Was the Son of the Black Dahlia Murderer in Weird Tales?

Michael P. Hodel
Author, Essayist, Editor, Radio Host
Born July 12, 1939
Died May 6, 1986

Who killed Elizabeth Short has been a mystery for nearly seventy years. One of the suspects was Dr. George Hill Hodel, Jr. (1907-1999). Hodel's son, Steve Hodel, has been investigating the case for more than a decade. He believes that his father killed the woman called the Black Dahlia and deposited the parts of her mutilated body in a vacant lot in Los Angeles early in the morning of January 15, 1947. In their book Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder (2006), Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss suggest that the murder was connected to the art movement of their title. Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) is probably the most well-known surrealist. Though primarily a painter, Dalí was also a moviemaker. His film Un Chien Andalou (1929) is filled with images of mutilation and death. Man Ray (1890-1976) and Denise Bellon (1902-1999) were also surrealists, primarily photographers. They, too, employed imagery of death, dismemberment, mutilation, and, in their use of manikins, lifelessness. There are indications that Elizabeth Short's murderer intended to make of her body and the scene where it was found a kind of artistic tableau. Dr. Hodel, one of the suspects in the killing, then and now, knew Man Ray and had an interest in surrealist photography.

George Hodel fathered eleven children by five women. He had four sons with Dorothy Harvey Huston, ex-wife of movie director John Huston. Steve Hodel was born in November 1941. (He had a twin brother who died in infancy.) Kelvin Hodel, born in October 1942, is the youngest. The oldest boy was Michael P. Hodel, born on July 12, 1939. According to Steve Hodel, his father and John Huston had questions about Michael's parentage. Finally, Dorothy Harvey Huston told her ex-husband, "Forget it, John, he's not your son." (1)

Tamar Hodel, an older half-sister of the Hodel boys, remembered her father's cruelty towards them. "Michael got it the worst," she said, speaking to Steve Hodel. "It broke my heart to see how he treated you three. Especially how he was with Mike." Steve went in the Navy and became a Los Angeles police detective. In contrast, Michael turned to "his beloved books" (2) and, like his mother, "a script and radio writer," became a writer. (3) 

Throughout his working life, Michael Hodel read fantasy and science fiction, wrote about fantasy and science fiction, and talked about fantasy and science fiction. He had a radio show called Hour 25, and it ran on station KPFK in Los Angeles for twenty-eight years. Mitchell Harding (né Eugene Loring Ware), Katherine Calkin, Mike Hodel, and Michael's wife, Terry Hodel (1937-1999), created the show. It went on the air in January 1972 with Ms. Calkin as host. Michael Hodel came on a few months later and served as host from 1972 to 1986. His co-hosts were Katherine Calkin (1972-1976), Mitchell Harding (1972-1981), and Mel Gilden (1981-1986). Late in his tenure, Hodel became ill and was unable to continue. He was succeeded by Harlan Ellison.

In addition to spending more than a decade on the air and interviewing such luminaries as Theodore Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, and Harlan Ellison, Michael Hodel wrote for fantasy and science fiction magazines and fanzines. His credits from The Internet Speculative Fiction Database:

• "Change of Hobbit Benefit" (essay) in Locus #151 (Dec. 1, 1973)
• "The Group Mind" (essay) in Transmission (Summer 1980)
• "Second Chance" (short story) in Fantasy Book (Feb. 1982)
• "Negotiations at a Lower Level" (short story) in Fantasy Book (Nov. 1982)
• "Native Tongue" by Suzette Haden Elgin (book review) in Weird Tales (Fall 1984)
• "The Businessman: A Tale of Terror" by Thomas M. Disch (book review) in Weird Tales (Fall 1984)
• "The Ghost Light" by Fritz Leiber (book review) in Weird Tales (Fall 1984)
• "The Mainstream That Through the Ghetto Flows: An Interview with Philip K. Dick" (1976) in Missouri Review (Winter 1984)

The version of Weird Tales to which he contributed was published by The Bellerophon Network and edited by Gordon M.D. Garb in 1984-1985. There were only two issues in that incarnation of the magazine. They are exceedingly rare.

