But June never carried out his instructions, because, as she had told me, Father's health took a turn for the better and he decided he had no need to have a final talk with her, as he had planned.
Seven months after he had written these instructions, Father had, as he had anticipated, suffered a severe stroke. It did not incapacitate him, as he had feared, but came to him as a blessing that took his life. There would be no suffering, no infirmity, no prolonged hospitalization, no loss of dignity or self-respect. Now, however, with the discovery of his notes, fate would insure that his private final wishes were revealed, and that he would speak to June from beyond the grave. She would find the note while looking through his pending papers, a final order, an act of control — proffered in the name of love — to destroy all of his personal effects.
In my career as a homicide detective, I have seen the worst of men's and women's passions unleashed as desperate acts against each other. In crime scene after crime scene I have witnessed the aftermath of this violence. 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.
Dr. George Hill Hodel Jr.,
1907- 1999
Dad's father, George Hodel Sr., whose family name was Goldgefter, was born in 1873 in Odessa on the Black Sea, the son of Eli Goldgefter, an accountant and a German scholar. In 1894, at age twenty-one, George Sr., facing mandatory conscription into the czar's oppressive military, where Jews were treated only slightly better than slaves, prepared a plan to escape Russia. Using a fictitious name and a forged passport, my grandfather somehow succeeded in obtaining a pass, claiming he was going to visit his sick mother in Vienna. Once across the Polish frontier, he boarded a train to Vienna and freedom, just barely escaping the interest of the suspicious officer who interrogated him. But my grandfather's first-class ticket and expensive luggage convinced the officer he was legitimate, and he was able to cross the border. From Vienna he traveled to Paris, where he assumed the name Hodel (a fairly common Swiss surname) and began a new life.
In Paris he met Esther Leov, a Russian emigrant from Kiev who was a practicing dentist, a very unusual accomplishment for a woman in 1900. I don't have much information on either of my grandparents, except that it was rumored that Esther Leov's family were the direct descendants of French aristocracy, many of whom fled from Paris to Russia during the French Revolution and returned to France in the nineteenth century. George Sr. and Esther married in France on May 5, 1901, and entered the United States through Ellis Island on May 31, twenty-five days later. The two of them migrated west to California from New York, settling in the desert suburb of South Pasadena, ten miles northeast of the emerging new capital of the silent motion-picture industry, Los Angeles.
My father, their only child, was born on October 10, 1907, at the Clara Barton Hospital at the corner of 5th Street and Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. On the birth certificate George Sr. listed his occupation as 'banker' and Esther listed herself as 'dentist.'
My father grew up speaking French as his primary language, in a completely French-speaking home. At age five, because his parents believed he had exceptional mental abilities that required special development, he was sent to Paris, where he was enrolled in the Montessori school, run by Madame Montessori herself. During this time, George lived with a Count and Countess Troubetzkoy, either relatives or close friends of his mother, in their penthouse suite in the Champ de Mars district of Paris, close to the Eiffel Tower. George's schooling in Paris lasted only a year or two, after which he returned home to begin his public schooling in South Pasadena. His mother, ever mindful of his cultural development, retained the services of a noted piano instructor, Vernon Spencer, to teach her son music. Spencer instantly identified him as a musical prodigy, and within a remarkably short time George had become not only an accomplished pianist but was even writing his own compositions.
By the age of nine, George had become recognized throughout Southern California as a future concert pianist; his teacher predicted a great musical career for him. An old family photograph captures the image of the Russian composer Rachmaninoff visiting the Hodel home in South Pasadena, where he, accompanied by the Russian minister of culture and his wife, attended a private recital given by Father when he was only nine.
My father's fame as a prodigy spread, and soon the newspapers were writing articles about him. On July 14, 1917, for example, the
BOY OF NINE CHIEF SOLOIST
AT SHRINE HOLIDAY EXERCISES
A little boy, 9 years old, has been chosen by the French committee to play before the Belgian mission at the French celebration at Shrine auditorium today.
The lad thus chosen above scores of adult musicians is George Hodel, son of Mr. and Mrs. George Hodel of 6440 Walnut Hill Avenue. He is a pupil of Vernon Spencer and is regarded in the world of music as a genius.
Though a mere youngster, he has studied music for years and he was selected as a piano soloist by the French committee entirely because of his great talent.
While he has composed several musical works, he will play Massenet and Chaminade selections when he appears before the Belgian mission.
The Hodels had erected a handsome estate in South Pasadena, located on Monterey Road, designed by the famous Russian architect Alexander Zelenko. It was built in the style of a Swiss chalet, a ten-room residence complete with a detached guesthouse, which would later become their son's private retreat in which he was allowed to pursue his intellectual creations in complete privacy. Thus, even from his earliest years, George Jr.'s parents treated him as if he were beyond special, indulging him, nurturing what they were convinced was his unique talent, raising him as if he were a child of European aristocracy, with all the privileges of a superior class. But in truth he was an American child growing up in California in the twentieth century, nothing more. And therein, I believe, were sown the seeds of his later problems.
In addition to his musical genius, George also tested exceptionally high intellectually, with an IQ score of 186, which apparently placed him one point above Albert Einstein. This 'genius mentality' rapidly advanced him through primary and secondary schools, and he graduated from South Pasadena High School at the ripe young age of fourteen.
In 1923, when he was only fifteen, George began attending college at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, intent on pursuing a career as a chemical engineer. Even then, Cal Tech was one of the most important engineering schools in the country, the home of early-twentieth-century experiments in electronics research, magnetic propulsion, and even anti-gravity wave propagation. However, George either dropped out or was expelled from Cal Tech after completing only one year, for reasons that still remain unclear. There are two versions of the story of his expulsion. In the first, he left college because he had a sexual liaison with a faculty member's wife, who became pregnant as a result and was divorced by her husband. In the second version, he was kicked out for playing
