Having come to this horrific conclusion, I suddenly wished I had never begun the journey. Part of me wanted to close Father's tiny album, destroy the photographs, and run from the truth. I felt fear and omnipotence. A few simple, undiscoverable acts by the son, and the father's sins would be destroyed — like him, reduced to ashes. The Hodel name and reputation would remain intact. A few simple acts, and his crimes would never be known. I could cheat infamy. A cover-up for the good of the family. I could easily do what the LAPD command had done, only better. This time the cover-up would be permanent. But the other part of me knew I could not, and would not, run or hide the truth.
* Billy Pearson was a prominent jockey in the 1940s, who was an art connoisseur and also a close friend of John Huston's. In Lawrence Grobel's biography
16
Fred Sexton: 'Suspect Number 2'
FROM THE MANY WITNESS SIGHTINGS and descriptions relative to both the Elizabeth Short and Jeanne French murders and the separate kidnappings and sexual assaults of Sylvia Horan by 'the Dahlia suspect' and lca M'Grew by 'two swarthy men,' both within days of the French murder, it seemed apparent there were two men committing these crimes, and I suspected the two were operating together and separately, at their whim. If George Hodel was Suspect Number 1, who was his accomplice? Based on his overall physical description, his close friendship with my father going back to 1924, and the fact that he had, in his own words, admitted to being my father's accomplice in the 1949 statutory rape of Tamar, Fred Sexton was, obviously and logically, the most likely candidate for Suspect Number 2.
Realizing I could no longer conduct a long-distance investigation, and needed to talk face to face with whatever witnesses I could find, I moved back to L.A. in June 2001. Joe Barrett, due to his personal familiarity with Sexton, was at the top of my list of people to question. Once I settled into my new Hollywood apartment, I called, made the short drive north to Ventura, and we met for lunch.
I asked his impressions of Sexton from the Franklin years, telling him the truth, which was that I hardly remembered the man. From Joe's description, though they were fellow artists, they were not kindred spirits. Joe did not like Sexton, and he said so. Here is the picture he gave me:
Fred was tall and thin, like your dad. He had a dark complexion. I think he was Italian. He was good friends with your dad and spent a lot of time at the Franklin House. Sexton and I actually worked together for a short time, at the Herb Jepson Art School, downtown at 7th and Hoover Streets. Sexton lasted there only about two months. He had a bad attitude. He was hitting on all the young girls in class. Half or more of them actually left his class because of it. He had many complaints from the kids in class, and so many dropped out because of him that Herb Jepson fired him.
When Sexton refused to leave the art school, Jepson and a couple of his 'big friends' forcibly evicted him from the premises. Barrett concluded:
I ran into Fred a year or two after that in downtown L.A. He was living in a second-story apartment on Main Street. He tried to avoid talking to me, probably feeling sheepish because he had testified as a witness for the prosecution in your dad's trial. That day was the last time I ever saw or heard from him.
Joe's knowledge of Fred Sexton and his association with him were limited, although he corroborated Sexton's predatory sexual habits and the 'swarthy' description so often connected with the crimes. Public information about Sexton was also limited, but I discovered that he was born in the small mining town of Goldfield, Nevada, on June 3, 1907, just four months before my father. He was the second child born to Jeremiah A. Sexton and Pauline Magdalena Jaffe, who had two other sons and three daughters. Fred Sexton married his first wife, Gwain Harriette Noot, on June 13, 1932, in Santa Monica, California.
Sexton made an application to the Social Security Administration on May 23, 1939, listing his place of employment as 'Columbia Pictures Corp., 1438 N. Gower Street, Hollywood, California,' and at that time he gave his residence as White Knoll Drive in the Elysian Park district of Los Angeles, just a mile from downtown. The house is still owned by his surviving first wife.
Sexton died at eighty-eight, on September 11, 1995, in Guadalajara, Mexico. All I knew about the man was what I had been told by Tamar and Joe Barrett. Now it was time to see what Sexton's own surviving relatives could tell me.
I spoke to Sexton's daughter in two separate meetings, the first of which took place in Los Angeles in October 1999. At that time I was in no position to confront her with any suspicions I harbored about her father and his possible criminal involvement with mine. In the spring of 2000, five months after our initial meeting, Sexton's daughter mailed me two photographs of Fred, which she told me had been taken in Los Angeles in the mid-1940s. In this mailing, she also included pictures of herself shown playing with an eight- or nine-year-old Tamar. She was three years older than Tamar, and they were friends from the early 1940s until Tamar's arrest and detention in 1949. She had known Kiyo during the time Dad was having an affair with her, and the pictures she sent me were, ironically, taken shortly after their 'breakup,' and showed the two children playing in front of Kiyo's beachside home in Venice.
I contacted her again in August 2001, informed her I was now living in Los Angeles, and scheduled a second interview to meet her at her home, telling her I had some important information to discuss. At this meeting, realizing that what I was about to tell her would be very similar in effect to the many death notifications I had made to family members during my long career in Homicide, and knowing she would need some emotional support, I requested that her husband be present, and she agreed. I opened our conversation with the shocking revelation that, based on my two-year investigation, it was my professional opinion that our fathers had been crime partners and had committed a series of abductions and murders of lone women in Los Angeles during the mid- to late 1940s. I informed her that all of my research and investigation was well documented, that the full story would be revealed in a book I was writing. I did not provide her with the names of any victims and was circumspect in my references to the crimes. Specifically, I did not indicate that the case focused on Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia.
Understandably, Sexton's daughter was profoundly shocked by my news. She found it difficult to believe that her father could ever have been involved in such violent crimes. She doubted my assertion that he, like my father, was a practicing sadist. Even though she acknowledged that he was a controlling person, she felt he was incapable of physically harming women to that extent.
In this interview, she disclosed a wealth of information. She was specific and provided much deeper insight into her father's personality and character, underscoring and increasing the probability that he was in fact the partner- in-crime of his close friend George Hodel.
Mary Moe