In 1979, Hawthorn Books published Enter the Lion: A Posthumous Memoir of Mycroft Holmes "edited" by Michael P. Hodel and Sean M. Wright. It was one of a number of books about Arthur Conan Doyle's characters issued in the 1970s and beyond, including The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974) and The West End Horror (1976) by Nicholas Meyer and The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1979) by Michael Dibdin. The Last Sherlock Holmes Story involves Jack the Ripper, who, like the Black Dahlia killer, mutilated and dismembered his victims.

Enter the Lion was well received. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar read it and liked it. Moreover, he "realised [sic] more could be done with this 'older, smarter'" brother of Sherlock Holmes. (4) In collaboration with screenwriter Anna Whitehouse, Mr. Abdul-Jabbar wrote a new novel of Mycroft Holmes called Mycroft Holmes. The book was released in late 2015 to good reviews.

"Mike died unexpectedly in May, 1986 at the relatively young age of 47," writes Steve Hodel. "His death from lung cancer, followed hard upon the death of our mother, just a few years prior." (5) In 1925, Ted Le Berthon interviewed Michael and Steve's father for a Los Angeles newspaper. In 1932, Le Berthon contributed "Demons of the Film Colony," an unrelated piece, to Weird Tales. In 1947, someone killed Elizabeth Short and left her body in an empty lot in Los Angeles. She had hoped to be in movies. Instead she was mutilated and murdered by a man who might best be described as a demon and who may very well have had connections to the "film colony" of southern California. In 1963, Steve Hodel joined the Los Angeles Police Department. In 1972, Michael Hodel began hosting a radio show about fantasy and science fiction. Probably because of that, he was in a position to review books for Weird Tales in 1984. Michael Hodel died in 1986, George Hodel in 1999. After his father's death, Steve Hodel put his experience with the LAPD to use in investigating his father's role in the Black Dahlia case. He believes he has solved it.

I tell you, this is a strange world we live in. (6)

Notes

(1, 2) Quotes from Black Dahlia Avenger: The True Story, unpaginated online version.

(3) "Social Activities: Palm Valley," Desert Sun, Palm Springs, October 6, 1950, page 7, here.

(4) Quoted in "Basketball Veteran Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Pens Story of Sherlock Homes's [sic] Brother" by Alison Flood in The Guardian, September 24, 2015, here. By the way, that's a British paper that misspelled Holmes' last name.

(5) From Steve Hodel's blog, here.

(6) Two final connections: First, Tony "The Hat" Cornero is in Steve Hodel's book. He also had a connection to Volney G. Mathison, who also contributed to Weird Tales and through his association with L. Ron Hubbard was connected to other strange happenings in Pasadena, George Hodel's home city. Second, George Hodel was tried for a crime against his daughter, essentially incest. In Chinatown (1974), Hodel's friend John Huston famously played a man who also had an incestuous relationship with his daughter.

From the very day Elizabeth Short's body was discovered, the Black Dahlia case has fascinated the reading public. Writers and publishers have continued to exploit it at every opportunity. (You could say I'm doing the same thing now.) Here is an example, the cover of True Detective from October 1948, with the blurb "The Black Dahlia Murders"--not just one, but more than one.

Michael P. Hodel collaborated with Sean M. Wright on Enter the Lion, published in 1979 and after. Their book inspired Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to write his own novel on Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes.

Text and captions copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Theodore Le Berthon (1892-1960)-Part Nine

On January 15, 1947, Betty Bersinger of Leimert Park, Los Angeles, was on an errand with her three-year-old daughter when she saw, lying in a vacant lot, what she thought to be a department store manikin. A closer look revealed the truth. Mrs. Bersinger rushed from the scene to phone the police. They arrived shortly thereafter to find what she had found, a woman's body, neatly cut in two at the waist. That was the beginning of the infamous Black Dahlia murder case.

