hadn't he told his mother and why didn't his mother confirm this to the police?
Further, how could Elizabeth still be in possession of the letters she had written and supposedly mailed to Matt overseas? We know she wrote the letter or letters on VE Day, May 8, 1945, and we know Matt was still overseas. There are only two possibilities: (1) the letters were found in his personal effects and returned to his mother, who forwarded them to Elizabeth; (2) far more likely, the letters were written by Elizabeth and, like those found in her suitcase to Lieutenant Fickling,
Elizabeth Short. . . was in search of a good husband and a home and happiness. Not bad. Not good. Just lost and trying to find a way out. Every big city has hundreds just like her.
From her own letters and from those that knew her in life, it is obvious that Elizabeth, at the young age of twenty-two, had several faces. As for myself, I will always think of her as the ingenue with only traces of the soubrette.
30
The Dahlia Investigation,
2001- 2002
OVER THE MORE THAN TWO YEARS that I'd been conducting my investigation into the Black Dahlia case, I had come to realize that police administrators have their own agendas, which may or may not coincide with the needs of the people they are supposed to serve. Arriving at that conclusion, I was afraid that, once my disclosures became public, LAPD could well take a predictable and traditional defensive stance, responding with a terse public statement such as:
Dr. George Hill Hodel was a prime suspect throughout our investigation. His name figures prominently in our files. He was always at the top of our list of suspects. We simply did not have enough evidence to proceed with a complaint, and then he left the country, effectively halting our investigation.
Even as a retired senior homicide detective, with almost twenty-four years of service to LAPD, I knew that the possibility of accessing or directly viewing any of the casefile information was nil. I was not even inclined to make such a request, because I already had all the proof I needed, and had made the case. Still, I had a burning curiosity to see if the Hodel name was somewhere in the official LAPD case file. Were today's Dahlia case detectives aiding and abetting a fifty-year-old cover-up by standing guard over the locked files? One possible course of action might give me that answer, and I decided to pursue it.
Kirk Mellecker had been my partner at Hollywood Homicide in the mid-1970s. After we had worked together for about a year, he had taken the traditional course and transferred from divisional detectives to downtown Robbery- Homicide Division. I knew that he and John 'Jigsaw' St. John had become partners and grown very close, having almost a father-son relationship during the decade or so they worked together until St. John's retirement in the late 1980s. Kirk himself retired in 1991. But because he had been John St. John's partner, Kirk had been assigned to the Dahlia investigation some sixteen years longer than any other detective, with the exception of the original detective, Harry Hansen.
I had not seen or spoken to Mellecker since my retirement in 1986. We had always been friends, and I knew him to be intelligent, dedicated, and hardworking. We had shared some special times and camaraderie at Hollywood. I wrote a letter to his last known retirement address, hoping it would find its way to him, and asked him to call me in Los Angeles. Three weeks later, on July 30, 2001, he called.
Ironically, I learned he was now a major case specialist at NCAVC, the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime near Quantico, Virginia. Kirk's current job was to train law enforcement officers nationwide in the use of a national crime computer database and retrieval program called VICAP, which is primarily used for analyzing patterns and potential evidence in serial sexual homicides and identifying possible suspects.
During our conversation, Kirk and I talked about old times, and when he asked what I was up to, I told him I was taking a look at a number of old unsolved Hollywood homicides, particularly the Elizabeth Short-Black Dahlia investigation, and writing a book. I knew he had worked the case with St. John, I told him, and asked if he might be willing to discuss it with me, without betraying any confidences. I specifically told him that I would not ask him to reveal anything he knew to be confidential.
Here is a summary of some salient points of that astonishingly revealing conversation, in which he cleared up for me a number of mysteries.
I was assigned the Elizabeth Short case when I first got to Robbery- Homicide in about 1976. I read the case in detail back then. After reading it, there were a couple of things I wanted to check out, but I quickly realized that it was the department's attitude to, 'Well, let's get working on things we got going today, and not worry so much about the old days.' John-John [John St. John] and I played with it over the years, but not as much as we would have liked to.
'Kirk, was the name Hodel in the case files?' I asked him.
'What are you talking about?' he said.
'Did you see the name Hodel anywhere in any of the case files?'
When Kirk asked what I was getting at, because he truly didn't understand my question, I finally informed him, 'My father's name was George Hodel. There are family rumors that he knew Elizabeth Short. Indeed, she may have been his girlfriend. Did you ever see his name anywhere in any of the reports?'
'Jesus!' he said. 'Are you serious? Your
