also have been doubly concerned that Tamar might reveal that he had taken nude photographs of her at the Franklin House, or that the prints had been discovered by the police.
Another of Dad's acquaintances, and Man Ray's as well, was the novelist Henry Miller, whom Joe remembered seeing talking to Father in his library. The Franklin House had become, in those days, almost like a salon, where artists flouting convention and social mores gathered around my father, who had the means to entertain them.
Joe told me, 'Tamar had named so many names to the district attorney that lots of people got arrested.' Even my father's close friend Fred Sexton was offered a deal by the DA if he would testify against George and his relationship with Tamar. But, Joe told me, 'Man Ray was somehow kept off the list of witnesses.' Joe said that Dad's defense attorneys, Giesler and Neeb, had cost him a fortune, and that to raise the needed money he had to sell all of his rare and imported art objects. 'I remember that a well-known jockey of the time named Pearson bought most of George's artwork,' he told me.*
The Black Dahlia Murder
Joe Barrett remembered that a Dr. Ballard was arrested for performing the abortion on Tamar. He was acquitted, partly because of my father's acquittal and because of the credibility of Tamar's testimony. Out of the blue Barrett also said, 'Did you know that your dad was a suspect in the Black Dahlia case? I know that for a fact. She had been murdered a year or so before I moved into the Franklin house. From what I heard, your dad had apparently known her.'
After the trial, when Joe was picked up by the DA investigators and taken to their office downtown, 'they were really pissed,' he remembered. ''God damn it, he got away with it!' they exclaimed, referring to the Tamar trial, adding 'We want this son of a bitch. We think he killed the Black Dahlia.' I'm sure it was investigators from the district attorney's office and not LAPD. They wanted me to spy on George for them. I remember one of the DA investigators was a man named Walter Sullivan. I think these investigators also tried to get a couple of gals that George knew to spy on him and report back to them.'
Joe was also present when the police served a search warrant on Dad at the Franklin House after he was arrested for incest. 'Thad Brown was out there standing around at the house with these DA investigators. I remember him from the newspapers. He was a police big shot back then.'
Duncan Hodel's Memories of the Franklin House
I was stunned by my conversations with Tamar and Joe Barrett. Their incredible revelations about what went on at the Franklin House around the time of Elizabeth Short's murder, and in the following two years, filled in many of the blank spots in my own life during that period.
Encouraged by what I had gained from Tamar and Joe Barrett, I decided to pursue a third source.
My eldest half-brother, Duncan, now seventy-one years old, had been another actual living witness at the Franklin House through the late 1940s, and he had testified at the Tamar trial.
In an October 1999 meeting in San Francisco, Duncan provided me with many details of our father's early life, before I was born.
Duncan had made regular visits to the Franklin House in the years preceding Dad's arrest and was twenty-one when the scandal broke. To this day, Duncan believes that Tamar invented the incest charges in an attempt to ruin Father's life. Although he apparently never questioned that Tamar might have been telling the truth, his interview would provide a damning revelation about another murder that took place shortly after Elizabeth Short's body was discovered. Duncan provided me with a thoughtprint so powerful that, had there been a murder trial in the Jeanne French 'Red Lipstick' murder, he would doubtless have been called by the prosecution to testify against Father. In our conversation, Duncan linked him to a critical element in the crime:
Dad had some very wild parties at the Franklin House. After Dad bought the house, I used to go down with my buddies from San Francisco and stay there, and Dad would fix my friends and me up with women. It was funny, when I was there Dad told me to tell all the women I was his brother. When women were around us at the Franklin House, he didn't want them to know he was old enough to have a son my age. I was twenty then.
I remember one party where everybody was laughing and having a good time and Dad got this red lipstick and wrote on one of the women's breasts with the lipstick. She had these big beautiful breasts, and Dad took the lipstick and wrote these big targets round each one, and we all laughed and had a good time. I remember meeting Hortensia, his future wife from the Philippines at the Franklin House. She was visiting the U.S. and came to Dad's parties at the house. I guess that's where he first met her. Then after the trial they got married.
I asked Duncan if he remembered or was acquainted with any of Dad's girlfriends from that time, and after pausing for reflection, he noted:
I remember one of his girlfriends was murdered. Her name was Lillian Lenorak. She was a dancer and artist. But the murder didn't happen until many years after she broke up with Dad. I think her young boyfriend killed her in Palm Springs or something.
I recognized her name from the court records of the trial and knew she had been on the prosecution's witness list. I then asked Duncan if he remembered any other names. He answered, 'I remember after Dad stopped seeing Kiyo in 1942 or so, he started dating this other woman. I think her name was Jean Hewett. Jean was this drop-dead beautiful young actress. She really looked like a movie star. I don't know whatever happened to her.'
The Trial
Duncan testified briefly at the trial as a defense character witness for Dad, or, he thinks, to talk about Tamar's promiscuity. But after the trial was over, he recalled, Dad told him something strange.
Dad told me that the district attorney had said to him, 'They were going to get me.' They were out to get him, and so I think that is why Dad left the country right away and went to Hawaii. That is what he told me at the time, just before he left the U.S.
Tamar's, Joe Barrett's, and Duncan's independent knowledge of Father's activities corroborated that Dad was suspected at the time not only of committing incest with his daughter but also of murdering Elizabeth Short. Both Tamar and Joe Barrett stated that the police believed Dad killed the Black Dahlia. Duncan, while apparently unaware of any Dahlia connections, had unintentionally and inadvertently become a witness linking our father to the Jeanne French murder.
These interviews were shattering. Till now I had proceeded cautiously, as I had hundreds of times before. Conducting my investigation as an objective and impartial homicide detective, amassing facts and evidence, I slowly and carefully built my case. But now a terrible, undeniable truth was hitting deep within me: my father, the man I had looked up to, admired, and feared, this pillar of the community, this genius, was a cold-blooded, sadistic killer. Probably a serial killer.