The so-called Black Dahlia was Elizabeth Short (1924-1947), a young woman from Massachusetts who had arrived in California at nineteen, and who, after having bounced around for a while, was murdered at age twenty-two in a yet unknown place. Her killer, also unknown, bound her, beat her, and cut her face and body. He further mutilated her body, drained it of blood, washed it, and carefully arranged its severed parts in the vacant lot where Mrs. Bersinger found it the next morning. The police questioned hundreds of people, suspected scores, and finally narrowed their list of suspects to about two dozen. About a third of those suspects were physicians or surgeons. One was Dr. George Hill Hodel, Jr., about whom Ted Le Berthon had written in 1925.

The murder of Elizabeth Short remains an open case, despite nearly seven decades of investigation by police, journalists, authors, and amateur detectives. After George Hodel's death in 1999, his son, Steve Hodel, began investigating the Black Dahlia murder. He is convinced that his father was the killer and has presented his investigations in Black Dahlia Avenger (2006), Black Dahlia Avenger II (2014), Most Evil (with Ralph Pezzullo, 2009), and Most Evil II (2015). (1) With his books, Mr. Hodel has convinced others as well, although there are dissenting opinions, especially about his later allegations.

Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder by Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss (2006) "presents the theory that Elizabeth Short's murder may have been informed by surrealist art, and that the killer was familiar with surrealist art and ideas." They, too, suppose that Hodel was the murderer, although they don't make an outright accusation. Their hypothesis is compelling, especially in view of images like those shown below. (2) There have been other books and theories as well. Some agree on the killer's identity. Others are more eccentric.

The idea that George Hodel was a murderer fits with themes I have written about on this blog:

First, the intellectual, very often a writer, artist, or philosopher, who sets himself above the world and all the people in it; who throws off traditional constraints, particularly moral constraints, and does or advocates to be done whatever he wills. Very often, that intellectual is strictly a man of words or ideas. He doesn't take any action, in which case he is sometimes seen as a comic figure or buffoon, as Hodel looked in Le Berthon's profile of 1925. When he does take action, however, he is very often deadly.

Second, and related to the first, a special kind of depravity that emanates especially from the middle class, from individuals with ambitions not so much to greatness as to be seen or recognized by the rest of humanity for their greatness; to be considered great thinkers or theorists, as great actors in society or history, as among the élite; to make their mark, often, if not exclusively, to make up for their sense of failure or their fragile sense of self-esteem; who see other people as mere objects or abstractions for them to use, manipulate, and, if necessary, destroy in their pursuit of recognition and the esteem of their fellows.

Third, the physician as a psychopath who, because he is himself a soulless machine--in other words a kind of materialist--believes that other people are machines as well, and yet is puzzled by the animation the unseen and unknown soul provides those people, and so cuts them open to find out what makes them alive and human.

Finally, the general effects of moral decay, dissolution, and chaos, and where they lead the individual and the society in which he lives.

No one knows that George Hodel was the Black Dahlia murderer, but even if he wasn't, we can still brand him a monster for what he did to his daughter.

To be concluded . . .

Notes

(1) The publication history of these books and their various editions or revisions is hard to puzzle out. We live in an age in which a "book" may not actually be a book and can be revised and republished and revised again without end, even several times a day if the author wants it. These are the titles and dates I have, though, and they'll have to do.

(2) I have not read the book, so I don't know the details of the authors' hypothesis. However, the online documents I have read supporting their case are measured, well argued, and well presented. See the authors' blog by clicking here. The quote is from that blog.

A young George Hodel (1907-1999), attending to a patient. 

Is that George Hodel on the left? No, it's actually Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), his near contemporary. On the right is Man Ray (1890-1976), who lived in Los Angeles from 1940 to 1951 and who was friends with Hodel. Dali is comic in his intensity. Man Ray is something else. This picture was taken in Paris in 1934 by Carl Van Vechten. 

Here is Dalí again in a photograph by Denise Bellon (1902-1999), perhaps from around the same period. In their book Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder, authors Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss make a connection between the Black Dahlia murder and surrealist art and photography. Note especially the breasts of the manikin on the left and the separated torso of the manikin in the middle. When you look at photographs like this one and compare them to photographs of Elizabeth Short's body, you begin to see that Mr. Nelson and Ms. Bayliss' case could be a strong one. 

