Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

operating procedure would have been to make transcripts of these conversations, as well as investigative follow-up reports documenting the findings. Where are these transcripts? Where are these reports? What do they say?

What guided Walter Morgan, a hitherto unknown survivor and witness of the truth, to the Hodel doorstep to tell his story, defies all the laws of probability. I neither knew he was alive nor did I seek him out. He came to me! Like so many other witnesses to these crimes, Morgan was unaware of his story's real import. Just another 'anecdote.' This is what many would call a 'coincidence.' It was not. There are no 'accidents.' There are no 'coincidences.' Like the night watchman discovering the burglars at the Watergate, Walter Morgan brought home the final pieces of the Dahliagate, to help prove that both city and county law enforcement officers were complicit in the cover-up and obstruction of justice.

When Lieutenant Jemison discovered that Dr. George Hodel was the Black Dahlia Avenger and had killed both Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French, and attempted to reveal those facts, he was immediately removed from the case and forced into silence. Morgan's unwitting revelation to me, the son of the killer and the solver of his crimes, closed a circle that had been broken for over fifty years. For the Black Dahlia investigation, it was the final thoughtprint.

Epilogue

I STAND IN THE PRESENT, and my mind, my intellect, the objective, analytical part of me, looks back through the recent past. Thirty months! So many pieces of the puzzle, so many thoughtprints, have fit into place. Most of the riddles and enigmas relating to this strangest of murder cases have been solved. My role as homicide detective is finished.

But what about the other part of me, the part that felt? I entered this bizarre, strange, and, ultimately, horrifying investigation as I have many times in the course of my homicide detective career — strictly as a professional. It was the only way I could pursue this journey. My personal feelings would twist, confuse, and contaminate the evidence.

In 2000, I was still living in Bellingham, Washington, at my house on the lake. It was a cold, rainy night, near midnight. Cedar logs were crackling in the fireplace. Seated on the couch, I had a dozen unopened envelopes before me on the coffee table. They had all arrived that day in the afternoon mail. Inside, I knew, were the death certificates I had ordered six weeks earlier, from the Los Angeles County Recorder, the Vital Statistics section. By then I had identified and was familiar with most of the details of the many specific crimes and had ordered the official documents for comparison with what I had read and researched.

Pen and notebook in hand, I opened the first envelope, and began to read the cold, unfeeling statistics summarizing the cause of death for each of the victims, who, I now believed, had died at the mad sadistic hands of my father and, in several cases, his friend and accomplice Fred Sexton.

Elizabeth Short. . . Georgette Bauerdorf. . .Jeanne French . . . Ora Murray ... I paused and looked around. I thought I had heard someone, or something, in the living room. I could see no one, but I felt a presence. No, several. It was they, the victims standing silently next to one another. I was surrounded by pain and sadness, as if they had been summoned from beyond, invoked by my reading the details of their deaths. I felt the sorrows of lives cut short, the loss their families and relatives had felt, thought of the long line of generations affected by their murders. They were there, I sensed, to help me find my way safely through the labyrinth of the Minotaur.

The feelings that came next were overwhelming. For the first time since I had begun my investigation, I realized that all of this havoc, all of this pain, all of this misery, had come from one man: my father! Not from some unknown suspect, like the hundreds I had pursued during my career. No, this was my father, the man who had given me life, made my bones and sinew! His blood mingled with my own, pumped through my heart. I felt bitter anger and hatred.

As these feelings were pouring over me, it was as if a light switch had suddenly been turned on: all the silent visitors had vanished. Gone! I was back in the rational. Real or imagined, at that moment I determined to make these silent victims my muses.

What I have learned, what has been made real to me since embarking on this, my own personal voyage of discovery, is that there are no accidents in life. Each step I took was both meaningful and in sequence: our own thoughtprints can, if pieced together, reveal our individual puzzles, our destinies, as we move through life.

My mother had named me Steven after her own personal hero in James Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus. As if in some self-fulfilling prophecy, my life had, like his, always been one of half-priest, halfpagan. My personal heroes were General George S. Patton and Mahatma Gandhi, men who achieved near-impossible goals at opposite ends of the human spectrum.

But there is more to my personal odyssey. Like Telemachos in search of his father, I too had found mine. My discovery did not bring me the heroic Odysseus, come back to Ithaca as hero to his clansmen. Instead, I uncovered the true identity of a monster, calling himself an avenger but in truth a psychotic killer. My journey's end revealed to me a father who was evil incarnate, everything I had spent my career trying to remove from society. He was the amalgamation of selfishness, cruelty, and extreme brutality; a sadistic but brilliant and controlling megalomaniac who turned his hatred on a segment of society and tried to eradicate it. In the case of my father — a misogynist and serial killer — it was women. He tortured, cut, and bludgeoned his victims, then slowly strangled the life out of them for the pure lust and pleasure it brought him.

I hated Father. I hated him for all that he had done to us, his family, and for what he had done to my mother, and my brothers Michael and Kelvin. I despised him for what he had done to Tamar. Now I would have to be the one to reveal what he had done to our family name, and I hated him for that as well. Try as I might to convince myself that after all these years I was still a cop, who had to depersonalize this like any other investigation, my entire being was filled with loathing for this man.

I wanted him to suffer as greatly as his victims had. And I wanted to be the one to make him suffer. I would inflict the same slow tortures on him he had inflicted on others. Let me be my father's executioner, in the name of Elizabeth Short, Jeanne French, Georgette Bauerdorf, Gladys Kern, Mimi Boomhower, Jean Spangler, Ora Murray, and all those who were never discovered and whose names will never be known. Let me serve as the hand of retribution, to become the 'Black Dahlia Avenger.'

Throughout my investigation, as the linkage was made from victim to victim, I asked myself the same question — Why? What was the trigger?

Then I recalled the story of Folly.

For more than fifty years Folly's existence had been a whispered family rumor. Mother had told me bits and pieces of the story when I was in my twenties: a vague reference to Father having had an early affair as a teenager, which resulted in the birth of a child; somewhere out there another Hodel, a half-sister, predating Father's acknowledged firstborn son Duncan, born in 1928.