Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story

In the summer of 1997, Father and June visited me in Bellingham for a three-day tour of the San Juan Islands. We had returned from our ferry crossing, having tilled our day with spectacular vistas, and an early dinner on Orcas Island. The three of us sat in my bay-front apartment as the sun began to set late in the evening. I had noticed that Father was especially mellow and the three of us, sated with the beauty around us, felt close and comfortable. He reminisced about how quickly time had passed, remarking that he was just months away from his ninetieth birthday!

It was then I broached the subject of the family rumor and Folly. 'Was it true, Father? Is there a Folly out there? A sister I've never met?' He paused, and I could almost see him turn back the pages of time in his mind. 'The rumor is true,' he said. 'I was very young, a boy of fifteen, and very much in love.' As I listened intently, Father told the story of Folly.

In Los Angeles, while attending Cal Tech, he had had an affair with a much older married woman. Her husband discovered the infidelity and they separated. She moved to the East Coast and gave birth to the child, a girl whom she christened Folly. 'I followed her east,' Father continued, 'found where she was living in a small town, and told her I wanted to marry her and raise the child. She wouldn't have it. She laughed at me and said, 'You're just a child yourself. Go away, George. This has all been a terrible mistake. Just go away from me. I never want to see you again.'' Father said he remained in the East and tried to convince her that they should be together, but to no avail. In the end he left, returned to Los Angeles, and never again attempted to make contact with mother or daughter.

As follow-up to his story, and by way of demonstrating the new computer software I had recently purchased for searching and locating witnesses and individuals nationwide, I suggested we check to see if Folly was 'in the system.' He provided me with the mother's last name, and the name of the small town in the East where she was last known to be living, some seven decades past. I input the information and pressed 'enter.' Incredibly, there she was! First initial 'F,' same last name, with her address and telephone number. Gazing at the screen in disbelief, Father paled. I suggested that maybe it was now time to make contact. Wouldn't he like to see and meet a daughter he had never met? For the third time in my life, I saw him visibly shaken. In a firm voice that bordered on anger, he said to me, 'No! You must destroy this information. She must never know. There must never be any contact. Do you understand?' I didn't, but I said I did. That was the last words ever spoken about Father's 'Folly.'

Now, some four years later, filled with a knowledge of his serial killings, I wondered: was this the trigger? George Hodel's ardent love for a woman, most likely his 'first love.' His passionate pursuit east to marry her, only to be laughed at and rejected with a stinging 'you're just a child.'

Was this why he had become the 'Avenger'? In his twisted mind, had his hatred of women begun here, with a proud fifteen-year-old boy insulted for trying to be a man? Would all future women who dared reject him pay the price? Elizabeth Short rejected him and she suffered the most brutal of deaths. Georgette Bauerdorf also rejected him and paid the price. How many others had said no? Certainly 'Folly' was a piece of the puzzle. A big piece, I suspected. But there was more.

Clearly Father's own seeds of insanity grew to become his Flowers of Evil. Did nurture and nature conspire to unhinge the mind of this child prodigy? Was he also avenging himself for the terrible wrongs he had suffered as a boy, he who was viewed as an 'intellectual freak' by his schoolmates? Had he grown to adulthood with the mind and potential of an Einstein, locked inside the emotions of a child? Time and time again, in his crimes, we heard and saw the voice of this emotionally arrested genius. His childish notes and drawings with their misspelled words, mailed to the police and press. Though he was a brilliant professional, and a man of forty, he could not conceal the psychotic child that hid just below the surface: 'We're going to Mexico City — catch us if you can.' 'The person sending those other notes ought to be arrested for forgery! Ha Ha!' Father's childlike arrow pointing to the photo of Armand Robles, saying, 'Next.' His stocking drawing over the face of Robles: 'Here is a picture of the werewolf killer's. I saw him kill her.'

As briefly noted earlier, these Avenger Mailings also clearly demonstrate that Father was well versed in Jack the Ripper lore. He used and demonstrated this knowledge not just in the Dahlia murder but in others. The Gladys Kern note, mailed and received by authorities before her body was discovered, uses the same kind of odd words and made-up slang found in some of the 1888 Ripper letters, which were also mailed before the victims' bodies were found.

Further, I submit that George Hodel lifted the term 'Avenger' from the 1926 Alfred Hitchcock silent movie The Lodger.; based on the life of Jack the Ripper. Originally, Hitchcock wanted — and surely George Hodel knew this — to title the film Avenger, but was forced to change it before its release. In it, the 'Jack the Ripper' character referred to himself as 'the Avenger,' a term that clearly lodged itself in George Hodel's young, increasingly perverted mind, to surface twenty years later with the Black Dahlia. By then, I suspect, Father saw himself in competition with the world's most infamous serial killer, and in his 'mad ego,' believing himself, in the words of James Richardson, 'a superman incapable of making a mistake,' he set out to 'out rip' the Ripper.

In the future, the 'experts' will weigh in with their varied theories as to why George Hodel was motivated to kill. There is no simple answer, nor can any one reason suffice. There are many. We each view and interpret life and people through our own unique lenses.

As for myself, I see the confluence of a number of causes. First and foremost was his high genius, a mental aberration, accelerating his intellect far beyond the ability of his emotional self to keep pace, and perhaps in some strange way actually causing its arrest at an age of eleven or twelve. Congenital insanity appears obvious.

Next came the disassociation with his peers, and the teasing because he was so 'different,' forcing him into a world of older men and women, with his attendance at Cal Tech at the young age of fifteen.

Father was clearly sexually precocious, with a satyr-like appetite for women; at age fourteen or fifteen he found himself fathering a child. It was at this precise point that Father asserted himself as an 'outsider.' His magazine Fantasia was born, with its dedication to 'the portrayal of bizarre beauty ... in a temple or a brothel or a gaol; in prayer or perversity or sin.' In 1925 (the same year he was rejected by Folly's mother) he reviewed Hecht's Fantazius Mallare and praised the story, whose protagonist beats and strangles to death his black-haired mistress Rita, avenging himself for her teasing, rejection, and laughter at him, as she tauntingly seduces his malformed manservant, Goliath, in front of him.

From here Father quickly moved into association with the underworld figures of Los Angeles, ruthless killers and drug smugglers. He himself began using alcohol, hashish, opium, and most likely stronger drugs. Already long recognized throughout Los Angeles and Southern California as a musical prodigy, from his FBI file we that learn he freely associated with the Severance Club, aligned himself with communist and leftist causes, and developed a distinguished reputation as a charismatic ladies' man and bold intellectual. He became a top debater and regular insider frequenting the elite parlors of wealthy Pasadena and South Pasadena's polite and not-so-polite societies.

It was at that time, I believe, that all these separate influences converged, and Father became Fantazius Mallare, with his schoolmate Sexton playing the initial role of Goliath, his omnipresent manservant, who would eventually become semi-independent from his master and learn to kill on his own time, in his own way.