Or this one, also by Denise Bellon.

More yet, this one, by the same photographer.

So why were surrealists so fascinated by manikins? By mutilation and dismemberment? By distortions and mutations of human anatomy? Was it the dehumanizing effects of world war and a decaying civilization? Was it a kind of materialism among the artists themselves? And if it was a kind of materialism, how is materialist surrealist not an oxymoron? The answer begins with recognizing surrealism not primarily as art but as an intellectual theory. André Breton (1896-1966), author of the first surrealist manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme, 1924), was a Marxist, i.e., a materialist. Surrealism was--strangely and remarkably--a communist and/or anarchist intellectual movement. As we know, Marxists, communists, socialists, and other assorted leftists have no compunctions about murdering or otherwise inflicting violence on their fellow human beings. That, too, has been a theme in this blog. One more strange and remarkable thing: André Breton trained in medicine.

Original text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Theodore Le Berthon (1892-1960)-Part Eight

On December 9, 1925, in "The Merry-Go-Round," his column for the Los Angeles Evening Herald, Ted Le Berthon wrote about a strange young man whose future would prove him to be not just strange but monstrous. The title of that particular column was "Clouded Past of a Poet." Its subject, described as "tall, olive-skinned, with wavy black hair and a strong, bold nose," was George Hodel. (1)

Born on October 10, 1907, in Los Angeles, George Hill Hodel, Jr., was a child prodigy. His IQ tested at 186. At age nine, he played solo piano concerts at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Hodel graduated from South Pasadena High School at fourteen and entered the California Institute of Technology to study chemical engineering. There his precociousness was expressed in a different way when he had an affair with and impregnated the wife of a faculty member. Things were kept quiet, but Hodel was forced out of the university. He faked his age, got a chauffeur's license, and started driving a cab at night. He also became a police reporter for the Los Angeles Record. "He was there to record the lurid details as pimps, prostitutes, and johns . . . were hauled off," wrote his biographer. "The precocious kid from Pasadena was now L.A.'s youngest crime reporter, rubbing shoulders with hoods, murderers, and corrupt officials." (2) He was then sixteen years old, making the year either 1923 or 1924.

As of 1923, Ted Le Berthon was also a police reporter, though I don't know for which paper in Los Angeles. Later, as a devout Catholic, he seems to have been drawn to the low life because of his concern for his fellow man. Nodel's motivations were likely far different, as events would prove. He might easily have been described as an aesthete and a decadent. "It's not George's gloom, his preference for Huysmanns [sic], De Gourmant, Poe, Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Hecht that pains us," wrote Le Berthon from the point of view of Hodel's friends, "but his stilted elegance, his meticulous speech!" (3, 4)

George drowned himself at times in an ocean of deep dreams [Le Berthon wrote]. Only part of him seemed present. He would muse, standing before one in a black, flowered dressing gown lined with scarlet silk, oblivious to one's presence. Suddenly, though, his eyes would flare up like signal lights and he would say, "The formless fastidiousness of perfumes in a seventeenth century boudoir is comparable to my mind in the presence of twilight." (5)

Based on those passages, not only aesthete and decadent, but also the phrase adolescent poseur might describe Hodel. That adolescence, along with the preference for fantastic and decadent authors, the name dropping, the evocation of the seventeenth-century past, and the florid language remind me of Lovecraft. Hodel even published his own avant-garde literary magazine called Fantasia. But again, his life went down a different path than that of Lovecraft.

At twenty, George Hodel became a radio host for Southern California Gas Company's Music Hour, a program of classical music, and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, to study pre-medicine. From there it was on to the University of California, San Francisco, for medical school. Hodel also wrote a column for the San Francisco Chronicle called "Abroad in San Francisco." I don't know of any further contact between Ted Le Berthon and George Hodel after 1925. Maybe Le Berthon's father, John L. Le Berthon, crossed paths with the young doctor, writer, and music aficionado in San Francisco.

