local movie theater, but on April 17, 1946, returned to California, this time to Hollywood. During the nine-month period preceding her death, Elizabeth was known to have lived as a transient at various boardinghouses and with a variety of roommates. She stayed at a hotel in Long Beach for several weeks during the summer months and then returned to Hollywood, where she first shared a room in a private residence, then lived in an apartment with seven other young women. She also shared rooms at several hotels in Hollywood for brief periods. In December she left for San Diego and returned to Los Angeles on January 9, 1947. That was the night she disappeared into the fog after leaving the Olive Street entrance of the Biltmore Hotel.
Subsequent to the discovery of the victim's body, and after many of the descriptive details from the autopsy findings were leaked to the press, not only Los Angeles but the entire country became obsessed with Elizabeth Short's murder. Before the age of the Internet, twenty-four-hour-cable news networks, or television, much of the interest in a mysterious, beautiful murder victim was driven by page-one newspaper headlines and radio announcers. Feeding the public's intoxication with the victim was her sobriquet 'the Black Dahlia,' which reporters claimed was given her by the men and sailors who saw the attractive black-haired young woman frequent their favorite pharmacy soda fountain in Long Beach.* Along with this name the newspapers printed blown-up high-school photos of the exotic young woman. This, combined with the horrific details of sadistic torture, bisection, and mutilation, fed the macabre imaginations of newspaper readers from coast to coast.
The ongoing murder investigation remained on page one of the Los Angeles newspapers for a record thirty-one successive days. The January 16 first-day edition sold more newspapers than any other edition in the history of the
In truth, the crime reporters were usually way ahead of the detectives, especially when it came to locating and interviewing witnesses. They didn't punch the time clock at five o'clock, but kept on working until they had the story. Reporters also worked for newspaper owners who had deep pockets and paid whatever it took to get a big story on the streets first. If it meant paying cash to help out a witness who was going through a rough patch, a reporter could always get the money. Then, after he'd called in the story, he'd turn over what he had learned to his friendly detective on the force. Thus both the police and the press had the power to get things done for each other. For the most part they tried to share their findings, but ultimately it was an uneasy partnership.
All of these factors were at work in the Black Dahlia case, to such an extent that the reporting of and publicity about her murder were unparalleled in Los Angeles history. Even the Lindbergh kidnapping or the Leopold and Loeb murder trials had not taken up as much local media space. The public was so voracious for any news that reporters spread out across the nation for background on Elizabeth Short. They located and interviewed her family, close friends and acquaintances, roommates and classmates, ex-lovers, and military men. With few exceptions, almost every detail these crime reporters discovered through their independent investigations, no matter how irrelevant, turned up in print the next day and helped keep the public's seemingly insatiable appetite fed.
After a full month of daily headlines, the Dahlia homicide had found its place as the most notorious unsolved murder of the century.
* It was later speculated that the original source for this name was
A Death in the Family
May 17, 1999, Bellingham, Washington
WHEN THE PHONE RINGS at one in the morning, you hope it's a wrong number. If it's not, it's usually bad news. And that's what it was for me on Monday, May 17, 1999: a hard ring, an insistent ring that wouldn't go away because my answering machine was off, and it woke me from a deep sleep. June, my father's wife, was hysterical on the other end, screaming into her receiver at their penthouse suite in San Francisco. 'Steve,' she said, trying to regain some composure, 'your father. He's dead!' Between her sobs I could pick up snippets of what had happened. 'Heart attack. Paramedics still here. Your brother Duncan and his wife are here with me. Come down. Please come down now. I could have saved him, Steven. I should have done something more. I am all alone now.'
When I was an LAPD homicide detective, I taught myself how to wake up instantly in the middle of the night when we had to roll out to a call. It was a skill I'd lost over the years since I retired, but it came back to me as June kept talking. I tried to reassure her that we would take care of things, offering her whatever comfort I could over the phone. 'I'll be there on the first flight I can get, June.' It was the best I could do. I made coffee and got on the phone to find a seat on the first flight to San Francisco from Seattle, some ninety miles south of my home in Bellingham, where I had been living for the past twelve years.
Eight hours later I was boarding the plane at SeaTac airport, looking forward to two hours of time alone to ruminate upon the passing of 'the Great Man.' The grief and the loss that I felt, that all sons feel at the death of their father, was mixed with the satisfaction. I had from knowing that his life had been long and remarkable. His life, as much as I knew of it, had been unique, much larger than that of most people I knew. George Hill Hodel, M.D., who seemed to have lived four lifetimes, had been held in awe by all of his children from all four of his families. And now he was gone.
As the plane lifted through the cloud cover and carried me toward the passage that almost all sons must inevitably make (the burial of their fathers), I felt oddly grateful that I had been granted the opportunity to repair a relationship with a father I had never really known. There were only snatches and pieces of memory from my childhood in our mysterious Hollywood house, and then, after he had left, nothing.
Now I was fifty-seven. But my relationship with my father had really begun only eight years earlier. Before that the two of us had been strangers, sharing a hello once in a while over the phone or a handshake now and then when I visited him in Asia or when he was passing through L.A. on business. For thirty-five years there had been brief encounters in hotel lobbies, but ours had never been a real father-son relationship.
What we had had were business meetings, where his stiff and formal demeanor was as offputting to me as it was to all his children. To us, he was the 'doctor' — clinical, cold, and remote. It struck me as passing strange that my father, with his brilliant mind and extensive training as a psychiatrist, was so obviously uncomfortable among his children. In lectures, using his vocabulary and wit, he was able to charm and hypnotize whole audiences with his charismatic personality and as a leader in his field. Yet in the role of father he was painfully awkward and inept. This paradoxical disconnect, however, actually gave life and body to the eccentricities that made him a distant legend to all of his children. And I was no exception, having lived in the same house with my father in Hollywood in the late 1940s and then twenty-five years later spending time with him in the Philippines when he wanted to woo me away from LAPD Homicide and groom me to take over his business. But that was more than twenty years ago.
