made it 1951 or 1952. 'He was changing some light bulbs over that glass fixture above the fireplace and discovered a box wedged and hidden in a far corner. He brought it down and it contained what he called 'kinky pictures.' I'm pretty sure he destroyed them.'
Another strange incident: Buck told me about the appearance of a 'bag lady' who came to the door back in the 1970s or early '80s. 'She looked quite old,' he said, 'but with street people it's hard to tell.' I spoke with her and she said, 'This house is a place of evil.'' He said that normally he would have simply dismissed her, but then she continued to describe the interior of the house. 'It was very scary,' he said. 'She obviously had been inside this place before we owned it. She described in detail to me: the great stone fireplace, and your father's gold bedroom, and the all-red kitchen that your father had painted. No question that she was very familiar with the house when your dad had lived here. She looked at me and said again, 'This is a house of evil.' God knows what connection she had with this place. She left, and I never saw or heard from her again.'
Based on a conversation I had with former tenant Joe Barrett, it is my belief that the person Buck described as a 'bag lady' was most probably our former maid, Ellen Taylor, Father's live-in housemaid/girlfriend, who lived at Franklin House from 1945 to 1950. In later years, Joe Barrett had run into Ellen on the street in downtown Los Angeles and discovered that she had been in and out of mental hospitals. Joe Barrett described her as 'living on the fringe, delusional, claiming she had had affairs with a number of prominent and locally famous personages.' (Knowing what we now know, perhaps Ellen was not as delusional as Barrett thought.)
Bill Buck also told me that another man who had visited the house on three different occasions over the years was a photographer named Edmund Teske, 'a local photographer and sort of a fixture here in old Hollywood. He had a home just down the street on Hollywood Boulevard. He visited here three separate times over the years and told me he was a good friend of both your father and Man Ray.'*
The overhead fixture where Dad's photographs had been hidden and obviously not discovered during LAPD Juvenile detectives' 1949 search of the house after Father's arrest but only a year or two after his departure would most likely have included Man Ray's nude studies of my then thirteen-year-old sister Tamar as well as other damning photographic evidence.
I thanked Bill Buck for his openness and many courtesies over the years and left the Franklin House in what I fully expect was my final visit. I exited the massive stone structure and paused near the top of the steps in the same spot where I had, as a naive and innocent boy of eight, smoked my first cigarette with Tamar and been caught by Father. I turned and gazed one last time at this Mayan temple, which for me had now been transformed into a haunted house of horror, and in a final reflection paused to wonder how many other unsolved mysteries would forever remain buried in the belly of this beast.
* Teske would in later years become a highly acclaimed L.A. photographer. He was dubbed a romantic surrealist, and some of his works are currently on display locally, in the J. Paul Getty Museum.
21
The Watch, the Proof-Sheet Papers, the FBI Files, and the Voice
The Dahlia Military Watch
The 1946 Man Ray photograph of my father embracing Yamantaka (exhibit 43a) reveals what appears to be a black-face military watch, commonly worn by officers during the war years, on Father's left wrist. As we know, George Hodel loved to portray himself as a military officer, displaying the power and prestige associated with his three-star rank. His officer's watch was another accessory of his former status, and he treasured it. We know that this photograph was taken by Man Ray, after father's return from China, most likely after his Yamantaka statue arrived in mid-October 1946. This means he was wearing the military watch just weeks before Elizabeth's murder.
In 43b, Father is posing in a family picture probably in the spring or summer of 1947, but in any event shortly
We know that '50 LAPD recruits' in their re-canvass and search of the 39th and Norton crime scene on January 19, 1947, found a 'man's military-type wristwatch on the vacant lot close to where the victim's body was originally discovered.' The watch discovered at the crime scene was 'a military-style 17-jewel 'Croton' with a leather-bound, steel snap band. Engraved on it are the words 'Swiss made, water proof, brevet, stainless steel back.'' There was no further mention in the press concerning police efforts to locate the owner of the watch.
To date, my attempts to locate a similar Croton watch for comparison to the one described in the article have proved futile. In 1946 the Croton Watch Company was located on 48th Street in New York City, but apparently the company is no longer in business. Other than the one newspaper article referring to the police finding the watch, I have found no other references. This would be considered extremely important physical evidence in the crime, and normal police procedure would be to photograph the item, contact the manufacturer, and attempt to identify and trace the item through potential witnesses. That no further information or follow-up were forthcoming is of serious concern. Apparently LAPD made no public appeal for assistance in helping identify the item. It does not appear that any special police bulletin was prepared or circulated within the confines of the local law enforcement agencies throughout Southern California.
Based on Father's apparent loss of his military-style watch matching the description of the Dahlia watch found at the crime scene, and his simultaneous documented wearing of a new watch, there is a strong possibility that it was Father's watch found near the body. Moreover, the watch in the Man Ray photograph did not turn up among my father's possessions after his death. It simply disappeared, possibly at the 39th and Norton Black Dahlia crime scene. Does this watch still remain hidden in a secure LAPD evidence vault, awaiting inspection and identification?
The Proof-Sheet Papers
We know that LAPD's chief criminalist, Ray Pinker, forensically examined 'proof-sheet paper' in the murder case of Otto Parzyjegla and compared them to the proof-sheet paper sent to the newspapers by the Black Dahlia Avenger. Parzyjegla's papers were eliminated as not being the same.
In January 1947, my father did have a printing press in the basement of the Franklin House. It was the same press he had had since his teens when he printed the first edition of