After working as a physician in New Mexico, Hodel returned to Los Angeles in the early 1940s. Still drawn to bohemianism and the avant-garde side of life, he was friends with Man Ray (1890-1976), Henry Miller (1891-1980), Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982), and Fred Sexton (1907-1995, the creator of the Maltese Falcon statuette). In the early 1940s, Hodel married John Huston's first wife. (He had been friends with Huston in the 1920s). In all, Hodel had eleven children by five women. In 1949, one of Hodel's children, Tamar, accused him of incest. The case went to trial, but Hodel was acquitted. In 1950, he left the country for the Philippines. He returned to San Francisco forty years later and died in that city in May 1999 at age ninety-one. After his death, one of his sons, Steve Hodel, began looking into his life.

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) Quoted in Most Evil: Avenger, Zodiac, and the Further Serial Murders of Dr. George Hill Hodel by Steve Hodel and Ralph Pezzullo (Penguin, 2009), Online, Ch. 1 (unpaginated).

(2) Hodel and Pezzullo, Ch. 1.
(3) Quoted in Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder: The True Story by Steve Hodel (Skyhorse Publishing, 2015), Online, "The Voice" (unpaginated).

(4) Poe (1809-1849), Baudelaire (1821-1867), and Verlaine (1844-1896) were published posthumously in Weird Tales. The others were not published at all in the magazine. However, I have written about Ben Hecht (1894-1964) and, in my article about him, a little of Joris Karl Huysmans (1848-1907). Remy de Gourmant (1858-1915) was an associate of Huysmans and a French Symbolist poet. Click on their names in the main body for links. Coincidentally, 1923, the year in which George Hodel got his start as a police reporter, thereby descending physically into the low life (I suspect he had begun a personal, spiritual, and moral descent by then), was also the year in which Weird Tales began. Despite the bustling Jazz Age in America, the 1920s were a time of decadence in Western civilization. The advent of Weird Tales was just one example of that. The prominence of the psychopathic killer was another. Stay tuned for more.

(5) Quoted in Hodel and Pezzullo, Ch. 1.

George Hill Hodel, Jr., South Pasadena High School Class of 1923, and the subject of "Clouded Past of  Poet," a column by Ted Le Berthon from 1925.

Original text copyright 2016, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Volney G. Mathison (1897-1965)-Part 7

Personal Life & End

Less than a month after his nineteenth birthday, on September 6, 1916, Volney Mathison married in Columbia County, Oregon. Unfortunately I don't know the name of his bride. It's safe to assume that she was her husband's first wife but not his last. However, there is some confusion on the Internet as to Mathison's marriages. I think that confusion comes from an odd article in the Los Angeles Times from 1935, odd only in light of other facts about his life. Unless Mathison played games with the truth (and if I interpret the facts correctly), the situation was this: Volney Mathison married Dorothy Jean Ashley, nicknamed Jean, in about 1929. The two remained married for the rest of their lives.

Born in Huntington, Indiana, on July 18, 1907, Dorothy Ashley was the daughter of an Illinois barber who died sometime between 1920 and 1930. At the time of the 1930 census, Volney and Dorothy Mathison were living in Berkeley, California, with her mother and her sister, Roberta A. Ashley, also called Audrey. (1) In 1935, the Los Angeles Times unintentionally threw a wrench in the works of this account by reporting:

Jean Darrell, music librarian for the local N.B.C. headquarters, returned from her vacation with a husband--Volney Mathison, who is engaged in [the] shortwave radio business.

The situation is confused further with this, from the same paper, thirty years later:

MATHISON, Jean, beloved wife of Volney Mathison, loving daughter of Mrs. Theodore Warkentin, sister of Audrey Ashley. Services at Pierce Brothers' Los Angeles Mortuary, 720 W. Washington Blvd. (2)

