the 20th century, and he writes about it in his new book, "Black Dahlia Avenger."

Author Steve Hodel discussed his book on his visit Thursday to The Early Show. He said his father killed the "Black Dahlia" and over a dozen others.

Although estranged for decades, Hodel and his dad, George, re-connected later in life before the elder's death in 1999. After his father died, Steve found photographs of the "Black Dahlia," which pushed him to investigate the connection.

After years of research, Hodel says he came to the realization that his own father was actually Short's killer, and George Hodel killed up to 19 other women, which the Los Angeles police tried to cover up for years.

Read excepts from "Black Dahlia Avenger":

Chapter Two

The morning of January 15, 1947, was especially cool and overcast for Los Angeles. At about 10:30 A.M., a woman walking with her young daughter caught a glimpse of white flesh through a clump of brown grass in a vacant lot. She turned and saw what she figured was a body lying right there in the dirt, just a few inches from the sidewalk's edge. She ran to a nearby home and called the University Division police station.

Even though the communications officer on the other end of the line tried to get her name, in her excitement the woman never gave it, so dispatch assigned the call to a patrol unit as a "possible 390 down in the lot at 39th and Norton Avenue." A 390 is a stuporous drunk. Nobody knew yet that they were dealing with a corpse. The lot in question was in the Leimert Park section of Los Angeles, a middle-class, residential neighborhood west of downtown in LAPD's University Division. The glamour world of Hollywood lay just five miles to the north, a short ten-minute drive away.

When the call went out, it wasn't just to the patrol unit ordered to respond, it was also to a whole cadre of newspaper reporters cruising their beats, with police radios in their cars crackling out cryptic messages to LAPD patrol units. In 1947 it was as common for the newspaper reporters to monitor the police and fire radio bands on receivers hanging under the dashboards in their private cars as it is for today's reporters to carry handheld digital scanners on their belt clips.

Los Angeles Examiner reporter Will Fowler, son of the famous writer Gene Fowler, and his photographer partner Felix Paegel caught the call from University Division dispatch just as it was broadcast over the police radio and were the first to arrive at the scene. As Fowler knelt over the dead woman in the moments before the police arrived, he could see that her fingernails had been poorly cared for, and her chestnut hair, as it appeared from the roots, had been dyed jet black. . . . No identification was found at the location and the victim was initially listed as "Jane Doe Number 1." [Her name was later discovered to be Elizabeth Short, and she came to be known as "the Black Dahlia."]

The Los Angeles newspapers were already running wild with the story. . . . The public was so voracious for any news that reporters spread out across the nation for background on Elizabeth Short.

"After a full month of daily headlines, the Dahlia homicide had found its place as the most notorious unsolved murder of the century."

Chapter Four

[I was] quickly overtaken by the enormity of what I had discovered in my father's photo album. First, those two photographs of Elizabeth Short appeared to be more or less contemporary with other photos of her just prior to her disappearance and murder. In both pictures her eyes were downcast and closed. It was clear that she had agreed to be posed this way. But why had Father kept these two photographs for more than fifty-two years in an album, where Elizabeth Short held a place of honor with the rest of those he loved?

I knew there might be, and doubtless were, perfectly innocent answers to all of my questions. He could have known Elizabeth Short in the weeks or months before her murder and even taken the photographs of her. Maybe they had even been lovers, which Father had never revealed after she was murdered because he was afraid of becoming a suspect for a crime he didn't commit. There were, I was sure, rational answers to all my questions, and I determined to be objective in resolving them. I could not allow my emotions to come into play.

What would I do as a private investigator if a client came to me with a similar set of circumstances? How would I proceed? The obvious answer: handle it just like I had all of the other homicide investigations I had conducted during my career. . . . But even with the experiences of six thousand nights as a homicide detective behind me, I was unprepared for what would be revealed to me over the course of my investigation. What I would uncover were horrors far beyond what I could even have imagined. What I would ultimately discover would take me to places I had never dreamed of, or expected to go: deep inside my own psyche, to my private heart of darkness.

Copyright © 2003 by Steve Hodel