The California Death Index reports that Dorothy J. Mathison, born July 18, 1907, in Indiana, died on November 9, 1964, in Los Angeles--obviously the same woman. (The cemetery where she was buried gives her full name: Dorothy Jean Mathison.) So how is it possible that a woman named Jean Darrell fetched back a husband from her 1935 vacation when that same man was married to Dorothy Jean Ashley from Indiana? Did he divorce Dorothy Ashley, then remarry her after a hypothetical marriage to this Jean Darrell ended? Was Mathison a bigamist (like L. Ron Hubbard)? Or did Jean Mathison go by the name Jean Darrell? If so, why? Maybe the Times meant to say that she returned from her vacation with her husband instead of with a husband. Or maybe the couple had kept their marriage of circa 1929 secret, only to make it public in 1935. The simplest answer may be the best: the article from 1935 is misleading. Who did the misleading? Probably the Mathisons. And who has been misled? Everyone who believes Volney Mathison was married just once to a woman named Jean Darrell in 1935.

In any case, Jean Mathison, Volney Mathison's wife, died on November 9, 1964, at age fifty-seven. Ten years her senior, Volney outlived her by only two months, dying on January 3, 1965, in Los Angeles. He was buried at Rose Hills Memorial Park as she was before him. There weren't any survivors listed in Mathison's death announcement. L. Ron Hubbard survived however, and on June 7, 1965, while the flowers on Volney's grave were practically still fresh, the founder of the Church of Scientology filed a patent for a "Device for Measuring and Indicating Changes in the Resistance of a Human Body." The patent--U.S. Patent 3,290,589--was issued on December 6, 1966. Hubbard had finally wrested the Mathison Electropsychometer from its inventor. (3)

Volney G. Mathison

Radioman, Seaman, Labor Spokesman, Inventor, Author, Chiropractor, Psychoanalyst

Born August 13, 1897, Paducah, Texas
Died January 3, 1965, Los Angeles, California

Volney Mathison's Story in Weird Tales
"The Death Bottle" (Mar. 1925)

Further Reading
Because of his association with L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics, and the Church of Scientology, Volney G. Mathison has received mention in books on those subjects. If you would like to read more about him, I would suggest finding books on Hubbard and his followers. For more on wireless telegraphy and radio, start with a history of radio or a biography of Guglielmo Marconi, David Sarnoff, or other pioneers in the field. For more on radio in Southern California, see an interesting website called Radio City Hollywood, here. You can find out more about Anthony Cornero Stralla by looking at books on organized crime, the Mafia, and the history of Las Vegas. Going farther back, you can read about Henry George and the single tax in any number of books and on any number of websites. Wikipedia might be a good place to start. Finally, to find out more about Hugo Gernsback and the origins of science fiction magazines, see a history of science fiction such as Alternate Worlds by James Gunn (1975), A Pictorial History of Science Fiction by David Kyle (1976), or Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction (1963) by Sam Moskowitz.

Notes:
(1) A woman named Audrey Ashley is credited as co-author of the story on which the movie Raw Deal (1948) was based. Her collaborator was Arnold B. Anthony. That may be the same pseudonymous author of the novel Parched Earth (1934), a story about agricultural workers in California (perhaps like Volney Mathison's father) and dedicated to the author's mother, "Who has known the heartbreak of lean harvests" (like Mathison's mother). My feeling is that Arnold B. Anthony was not Volney Mathison, but it's always good to consider possibilities.

(2) Theodore Warkentin was a boatbuilder, carpenter, and stevedore in California.
(3) The following year, Hubbard--like Tony the Hat before him--took to the sea where he could operate away from watching eyes.
Postscript (Aug. 14, 2016): It seems likely to me that--given his father's interest in intellectual ideas--Volney George Mathison was named after the French author, intellectual, and politician Count Constantin de Volney (1757-1820). Although he was a friend of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Volney also associated himself with the intellectuals behind the French Revolution and with their ideas. These men tended to be religious skeptics, materialists, or atheists. They also tended--as history has shown--towards pseudoscience and otherwise crackpot ideas about economics, politics, philosophy, science, and human nature.

  

"Looking North on Vine Street from Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, California," a postcard of the 1930s or '40s. This was the milieu of countless stars, executives, and technicians, as well as Volney and Jean Mathison, the fictional Philip Marlowe, and the infamous real-life case of the Black Dahlia.

Original text and captions copyright 2012, 2023 Terence E. Hanley